Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Between the blizzard and the Capitol, it was the roughest winter in Twelve anyone could remember, even the most ancient oldsters who’d seen the hard times shortly after the Dark Days. Haymitch looked at all of it, at the gallows and the whipping post, the harsh Head Peacekeeper, the Hob burned down, the tesserae that came late if at all, the longer shifts and higher coal quotas in the mines. His mind went back to a summer garden when he was seventeen, to blood and roses and that threat of Do what I say or else, those cold, precise Capitol tones describing to him exactly what he was seeing unfold in front of his eyes if he didn’t play Snow’s game.

He’d sold himself on Snow’s whims for years trying to keep this from happening, and seeing it come to pass now, the old guilt was right there, like a dog that never left his heel. He’d done this, he’d called down the wrath by thinking he could challenge them and bring two tributes home alive, and one of them a dangerous one like Katniss Everdeen to boot. He'd foolishly figured after all this time, after what a complete fuck-up he’d become, Snow stopped considering him a threat. He should have had more sense than that.

There wasn’t enough white liquor in the world to deal with that, to wash away the desperation of the district all through the winter, and with Ripper out of business, he was having to stay a hell of a lot more sober than he’d like to begin. That just made it all the worse, because the stretches of reality were right there, too bright and too awful to bear.

The kids brought Hazelle Hawthorne to him one day, asked him to hire her on to housekeep for him, said she was out of the washing business after her boy Gale got flogged half to death and nobody wanted to risk it. They had no idea, of course, about things from long before they were born, but it was Hazelle so of course he nodded and agreed to it. It embarrassed him to have her of all people see the place, both the dusty untouched rooms upstairs where he hadn’t ever dealt with the things belonging to his ma and Ash, and the liquor bottles and the assorted clutter downstairs where he’d just really ceased to give a shit.

It embarrassed him even more to think how he hadn’t stepped in and helped her out before, because Jonas must have been dead five or six years now. What a thing that was. Briar died in that fire long ago, Jonas and Burt died together down in the mines. Of the four of them, their little pack that had been out scouring the woods together back when he was young, he was the one still alive. Well, he’d proven in the arena he had a survivor’s talent for outliving good people. Life really was a bitch like that.

But she was truly desperate now. So he could suck it up and suffer some embarrassment. She cleaned the place top to bottom, dragging out the broken furniture and broken liquor bottles, polished and dusted. As she left him with a hot dinner and a clean house, she told him with some irritation, “She’d be ashamed to see you like this.” No malice, just a simple statement.

He didn’t have to ask what “she” was being referred to here. They both knew she wasn’t referring to Katniss. Nor did he flinch at the harsh truth of it. “I know she would,” he said, staring bleakly at a half-full bottle of white liquor and wondering if he could make it somehow last more than a day or two. Of course Briar would be ashamed of him, if she’d lived to see what he’d become. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one because he’d found shame in himself was one of those things alcohol didn’t quite manage to drown. “Hazelle,” he said, using her full name rather than the fond and familiar "Haze" he had as a kid, sensing she was about to go. “Take some of the food back for your kids.” She’d be too exhausted to go home and cook another meal, and his pantry, even as little as he cared about food most days, was a hell of a lot better than whatever she was scraping down together in the Seam. “Too much there for me to eat. Call it part of your wages.”

There was a lot he could have said about how he was sorry, about how he realized now he should have stepped in long ago to do something for her. In a better world than this one, she’d have been his sister-in-law and those four kids down in that house in the Seam would be his niece and nephews. He’d just gotten so out of touch with everyone and everything years ago because he didn’t belong any more, and it was easier anyway to not be involved in their lives given that any misstep would be taken out on them. Plus there was the little fact he brought two of their kids to their doom every year.

But apparently he was still Seam born and raised enough, grey-eyed and black-haired and olive-skinned as the open proof of it, to know full well if he said it and tried to explain, tried to make it about what he felt he owed her and about his sense of guilt, her pride would hate it. Putting it simply as part of employer and employee, that was acceptable. She ladled up some of the stew to take back home, though he wished she’d take more of it. He made sure she took some of the bread. “Thank you, Haymitch,” she said quietly, though he much preferred her flash of temper because it felt more honest than that weary gratitude. “Good night.”

She walked out into the cold and he sat at his kitchen table wondering how much more they could all endure before they either shattered and Twelve just disappeared, or they rose up and gave Snow that excuse for active annihilation that he so obviously wanted.

He got his answer right quick come the spring after all of Panem watched Katniss twirling and modeling her wedding gowns and they moved into a public announcement with President Snow. He remembered how little he’d thought about the reading of the card last time, how he and Briar had both tried to ignore the danger of a double reaping, so unaware of how it would wreck his life and eventually end hers. Should have figured it would find a way to do it to him again. Reaped from the existing pool of victors. He didn't hesitate to reach for the liquor. He figured he deserved it.

After he woke up the next morning, having gotten good and fully drunk for the first time in months, he remembered sometime the night before he’d promised a drunk Katniss he’d save Peeta after he promised a sober Peeta he’d save Katniss. Well, wasn’t that a nice little conundrum. He sipped a cup of broth that Katniss handed to him when she padded over to his house, and as she sipped hers too, sitting beside him, they watched the sun rise, and he started to think what the hell he was going to do here.

Then Peeta dumped out all the liquor, bullying and threatening them into the notion of training their asses off for the Games, claiming they had to train like Careers and that being drunk was just going to hold them back. OK, so he was right about that but it was annoying to hear the self-righteousness in it. Complaining about Haymitch being too reliant on a fucking crutch that would become his weakness in the arena, when his own was standing right there with her braid down her back, listening to the same lecture. At the same time Haymitch really wanted to strangle him, some part of him was laughing grimly, realizing he’d actually run up against a superior force here. The boy had more balls under that gentle demeanor than a lot of people wanted to believe. He was sort of impressed even as he was furious.

Of course he found out later from Hazelle that Peeta had dropped by over the next few days while Haymitch was in his bed, busy rolling on the painful waves of sudden total withdrawal. He didn’t even know it, too caught up in shaking and raving insanely at nightmares of a burning Seam house and candy-pink birds and Sapphire with her empty eye socket and dozens of dead kids both merchie gold and Seam dark that he’d tended down in the tribute morgue and some of his worst nights being whored out, the ones that had usually left him in Doc Sixleigh’s care and with some of the other victors looking after him. Dropped by to bring him food he was too sick to eat, and some herbs from Perulla Everdeen for settling the nausea once he could keep anything down, but mostly to make sure he was still alive. Katniss, of course, had been nowhere to be found. That was actually a relief. She already held him in more than enough contempt. He didn’t need to hand her one more reason, seeing him that weak.

He didn’t ask Hazelle what he’d been screaming in his delirium. She didn’t offer to tell him. At least she let him pay her extra, claiming that nursing hadn’t been in the contract. Cleaning up vomit buckets, forcing water down him when she could, and changing sweat-soaked sheets--well, so he managed to embarrass himself a little more in front of her. On the bright side, not much more he could do to look worse to her, right?

He sat on the porch again, sipping the herbs she’d made into a tea for him, feeling it settle his uneasy stomach. So this was full sobriety, a day without even a sip of something so mild as wine, probably for the first time since he was twenty or so. The morning sun was too bright and his head hurt, his ribs ached from all the heaving, and he felt about as weak as a kitten. He felt the press in of all the darkness that was as ever waiting just at the edges of his vision, creeping up on him. He winced. Yeah, he definitely preferred being drunk.

But poking cautiously through his mind, he had to admit that so long as he deftly avoided a lot of dark areas that loomed too big without the hazy filter of alcohol, getting out of the starting gate when it came to thinking was looking a bit easier. He turned his mind to the Quell problem. Never mind the horror of all his friends in it. He shut that behind its own door for the moment with some effort and he just pondered the issue at hand here in Twelve.

Obviously the boy deserved to be the one saved this time, just like he and Katniss had agreed. But Katniss didn’t even realize how important her life was. All those little district rebellions since the Victory Tour, the way Snow put the screws to Twelve all winter long, just hoping they’d rise up and give him reason to crush them. The way there was no fucking chance that Quell card had been put there seventy-five years ago. What were the chances back then they could rely on all twelve districts having at least one male and one female victor still alive for it to be a full Games? He didn’t bother doing the math yet on whether that even applied currently, because that would mean running over the names of too many friends who were caught up in this abomination. What were the chances that particular twist would happen to be just in the year after a potential challenge to Capitol power popped up? He was no math genius like Beetee, granted, but being from Twelve, he was naturally very familiar with the notion of next-to-none odds.

He’d told Peeta he’d save Katniss. He’d told Katniss he’d save Peeta. Frankly the thought of sending either of them to die like this when he’d actually managed the impossible and saved them both seemed unbearable. It really took him a bit longer to fully grasp it than it should have--blame his brain still trying to settle down from its years-long spin and secure itself down in this new sober world--but he laughed as the solution, almost elegantly simple, came to him. It was all right there for the taking, wasn’t it? He spent the rest of the afternoon starting to put the pieces together of how it ought to go.

After he ate a good dinner, managed to keep it down, and Hazelle went home for the night, he picked up the telephone and he called up Plutarch Heavensbee.

The call came just as Plutarch Heavensbee was sitting down after dinner with some plans for the new arena, with creative suggestions for each particular “hour”. He pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping that upset people hadn’t actually gotten hold of his home number. Five days since the reading of the card and already the call log at the office for the number of citizens asking if something couldn’t be changed was in the hundreds. At the same time he was dealing with the sense of Capitol outrage, he was seeing decades of carefully buried traces of a revolution in the making burning down before his eyes. In short, it had not been a good week.

“This is Plutarch,” he answered, with as cheerful a tone as he could muster.

“It’s Haymitch Abernathy,” came the voice on the other end. Plutarch raised an eyebrow. Same rough district twang but lacking his usual slurring. Interesting.

“Haymitch, let me save us both some time. No, there are no current plans to alter the Quell. Yes, a petition is circulating to be presented to President Snow. No, I cannot tell you anything about the arena.”

Haymitch laughed, that low bitter-black laugh he had. “I didn’t call to whine at you about that, Heavensbee. You said call if I ever wanted a game of chess.” Plutarch’s fingers tightened on the phone at those words. “I can’t get a decent player here in Twelve, though the boy’s coming along nicely. Plan on teaching him everything I know. All my tricks.”

“I thought you said you didn’t have a telephone.”

“Trinket took care of that months ago. Very good at twisting arms, our Efficient Effie. She apparently got tired of hearing about people having to call the mayor on matters related to our little victors rather than dealing with sweet ol’ me and told me it was presenting a poor image, or something. Look, we gonna play or not? Even if you’re the bastard who’s busy trying to be killing me off, you’re about the best I’ve played. So pull out the fucking board, set up those little pawns of yours, and let’s have us a game.”

“Give me just a minute to get my board.” With that, Plutarch hurried for the parlor and the chess set there, his heart thumping with a wild excitement. He’d been waiting years for this call, been on edge for it ever since the Victory Tour when he was one of the few in the Capitol to be made privy to the uprisings that were brewing. He’d expected it and when winter passed and it didn’t come, he’d started to think it never would.

He brought the board back to the table near the phone, set it up with its handsome carved onyx and alabaster pieces. “It’s difficult to flip a coin for who’ll take white. I can’t see it or you can’t see it, so that’s hardly fair.” He imagined Haymitch sitting there, eyeing his own setup, wondering what was going through his mind.

“Nah, whatever. I’ll take black.” Yes, this was apparently that call. He found he was grinning as they made the opening moves and he watched Haymitch’s game to see what message it contained, what hint of strategy he was offering up.

They’d started to play chess over twenty years ago now, when Plutarch was newly arrived from Thirteen and working as an aide to the victors. He’d tried to befriend Haymitch on the orders of then-President Link because they’d seen his victory, the defiance of the Capitol in it, and thought that this might be the moment, the right spark for a rebellion. By the time Plutarch found him, though, Coriolanus Snow had already put the chains on him good and thick.

Haymitch’s game back then was deliberate, cautious, loath to sacrifice any pieces. Given what he’d been through and what terrible price he was then paying to keep Snow away from his district, Plutarch wasn’t too surprised. He’d found chess was an excellent mirror to hold up to someone to know the truth of their nature and current mindset.

They’d kept playing chess for a few years until Plutarch moved up to being a junior Gamemaker, and he told Haymitch, Anytime you want to play a match, just call me on the telephone and let me know.

He’d carefully let Haymitch know over the years what pieces were in place, just waiting for the right moment. So when he said that, he’d seen in Haymitch’s grey eyes the other man understood the message, and in how he casually answered, Yeah, maybe someday I’ll call you up. I'll even give you the white pieces. After that they mostly lost touch except for a few matters here and there related to the Games. He’d meant to talk to Haymitch last year after the girl came along, that marvelous girl with her fire and her fearlessness, but there had never been a good opportunity.

Yes, something had definitely changed. Haymitch now played swiftly, aggressively, his moves spoken over the telephone with barely a pause. Ruthless too; he didn’t hesitate to sacrifice pieces. He kept putting his queen in play, putting his most powerful piece at risk, though Plutarch noticed the black queen’s bishop was usually right with her as protection.

He thought he was starting to understand this developing message very well. Then came the point where under the pressure of an attack Haymitch casually left that bishop for the taking to protect the queen’s aggressive push towards the white king. “Really? You’re sure of that move?” Plutarch asked him, trying to not let surprise show. “It seems like a mistake.”

Haymitch let out a snort of confident amusement, as if he knew something Plutarch didn’t. “What, losing the bishop? Fuck him. He’s past his usefulness. No, take a look at my little queen there, Plutarch. She’s the one that matters, and she’s got your king in checkmate in two moves.”

Plutarch looked. “I count three.”

“Two,” Haymitch insisted. Taking another long, careful look, Plutarch sighed as he realized the other man was right. It was in two.

“You sure your own king’s as safe as you think?” It sounded like the standard insults and attempts to fake each other out, but the deliberate question was there. He hoped Haymitch understood.

Another of those amused laughs answered him. “He’s snug as a bug back there where he belongs. You're not getting anywhere near him.” A pause and then Haymitch asked, “You wanna play to clear who’s left off the board or just call it quits here?”

“Fine. Checkmate in two. I admit it.” He tipped over the white king with a sense of satisfaction. “You win this one. Well played. Apparently you haven't lost the touch.”

“Well, hey, I win at chess, you win at the Quell, so I think you come out ahead.” Damn him, making it all about reality for a moment like that.

He sighed and shook his head, “If you want another game, go ahead and call me. Just don’t ask me for tips about the arena.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going to be a bit busy. So much to do, planning for the fun of the Quell and all. Trying to manage my adorable lovebirds and this new little tragedy. But tell you what. You’ve got two weeks to improve your game. I’ll expect some development by then.” With that Haymitch hung up.

Trying to not think about some of the implications Haymitch had just implied with his game, Plutarch immediately turned around and sent a coded message to President Coin on Thirteen’s wavelength. Mockingjay will be ready to fly if we get her out of the cage. Need progress report in two weeks.

Chapter Text

A few days into training, panting after yet another run, Haymitch decided that he really hated Peeta Mellark and his recently discovered ruthless streak with a passion. He also laughed sardonically at how Peeta had no idea what “training like Careers” fully entailed--particularly how they cultivated Two’s ability to slaughter and One’s ability to seduce--and that was really a good thing. But he knew that he needed the younger man nonetheless for this crazy plan to have a better chance of success.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he told Peeta once the afternoon’s torture-slash-training session was done. With a glance at Katniss who was already heading back to her house in the Victors' Village, barely looked winded compared to the two of them, Peeeta looked back at Haymitch and nodded. They walked in silence until they were farther into the Meadow, and there was nobody around, even in distant sight. He didn’t waste time getting to the point. “So I had a good long think about it this past week, and I’m the one who’s going in with her.”

They walked along and Peeta came up with all the right and expected arguments. You’re too old, Haymitch. You’re too dependent on alcohol, Haymitch. You’re too out of shape, Haymitch. He nodded in agreement. All of that was true, after all. The boy was smart enough to see it and honest enough to point it out now when so much was on the line. Although even Peeta didn’t know how deep the rabbit hole went in this case.

He let Peeta get a half-step ahead of him, then grabbed his wrist and kicked out with one leg, sweeping the weak point beneath Peeta’s knee where former flesh and bone was now metal alloy. In a second or so Peeta was on the ground on his back, Haymitch’s hand still holding him by the wrist and with the toe of Haymitch’s boot resting lightly on his throat. Smart as he was, once the initial startle passed from his blue eyes, he realized that it wouldn’t take but a small move from Haymitch, a slight press down of his foot or a little tug on Peeta's wrist to pull him up, to apply enough pressure to cut off his air. He stopped fighting almost immediately. Haymitch was convinced Katniss would still be struggling and glowering at him defiantly even as she choked to death, just to make her point. But then, she was just like him in all the wrong ways.

“That’s for pouring out all my liquor, you sanctimonious little shit,” he said with a smirk, and let him go. Peeta sat up, rubbing his throat and coughing lightly. Haymitch sat down in the grass beside him. “So here’s the thing, boy. You’re younger and you’re not coming off a years-long bender, true. But you’ve got an artificial leg and a limp. Means your agility really ain’t that great. Means you can’t sustain a run because it’ll chafe your stump. Means you can’t sprint at all because of your balance. Means they’ll all go for your leg first, just like I did there. So I figure we’re roughly about equally useless physically.”

Peeta nodded, though Haymitch could see the reluctance to admit the truth of it on his face. “Go on. Say everything you've got.” He’d always liked that about Peeta. Unlike Katniss, the boy actually had the smarts and the humility to know when he ought to hear a thing out before he started protesting.

“I killed six tributes. Four Careers.” They likely didn’t know if it was Maysilee’s dart or his knife across the throat a few seconds later than actually killed Aurelia from Two. But since he survived and Maysilee didn't, they credited it to him. Typical Capitol. “I was very, very good." He said it without pride. Nobody ought to take pride in a thing like that. "I can get back to being decent. Maybe even good if I push it and I’m lucky.” That was the first he’d mentioned about his Games and he really hoped to hell Peeta wasn’t going to ask him to go on because he didn’t have any desire to revisit those memories. “Your track record from last year? Giving mercy to a dying girl and accidentally poisoning a starving girl. You haven’t proven you can kill when you’re pushed to it. I can do that. Katniss can do that.”

“I’ll kill if I have to.” They both heard the careful way he said it, the hope that he wouldn’t have to do it. Peeta was a mutt of a victor, the only one Haymitch had ever met who came out with more than shreds for a soul. Even if not for the underlying reasons he had, the essential need to keep Katniss alive at all costs, he’d want to protect the last of that innocence in the boy by keeping him out of the arena.

Haymitch shook his head and sighed. “Boy. Peeta,” he corrected himself. “ It’s not a matter of if you have to kill. It’s when. Now, me, when they come for her, I will kill them.” From Peeta’s glum expression he knew he’d picked up on the steely conviction in Haymitch’s voice and heard the difference.

He could sense he was getting somewhere, but he kept on. “You stayed alive mostly because you were in the Career pack. You’re not great on survival skills. You didn’t recognize nightlock and it almost killed you. You’re not a hunter either. You want to hunt a thing, you look at it and you learn its ways and its instincts and its weaknesses, and know it all like the back of your hand. I know these people. I know how to deal with them. I know how to kill them.” The thought of turning it on old friends, turning them into prey just like he told Peeta, cut deep into him but he pushed it away ruthlessly because he couldn’t afford to think like that, not now. Only the necessity of what had to be done kept a wall between him and the acknowledgment of the full horror of it. He’d keep that wall up as much as he could.

This was another one of those things that he couldn’t burn away in white liquor, that knowledge of something savage and inhuman crawling beneath his skin. Living with the knowledge he was a killer, and now they wanted him to go back to that terrible, red place inside himself and unleash it again on some of those he cared about most. He was already sunk well and good into living hell. It might as well be him and spare Peeta from going there also. He was a mentor. He’d spent twenty-three years not saving a one of them. No chance he was going to just casually toss away one of the two he had managed to keep alive and let him go die on some ill-reasoned romantic whim.

“So I’m hopeless and I shouldn’t have survived,” Peeta said through stiff lips. “Thanks, Haymitch.” Sometimes he seemed so much older than he was, so wise, and then he went and did a thing like that and reminded Haymitch sharply how much of a boy with a boy’s pride he really still was.

“Peeta,” he said with a sigh, not liking this conversation because he really wasn’t good at this kind of shit, but he gave it his best attempt anyway. “You’re the best person to come out of that arena alive. Look. If anyone deserves to live, it’s you. I left you for dead last year. This year I keep you alive.”

“It’s that Seam thing, isn’t it?” Peeta’s fingers nervously plucked at blades of grass, sending them flying in the spring breeze. “She talks about that. This sense of...owing.” From how he said it, Peeta didn’t quite understand it and maybe he never would. It was probably something that just couldn’t be explained. Like love, you either knew what it felt like or you didn’t.

“She’ll need you once it’s over.”

“She doesn’t need me.” Haymitch decided that self-pity really did not look good on Peeta Mellark.

“Not everyone falls in love at first sight, kid." He remembered being sixteen, for all that it hurt to recall even now, and he knew what a constant ride it was emotionally at that age. So for that, for remembering what a stupid kid he'd been once and how confusing and overwhelming love had been, he tried to be patient with Peeta thinking if she didn't love him right back with the same passion he had for her, it couldn't ever happen and it would be the death of him. "And she needs you as more than a lover. She needs you more than she knows how to admit. If you die, she’ll never get over it, and that ain’t about owing.” He thought it wasn’t, that she was just opening to it slow and steady. Glowering suspiciously all the while, of course.

“You’re serious about this? No drinking, hard training, the whole nine yards? You’re already struggling with it. You’re not going to thank me for pushing you even harder.”

“No, I already want to damn well kill you at least once a day.”

“You said a minute ago you really want to keep me alive.”

Haymitch just laughed at him. So young, so naive about some things. So hopelessly pining from afar for so long, and the experience of love with a real person rather than an ideal hadn’t sunk in yet for him. “Give it a few more years with her, Peeta, and I promise you, you’ll know how you can like someone and want to kill them all at the same time. But hey, you poured all the liquor out. See? I want to strangle you for that, but I’ll also admit, proves what a good little mentor you make already.”

“I can’t watch her die, Haymitch.” Soft, serious as a heart attack. “And I don’t know if I can stand to sit there and to know I’m not with her and that means there’s nothing I can do to help her.”

“Welcome to the last couple decades of my life, kiddo.” The remark crossed his lips before he could think better of it. But it was the truth. “But you can do plenty for her. You’re young. You’re attractive. You’re charming.” And wouldn’t that make you sell for a high price if you didn’t have that imperfect maimed leg and if you weren’t one of the Capitol’s romantic darlings. Maybe they wouldn't even care about that. “You’re tragically romantic, trying to keep your girl alive. You can get even the sponsors that wrote me off years ago. That’ll keep her alive more than anything you can do with a knife in your hand.”

“You’re planning on dying in there.”

“Twenty-four go in, one comes out. Do the math.” At least it’d be a death Snow couldn’t complain about and punish people for in case this whole rebellion thing failed. But with him dead in the arena, Peeta would be needed even more. Diplomat for things, so much more inspiring than a washed-up old drunk. Handler for Katniss, and he’d probably do a better job of that than Haymitch ever could. Strategist because fuck knew they couldn’t let her make the plans and Peeta had already surprised Haymitch with how very prettily he lied and how well he could play the long game. Better than he could at Peeta’s age. “She’ll need you once it’s over,” he repeated. “Because I’ve got a plan in motion for getting her out of that arena so she can start that rebellion she wanted.”

Peeta laughed at him just like Haymitch laughed at Katniss when she’d suggested it. Then he stared at Haymitch when he realized he wasn’t laughing back. “You’re not joking. Haymitch...”

Haymitch hit him up with it while he was still dazed and reeling with that piece of news. “Snow’s finally overplayed his hand with killing off victors like this. Even the Capitol’s likely to be pissed off, let alone all the districts. We’ll never be more united and ready to rally behind that little Mockingjay.” If they didn’t do it now, if they just let a challenge like that stand, they might as well just roll over and give up forever. “Decide now. You being in on it will make it a hell of a lot easier for some things. It’ll make it a hell of a lot harder on you. If you’re in, you’re all in. Deep as it gets, and this is dangerous stuff for you to know if we ever get caught. Otherwise, you tell me now and then you stay out of the way and keep your mouth shut.”

Somehow he wasn’t surprised at all when Peeta met his eyes and said firmly, “I’m in.” He’d known that courage was there, and of course, the resolve to do whatever was necessary when it came to Katniss. If only the girl actually deserved him.

“Good. Then I’ll keep you informed as I hear things. You don’t tell her about this,” he warned Peeta.

“We can’t keep her in the dark. Didn’t you learn anything in Eleven from how you two didn’t tell me things? People died!”

“That was then, and it was you. You were right. You should have been in the loop on it, and that was my mistake. This is now, and this is her. She’s always much better off-script. Lousy liar. Lousy at keeping her thoughts hidden. Look how much all the acting on the Victory Tour took out of her, and you want her to keep cover on even higher stakes for several months? Especially with all the cameras on her once we hit the Capitol?” He stared Peeta down, willing to be ruthless about this. “Besides, if this all goes to hell and we get captured, you really want her to know everything and have them draw it out of her piece by piece?" He saw that one definitely hit its mark as Peeta flinched. "You don’t get to jeopardize everything just because you’ll feel bad keeping secrets from her. You want to save her life like you did last year? You don’t tell her.”

“She’s not going to like us doing this to her.”

“Ah, well. I’ll probably be dead, so you get to deal with the fallout of how pissed off she gets.” He grinned nonchalantly. “Sorry about that.”

There was a lot to say, even to get him up to speed about the basics, about Plutarch and District Thirteen, but there had been enough of a shock for one day, perhaps. Peeta glanced at him and said, “If you let her die, Haymitch, I seriously will think about killing you.”

Now that he did believe when Peeta said it. Granted, as a threat it wasn’t exactly impressive--thinking about killing him--but he let that bide. “If she somehow dies on my watch, you won’t have to worry about me coming back.”

Plutarch wouldn’t call him back for a week, but he sat down that night, pondering it over. Peeta was right, of course. One middle-aged man to guard her wasn’t going to be enough of a guarantee, not against twenty-two others. Particularly when none of them were going to be the ill-fed, trembling cannon fodder that usually characterized half the field of any given Games. Every single one of them was a proven killer, even if some of them were old or in rough shape. There would be some genuine threats in there, no matter what.

Twenty-four years of the Games. He knew so many of them well, was friends with a lot of them. How many times had he had a drink or gone to dinner with people whose tributes were trying to kill his, or sometimes even had? But district didn’t matter for victors. They all knew they just went there to Mentor Central every year and did the best they could to bring one kid home alive, and no fault was given for that. They’d all be as disgusted by this Quell as he was.

They’re not the only ones who can form an alliance, Katniss said to Chaff’s little girl last year, and he knew that sight of a cross-district alliance, so startlingly unprecedented, was part of what had made the other districts love her and make her their own. She wasn’t just from Twelve. She was all of Panem’s, the Mockingjay that gave them all something to believe in for the future.

She belongs to all of us. Maybe he could convince some of them of that. With that he grabbed a pad of paper and started writing. Who’s guaranteed a spot?

Johanna. The only female victor from Seven. Pain in the ass in a way that reminded him too much of himself--no wonder they got along so well. He’d been the one Mags and Blight trusted both Finn and Jo to that first year Snow sold them off, so they were his, in both trust and the weight of responsibility, in a way none of the others had been until Katniss and Peeta. Jo would bitch about it but he knew he could talk her around. Particularly when it involved the chance to give Snow and the Capitol the middle finger.

Woof. There were three female victors in Eight, but he was the only male. Damn. He’d won the 9th Games, mentored for fully sixty-five years now, and now he’d be dragged back into it. He sighed. He respected the hell out of Woof because the old man had been something formidable and steady once, showing him the ropes back when Haymitch was new, but he was mostly deaf now and his mind wandered a bit sometimes. But he’d be in the mix anyway, and if nothing else his experience of so many Games would be valuable.

Max from Six, the only male from that district, and his good friend the morphling syringe. Haymitch was hardly one to talk harshly about any victor using any kind of chemical method of coping, but at least with alcohol he was still there in a way that Max wasn't when he was riding high on the morphling. But really, he and Poppy were like a pair of sweet, dreamy kids, and even the bitchiest victors got shut up quickly by the rest when they tried to make fun because the instinct to protect the two of them was right there. Well, Max might not be much of a help in the arena, but he wasn't going to present a problem either.

He was fairly confident whoever got reaped from Four could be roped into his corner. Mags held an almost uncanny level of influence over every victor in that district, so he could probably get Mags to talk them into it. He had a sneaking suspicion the reaping ball just might pick Finnick. The Capitol, even alongside their hysteria at the notion of losing victors, would love to see their darling boy in action again.

Three would be Beetee or Spark and then Wiress or Luma. He knew them all well enough--except for Luma, they’d all been around since before him, and Luma had won the 56th Games so she'd been around a while--though if Wiress got reaped without Beetee to make sense of her she wouldn’t be much help.

He had good odds on Eleven. Chaff was his good friend, after all. Seeder would be in as their only female. Either she or Chaff could do some talking on his behalf if either of the two others in Eleven got reaped. Nobody ever saw Rice these days and Cotton hadn't been back to the Capitol since even before Haymitch got there.

One and Two would be ciphers. He had a couple friends there, sure, but they had so many victors to choose from that he had no idea whether they would be of any use or not.

Still, looking at the scribbles he’d put down already, there were good odds he could get a guaranteed pack of at least a half-dozen as a starting alliance to protect Katniss. At least a few of those might well be strong contenders, Jo in particular. Wasn’t much, but it was some place to begin. So much was out of his hands on it, though. Well, he'd managed before coming up with strategy on the fly. The rest he’d just have to see how the reapings went, who he knew and who owed him favors, and who he had no pull with whatsoever, because those were the dangerous ones.

He also tried to pretend that there wasn't something even a bit self-serving to it, and that he didn't feel a sense of relief at the notion of an alliance that could keep even a few friends from becoming enemies he'd have to kill, even if it was just for a little bit longer.

Chapter Text

As the spring passed, he realized Peeta had been right; they needed to get their shit together and train. He was growing stronger, faster, shedding the extra weight and able to go a little bit longer every day. That didn’t mean he didn’t still ache for a drink with a pain that seemed fit to kill him. Seeing the world clear, feeling it all press in around him unfiltered and intense, was hard, and every time he thought about going back in the arena it was almost unbearable.

So he filled the space where white liquor used to be with preparations. Training, running, climbing trees, fighting, relearning the survival skills he'd known when he was a kid. Going until his body started to feel it and complain and then going even further because that was how it had to be. He’d have to have no mercy on anyone in the arena, so he excused himself from weakness and surrender least of all right now.

Besides, he’d spent years anyway ignoring the protests of his body that he’d reached a limit. Telling it to shut up and keeping right at what he was doing was nothing new. Then, it let him pass out drunk. Now, it let him collapse in bed for a few hours too exhausted to dream and in his mind, that was really a nice bonus.

He’d never be what he was when he was sixteen. Trying to coax that much from the long ill-maintained body of a forty-one year old man was a losing proposition. For every bit of agility or stamina he successfully brought back, he could see Katniss right there mocking him with her youth and the ease of it. Peeta usually sighed and told him he needed to take it easier and eat more. He ignored both of them and just tried to throw up out of sight when he pushed himself that much too far, which thankfully got less frequent. He decided he infinitely preferred puking when he was drunk because at least then he didn’t much taste the acid of it scalding his throat.

He wouldn’t be what he was but he just hoped he could be good enough. He was stronger than he had been then, and infinitely smarter, and that counted for something. He’d be facing some older opponents too, not just a pack of disgustingly fit children. And unlike the Career children he knew this much: it didn’t need to be pretty or perfect if it got the job done. Plenty of wins had come in ugly ways. If he could consistently throw a knife and hit the target somewhere, that would do. He didn’t have to be that freakishly good little Two girl from last year with pinpoint precision. Anyone with a knife sticking in their thigh or shoulder or side was going to be distracted by it long enough for him to move in for the killing blow with another blade in hand.

Still, Katniss always looked at him with that easy contempt as he huffed his way through yet another run or threw a knife and only hit the shoulder. About the only time she listened intently to him was in the evenings, when they came over to his house and they popped in videos of the old Games that Effie Trinket had gotten at Peeta’s request, and Haymitch told them what he knew about them.

Fifty-nine victors left alive, which meant fifty-six potential opponents. These were the highlight reels, condensed down from weeks and weeks of Game footage. Mostly features of the eventual victor, with some of the “best” moments of the Games on the whole thrown in for some extra spice. He’d seen a tape with his name in there and wondered what the fuck Trinket was thinking, including that, but chances were she was so bubbleheaded she just hadn’t thought that ordering tapes of every living victor would include his. When he saw last year’s tape with Katniss and Peeta was also included, that convinced him of it. Chances were the kids had seen his tape right there in the box and would notice if he destroyed it, so he left it alone. He’d just absolutely refuse to watch it if they asked, that was all. There was no reason for it since he wouldn't be their opponent.

They sat in front of the television and they watched his friends as they learned what it was like to kill people. In a way he felt far worse than if he was watching them starring in one of those smutty Capitol pay-to-views. Seeing them, young and still relatively innocent, and seeing how the Games slowly corrupted them all, was seeing them at their most naked.

All the while, of course, he was offering up advice. Plutarch was responsible for anything related to Thirteen and what happened after Katniss got out of the arena, because Thirteen to Haymitch was like a mythical fucking unicorn--he'd heard the stories it existed, but he'd never seen it so he didn't know anything about it. He would stick to what he knew, namely victors, the Games, and the arenas. Which, happily enough, was precisely what Peeta and Katniss wanted to hear about when it came to their would-be opponents: things about their nature, their weaknesses, their technique in the arena. He told them nothing about the actual people they were, because it was better for them anyway if they didn’t know all that.

“Chaff McCormick. He’s one-handed, so of course that’s gonna be a drawback for him. But yeah, you see that right there--cut off his own finger to try to keep the poison from spreading from that snakebite. Didn’t work, of course. Peeta, if you need to puke, don’t do it on the carpet. So don’t underestimate how determined he is. Even with one hand he can still use that cane machete.”

Chaff and his constant stupid jokes that made everything seem a little bit brighter. Chaff who’d looked after him that first time he came back from a Capitol “party” all cut up and drugged and who’d been sort of looking after him ever since. Chaff and how he’d handed over that sponsorship money from Eleven last year, saying, “That girl deserves to know we’re grateful.”

“Oh, Brutus Allamand. Straightforward enough--big, strong, likes the sword like most Two boys do. Congratulations, sweetheart. If I'm somehow tossed in there," because he and Peeta were both careful to pretend they didn't have their little agreement, "there is actually one person out there who'd make me his priority kill, not you.”

“What did you do to make him that angry?” Katniss asked him.

Haymitch just laughed. “Maybe I stole his girl.” Or maybe it had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with Brutus’ win and how Haymitch killed a Two tribute in the arena.

Brutus looked at him with the frustrated sense of someone struggling to explain something obvious to him. “No, that’s the point! He was better than me, and you were good enough that you killed him in combat.”

“So this is what, you trying to challenge me to a duel? Beat me and you’ll somehow help justify your continued existence?”

“Very funny,” Katniss mumbled. Yeah, of course to her he’d always been old and drunk, hardly the type to steal peoples’ girls.

“He’s got a point to prove. Brute’s always really wanted another good fight because his win wasn’t that impressive--you see it happening right there, most everyone froze to death that year.” He was grateful neither of them brought up that had been the first year he’d mentored. If they did the math and realized it, they didn’t ask. “He’s in pretty good shape for his age and he’ll probably take some dumb risks to try to regain his honor. That could be either helpful or make him more dangerous.”

He didn’t say anything about how Brutus always drank terrible wine and sang off key, had eventually developed a wickedly dry sense of humor, and while he was always proud of Two he saw no pride in tributes who played with their kills, and Haymitch had always liked that.

“Finnick Odair. You two were just youngsters when this one was on live, but I’m sure you’ve seen the reruns. Youngest victor ever.” Finn, fourteen and so young, a guileless boy who charmed Panem with that playful Four nature. A puppy that was wagging its tail even as it got tied into the sack to get drowned. “He was a menace even then with that trident, of course, and he’ll be even more of a threat with it now that he’s grown.”

“He’s really popular too with the Capitol people,” Peeta acknowledged. “That’ll help him with sponsorships.” They had no idea how popular Finn was, or how miserable it made him.

Finn was at his door in the middle of the night with his green eyepaint all smeared from the tears, reeking of sex and expensive alcohol. Haymitch sighed. He knew from experience you couldn’t lock it all down deep inside right from the start. “C’mere. Let’s get you cleaned up.” A few days later, he walked in on Finn and Jo in the lounge of Mentor Central when he was dead on his feet and ready for a nap because he’d been up for thirty-six hours keeping Maya alive. He’d jokingly snarked at them about being horny young kids but he’d been relieved the two of them were there for each other because that would help them endure.

“Johanna Mason. Seven’s only female victor, so she’s guaranteed to be in there. Obviously she’s very good with that axe. Smart enough that she played possum in the arena," or so the official story went. "But that won’t work now since everyone knows. But she’s crafty, she’s tough, and she won’t hesitate to just get in there and do what has to be done. Take her seriously.”

He really wanted to punch Blight for how obvious it was he was nervously grateful to hand the whole matter over to Haymitch. But then, after that notorious last appointment ten years back, he could hardly blame Blight for flinching at anything to do with whoring out victors and wanting to keep away from it. He glanced at her, the clever girl who’d blundered and killed her own family just like he had. “You sure that’s what you actually want, sweetheart?” He'd do it as a favor to her, sure, because after his own experience he'd rather see just about any young victor avoid having to endure their first time being with a patron, but he wanted to be certain of this first.

She looked at him, fierce brown eyes trying to conceal the hurt. “No, but it’s the best that I can have.” She wasn’t tough enough then to hide everything she was feeling, but she was unflinching at facing the truth and seizing hold of the one choice she did have. He thought she might even be strong enough to survive all of it.

He made them pay attention to the arenas themselves because even at sixteen he'd won by thinking in terms of the arena rather than his opponents. Not that he was advising them to follow in his footsteps or anything, but he knew full well the nature of an arena was as important as the competitors, sometimes even more so. Strategy would differ a lot from a woodland to a desert to a beach. Or a paradise where every beautiful thing was deadly. "Quell arenas seem to have more of the unexpected than the usual. Don't go in hoping it'll be a nice simple wilderness like last year." Surprisingly, they didn't ask him the obvious question. Maybe they saw the look on his face and were smart enough to keep their mouths shut. He'd have to tell them about it at some point, tear open all sorts of old wounds, but he was enough of a coward he couldn't face it just yet. They'd gotten close to part of it last year in that cave, asking each other how they thought he'd won his Games, and agreeing he'd outsmarted them. Holding out that handful of berries days later, they didn't know how much danger they were in, and that a person definitely could be too clever for the Capitol's comfort.

Still, as Quell victors went, he had it better than Harvest Anderson from Nine, the girl who'd won the 25th Games. Woof told him once that in the First Quell they gave the tributes plenty of food and water but no weapons and they prohibited them as sponsor gifts. So the tributes brained each other with rocks. They pummeled each other to death with their bare hands. They strangled each other. They drowned each other in the lake. One girl got burned to death over someone else's campfire. The discards of their districts, they got turned into the worst type of ruthless killers. Small wonder Harvest somehow "forgot" she was a strong swimmer later that year and drowned in a river in Nine, unable to face what she'd done or face the district that voted her away to die in the first place.

He also didn’t tell them how automatically, for every tape they put in that was a mentor year for him, he could easily recall the names and faces of the two Twelve tributes. What they’d been like, on camera and off. How long they’d lasted and how they’d died. How long it had taken him down in the tribute morgue to prepare their body for their family, or if they’d been such a barely-human ruin it was impossible and he’d signed for a sealed casket to send them home in so the family wouldn’t have to ever see it.

They watched a tape every night and Peeta wrote carefully in a notebook as Haymitch made his remarks. Good little mentor indeed. Then once the tape was done, Katniss and Peeta would head across the silent Victors' Village green to their own houses, to get some sleep and be ready for more running in the morning.

He wouldn’t go to bed just yet, not quite tired enough to just drop into that blissfully blank sleep. Once he was sure they were tucked away snug in their houses, he went to train alone in the far corner of the Meadow where the Peacekeepers usually weren’t watching and there was no Katniss and no Peeta.

Mentors taught each other plenty of in the down hours of the Games, usually fueled by liquor. Drinking games were popular, and anything that could be turned into a drinking game. Of course, they could turn anything into a drinking game. When he was young he’d learned a couple of kali dances courtesy of Brutus, the swift and deadly knife forms the Careers in Two did as part of their training. Here, you’re good with a blade, let’s see you keep up with this. Loser buys the drinks, right? He’d won a bottle of that shitty District Two wine from Brutus by doing them perfectly after a couple tries. After all, people in Twelve knew how to dance.

Once he had been a Seam boy who danced in the Meadow to the sound of fiddles with a grey-eyed girl. Now he was a Seam man who danced in the Meadow to the stillness of the night with a steel-grey knife. He danced for war, not for joy.

A knife was the only thing he’d ever held in his sleep in that house in Victors' Village; no wife, no woman at all. The only thing now that could keep him and the girl alive in the arena. A simple knife had been deadly in the hands of a boy who’d butchered kills in the woods and knew where to stab and to cut. Not the most elegant of weapons--knife combat was actually pretty bloody and brutal. But that was good. He didn’t want to give them something flashy and impressive, something that pretended it was really something beautiful rather than simply reducing a human being to meat.

Clumsily at first, as the weeks went on he felt some of the strength and grace returning as he went through the moves, demanding just one more repetition from himself each time he wanted to drop to the grass and lie there panting for breath. He would never be what he was then, but when that dance flowed from him again sweet and smooth as fiddle music and the knife felt as comfortable in his hand waking as it always did sleeping, he thought he just might be enough.

He’d gotten used to Hazelle being there, that she’d be cooking when he came back from afternoon training and by the time he finished showering the meal would be ready. Sometimes he’d just have Peeta and Katniss there too so they could sit down with the tapes right after.

There was something wistfully comfortable about it, even with Hazelle’s deliberate distance, the glimpse of something another, different Haymitch could have once had. Of course, they weren’t his kids and she wasn’t his wife. At least she readily just took the food home to Gale, Vick, Rory, and Posy by now, accepting that in cooking at his place, she was cooking her own family’s dinner too. She never said much to him but he didn’t much expect that. When she did it was kind of a pleasant surprise so he tried to spin it out as long as he could when that happened.

“Gale says you’re pretty good at snares,” she told him one evening in late spring. “Managed a good cloverleaf today.”

Yeah, the kid pretty much said the same thing to him that afternoon, staring incredulously at the tight, perfect knots. All youth and arrogance, amazed that someone older than thirty could be capable, and Haymitch kind of wanted to smile at the naivete of it even as he wanted to smack him upside the head. It was a sign of how much both Gale and Peeta cared about the girl that they managed to get along for Gale’s lessons. “I think his words were ‘Pretty good for an old man’. Your boy’s a good teacher. Dinner smells good--what’s that you’ve got in there?”

“Haymitch.” She put down the spoon and raised an eyebrow as she gave him a direct look. “I know you were the one that taught that snare to Jonas when you were only ten or eleven. Hell, you taught it to me when I was eleven. Why are you playing possum on it now?”

“Everyone in Twelve knows I’m fairly useless,” he told her pleasantly. “Doesn’t cost me anything in the way of pride to not object.” It was just simpler--far less ridiculous too--for him to not stand up and demand after all this time and all his screw-ups that they suddenly ought to treat him with any kind of respect. “Who knows, maybe I drank how to tie the thing out of my brain years ago,” he added snarkily.

She actually flinched a little bit and he realized it could have sounded like he was lashing out at her for that comment about Briar back in the winter. “You didn’t answer the question,” she said.

He sighed, irritated that she was determined to dig her claws in here when she’d made it obvious she’d take his money but didn’t much like it, but deciding it was easier to just give in. “Because being useful to Katniss, doing something to help her, keeps him from going crazy over it and doing something towards getting himself back on that whipping post or worse.” He could easily tell Gale Hawthorne was the sort that would go do something stupid in his helpless frustration.

She opened her mouth to say something, then whatever it was faded from her and she nodded. As she left that night, she did say, “Thank you,” and he thought there was something genuine about it rather than weary politeness.

That night once Peeta and Katniss were settled on the couch, he glanced at the name on the tape Peeta had selected for their viewing pleasure. “Annie Cresta.” Finn’s Annie. “Ah, you probably remember this one. District Four. 70th Games.” But of course the name didn’t readily ring a bell for them, or the year. For them, the Games they’d grown up with all just blurred, years of victors that didn’t matter because it was never a kid from Twelve. “Another spectacularly unspectacular disaster year. Busted dam in that one, flooded the whole arena.”

Somehow he wasn't surprised Katniss didn't remember. The 70th, that was the Games after that bleak winter day Burt Everdeen died down in the mines. She'd have had a lot more on her mind that summer than yet another Four victory. That summer was his first year off the victor-whore circuit and therefore the first year he'd been drunk from start to finish.

Now he saw the flash of recognition on Peeta’s face. “Oh, her! She won by outswimming everyone.”

“Didn’t she go crazy after her district partner got beheaded in front of her?” He’d watched Finn almost crumble at his mentor station when that happened, as Annie fled the scene screaming and sobbing and wild-eyed, scarlet from head to toe with the blood of both her partner and his killer. Annie, who wasn’t all there sometimes even now but from how Finnick spoke about her it seemed like she and Finn kept each other anchored to life and to sanity in a way he both admired and envied.

“Yeah, well, do take notice that she still killed the boy from Two who did it before she ran away,” Haymitch pointed out dryly. As he started describing Annie for them, he wondered if somewhere in the other districts, someone was watching another tape and saying Haymitch Abernathy. Now, he was something once--fast, smart, dangerous. Don’t worry too much about him. Too many years and too much booze. He’s just another has-been.

Chapter Text

Summer was coming on, barely two weeks left to Reaping Day. Plutarch was assuring him things were coming together on Thirteen's end of things. Haymitch--or more likely, Peeta as his proxy--would keep him posted as things came together in the Capitol with the other victors. It was a sticky, humid afternoon when Romulus Thread found them out practicing in the Meadow. Seeing the grim grey spectre of the Head approaching, Haymitch drew in a tight breath. Obviously with the electrified fence and Peacekeepers crawling so thick throughout Twelve that they were up everyone’s ass they could hardly go train out in the woods. But the brazen daring of doing it right in front of the Peacekeepers was something they shouldn’t have planned on being successful. It was one thing when it was simple conditioning, running and lifting weights and the like, but the moment it moved on to combat and knives and things like that, that moved into dangerous territory. He’d gotten sloppy in not worrying about how obvious they were because nobody had said anything, but apparently now it would be an issue. “Keep at it,” he told Gale, who was showing Peeta and Katniss a deadfall. “I’ll handle this.”

Thread was leaning up against a tree watching the three kids when Haymitch came up to him. “This has been the most entertainment I’ve had since coming to your pathetic little district,” he said almost merrily. “Particularly watching you improve out of simply making a jackass of yourself.”

“Well, so long as we have your approval to carry on,” Haymitch said with false brightness, trying to not let anything in him relax at the notion they might get away with it.

Thread chuckled. “You might as well. It means you might give at least a halfway credible fight rather than going down in the first ten minutes, so that’s worth giving you a little latitude.” Considering how steely he’d seemed the day he and Katniss and Peeta had intervened to keep him from whipping Gale to death, and how nonchalant he’d seemed at every hanging or whipping since, seeing him amused was actually kind of disturbing.

Haymitch cocked his head, hearing the words and recognizing the sentiment, and suspicion sharpening in his mind. “You’re from District Two.” A slight nod. “Thread,” he said mostly to himself with a heavy sigh. How stupid was he to have not put it together before this? Granted, he’d had a lot of other fairly important shit on his mind related to keeping Katniss and Peeta both alive. “And let me guess. You had a brother or cousin or something named Remus who was in the 50th Games with me.”

“Remus was my twin,” Thread confirmed. There was, strangely enough, no hint of affection or grief in his voice. Having grown able to pick up on the flickers of that even behind Two stoicism, Haymitch found the lack of it strange.

Another generous gift from Coriolanus Snow--their Head had a personal bone to pick with Twelve. No wonder he’d come right in and started his little reign of terror. “Well, Brutus already wants a piece of me, so lucky you, you might even get your chance to see a Two victor kill me.”

“Brutus is a disgrace to our district. He should never have been in the arena anyway.” Haymitch suppressed a wince, seeing he’d blundered there in mentioning Brutus. Granted, others he’d talked to from Two weren’t so vehement about it, but he’d been aware Brutus wasn’t all that admired for his victory back home. Only his proven talent for mentoring multiple victors had earned him some respect.

“I know. If the Quell hadn’t happened the year he came in second in Two’s tribute tournament, the next year was supposed to be Remus’ year to win the honors and enter the Games.” He’d heard plenty on this from Brutus over the years. He was trying to keep his voice level as he could, agreeing with Thread without hesitation, because there was something off-kilter about him, something that he sensed could tip easily if Haymitch pushed him even a little bit. Calling it madness might not be too far off the mark.

Thread lowered his voice and stared at him with those unnerving dark eyes. “I’m letting you all train because apparently you took a notion to put down the bottle and actually put in some effort. At first I was going to stop you. Then I decided that Remus’ memory deserves better than seeing someone who was skilled enough to defeat him die like a pathetic old drunk. Two or Seven or One or even that little girl with her bow, I don’t much care who it is that kills you. But you’d better give it your all in there, Abernathy, and come out alive if you possibly can, or die a worthy death in trying.” The or else wasn’t spoken, but Haymitch heard it loud and clear. Thread wielded more than enough power here to make his displeasure something fairly painful for people in Twelve.

He could have pointed out there was no guarantee anyway that he’d be in the Games rather than Peeta, but given that it was already decided and Thread was crazy, that would just be poking him with a stick to no point. It was simple enough to follow. He’d killed Remus Thread and now he’d better balance the scales again, blood for blood. “Understood,” he acknowledged curtly, heading back towards Katniss and Peeta. He wouldn’t tell them about this. They had enough to worry about already without something oddly personal like this horning in to give them further concerns.

So, he’d better find a glorious death in combat or else. No fucking pressure or anything. He had the definite feeling he’d unfortunately killed the better of the two Thread brothers in the arena all those years ago.

Reaping Day was hot as hell already and the sun was barely up. Sipping his morning coffee on the porch, Haymitch saw the Peacekeepers walking the green looked miserable in their thick white uniforms. He wondered what had happened to Darius, that flirty redheaded boy who’d defied Thread back at the flogging, trying to step in. The one Haymitch had practically tripped over, lying there on the icy ground. He hadn’t been seen since. Haymitch was afraid he already knew that answer.

To his surprise Hazelle came up the path. “No need to tidy up today,” he told her with a faint shrug. “I’ll still pay you, of course. Not your fault ain’t much of a need for it.”

“You’re not planning on coming back,” she guessed shrewdly. When he looked startled, she sighed and gave him a faint smile. “You’re not as subtle as you’d like to think, Hay.” That old nickname. He hadn’t heard it in years. “You keep nagging me to take things. Extra money too. As if you knew I’d be out of a job again soon enough.” She looked at him and her voice softened. “You had me take your ma’s things. And your brother’s. After all those years.”

“Haze...” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “I figured my ma’s things would do for you, and your boys might as well use Ash’s clothes and all. I mean, they all got bought new and then they never got to use ‘em.” She kept looking at him, waiting for what he was really thinking, in that quietly expectant way she had. “I’ve fucked up enough years of my life. Peeta’s young. He has a chance. He deserves to see it through.” Now he could admit honestly enough, “And I should have done for you and yours years ago. For Briar.”

She drew in a slow breath and nodded. “I brought you this.” She opened her hand and he saw the wooden spiral pendant that Briar used to wear, the one he'd carved for her back when he was a kid. “I thought you might...you might want this. For the arena.”

“I thought you said she would have been ashamed of me.” He couldn’t help saying it, because the thought of it still hurt.

“I was pissed off with you that day.” She sighed. “Then you said a lot of things. When you were...sick. Things that make me think it ain’t exactly been easy for you.”

This was going somewhere risky in a big hurry. Much as she looked at him openly, almost sympathetically, inviting him to confide in her, he knew he shouldn’t. It might do him some good to lay down his burdens like that, but putting them on her shoulders, all those dangerous secrets, would be too much. “And it’s things where it’s really safer for you that you don’t know the details, Haze,” he told her quietly. He closed her fingers over the pendant. “Keep it. It’s...I’m honored, but I don’t want to maybe lose it.” Some of the victors had been trophy hunters in their first Games, and he didn’t want to think of losing one of the few pieces left of Briar like that. The same reason the braided leather wristband Ash made him, the one he’d worn in the arena last time, wasn’t coming with him either.

She nodded. “Bury you with it?” She said it matter-of-factly, but then, she’d buried plenty of dead, from an early age. Briar’s death forced her to grow up fast. She’d been the one that consoled Jonas after his sister Lorna got hanged for poaching. She’d dealt with Jonas' death too, though the mines gave back nothing for her to bury beneath that wooden marker.

“If you would. That and the wristband Ash made me back then. It's in the bedside drawer upstairs.” Assuming they even bothered to return his body, given the stunt he was planning to pull. “Did she...” He cleared his throat. “She ever say anything about Maysilee Donner, during the Games?” They’d never talked about it, him and Briar. At first he was too stunned by surviving and too afraid of what she thought of him, and then she was too dead.

“She was grateful the girl helped keep you alive, and as for the other? It was one kiss on the cheek, Hay, between two kids that were pretty giddy they hadn’t just died. She knew that.” Guiltily he knew there was the chance it could have maybe been far more than that had he and Maysilee both lived, but never mind that. “Should she have worried?”

He really wanted to lie, but looking at the end of things like this, there was no point. “I honestly don’t know. That was the arena, and that moment. I never had to find out if there was anything beyond that because she died, and then Briar died.”

Hazelle laughed ruefully. “Looks like it’s in the family to lose the hearts of someone we love to a brave merchie kid we can’t even hate because they’re good people keeping the one we care about alive. First Briar, and now Gale.”

“Does it really matter, Haze? I didn’t get to choose either of ‘em in the end.”

“Or anyone else, for that matter.”

He leaned in closer, talked lowly to her just in case someone was listening. He’d tell her this much because this wasn’t simply offloading a burden. This was truth she deserved to know about how her sister died. “Briar--the fire was my fault. Snow’s punishment for how I won.”

She didn’t look surprised. “You think that’s some guilty secret of yours? We always knew it was no accident. We just all knew better than to speak up. That’s on Snow’s head, not yours.” She sighed. “But whatever sins you’ve got, Hay--the real ones--I think you’ve paid enough.” She put a hand to his cheek, turned his face to her, and kissed the other cheek softly. “Good luck.”

The square was bordered by Peacekeepers with machine guns, keeping an eye for any unrest. They needn’t have bothered. The weary cattle look was there when Haymitch glanced around him. The stupidity of standing there cordoned off in a pen with Peeta, Katniss in another one barely five feet to their right, was obvious.

Even Effie had lost her chirpy sparkle, though her metallic gold wig more than made up for it. He saw how her fingers looked unsteady as she clawed around and around the reaping ball, nervously chasing the one slip of paper with Katniss’ name. Katniss walked on up as she was called, and Effie hurriedly snatched a slip from the other one, almost crushing it in her fingers, as if to avoid a repeat performance. “Haymitch Abernathy,” she read out in a tight, high voice.

Haymitch shot Katniss an unhappy look and gave a half-shrug as if to say, Well, there it is.

Peeta, bless him, was quick on the draw to get the performance started. “I volunteer as tribute!” Peeta’s voice rang out loud and clear. Just like everyone probably expected he’d do.

Right on the heels of Peeta’s desperate shout, Haymitch followed it up with a crisp, “And I ain’t letting you volunteer!” The two of them turned to face each other, kicking off the inevitable argument.

“Haymitch...please...you have to let me go.” Peeta’s face was a perfect study in anguished love. “I have to be there, I have to protect...”

“She needs you to stay alive, Peeta.” He took hold of Peeta by the shoulders. “Twenty-four go in, one comes out. If you go with her, either she dies or you die. You two, you're young. You deserve to have a life together. So let me go. Let me do this.”

Peeta stared at him for long seconds, and finally gave a tiny nod. “Promise me, Haymitch,” he demanded fiercely. “Promise me you’ll make sure she comes back.”

“I’ll keep her safe for you. Whatever it takes.” Acting it to the hilt, the two of them, and he hoped the television audiences were buying it. He leaned in close now, as if the two of them were exchanging some kind of private words. “Good job. Keep it together now, and we’re on our way.”

“Don’t you let me down, Haymitch,” Peeta said with the miserable anxiety of someone leaving the most precious thing he had in the trust of someone else.

He clapped Peeta on the shoulder, let go of him and headed up to join Katniss. First time he had been on this stage in years that he wasn’t at least tipsy, possibly all the way gone to roaring drunk. He shook hands with Katniss who gave him a slight nod, probably figuring he’d talked Peeta out of going into the arena and thus fulfilled his promise to her to keep him alive. She was satisfied with it--their bargain was kept. Obviously she knew he’d be keeping his word to Peeta now and keeping her alive.

Effie asked Mayor Undersee nervously, and he heard the strain in her Capitol-prim voice, “Is refusal of a volunteer even permitted?” Ah, Trinket, always falling back on manners and protocol when she was upset. Admittedly, he was touched that she was upset. She was foolish and feather-brained and had no idea about anything that mattered, but in her own way, she’d come to care about Katniss and Peeta. From the couple telephone calls she’d given him since the reading of the card, apparently this Quell thing was knocking her off-balance too. “I’m not sure it’s ever happened before!”

“It seems the two gentlemen have both agreed who’s volunteering to go into the arena, so I don’t see there being an issue with it.” Undersee's face spoke of his unhappiness at this whole thing. He heard the faint tone of But better him than the boy in Undersee’s voice. He agreed entirely with him.

He looked out over the crowd, standing there sweating and kept unnaturally still by the armed guards. Even if they could have risked it, and he wasn’t sure it would have been wise, they wouldn’t have touched their fingers to their lips for him as they had last year for Katniss. He was no youngster surrendering a life full of potential, someone whose sacrifice was of such a magnitude to make them a figure suddenly beloved and admired. He’d lost any claim to their love a long, long time ago.

But he saw nods of acknowledgment, and some looks of respect. He couldn’t bring back their forty-six dead children he had failed, but today he had stepped in to say he wouldn’t let them take these two. He refused to let Peeta die instead of him, and then openly promised he'd die so Katniss would come back alive. He'd calmly traded his death for their two lives. In their eyes, with that gesture, he had given all that he had left to try and pay his debt.

He was spared from an awkward hour of sitting in the Justice Building without any farewell visitors by being greeted by Thread’s satisfied smile as they were escorted right to the train under armed guard. Katniss just looked stunned at it, and he was sure there was plenty she’d wanted to say to her ma and her sister and Gale Hawthorne. As for him, he shrugged and settled down in his seat for the train journey to the Capitol. Unlike her, grief at those suddenly-severed ties to home wasn’t making him upset. On the contrary, he felt light, almost free. Finally, for the first time in twenty-five years, he wasn’t weighed down by that crushing sense of owing Twelve more than he could ever repay. Apparently imminent death helped that notion. He thought, Now I’m ready.

Chapter Text

As the border of Twelve faded behind them, Haymitch heard as Peeta reassured Katniss she could write letters to her family and friends to say all the things she’d just been robbed of the opportunity to say in person. He’d left Peeta to console her, say all the things that would help her. That had never been his strong suit. Goading her into what needed to be done and keeping her from her own stupidity sometimes, sure. But not comforting her.

For his part, Haymitch shrugged, sat down at the mahogany writing desk, and made out a will. Not the usual thing for District Twelve when the earthly possessions of the deceased usually consisted of worn clothes, lots of coal dust, and maybe grandpa’s old dresser and nobody was going to contest that. But he’d had twenty-five years of income the likes of which the rest of Twelve could only dream about, and well, aside from a lot of liquor and some food, he really hadn’t touched it. Every year at the Games he heard from some Capitol banker informing him of the balance and how nicely it was accruing interest sitting there. Might as well at least take a crack at designating where it would go, although he was cynically pretty sure if this whole revolution got started, a rebel’s last will and testament would be worth a wipe of someone’s ass and that was about it.

There was a list of forty-six names, from Larkspur Taylor and Dean Gordon all the way to Fern Matthews and Jimmie Aberforth. To the next of kin in each case--probably still the parents for most--he left a sum that would probably keep them comfortably for several years. The remainder, he designated split between the next of kin of Briar Wainwright, namely Hazelle Hawthorne, and the next of kin of Maysilee Donner, namely Maribelle Undersee. A few personal items to Peeta and Katniss, and he was done. They'd understand why he hadn't named them for the cash. They had plenty of their own and probably would rather see it go to someone who could really use it.

“Effie!” he yelled, seeing Effie’s gold wig bobbing in the window as she passed. “You wanna come sign this for me?”

She minced her way towards him in those too-high heels and that skirt with the ridiculous hobbling hem that didn’t even let her take an actual full step. Leaning down over the desk, she glanced it over. “A will? Haymitch...” There was something almost human in those blue eyes, even with the garish mask of paint.

“Just sign it, all right? Needs to be witnessed that I wrote it out and wasn’t crazy when I did it.” He smiled wryly. “Might be up for debate to some, mind. Peeta and Katniss are both named in it so they can’t sign.”

She sighed, picked up the pen, and signed the paper. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised her signature was full of loops and curlicue embellishments. “It’s actually ‘Euphemia’, huh?” He'd never known that. Now that was a name with some actual dignity. One that didn’t lend itself to the little names he flippantly gave her just to piss her off. Efficient Effie. Effusive Effie. Effective Effie. If he was really drunk or irritated, he could go all the way to pulling out Effing Effie.

Obviously Effie wasn’t in the mood for any kind of banter. She bit her lip. “It just isn’t right,” she said lowly, and glanced around in an almost animal panic in case someone overheard her speaking even that little rebellion. “The two of them after all they endured and you, and your manners may frequently be dreadful but to have this happen...” Her voice went even lower, spoke even worse, direct treason. “This is wrong.”

And with realizing that, a rebellion is made. He considered for a moment. She was full of fluff but she was facing it square here and calling it like it was, looking like she wanted to do something. No. Too much to risk to bring her on board directly, and he had little notion of what best use he could make of a Capitol gal like her. Nothing he could manage in the arena, he was sure. “I’d suggest you take your concerns straight to Plutarch Heavensbee,” he told her, looking directly at her so she’d know it wasn’t just a casual blow-off of a remark. “Maybe he’ll have some ideas of what you can do.” If Plutarch sounded her out and found some way to use her, all to the good.

She nodded and wobbled her way out of his compartment and he almost thought she was sniffling a bit. Of course, by dinner her makeup was all back in place again, but he and Katniss didn’t say much and Peeta and Effie’s lousy attempts at conversation died out quickly.

They sat down to watch the replay of the reapings. Haymitch knew on a strategic level he ought to be making mental notes of who would be on the playing field, both as allies and opponents, but right then it was all he could do to watch it and not shatter. He left it to Peeta with his notebook to handle that.

Chantilly Forbes--though she was Chantilly Dumas now, married to her fellow One victor Niello, and two kids to boot--got called from One and right off the bat he knew this would be awful. Chantilly won the year before him, and got sold to Capitol buyers just like him, and they’d propped each other up through a lot together those early years as friends. A bit more than friends, really, but while they’d both agreed to be there for each other, it had to be a lot less than a romance. Then Gloss Donovan was called and immediately his twin sister Cashmere volunteered in place of Chantilly.

Well, Cash never went anywhere Gloss couldn’t go with her. She won the year before him. They hadn’t turned to him as their mentor in the ways of the victor-whore as Finn and Jo had--they naturally turned to Chantilly instead as a native of their district who was just then finally getting out of the life herself. Of course she told him about it: they usually booked the Donovans as a pair. If they were lucky it was someone wanting the experience of fucking a twin brother and sister. If they weren’t lucky, it was someone wanting the experience of watching a twin brother and sister fuck each other. Bad as some of his own appointments had been, Haymitch hadn’t been beyond wincing at that. Small wonder the two of them clung to each other so much now.

Enobaria Reska with her fangs from Two--she’d apparently bought the Capitol shit so deep after a few years she really believed being sold as a whore was something to be proud of, proving how many admirers she had. He felt sorry for that even as it made him instinctively cringe away. Brutus practically lunged for the stage to volunteer. Somehow Haymitch wasn’t surprised he did it. He’d been desperate to regain his self-respect for years, and for him, the arena was the way to do it.

Annie Cresta got called in Four, and immediately she started going into one of her panic attacks. The old stroke-garbled voice rang out and Haymitch saw Mags Robichaux heading for the stage, leaning on her cane. Oh, fuck no. Mags. He closed his eyes for a moment. Woof would be glad his old friend was there, but it hurt to see it. Finnick got reaped next. Of course. Finn glanced at Annie, gave her a little smile, and went to take his place with Mags.

Johanna Mason stormed the stage like she owned it in Seven, and she hid whatever rage and defiance she had behind a flippantly sarcastic, "Well, let's get this party started. Who's my dance partner?" Blight Arnesson followed her, poor bastard who’d finally broken all to pieces inside the night some particularly sick bastard forced him to fuck the thirteen-year-old daughter of some business rival as some kind of revenge, by them threatening to kill her slowly instead and make him watch if he didn’t do as he was told. He’d never been quite right since. Not that Haymitch could blame him. They were all killers but that level of cold sadism was just something else entirely.

In District Eight he saw Taffeta Locke in the women’s pen, and was a bit surprised her patron hadn’t somehow gotten her exempted. That had to be killing Cinna, that the mother who’d been sold to a politician and turned from a whore to a Capitol mistress, and thus denied the chance to go home for near to forty years, had been forced to go back like this. They called Cecelia Vechter instead, the youngest of the female victors with her three kids clinging to her and crying. Taffeta looked like she was about ready to volunteer and stop it, but Georgette Watkins grabbed her elbow. Given how much unrest there had been in Eight and how brutally Haymitch heard it had been cracked down on, he understood Georgette keeping her from risking it because she was more in touch with the climate of things in Eight than Taffeta. By the looks of it, he thought if someone even cut a loud fart in that square there might be bullets flying. Old Woof Jones hobbled up quietly after that, no protest and no drama.

Of course once Twelve came around they made a big teary deal out of him and Peeta, how he’d willingly laid down his own life and swore to make sure Katniss made it back alive. That was only because Peeta and Katniss were still the Capitol’s darlings, and really, he’d made it just that ridiculously obvious to every home viewer what was supposedly going through his head that the announcers could hardly ignore it. He’d sort of had to do it. It would have looked more than a little strange for Peeta to just give in without an argument. He noted they’d sold the act pretty well for the cameras. Good. He also noticed the faint look of relief on his face and the little smile on his lips when he was up on stage he hadn’t even realized was there.

The announcers remarked with some surprise on the number of volunteers that year. He knew most of them and saw what they were doing, in the places they could take the risk. They had volunteered for the eldest and most frail, to let them spend their last years in peace. They had volunteered for the youngest ones and for the ones with kids, to let them have that chance at life. They hadn’t gotten the laurels he had for it, but right from the reaping ball they were trying to protect the vulnerable ones and the still-hopeful ones, just like they did every year in the Capitol. They had been courageous and quietly dignified in the face of the worst kind of ordeal, making the best of it and saving those they could. In short, they were magnificent, and he could barely contain the pride he had in every damn one of them.

That didn’t stop him from sort of wanting to go bawl like a baby, of course, once it was over. Ridiculous, anyway. He hadn’t cried in years.

He headed out, not in the mood for the lovebirds right then. On the way to his compartment he snagged a bottle of wine from the dinner cart where Effie had put it aside after noticing he wasn’t drinking. He took a sip and yes, the animal was still there inside him, wanting him to give in. He hadn’t been under the illusion that drying himself out would fully kill that weakness in him. But necessity and sheer grit over the last months had at least put a solid wall between it and him. He could hear it and feel it calling to him, but it was a muted sound that didn’t have him down and helpless to do anything but give in. So he found that he could take a couple sips of wine to silently toast to his absent, soon-to-be-dead friends, and not start just chugging the whole thing.

He woke with a start, seeing it was dark out now and realizing he’d dozed off in the chair. Grimacing and stretching, deciding that sleeping in a chair wasn’t in the cards for him in the future, he saw the bottle of wine down at his feet. Sighing and plugging the cork back in, he went to go put it back. That was a little victory right there--the ability to put the fucking thing down with alcohol left in it.

The kids were watching something on the television, from the flickers of light and sound coming from the open door. As he was passing by his ears picked up on a familiar Twelve twang, “...one hundred percent as stupid as usual, so I figure my odds will be roughly the same.”

He leaned on the doorjamb, looking past their shoulders and already knowing what he’d see. Himself at the studio all those years ago, in that baggy blue suit Terricia dressed him in, sitting opposite Caesar Flickerman and giving the audience a cocky half-grin.

“And with a training score of seven too. That’s quite impressive for a young man from District Twelve. Care to share with the audience how you managed it?”

“Oh, I can’t give away all my secrets now. What’ll I give y’all to watch in the arena?” He’d meant it to sound utterly sarcastic: Besides my gruesome death, of course, you candy-coated pieces of shit. Somehow it sounded almost teasing. It must have been the nerves.

“I think I see some enraptured lovely young ladies in the audience who could answer that question, Haymitch.” He’d just laughed a laugh that meant nothing, all fake as everything about the Capitol, thinking desperately of Briar and how much he wanted to see her again and how he wanted to kiss her and bury his nose in her soap-and-sunshine hair and finally actually sleep with her and everything else he’d never get to do because he was probably going to die.

They were watching his damn victor tape. The impulse, swift and immediate, was to charge in there screaming at them for it, the feeling of betrayal swift and sharp. He didn’t want to relive this shit and he sure as hell didn’t want them seeing him like that either. But then he calmed down. Realized he’d have had to tell them about it eventually in the course of explaining some things, and maybe it was better to just let them watch it. It saved him from having to find the words.

He’d never watched his Games again. He watched them now. Sick curiosity or what, he wasn’t exactly sure, but having seen that younger ghost of himself, now he was unable to look away.

He remembered how amazing the arena had looked and smelled, and how he’d looked around and saw everyone in such a daze he decided to make a run for the Cornucopia. Saw himself dash into the safety of the woods, remembered how much those squirrel bites had actually hurt. Saw the confident smirk he gave the cameras when that boy from Six died below his tree from drinking the water and he figured out it was all poisoned. I'm onto you and I know a lot about traps. Try harder, catch me if you can.

When he rigged up some snares in hopes of catching a tribute or two--because he wasn’t going to risk eating any game he caught in that place--Katniss irritably asked Peeta, “He knew how to do snares all along?” Peeta just chuckled.

The volcano erupted and the camera caught him with a sudden expression of both awe and fear, eyes reflecting the fiery crimson glow from the flaming sky. He remembered feeling that fear. He realized with some surprise it wasn’t there now. He wasn’t a scared child this time, afraid to die because he’d hardly lived. Maybe he'd still not done much that might be properly called "living", but he accepted that his death wouldn't be a loss.

Back in the woods, to stumbling upon three Careers. “Well, Twelve, looks like it’s not your lucky day.” He didn’t waste his breath on a smart remark. He grabbed his knife, leaped right into the fray, and killed Esca in seconds. It seemed like an eternity when he had lived it. He watched as he turned immediately into the next fight and killed Remus and Aurelia screamed for her dead love and attacked him with an unstoppable fury, disarming him like he was a clumsy toddler. He watched her yank his head back and put her knife to his throat, saw his sixteen-year-old self bleeding from a half-dozen small slashes and with the blood of the two kids he’d just killed freckling and splashing his face. He looked, and he saw in his own eyes the moment he realized he was going to die, and that flicker of anger and terror at it.

Maysilee’s dart flew from the woods, from where she’d crept in close at the sound of combat, and as Aurelia let go of him and fell to the ground, cat-quick, he grabbed his knife and turned to cut her own throat. “We’d last longer with the two of us,” Maysilee said, stepping out into the clearing.

He rubbed the thin cut on his neck. “Guess you just proved that. Allies?”

They’d made a hell of a team, and he’d been utterly grateful to have her there. It made the entire burden of it so much easier to have someone to talk to, someone to trust to have his back. All the while, though, there’d been that unspoken weight of knowing they’d have to split up eventually, or else kill each other. And they weren’t Two, willing to overlook that. Twelve didn’t kill its own.

After Lea almost killed them, she stitched up his arm when he told her he didn't know how to sew to do it himself and then she impulsively kissed him on the cheek. They both looked flustered at it. Hazelle was right. It was one small moment between two kids thrilled to not have just died, but his romantically confused and teenage-dramatic sixteen-year-old self had panicked and seen it as a massive betrayal. He could barely remember being that innocent now.

He watched as they found the cliff and Maysilee broke their alliance. No, May, don’t go, some part of him was pleading silently now, even as it had then. He’d just said, “OK,” and let her leave. Because he didn’t know what to say to her, what he was feeling for her, and it was easier to not look at it because in the end only one of them could live anyway.

The look of triumph on his face and his pleased laugh as he accidentally kicked the rock and then deliberately chucked a bigger one and figured out the forcefield was hard to stand. Stupid kid, flush with his own supposed cleverness, but too dumb to see how he was just tying his own noose. Candy-pink birds filled the sky as he raced into the woods, far too late, to fight the last couple of them off and find her down on the ground. Her bloodstained fingers in his, pressing that gold mockingjay pin into his hand and he knew she wanted him to take it and give it to her family. He leaned in close as she gurgled the words the cameras thankfully didn’t catch. Glad you came. Do what I can’t. Win. Then give ‘em hell. Show the Capitol something they’ll never forget.

He hadn’t thought about that in a long time, and at the time, youthfully ignorant and that distraught over her dying, he’d assumed she was just talking about Twelve and becoming their victor, something to give them a little hope for the first time in a long, long time. But looking at Maysilee as he closed her eyes, and then touched his fingers to his lips as the hovercraft retrieved her, and at Katniss, he thought maybe he understood a little more of what she’d meant. She should have won. Maybe then Panem would have had its mockingjay all ready to fly twenty-five years ago.

“He really cared about her,” Peeta murmured.

“You don’t think they were...?” Haymitch caught himself from an irritated snort at the last moment, because they hadn’t noticed yet that he was here and he was sort of enjoying the privacy of his own little horror show here separate from theirs.

His fight with Sapphire was long and brutal and terrible, and he scrambled through the woods, once again knowing that dreadful feeling of mortality. “Run away, little boy, but you’re just delaying the inevitable,” Sapphire called after him. “I’ll make it fast.”

At the time holding onto his own guts, he didn’t remember it had been a gorgeous sunset. The sight of himself and Sapphire on that cliff in that orangey light was like something out of a painting.

Now this was interesting. He knew they’d edited his victory moment, because that was the one clip he had seen, curious how they managed to sell something that dangerous for public consumption. They’d cut from her chasing him up the cliff and throwing the axe, and suddenly the axe was flying in front of him to bury itself in her head while he was on the ground twitching and dying. The sheer power of visual suggestion: how many times over the years had people congratulated him on somehow finding the strength and timing to catch that axe at the last moment and make such a beautiful return throw when he was so badly wounded?

He always knew when he met a victor who’d seen the real thing. They reacted to him differently. There were those that saw it live. Then there were those who'd been too young for that, but who Snow showed it to as a part of the standard Do not think to fuck with me or you’ll end up like Haymitch warning package. Apparently since they rarely showed full victor reels on television, they hadn’t bothered to edit this the way they had the clip.

Katniss was laughing about how smart he’d been, and he could have grabbed her by the shoulders and yelled at her. All the warnings he’d tried to give her, and she didn’t see it yet? How much more would he have to tell her for it to get through to her that this wasn’t a game and they took it seriously? He was grateful she hadn’t had to suffer the same things he had, but if she didn’t get smart quickly, she’d stumble right into the worst of it. “It’s almost as bad as us with the berries!”

“Almost,” he said dryly. “But not quite.” No, at least for his own little sin, Snow hadn’t rigged a Games just for the singular purpose of killing him. They both turned to look at him with the guilty expressions of kids with their hands in the cookie jar. He smirked at them and uncorked the bottle of wine to take one last sip, because he really needed it after that fun trip down memory lane with dear young, naive, stupid, vulnerable, cocky, fucking dumbass Haymitch Abernathy.

Then he waved them a jaunty, dismissive goodnight and headed for his room, not wanting to stick around for the post-Games discussion there. Spying the wine cart, he put the wine bottle down on it with a careful hand. All right, Maysilee, I’m a bit late but you got it. Damn straight I’m gonna show the Capitol something they’ll never forget.

Chapter Text

Dealing with Portia and the preps, Haymitch reflected glumly that he’d really enjoyed when he finally got too old, too drunk, and too unruly for anyone to pay for him five or so years back. By that point he’d dreamed of celibacy with the same passion most men had when they dreamed of getting laid. Not to mention the very enticing fact that he’d actually been able to stop going in for the obligatory appointments to get waxed within an inch of his life. There was something really pathetic about the Capitol need to preserve the illusion of youth that ripping the body hair off a thirty-something man had made them think they accomplished something.

Portia looked at him with some sympathy, her girlish turquoise braids swinging down around her shoulders. “This’ll hurt a bit, I imagine.”

“I think I can manage,” he told her with dry understatement. He’d endured this shit before for years, so he was an old hand at it. He debated asking her to give him a haircut, make it more practical for the arena than the grown out and sort of disheveled way he'd had it for probably a good fifteen years now, too damn uninterested to bother with something like regular haircuts. He'd shown up in the Capitol one year with it once again grown out and apparently some of his devoted buyers saw and approved of his "new look" before they could take the shears to it. So they all just accepted it was now a part of his particular "style" and they quit bugging him about it. One less thing to worry about over the years, but now was a time to consider the practicality of it. He figured he'd bring that issue up later without the squawking preps there to screech about how it would be ruining his signature look or whatever.

At least they didn’t try to dress him for the dog-and-pony show in something fit for a child tribute. Or something showing miles of skin. Actually, he couldn’t help but smile a little bit at what Cinna and Portia had come up with. Dark, smoldering fires.

Katniss got irritated at Chaff kissing her and clung to the chariot. He could have told her it was the standard hazing--that most new victors could expect far worse than that in a big hurry.

“Well, fuck me, Haymitch,” Chaff said, grinning at him from under his woven wheat-stalk hat, “I thought you looked awful steady on your feet during the recap.”

Haymitch laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Some people drink for special occasions and all that shit. I sober up.” He leaned in close and said lowly, “Gonna be having a little meeting in the next few days. Tell Seeder.”

Chaff nodded, and Haymitch spied Finnick headed away from Katniss as Cash and Gloss were rolling in their chariot. Apparently he'd have to catch Finn later.

But during the actual chariot ride, it really was kind of a joy to just stare straight ahead and ignore the crowds. It actually put him in a halfway good mood. Johanna stripping off in the elevator did that too, for that matter, because he knew like Chaff's kiss, she was doing it to mess with Katniss, and it was working. He knew fully why she got so up-front in showing off her body--nobody wanted to pay for something shoved that aggressively in their faces. They chatted about a couple little things on the ride, trying to cut each other down with some snark as they usually did.

He gave her the same murmured heads-up as she exited on the Seven apartments. Johanna laughed and said, “Yeah, sure. Looking forward to it, old man.” She chucked him playfully under his now-smooth chin and said, “You looked better with the stubble. ” He laughed quietly to himself, watching the sassy sway as she sauntered away. Sure, he was more than happy to be sleeping alone these days, but he could still appreciate that watching her leave was quite a sight indeed.

Katniss turned to him with a scowl. “Are you seriously flirting with her right in front of me?”

He cracked up at her aghast disapproval. Seriously, the girl sounded like she’d just walked in on her dad having sex. “Down, sweetheart. No need to get so upset.”

He just started laughing even harder as she started scolding him, “We’re going to be in the arena in a week, Haymitch, and you think your highest priority is trying to get in Johanna Mason’s pa--”

“Now, now, sweetheart, Peeta’s the mentor h--”

They both saw the Avox at the same moment, the shock of red hair against the crimson uniform. Katniss let out a strangled gasp and he squeezed her arm just as Effie remarked brightly that they had a matched set this year. As Darius saw them, the shame and misery in his brown eyes spoke volumes.

Katniss ran off to her room quickly after that. Haymitch pulled Darius aside, knowing full well the few holes where there was no video surveillance. The whole place was bugged for audio of course.

He made a few quick signs to him in the hand-speech the Avoxes used. He’d started learning some of it years ago from the Avoxes of his time, Rika and Cicero, because once the tributes were dead and the escort--first Honoria Delight and then Effie--went home, they were the only people left in the apartment and it had been good to talk to them. After Mags’ stroke and Woof’s growing deafness, it had come in handy that he knew even a little bit of how to talk with his hands. How long have you been here?

Darius’ eyes widened and his hands flew. Obviously long enough that he’d learned the hand speech well. Haymitch barely caught every third sign.

He made the sign for slow twice for emphasis. I don’t know all the signs.

What happened to Gale? Darius signed again, slower. They wouldn’t tell me.

He lived. It took a while but he healed up well. Haymitch sighed, and admitted, It was hell in Twelve all winter. Hangings. Floggings. People starving.

Darius winced at that. For his part, Haymitch was glad he’d missed it. Although what had happened to him was hardly any better. He tried to protest, so they took away his ability to speak. Just like they took away choice and protest and freedom from everyone. Took away the ability to say the dangerous words, This is wrong, the words that had so scared Effie to speak them on the train. This was why they were on the edge of starting a rebellion. I’m sorry, he signed to the boy.

I’m all right. Of course he wasn’t and he never would be, but Haymitch understood plenty about the necessity to keep what shreds of pride and dignity remained.

Given Darius, dinner was awkward as anything. Katniss settled down to watch the recap of the chariots with Peeta and Effie. He had no patience for seeing old friends paraded around like that so after changing out of the glowing-ember outfit, he went up to the rooftop, claiming he needed some air and wanting to talk shop with Cinna and Portia about their interview clothes.

“Plutarch got hold of you?” he asked them quietly. Unfortunately once he had become potential arena bait rather than a confirmed mentor for this year, it would have looked a little funny for him to just be calling up the stylists.

Portia nodded. “It’s really starting?” He didn’t know if she and Cinna had been lovers since before they were assigned to Twelve together. He did know she’d been Cinna’s firm partner in crime since that point. Because she handled Peeta, people tended to forget it was both of them that had presented the Twelve tributes on fire last year. Both of them had come to talk to him about the flaming chariot costumes when he was tipsy and still vaguely cynical about the two fighters he’d gotten that year.

But he trusted Cinna, and he’d quickly come to trust Portia with her wry wit. He’d been a little surprised to find if anything, she was more of an enthusiastic rebel than Cinna. But then, perhaps Cinna’s upbringing taught him well to hide better what he was feeling and thinking.

“It’s really starting,” he confirmed. “And we’ll need you for it. You helped kicked this thing into motion just as much as I did.”

“Of course,” Cinna reassured him. “You know whatever you and Katniss need we’ll provide if we can.” Haymitch knew he didn’t say that lightly.

“Chances are they’ll come down hard on you as being involved in the conspiracy,” he warned them. “Last chance to step back and be able to say you just design the costumes.”

Cinna handed him a piece of paper. Haymitch unrolled it. “This is her interview dress.” He looked at the design in the lights of the rooftop, sucking in a quick breath between his teeth, immediately seeing the idealization behind the pattern of the black and white, the wing-like swoop of the wide sleeves. Mockingjay.

He looked again at the shape of it. “This looks a lot like a wedding gown, Cin.”

“She’s supposed to wear the wedding gown they voted on before the card was read. This dress will be underneath it.”

“Ready to burn away,” Portia said. “We’ve been working for months on how to run some flammable lines in the costume that’ll burn away the top layer of silk while leaving the dress below untouched.”

“You two are a pair of mad geniuses. You’re also taking an insane risk in this.” Burning away the forced bride to reveal the Mockingjay beneath. Subtle, and all the people in the Capitol wearing mockingjays as victor fashion would have no idea, but Snow would understand what it meant. It would be a risky move being so bold as to openly display her as the symbol of rebellion like that. Haymitch of all people knew that poking Snow with a stick was always a dangerous move.

“We know. We’re ready to take that risk. We’ve been ready,” Cinna said it confidently.

“Is it going to make it worse on you two in the arena?”

“Portia, it’s already going to be total hell from the starting gong. I don’t much imagine Snow plans to allow the slightest chance of either Katniss or me potentially becoming the victor.” Considering he was fairly sure they were officially two of the most dangerous people in Panem right now when it came to being on Snow's shitlist. “So....hell with it. Bring it on. It’s brilliant, and might as well start this thing off with a good spark.”

“Good.” Cinna’s green-gold eyes danced with humor. “Otherwise if you scrapped that idea we were going to have to put her in something skimpy and low-cut for the interview. Since we didn’t pull that out for the chariot rides.” It felt good to laugh.

“You had that get-up ready for me tonight rather than Peeta,” he commented. He’d noticed it hadn’t needed as many alterations as it would if it had been made for the merchie boy still growing into his stocky, powerful frame. “Rush job on tailoring after the reaping, or like I suspect, you had me in mind from the start?”

“Maybe we know you too well,” Portia told him with a faint grin. “Let’s just hope this works.”

“Let’s not trust it to hope,” Cinna corrected her with a soft smile. “Let’s have faith.” At that, Haymitch couldn’t help but smile too. Cinna was his mother’s boy, without question.

He was there at Taffeta’s for more evening clothes. This was the Capitol, after all, and he was still fresh and novel, the witty, dangerous boy from Twelve, so he could hardly be seen in the same stuff night after night. Wouldn’t make the clients feel special enough, apparently. They left ten-year-old Cinna playing with his toy animals on the floor to go have some “grown up” talk outside. He couldn’t say how relieved he was that the kid didn’t have toy weapons or anything like that, like other Capitol children he’d seen.

“Well, you’re finally growing into that height,” she said, giving his shoulder a pat.

“How do you even manage it?” he blurted. Three years at the whore game and he could hardly stand it already. How she could have survived all those years for hire, and then being sold like that to be the property of one man, to be taken from ever going back to her district, to have a child out of what amounted to repeated rape. “I mean, Cinna’s a great kid...but...” He shook his head, trying to imagine being obliged to father a child on some Capitol woman and not sure he wouldn’t always remember the circumstances of how it came into being.

“Why didn’t I abort the baby?” Taffeta said it almost nonchalantly. She was forty-five to his twenty, and apparently in those extra years of living, she’d acquired the ability to just get right to the heart of the matter in a calm manner, whereas he either stammered and dithered, or just dashed ruthlessly right into it. “I almost did. I made an appointment three times at the clinic.” Here in the Capitol, she’d even have been able to get it done safely, rather than relying on some kind of noxious tonic like out in the districts. “The last time, I actually walked out of the waiting room. I told myself all the things you’re probably thinking, about how I wasn’t sure I could ever look at that baby and love him. About how after the arena, I didn’t think I ought to be trusted around a child anyway.”

“And?”

“I chose to believe that for all the shit in this world, Haymitch, that good could prove stronger. That my baby could be the child of me and my protector and that he wouldn’t be born bad. That yes, I could kill kids in the arena and have to sleep with anyone they forced on me, but with this baby, I could still give something good to the world. I'd make him into something that could have the advantages and opportunities of being born Capitol without becoming one of them.”

“So you’re talking about hope.”

“No. Hope’s flimsy by itself. It’s just wishes. It’s a cloth that doesn’t keep out the cold. I promised myself that I’d raise my child to be a citizen of the Capitol who gave a damn and who might someday make a difference. Hope is the desire for tomorrow to be better, Haymitch, but it needs faith for it to stay alive. Faith is looking at today, in all its ugliness, and still committing to the actual belief that there’s goodness left to be had in the world. That maybe you can do something about it. It’s tough to believe sometimes, I know, but if you ever want to have hope, sometimes you just have to take that leap and let yourself have faith.”

Looking at today in all its ugliness and committing to believing that despite the Quell, there was something on the horizon worth fighting for with all their might. Cinna was right. They needed to have faith right now. Taffeta had been right to have faith all those years ago that the child she’d have would be worth it. Look what he’d turned into, and how he was helping try to set Panem free. “How’s your ma?” he asked Cinna softly, thinking of Taffeta. “I saw her on the cameras in Eight.”

“Back here in the city,” Cinna confirmed. “She has to mentor Woof and Cecelia, of course.” He sighed quietly. “I managed to catch her down by the chariots. Just for a moment. She said it’s worse in Eight than she thought.”

Haymitch was reminded that at eighteen, Cinna had started as an intern on the Eight stylist team in honor of his mother. A few years after that he’d lost track of Cinna Locke for a while after that when Taffeta was obliged to retire from being stylist to her fellow victor-whores--and Finnick’s wardrobe was unfortunate proof that her replacement believed in simply showing skin rather than cultivating something like seductive elegance--and Haymitch really began to just not give a shit about anything Games-related. Then last year Cinna popped up with Portia, volunteering to take on the perpetual pathetic underdogs of District Twelve. Just don’t fucking dress them like Terricia did, he’d drunkenly told Cinna. Your ma, when I first met her, told me she wanted to burn everything Terricia ever designed. That’s right about when I decided to like her.

He wasn’t exactly sure when for himself, Portia, and Cinna, it had morphed from trying to bring home a live Twelve tribute to something much more. If he had to choose, maybe about the point Katniss started a riot in Eleven and Haymitch was left scrambling for damage control with that little meeting with Seneca Crane, suggesting promoting young love and that two-victors change. Right about then it had hit him just how dangerous the girl could be. He’d spent so much time since then trying to keep that fire contained until the right time, keeping Katniss from blundering into something she and Panem weren’t quite ready to handle.

“Well.” He smiled wryly at the two of them. “How the hell one prickly little girl’s managed to get us all up in such a spin is beyond me. But looks like she’s somehow made a believer out of us all.” Peeta had been right. She didn’t have any idea what effect she could have on people.

“Any requests for your interview suit?” Portia asked him.

“The ability to wear a shirt?” he asked wryly, knowing full well they wouldn’t inflict an Odair special on him. Finn’s barely-there chariot costume was the most wince-worthy thing Haymitch had probably ever seen him dressed in to date.

“Hey, I can say from seeing it this afternoon, you definitely lost weight and your physique’s actually pretty good for your age,” she teased him a little. Cinna chuckled a bit. For his part, Haymitch just rolled his eyes.

“Peeta revealed he’s got an inner tyrant. No drinking. Hard training. It’s seriously impressive how much of a bastard he can actually be. Maybe he should have been the mentor all these years.” That set the two of them laughing. “No, I trust you two to make me look presentable somehow. She’s the one you need to make look good.” She was the one that mattered.

He bid them goodnight, and headed back down to the Twelve apartment. Stepped in to see Capitol television wasted no time in slapping stuff together, analyzing the tributes and reminiscing about their years post-victory as the Capitol's favored celebrities.

Eating an apple and trying to ignore it, of course with his luck, they commented on him. The promising celebrity of the Capitol who’d fallen into dissolution thanks to all the years of his district never mustering another tribute with his potential. Complete with pictures of him through the years, from him as a seventeen-year-old mentor all the way through last year. They dwelled lovingly on his heyday in his late twenties or so, when the amusingly bratty snark of a boy had grown into a dangerous, arrogant wittiness that they’d considered unbearably seductive in a grown man. Then they focused on his rebound last year and now this year, his tender affection for his young charges and his determination to protect them.

“Huh,” he said with a smirk. “So they actually think that old asshole has a heart in there. Little did they know.”

Katniss glowered at him like he’d stabbed her in the back. “Gee, looks like you were the Finnick Odair of your day, huh, Haymitch?” Not quite. Finnick was still more widely in demand eight years into his whoring career than he'd been, poor kid. She’d been too young to see all of it when it happened, of course, but maybe it was a good thing he’d already put himself at a distance from Twelve by then. When he was seventeen and it was mostly people twice his age that were screwing him, they didn’t want to advertise it. But when he was twenty-seven, women--and men--wanted to be seen with him, wanted to openly flaunt being on his arm. When people in Twelve saw the pictures of him looking like he was busy taking Capitol lovers, he knew what they must have thought. He’d seen the looks he got. What a good little Capitol man you’ve become. Too good for your own district now, with your fancy clothes. Traitor, too busy partying with them to bother to save our tributes. Slut.

Whore, he always desperately wanted to correct them, but he just kept his head down and said nothing, because that was part of the deal. He shut up and they stayed safe, or at least as safe as Twelve could be. It wouldn’t matter if he told them anyway. They’d still had cause to judge because he still brought back their tributes dead every year.

Katniss was the one that mattered and he’d die for her and what she represented, but right about then he really wanted to just tell her to shut the hell up because she didn’t know what she was talking about. Well, the two of them had a mutual understanding that of course they trusted each other implicitly, but that didn’t imply much on a personal level. She usually made it readily apparent she didn’t much like him and in spite of his best intentions he still easily got annoyed by her. “Sweetheart,” he told her coldly, “you’ve got no idea.” Rather than tell her something he might regret later, or stick around and end up grabbing a liquor bottle, he just went to his room to try to turn his mind towards that meeting he'd be calling once he tapped some shoulders for it.

Chapter Text

By the second day in, Katniss complained to Peeta that Haymitch didn’t seem to be taking training seriously, spending most of his time chatting with the other victors rather than focusing on the training stations. Peeta didn’t say much to that--there wasn’t really much he could say. He couldn’t say he was happy with Haymitch’s demand he keep quiet about all of this but it was for her own safety, and Haymitch was right--he’d kept secrets from her before. She’d kept secrets from him too.

He really just wished they could someday maybe come to a place where all the secrets and the lies could stop, because it was tiresome. “I’m sure he’s doing something useful,” he tried to soothe her. “Making alliances and all.”

She threw up her hands. “Oh, right, he’s going to team up with Chaff and Finnick and Johanna and it’ll be one big ‘Let’s all mess with Katniss’ alliance.”

“So tell him who you want on your side,” he suggested. “Maybe he’ll listen.” Being the intermediary between Katniss and Haymitch the last few days was wearing on him. Or more rather, mostly he was listening to Katniss vent because Haymitch was uncharacteristically refusing to engage in bickering with her.

Though even he had been shocked to see the television profiles of the tributes, viewing Haymitch young and handsome and with Capitol girls hanging all over him. He’d sort of waited for the older man to offer some kind of explanation or defense for it, but he’d just gone silent about it. Guilt? Growing up, Peeta hadn’t ever heard much about Haymitch. He was the mentor who took tributes to the Capitol and brought them back dead. He came to the bakery and bought bread sometimes in a cloud of liquor fumes. He’d thought last year that Haymitch ended up drunk and alone because he’d taken his Games so hard--and seeing the tape they had truly been a nightmare--but he wondered now if there was more than that in play.

“An eighty-year-old woman and Nuts and Volts? Yeah, he’ll love that.” She sighed, with that look of angry frustration she’d worn for most of the Victory Tour, that look of being trapped and helpless. He wished there was something he could do or say to make her feel better, but right now he was feeling every bit as leashed as she was. Maybe he’d made the wrong choice in agreeing to send Haymitch in. His hands were so tied right now and at least if he was in there with her he’d feel like he was capable of doing something. As was, he had Katniss bristling angry and Haymitch seethingly silent and he had no idea what he was supposed to do with mentoring and getting sponsors, let alone this whole thing of coordinating stuff with Plutarch and Thirteen. I just can’t fail, that’s all, he told himself tiredly. Too much was depending on him somehow figuring it out.

“Meeting, Peeta,” Haymitch said to him at dinner in an undertone. “Four’s apartment.” They waited until Katniss turned in for the night and then headed downstairs.

They weren’t the first arrivals. Plenty of people were draped all over the couches and chairs by the time they stepped into the Four apartment--predictably, decorated in blue and green and white. Peeta glanced around, recognizing most of the faces from the victor tapes and from the reapings. His mind clicked them off as the pages in his notebook: Finnick, Johanna, Mags, Blight, Woof, Beetee, Wiress, Poppy, Max...

He couldn’t say exactly when it dawned on him, but he did a quick headcount. Lyme from Two, Clover from Nine, Dazen from Five, and Chantilly from One were mentors, not chosen as tributes. But the rest...yes. All twelve districts were represented here tonight, and that surprised him. Unified together in Four’s apartment as one, an idea that was almost terrifyingly subversive, and they sat there so casually as if they didn’t even think about it. While there were a few flickers of interest his way, most of them were watching Haymitch.

“Beetee?” he said questioningly to the older man with his owlish glasses.

“You’ve got half an hour off the surveillance. Perhaps forty-five minutes.” He'd shut down the bugs in the walls? How had he done that?

Haymitch nodded. “Then let’s get down to it. You’re all shocked to hear it, I know, but I’m aiming to misbehave a bit.” A few ripples of laughter. “All right, let’s get it the full picture here first. What’s the current situation in all your districts?” He told them about Twelve, about Romulus Thread and the winter they’d all endured. “We didn’t rebel like he wanted. No chance of carrying it off alone. So that’s why he’s fucking us now with this Quell business.”

Katniss had told him about Eight, and about suspicions in Three and Four of uprisings. Peeta wasn’t all that surprised to hear them confirmed, but hearing most of the other districts were on the verge of it was a bit of a shock. Haymitch hadn’t been kidding in telling them how they needed to keep a lid on it during the Victory Tour. As bad as things were in Twelve, Eight appeared to be on the verge of disaster.

He noticed seductive Finnick sitting with Mags from his own district and Woof from Eight, his hands rapidly flying as he made hand-signs to both of them, apparently translating what was being said, and speaking their comments for them. Well, Katniss had said Mags’ speech was garbled and that Woof seemed really kind of deaf, so maybe that really was the best way for them to communicate. Seeing how easily he had slipped into that role, though, made him think Finnick had been doing it for a while. “Two?” Haymitch asked Lyme Rathbone, with her powerful features and short blond hair.

She shook her head wearily. “You know how it is, Haymitch. Lots of diehards. Plus with Peacekeeper trainees right there in so many of our villages, it’s suicide for us to rebel unless we’ve got the right push to get momentum.” Peacekeeper trainees? Peeta’s head was spinning already with the things he was hearing about the other districts, things the rest of these people all seemed to be taking for granted as simple common knowledge. Well, they’d all had years to learn it from each other.

“Yeah, gotcha.” Haymitch blew out a slow breath. “Well, shit. Chantilly?”

“Rough winter in One,” Chantilly answered him, idly brushing a cinnamon-brown lock of hair behind her ear. “Lots of cancelled orders and shut-down workshops with Capitol citizens freaking out over shortages and stockpiling food and the like rather than buying luxuries. Tesserae went through the roof. We’ve got plenty of hungry kids. We’re pissed off.”

“Looks like One ain’t doing its usual job of delighting the Capitol?” Haymitch asked her dryly. Peeta suppressed a wince, hearing it as an insult, but instead Chantilly just laughed grimly and nodded.

At that Haymitch leaned back against the dining room table. “OK, so here it is. We’re all plenty pissed off and ready for a revolution--Two excepted, sorry Lyme.” Lyme gave a dismissive flick of her fingers. “So I aim to start one.”

“You’re talking crazy,” Dazen said with a frown.

“Of course he’s talking nonsense. He’s actually sober for once and that’s like other people being drunk,” Angus Wahlstrom from Ten said with a smirk.

“Oh, fuck you Angus,” Haymitch said with a chuckle. Peeta waited with some dread for the punches to fly but instead Angus just laughed and sat back in his seat again. “You’ve all seen the girl on television, even if Snow told y'all to play keep-away from her during the Victory Tour. You know what she can do for us. For all our districts. I played a nice touching story at the reaping there about how I aim to die to keep her alive and returning home, but I know and you probably agree there’s no chance in hell Snow lets her be the one to leave the arena alive.”

“So what’s your plan?” Chaff asked him, fingers of his one hand tapping out an idle rhythm on his knee.

“District Thirteen’s got a hovercraft coming to pick her up if we break her out of the arena,” Haymitch explained.

A whole flurry of comments flew at once, mostly to the tune of “You’re crazy, nobody breaks out of the arena, and there is no fucking District Thirteen!” Explaining that there was and that the Head Gamemaker was one of them definitely blew some minds, Peeta could tell. Having it told to him had been a revelation, and somehow seeing it was a stretch of imagination for them too made him feel a little bit better.

“Problem being,” Haymitch said more slowly, “we need to break her out of the arena. So that means two things: she has to stay alive, and we have to get that forcefield down somehow.”

“Well, you tell us. You’re our little expert here at fucking around with arena forcefields,” Johanna piped up.

“No, sweetheart, I’m our little expert here at making ‘em into a weapon. You want some lessons in bouncing that axe of yours off one, you give me a holler.” From the chuckles, obviously they’d all seen Haymitch’s Games too. Johanna smirked and sat back, crossing her arms over her chest. “Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about how to destroy one.” Haymitch glanced at Beetee from Three. Peeta remembered watching the tape of a young Beetee almost forty-five years ago, despite losing his glasses rolling down a steep hill on day one while fleeing the Cornucopia, carefully make an electrical trap to win his Games. One moment there were four kids laughing and talking to each other, sitting below a tree, and then suddenly, they fell to the ground, convulsing spastically. Unable to see well, Beetee had carefully listened for the cannon shots before he emerged from cover as the victor. “You got anything for me there, Volts?”

Beetee sat up and launched into a long explanation that involved words like “introduction of an element of superconductance” and “disruption of the electrical feedback loop,” and finally he looked around at the looks of mute incomprehension around him and sighed. “You’re not understanding this at all, are you?” he asked with the gentle irritation of being confronted with particularly slow pupils. Well, at least Peeta wasn’t the only one lost from the get-go.

“Beetee, I’m from Twelve. About all I know when it comes to electricity is to count myself lucky when the fucking lights actually turn on when I flip the switch,” Haymitch said with a rueful grin. That set the whole group off again.

It surprised him how easily they all understood each other’s humor and laughed together. It also surprised him, when he thought about it, to take a look at Haymitch. Especially given the sheer surly annoyance of the last few days, this Haymitch was a study in contrast. The humor, the laughter, the smiles--wry and witty, missing the cynical bitterness Peeta was used to in him. This Haymitch was actually engaging, almost likable. More like the boy they’d seen in the Quell interviews, the one who’d charmed the audience and then obviously come to care about Maysilee Donner. Was this the man that managed to enthrall the Capitol when he was younger?

“All right, so you figure it out and you come tell me--nah, let’s do this right, nothing fishy looking. Mentor to mentor to Gamemaker. You get your supply list and tell Spark and he’ll get it to Peeta,” Haymitch amended, nodding back over his shoulder to Peeta, “so Peeta knows what you’ll need to make that happen. And he’ll get it to Plutarch. Not so unusual a mentor tries to make a last little conversation with the Head before the Games to make sure something’s in the Cornucopia. Anyone sees them chatting, they’ll think it’s like me last year and he’s just making sure of a bow and arrows for Katniss.” Peeta felt their eyes on him and gave a nervous wave, realizing with how casually Haymitch put that on him that he was well and deep in this plot. He’d signed up for it, though, hadn’t he?

“So we’ve figured out what precisely?” Seeder asked calmly.

“That Beetee’s just moved up the priority list of being kept alive to number two, right behind Katniss.”

“I’ll need Wiress also,” Beetee said. “If I fall she’ll understand what to do.” Wiress next to him nodded.

“All right, all right. This brings us back to point the first: keeping people alive. Now, I ain’t drunk and admittedly that helps but really, I can’t take on all of you. And with Beetee and Wiress as essentials, that’s three to keep alive as long as possible.” Haymitch paused and looked all of them over. “You know we need that little Mockingjay alive to rally all the districts together. If we all kill each other, if she dies, if this shit goes on the books as just another Games, we might as well just forget any notion of a rebellion for the next hundred years.” He let out a slow sigh. “So I’m here and I’m asking for your help. There’s the very slight chance you might escape on that hovercraft. There’s a much greater chance you won’t. Volunteers only, or for those of you that are here as mentors, tell me what you think of your tributes for this ‘cause I don’t know them as well as I do you. If you want to just play the Games straight up and take the chance you might be the last one standing, that’s no hard feelings. Just realize that those of us keeping Katniss alive are going to be doing our best to take you down first.”

Old Woof spoke up now rather than using his signs, and while his voice was a bit slow and gruff, his blue eyes were still keen right now. “Boy, we were ready twenty-five years back for you to start something.”

Haymitch gave him a sheepish grin, like a chastised kid. “Better late than never, Woof?” he replied, carefully using the hand-signs as he spoke it.

“You can’t have us all as an alliance,” Mags chimed in, via Finnick. “If all twenty-four tributes are trying to save her and aren’t fighting, it’s the 4th Games all over again.”

“I’m not familiar with the 4th,” Haymitch said carefully. “But that was Nualla's year, as I remember hearing it.” Peeta recognized the name. Nualla Clearly was Twelve’s other victor. She’d died long before Haymitch’s Games, let alone his and Katniss’ last year, so that tape hadn’t been included. They didn’t talk about her in the history of the Games at school, but then, they hadn’t really talked about Haymitch either. "They've never broadcast a rerun that I've seen, although I don't remember even as a kid that they ever really did reruns of anything before, say, the 20th."

Mags nodded, gnarled fingers rapidly signing to Finnick. “They wouldn't want people to see the early Games. Too much about revenge and no way to pretend otherwise." Peeta remembered how bloody and awful Mags' Games had been, and Woof's. "But for the 4th, they decided to try something new that year. Refusing to fight, working together for food and water. So they reaped them all over again. Drew a name every six hours, retrieved them in a hovercraft, and showed their execution on the projection in the sky. Some died of thirst after they took the water away. But they wouldn’t fight. Nualla was the victor only because she was the last one left.”

“Well, well. So we’re all pesky rebellious victors in Twelve. Made her life hell, I assume. No wonder she went beyond the fence in the end. Her family?”

“Orphaned before the Games,” Mags replied.

“So she had that going for her at least.” There was an odd note in Haymitch’s voice that Peeta couldn’t quite follow, but from the expressions on some of the faces around him, they knew something he didn’t. Being here and feeling too much like the new kid, missing most of what wasn’t said but that they all understood anyway from years of acquaintance, was frustrating.

“The next year, before they started the countdown to the gong, they beamed a feed into the arena. They showed the tributes they had their families down on their knees in front of the Justice Building in each of their districts with rifles pointed at their heads. The 5th Games went off as planned.”

Finnick finished translating for Mags and glanced over at Haymitch. “She’s right. If nobody fights in there, we tip our hand much too early. They’ll know something’s up.”

Chantilly pitched in just then, though with an expression of reluctance on her face. “It’s a moot point anyway. You won’t have Cash and Gloss. They're angry and wouldn’t be opposed to a good rebellion, mind. But you’re not going to be able to rely on them as allies, Haymitch. They’ll only trust each other in there.”

“I know. And none of us can blame ‘em for that.” A few murmurs of something like sympathy and Peeta wondered what story was behind that casual acceptance.

“But I’ll do whatever I can for you or for Peeta. Niello definitely will too.” Haymitch nodded his thanks, turning next to Lyme.

“Enobaria and Brutus?”

The Two victor sighed. “Baria’s probably a lost cause for you. She has to think it's all been worth it in her mind.”

“Figured. Brute? Hell, you’d think getting him on board for a worthy fight shouldn’t be that hard.”

“He’s in too deep on thinking this is the way to prove himself. Sorry. I’m with Tilly, though. Whatever Hannibal and I can do from our end.”

Beetee and Wiress were in, as were Mags and Finnick. Dazen from Five said apologetically that he didn’t think either of his could be fully relied on. Poppy and Max from Six just nodded dreamily when asked. Johanna spoke up for both herself and Blight from Seven. Woof and Cecelia from Eight joined them, Clover from Nine shook her head regretfully on the tributes but promised to do her part, Angus from Ten said if he outlived Sandy he was in but until then she’d stick to him like a burr, Chaff and Seeder both were in.

“Heavensbee can't tip his hand as to much when it comes to the arena. But he gave me a little heads-up I’d probably want Finnick with her from the gong.” Haymitch glanced over at the bronze-haired Four victor. Peeta noticed there was no trace of the usual seductive languidness he was used to seeing in the other man on television. “Finn?”

“Count on me. I’ll get to her.” Finnick grinned almost boyishly. “Can you give me some kind of sign in case I get to her before you so she doesn’t just up and shoot me?”

“What, you didn’t reduce her to whimpering with joy with one smoldering glance?”

“Oh, I think she’s immune to my charms. Maybe I’m slipping. Or maybe she’s just got better to come home to, right?” Finnick winked at Peeta, almost friendly in how he did it.

“See, girl’s got taste. I’ve got a bracelet they gave me as a district token. I’ll give you that. Jo. You and Blight look after Beetee and Wiress until we can all get together.”

“Why the fuck do I get stuck being the babysitter to Nuts and Volts?” Johanna complained irritably, as if Beetee and Wiress weren’t sitting less than ten feet away listening to every word she said.

“Because we need ‘em, and because you and Blight are strong enough to keep those two alive and I know I can trust you of all people to take the lead there and get it done.” Johanna scowled and looked away, apparently having no smart comeback to that.

They were doing this in the hope their deaths would mean something more than just entertainment for the Capitol. Watching how they talked to Haymitch and how he talked to them in return, how he asked after families and promised they’d be taken care of if possible, Peeta realized they agreed they would die for the idea of freedom. But they spoke up and swore to die if need be for Haymitch and for the hope of the Mockingjay he promised them, not for Katniss herself.

Because now, clear as day, he could see these victors were a family, and a closer family than his own would ever be. A real, true, family that loved and trusted and looked out for each other. He saw that they loved Haymitch and he was their own in a way he and Katniss would never be, and he saw that Haymitch loved them just as fiercely in return. They had been there for him in a way he hadn’t had from anyone in Twelve. What a life that must have been--to have his only comfort and support be during what must also be the most terrible weeks of each year for him.

That made this Quell awful on a whole different level now, seeing firsthand how deep the bonds ran between them. It was like a Games of parents and siblings and cousins all forced to murder each other. He’d have cried and broken down at the thought of it. He knew Haymitch had gotten ferociously drunk at the mere thought of it the day the card was read. Yet now they had put aside the sorrow and calmly promised themselves to Haymitch and his plan, trusting that with their lives, they bought a better Panem.

Most everyone in this room would probably be dead within the week. What he was seeing now was the last gasp of something that was strangely great and powerful and moving--the intense courage and love and dignity of Panem’s victors. It was something that would soon be destroyed and never exist again in this way. He’d never be a part of their family and never come to know them like he was seeing right in this moment, and he intensely regretted that right now. He thought he would have liked to know them.

Before he realized it he’d spoken up, feeling like he couldn’t just stand there silently and let them go unremarked. He’d spoken up in Eleven and gotten people shot for it, clumsily trying to acknowledge those who had saved the girl he loved, but at least this time the only ones dying would be those who knew it was coming. They deserved his gratitude, all that he had to give. “I...I know you’re doing this mostly for Haymitch. That’s because you know him, the way you don’t know Katniss or me. Maybe if you’d had the chance, you’d have come to love her too and you’d have all the more reason to fight to save her. I’m sorry I won’t get the chance to know all of you. But,” he looked around at all of them, “I swear I’ll remember you and what you did for her.” He felt their approval when they looked at him, their respect.

He felt Haymitch’s hand on his shoulder, giving a squeeze and then letting go. “Peeta’s going to need some help in Mentor Central, getting shown the ropes. I know I can count on you for that. As for the rest of you,” Haymitch looked around, “if you find our alliance, you’re in with us. Until then, good luck. Stay alive out there.”

Haymitch hesitated then, as if fighting to say something, and then his voice went fierce and low and ragged as he told them, “These years. All of you. It’s been an honor.” He touched his fingers to his lips for them in the old Twelve salute. When they returned it right back to him, Peeta knew he’d been right. They loved him, and he could feel Haymitch struggling with it right next to him, trying to keep his composure.

It was Johanna Mason who stepped in to save him from it, flippantly joking, “Well, fuck me with a peavey. Any of you ever imagined stirring up rebellion could look really good on this drunk bastard?” With some hoots and snickers to answer that, given a moment, Haymitch readily pulled himself back together.

“Thanks, Johanna,” and his tone was dry and sarcastic, but Peeta had the sense the thanks was actually genuine. “All right, see you all at training tomorrow.” With that, he headed out and Peeta followed, having enough sense to not speak up when he sensed Haymitch was grappling with a lot of thoughts and emotions at the moment. He wished Katniss could have been there too, to come to know them even a little bit away from the cameras and the Gamemakers.

Chapter Text

For his part, Finnick was going to count it as something of a victory he’d finally gotten Katniss to thaw enough to swap trident lessons for archery. There were some bow-fishers out in the bayous and the swamps, but he lived on the coast so he’d never had the opportunity to learn. Seeing her at work with the decoy birds, he’d been as impressed with it as the rest. If Haymitch hadn’t already put him in this alliance, well, he’d have been asking Annie to talk to Peeta about it.

Annie. He’d hoped she could stay back in Four where she was safe, but they’d claimed that since she’d been reaped, even with Mags volunteering for her, she was obligated to come along as Mags’ mentor. Carrick would be doing his best to help her out, since she’d never mentored before.

After that, he was at work at the knots station when Haymitch came over and started practicing alongside him. As the station leader, Drusilla, left them to it, Haymitch muttered, “Katniss is warming up to you, eh?”

“Seems to be the case.” He looped the bitter end again, then neatly threaded it back through itself, pulling the knot tight.

“How’s your Annie taking being here?” Finnick nodded appreciatively, glad Haymitch cared enough to ask.

“Good days and bad.” He sighed softly. “She ran into...an old acquaintance last night and...” At least her condition had spared her the worst part of being a pretty, desired victor. Of course, being raped even a few times was bad enough. He remembered her showing up at the Four apartment four years ago, nearly naked and bleeding and wild-eyed. It was the blood that had made her snap. She’d been drenched with it in the arena after Shoal got beheaded and she killed Nero in turn.

While Annie showered over and over, trying to get off the blood, he’d made the calls to Victor Affairs for damage control. Yes, apparently Septimus Thirsk was still alive. Yes, of course, it was simply a misunderstanding and she hadn’t actually meant to try to kill him. Her mind simply went back to the arena and that was a dangerous thing, of course. No, he didn’t think Miss Cresta could fulfill the appointment, given Mister Thirsk’s apparent love of knifeplay in the bedroom, but perhaps he would accept Finnick Odair in turn as an apology for the misunderstanding. Said Finnick Odair’s abject apology cost him two days in Remake. The scars scrubbed off clean, as they always did.

Well, after that they could hardly have an unstable whore who might kill her clients. So Annie was off the circuit and Finnick could have wept with gratitude for it, even as Snow informed him he’d have to pick up the slack. As Annie and Carrick came back last night from the sponsor benefit and Carrick told him that Thirsk had been there and how he’d laughed and brushed a possessive hand against Annie’s arm, Finnick knew exactly why he was hearing the sound of the shower running. She came out, took the bottle of rum straight from Finnick’s hand, and knocked a few swigs of it back neat, but at least her green eyes were there again rather than staring inwardly into nothingness. She’d come on back on her own.

“Damn,” Haymitch said succinctly. Didn’t that just say it all. He neatly tied a knot of his own, fingers steady and sure, and with the turn of his wrist Finnick again saw that ugly scar on his left forearm, one that they’d never scrubbed off him for some reason. He’d never asked. They were allowed little enough in the way of secrets, and Haymitch never volunteered to explain.

“She’s OK today. We’re all worrying about the boats out, of course.” He shook his head. Four had rebellion coming for a while. The Capitol never seemed to understand the concept of a thing being finite, coal or forests or fish, and while Finnick had heard that the fish and the shrimp were abundant when his daddy was a young boy, meeting expected quotas had taken its toll. The stocks hadn’t rebounded under that much constant pressure. It meant gradually, boats went further offshore on longer trips in lousier weather and took less time in the shipyard for repairs. More risk, more deaths. Eventually last year they hadn’t met their quota at all and the Capitol responded by reducing the supply trains. Take away our seafood, we take away your food.

He wondered how empty his brother Keith’s skimmer nets were probably coming up today, and how many boats were jockeying around each other in the estuary for the pathetic few, tiny shrimp there were to be had. Annie’s sister Unalla would be far offshore for the vague hopes of landing some big tuna. Finnick tried to not think of how many District Four fishermen were desperately scrambling to appease the Capitol right now and how much risk they were taking to do it.

Haymitch would understand his worry. He’d told Finnick forty-seven miners had died over the winter in Twelve. Finnick told him forty-three fishermen died since last summer from Four. Four and Twelve seemed to share that same kind of clannishness, that understanding that disaster never struck singly in their districts. A mining crew or a fishing boat crew, they knew it was a communal fate where people were bound together, either sank or swam together. Neighbors looked after each other because of that, since they knew they could always be the next ones laid low.

It was probably why Four and Twelve formed such tight district partner alliances--Haymitch and that pretty blond girl, Annie and Shoal, himself and Maira, Katniss and Peeta--whereas the likes of Seven and Nine and Two pretty much looked at each other and said, “Good luck, but fuck you, at the end of the day you’re gonna be on your own here.” It was a thing someone like Johanna with her wide open spaces and logging teams couldn’t understand, where one man might die here and there, but a half-dozen or more didn’t depend on each other for survival and potentially get wiped out at once.

Maybe that was why he’d always sensed he could trust Haymitch to have his back. Mags had brought him to Haymitch when he was sixteen and Snow had just explained his new duties to him. “Trust him, he knows what he’s about,” she’d advised Finnick, and deposited him for a chat with the man who was the Capitol’s fading star by that point.

Haymitch was the one that taught him how to survive this new game and all its horrors. How to lock away parts of himself. How to tell the lies they wanted to hear so it would go easier. How to fuck and not feel it emotionally. Though looking back with greater perspective on how Haymitch had been the night he was Finnick’s first, he didn’t think it was a simple lack of natural attraction to men that had made him seem like he wasn’t all that into it. He seriously doubted after so long that the simple physical sensation of sex meant all that much to Haymitch either. It hadn’t for Finnick either after a few years.

Not until Annie and he found out that yes, it was different and that he wasn’t too broken down by constant fucking to be unable to actually make love. Though that made it harder in some ways every year to lock away something that beautiful, come back and submit to the profane, the sweaty bodies and grasping hands.

Looking at Haymitch, busy tying another knot, he felt sorry for him, being so alone, but he’d never say so. It would be the last thing that he wanted. So instead Finnick just did what he could in return without fanfare. That usually meant in years past making sure Haymitch didn’t drink himself to death or end up saying something too ill-considered on camera. This year, with him sober and focused in a way Finnick hadn’t seen since Snow made him watch the tape of a sixteen-year-old boy in the Second Quarter Quell, it was different. He could do something more than just ease the way of Haymitch tiredly going one step further towards oblivion. That meant even if Katniss and her role in that hoped-for rebellion hadn’t been there as compelling reason, he’d have been on board for this alliance. Haymitch had asked them. He and Jo both agreed that was reason enough. Trust him, he knows what he's about, Mags had said, and Finnick did then and he did now.

“You want to go get in some spear practice?” he offered, jerking a thumb towards the targets where Brutus was now finished tearing them up, looking well satisfied with himself.

Haymitch shook his head with a faint smile. “Oh, no. I’m not letting those idiots,” he nodded towards the Gamemakers taking notes from the gallery, “get a sniff of me touching a weapon in here. Drive ‘em crazy wondering how shitty I really am these days.”

Finnick had the feeling, looking at the sharp intensity in Haymitch that had been so missing in all the years he’d known him, that he’d done a pretty damn good job of locking himself away. Katniss might be the Girl on Fire, shining brightly, but her mentor here had something of deep waters about him, deceptively still until they had exploded now in a storm, bringing all sorts of concealed things back to the surface again. “All right, then.” He grinned cheekily at Haymitch. “Thanks for the bracelet. Looks better on me than you, I’ll bet.” The flame-patterned bracelet was safe in his drawer for now. If he was lucky maybe he could win Katniss over before the starting gong and not need it, but the security of it was nice to have.

After the week of training, they all sat waiting to be called in for their individual sessions. A Peacekeeper in his black beret that designated a Gameskeeper called, “Donovan, District One.”

“Which one?” Cashmere asked him with some irritation.

“Males first as usual,” the Peacekeeper said. With that, Gloss shrugged and got up from his seat, straightening his training shirt and combing his fingers through his artfully tousled blond hair.

So that was how it would be. Sure, they’d referred to them by surnames before in this situation--Haymitch remembered it clearly, even twenty-five years later. But to be reduced back to that from the familiarity of their first names and how casually the Capitol used them was kind of an odd slap in the face.

Chaff sighed softly and leaned in to say, “So they’re doing it by the book here.”

“Seems like it.” Maybe it was the only way they felt they could cope with the grief, or some shit like that. Nobody seemed happy, from the Peacekeepers to the trainers to the staff. Well, that was a slight comfort.

One by one they all disappeared as they were summoned. Katniss didn’t say much still. At least over the last few days they’d started grudgingly talking again when he told her he really didn’t give two shits whether she liked him so long as she listened up enough to let him keep her alive.

“Talmadge, District Eleven,” and with that, Seeder left and it was just the two of them.

“Any advice?” Katniss asked him quietly, which surprised him a bit. So she’d come around enough to actually believe he might have something worthwhile to say. That made things a hell of a lot easier.

“Try to surprise them somehow.” He shrugged. “Nothing to lose.” In her case she might as well. He had the feeling no matter what she did, they were going to nail her with high marks and thus make her a target. It wasn’t like she could play possum and pretend she’d gotten utterly terrible in a matter of months. That eleven from last year everyone had seen might as well have been tattooed on her skin.

“Abernathy, District Twelve.” He followed the Gameskeeper down the corridor, giving one last glance back at Katniss sitting there alone. He walked into the training room and it was just the same as it had been twenty-five years before, the training area now only half-lit with its pools of shadow for those who wanted to show off stealth, the racks of weaponry. The Gamemakers on the dais above, watching him with interest. Back then he’d been desperate to prove his capability. He’d earned that seven with showing off his swiftness, his agility, his ability to lay and carry out an ambush. It still had been only mildly impressive put up against the Careers of that year.

He was forty-one now, not an overwhelmed child. There was something ridiculous about them expecting him to put on a show. Well, they’d seen at the reaping, he intended to keep her alive. They didn’t know all the plans he had laid, but they knew he and Peeta both intended that he’d protect Katniss at all costs.

He could still easily measure himself against Katniss, against the youngest victors, and know he wasn’t the boy who’d won all those years ago. He’d deliberately avoided the combat training as much as he could. Let them think he was hopelessly down the drain on it. Let them underestimate him again. He was counting on it.

They’d be coming for her and he had to keep her alive and keep the alliance together until Plutarch got that damn hovercraft there and Beetee brought the arena down. A lower score would help him there. He had to make those outside of the alliance think he was no threat, and probably kill them before they could kill her. He’d let himself feel the pain of it later. Right now if he let it in, unbearable as it would be, he’d be useless.

They were watching him eagerly, so he grabbed a knife from the rack, leaned back against a pillar, and started cleaning his fingernails with it. “Well, looks like Quarter Quells and me just go together. Sorry I ain't gonna be around to see how I'd end up stuck in the Fourth.”

He really just wanted to take a page from Mags and drop down for a quick nap. He’d been burning the candle at both ends and then in the middle to boot over the last week and it was catching up to him. Training with Katniss, even avoiding the combat training as much as he could, he’d been brushing up survival skills over and over. Running Peeta ragged with a crash course in sponsors and mentoring and demanding just as much as the boy had from him during their months of training in Twelve, and conferring with him on messages Peeta got from Plutarch. Coordinating plans with the other victors for the alliance and the arena. He’d been pulling triple duty at least, and he was so damn tired he barely knew what way was up by this point.

He heard the sigh. “Haymitch,” so they actually were going to use his name now, “do you have anything you want to show us?” Plutarch asked him. He had the feeling from that weary question more than a few of the others had pulled this trick before, just refusing to do anything. Good for them.

“How ‘bout my ass?” He looked up at them and smirked, locked eyes with a few of them. “Actually, three....no, sorry, four of you, you all got a good look at it back in the day in the business of getting naked with me.” It felt sort of liberating to not really care and just say something like that. He couldn’t just spout the full truth, but mocking them even slightly like that felt damn good. “Nah. Think I’ll just relax here.”

The silence fell. He finished his nails. “So, think we’re about done here.” But Katniss’ grumpy words about the forcefield in front of the table courtesy of her little arrow stunt from last year came back to him. He eyed it, not seeing it but trusting it was there. Suddenly he found himself grinning. Well, why the hell not? One last little fuck-you. He had definitely earned that much. “Heavensbee, you sentimental old bastard, I had no idea you were a fan of the classics!” he called. Plutarch looked up at him and Haymitch caught a faint smile.

He tossed the knife with a flick of his wrist and they shrieked as it hit the forcefield with a crackle of discharge, then shot back like an arrow from a bow, straight into a dummy’s shoulder. His eyes went wide as he saw it. Well, fuck me. He’d take it, and count it a little gift of incredible luck he’d hit a dummy at all, considering he had no idea what way it might ricochet off an angled throw. It looked a hell of a lot more impressively deliberate than it had been. He’d really just been planning to rebound it, period, to make a point. He laughed mockingly, deciding to play it like he’d planned it exactly like this, dummy and all. “Once more for old times’ sake. Just because you went to all the trouble to put my favorite weapon in the room.” He sketched them a sweeping bow, elegant and correct as anything he’d ever done at a fancy Capitol event, and headed for the door.

Of course the moment he hit the door he realized he’d just done something incredibly stupid. Back at the apartment, admitting he’d played games with the forcefield and then hearing that Katniss had hanged Seneca Crane in effigy at least fulfilled one important purpose. It brought them back together united in purpose and in hatred of the Capitol as they looked at each other and and shared a laugh in that grimly entertained, Oh yeah, we’re both totally fucked now kind of a way. Meanwhile Peeta was shaking his head and looking at the both of them like they’d gone absolutely batshit insane, and Effie was sighing and fretting about how dangerous it was for them to be so unruly and defiant like that. He didn’t really care. He and Katniss just kept glancing at each other and one of them would start laughing and set the other off again, and it felt good sitting there snickering like a pair of fools because it was much better than being afraid or weighed down by the sheer crushing burden of what was to come.

When they finally played the training scores, he took notice: high marks for Cashmere, Gloss, Enobaria, Brutus, Finnick, and Johanna. Then his picture flickered on screen, in his training uniform. Clear-eyed, clean-shaven, a little dangerous looking. “Haymitch Abernathy of District Twelve, with a score of twelve.”

“This is not good,” Peeta said softly.

He wasn’t at all surprised when Katniss got a twelve too. So they’d be the prime targets right from the starting gong. But then, he’d always had a particular weakness for defiant gestures without much thought to their timing. Only the realization that he probably could have just stood there and belched his way through a drinking song, and he’d still have gotten a twelve anyway to make him a priority kill, kept him from calling himself a complete idiot.

As was, he’d settle for calling himself mostly an idiot, and be grateful at least he and Katniss seemed to be on the same page again for the moment.

Chapter Text

Johanna had long stopped listening to the fashion advice of a woman who’d dressed Seven tributes as trees for forty years. Of course, once again this year, Donella sighed over Johanna’s short hair and said, “It was so beautiful when you were in the arena, love. I wish you’d grow it out again.”

Putting aside the stupidly obvious fact that likely being dead in the arena in a few days pretty much put a stop to any ideas of growing out her hair, Johanna always hated hearing that suggestion. Yeah, she’d had beautiful long wavy hair once that her dad said came from his mom, her Oma Kirsten. That her mom had loved to brush out at night until it flowed like silk. That her little sister Heike used to beg Johanna to let her practice braiding it. That her big brother Bernhard used to teasingly tug. She’d had beautiful long hair once, and she’d had a family too.

She lost the family when she refused to get sold off. Lost them to no point anyway because she was stupid enough to think that Snow wouldn’t still find a way to make her bend over and take it. She lost the hair only about a week later when she came back from an appointment with Thalius Eland and hacked it all off with a knife and shaking hands, leaving only the short porcupine-like spikes she’d kept ever since. Nothing that was long enough anyone could get a good grip on it. Nothing that was long enough to be twisted around some man’s fingers to hold her in place so he could fuck her throat while she fought to breathe and to not gag.

When Haymitch saw her the next morning and didn’t ask questions but took her out for a drink and let her vent about it, she’d been grateful but at the same time she’d sort of hated him for the jaw-length dark hair he apparently felt safe enough to have. She was still young and soft enough then to not make the cutting remark she would now: Bet you’re so well-trained now they don’t ever need to grab your hair, huh? She’d sort of hated Finnick too for his gorgeous tousled bronze hair, even as after that she found herself wanting to run her fingers through it every time they fucked. The right to have that long hair was just one more thing the Capitol took from her.

“Are you sure we can’t put some hair exten--”

“They’ve all seen me the last eight years, Donella,” Johanna cut her off harshly. “They know I’ve got short hair.” No chance in hell she was going to bring back the long hair just for them all to gawk and slobber at her one last time before they sent her off to die. No. They got the porcupine bitch as usual.

Her interview dress was strapless, green, almost black at the hem and shading to bright leaf-green at the bustline. It could have actually been a decent effort if it wasn’t so tight she felt like she’d been shrink-wrapped into it and if she took a deep breath her tits and ass and all the rest would come bursting out. Maybe she ought to go for that. Do the interview naked. Give Panem one last fuck-you to remember her by. “Show off that pretty figure of yours one more time,” Donella chirped at her with a wink.

She rolled her eyes and stalked out to where the others were gathering. A little knot, talking with each other, rather than the usual line, no talking, like kids in school. Blight was there already, and Troilus had put him in a matching shirt. It irritated her to see it, at least a little bit. It wasn’t like he’d been all that useful to her. Went all cracked in the head even before her Games. It was Cedrus that had been her mentor in the arena, who’d be working Mentor Central for them both now, and it was Finn and Haymitch after that who were there for her. “Johanna,” Enobaria said, dark eyes coldly amused, raking her up and down in her barely-there dress, “planning to strip as part of your interview? I heard that was how your private session went.”

“Oh, please. Me stripping would have been worth at least a ten.” She’d gone after the dummies, naming them in her head as the Capitol people that had fucked her, both physically and situationally. “President Snow” had been left limbless, headless, and she “accidentally” threw her axe in his crotch as a final gesture. “I’ll leave looking like a brainless idiot onstage to you."

Enobaria showed off her fangs and was just about to say something when Finnick said softly, “Holy shit,” as he joined her, glancing back down towards the dressing rooms. Johanna turned to look and saw Little Miss Hope of the Rebellion herself joining the party, accompanied by Haymitch.

They’d actually had the balls to dress her in a wedding gown, an airy thing that was all virginal white silk and pearls and lace. “I can’t believe Cinna put you in that thing,” Finnick said with surprise. Johanna had to agree. From what she’d seen, Cinna had a hell of a lot more taste than that.

Katniss’ eyes were angry as she walked up. Johanna actually liked her for that better than if they’d been miserable or ashamed. If this girl was going to be the one they were hanging all their chances on, she’d damn well better be tough enough to endure some indignities but swear to not just forget them. “He didn’t have any choice. President Snow made him do it,” the girl practically spit.

Cashmere, as usual pissed off whenever anyone else showed her up, told her she looked ridiculous, grabbed Gloss’ hand and stomped off to form the line. Some of the others gave Katniss a pat on the shoulder. Johanna went over, and straightened the pearl necklace that was straight anyway, just to have a chance to lean in and say lowly, “Make him pay for it, OK?”

She glanced at Haymitch, wondering what their little rebel mastermind himself was thinking tonight, and he just gave her a slight nod of acknowledgment. He actually looked pretty sharp himself, dressed for a wedding also in a formal long black coat and striped trousers with a grey vest. His hair was short now for the first time since she'd met him, all unruly curls, and the fact he'd made a change suddenly like that was interesting. Yeah, well--obviously he was being pegged as the acting father of the bride, definitely not the blushing blond would-be groom. Though she had to admit, the attractiveness was more in his attitude than the attire. He usually dressed well, even when he was drinking. But the way he carried himself now, keenly aware and with a dangerous edge, rather than tired and cynical, took years off him. She hadn’t been kidding when she’d said at the meeting at Finnick’s that rebellion really looked good on him, even if she’d done it because she could see the sentimental old bastard was obviously about to break down. At least he seemed more than alert enough that this rebellion plan of his obviously wasn’t something he cooked up while pickling his brain one night in Twelve.

As she passed the Ten tributes to go take her place with Blight, Sandy Marchand, dressed in a stupid brown-and-white print dress, leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “Seriously, Finnick’s gorgeous as ever. But who knew Haymitch cleaned up that nice?”

She rolled her eyes, not interested in giggling about men with an idiot like Sandy who was six years younger than her, which meant Haymitch was definitely old enough to be her dad. She also felt the irritation of yet another moron hopelessly smitten with Finnick Odair, the sexpot of Panem. Obviously cowbrain here wasn’t aware what Finnick’s night job entailed. Considering Johanna hadn’t seen her back in the Capitol since she won her Games two years ago, not surprising. “Everybody knows Finnick's hot," she agreed boredly. Might as well observe the equally obvious fact the sun rose in the morning. "As for Haymitch? Apparently it can happen when he’s not drunk off his ass,” Johanna told her dryly. “You’d better get a move on it since you’ve got, oh, about twelve hours left before the gong. Might as well enjoy your last night among the living.” She smirked. “But sure, take it from me. Both he and Finn are worth taking 'em for a ride.” Couldn’t resist rubbing it in the other woman’s face that yeah, she’d had both of them that she knew it for a fact. Never mind the circumstances of it when it came to Haymitch. Or the circumstances with Finnick, come to think of it, once Annie Cresta showed up.

They did it differently this year, having them all seated in a semi-circle out on the stage and going to the interview chair one by one. Apparently they wanted to stare at their beloved victors as much as possible before sending them to imminent doom. How precious.

She sat there and she tried to not smile as they all one by one carefully wrestled control from Caesar and started lashing out in oh-so-delightful ways. Talking about the love the people of the Capitol had for them. How much they’d enjoyed the hospitality and all that. Finnick quoted a poem about his true love in the Capitol that had people in the audience fainting, and Johanna wanted to scream that it was Annie Cresta, the stupid assholes, but even as she thought that she had to acknowledge how smart he’d played that.

For her part, she made the aggressive push into dangerous new territory with it, sweetly told them about how tragic it would be to lose the bond between the Capitol and its victors, and couldn’t something possibly be done about it? She aimed to make them all pay for doing this to her a second time, after everything they already took from her the first time around. If she was going to die in that arena, she really wanted to make them hurt for it as much as she could. Unfortunately she wasn't tragically romantic like Katniss, or like Finnick with everybody in love with him. They wouldn't miss her that much. She was just the cunning bitch with the smart mouth.

Blight followed behind her and brought it on strong, talking about how the first Gamemakers, thinking only about punishment for treason, could never have expected their Games to develop into such a shared experience like this, and she could almost have kissed him for that, because apparently someone had paid close attention to Seneca Crane’s pre-Games bullshit last year. Bastard even quoted it with a total pokerface.

Woof and Cecelia caught the thread of it and added their own thoughts. By the time they got through Seeder and then Chaff, the crowd was almost in hysterics by the time Katniss went to go take the interview seat. Capitol morons all crying, sniveling, shouting out for a change to the Quell. Yeah, like Snow would actually listen to them. He was determined that little girl was going down hard and this was the way he was going to do it, and to hell with the collateral damage. Excuse me if getting caught up in your little vendetta pisses me off a bit.

By this point Caesar didn’t bother with the usual tricks and questions, just asking her if there was anything she wanted to say.

Haymitch watched as Katniss took the stage, looking too young in that gown. The audience was going crazy. If only there was actually any chance it would work. He wasn’t going to be that naive. That didn’t mean he wasn’t proud as hell of all of them who’d come out fighting, adding their jabs to the attack. They’d all be in hell itself tomorrow morning but at the very last, they refused to just meekly submit.

She hit the right notes of the song all on her own to strike at their hearts, the little Mockingjay, trembling voice telling them how sorry she was that they wouldn’t get to see her wedding. Raising her arms and turning and turning to show off the gown, and he watched with all of Panem as the silk burned away, twirling ribbons of charred fabric falling to the stage. As the black dress underneath was revealed, she lifted her arms and looked at the sweep of the sleeves, the white patches. “I'm a mockingjay,” she whispered as Caesar questioned her about it, and as he thought You have no idea, sweetheart, Haymitch’s eyes went out to Cinna in the audience. He didn’t dare smile, not with the cameras right there, but Cinna met his gaze and smiled slightly for them both, right before the spotlights and cameras found him to take a bow for the design. The buzzer went off in the middle of the applause.

“And finally, from District Twelve, Haymitch Abernathy.” He walked up to the seat opposite Caesar, knowing he was the last chance, the final word. The pressure of it was intense, but screw it, they were all looking to him to lead this insane kick-off to a rebellion anyway. He was just going to make sure to twist the knife over and over, drench it with as much pathos and drama as he could, gain all their sympathy and ruthlessly hand it to Peeta to exploit. While he was at it, he was going to do his damn best to make these bastards hurt as much as they were making him hurt right now, facing tomorrow morning.

“Haymitch, welcome back,” Caesar said. They did the bit of back-and-forth, the humor they expected from him. All the while he was adjusting, careful to temper his trademark witty sarcasm with the flashes of what they really wanted from him, the man who’d stepped forward to volunteer for Peeta and to die for Katniss. Conscious of the ticking clock, Haymitch just hoped like hell Caesar would give him an opportunity to run with here.

“So. Haymitch. We all saw you refuse Peeta’s gallant attempt to volunteer at the reaping. What can you tell us about that?” There it was, the lead-in he needed to get into what they really wanted to hear about from him. Good.

He shrugged. Deliberately shed the wisecracks, brought the softness they all wanted to see. “They’re both so young, and after what they went through last year to be together? And they’ve barely had any time together married--”

“Wait, I thought they weren’t married yet?”

He gave Peeta and Katniss an apologetic grin. “Sorry, kids. My fault. Cat’s out of the bag.” He turned back to Caesar. “After the Quell got announced, they asked me to help them have at least a little time together. It’s not on paper in the Justice Building because we all know word of that would get around and Katniss’ ma would come kill both Peeta and me,” a nervous giggle from the audience, “but by our district’s custom, well, they’re hitched.”

“And how did it make you feel, seeing the two young lovers you mentored through impossible odds together?”

“Proud as any dad could be on his little girl’s wedding day.”

Caesar leaned in, eyes wide. Haymitch was convinced you could have heard a mouse fart in the anticipatory silence. “You don’t mean to say...”

Katniss really might kill him for this one, but screw it, all in to open the floodgates here. He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “Well, I was a bit wild when I was young...”

Fucking Flickerman stepped right into the cue for him and Haymitch could have kissed him for it. “Yes, we all remember how much of a heartbreaker you were in your youth. Although I daresay you’re cutting quite a dashing figure again now.”

Haymitch pointedly ignored the invitation to flirt with the audience in that last comment. “There was a girl back home for a time, and, well...after we broke things off, she never told me. She died, but the Everdeens took the baby in.” There. Better than insinuating he’d had an affair with Perulla Everdeen with Katniss as the result. He wouldn’t want to take a shit on Burt’s memory like that. People back home might even believe he was the sort to knock a girl up and not bother to find out that he had a child. “I didn’t even know until last year after Katniss won. There’s things I ain’t been proud of in my life, Caesar. Not knowing about that for so long, and not taking care of her right from the start like I ought--that’s definitely one of ‘em. But Katniss herself, well, nobody could help but love her.” He smiled, deliberately wistful. “Just look how she caught Peeta hopelessly, first time he laid eyes on her.”

“No wonder you’ve sworn to protect her in the arena, as a caring father would do.” The cameras cut to Katniss and bless her, she was looking almost teary rather than ready to rip out his guts. Caesar held up a hand for quiet and listened to whoever was squawking in his ear. “My sources backstage have informed me this makes Katniss the first victor who’s the child of another victor. Quite remarkable!”

“We haven’t had one of those yet?” He played dumb, knowing full well there had never been a legacy victor and that they probably had never planned on there being one. Too dangerous for them to let one family start repeatedly snatching its children from a gruesome death. “Well, how about that. But we all knew she was something special last year, am I right?”

“Oh my, yes. It must at least be a comfort to you knowing that, if you manage your goal of protecting her, she’ll have a long and happy life with a wonderful young man.”

“Of course.” He gave them a soft-edged smile, the dangerous rakehell tamed down to a touching kind of domesticity. “Just wish that it hadn’t come out like this. Or that President Snow could do something to change it, even at this late hour. I got to see her married to a good man, that’s for sure. But I would have liked to be there when the baby’s born, see what it’s like being a grandpa and all.”

Now the audience exploded, hysterical over the tragedy of it all. The family so recently brought together that would inevitably be torn apart by the Quell. The would-be bride, fighting for the sake of a life with the baby she carried and the husband she loved. The husband, doing his best from Mentor Central to keep her alive. The father, determined to die to make their happy-ever-after a reality. They’d bought it--hook, line, and sinker. He really wanted to punch the air in victory but instead he did his best to keep his expression one of quiet determination and barely-contained emotion.

The cameras went to Katniss again and now she looked really on the verge of a breakdown, as if she was terrified of losing everything good in her life. He had no idea where she’d summoned that acting ability from, but it couldn’t have come at a better moment. She looked like someone whose whole world had crumbled beneath her feet.

The buzzer sounded while the audience was still out of control, and with that he headed back to his seat, ready for her to give him at least a flash of temper. She surprised him yet again by taking his hand, holding it tight. Then she turned to Chaff and offered her other hand. In what seemed like moments, the twenty-four of them stood as one unbroken line, all twelve districts together and united. Sure, his little rebellion meeting had done the same thing, but nobody saw that or knew about it. The open, almost defiant symbolism of this was obvious, and something in him was thrilling at it.

This was why they needed her. These moments of hers, where she reached out to anyone and everyone, and made district and anything else just an artificial construct. She could be a prickly pain in the ass but when she was genuine, he thought there wasn’t a person in the world she couldn’t reach. Burt had been a lucky, lucky bastard to have a daughter like her.

It was all chaos after that. Recap cancelled, everyone sent home in a rush. Presumably there might even be a formal petition to Snow to stop the Games. Assuredly it was going to be denied.

They went back to the Training Center in relative silence. Katniss went to her room. Haymitch went to the roof for a while, hoping to wait up there until he was dead on his feet, because otherwise the bottles of liquor in the apartment were going to be calling him a little too loudly tonight. Peeta found him up there a while later, looking out over the city, at the giant odds board displayed across the way. The same board he looked at every year to confirm doom, except two columns were new.

Brutus Allamand. District: 2. Age: 42. Height: 6’3”. Training Score: 9. Previous Games: 51st. Previous Kills: 4. 12-1.

Finnick Odair. District: 4. Age: 24. Height: 6’1”. Training Score: 10. Previous Games: 65th. Previous Kills: 6. 8-1.

Margaret Robichaux. District: 4. Age: 83. Height: 5’1”. Training Score: 2. Previous Games: 8th. Previous Kills: 3. 100-1.

Poppy Lowrey. District: 6. Age: 60. Height: 5’6”. Training Score: 3. Previous Games: 33rd. Previous Kills: 2. 80-1.

Johanna Mason. District: 7. Age: 25. Height: 5’4”. Training Score: 9. Previous Games: 66th. Previous Kills: 5. 12-1.

Rye Laaksonen. District: 9. Age: 33. Height: 6’0”. Training Score: 6. Previous Games: 59th. Previous Kills: 1. 40-1.

Haymitch Abernathy. District: 12. Age: 41. Height: 5’10”. Training Score: 12. Previous Games: 50th. Previous Kills: 6. 8-1.

Katniss Everdeen. District: 12. Age: 17. Height: 5’3”. Training Score: 12. Previous Games: 74th. Previous Kills: 4. 3-1.

“Look at that. We’re back to being just a bunch of fucking numbers,” he told Peeta wearily, really wanting a drink. “She’s got good odds, though. I’m gonna have my hands full keeping her alive, but you’re golden when it comes to finding sponsors for her.”

“Is it true?” Both of them startled to see her standing there, that angry, vaguely deadly look on her face, particularly when she looked at Haymitch. He spared a moment to be thankful he hadn’t started talking about Heavensbee and Thirteen or anything like that to Peeta for her to overhear. “Are you actually my...”

“Father?” He said the word she obviously was too horrified to manage to get off her tongue in conjunction with the thought of him. He felt an answering anger stirring in him. Did she have to make it so damn obvious that she was disgusted by him? “No, sweetheart,” he told her sharply, “you don’t have to worry you’re the bastard of Twelve’s resident failure. Just giving them a big finale.”

“You didn’t have to say that!” He wondered if her thinking he had been an enthusiastic Capitol man back in those days had made it worse. Probably so.

“Why don’t you talk to your beloved husband here who did a secret toasting with you and then got you pregnant?” he asked her with excessive sweetness. “His idea to say that, after all.” Peeta had made the pitch to him that afternoon, but Haymitch quickly had seen it was pretty brilliant.

“Peeta?” She asked the boy in an almost pained voice, obviously surprised he’d had that kind of hand in the subterfuge.

“I thought that...Katniss, it’ll help keep you alive,” he said, sounding like she had him in agony. Haymitch almost hurt to hear it. Though he suspected Peeta had put forth that particular story because then at least, in the quiet space of little white Capitol lies, he could have the happy life with her that she was so reluctant to want to share with him. Marriage, a kid. The simple, normal things a young man would start to think about with the woman he loved. Things he'd thought about Briar once, long ago.

“Why?” she demanded of either of them, or maybe both.

“Because you saw what a difference sponsors made last year. Because they’re morons who need a nice simple story to believe for why I’m going to die in there to keep you alive,” he told her bluntly. “Don’t try telling them about obligations and honor and how I’m your mentor and all of that. They won’t believe I won’t suddenly turn on you at the end. But if I’m your dear old dad...”

“Don’t you say that!” she almost snarled at him, all wounded fury, and he could suddenly see how young she still was, how much her father dying had left its scars. He’d never known that pain, at least. His pa had been a violent drunk--an irony he winced at now--and he’d died down in the mines when Haymitch was only three. No big loss to his life. Not the way Burdock Everdeen was a loss to Katniss. She glowered at him. “And are you?”

“What? Going to die in there to keep you alive, or going to turn on you at the end? Yeah to the first. No to the second.”

“Why?” she insisted again.

“I kept my word to you and kept him alive by kicking him out of the running. I’m keeping my word to him to keep you alive and to do that I can’t exactly survive the Games myself, now can I? That’s it.”

At this point Peeta broke in, seeing the two of them poised on the edge of violence or saying something neither of them would ever be able to take back. “He and I did it to get you as much in the way of sponsorships as possible. We kept you alive last year by me revealing I was in love with you. Look how they responded to it. Look how they responded to what he said tonight.”

“When I’m dead you can go right on ahead and tell ‘em everything I said up there was a lie,” he told her, almost taunting her with it. “They’ll really have no trouble believing it of me. Promise.”

“I’m sick of the two of you trapping me in your lies,” she told them both, the heat of fury in her words. “How is it living if your entire life is one big lie?” He’d lied time after time. To keep people safe. To spare them the truth. Sometimes to spare himself some pain because damn it, he deserved a little mercy like that now and again. He’d had to tell enough lies, big and small, that some days he wasn’t sure he remembered the truth on some things any more.

“Spoken like someone who fortunately hasn’t lost enough to know better.” Given the chance, he’d have lied and cheated and done anything to keep his own family alive. He’d killed to get back to them, hadn’t he? “You’re already a killer, sweetheart. Being a liar stacks up pretty small against that.”

“Haymitch!” Peeta snapped at him, now physically putting himself between the two of them. “Not the time!”

She stared at him. “My father--my actual father--was a good man. And you’re nothing at all like him.” She turned and walked away from them both.

He watched her go and said too quietly for her to hear, “Oh, I know that too well, sweetheart.” Better than she did, he was sure. Sensing the younger man still there, hovering anxiously, he turned to him. “Go to bed, Peeta,” he said flatly.

“You should get some rest, Haymitch. I’ve seen how you’ve barely slept this week.”

He smiled painfully. Good little mentor. He slept as badly in that room as a tribute as he ever had as a mentor. Not that taking a tribute room would have improved things for him at all, and Peeta had meant well in just telling him to take the mentor room this year as usual. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll be down in a little bit.” Another little lie. As he sat up there and watched the neon-lit Capitol night, thinking of Burt Everdeen and about the people he might have to kill in the morning, he somehow wasn’t surprised Peeta was still good and trusting enough to believe it.

Chapter Text

In the morning he put on the prep robe left for him and went out into the living room. Snagging an apple from the fruit bowl, he started eating it even if he didn’t have much appetite. No telling what the arena would be like in terms of food, and it would be better to have something in his stomach to start. He tried to think when he stopped telling that to his tributes, handing them an orange or the like and making them eat it before he escorted them up to the roof. What exact Games had had been, when he started to accept, It really won’t matter and given up on little things like this? He couldn’t even remember.

He hadn’t done it for Peeta and Katniss last year. Too long out of the habit. But this year he tossed Katniss an apple when she showed up and at least, even if she was still glowering at him some, she saw the wisdom in the thinking and ate it.

Peeta came out of his room looking like death warmed over. “Where’s Effie this morning?” Katniss asked him, looking around for her.

“All non-essential Games personnel got sent home last night,” Peeta answered.

Shit. He hadn’t even thought about Trinket last night. “Tell her...” She was a featherbrain but she’d come to care about these two and start to break out of the Capitol mindset and he respected her for that. He wished he could have at least said goodbye in person. “Tell her thanks for me, will you? She’s a good sort. Even if she is a pain in the ass sometimes.” Peeta was free to embellish on that however he wanted. Katniss gave her own message, Haymitch a little surprised to hear it included “all my love”. After that they all went up to the roof together. He hung back a minute to let the two of them have whatever words they wanted. He glanced up just as Katniss kissed Peeta on the cheek and walked towards the hovercraft.

Then it was his turn. “You screwed up a bit last night, Haymitch,” Peeta told him softly. “I know you meant well but she’s really upset about her father.”

“I really don’t have time to worry about her precious feelings, Peeta.”

“You and I already put her in living out this fairy-tale romance with me. We did that.” Peeta’s blue eyes bored into him, absolving neither of them of the blame. “Now you took away something she really cherished. The memory of her father.”

That was what the Capitol did. It took and took and took. Everything you loved. Everything you were. It made you sell away every piece of yourself to keep people safe until you were nothing but their lies. She was so young. She didn’t understand that yet, but someday she...fuck. She really didn’t understand that yet, did she? There he went, acting all Capitol in her eyes. No, he was acting Capitol, acting like what they’d made him into. Some kind of mutt fashioned mostly out of Capitol lies and the few bare threads of something that had once been Seam. He sighed. “I’m a complete bastard, didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

“No, you’re not, even if you want us to think you are.” Peeta’s eyes on him, seeing a little too much, were suddenly a bit unnerving. “I told her she might have to play along with it some, but that I’d tell you that you’d better try to fix it however you can. And you’d better.”

He smiled a little. “Fine mentor you make,” he told him quietly, putting a hand on his shoulder. Peeta startled him by stepping forward and giving him a fierce hug.

After he let go, Haymitch told him lowly, “I’m keeping my word to you both to keep you alive. You promise me something in return now.” He knew Peeta’s type. The type to put himself at stupid risk and go to any length, make any sacrifice, to save someone. “When that arena goes down, you do not worry about me. You get her out and then get the hell out of there.”

“Haymitch...” He sensed the coming protests and tried to just override them.

“If by some miracle I’m still alive and I’m right there with her, fine. But no risks. No delay. No extra effort for me. She’s the only one that matters. This is the way it has to be. We’re not all ready to die in there for her so you can screw it up by getting sentimental at the last minute. So you promise me that.”

Peeta might not be Seam and he might lie prettily, but Haymitch knew this promise was one he’d keep. With that, he nodded and headed for the hovercraft himself. Sat down, let them mark him once again as Capitol property in just one more way with their tracker injected in his arm, near the old scar from the last Quell.

At the Stockyard, he looked at the tribute uniform for the year. Long tan trousers with numerous pockets, zippers at the knees to apparently turn them into shorts. A t-shirt and a long-sleeved button-down shirt, in Twelve black, and Portia showed him that a button above the elbow could fasten the sleeves back to make it short-sleeved. “It’s pretty thin fabric,” he observed, shrugging into the t-shirt. Lighter than the uniform in his year. “Probably not going to be much protection from cold.” He’d been around the block enough that every year, looking at the uniform his tributes were in as they stood in their launch tubes, he could start to formulate some guesses as to the nature of the arena. Well, so probably not an icy wasteland. Hurray for that.

Portia held the shirt up for him to slip into. “I interned on the Four team as my first position. I think this is the fabric their fishermen usually wear out on their boats. It dries fast and it blocks sunburn.”

“Fantastic,” he muttered. So, it was probably going to be wet and sunny. How wet? Torrential rain? Swimming?

“Did you not bring a district token with you?” she asked him, as he buttoned up the shirt and for now fastened the sleeves at his wrists.

He shook his head. He’d given that gold bracelet to Finnick. The only thing he needed to remind him of what was at stake, what he was fighting for in that arena, was Katniss herself. He’d debated bringing the black queen from his chess set at home as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, but decided against it at the end. Too risky. An odd padded belt and rubber-soled nylon shoes and he was dressed and ready. “Thanks,” he told her as he headed for the launch tube. “Hell,” he teased her lightly, “you even made me look good last night. You’ve got talent, Portia.”

She smiled back, turquoise braids over her shoulder, watching him go. “Good luck in there. Cinna and I will be watching.” The plate rose and he tried to take deep breaths, tried to not flash back to twenty-five years ago.

Water. He was surrounded by water, waves of it lapping at his feet. He crouched down carefully, touching his fingertips to it, about to taste it and see if it was fresh or not. Remembering suddenly how they’d poisoned the water last time, he stopped himself. They’d love that. Haymitch Abernathy being enough of a brainless moron to kill himself even before the starting gong.

Really? Would they poison the whole damn thing, considering as he looked around that obviously swimming was the only way to reach that strip of land and thus the Cornucopia? Probably not. He still couldn’t quite shake that unnerving feeling, though.

He looked around, the colors of the tribute shirts helping him identify who was nearby. To his left, sharing that wedge of water, was redhaired Lamina Rosencoff in the purple of Five. He remembered her Games...shaking it off with an effort, he told himself with a trace of fury, Not Lamina. Purple shirt, woman. That’s Five’s female. Age, thirty-four. Training score, six. Favorite weapon, a dagger.

He kept looking, spying the colors rather than the faces. Eleven brown. One gold. Three yellow. Two red. Eight blue. He didn’t see the black shirt of Katniss anywhere in his view. She must be on the other side of the Cornucopia.

She could swim, he knew that for sure. He’d asked both of them that after they watched Annie win the Games by treading water for nineteen hours.

”You saw how important it can be in some cases, so can you both swim?” Katniss nodded. Peeta shook his head. “Well, Peeta, you ain’t getting a good chance to learn between now and the Games, so let’s just hope swimming doesn’t come into play this year.” Not with the lake in the woods off-limits and nowhere within the fence that he could learn it.

“What, can you swim?” she asked him. He could. Just one more thing he’d learned as a kid out in the woods. Netting and shooting waterfowl and fishing and collecting the plants at the water’s edge, it was a good idea to know he wouldn’t drown if he fell in, or that he could swim out to collect a bird that fell in the water and not have it go to waste. It had been Jonas who taught all of them, back when they were little.

“Yeah, good enough.” He smiled wryly at her questioning look. “Hey, you pick up a lot of random knowledge in forty-one years of existing.” Not living.

He realized that Burt must have taught her. It seemed like the ghost of Burdock Everdeen was everywhere this morning. He dived in at the gong and started swimming for the land. Unfortunately, this was one skill he hadn’t practiced in twenty-plus years so to begin he was more towards simply not-drowning than actually swimming. Choked on a mouthful of water as he hit a wave wrong and confirmed yes, it was saltwater that stung his nose and the back of his throat with a thick, burning feeling that made him cough and sputter. But eventually the rhythm and instinct came back and he made better headway. When he didn’t up and die by the time he made it to the sand, he at least knew for sure the water wasn’t poisoned.

Scrambling to his hands and knees and then to his feet, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw most of the little figures of the other tributes still standing out there, presumably unable to swim. The memory of dozens of dazed expressions under an unearthly blue sky came to him and he gave a tired laugh--just like the first time, wasn’t it? They were stuck on their plates and so he could make a break for it. He started sprinting for the Cornucopia. All instinct now, he had this chance to get in there and get something, some kind of weapon.

He didn’t just rush in for the mouth of it, though, in case some of the others had gotten there first. Instead as he got closer he rounded the side of it carefully, and knew he’d done right in approaching cautiously when he heard voices. But then he recognized the voice saying, “Don’t trust One and Two.”

“Finnick?” he called.

“Oh, Haymitch, Katniss and I were wondering if you’d show up,” Finnick called lazily to him. Ducking around to the mouth of the Cornucopia, he spied Finnick in his shirt of Four’s blue-green and Katniss in black. He didn’t waste time with more than a nod, looking at what they’d left heaped there for the tributes. All in a cluster right in the mouth, rather than spread out as it usually was. They wanted to draw them in for the fights, all right. “Weapons only?” he asked, seeing only the gleam of metal greeting him, assuming they’d glanced it over already.

“Looks like it,” Katniss confirmed with a bow already in hand. Well, at least it wasn’t only a heap of spiked maces. That had been a particularly bad year. He forced himself to shake that off with an effort. This was the 75th Games and he was in them. Really not the time to dwell on memories of the 67th.

“Grab what you want and let’s get out of here,” Finnick suggested. He nodded, already on it, putting several knives into his belt, grabbing hold of some of the lighter throwing knives, a couple of sharp handspikes that could be useful as pitons or to help secure things up a tree if climbing somehow came into play. Assuming Peeta could send some rope.

He heard the twang of Katniss’ bowstring behind him and turned, seeing the four Careers coming in, and Gloss taking an arrow to the calf. Tried to not feel strangely conflicted when she shot an arrow at Brutus and the big redhead blocked it with his belt, ducking back into the safety of the water. “Now would be a good time to leave?” he suggested, sliding one last knife into his belt.

They cleared out in a hurry, him bringing up the rear, and along the way someone grabbed him from behind, wet clothes and hot breath on the back of his neck. Someone who’d just climbed out of the water. He felt a hand going for one of his knives and pulled one from his belt one-handed and stabbed blindly behind him, punched it into his attacker’s belly and heard the cry of pain. As they let him go, he whirled around and instinctively slashed for the throat to finish him off. The blood splashed on his face and his hands. Just like it had in the woods all those years ago. Warm and salty as the water he’d just been swimming in.

He saw the face and recognized it, the brown eyes wide and terrified, even before he saw the amber-orange shirt of Nine. Rye collapsed down onto the sand, painting it red around his slashed throat as his heart continued to pump out the blood. Rye, who’d won with only one kill of the boy from Four when a lion mutt killed off most of the rest of the Career pack, and he loved beer and was terrified of spiders, and Haymitch's tributes that year were fourteen-year-old Addie Fitch and twelve-year-old Toby Mercer and they both died in the initial bloodbath and after that he’d spent most of those Games playing kept man to Lucia Flair, and fuck he’d killed Rye thoughtlessly as breathing. He’d turned back into a killer just like that. He stood there staring numbly until Katniss yanked his arm, and it took a split-second to recognize her face and her shirt and not automatically attack her as a threat too.

With that he snapped out of it and saw Finnick was finishing helping Mags in through the waves. Lock it down, don't let it in. Gotta do better than this. He’d managed to do it all those years in all those bedrooms. He reached down and scrubbed his face and hands clean of Rye’s blood with a handful of the salt water, grateful he could do that little thing at least. Last time with it all being poisoned, all their clean water was conserved for drinking so he hadn’t even had that luxury. “No objections to Mags, huh?” he asked Katniss wryly, knowing she’d protested the hell out of Finnick, but Haymitch had insisted on including him. Apparently that, and the gold bracelet, had convinced her to trust him. Good.

“I wanted her from the start,” Katniss protested. “Even more now that I see this arena. She can make a fishhook out of anything.”

“Katniss has remarkably good judgment,” Finnick said cheerfully, hauling Mags up behind him. “Besides, Mags is one of the few people that actually likes me, so I can hardly leave her behind.”

Mags gave him a toothless grin and a wave. “Well, she’s one of the few people that likes me too, so I’m with you on that,” he told Finnick, and even managed to laugh, to try to forget Rye’s body not thirty feet behind him now. Live in the here and now, wall off the unthinkable, and count the cost later. The only way to survive.

Seeing some of the other tributes bobbing around in the water now, and Mags informing them the belt was keeping them afloat, he was relieved when Katniss suggested they clear out for now. He thought he saw a green shirt from Seven teamed up with one of Three’s yellow, and hoped to hell it was Johanna keeping up her end of things with Beetee and Wiress.

He ended up taking point with a machete to use on the thick vegetation, carrying the spare bow and a quiver of arrows. Finnick had Mags on his back, and they hiked into the jungle. Thick, dark, almost oppressive. He tried to not imagine that sniffing those riotously colorful blossoms would kill. The heat dried the water off their clothes in a few minutes, leaving them only a bit stiff from the salt, though at least the thin fabric seemed to let the sweat evaporate easily too.

After a mile or so of sheer uphill trek, they stopped to take a rest. Katniss shinnied up a tree and the look on her face was bleak as she came back down. “So what, have they vowed to not fight? Threw away all the weapons? Joined hands and started singing songs of peace and friendship?” Finnick asked her almost defiantly.

“No.” She looked at Finnick, looked at him too. He’d seen the body with its purple shirt on the sand near Finnick. Both of them had chalked up a kill quick enough, turned someone that should have been a friend into nothing but a cooling corpse.

“None of us got out of the arena the first time without turning killer,” he told her. “Except Peeta. And he ain’t in here. The rest of us, we do what we have to do to survive.” Maybe there was a little justice in the world for that--Peeta would never have to become like this. She stared at him and Finnick as if the sight of both of them hurt, at least a little. Looking at what she was already in the process of becoming. “How many are dead down there?” he asked her. “We know of two for sure.”

“Hard to see the colors clearly at this distance,” she answered, looking defeated. He didn’t want to admit it but yeah, it hurt him plenty, and he was trying to not imagine who might be lying motionless on the sand or in the water, and how well he knew them and how well he’d cared for them. “At least six are down, I think, but they’re still fighting.”

“Let’s just keep moving,” Finnick said tiredly. “We need to put distance between us and the Career pack before we make camp or the night, and we need to find some water.”

He caught up to Finnick for a second on the way to pick up Mags. “There’s a chance it’ll be like my arena,” he said in an undertone. “No clean water on hand at all.” Finnick just nodded, an old hand himself at acting on the Capitol stage and understanding that either of them might have to try to play into the sympathies of a sponsor tonight for some water, and slung Mags over his shoulders again.

Hacking away at the vines, he thought he heard a sharp gasp from Katniss just as the machete connected again, he felt like he’d swallowed the hardest, harshest kick of white liquor he’d ever had in his life, searing his entire body with pure lightning, and he blacked out.

Chapter Text

Bowled over by Haymitch getting flung back, by the time Finnick picked himself up off his ass and made sure he hadn’t crushed Mags beneath him, Katniss was yelling Haymitch’s name and slapping his face, trying to bring him around. She sounded on the verge of going hysterical.

For a split-second Finnick let himself wonder if what Haymitch had said last night was true. The trouble with Haymitch was Finnick’s same problem--he got a little too accomplished at spinning tales, and it got to the point where even his friends had trouble knowing when he was telling a lie or not. He was sure Katniss had been shocked by the announcement, though. Still, given how Haymitch claimed she was the product of his supposedly wild youth, Finnick suspected he’d just been blowing smoke.

She obviously wasn’t being all that helpful with the shrieking and slapping. Pushing Katniss aside, and then impatiently shoving her away with some force when she tried to pull him off, he put his fingers to Haymitch’s neck. Nothing. Not even a flicker of a pulse. Beetee and his ramble about the electrical current in forcefields came to mind. This happened in Four--not from electricity, but from drowning. Sometimes they could bring them back. You don’t get to die just like that. You don’t get to do this to us. Not now. Not like this. Don’t you leave all this on me. She’s probably going to fucking well kill me in my sleep tonight anyway if you die.

Shoving up the loose fishing shirt and finding the sternum through the thin silky layer of the tech t-shirt, Finnick meshed his fingers together, and started giving compressions. The world reduced to the simple cycle: two breaths breathe pause pause breathe, thirty rapid compressions onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight, hearing the pop of some of the cartilage give way from the force of the compressions as he did it but persisting on. Haymitch could survive with some cracked cartilage, even if his ribs might hurt like hell. He definitely couldn’t survive with a dead heart. Stubborn old bastard. C’mon. C’mon!

Minutes went by and finally Haymitch coughed weakly as he was going in for another breath. Finnick’s fingers brushed his neck again and there it was, a pulse, gradually growing stronger and steadier. “Damn, Finn,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, a shuddering breath needed after each few words. “If this is our plan for getting water, I’d better be more enthusiastic and you’d better use more tongue.”

He couldn’t help it. He started laughing, almost to the point of breaking down with sheer relief. Carefully he helped Haymitch sit up. Katniss hovered anxiously over them both. Even Mags had gotten up and hobbled over to investigate.

“Oh, this is outstanding,” Haymitch said with a sigh, taking slow, deep breaths, his voice now getting stronger. “A deadly forcefield. The Gamemakers really must love me to put that in play.” Finnick wondered if he was right. Had they put that in as a special treat, hoping Haymitch might be up to some of his old tricks? It would have been the height of irony to have the thing he exploited the first time around to save his life be the thing that killed him this time.

“You were dead!” Katniss blurted fiercely. “Your heart stopped and--”

Haymitch waved a hand tiredly. “No cannon for me just yet, sweetheart.” Katniss gave something that might have been a laugh or a sob and then suddenly it was sniffling like crazy. “Hey. C’mon. I’ll get by.”

“It’s her hormones,” Finnick said, still catching his breath. “From the baby.” Now that part he wasn’t sure. It could well be true. It was obvious she now cared about Peeta intensely, even if last year he’d seen through her acting. But keeping in mind the sponsors--always about the sponsors--he threw Katniss a bone here and helped play up the baby card for her because she was obviously too distracted to seize the opportunity. “Can you move out?” he asked Haymitch.

Seeing him struggle to his feet was hard to watch. “We can’t stay here, so yeah, I’ll manage. We’ll have to go slow,” and Finnick could hear the sheer reluctance in the older man’s voice. Not wanting to admit to any weakness. Mags handed Katniss some moss to wipe her runny nose.

Katniss insisted on taking the lead, giving some story about how her reconstructed ear could apparently hear the hum of the forcefield. Haymitch looked at her, looked at Finnick and spread his hands helplessly, shrugging. Just go with it. “Nice piece of luck you can hear it, then,” he said brightly, leaning on the walking staff Finnick had cut, and gesturing Katniss on.

Soon enough Finnick saw what she was doing, bouncing the nuts off the forcefield with a sizzle and pop to test where it was. How she’d actually picked up on the forcefield just before Haymitch hit it was beyond him, but he’d trust that she could hopefully find it again. Mags, for her part, just started collecting the nuts and eating them with a laugh. No point food going to waste, right? she signed to Finnick with abbreviated one-handed signs, the other hand on her own walking stick. Tasty too. He laughed and picked up a few of them himself. He wondered how Annie was doing up in Mentor Central right now, watching him in the arena again. He knew what it was like watching someone you loved go in like that from her Games. Helpless as Snow had made him in so many ways, that was the most helpless he’d ever felt, unable to do anything for the girl he loved except send her some little silver parachutes.

So he knew exactly how Peeta Mellark must be feeling right now, and he pitied the poor bastard.

Apparently Katniss didn’t hate him enough to wish him dead. Well, that was a start. He had to admit he’d been surprised to see her sniffling for him, though, given how angry she’d been the night before. He’d take it.

His ribs felt like they were on fire and everything felt like he was trying to do it after a five-mile run, heavy-limbed and exhausted. But he kept going, ignoring it like he had all spring, because he didn’t want to be the one dragging this down.

The news when Katniss went up another tree that the arena was small and without any sign of drinkable water was definite bad news. That meant, having reached the edge, they’d have to head back down towards the middle. Towards whatever fight was waiting for them there.

Finally it was Mags that called for a halt, sounding apologetic but giving him a glance that said she knew he needed the rest too. So they set up camp for the night. Haymitch entertained himself winging nuts off the forcefield to roast them, because it was something he could handle and besides, it cheerfully gave the Gamemakers a middle finger. Hey, assholes, you gave me a useful tool again. Thanks.

Katniss went to search nearby for water. He tried to go with her but all three of them pretty much told him to just sit down and shut the hell up, so he did it reluctantly.

The cannons went off a few minutes later. Eight down. He knew about Laurence and Rye. Wearily, he met Mags’ eyes and he wondered who the other six had been. You did only what you had to do, boy, she signed quickly to him in little gestures the cameras might not catch. No blame for that. Just like she’d told him all those years ago when he’d apologized to her for killing Esca in his Games.

Katniss coming back with a wet-muzzled rodent caused some excitement as they tried to figure out, without much success, just where it had gotten water. But roasting pieces of the gamey rodent in the forcefield, at least they were all full, if still thirsty.

After darkness fell their faces played in the sky beside the giant, luminous white moon. Laurence. Max, who’d never need another syringe of morphling. Cecelia and Woof both, and Haymitch heard the soft cry of dismay from Mags as she saw her old friend’s face up there in the sky. Rye, with Haymitch seeing his wide-staring eyes as he died, and Amaranth. Sandy. The last was Seeder. Haymitch looked away at that, finding it hard to bear. Remembering being seventeen and how he’d stumbled out of that “party”, still high on the Amp they’d shot into him and half-dressed and barefoot, but desperate to get away, back on fire from whip marks and feeling unbearably dirty and ashamed from all the hands that had been on him. His key was in his jacket back at that mansion so he’d pounded on Eleven’s door, so out of his mind he was convinced it was Twelve. He ended up bawling like a damn baby on Seeder’s shoulder, seeing her almost-Seam looks and being convinced she was his ma. He miserably told her that he just wanted to go home, and she’d told him softly, “I know, baby. I know,” and she just held him while he cried.

Now you’re free, he thought for all of them. No more pain, no more sorrow, no more Capitol manipulations. But it was a cold comfort in the grief.

The beep of a transponder made them all look up, and the silver parachute floated gently down into their camp. They all stared at it. “Well, Haymitch died today, so I say he gets it,” Finnick joked lightly. Katniss shrugged and gestured him to it.

At least he could identify the little metal tube in his hands, though it took him a bit of thought and some reaching back through the years. After all, the ones he’d used back in the day were made of carved wood. “Well, this hopefully solves the water issue,” he said with a sigh of relief. “It’s a spile.” He doubted Peeta knew what one was, and Carrick and Annie probably didn’t either since neither Mags nor Finnick showed any sign of recognition. He had the feeling the hand of Seven was in this and Cedrus might have had had some advice to give on the sly. He smiled a little at that. So the alliance was in force.

Katniss obviously recognized it then too and was explaining it to Finnick and Mags. It took a while but they all were rewarded when tapping into one of the trees yielded the water they’d hoped for. They all grinned at each other like a bunch of idiots, drinking their fill and washing the stickiness of saltwater and sweat off their faces.

Finnick took first watch and Katniss raised an eyebrow at him as they crawled into the little grass-mat hut Mags and Finnick had constructed, weaving grass frantically for much of the afternoon. “You really should sleep.”

“I will.” Exhaustion had made him sleep sounder of late, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He’d already told Finnick that if he started thrashing and yelling in his sleep, he ought to kick Haymitch awake and say it was time for his watch, even if it wasn’t. But before that he figured he ought to try to clear the air, at least a little bit. But how to just launch into that--it wasn’t like he could simply openly apologize for lying and claiming to be her father on national television. “So how’s it you know about spiles?” He had the feeling this might play out to the opening he needed, but he had to go careful because he’d jerked her around enough on this issue.

“My fa--” She faltered. “I mean, the man who...” She stammered and sounded lost, a little girl who’d had her daddy taken from her once again in a whole new way, and now she didn’t know what to do, because she couldn’t scream at him as she’d like. He hadn’t left her that option. Peeta was right. He’d done it to help her, but he’d screwed up all the same.

“It’s all right,” he said, with a dismissive wave that she could probably barely see. Somehow it was easier to say things without having to see her expression. “I...probably shouldn’t have said anything last night. I kept quiet on it this long after I found out. It was selfish of me to put it on you like that. I just, well...you’re one rare thing I ain’t ashamed of in my life and...I mostly wanted to say that but it came out all wrong.” He felt like he couldn’t breathe again and it wasn’t just the ribs because it cut a little too close to the truth and admitting something so openly scared the fuck out of him. But saving her and Peeta was one of a handful of things he’d ever done right. “It doesn’t matter anyway. What part I’ve had in your life...never mind it. You should always tell yourself Burdock Everdeen was your real pa. And he was always a good man. One of the best.” That was the best he could give her for right now with the lie he’d stuck her in--the right to ignore it and to reclaim the father she’d loved.

He imagined those Seam eyes were sharp on him. “Did you know him?” Her voice had softened a bit.

“He was one of my best friends growing up. Him and Jonas Hawthorne--he was your cousin Gale’s daddy--and Briar Wainwright.” Even now he was careful to remember the official story of the “cousin” back in Twelve. “The four of us got into so much damn trouble as kids.” He had to be careful telling stories, because none of them could involve the woods that had been such a big part of their lives and their friendship. But he managed an admirable trick of it, substituting the Meadow and the town and the slag heap, changing little details to fit.

He knew the cameras were there recording everything he told her but he wasn’t doing this cynically for the sponsorship opportunities, tugging heartstrings with some supposed daddy-daughter bonding time. He was the only one of the four of those childhood friends left alive, the only keeper of these memories. It seemed only right that having clumsily taken something of Burt from her last night, he should now give back what he could, with interest besides. Perulla wouldn’t know these stories to tell her. He was the only one that did, and this was the last chance he would have to tell her.

So he told those stories for her, and for him because it was good to think about the fact he hadn’t always been like this, and for the memory of good friends who all died far too soon, leaving him the one left alive. “Of course there he is singing it ‘out into the bleak cold and damn winter’ at the top of his lungs during his solo just like I dared him to do--beautiful voice, even at eleven years old--and the music teacher is staring at him about to either lose his mind or bust out laughing. Finally he picks busting out laughing, tells Burt for next time it’s ‘damp winter’ and tells us all to get lost for the afternoon, class dismissed.”

Katniss was laughing as he told her, an open and honest sound like she was just seventeen and not a rebel symbol and not a girl thrown into the middle of a fight to the death.

“It was Briar that showed us about spiles, though. There was this old maple out by the slag pile,” of course there hadn’t been. They'd tapped the maples and birches out in the woods for their sap.“So, you and I have her to thank for having water tonight, eh?”

“I know my dad and Gale’s died in the mines a few years ago. But what happened to her? You didn’t mention her as much as the others.”

He felt the tight wedge of grief in his throat. There was a lot he could have said. She taught me about nightlock when I was eight because I was just a dumb little shit who thought it was blueberries. She’d call me out when I needed it and tell me when I was full of it. She was always sweet to my brother and to my ma. I kissed her when I was ten and we both agreed we didn’t see what the fuss was about. She kissed me when I was fifteen and then we realized how dumb we’d both been when we were ten. Her hair, it smelled like soap and sunshine and I loved that. I loved her. I loved her and she loved me and that’s what killed her. “Oh, that’s because Briar died real young,” he said quietly. “I mean, not that Jonas and Burt didn’t die sort of young too, but...” Not like dying at sixteen.

“Was she in the Games?” Katniss asked it with some apprehension. He’d wondered sometimes what a torment it would have been to have either Ash or Briar as one of his tributes. Apparently Snow had been a little too quick on the trigger to crack down and punish him to consider the implications of that. It would have been the worst hell imaginable. Watching the house burn and being helpless for a matter of seconds to do anything about it had been bad enough. The Games always killed relatively slowly in comparison, even the ones dead in the first five minutes, given the days of spectacle and training beforehand.

“No.” He heard his voice was a little too much on edge and he smoothed it out only with effort. “You know how it is in the Seam. Plenty of us just...die young.” He rolled over onto his side, not wanting to talk about it much more. “'Night, Katniss.”

“'Night, Haymitch,” she returned quietly. The sound of a bell woke him in the middle of the night but tired and strained as his body was, he drifted back to sleep.

Finnick woke them up a few hours later for their watch. It seemed like the tension with himself and Katniss had eased, and while they’d never been big talkers, at least that sense of distrust wasn’t there any longer. That was something he was grateful to see. They busied themselves getting more water, preparing more nuts and the like for breakfast in the gloom just as dawn was breaking in the unnaturally pink sky, when Katniss’ head shot up. “Do you smell smoke?”

Chapter Text

He would have liked to have said he sprang nimbly to his feet but in truth it was more of an roll-over-and-push-up all the while wincing as every little ache seemed magnified a hundredfold. However, the aches and the undignified manner of it were something he could quickly ignore given the much bigger problem.

Namely, the smoke that Katniss had smelled, thick and acrid, and as he looked, he saw the first lick of fire on the crest of the ridge, roaring to life in the jungle as a searing red flame. He didn’t waste time agreeing with her that yeah, that was indeed smoke, and he was already heading for the hut and giving Finnick a slight kick in the ass to wake him up with a bellow of “Let’s go!” No time to waste with a nice polite hand on the shoulder. Not to mention it might get him stabbed with a trident. He knew full well that waking up victors could be a tricky proposition sometimes.

Finnick, to his credit, came from sleep to wakefulness almost instantly, not asking questions and springing to action. He threw Mags over his shoulders like a sack of coal as Haymitch scooped up his trident, adding it to the weaponry he was already carrying. Katniss was waiting for them ten steps down the hill already, and with that, they ran from the heat of the flames.

He didn’t know how long they made it going hell for leather like that. But no matter how fast they went they never seemed to stay that far ahead of the flames, crackling and roaring like a living and hungry thing right at their backs. The smoke was starting to blind them, to obscure their steps and make their feet clumsy and unsure. That wasn’t even the worst. Inhaling any of it, thick and bitter and hot and black, immediately set off a fit of coughing. It burned like agony in his chest, already abused and sore.

They all stumbled on the uneven downhill terrain, on the vines and roots they could now barely see, even Katniss who was making the two of them, Haymitch with his shaky breathing and Finnick with Mags on his back, look slow and flatfooted. When Finnick tripped and rolled a good twenty feet down the hill, letting out a cry of dismay, he moved instinctively to grab Mags, seeing the younger man was getting close to exhaustion. “I’ve got her.”

Which was insane because he was seventeen years older than Finnick and even if he was in pretty damn good shape for those years thanks to Peeta being a merciless bastard, he wasn’t exactly at a hundred percent right now. Dying sort of did that. But Finnick couldn’t keep it up, they could hardly make a little thing like Katniss carry her, and just leaving Mags behind wasn’t an option to him if there was any other way. The cold rational part of his mind knew it was only Katniss that really mattered and that putting things in jeopardy to save Mags was stupid and maybe even selfish, but fuck that. He had to try, at the very least.

She hadn’t been the first victor he’d met, or the first one to start to try to help him adjust to what Snow was preparing him to do. That fell to Taffeta Locke when she got obliged to become his stylist on behalf of Victor Affairs. But Mags Robichaux was the one who’d come and got a seventeen-year-old boy out of the Twelve apartment at the Training Center and taken him to meet all the others with a brusque, So it got pointed out to me that as you’re our only victor from Twelve you might not exactly know the way of things. Go on and get yourself ready, we’re all having lunch together and you ought to be there. Even then she’d said “our only victor”, not “the only victor” automatically including him in something which he hadn’t even realized existed, keeping to himself in those early days as he had. Mags dragged him out and introduced him around and started to ease him into that circle of support which had become likely the only thing that somehow kept him sane since. Mags and Woof, even then, were the two all the rest respected, the ones they looked up to as something of their leaders. Woof died yesterday and nothing he could have done about it now. Mags, at least, he could refuse to just let go as if she didn’t matter because she was old. She mattered. She’d looked after him too often in her intimidating way. She’d trusted him enough to put Finnick in his hands when his own district saw him as an irredeemable screw-up when it came to tributes. He owed her a hell of a lot more over the years than he could even count.

She was trying to protest as he scooped her up and he told her roughly, “Shut it, Mags, not unless there’s no other way.”

Immediately he could see it hadn’t been the wisest option. There was no way he could go as fast as Finnick. The flames should have been on them in less than a minute at that rate. Though Katniss glanced back behind them and said in confusion, “It seems like it’s slowing down. I don’t know why.”

“Oh, goodie,” he grunted, not sparing the effort to glance over his shoulder. Maybe the change in elevation or different vegetation or something was putting it at a slower burn. “Just...keep an eye on it.”

With that Katniss took point, right in front of him, grabbing Mags’ walking stick and feeling ahead in the drifting and churning smoke. He tried to keep an eye on her feet, setting them where she did. Finnick was right behind him in case he stumbled with Mags.

He went until every breath was burning in his chest, and Finnick was right there to take Mags again. He dropped back behind Finnick to take the rear. Unaccountably, from the sound of it, the fire sped up again as Finnick picked up the pace. There was an odd pop-hiss he kept hearing now as it drew closer.

He didn’t want to speak up because all his effort was towards following Finnick’s feet now. But his mind was racing. Wildfire didn’t change speed like that, keeping at a fairly constant distance from what was fleeing from it. There was something deliberate about it, and as he heard another pop-hiss and felt the heat of flame suddenly catching close behind him, sending an explosive shower of ash and embers over them, it snapped into place.

The Gamemakers were steadily firing off some kind of flame-jets buried in the forest floor.

Knowing that, knowing they were deliberately toying with them by keeping the fire licking right at their backs at that constant distance so there was never any real margin of safety, forcing them to drive ever onward, was terrifying. Stepping it back when he had carried Mags was just to mess with their heads a bit more and keep them going. If they were eventually reduced to crawling, he had the feeling they would likewise slow the fire down for that only to make them keep going and prolong the agony and the drama of it.

He had the feeling they’d die only if they gave up or absolutely couldn’t go on. But he couldn’t be certain. Maybe that was what they were planning any victors caught in this would rely upon, just so they could undercut that hope. If they were sitting up there in Command Center, they could easily make the flame leap ahead of them and encircle them, trap them in the inferno. They could torch the entire section of forest. All it would take was a single push of a button and they were all dead.

That awareness that such deliberate human control of the menace was there like that made it all the more of a torment. The fear was right there, wrapping itself around him in a smothering blanket. He didn’t dare tell the others, afraid that if he voiced the thought and made them start to believe that hopefully if they just kept going steadily they’d be all right, that would doom them and some white-clad technician would push the button that would turn them all into blazing torches just to prove him wrong. He wouldn’t even need to say anything to invite it. All it would take was a Gamemaker thinking it would produce great ratings. Proof that the Capitol had ultimate control over their lives and their fates.

So he said nothing about it and just kept going, taking Mags on his own back for a time when Finnick couldn’t, and handing her back to Finnick when he needed a break. The two of them got good at handing her off with barely a pause. All the while Katniss led the way, finding the safe trail for them to follow. She kept calling encouragement back to them amidst her coughs, urging them to keep going just a bit further, that the beach couldn’t be all that far and they’d be safe in the water, even trying to volunteer to take on carrying Mags herself for a little while. In spite of himself he smiled. There’s my girl, rallying us on. He hoped they didn’t construe that as rebellious enough to push a button and light up the whole forest.

Finally they burst out onto the blazing white beach, and as they stumbled out onto the sand, the roar of the flames suddenly died down. As he now dared to look back, they had disappeared as if they’d never been, leaving only the black scar of a suspiciously narrow path in its wake. They had cut off the flame jets as the four of them had escaped the jungle.

None of the four of them spoke. Katniss stood with her hands on her knees, head down, shoulders heaving as she panted. Finnick set down Mags and took a knee, turning his head aside and puking. Mags just shuddered and coughed. For his part, he was hacking and coughing up chunks of black phlegm that burned his throat coming up and if he wasn’t desperately sucking air trying to breathe he’d have been laughing wryly at how much like home that was, looking in that moment like he had a rough case of blacklung as a coal miner of his age definitely might, he who’d never had to go down in the mines to make his living. He'd have rather been a poor miner than a rich killer and whore.

They looked almost like a gang of coal miners anyway, streaks of black soot and sweat and ember-scorches on their faces. Eyes inflamed red and streaming from the smoke. Clothes also black-streaked and with a small few holes here and there where the embers of exploding trees and burning leaf-fibers curling through the air had landed.

He brushed a shaking hand through his hair, finding only a few singed strands, glad he’d talked Portia into cutting it before his interview. The preps had shrieked about it but done it anyway. At the time he was thinking of sheer practicality. Nothing to grab, that was one consideration. He had the feeling Jo cut hers all those years ago on that reasoning, more or less, though he well understood it. He’d had his awful nights with Thalius Eland too. But cutting it for the arena also meant nothing to fly in his eyes at an inopportune time, like in the limited visibility back there in the smoke. Less to burn too, for that matter. Right now he was glad he’d done it all the same. Left the longer hair back with the elegant clothes. Left behind what he’d become over the years to please them, to gain what little power he had by intriguing them with wit and style. Here he was, short hair and a knife and a tribute uniform with Twelve black. Like he’d been all those years ago, and he glanced over at his ally, the girl with the mockingjay pin gleaming bright gold even now after the soot and the fire. That too was just like before, even if this girl was Seam dark rather than merchie gold. Defiant rebels at heart, both of them, Maysilee and Katniss. This time, though, she wasn’t dying on his watch. This time he knew and understood what was at stake. If he had understood all those years ago what Maysilee could perhaps become, would he had had the guts to embrace his own death to let her win? He didn’t know. He only knew this time he’d do a better job of it.

He couldn’t bind up the years since and leave them all behind. But he felt like he’d maybe become a little more real, connected back to the person who that sixteen-year-old boy had been, rather than all the dark veneer that had been painted on since. The hair had been just one more step in something that had started when he agreed to train with Peeta and when he called Plutarch Heavensbee for that chess game that said I’m in. If he was going to die, and he pretty much accepted that he was, at least maybe he would die as something that was less the Capitol's pet.

“Everybody OK?” Katniss asked finally, raising her head.

“Well, I wouldn’t turn down a drink,” he told her with a weary grin. She sighed and shook her head, irritated with his weakness for the bottle as usual, but he thought he saw a slight smile on her lips all the same.

Mags said with some effort, “Stupid...boys. You...Finnick. Both.” He looked up and her green eyes were full of gratitude and exasperation and that hint of guilty shame at her own frailty as she signed, But thank you for saving my ass.

“They’re the only ones that ought to be ashamed,” he told her quietly. The earliest Games had been hell, from what he’d heard, and from what he'd seen on her tape and Woof's. Less of a mindfuck without all the current spectacle, but brutal beyond belief. She’d survived that and mentoring decades of tributes, some to becoming victors but many to simply an early death. Kids, grandkids--and here she was, after living so long when she ought to have the last years of her life in comfort and respect and dignity, turned into just a grotesque amusement. Betting just how long an old woman could last in a place like this; he wanted to put an axe through all their damn skulls for it.

She’d volunteered for Annie, to spare her for Finnick’s sake. He’d volunteered for Peeta, or rather, shoved him aside, to spare him for Katniss’s sake. In that moment he saw he and Mags understood each other perfectly, because both of them would do just about anything to see the two others with them on that beach somehow walk away from this hellhole to have the lives they deserved.

Their sheer teamwork in the woods earned them some love from sponsors, apparently, because the silver parachute that descended on the beach had some ointment for the burns and scorches, and a bottle of aspirin. Finnick raised an eyebrow, and tossed the aspirin right to him. “Probably for your ribs.” He sighed in relief at that sight and took several of them, not even bothering to wait until they tapped a tree for water. He was an old hand at dry swallowing them anyway. Plenty of times he’d been chewing aspirin for breakfast after a rough night with a patron. Either that, or he’d been chewing aspirin for breakfast after a rough night with a bottle.

They started taking stock of their possessions. Finnick had lost a trident. Katniss had tied the spile to her belt in a smart move, so that was still with them. He’d left behind one machete at their camp. They agreed to spend a little time on the beach in the morning recovering their strength and risking the jungle again when the afternoon sun started blazing. Finnick dived into the water and started bringing up shellfish for food. He and Katniss said they’d go get water, and Mags handed him the awl. He ended up staring at the black scar marking the fire’s path as they deliberately moved aside of it, into a section of jungle that was still lush and green.

The Girl on Fire. He wondered if they’d planned that fire trap deliberately, knowing she’d be in the arena and hoping she’d get caught in it. But maybe not. Fire wasn’t exactly an uncommon horror. Finnick had told him once fishermen feared nothing more than a fire at sea, being stranded out on the open ocean with the choice to either drown or burn. He’d told Finnick he’d much rather drown, an opinion the two of them shared.

He knew fire too well to think it was a good death. At sixteen, he’d seen his old house burn and his entire family with it. Spent a month with the apothecary and his pretty daughter Perulla looking after him as he recovered from burned hands from trying to get in thinking he could somehow save them. A month where he didn’t speak to anyone. A month where he only left the house for the funerals four days after it happened, drugged half out of his mind anyway to be able to bear the sheer physical pain, and at least it dulled everything in him to the point where even the emotional pain that ravaged him later when he was more aware was blessedly muted.

Closed casket funerals, of course, to spare him the sight of the people he loved, a mother and brother and a girlfriend, all burned to something that was barely human. It didn’t matter they’d tried to save him from it then. He knew well enough now. He’d killed off forty-six tributes, seen plenty of others from other districts die as well. Of course some of them came into the tribute morgue burned to death. He knew the way the limbs twisted as the heat contracted the muscles, the way flesh burned and charred. He knew what those burned down to bones looked like, and even those burned all the way to ash. He looked at those tributes, saw there wasn’t a damn thing to do to make them presentable, signed for a closed casket, and went to go find the nearest bottle.

Cinna was a genius with the costumes, no question, but last year Haymitch admired the brilliance and beauty of it even as in a visceral reaction some part of him hated watching Katniss and Peeta burn in that chariot. It made him think too much of what they could soon become. What they’d almost become now in that jungle. What they could still become.

He was protecting the Girl on Fire, and though he never admitted it to anyone, fire probably horrified him like nothing else. Just one more heavy hit of irony in his life, right?

Chapter Text

The last few weeks in particular, Haymitch had put him through a pretty fierce crash course on mentoring, and Peeta had a notebook in his pocket filled with names and notations, how to approach and how to flatter. How to close the deal. What order he should likely contact them in and how much he was likely to get. All the knowledge Haymitch had gained in twenty-four years at it. And he reeled it off without reference to notes or anything himself, just whatever was stored in his mind. Peeta looked at the names, especially the ones he’d been told had sponsored himself or Katniss last year. “They’ll be eager to repeat their support of her,” Haymitch told him. “They’ll definitely be happy to talk to you. Go to them first.” What he didn’t say but what Peeta readily understood was that he should present himself as grateful for their help last year but in need of it again. Make nice.

Even with that book, though, he’d have been lost without the help of some of the other mentors. The console at Mentor Central was bewildering still. Carrick Weston from Four had readily just roped him in over at his own console yesterday morning to demonstrate to both him and his district partner Annie how the thing worked, pointing out the purpose of each screen and control. “Are you allowed to do this for me?” he asked the older man softly. He didn’t want them looking suspicious for helping him out, alliance or not.

Carrick smiled at him, the laugh lines at the corners of his blue-green eyes crinkling. “Oh, it’s no big thing, boy. You don’t have anyone up here from your own district to show you, so it’s expected that someone will. We had to give Haymitch some pointers all those years ago too because he didn’t either.” After experiencing the learning curve himself now, Peeta had a lot more sympathy for a seventeen-year-old Haymitch.

Sitting at the console with the headphones on, being wryly advised that the couch in the lounge was open when he wanted to get some sleep because he had to be readily available 24/7, Peeta couldn’t help but think that this was how Haymitch had spent twenty-four Games, twenty-four summers. Staring at a screen showing a tribute’s live feed from the nearest camera. Staring at a matching screen up on the wall, one of twenty-four showing each tribute, screens that Peeta found out all too soon went black when a tribute died. Staring at the readout of their biostatistics from the tracker and seeing their hearts were still beating and their temperature was still normal. Staring nervously at the displayed sponsorship balance.

He’d already heard from some Capitol citizens how thrilled they were that Twelve finally had somebody interesting after so many boring years. Growing up, like most people, Peeta had figured there was something Haymitch could have done for his tributes and that he just wasn’t. His bleak, sarcastic words on the train of Embrace the probability of your imminent death and know in your heart there’s absolutely nothing I can do to save you hadn’t been just him being an uncaring ass. Twenty-three years before Katniss and himself, all those years of relative helplessness to do anything except beg for money from people who hadn’t been interested in Twelve’s "boring" tributes. No wonder he drank so much.

Carrick caught his eye and gestured him on over. He held up a finger to indicate he’d be over in just a second. Glancing down at his two screens and seeing they were still safe on the beach, he looked at the others on the screen wall. Brutus, Enobaria, Cashmere, and Gloss were in the jungle. Chaff was on the beach. The yellow-skinned morphling woman from Six--Poppy--was in the jungle. He quickly gave up because the jungle and the beach all looked the same so he’d have no idea if other victors were near Katniss and the others. He put down the headphones and the sound of Katniss talking to Finnick about fishing was cut off, and he could suddenly hear the murmurs and talk of the mentors who were off their consoles because their victors had died yesterday.

He passed Clover from Nine on the way over to Four’s station and gave her a guilty smile. The Careers killed Amaranth, but Haymitch had killed Rye. It had stunned him to see it. Haymitch hadn’t hesitated once Rye grabbed him. One stab to the belly, one slash to the throat, and Rye was on the sand, dying. Apparently he’d been right in telling Peeta he could kill when pressed to it, but seeing it in action was unsettling. Not that watching other victors die yesterday hadn’t been disturbing too, but seeing his own mentor dispatch one like that had been the worst. Clover sighed, and told him gruffly, “It happens. I don’t blame him for it, or you. So stop cringing.”

Heading over to Carrick, he nodded a polite hello to Annie too, who took off her own headphones. “He’s still alive,” she told Peeta with a smile of relief, though her green eyes reflected her worry as she glanced back at the feed of Finnick sitting on the beach, gesturing with his hands as he talked to Katniss.

In that moment, seeing something reflected in her that struck an answering chord within him, he was sure Annie Cresta was in love with Finnick Odair. Finnick, the Capitol’s darling who loved and left his lovers with casual ease. Glumly, he had to admit he had fellow-feeling for Annie. Katniss didn’t love him either. Well, at least she wasn’t about to fall for Finnick. She’d made that pretty clear to him.

Carrick reassured her, “He’s fine, Annie.” He nodded to Peeta. “We were thinking of getting some food together for them this afternoon? Finn’s tearing up the scallops there, but they need more than that to keep going. Some bread, for sure.”

Since their four tributes were in an alliance they’d been working together on sending parachutes. Peeta had sent the spile yesterday and the medicine this morning off Twelve’s account. Though it wasn’t just Four that was helping him. Big grey-haired Cedrus from Seven, giving him some advice yesterday, had quietly told him about the spile that he was sending to Johanna, Blight, Beetee and Wiress. Peeta understood and thanked him, and promptly went to go order one up himself. Taffeta from Eight had promised to come wake him up from his nap if something started to happen. Some of the others helped too in their little ways, advice on how to better multi-task or the like, and once again he wished he could have known them all better, especially the ones trapped now in the arena.

Peeta smiled. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t bake any for them or I would. Some chocolate croissants, even. Katniss loves those.” Chocolate and bread. He wanted to be able to see her eat one again and see her eyes light up in pleasure at it. Carrick laughed appreciably. “You might as well send them some of your bread? Ours in District Twelve is nothing for them to smile about if we send that for days on end. I always liked your bread from Four.” He had, that was true. The green tint, the crunchy sprinkle of salt flakes on the crust, the odd but fascinating taste of seaweed. But that wasn’t why he said it.

Plutarch Heavensbee had told them the day already. After getting over the weirdness of being cornered by the man in the bathroom this morning while he was trying to pee, Peeta listened. The hovercraft was coming on day four. The hour was still forthcoming. But they would start sending the bread today and hope that Haymitch’s memory of its meaning hadn’t gotten zapped out of him yesterday.

Yesterday he’d watched that biostats screen and saw the heart monitor go to an ominous flat line and the respiration rate to zero. Haymitch had watched that happen forty-six times in his life. Peeta had seen it once, and there had been several anxious minutes until Finnick managed to resuscitate him, and he never wanted to see that sight again. He hadn’t gone for the crystal bottles of alcohol on the buffet table, but at least a small part of him had wanted to do it. Other parts of him wanted to throw things, or leap up and scream about how unfair and disgusting it all was.

Carrick’s eyes narrowed a bit as he perceived the message. He nodded. “Will do. I’ll flag you down when I call up the parachutiers so we can look the package over. Any special requests for what to send them?”

“Whatever you think would be most useful to keep them going.”

“No, Peeta, we can’t send Haymitch a bottle of whiskey.” The two of them shared a quick laugh at that and Peeta excused himself to head back. Leaving them unobserved for too long was making him nervous.

Annie caught his sleeve as he turned to go and said kindly, “If you need to...talk, or anything like that.” Her eyes said it plainly enough: I know what it’s like to be in love with someone in that place.

“Thanks,” he said softly, appreciating the offer. When he got back to his station, slid back into the padded chair and put the headphones on again, they were gathering their things to brave the jungle once again. Katniss advised them to go a good ways down the path from where they’d endured the fire and Peeta nodded, relieved at her sense. He watched with some dread as they went clockwise, though.

Caesar’s voice filled his ears as usual, his back-and-forth with Claudius accompanying the camera feed. Peeta only half-listened to it. They’d spent the morning tracking the public debate, among other things, whether Katniss ought to be formally entered on the Games register as Katniss Everdeen, Katniss Abernathy, or Katniss Mellark. Plutarch Heavensbee, in a brief interview, threw up his hands and said that since apparently her birth certificate at Twelve’s Justice Building claimed her parents as Burdock Everdeen and Perulla Banner Everdeen and that her union with Peeta Mellark hadn’t been legally formalized there either, she was still just Katniss Everdeen.

Peeta couldn’t help a slight smile as Katniss Mellark apparently got close to seventy percent of the vote, wistfully liking the sound of it. But he realized it was probably better she stay herself for this: Katniss Everdeen. Mellark would tie her to him closely. Abernathy would make her Haymitch’s in the same way. Everdeen made her only herself, the girl who’d volunteered from Prim last year, the girl who could belong to all of Panem. Plutarch probably recognized that.

They’d gone in a clockwise direction, and Peeta watched their trek and tried to not wince. They now entered the forest again three spokes over from the fire scar, and on his console’s arena map, Peeta watched the two little blips of their trackers moving away from the center, into the thick jungle. Of course they didn’t put all the tributes on his map--he didn’t even have Mags and Finnick’s trackers displayed there, despite the fact he could see them right alongside Katniss and Haymitch plain as day on the camera. But seeing the two of them, together and still alive, was a constant comfort. Unfortunately, as he glanced at the clock and saw it would be eight o’clock in only ten minutes, he was already on edge.

The announcers had quickly let the mentors, and all the viewers of Panem, know the nature of the arena: the clock, with its schedule of hourly horrors. Johanna, Blight, Wiress, and a wounded Beetee had hit the dirt at midnight as lightning began to dance above their heads, filling the trees all around them and making their hair stand on end. The Careers had endured a thick rain of pure blood at one in the morning, and only Brutus’ advice to just sit tight and keep their heads down, had kept them together and kept them from choking on it. “If we can’t fucking well see the others in this,” the big Two victor pointed out in a growl, “they can’t see us either. No point stumbling around like idiots.” The fire-jets had lit up at five in the morning, driving Katniss, Haymitch, Finnick, and Mags down the beach. Peeta had watched all of it, nails cutting into his palms and hoping none of the Gamemakers was in the mood to just kill them off with one swift blast of flame. Apparently that wasn’t the case. Peeta had missed what killed old Blight in the seven o'clock wedge, busy as he had been talking to Carrick at that point. He didn't feel like he could just go ask Cedrus either.

They hadn’t announced the eight o’clock trap yet since no tribute had been caught in it last night. They obviously were looking into it now, given four people right there about to walk into it. “And at eight o’clock, Claudius, what do we imagine can the victors expect?” Caesar’s voice lacked some of its usual enthusiasm, as had Claudius’. Neither of them seemed to be enjoying these games with their typical verve.

“We’ll see soon enough, Caesar.” The cameras panned around the sector until they caught movement through the trees. “We’ve had fire already. Perhaps ice?” An ice storm, in those thin, quick-drying shirts and trousers?

“Is that...” A little brown-furred wolf with golden eyes slunk through the jungle. A huge blond one with green eyes padded alongside. A red one with amber eyes. Peeta stared at them, feeling his stomach turn, remembering watching them at the Cornucopia. Rue. Glimmer. Foxface, whose name he’d found out only later was actually Marissa. It was the wolf-mutts from last year.

Claudius was echoing what Peeta already knew. “Those appear to be the ‘tribute’ style wolf muttations seen during the finale of last year’s Games.” The lower corner of Peeta’s screen showing their commentary, suddenly popped up a clip of himself, Cato, and Katniss on the Cornucopia last year, the mutts howling and scrabbling to get at them.

The cameras now caught iridescent blue flashes of some kind of insect, big as Peeta’s hand.

“And those look like the mosquitoes that Finnick encountered in the 65th Games.” Another clip rolled now. A young, baby-faced Finnick, running from a swarm of the insects, dived into the water and submerged except for coming up for the occasional gasp of air, while a girl tribute behind him ended up brought down to the ground, screams eventually becoming weaker and then silent. Peeta watched as the other tribute was drained of her blood, the bellies of the mosquitoes filling up full and bulging and red. They bled her dry, all shriveled and white, leaving her for to Finnick to see whenever he finally emerged, and they flew away.

Pink birds winged their way through the trees now, a bright candy pink like Effie would wear. Long legs, tall as a man, cruel, needle-like beaks and talons. He’d seen this tape on the way here so he wasn’t surprised when the clip they showed was of young Haymitch, turning his knife on the last couple of the birds as one took wing and slashed him deeply in the arm with its talons, and Maysilee Donner was already down on the ground and bleeding. “Oh yes. Haymitch ran into these particular mutts during the Second Quarter Quell when they killed his district partner.”

Maysilee. Her name was Maysilee Donner. He doubted any of them remembered that, or cared. He saw the mockingjay pin shining bright on her jacket as Haymitch ran to her too late to save her. Tried hard to not think of an echo of it, tried to not give into the terrible vision of Katniss, down and bleeding on the ground, as Haymitch ran to her too late to save her.

He’d seen the tapes of the few victors in the running from the earliest Games, and he remembered the mutts from then were horrible in a different way. Mostly they were just altered to be as gruesomely and assuredly deadly as possible. The bear that slunk out of the trees seemed at least seven feet tall at the shoulder. It had razor-sharp teeth and claws and Peeta was sure it could kill with one casual swat of those huge paws. Radiating deadly power and speed, it prowled down the hill. “Finally, a throwback all the way to the 8th Games with the bear muttation that hunted down and eliminated ten of the tributes that year before being killed itself.” Roll the clip: a young, red-haired Mags brandishing a harpoon, three other tributes by her side, all squared off against the bear that had them trapped against a cliff wall.

“It looks like it’s facing old foes for victors that are stuck in the eight o’clock zone, Caesar.”

“So it, does, Claudius. The Four-Twelve district alliance proved this morning they’re a strong and cooperative team for this early stage of the Games. We’ll see how Katniss, Finnick, Haymitch and Mags all fare against these mutts the second time around.” Peeta’s eyes flicked back and forth between the mutts coming down the hill from where they’d been released, and the four of them walking uphill through the jungle, all too unaware of what they were about to encounter. They’d converge in a matter of minutes and he was helpless to do anything but stare and watch it happen, and pray they could survive.

Chapter Text

They moved into the jungle carefully that morning, himself and Katniss in the lead and Finnick with Mags on his back only a few steps behind. The thick, clammy hot air didn’t abate at all and their clothes still clung to them with moisture and sweat, but at least the broad, shady leaves of the trees blocked the worst of the sun. Haymitch had been chucked into a sauna a few times out on an appointment, since for some people in the Capitol sweating it out was somehow popular, and never found much liking for it.

Katniss moved a little closer to him and suddenly asked him in a voice too low for the cameras, “So, uh, do you like guys or something?”

He glanced at her. “Wait, what?”

“I mean, you and Finnick. You just seem...real close?” she ventured awkwardly. “So I figured, you know...”

He couldn’t help but laugh, shaking his head. “No, sweetheart. I don’t like men.” Let her puzzle through that, because she’d seen him in those old pictures hanging out with other men, looking like their lover.

Finnick looked at him with a shocked expression, sixteen and still as boyishly innocent as he’d been at fourteen. “You like other men?” Well, he’d slept with Johanna when she talked him into it so he figured he owed Finnick the same offer. Wearily he thought he really would have preferred if they’d just screwed each other or if he felt like he could rely on Cashmere and Gloss enough to hand the problem over to them. No such luck.

“Nope. And I sure as hell don’t like boys,” he answered pointedly. Actually, to be perfectly honest, he wasn’t all that sure he much liked women any longer either. A good bottle of whiskey felt a lot more honest as a companion for the night. “I assume you don’t like ‘em either?” A faint shake of Finnick’s head. “Here’s some advice.” Angus had told him this all those years ago himself, back when he’d been able to be awkward and shocked at the idea of being with another man. “Learn fast to pretend you do. You’re going to be fucked by another man in two days and he won’t give a damn that you don’t like men. He might be the first--or second, if you take me up on it--but he won’t be the last one by any means. They’ll expect you to act like a lover, not a disgusted and scared kid. That’s reality.”

Finnick looked at him, still struggling with it, and Haymitch wondered if he was perceptive enough to see that this was what he’d eventually become in ten or fifteen years.

He’d slept with Finnick only once. Same with Johanna. After that, he’d shooed both of them off when, scared and scarred by their first appointments, they tried to come back for a second round, wanting whatever comfort he could give. At least when he was going through his introduction to the life there had been others his age also forced into the whoring game, victors he could lean on for support and a friendly fuck. But after his Games it had been mostly victors from One and Two that the Capitol wasn’t really thrilled with, aside from Enobaria, Cashmere, and Gloss. The arenas started getting more elaborate and diabolical to make up for the excitement the tributes weren’t providing. The victors didn’t get sold off. So he was what those two had, and he knew how easily he’d started to get attached to the older victors who looked out for him when he was young. Throw sex on top of that, and having either of a pair of young, traumatized teenagers start to get that powerfully reliant on a man twice their age was a bad idea. The sheer imbalance of it would be almost no better than the people who bought them. If he let it happen the fault would be entirely his own.

So he gave them all the advice and help he could, let them sleep on his sofa when they wanted, cry on his shoulder a few times, offered them the booze when it seemed like they could use the forgetfulness of it, and generally told them he was available when they needed him. But he refused anything physical, and he was relieved when they soon turned to each other like he’d sort of hoped they would. Thinking of Johanna, he hoped she’d found Beetee and Wiress. There had been one cannon a little while ago. He hoped it wasn't hers. “Mags and Blight asked me to help look after Finnick and Johanna both when they were new victors. Be sort of an additional mentor to them. That’s all.”

“OK, but why you?” she persisted. “If they already had Mags and Blight there from their own districts, why would they need you in addition?”

As usual she saw too much, but still not enough. Reasoned it out a little too far to just let it go but not to the point of being able to spot the answer for herself. Frustrated with her persistence, he was trying to think of a good way to get her to just drop it when he spied a flash of pink out in the trees. “Something‘s out there,” he said tersely, hand straying down to a throwing knife at his belt, speaking up loud enough for Finnick to hear it too.

“I just spotted something too,” Finnick said, putting Mags down on her feet and reaching for his trident.

Katniss’ bow was in her hand in an instant, hand reaching over her shoulder into the quiver of arrows, one nocked and at the ready. They formed a triangle, Mags at the center, each facing a different direction and watching with keen eyes for the slightest movement out in the trees.

He heard an odd singing whine first, and Katniss’ arrow took the first one down as it flashed into view at the edge of the trees. It fell to the ground, and iridescent, shining blue. He heard Finnick give a grunt of surprise at his back. “Finn?” he queried.

“That looked a hell of a lot like the giant mosquitoes from my Games,” Finnick admitted, and Haymitch could hear his voice was steady only with an effort. Oh, yes, he remembered those ones. They killed off Daisy that year on the sixth day of the Games. Her body came into the tribute morgue bled white and shriveled up dry and leathery. Another closed casket.

“Yeah, I remember those. Just don’t let too many of ‘em land on you at once and you’re fine.”

Katniss spoke up to say, “I’ll try to pick off as many as I can at a distance.” He heard the twang of her bowstring and was sure another one was falling to the ground.

Some of the mosquitoes eventually ventured in and with knives, trident, and simply swatting the shit out of them, the bodies of them piled up. The couple bites he got stung and itched, but nothing dangerous. Eventually, the whine died down as the survivors apparently retreated.

“Well that wasn’t so ba--” Finnick started to say with a laugh.

Katniss gave a cry of alarm then, even as his eyes picked up that pink again and it wasn’t just a flicker through the trees, now it was a damn bird perched on a branch, tall as him, looking down at him with its cruel black eyes. He’d seen these birds often enough in his nightmares that they were unmistakable. They were the reason he loathed every time Effie insisted on wearing pink. Instinctively, he took a half-step forward, to better get between it and Katniss and snapped, “Not this time, you asshole.” This time, the girl with the mockingjay pin wasn’t going to end up bleeding out her life.

He sent a knife at it with a flick of his fingers and it wasn’t a square hit right in the chest, but the red suddenly showing against the horrible pink of its feathers still felt good. Unfortunately just then more of the things showed up, winging through the trees. “They’ll go for the throat with their beaks,” he yelled to the others. He knew from experience that a slash to the arm hurt like hell but it was survivable.

“What beaks?” Katniss yelled back in confusion. Then he heard something growling behind him, towards Katniss’ direction and he didn’t look, couldn’t look, but the birds hadn’t ever growled. “Oh, shit, those beaks,” she said, obviously having seen them. Then on the ground now he saw a wolf mutt slinking into his vision, black-furred and huge.

“Tell me those aren’t the ones from last year,” he called to her, pretty sure of the answer already. The growling. The way she’d reacted to them.

“They are.” Of course they were. After that they didn’t waste time with chitchat. The only sounds after were the occasional grunt of exertion or gasp of pain, and one yell from Katniss for her to give him the spare quiver of arrows he had on his shoulder. He shrugged it off his shoulder and handed it to her. He ran out of throwing knives quickly enough and then it was waiting for them to come closer and stabbing at pink feathers and wolf fur alike, trying to avoid talons and beaks and teeth and not always succeeding.

But they survived it. Bloodied, panting with exertion, they surveyed the bodies of wolf and bird mutts piled up around them. “I think we’d better get out of here in a hurry in case any more show up,” Katniss said, and neither he nor Finnick was inclined to disagree. They didn’t even take time to retrieve arrows or throwing knives, just scrambling to get out of there. They might well have to risk another turn at the Cornucopia to restock if nobody else was out there.

Wearily they trudged along, keeping eyes and ears alert. As Finnick put Mags down for Haymitch to take a turn with her, suddenly they heard a thick, bass growl off in the distance. His eyes went wide as he immediately realized that whatever it was, it was big and it was seriously pissed off.

Then he realized another thing. Mosquitoes--Finnick. Birds--himself. Wolves--Katniss. They’d forgotten about her, protected in the center of their triangle. His eyes went to Mags’ and he remembered her tape, the one he and Katniss and Peeta watched at his house maybe a month ago. Remembered the way the giant white bear mutt tore through tributes with ease. It was like normal bears in the same way the ferocious sharks Finnick told him about were like the trout in the pond out in the Twelve woods. The four tributes left all had to worked to bring it down and three of them died. Mags ended up wedged in a cleft in the rock bleeding badly and only the fact that the Gamemakers called the damn thing off, having found their sole survivor, saved her life.

They had a trident and arrows and knives as weapons. Sixteen-year-old Mags had fucking harpooned the thing, buried a good foot of steel right into it, and it still kept coming. They weren’t going to survive this.

Mags’ green eyes met his, seeing the understanding there and nodding. “Here soon.” She snapped at them, “You...take her.” A nod to Katniss. “Run. Now.” She didn’t say it or sign it but Haymitch heard the, While you still have a chance, that she obviously meant by it. He’d asked them to be willing to lay down their lives to protect Katniss, to protect the chance she could become the thing that led Panem to freedom, and here she obviously meant to do it.

“Mags,” Finnick protested, moving to pick her up, unwilling to just leave her.

She put up a hand to stop him. She signed quickly to Finnick, Be strong, and, Love you always, and then she looked his way, softly touched her fingers to her lips and held them out to him in the gesture he’d given them all back in the Four apartment and signed, Look after him. Look after Finnick. He nodded to say that of course he would. All that took a bare few seconds. Then her eyes hardened to sheer green ice and she snapped, “Go!” She turned away from them, straightened her age-bent body as much as she could as she faced uphill, to where it might be coming for them. He thought she maybe said something like, “Always meant to be this way,” but he couldn’t be sure because he was already running, following Katniss.

They went, pushing through the tiredness and their wounds, running like hell. She was giving them what chance she could, distracting the monster for a little while at the price of her own life. They took what she gave them, and he tried to not listen to the growls and roars floating through the jungle, tried not to imagine which one meant that it had finally found her. They were almost to the beach when the cannon sounded and Finnick gave a low animal moan like he’d been stabbed through the heart and he stumbled. Haymitch just caught the back of his shirt and pushed him on ahead, snarled at him, “Don’t you dare give up now.” If Finnick broke down, damn it, he wasn’t sure he’d keep it together either. Killing Rye was bad. Finding out last night he’d lost Seeder was horrific. Watching Mags deliberately sacrifice herself like that was something that would never leave his mind. He’d asked them to do it, knew it was needed, but that didn’t mean it didn’t cut him down to the bone anyway to see it happen.

They burst out onto the beach and, backs to the water, stared nervously at the jungle as if it would somehow magically hold the damn thing in there. If it wanted to chase them into the water they were helpless to do anything about it.

It didn’t come for them. From the jungle, he heard only silence. The hovercraft dipped a claw down to retrieve Mags, and Finnick gave a sick, strangled sob when he saw it and Haymitch gripped his shoulder tightly, trying to stay composed himself. But there was no sign or sound of the bear mutt. Maybe the Gamemakers had called it off once they saw the three of them had made it past the jungle.

They stayed on the beach after that for a while, because having braved the jungle twice and been screwed by it, they were in no rush to try again. Finnick kept himself busy diving for food to have something to do. He and Katniss eyed the Cornucopia and discussed the possibilities of going out there again, since she was down to four arrows and he had a machete and one knife and that was it. They’d have to at some point, but pitting the three of them against the potential four Career alliance was probably inviting death unless they were sure the coast was clear.

Katniss was the first to notice something about the jungle. “I don’t see where we had the fire.”

He looked and saw she was right. It shouldn’t have been all that far away, giving a clear sign of where not to go. Facing the trees, he looked left. No blackened scar through the jungle. “They must have somehow replaced it,” he said. They’d have to keep track of where they went and how many spokes over things were. Already he was keeping a list in his head.

He thought maybe he saw someone far across the way once, but couldn’t be sure. As the morning sun was high in the sky and they risked retreating to the very edge of the jungle for some shade and to tap some trees for water, they ate shellfish and drank water and tiredly washed out their assorted wounds. They watched as a giant wave of water roared its way down the jungle two spokes down, slamming into the saltwater shore with such force the water went high up on the beach. “Good thing we weren’t down on the beach napping,” he murmured. He added it to his mental list.

“Let’s not go to that spoke,” Katniss said in answer, as another cannon fired and the hovercraft retrieved the body from the jungle that had just been scoured by the wave. Too far away to see the shirt color, so he didn’t know who it might have been.

“Who do we have left out there?” Finnick asked, and that was the first he’d spoken since saying goodbye to Mags.

Haymitch thought about it, ticking them off on his fingers. “Cashmere, Gloss, Enobaria, and Brutus. You know they’ll all be teamed up. Beetee. Wiress. Lamina. Poppy. Johanna. Blight. Angus. Chaff. We heard a cannon this morning when we were getting ready to head into the jungle, and one more just now. So that’s two of those down. Don't know who just yet.”

“Half of us gone already,” Katniss said quietly. Except for Lamina and the four Careers, all of the ones that were left were sworn into this alliance of theirs. That left only five to worry about, but of course, One and Two were nothing to scoff at. He had no idea what was happening with Nuts and Volts either, and if they ran into the Careers, the whole plan was pretty much screwed because it was on Beetee to take down the arena.

They couldn’t stay on the beach because, as it appeared to be the only safe haven, everyone would end up down here eventually and that was inviting confrontation and a bloodbath. Not to mention it would be hard to blow an arena from its center. They’d have to trek all the way uphill at some point, to the edge of the arena. But they could hardly go into the jungle blithely considering they almost got killed the first time and they’d lost Mags the second time.

Sitting there and pondering that happy problem, the parachute landed, with some food for them. Finnick turned one of the fish-shaped pale green biscuits over and over in his hands, his face suddenly young and vulnerable at that reminder of home and of Mags. “This’ll go well with the shellfish,” he said, composing himself.

“Salt’ll taste good,” he agreed. He remembered what he’d agreed with Heavensbee. Whatever district’s bread got sent was the day the hovercraft would be there. Which pretty much meant the man better make it a district represented in their alliance, because having the buttery rich stuff from One or Eight’s light-and-dark marbled loaves get sent in would have looked more than a little peculiar. He was thankful it was the fish biscuits of Four and not the drop biscuits of Twelve. Not only because of the taste, but because this was only the second day and already they were burning through victors hard. Being told to survive ten more days would have been rough.

At that point he thought he saw someone coming out from the woods right on the next spoke, a little too close for comfort, and was immediately on his feet, knife drawn, waiting to spy their colors if possible. When he saw the bright yellow apparently being dragged by a figure in a dark colored shirt, and another yellow orbiting the two of them in crazy circles, he relaxed. “Looks like it's Johanna,” Finnick voiced the same thought Haymitch was having. The only other shirts that were probably dark enough to be mistaken for that deep Seven green at a distance were Twelve black, Eleven brown, and Eight blue. He and Katniss were both here, Seeder was dead and Chaff was taller than that, and Woof and Cecelia were both dead. Obviously it had to be Johanna as the figure was too short and not broad enough to be Blight, but he saw only one green shirt. No one followed Johanna out from the jungle. Oh, shit.

They headed down to meet Johanna and he was pretty sure he heard Katniss mumble, “Oh, lovely,” as she pushed to her feet and followed them.

It was Johanna, he saw it for certain as they got closer. He saw the axe in her hand lower as she obviously finally identified them from their own shirts as Four and Twelve. One arm around Beetee, obviously having hauled him some distance from how she was tiring, she dropped the older man to the sand and stood there, hands on her knees. “This one got knifed in the back at the Cornucopia,” she nudged Beetee with the toe of her shoe, “trying to get his hands on that stupid coil of wire Nuts has on her belt.” He glanced at Wiress and saw the coil of it, shining a pale gold. She shook her head. “District Three,” she said irritably, staring at Wiress still making her loops. She shoved at her halfheartedly as she passed, pushing Wiress down to the sand. “Seriously, Nuts, will you stop that?”

“Blight?” he asked her quietly. He must have been one of the cannons they heard this morning.

She looked up at him and in her scowl was an implied, Shut the fuck up, Haymitch, I spent the last day shepherding these two around for you. “We ran into...there was...” She was struggling with it due to more than just panting from hauling the dead weight of Beetee for however long.

“Let’s get you some water first,” Finnick told her, and Johanna nodded, following him back towards their makeshift camp. Haymitch slung Beetee over his back and carried him. Wiress followed, as he imagined she would.

Johanna and Wiress settled down with the shellfish, the bread, and the water. He and Katniss tried to look after Beetee’s wound, which was nasty-looking more than it was dangerous. After all those years down in the morgue sewing up tribute bodies, he could have perhaps stitched it up if he’d had a needle and thread, but the pad of moss Katniss retrieved from the forest, the same moss Mags had given her to blow her nose yesterday, worked well as improvised gauze when bound in place with some vines. After getting a few crushed aspirin and some water in Beetee, he slowly started to come around. Wiress settled down next to him, keeping watch.

“Nice job, sweetheart,” he told Katniss. “Your ma would be proud. You’re not a bad little healer.”

She shook her head fiercely. “No. I’ve got my father’s blood.” She realized what she’d said and how it tied into the lie he’d spun for the cameras and her startled eyes met his. Burt had been a gentler, kinder soul that his daughter. He wondered what Katniss would have been like if not for that mine explosion. Kinder, gentler--less able to survive the Games, perhaps. Just like maybe he'd have been kinder and gentler if his father hadn't been a useless bum who up and died and left his mother so desperate that after her mine shifts she'd go and sell herself to Peacekeepers to keep food on the table. Katniss might not be his in blood, but those who said the two of them were much of a likeness apparently weren’t wrong. They'd learned young to step up and do what it took to survive and to keep a family together.

A bit rested now, Johanna finally explained, “Out in the jungle it suddenly went pitch black. Couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. There was something out there moving. Nuts freaked out and started trying to make a run for it.”

“Wiress’ arena went that dark every night,” Katniss pointed out in a soft voice. Haymitch remembered watching it, both live as a twelve-year-old kid and in their recent tape review. They’d fitted the cameras with night vision capability and watched as tributes startled at every little noise, not knowing if it was an ally or a mutt or an enemy. Alliances fell to shreds as terrified kids attacked at any sound near them. “She was probably remembering that.”

“I’d never have known that,” Johanna snapped at her. “Hey, tell me, how long have you been around as a victor anyway?” She and Katniss stared at each other for a few seconds with fierce dislike. She shook her head, resuming the story. “I tried to tell her it was probably just the weird rodents we’d seen, but she wouldn’t listen. So I was dragging Volts with me while he went after her. Blight, well, he hit the forcefield--it’s deadly, by the way.”

“Yeah, we knew that,” Haymitch told her wearily, both from the forcefield and hearing about Blight's death. She looked at him long and hard, brown-eyed gaze intent, and obviously she figured something of it out because she gave a sharp nod.

“I’m sorry,” Finnick told her gently.

“Yeah, well, he wasn’t much but he was from home,” she said, looking down and scowling. He knew much as she complained about how useless Blight was, she’d cared about him in her way. She looked at them. “Where’s Mags?” None of them could readily speak up about it. “Oh,” she said simply, and he had the feeling if he and Katniss and the cameras weren’t there, she’d have plenty to say to Finnick to try to console him in her way. “We heard two cannons after Blight. One of them a little while later and the one just a bit ago.”

“That was the one just after his,” Katniss told her. “The one we just heard was someone who got caught in a huge wave of water.”

Johanna simply nodded. “Well, that’s that.” Running a hand through her short, spiky hair, she looked at Haymitch and said, “So, genius, what’s the plan here?”

Looking at tired Johanna, at Finnick trying to hold it together after Mags, at wounded Beetee and cracked Wiress chanting tick tock to herself and at Katniss who was also looking at him expectantly, he said to himself, I really wish I knew.

Chapter Text

Still on the beach, taking stock of things and trying to figure out the plan from there, they watched as lightning struck the tree, distant all the way across the arena from them, and those annoying bells tolled again like for a funeral, like they had been all morning long.

“We got caught in that shit last night,” Johanna muttered angrily. “Hit the ground so it didn’t kill us.”

“Is it the same tree that keeps getting hit?” Finnick ventured, looking up at the sky doubtfully.

Beetee, by now a good bit more lively, frowned, pushed up his glasses, and noted, “It appears there’s a similar tree at equal intervals all through the arena.” His finger traced the horizon where glancing, they could all see he was right. Each spoke of the arena had a tree that was taller than the rest. “Of course, it can’t be a real tree,” he ventured.

“Of course it can’t,” Haymitch echoed with a wry smile. There Beetee went again, making them all look like a pack of drooling schoolkids who could barely tie their own damn shoelaces. “And why is that?”

“A real tree when struck by lightning of that intensity would be destroyed, isn’t that correct, Johanna?”

“That is correct, Volts,” Johanna said with a roll of his eyes, deliberately toning down her sing-song round Seven vowels to imitate his fainter Three accent.

“Tick tock,” Wiress insisted again. Haymitch glanced at Beetee: Care to translate? Beetee just shrugged, obviously at a loss to interpret for her as he usually did. Apparently she hadn’t said much of anything else since the mental shock she went through courtesy of the blackout last night.

“Well, we can’t stay here,” he made a crashing statement of the obvious. “Finnick’s got one trident, Katniss is about out of arrows, I’m low on knives. Johanna, you’ve got what, one axe?” A nod of confirmation. “And I assume Beetee and Wiress haven’t got anything in the way of weapons so y’all know what that means.”

“Haymitch, don’t start to fucking go all Volts us here,” Johanna grumbled. “Just say it.”

“We go to the Cornucopia and stock up on all the weapons we can carry. Then we start to try to figure out the safe areas of this damn jungle.”

“We know lightning apparently strikes there,” Katniss observed, “which is...four spokes to our left.”

“The mutts were four to our right and the fire was two to our right.” They glanced at him. “Yeah, I’ve been keeping track, especially since the fire scar disappeared. Johanna, you move over far from where you were before you actually came out of the jungle?”

“Don’t think so. When we could see again, I started pretty much making my way straight downhill. Slow going, dragging Volts along and trying to keep Nuts on the path. It took me until I found you guys down here.”

He picked up a twig and started sketching it out, helping to visualize the arena. “All right, so the darkness goes here, one to the left of the mutts.” Then he added in the other ones that they knew.

“Tick tock,” Wiress said with obviously mounting frustration.

Katniss’ head shot up. “You said Blight’s cannon happened just before we ran into the mutts with Mags, right?” Her finger pointed at the slice he’d labeled Darkness. “Blight. Just a little while later,” her hand moved to Mutts, “Mags.” She pointed to Wave. “We were here on the beach watching when that happened and it was probably a couple hours after we ran into the mutts.” Her eyes were shining with excitement. “Look! It’s a clock. It’s not just where the traps happen, it’s when. Each hour,” she gestured, “sets off another one.”

“Tick tock.” Now Wiress sounded relieved, sitting back with a smile on her face, pleased at having finally been understood. Haymitch glanced at her, because intuition like that was downright scary.

He looked back at the sketch he’d made and immediately saw what she was getting at. “And the lightning...”

“It started at midnight,” she said, and there was an odd expression on her face, as if she was hearing the funny echo of something in her head.

“Midnight? You’re sure?”

“I’m pretty sure I heard twelve bells last night and just now,” she said, and he saw something in her face that told him it wasn’t the full truth.

“Well, that means it’s noon now since we saw the lightning strike,” Finnick made the next leap of intuition.

He laughed, because with that it all fell into place. A clock, and if they knew where the dangers where and when, they could stay ahead of the troubles easily. Not that they knew every piece of the puzzle, but they knew enough. He told Katniss in earnest congratulations, “Damn, girl, you’re brilliant.”

“Gets it from her dad,” Johanna said, eyeing the two of them with an Isn’t that right? sort of a smirk.

They packed up their things and waited a little while, just to see. When a single bell tolled through the humid air and they knew it was one in the afternoon, they all grinned at each other like idiots. “So we don’t go there when we leave the Cornucopia,” Katniss said, pointing at the spoke just to the right of the lightning.

“Well, let’s get a move on,” Johanna said, getting to her feet and stretching. “I hear some axes calling to me.”

Their excitement waned some when, while walking the sand strip out to the Cornucopia, another cannon suddenly fired. Whoever had been caught by the trap at one o’clock hadn’t made it out alive, or else the Careers had found them. “Twelve left,” Finnick muttered softly. Haymitch nodded. Six of them were standing right here, four with the Careers, and two at-large loners. He wondered how long it could last before the two alliances clashed. Beetee and Wiress wouldn’t be much use in a fight, but with Johanna, that made four fighters on their side against the Careers. He’d just have to go for Brutus himself, that was all. The oldest of the pack, probably the best strategist from all that experience, and the one he could most likely distract away from the others, given all that history between them.

He’d said it to Katniss before, but now he told that to Finnick and Johanna. “We run into One and Two, leave Brutus to me. Chances are he’ll go for me first anyway.” The two of them just nodded, knowing at least a little of the odd friendship he and Brutus had over the years.

“Well, then I call dibs on Enobaria,” Johanna said.

“You have some kind of grudge with her I don’t know about?” Finnick inquired with the smile and the honey-smooth drawl that snared hundreds of Capitol hearts. But turned towards Johanna at least it was genuine. The two of them were best friends, after all. More than that once, before Finnick fell for Annie. After that he’d watched Johanna screwing around with any of the other victors, and then Capitol people, that she could to show Finnick just how little she cared. All it did was show Haymitch how much it had broken her damn heart. When she showed up and tried to get him to sleep with her he gave her all the alcohol she wanted and let her bitch at him that a pathetic drunk asshole like him didn’t know anything at all about her life until she fell asleep on the couch in the living room of the Twelve penthouse. He had the feeling it did her a hell of a lot more good than sex with him could have.

“No, I just figure if we're splitting them up I'll go for her. Why the hell not?”

Given that Johanna was spoiling for that fight, he shouldn’t have been surprised when Katniss sounded the alarm as he was finishing restocking his knives, listening to the thunk of Johanna practicing with her axes on the soft metal of the Cornucopia and laughing to himself at it. He made it just in time to see Wiress down on the ground, and barely ducked a spear Brutus flung at him, giving a grunt of pain as he wasn’t quite fast enough to entirely clear it and it traced a line of pain like fire across his arm. Hurling a knife in return he saw it strike home in the other man’s shoulder. “Glad you’ve still got it, Haymitch,” Brutus called, like they were just two pals drinking together and playing a game of hoopball or something rather than flinging deadly weapons around. He sounded almost deliriously happy.

“To hell with all of this, Brutus,” he snapped, already palming another knife and sending it on its way, but at that point Enobaria grabbed Brutus and told him it was time to leave. The two of them sprinted down the sand towards the jungle, and soon were out of range of even Katniss’ arrows.

It was only when he looked around and saw Cashmere and Gloss in their gold shirts, Cashmere in the water and Gloss on the sand, that he realized that was why Enobaria had run from the fight. Outnumbered suddenly, four to two, Enobaria had taken the wiser course and chosen to flee to continue the fight on better terms later. “Shit,” he said with a sigh. Chantilly would probably be taking it hard--she’d cared a lot for those two, the same way he’d taken on Finnick and Johanna. Three more cannons fired off for Wiress, Cashmere, and Gloss.

He saw Finnick was limping slightly from a thigh wound and Johanna had just come back from retrieving her axe from Gloss’ chest when suddenly the ground starting turning beneath their feet, spinning dizzyingly. He was flung off the sand like a droplet of water shaken off a dog’s fur, sailing through the air and landing hard in the water. Gasping to try to recover his breath after the shock of impact, the salt burned in his various cuts. He sighed, slowly making his way back to shore. Along the way he saw Finnick had dived in to help retrieve Beetee more quickly than he could bob along with his flotation belt. Apparently Finnick, Johanna, and Katniss had managed to grab onto something to hold onto. Great. He and Beetee got to be the slow and senile ones.

Back on the sand, he grabbed a couple more knives for good measure as Finnick went back to chase Wiress’ body to retrieve the coil of wire that had hung on her belt before the hovercraft could retrieve her first. “There goes our big advantage,” Katniss said bleakly when he came back. “They turned the Cornucopia and now we don’t know what hour we’re looking at.” She was right. The tail had formerly pointed to twelve and now there was no clue of where they’d ended up.

“Well you had to say it out loud or else we wouldn’t know what you were talking about and we’d be stumbling through that jungle running into all kinds of stuff, brainless,” Johanna pointed out with exasperation.

“Never mind it,” Finnick said soothingly, trying to play peacemaker. “At ten the wave will still come, right?”

“I doubt they can change the configuration of the arena given all the structure they had to build to set off all this for us,” he agreed. Too many trapdoors and triggers and the like had been set at specific points. No, Finnick was right. The hours were set.

“Then at ten we’ll know where we are again, at least,” Katniss said, brightening a little.

“That’s hours away yet,” Beetee said with a low sigh. He was right. They hadn’t even heard the two o’clock chime yet, and a lot could happen in eight hours. Enobaria and Brutus could come back for another round.

“So we’ll set up camp on the beach for now and wait for the wave to come. I think the only thing we’ve run into that continues onto the beach is the wave, and if that comes where we are, well...” Katniss gave an awkward shrug. It wasn’t like they’d be able to run from it in the time it took to scour the whole sector.

“Ride with it and try to stay afloat,” Finnick said dryly. “All of us should keep our belts on, just in case.”

“Pick your spot,” Johanna said, inviting Katniss to do it with a sweep of her arm. “Make it a good one.”

They stayed on the beach, well armed and wary. Finnick’s thigh wound proved not too bad. Viewers at home probably loved that Finnick sacrificed his loose overshirt for bandages for them all, running around in the skintight t-shirt. Brutus and Enobaria didn’t put in another appearance, though. Darkness fell and the faces played in the sky. Cashmere. Gloss. Wiress. Mags. Lamina. Poppy. Blight. “That leaves us five, Enobaria, Brutus, and...” Katniss trailed off, obviously searching her mind for the last two.

“Angus and Chaff.” He could summon the names with no effort. Angus who’d given him a hell of a lot of helpful advice about how to survive. Chaff, who’d been there for him through even the roughest of years. Wherever you two are, be well tonight.

“Fifteen gone in a day and a half,” Johanna said bitterly. “I hope they’re enjoying watching us die.”

Night come now and the frenzy of the day done, Finnick was obviously finally wrestling with the grief that descended on his shoulders from Mags. “I’ll take first watch for the night,” he volunteered, his voice low and uneven. “I don’t think I can sleep for now.”

“No, we’ve got it,” Haymitch told him. “You should at least try to rest, given that leg and all.” He put a hand on Finnick’s shoulder and told him softly, “Let us take the watch. We’ll keep the cameras off you.” That way he could at least grieve for Mags in some privacy rather than suffering the violation of all of Panem watching him weep. Finnick nodded, his fingers grasping Haymitch’s for a second in a gesture of thanks. He lay down and the rest of them started talking about oysters and about weapons and about anything at all to cover the soft sound of Finnick’s tears until they finally stopped, and it seemed maybe he actually had fallen asleep.

“We really need water,” Johanna said bluntly. They’d avoided it all day thanks to not knowing the dangers of the jungle, but the blazing heat had taken its toll on all of them. “I’ll risk it. Give me your spile and I’ll go.” She sighed, sounding irritated with herself when she said, “I lost the one Cedrus sent me when we were in the blackout zone. Smart move, tying it on your belt like that.”

“You shouldn’t go alone,” Haymitch argued. “I’ll go with you.” Yeah, he wasn’t going to be stupid enough to suggest Katniss and Johanna go on a water run together considering only one might return alive, and no Gamemaker trap would be the cause. Beetee couldn’t protect Jo either. But he was reluctant to leave Katniss with only Beetee. “We shouldn’t go in too far, though.”

“We won’t,” Johanna said impatiently. “Come on, let’s get it over with. We’ll call the rest of you when we’ve got one tapped and ready for you to come get your fill.”

They went perhaps a hundred yards into the jungle to find the nearest of the thick-trunked water trees. Out of the line of sight of Katniss which made him distinctly nervous but at least they were close enough if they heard a shout to dash right back out to join the fight.

Cutting into the tree with one of his knives, Johanna handled the spile and soon enough the water was flowing. Drinking it was a relief and he wondered if any liquor had ever tasted quite as good as this warm, tepid water did right now.

The bells tolled. Nine. “One more hour and we’re good to go,” Johanna said with relief.

The first blast of cold after the humid heat of the last day and a half was a shock, cutting through his thin shirts and trousers like he wore nothing at all. “What the...”

“Oh, shit,” Johanna said. “I think we just found out what happens at nine o’ clock.”

Shuddering already with the cold, they went back towards the beach and he tossed a rock to check, suspecting they’d trapped them in here with a forcefield. It would be a little too easy to just let them walk right out of the cold, and he was in no mood to die again by hitting the stupid thing headlong. It bounced back, glowing, and he ducked aside. “Yep, figured. We’re stuck." Freezing cold with no shelter, no warm clothes, no fire. He was trying really hard to not think of all those cold, quiet, bloodless deaths in the snow in his first Games as a mentor.

Finnick was there with Katniss, staring at them with concern. They were obviously talking but no sound came through, and he shook his head, pointing to his ear to tell them he couldn’t hear.

So Finnick used a few of Mags’ handsigns. What’s going on?

Stuck in here. It’s very cold, he answered, and the obvious shake in his hands already as he tried to sign probably supported that. How much had the temperature dropped in the space of a few seconds? Eighty degrees? Finnick obviously relayed that to Katniss, who looked at both of them with growing concern.

“Tell him we’ll be fine,” Johanna said.

“Are we?” he asked her brusquely.

“Damn if I know, but tell him.”

Johanna says we’ll be OK. Back out when the hour is over.

With that he let her yank him back into the trees. “Lucky, lucky you,” she said. “At least I know how to deal with cold.”

“We get snow in Twelve, Johanna. I ain’t Finnick, living in a place where the temperature probably never goes below fifty degrees.” The memory of last winter and the feet of snow it piled on the district was sharp in his mind. “But you probably know more than me,” he admitted. She came from the cold north woods of Seven.

“These trees all suck for shelter,” she muttered, but she had them burrow their way into some of the big ferns of the undergrowth for a little cover from the cold. Then she snuggled up close next to him and he was about to say something when he realized what she was doing. Same thing any Seam kid who had to share a bed with a sibling found during a harsh winter: the warmth of her body against his was helping and that huddled together like this they were still shivering, but shivering less.

Of course, when she leaned over and kissed him that definitely wasn't sisterly or in the name of keeping warm, and it really was a bit too much. “Johanna?” he said, raising an eyebrow and really trying to resist the urge to say, What the fuck?

“What?” she said, looking at him with a totally guileless expression. “Fuck it, Haymitch. If I’m gonna freeze to death figured I might as well take my last shot here with you. I don’t care if all of Panem sees it.” Yeah, those last words clued him in. She wanted all of Panem to see this, which pretty much told him she had something going here, and it wasn’t being starry-eyed in love with him.

He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “What’s your angle?” he asked her carefully.

“It’s not like you haven’t just pulled a romance out of your ass before for the cameras,” she said with some amusement, even if her teeth were chattering. “We all saw you at it last year.” Yeah, they had. Johanna had plenty of pointed comments about it then, he remembered clearly.

“Any particular reason to pick this moment to become tragically romantic?”

“Oh, please. You and Katniss both drip tragedy like it’s going out of style. Is she actually your kid, by the way?” He tried to not feel the irritation with himself at having to actually explain to his friends now that no, he really didn't have a daughter he'd been unaware of all these years. Well, it really was his own fault. He'd caught himself neatly in one of his own lies there.

“No. Did it for the sponsorships. What, are you after...?”

“Sponsors? Please. No. I don't give a shit about their money. Look, you two are sob stories. Finnick’s going to have hundreds of people sobbing for him. Me? If they’re going to kill me off in here, I damn well want to be able to die laughing that I fooled them one last time and made those assholes cry their little eyes out for me. The heartless bitch with an axe.” She grinned at him. “C’mon, Haymitch. You know you want the chance to mess with their heads one last time. Think about it.”

She pegged him a little too well with that. The notion of giving them one last middle finger was almost irresistible. “And why is it they’ll believe you’re actually falling for me?”

“Why not? You’re still good-looking enough when you’re not sloppy drunk,” she shrugged. Her fingers traced down his chest. “Been working out too, mm? You definitely look better without the extra pounds from all that booze.” She sounded amused.

“Oh, shut up.” Considering how he’d spent most of his adult life, first being sold off left and right and then being pathetically drunk, the fact he apparently had even some shreds of dignity left for her to attack and make him feel a little self-conscious was more than a bit annoying.

“Besides, they know you’re about the only one that can keep up with me. Clearly I eat nice men for breakfast.”

“On toast, no doubt. Fun as the notion of you and I being grandly romantic and messing with them one last time is, and you know I like it, it has to take second place to keeping Katniss alive,” he warned her.

“Of course it does,” she said sweetly, but there was an odd note in her voice he couldn’t quite place. She raised her voice so the cameras would hear and said in feigned exasperation, “I know, all right? You idiot. You pretty much told everyone out there you’re planning to die in here. But I’ll take the few days I can get.”

“Assuming we don’t freeze to death right now,” he reminded her.

“Assuming that.”

“You’re crazy to fall for someone like me,” he said, following her lead in this, falling smoothly back into the habit of quickly disappearing into the demands of an act, “but, well, what can I say?” His hand swept the line of her jaw in a soft caress. “I always did like a girl who appreciates sarcasm and a well-thrown axe.”

“Flatterer.” She leaned into his hand, moving closer as she ended up pretty much in his lap.

He leaned in and kissed her lightly on the lips. “I swear if you start humping me you won’t have to worry about freezing, because I’ll strangle you,” he said against her cheek, dropping the volume once again.

As she snuggled up closer she wriggled her hips against him a little just to be an ass, fingers clutching in his shirt. “Whatever. Bet it’d be the best action you’ve had in years.”

“I mean it," he warned her, even as his arm went around her to hold her in tight against his chest. “My days of fucking on camera? Done.”

“Just a sweet little doomed romance for them to get all dewy-eyed about, honey. Promise.” She kissed him again, and laughed. “Though you know they were probably hoping people would get naked and naughty in here to help keep warm.”

He chuckled lowly in return, though laughing through chattering teeth made it kind of an odd strangled sound. “Then aren’t you glad you didn’t get stuck in here with Beetee?” She’d definitely have rather been stuck in here with Finnick, of course. The viewers probably would have gotten a real kick out of that too.

“Well, thank you for killing off my libido with that image.” Her fingers tangled in his hair.

“I doubt that. Yours always was pretty healthy.” He nuzzled her neck, giving it right back to her in equal measure, knowing she was just enjoying teasing him.

“Asshole,” she grumbled. “You don’t get to judge.”

“I’m not. Really. This is romantic, though. You, me, freezing to death, the smell of day and a half of sweat...”

“Smells better on you than all that booze did.”

“Bitch,” he snorted, but she was probably right.

“Just shut up and hold me, all right? It’s really cold in here.” So he did, and Panem got to watch an hour of the two of them cuddling close to keep as warm as they could and trading what looked like a hell of a lot of sweet nothings. Mostly it was just her snickering about how apparently he wasn’t too old or too cold for her to get his cock’s attention and him growling irritably at her that she’d screwed enough men in her life to know he couldn’t exactly help it the way she was squirming against him.

Finally the cold eased up and the warm humidity of the night hit them like a wall. Getting to his feet and stretching his cold-stiffened body, thankful for the long tails of his shirt, he rubbed his hands together briskly to warm them up. Johanna said wryly, “So let’s tell them to mark ‘freeze your ass off’ at nine o’clock.”

“Done.” He turned and pressed her up against the tree and kissed her hard as she let out a quick gasp of surprise at it. “One for the road, sweetheart,” he told her with a smirk, because he’d agreed to this, enjoying the thought of messing with a few heads along the way, but damned if he’d let her get the better of him on it.

They went back to the others, and as they reassured Katniss and Finnick and Beetee that they’d be fine with a little while longer to warm up. “OK, so we’ve determined ‘freeze your ass off’ goes at nine,” Johanna said. “On the bright side, the water’s probably gonna be nice and cold from the spile for a little while, so get it while the getting’s good.”

The bells tolled and they watched the wave sweep the ten o’clock zone, and with that, they were definitely back on track. He sat down to draw a map of the arena, given what they knew. Two days almost done now. They’d lost Mags today, and that wasn’t going to heal for them. Even Johanna looked diminished by the news. But at least Beetee and Katniss were together now, the two essential pieces of the puzzle. They just had to get through at least one more day.

Chapter Text

After agreeing that yeah, the arena at nine o’ clock apparently froze people, knowing it was probably safe for the next twelve hours, they moved into the trees for the night and set up camp. The usual business of collecting food, getting water, setting watches, and the like kept them busy. “You’re both OK?” Finnick asked them.

“Fine, Finnick,” Johanna said brusquely. “None of you go in there alone, though. You’ll freeze to death without a second person around.”

“What?” Katniss said, looking at her in some confusion.

“Your dad’s pretty good at keeping a girl warm,” Johanna said with a smirk.

“Johanna, cut that shit out,” he snapped at her. It was one thing to screw around with the heads of Capitol folks. It was entirely another for Johanna to take that and start trying to mess with Katniss. Particularly given the damn girl already thought he was shamelessly easy and he really didn’t need Johanna feeding more coal onto the flames of that impression. Not to mention, screw her and that knowing grin, because she knew full well how he’d acquired any skills in bed. “We stuck close to keep each other warm. That’s it.”

“You’re not funny,” Katniss told Johanna. Well, at least she chose to believe him on it. That was more than he'd have given her credit for a few days ago. Apparently Katniss finding someone that frustrated her more than he did had been something of a revelation.

“Sorry I don’t meet your standards, kiddo. But hey, all I’ve done here in the arena was keep your buddy Volts alive for you while you were, what, busy getting Mags killed?” Finnick flinched at the mention of Mags. The two women glowered at each other, hands straying down to their weapons. “Go ahead. Try it. I don’t care if you’re knocked up, I’ll still come over there and rip your throat out,” Johanna threatened, eyes narrowing dangerously.

Beetee was the one who glanced up from fussing with his coil of wire and said mildly, “You realize that currently we have five people in this alliance. The four of you are strong fighters and that will keep Brutus and Enobaria at a respectful distance for now. If any of you turn on each other now, it would only aid them. Hopefully both of you can agree that’s not the desired result.”

They obviously saw the sense in that because the tension in the two of them eased and they settled back down.

“Not funny,” he said lowly to Johanna in passing by.

“When did you get so sensitive?” she said back. “You’re the one that told me I had to learn to laugh about it.” All right, he had, and it irritated him to realize she was right.

With no good answer to that he settled down and started slicing up some of the fruits from the trees. “You’re sure those are safe?” Finnick asked him, accepting a piece.

He chuckled lowly in reply. “I paid attention to poisonous fruits in edible plants training, Finnick. Believe me.” He noticed Katniss had avoided that station in favor of the weapons. All the more reason for him to cover it closely and avoid combat training himself.

Katniss came over to his side after they ate, having volunteered for watch with him. Thankfully she didn’t ask about Johanna. “I’m not sure we should stick with this alliance all this much longer,” she said quietly, keeping her voice down. “I mean, I know they’re apparently your friends, but...what happens if there’s only us five left? We all see how nasty it gets when an alliance finally turns on itself.” Yeah, they had. Every year that the Career pack tore itself apart got pretty ugly.

But he could hardly let her just walk away, given there was at least one more day left for them to get through before Heavensbee would be ready for action. “There’s four others left out there,” he pointed out, slicing off another piece of fruit and handing it to her. To her credit, she at least listened rather than just arguing right back at him. “Angus, Chaff, and Brutus aren’t young things like you, no, but they’re still credible threats. Enobaria definitely is a big problem. If you and I break off now and run into Two, we might survive it. We might not.” If Enobaria got inside the range of Katniss’ arrows keeping her at bay, they almost definitely wouldn’t. He’d tried to show her what he could about basic knife fighting but he and Peeta had both quickly seen that Katniss wasn’t much good at close-quarters combat. “With Finnick and Johanna on our side, when we fight those two, the odds are definitely in our favor,” and he resisted the urge to mimic the Capitol accent on those last words.

“So what are you saying?”

“I say we really do need to stick with this until we take down Two.” Honestly, he hadn’t planned on them burning through tributes this quickly. He doubted Plutarch had either, given the delay in the hovercraft arriving from Thirteen. He wondered if Plutarch was operating under orders from Snow to get these Games over with in a hurry, to make sure Katniss was one of the dead. Or, frankly, it could just be the logical result of an extra-deadly arena expected of a Quell with the threat of twenty-four proven killers dumped in it. “Maybe until either Chaff or Angus or both shows up too.”

How the hell was that even going to work? If they had an alliance of seven working against a team of two, that might start looking suspicious. He’d asked them all in for this alliance because he hadn’t known who he’d get on his side early on. Chaff could just as easily have shown up as Johanna. You can’t save them all, Haymitch, he told himself. The only one he could promise to do his utmost to save was Katniss. The rest all understood that. But there was a difference between not being able to act to save someone and coolly cutting them down on camera to preserve appearances. Somehow he hoped he wouldn’t be forced to encounter that problem.

He found himself hoping Enobaria and Brutus would stay hidden tomorrow because if they took those two down a day before the hovercraft and there was no further reason to maintain the alliance, then everything really went to hell in a handbasket.

The lightning struck at midnight, on schedule. In the wee hours, between three and four, apparently a parachute floated down and Johanna woke them up for it. More salve for their wounds, which, given they’d lost the last load of it in the Cornucopia spin yesterday, made them all give a big sigh of relief. A pot of thin red sauce. Bread too, the still-warm green fish-shaped biscuits from Four, big as his hand. Haymitch counted twelve of them. There had been eight last time as the first message with the bread's district of origin indicating the day. Apparently this was an update--twelve biscuits, twelve hours? They were set on noon tomorrow for the breakout. He managed to keep the look of relief off his face.

“Twelve doesn’t divide all that evenly between five of us,” Finnick noted, tearing off a chunk of biscuit with a sigh. Nobody pointed out how evenly it divided between four.

“What’s this?” Johanna asked him, sniffing the red stuff suspiciously.

“Hot sauce!” Finnick crowed happily. “This’ll go great on shellfish. I’ll get some in the morning.”

“Could you show me how to get them?” Katniss asked. “I mean, it looks kind of fun.” For a minute again she looked like herself, a teenage girl interested in learning something new.

Letting the three of them talk, he caught up to Beetee for a second, sketching in the dirt again with a twig and staring thoughtfully at a bit of bark that he bounced off the forcefield as it lay on the ground glowing a harsh cherry red.

“Stealing my angle?” he asked with a wry grin, nodding at the forcefield.

“Oh, this explains a lot,” Beetee told him cheerfully. His tone changed slightly and he added, “Given the sheer amount of energy represented in it, I think Katniss may have been correct in being able to hear something of the vibrations in the air. Look at that discharge,” he nodded to the bark, the glow slowly fading. Nice to see that book-smart as Beetee was, he was clever enough to cover his own tracks here too with his diagrams and experimenting by spinning a line of bullshit for the cameras. Haymitch decided to just play along, trying to not feel like he was back in the classroom with the teacher.

“So what, you’re studying this thing to help us avoid it, I hope?”

“Given that the forcefield’s discharge has proven of a magnitude that it fatally injured Blight and, well, fatally injured you as well, I think that would be wise. Artificial resuscitation is a dodgy business, Haymitch. You’re fortunate it worked on you.”

He nodded at that because really, what was there to say? He crouched down beside Beetee and pretended to study his drawings. “Is that actually anything useful to us?” he asked softly. He just saw a bunch of numbers himself, and a few doodles.

“Oh, mostly I’m just drawing out everything I can recall that’s mechanics of electricity,” Beetee told him with some amusement. “I hardly think drawing out my actual plan for them all to see would be a good idea.”

“Yeah, OK. Looks like noon tomorrow,” he confirmed.

“Good. Then Plutarch is realizing I’ll need the lightning strike as a power supply,” Beetee said, looking pleased. Haymitch shook his head and left him to his muttering and doodling, and went to go eat some of the bread.

“This salt tastes amazing,” Katniss mumbled around a mouthful of it, handing him a biscuit as he sat down. Apparently with that Johanna and Katniss actually found one thing they agreed on.

The edges of the little mockingjay on the pin dug into his fingers as he walked to the sweetshop. “Pick out whatever you want, squirt, we can afford it now,” he told Ash, trying to muster a smile. He’d only had candy as a little boy when Phineas Fog, the Head, sometimes gave him a piece and told him he was a good kid. Once he got old enough to see the funny way Fog looked at his ma and the way his greying hair was brown the same way little Ash’s was brown, he always threw the candy away.

Ash started looking at the shelves. He had kept the pin until now because he didn’t want this to be for the cameras. Looking at Rab and Faydre Donner behind the counter was hard enough, how old and tired they looked but then Maribelle came from the back room and his heart about stopped because she looked exactly like Maysilee.

He put the pin down on the counter where it gleamed bright against the dark wood. “I...she gave me this. Told me to...to please bring it back to you. So...” She’d told him other things too about giving them a sight they wouldn’t forget and well, he’d done that, but it didn’t mean much right now looking at their faces.

Haymitch startled at the sound of footsteps behind him and whirled around, ready for the attack, to see Ash holding two sticks of candy. “That’s all you want?” he asked, willing his heart to stop pounding. Ash glanced down and nodded.

He looked back at the Donners, and Faydre reached out and picked up the pin. “Thank you,” she said softly. “And please, no charge for the candy.” She handed him a couple sticks of blue-striped candy, like he was still a kid himself. “Here. Blueberry. You said that’s your favorite, right?” He’d told Maysilee that, yeah, spying the dried blueberries in the parachute of food and water. The way Faydre tried to smile at him hurt like another stab in the guts.

He didn’t want the candy at all but he knew if he refused it’d hurt them all the worse so he took it and he said, “Thank you.” And as he looked down, he saw the scar on his left arm that she’d sewn up, the one scar they’d let him keep--why? To remind them of some supposed romance nipped in the bud? To remind him of how he’d failed? He finally managed to say it because he wasn’t looking at them, “I’m sorry. I tried, but...I couldn’t save her.”

But as he looked back up he saw he hadn’t said it to the Donners. Because Faydre was suddenly Perulla Everdeen and Maribelle was now tiny Primrose and Rab had disappeared entirely because of course Burt had been dead for years, and Perulla clutched that little mockingjay pin and looked at him like he’d cut out what was left of her heart.

He came to with a sharp grunt as someone kicked him and he slashed into the darkness with his knife instinctively, already scrambling to his feet. “It’s your watch soon,” Johanna told him, having leaped back a safe distance.

He realized he must have been on the verge of showing he was in a nightmare, tossing and turning or mumbling something, and he nodded his thanks to her for snapping him out of it. Getting to his feet more slowly now, he tried to shake off the image of Perulla’s face, twisted with the grief of losing Katniss. It wasn’t going to happen. He couldn’t let it. He glanced over to see her still sleeping peacefully, that pin still bright on her shirt.

Come morning, with Brutus and Enobaria still at large, they decided to spend the day resting their various wounds and stocking up on food and water. “We’ll push for the big finale tomorrow, huh?” Finnick said with a half-smile.

“Might as well be in the best shape we can for it,” Katniss agreed with him. So they broke open the pot of salve and seeing that the tattered remains of Finnick’s blue-green shirt wouldn’t cover it, the rest of them tossed their outer shirts into the pile. Haymitch set to work neatly cutting them into strips that Katniss rolled up into a bandage bag with one of the silver parachutes. He glanced at them, at the blue-green on Katniss’ arm and the black covering Beetee’s back wound, the dark green bound around his own biceps. Bright yellow on Finnick’s leg and black around Johanna’s hand. They hadn’t intended it but he thought that this here was a quiet little rebellion in and of itself--wearing another district’s colors in the arena.

Beetee sat them down and discussed the notion of, at noon tomorrow, trying to draw Brutus and Enobaria out and forming an electrical trap for them in the saltwater. “We’ll have to run the wires all the way from the lightning tree at the edge of the arena down here to the beach. Fortunately, there’s miles of this wire on this.” He held up the spool of it.

“Great. Good to know that shit actually has a purpose,” Johanna grumbled, but she was listening.

“However, once the lightning hits, if they’re even on the wet sand, let alone in the water, they’ll be subjected to a severe shock. We had best be off the sand ourselves when that happens.”

“If you fry the entire little sea here, won’t that kill all the seafood?” Finnick questioned.

“Yes, it will. It’s unlikely anything will survive.”

“Well, if we kill it off, at least they don’t have it to rely on as a food source either,” Katniss pointed out practically.

“Better collect it while we can, then,” Finnick said. “You wanted to learn, right Katniss?” Finnick taught Katniss to dive for shellfish and while she busied herself with that, Haymitch watched him help improve Johanna's novice swimming skills. Three young people out in the water, just having fun like it was a normal summer’s day. Even if all three somehow got out of the arena, the world wouldn’t be the same. The rebellion would irrevocably be on.

“Look at those three,” he told Beetee as he paused in cutting up fruit to let it dry out in the sun. “Young yet.” Not that the kids in all the other years hadn’t been either. But for them to have survived the arena once and all it took away and now to have to give up even the hopes that were left seemed far worse a fate than someone like him who’d been just marking time for years and years. “If this shit hadn't happened, they could still have had a life.”

“And you? Officially counting yourself among us old men simply whiling away the twilight years, Haymitch?” Beetee said mildly, scratching more details on his diagram.

“Everyone knows I’m the walking dead,” he answered with a low laugh. “My ‘twilight years’ are down to a matter of hours.” It wasn’t like he’d had a life anyway, not since he’d realized at seventeen that it was far better for everyone that he didn’t. “So why the hell not?”

They picked their way around the beach, keeping a close eye on the hours and avoiding the ones that threatened the beach. Early in the afternoon they ate a mess of shellfish with the red sauce, and another delivery of more bread arrived, complete with twelve fish biscuits. After that Katniss decided to try to get some of the tree rat. “I’ll go with her,” Finnick said. “Try and get more of those nuts. We won’t go too far in.”

Moving things towards the known safety of the five o’clock zone so the rest of them could keep processing the food on the beach while they hunted, Haymitch warned them, “We’re coming up on four already, so make it quick.” As if to make the point, the bells tolled for four.

That was when the high-pitched scream of a little girl came from the jungle and Katniss screamed, “Prim!” Like a shot, she was off into the trees, right into the four o’clock zone. Finnick bounded right after her.

It took him only a split-second to react, but it cost precious seconds to cross the beach and reach where they’d disappeared into the jungle. Just before he reached the tree line, Johanna tackled him, and even if she was probably a good sixty pounds lighter than him, she hit him low so she brought him down anyway.

“Get off!” he snarled at her, flinging her off of him easily.

“Moron!” she snapped and threw a chunk of oyster shell so he could see it ricochet off the forcefield the Gamemakers had raised, probably the moment Finnick cleared the treeline. “There’s nothing you can do for them. Whatever’s in there, they’re on their own.”

They stood there, watching anxiously. Beetee joined them, but he kept watch towards the beach. Eventually, the two of them reappeared, looking like they’d seen something unbearable. Looking at them standing there, obviously they figured out that a forcefield was up and they were stuck. What is it? he signed to Finnick, but from how Finnick was cringing and keeping his hands over his ears, Haymitch figured he wasn’t going to get any answer there.

Katniss pointed at her pin. He stared at it, confused. Mockingjay. What harm could a mockingjay do, caroling tunes? He shook his head to tell her he didn’t understand. She pointed at the pin again, vehemently. Herself, as the Mockingjay? Something about the rebellion? Did she actually know what was going on? Oh hell. That made it suddenly all the more critical he get her out alive, because if she was captured knowing that, they wouldn’t stop until they tortured everything out of her and maybe not even then.

“I think she’s saying it’s jabberjays,” Beetee said quietly. “One of the forerunners of the mockingjay, and of course, capable of reproducing the sounds of human speech. Or screams, in this case.” When Katniss pulled out her bow and shot at something up in the trees, he saw the dead crested black bird drop to the ground at her feet. Then he knew Beetee was right. From the distant, hard look on her eyes as she ripped the arrow from the bird and tossed its body away into the ferns, he also knew she’d been wounded in a way salve and bandages weren’t going to heal up.

He watched as she stopped shooting and like Finnick, eventually just curled up on the ground, hands clapped over her ears, trembling like a leaf. When he could hear the sound of her harsh, sobbing breaths he knew the forcefield was gone, and he moved to her side, putting a careful hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right.” Even though he knew it wouldn’t be, not really. “It wasn’t Prim. It was the jabberjays.”

“It was her! They had to...to have hurt her to get the sound for it to record!” Katniss’ eyes were wild when she looked up at him. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Katniss.” He used her name, like he almost never did. Knelt down and caught her eyes with his. “Don't be stupid. She’s not dead. They’ll be interviewing her soon enough for the Games special on the final eight. Probably the first person they’ll interview in your case, knowing how important she is to you. They can’t do that if she’s dead.” There’d be nobody they’d interview for him, of course.

“He’s right,” Johanna said, turning from where she’d been trying to talk Finnick out of his own huddle. “The whole country loves that little girl. If they kill her, why, they might have some really unhappy people out there who might like to show how angry they are at how unfair it all is.”

“Jo,” he said in an undertone, knowing she was on a dangerous edge here, but she was too far gone for it.

“Whole country rising in rebellion and saying killing children is wrong? Can’t have that!” she yelled defiantly at the cameras.

They’d edit that out, of course. But he’d heard it and even as he wanted to tell her she was gutsy as hell he wanted to tell her she was crazy because there was no way Snow would let that go unpunished. But she was planning on dying in here too. He wondered if any of that was in the name of protecting Finnick, hoping he might make it out alive on that hovercraft, or if she was just determined to no longer play along with the Capitol and all its many games.

Beetee reassured both Katniss and Finnick, “It’s not that difficult to produce a clip of person saying or vocalizing something, given a baseline of them actually speaking as raw material, and of course, there’s plenty of that for them to work with given their previous interviews associated with your Games and Victory Tours. It’s a project our schoolchildren in Three learn to do.”

Johanna was staring at the whole scene, obviously uncomfortable with seeing Finnick that destroyed as Beetee began to explain calmly to both him and Katniss exactly how they made those altered sound clips happen in Three. “I’m getting water,” she said fiercely.

Katniss caught her hand. “No, you can’t go in th--”

“The jabberjays are gone. And I’m not like you,” Johanna said roughly, shaking off Katniss’ grasp. “They can’t hurt me like that. There’s nobody left at home I love.”

He found himself tagging after her, telling Katniss, “She shouldn’t go out there alone.” Given that Finnick and Katniss were in no shape for it and Beetee was calming them down, that left him.

He caught up with her and she turned on him, and he was almost ready for one of her axes to be thrown his way as she gave a wild-sounding laugh. “You and me both, Haymitch. We’ve got nobody left at home to torture. You know what? I’m glad. No fucked-up way for them to hurt us like that.”

Right then he couldn’t help but think of her at seventeen blurting out that Snow killed her family when she refused to get sold off. Then she’d tried to be so hard, so adult, about it. But maybe because it was a path he’d walked for years, he could see she was trailing blood from it with every step. She still was. He still was too. A murdered family was a wound that didn’t ever really heal. He put an arm around her shoulders and she shoved him away the first time, hard enough that the heel of her hand probably left a bruise on his shoulder. The second time he tried, she let him pull her in tight for a minute, just for a hug, and it could have been played as a deliberate and cynicalsmile for the cameras, sweetheart but it wasn’t really about playing it up for the cameras at all.

It was about Ashford and Magnolia Abernathy and Briar Wainwright; Gunnar and Petra and Bernhard and Henrika Mason. Names that they'd finally told each other once, being drunk enough to speak them. Dead and gone, agonizing deaths too, simply because of who they loved. It was about being left alone eleven months of the year in a big empty house with only the silent knowledge of guilt and grief where family should have lived.

“I don’t need jabberjays to hear them scream,” he told her quietly. “I hear them often enough in my head.” That was something she of all people would understand. Neither of them had been there to hear those dying screams. But imagining what they must have sounded like in their final moments was a torture the Capitol had already inflicted on them for years. It didn’t need to be covered in coal-black feathers.

“Yeah. You and me both.” With that her fingernails dug into the nape of his neck for a moment. “That girl had better be worth this,” she warned him fiercely. Then she let him go and said loud enough for the cameras, “All right, fine, we’ll do it your way. Stubborn old bastard. Let me see that spile.” Obviously the timeout was over, and he handed the spile over.

They came back to the beach with the water and Katniss and Finnick at least looked alive again, if not quite all there.

When a cannon shot rang out after six, they watched as the hovercraft claw fished five different times for pieces of a torn body, trailing what looked like thick tendrils of some kind of net or webbing.

“My guess is a spider of some sort,” Beetee said. “Spiders can be somewhat messy eaters and from what I saw, that webbing appears organic.”

Silently, Haymitch unfolded the map and added Spider to the six o’clock zone. Enobaria, Brutus, Angus, or Chaff. One of them had been all torn to pieces. He wondered how long they’d been caught in the web struggling as they watched the spider approaching, helpless to do anything.

But really, the spiderwebs weren’t confined to one hour. All of them were caught in Capitol webs anyway and had been for years, trapped and struggling helplessly, watching as Snow and his cronies did whatever they wanted right in front of their eyes.

Chapter Text

Annie watched Finnick dozing on the sand of the arena, like she had watched him sleeping so many times in Victors' Bayou back in Four, in the whitewashed houses whose windows opened to the sea breeze and the smell of salt and the soft sound of waves lapping on the shore. She remembered the morning before the reaping, making love to that rhythm. “Just...stay with me,” Finnick said, his fingers gripping hers and his green eyes on hers were all part of the warm clean shining sunlit sea that easily buoyed her, not the chilly deep waters of her arena that pulled her down.

“I will, I will,” she said back, nuzzling her nose into his fiery hair and feeling the guilt of hoping just maybe some of Four’s other victors would be picked. She didn’t keep her promise to him. When Jarred Stripe reached into the reaping ball with those purple-tinged fingers and he called the name Annelle Cresta she felt the cold dark water closing in again and she screamed because the lull of the waves became the roar of the flood bearing down on her.

She watched him sleep in the arena, surrounded by friends, and she was afraid. Mags and Finnick had explained it all after they met with Haymitch and the others. Katniss was necessary. What she represented, the freedom from all the ugliness, the things that tore at her mind and made Finnick do things that made him never come back to her house after the Games without smelling of harsh soap, was needed. But she was afraid anyway. In his saving Katniss she’d lose him and in losing him she’d be adrift in that flooded arena again, waiting for something to come up from the cold and deep and yank her under, and this time Finnick wouldn’t be there to pull her back towards the light. It was selfish because so many people had lost so much because of the Games but the thought of it made her want to scream, Not this, you already took my mind and you take his pride every year so he and I, we deserve this one thing you’d let us have and you can’t have it.

It didn’t matter. They came in and they took it anyway to prove that they could, so here she was forced to handle a mentor console and Finnick was forced into the arena. She’d had to watch Mags die and maybe she’d told both Annie and Finnick that it was inevitable, but there had been so much blood. Carrick had told her to look away and she had, and she’d pulled off the headphones too so she wouldn’t hear the roars of the bear mutt as it mauled the woman Annie had loved like her own kin.

Carrick looked after her as best he could and she knew guiltily that he was having to do more than his share of the mentoring work. But it was Peeta Mellark that came to talk to her as she sat in the mentor’s lounge, bringing her some water and a pastry. She didn’t really want them but it was such a nice gesture she took them anyway. “I don’t know how they do this every year,” he said softly. “Watching them die. But...it’s ten thousand times worse when it’s someone you love. And I know you love Finnick.”

“He loves me too,” she whispered, looking down at her hands and relieved to see they were still her hands and not the bony fingers of a wraith, come up from the deep and dark as a monster. I love Finnick Odair and he loves me and when he’s gone I might go completely mad. He sat with her and told her about how he’d like to come back to Four and paint the seashore someday, describing the colors he would use for a sunrise over the water, and she decided that Peeta was a good sort. He deserved to be happy with his Katniss.

Watching Finnick was hard. But watching Johanna with Finnick was always painful for her, because theirs was a well-known friendship that the cameras loved to capture, year after year. She knew when the two of them were young they’d been together. Finnick said Johanna and Haymitch were what kept him sane those first few years. He claimed her as a friend still, but Annie knew that closing the door on what they’d had before that was a one-sided thing. Johanna still wanted so much more. Johanna’s eyes followed him, the need she had for him practically coming off her in waves. Her eyes strayed sometimes to Finnick, and her body leaned towards Finnick as if she was screaming for him to love her in a way she probably never said with words. Annie knew, because she knew the way her own eyes and her own body yearned towards him sometimes, craving more than he could give because Finnick could never claim her openly, not when the Capitol thought he belonged to all of them.

It made her want to pity Johanna, so obviously lonely and so afraid that she apparently couldn’t bring herself to love any other man. But mingled with the pity was a big desire to slap her and yell, “He’s mine, so back off.” Pity wasn’t reason enough to be willing to share him with someone else. She already had to share him with far too many people.

Then she watched as Johanna kissed Haymitch and claimed that she’d figured out only too late that she wanted him, and Annie wondered if that was actually the truth. For Haymitch’s sake she almost hoped it was, because he was lonely in the same way Johanna was, and she knew Finnick cared about him and worried about him, just like Haymitch worried about him early on. But when Johanna sat down next to Finnick again later, Annie was pretty sure it wasn’t true.

She watched Finnick and every time he went into the jungle and away from the life-giving sea, she found herself cringing. The jungle was only full of death and horror. She knew it. They proved it when they made the jabberjays sound out her own guttural screams and Finnick screamed for her like she screamed for him whenever the nightmares came.

She ended up in the lounge again with his plaintive cries of Annie, Annie, Annie ringing in her ears, rocking back and forth and without him there to guide her, trying to avoid being dragged down, trying to somehow replace the sound of it with how he said her name in laughter or in love or in the abandon of pleasure. It was no good because a low pleased gasp of Annie when he came would suddenly alternate with the terrified shriek of Annieeeeee until it all mixed and wailed through her head like a siren and suddenly he was somehow there watching and screaming her name in horror while Septimus Thirsk was on her and in her and her skin bled red from where he’d sliced it with his knife. Her hands went over her ears and her eyes shut tight and she tried to drown it out with a chant of Finnick, Finnick, Finnick in her own head.

Sending him little silver parachutes was all she could do, that and knowing he’d taken her heart with him into the arena. But she knew if she watched Finnick die she’d probably sink and never come up again. Keep yourself alive, she pleaded with him, watching him on her console.

Carrick caught up to her when she was getting some water and told her softly, “I’ve spoken to Peeta. You’ll be going with him when the time comes.” When the time came--when the hovercraft arrived, to rescue Katniss and Finnick too because she couldn’t let herself believe otherwise.

She looked over at Peeta, his young face intent as he watched his own console and the girl he loved so much. “Why?”

“Because,” Carrick said, voice so low it was barely above a sigh, “once things happen and they suspect Finnick’s a part of it, do you think I’d ever let them get their hands on you?” She thought about it and realized what he meant. Capture. Torture. Knives slicing her skin and grasping hands and she felt the waters rising again. Finnick! She managed to push it down with a lot of effort, by thinking of Finnick and about seeing him alive again on that hovercraft.

“All right,” she said quietly. “But until then we have work to do, right?” Finishing her drink she headed back to her console, determined to try to stay with it.

As dusk was approaching Enobaria was busy cleaning her knives, since the saltwater and the sand weren’t good for blades. She did it with the steady, methodical movements that she’d learned back in training, the action by now so practiced as to be mindlessly smooth and instinctive, the soft rhythmic scrape of the whetstone on steel almost a song.

Brutus watched her even as he tended to his own weapons, because that was one of the primary lessons, drummed into him at eight years old: Always keep your weapons in peak condition or else risk not having them when they’re needed. Hannibal and Lyme had sent whetstones and oil for the steel even before they’d sent food.

They had kept to the jungle since a few quick glances during the day had proved that Haymitch’s alliance had claimed the beach. Having figured out the nature of the arena and that they would have to move in the morning to avoid the pitch-darkness in this particular zone, they could at least settle down for some of the night.

“I think we should finish it tomorrow,” she said matter-of-factly, putting down one dagger and picking up another. “There’s no point skulking around this jungle for days on end.”

“Confront them directly with four-to-two odds, Enobaria?” he asked her, shaking his head. “We took them on yesterday, four-on-four. You see how well that turned out for both Cashmere and Gloss.”

Her dark eyes flashed as she glared at him, and he knew it had been a rough hit. Gloss and Cashmere had been two of her closest friends, won in the two years immediately following her, and even if she wouldn’t admit it to him, let alone let it show for the cameras, he'd known her closely since her victory thirteen years ago and he knew she mourned them. “Afraid you won’t give a good fight, Brutus?” she taunted him, striking right back in his own soft spot.

He’d deserved that, he reflected glumly. She of all people had the right to remind him that his victory had been as uninspiring as hers had been impressive, that she had honored the Capitol and District Two properly. He had a personal point to prove here and she didn’t, having already proved it the first time around. “If you encounter a fight where the odds are against you and you go down fighting that’s one thing. To deliberately seek that’s not wise.”

The fact that she was growing impatient probably looked to people in the Capitol like she was growing edgy without combat, spoiling for the next fight. He knew better. I want this over, her words and her demeanor said.

They hadn’t been allowed friends growing up, not after the testing at six that selected them and sent them to tribute training. Anyone else in training with them, particularly in their year, was a rival and potential enemy in the arena, so to actually befriend them was soft and stupid.

But then they’d become victors and it was safe to have friends, to come to like and even admire some of the others who’d proven their mettle in the same ordeal. To drink with them, laugh with them, come to like them in so many ways. They let their guard relax and allowed themselves to care because victors weren’t permitted to fight, they were even encouraged to befriend each other. It was safe to have a friend because they’d never be forced to face them across the clash of blades.

Now it suddenly wasn’t safe. They’d been sent into this arena and told to kill those friends. He understood. It was the price the districts paid for their treason all those years ago. He’d come into the arena willing to accept that. But that was before he found out how different it was when his sword sliced into the body of someone he knew well and liked rather than the simple unknown meat of other child tributes from districts he didn’t know and didn’t respect. So now there were traitor thoughts in his own mind sometimes. Two didn’t even rebel, we’re the most devoted and loyal, why are Enobaria and me being made to pay like this? That was dangerous because then it led to wondering why Two was even in the Games in the first place and as he scrabbled for the usual answers of honor and duty and a price owed he saw that was a dark, dark room he couldn’t stand to enter so he closed the door on it hastily.

“They’re an alliance of five, and Beetee’s useless in a fight.” He wondered why they were keeping the old tinkerer around. In a strong alliance with four fighters like that, it didn’t make sense. “We should look to split them up, take the fight to them on better terms.”

“We should have had Finnick on our side. Four never teams up with Twelve.”

He’d have gladly had Finnick in the pack, even Johanna for that matter since she was a terror with those axes and a close friend of the handsome Four victor. He’d had Hannibal make a quick pass at it with Carrick, but he’d known it was a lost cause from the start. If anyone had first dibs on Finnick’s loyalty in an alliance, it was going to be Haymitch. “They did this time. Apparently Twelve is rather persuasive this year.”

“Oh, yes, she's deadly with a bow and Haymitch probably promised the moon and the stars to people who’d help him protect his little girl,” Enobaria said with a derisive snort.

Was the Everdeen girl really Haymitch’s? While Haymitch’s attentiveness last year could have been chalked up to that, and his passionate defense of her this year certainly fit, some elements of the story caught him in a doubtful way. A wild youth? A girl back home in Twelve? Not the Haymitch he knew, and he'd known him a long time.

He’d handed things over to Lyme for the evening and agreeing to take a break from the Games because Haymitch’s tributes were both dead--as usual--and Enobaria and Tyrus were in Lyme’s hands, he and Haymitch were sitting and drinking and watching some sappy Capitol romance in the Twelve apartment, turning it into a drinking game. “Damsel’s in distress again. Drink.”

“Move your feet, asshole, I don’t have somewhere to put my drink,” Brutus told him irritably, shoving Haymitch’s feet off the coffee table. The moment they’d gotten there Haymitch made himself comfortable as he always did, flinging off his coat and tie and shoes. Stylish Capitol elegance suddenly turned into a young man of twenty-eight padding around barefoot with his collar undone and sleeves rolled up, the picture of someone from a rustic, backwoods district. Brutus’ shoes stayed on, of course.

“Then we need to just keep you with the drink in hand,” Haymitch said, sprawled out on the couch in a loose-limbed way, shaking the bottle and grinning. “After all, this isn’t that for-shit wine from Two that you drink.”

“Like that Twelve rotgut you like to swill is any better. Fill me up,” he said, rolling his eyes and holding his glass out, “because look, she just swooned. Doesn’t this fucking thing have any swordfights in it?”

“No. Just sighing, pining, and all that crap. You types from Two have no sense of romance,” Haymitch drawled with a smirk. “I mean, how long are you and your girl there gonna carry on before you ask her to marry you, anyway? Lyme’s been mentoring with you for nine years, Brute. Sleeping with you for at least six of ‘em that I know about.”

His first thought was relief that apparently he and Lyme had been discreet enough to not be found out for the first two years. The second thought was processing all of what he said and immediately feeling awkward because of it. “It’s complicated.”

“What? You like each other, you’re having sex, the Capitol probably would love for you two to have some little warrior babies,” and Brutus instinctively winced as he always did when Haymitch’s voice turned ever so slightly sarcastic when he talked about the Capitol. “Seems pretty simple to me.”

“It’s not so easy when back home they prefer both of you to keep your heads down, mentor some better victors than yourself to restore district pride, and otherwise just stay the hell out of the way. When your wedding would be seen as something you haven’t earned rather than something they’d celebrate,” Brutus said curtly. “I’d imagine you should understand what it feels like to be a letdown to your district.” He regretted it almost as soon as he said it, but Lyme was something that hurt to think about sometimes. To ask her to marry him and to have kids that would be raised knowing their parents had fallen that short of the mark--it seemed cruel. Life in Two was harsh enough without starting out stigmatized from birth.

Haymitch’s grey eyes narrowed for a moment but that was the only reaction he showed to what Brutus would readily admit had been a nasty low blow. Beyond that he just sat there and kept sipping his drink, casual as anything. “Yep. I know plenty about that. Not gonna improve my image this year either since both my tributes are dead and I’ve burned through a couple of my ardent admirers already, mm?” He shrugged. “At least you’ve got a woman who wants you in spite of you being a disgrace to your district. Don’t underestimate the value of that.” He reached for the wine bottle with a grunt of effort, pouring himself another glass. “Me? The only women back home I could probably have would be the whores.” A little smile came across his lips, almost chilling in how it didn’t reach his suddenly empty eyes. “You think it’d be the fact that I’m rich and they know it, or just them recognizing their own kind?”

He and Lyme hadn’t lasted much past that, particularly when next year they replaced her with Enobaria as Two’s female mentor. He’d mentored Enobaria through the Games, and what came beyond. She was brave and skilled and her unusual victory earned her plenty of attention. Her looks, the keen dark eyes, skin the gold of raw honey and the dark brown hair, only made her all the more beloved by the Capitol. So she entered the way of life he’d never had to live because the Capitol didn’t love him the way it loved some of the other victors. He told her what she needed to realize: that this was another way the Capitol showed its admiration for her, that she should be honored to have their attention. He said it and coaxed her to believe it as she had to do. He did that even as his mind sometimes said that it was embarrassing that a proud warrior should be expected to perform bedroom tricks, and that if it was an honor why did her eyes have that unsettling dead look sometimes when she thought nobody was looking? He’d seen that look before, in Haymitch, in Chantilly, in Blight, in Cashmere and Gloss and others. He saw it come over Enobaria even as she accepted that this was the measure of Capitol esteem for her and he tried to keep down that occasional traitor thought of She’s unhappy, this can’t be right. It wasn’t given to them to determined what was right, only to give the duty they owed to the Capitol.

“Enobaria.” Not the nickname of Baria. He wouldn’t reach out either and touch her in any kind of way, not with the cameras in sight. Not the way he sometimes did for her over the past years, when he could. When she maybe needed a little bit more than an offer of a sparring partner and the sparring moved to his bed or hers, and he’d wake up in the morning with the covers thrown off and the mark of her nails on his back and bruises. She never used her teeth on him, though. That much she’d hold back and that said plenty about her respect for him. She’d never be there when he woke up and she’d never say anything so open as gratitude beyond a casual, “Thanks,” but on those mornings he could see how the tension in her had eased all the same.

The sooner it was done the better. It was necessary but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t rather just end this whole thing. He preferred kills clean rather than drawing out the agony. He hadn’t had the patience for that crap starting with Ruby Dawes all those years ago and he hadn’t gotten any better at it since.

Trying to brush away his unease and distaste for these Games the deeper in he got, he couldn’t help but think of Cato, last year’s boy. Cato had failed Two, of course, in only taking third place, but his dying was something that Brutus had watched until the end anyhow. A bad death. But even before that, something in him had broken. His last words, which Brutus had winced at and dismissed as the blood-crazed ravings of a dying boy, took on new meaning now. I can still do this, one more kill. The only thing I know how to do. Bringing pride to my district...not that it matters.

The notion of not that it matters when it came to fulfilling the expectations of Two was another of those treacherous thoughts threatening him again. But it stayed in his mind, twining its way through Enobaria’s empty eyes and a dead Gloss and Cashmere and Haymitch’s empty laugh and the sight of his sword cutting down people he’d called friend only a month ago, turning into a thing of tight, painful knots.

So he bowed his head over his sword, trusting that the steel would provide the answers come morning. These Games would be better ended quickly--if they had to kill other victors, at least they could give them the mercy of a swift death.

He half-hoped someone else would take Haymitch out before it could come down to a duel between them. As much as he’d wanted that jumping into these Games, the chance to prove himself and regain his honor, the thought of actually being the one to slay him now gave him dangerous pause. Would it prove anything in the end? That he could kill on command, even those closest to him, to show he was true and loyal to the Capitol? If he was the victor and went home, would they suddenly honor him as they hadn’t for all these years? Would it even matter as much as he’d thought it would, knowing he’d earned his way to the accolades over the bones of so many friends who had stood by him all these years even when he was a disgrace? To hell with this, Haymitch yelled at him at the Cornucopia, even as he sent a knife into Brutus’ shoulder. It seemed like neither of them had been all that lucky in life thus far. So he doubted they would avoid fighting each other in the end. Not like there was anyone else left who would be inclined to take Haymitch out. Chaff wouldn't want to, or Finnick or Johanna either.

He gave Enobaria a glance that hopefully let her know he understood what was on her mind, that never mind the odds, she just wanted this over. They could perhaps make a strategy to draw a couple of the members of their pack away and deal with them. Finnick. Johanna. Katniss. Haymitch. Haymitch had made his alliance plans well, surrounding himself with those that were both loyal friends and formidable fighters. “Let's try to draw a couple of them away first to deal with them rather than just attacking head on, but you’re right. We should just try to finish it tomorrow.”

Chapter Text

Packing up camp in the morning after the nine o’clock tone, none of them really said much as they shouldered their few belongings and kept their weapons at the ready. Finnick took point and Johanna brought up the rear as they moved onto the twelve o’clock section of the beach and then began the trek into the jungle, towards the tall spike of the lightning tree in the distance.

When the anthem played last night, they’d found out that Angus had died, torn to pieces in the spider zone of the arena. Finnick, Johanna, and Katniss had little reaction to that. Why should they? They had very little to do with a victor from District Ten who’d won almost ten years before even Haymitch had, one who’d been off the whoring circuit for close to fifteen years by the time Finnick won and thereafter mainly kept to himself and his mentoring. He was just another older victor to them, perhaps politely nodded at sometimes but not really well known. Beetee glanced over at him with a faintly sympathetic smile, knowing Haymitch had been friends with him.

After giving Haymitch a big slap of reality on exactly what he could expect from his nights, Angus looked at him and gave him a wry smile. “Well, if you heard all that and you’re still standing, you might even have a chance. C’mon. Let me buy you a drink.” He pointed across the street at some gaudy neon Capitol club.

“It’s only two o’clock.” Back then he’d been so young still, so provincial, startled at the idea that people in the Capitol would actually start seriously drinking something more than a glass of wine with lunch this early in the afternoon.

Angus laughed at him and held the door. “Oh, hayseed, then we’re already late in starting.”

That meant Chaff was still out there somewhere, he thought, and Brutus and Enobaria. He hoped Chaff might find them before the end, but he couldn’t afford to fret too much about it at this point. Climbing uphill, he could tell hitting the forcefield like he had and still pushing himself to keep going, and the accumulation of small wounds over the last few days, was taking its toll. He wasn’t as fresh as the young ones were; he was having to work a bit harder for it. As well it would all be over in a few hours, one way or another.

They reached the tree and Beetee got Finnick to work as his assistant, and the rest of them stood in a loose fan facing the jungle, ready to encounter any potential danger from whatever location it might present itself. Beetee mildly said, “Excuse me, Haymitch,” at one point, unspooling a long strand of wire and looping it over a broken branch. Glancing behind him for a second, he saw the blurry shimmer in the air that Beetee had explained quietly was the visible signature of the forcefield, the place he planned to attack it. Good.

As Finnick scrambled down from hanging the last of the wire under Beetee’s direction, the roar of the wave beginning to sweep its way down the jungle could be heard over in the ten o’clock section. So, it was obviously some point in the ten o’clock hour. “We’d best hurry,” Beetee said, though as usual his expression was calm and betrayed no hint of anxiety or agitation. He held up the spool of wire. “We’ll need our swiftest runners to unroll and lay the wire all the way down to the beach, out onto one spoke of sand, and to drop the remainder into the deep water so it’ll stay hidden.”

“I’ll go,” Katniss said immediately. “I’m fast.”

“I’m with her,” he spoke up in almost instant echo. It was only natural. Katniss would go and he would go with her.

Beetee studied him. “You’re generally rather quick on your feet, Haymitch, I agree. But this morning you’re obviously tired. You suffered some significant cardiac stress and you haven’t had time to properly rest from it. The window of opportunity is narrow enough as is for two people to take the wire, lay it out properly, and be able to escape into the jungle in time. No, I would suggest we send Johanna.”

“Guess I’m fast enough, yeah,” Johanna said. She sounded about as thrilled to be teamed with Katniss as she would be to end up cuddled up to Beetee in the cold zone. Not liking it but unable to argue with Beetee’s logic, Haymitch gave her a warning glance of, Don’t let us down. “Gimme.” She held her hand out to Beetee and he gave her the spool. “All right, Kittycat, I’ll start unrolling and you take guard. Let’s go.”

“We’ve got it,” Katniss told him, obviously trying to reassure him. Did he really look that unnerved? He tried to compose his expression more.

“OK,” he said, not wanting her to waste any further time fussing about it. With no further delay Johanna started off down the hill as quickly as her feet could carry her, the shining gold thread of the wire following her, and Katniss was by her side with her bow at the ready.

He watched them go, still feeling uneasy. “Maybe you should go with them,” he told Finnick quietly. Whoever was by Katniss’ side when the dome blew had a good chance of being picked up and saved. He had Annie waiting for him, which was pretty significant cause to stay alive.

Finnick shook his head, readying his trident. “I’m not as fast as Jo. I’ll just slow them down.” His face gave no sign of what he must be feeling, knowing he’d given up his best chance to get out of this alive. They’d signed up for this, true, but that didn’t make it less of a sacrifice. Haymitch nodded, unable to tell him what that meant, but maybe he’d understand nonetheless.

A little after eleven, a sharp clicking noise rose in the zone next to them, a weird almost metallic drone. “What the hell is that?” he asked, staring over that direction and glad he was certain the Gamemakers had trapped it in its proper place with a forcefield.

“Some kind of insect, my guess,” Finnick said. “It sounds a good bit like the cicadas back home, but...pretty hungry.” Haymitch thought “hungry” was kind of an understatement. It sounded ready to strip whatever it caught down to the bone with voracious jaws.

“Flesh-eating insects. Lovely.” He shook his head, fingers tight on the knife in his hand, glancing around for any sight of Chaff or the two victors from Two. Suddenly the sound of a cannon shot split the air, and his eyes went wide to hear it, just as the severed end of the golden wire sprang back into their view, various coils and snarls and tangles of it catching in the trees around them. “OK.” Said it then to Maysilee and said it now to Katniss and I just let her walk away like that, the girl I’m supposed to be protecting, and don’t I ever, ever learn, colossally stupid fuck that I am?

Like a shot he was off, on his way down the hill and he yelled back to Finnick, not even looking, “Finn, you stay with Beetee!” Fear burned off the fatigue and he was flying along, somehow keeping his footing even with a few stumbles from the slope and the vines and the uneven pitch of the ground.

He found the dropped spool of wire and the blood bright and slick against the green leaves on the jungle floor. No sign of Johanna. No sign of Katniss either. One cannon, one of them was dead and he was afraid it was Katniss because Brutus and Enobaria weren’t stupid, they knew how to take out a skilled archer. They’d ambushed them right here close in and he knew Johanna could hold her own in a melee, but maybe because of that they’d taken her out first.

He was trying to figure out what way to go, following the blood trail and wondering where the body was, terrified any moment now he’d hear that second cannon and know both of them were dead. He caught the glimpse of a flash of red in the trees, the dull red of Two’s shirts, and he threw a knife at it. He obviously scored a hit because there was a grunt of surprise and pain, high-pitched enough that he knew it was Enobaria. Drawing another knife, he raced for her, not wasting time or breath on speeches or challenges. He just laid right into her with everything he had.

She was quick, though, and just like that she was on him too. He’d seen how Two fought with knives in some Games where it came down to the tributes from Two turning on each other as the final pair, learned some of it from Brutus besides. Kali knife fighting rarely used stabs except to the belly, not wanting to risk binding the blade up among the bones of the ribs and having it get stuck or broken. Instead it was mostly a whirling circle of steel, staying engaged in close reach, weaving aside from an opponent’s blade where possible and staying in constant motion with flowing slashes and the occasional staccato punctuation of a gut-stab.

Beautiful and graceful to watch as a form. Brutal and ugly to watch as an actual battle. It was injury that mounted up bit by bit, each slash or stab adding to the increasing toll of blood loss. A death by dozens of cuts. A smart way to fight for Two, because the winner was the one who had the best endurance, who could take some punishment but deal out more, who could push through the pain and try to play it smart rather just go in wildly for one lucky stab.

In a matter of seconds both of them were bleeding from multiple wounds, including one that clawed its way across his right cheekbone that he knew had just barely missed his eye. He hit her back with a solid deep slash right above her hip that sent the blood flowing over his fingers. He was sure the blood was just as slippery on the grip of her knife as it was on his, and that it would be getting harder to keep a good grasp. He also knew he was ten years older than her and this morning he was already flagging from injuries he hadn’t been able to rest. Necessity and rage were giving him enough adrenaline for the moment but if he kept this up he would be the one whose endurance gave out first and she’d kill him. He couldn’t keep fighting her on her terms. He hadn’t won all those years ago trying to fight like a Career from Two.

So he broke away from the spiral of it, stepped even further inside her guard and it meant that her stab aimed just beneath his ribs cut deep in an unsettling way but while it hurt like hell he didn’t feel the old feeling of his guts trying to escape his body. She was a tall, sturdy woman, only a little shorter than him, but he had probably thirty pounds on her, and he used the force of that and of his lunge to take them both down to the ground. At that point his upper body strength as a man was a distinct advantage and he ruthlessly used it as they kicked and grappled down there in the dirt, wrestling for control, striking with elbows and knees. They lost the knives along the way. Eventually he got her pinned down tight, one knee pressing her right hand into the ground in a way that had to be extremely painful for her, grinding into the bones of her wrist like that. He didn’t much care. He’d learned one valuable lesson from his fights with Remus and Aurelia, and with Sapphire, twenty-five years ago: carry more than one knife so if you’re disarmed it’s not the end. So he blindly plucked another knife from his belt with shaking, bloody fingers and leveled the edge of it at her throat. “Where is she and what did you do to her?” he demanded.

She looked up at him with absolutely nothing at all in her dark eyes, not even calm acceptance of her death, and that was chilling even through his grief and his fury. “Let’s just end this. You’re going to kill me anyway. My answer gonna somehow change how quickly you do it, Haymitch?”

“Fuck you, Enobaria, just tell me!” he growled, still trying to catch his breath, feeling the world slide just a little in a woozy way that felt like it did after the first drinks of the night, or maybe the first warning signs of gradual blood loss. Right then he felt the light pressure of another blade against the back of his neck, something bigger than a knife. Knowing it must be a sword and exactly what that meant, knowing he was screwed and he was a dead man, he gave a tired laugh. There was no Maysilee this time to shoot his attacker from cover and save him. “Looks like you missed that duel you wanted all these years, Brutus. I’m not gonna give you much of a fight.” Hopefully Enobaria was good enough for you, Thread.

“No, you’re not,” Brutus answered him quite calmly.

“So how does this go? You kill Katniss, so I kill Enobaria here, so then you kill me, and then either Finnick kills you because you killed me or you kill Finnick because he’s trying to kill you?” The thought of it was dizzying, all the stupid shit about revenge that kept it going and going and going. Or maybe that was just him getting a little light-headed. Was it blood loss or the inevitable crash as the adrenaline wore off or both?

“We didn’t kill Katniss,” Brutus said, sounding puzzled. “We saw Johanna running off when we found the girl. She was bleeding badly from her arm and we figured she was out of the fight, so we left her to chase down Johanna.” He tried to think that one over. Bleeding badly from the arm--Johanna had cut out her tracker, just like the plan said she ought. But if it wasn’t Johanna’s cannon or Katniss’, that left only one explanation.

“That was Chaff’s cannon?”

“It must have been,” Brutus confirmed. Oh, hell, Chaff. He couldn’t let himself think about that right now, not with how he was starting to come down hard and how he knew Brutus could easily spit him like a skewer of meat for grilling if he so much as twitched the wrong way.

“You didn’t kill him either?” he asked carefully, already suspecting the answer. The insect noises had started, and the cannon followed shortly after. All caught up in his own blame and anger and terror, he hadn’t waited around to see where the hovercraft came to retrieve the body, but he suspected now it would have been in the eleven o’clock zone.

“No. We haven’t seen him since the Cornucopia.” Brutus sighed, the weary sound of someone who had been pushed to the brink. “Johanna turned on Katniss, Haymitch. Baria and I both saw it. Your damn friend just tried her best to kill your district partner,” Haymitch noticed he didn’t say your daughter because Brutus probably knew him too well to believe it, “and only the fact we scared her off kept her from finishing the job. That’s enough. This...this whole thing is crazy. It’s bullshit.”

He couldn’t believe he was hearing Brutus say words like that. Loyal Brutus who got that pained look on his face when someone made a pointed Capitol joke. “What are you saying?”

“I’m done killing off my friends. Fuck it.” The pressure of the sword lifted from his neck and from the corner of his eye he saw Brutus stab it into the jungle floor. “Maybe Cato was right.” He remembered how Brutus had tried to wave off the last words of the boy from last year when Haymitch had questioned him on it and he’d wanted to say, No, he finally figured it out, Brute, and I wish you would.

He felt a wild urge to laugh but worried that given how much on edge Brutus must be with this, with how much it was costing him to dash a lifetime of loyalty and certainty to pieces, he didn’t dare because it could come out wrong. “You with him on that, Enobaria?” She nodded carefully.

He let her up, sitting down beside her in the dirt and taking deep breaths. Rebels from Two. Who’d have ever guessed it? “Well, shit. What do we do now?”

“Take whatever consequences for it, I suppose,” Enobaria said, pressing a hand to the wound on her side. “I don’t think you or are in imminent danger of dying before that.” No, probably not. He’d seen enough deaths in the arena to begin to gauge his wounds. The gut wound was the worst but it wasn’t as bad as last time, when he felt his life fleeing him by inches. He would last hours, at the very least. “I doubt they’ll spare multiple tributes if we refuse to fight each other. Not two years in a row.”

No, that sets a bad precedent. The fact that they were willing to say this on camera shocked him. It was nothing so open as a Fuck you, President Snow, but refusal to play by the rules and saying this Quell was bullshit was too dangerous to let pass. They knew they’d probably die for it, and they didn’t care. He found he was smiling because at least now they were all on the same side. “Good.” But there was of course a bigger problem to be faced right now. “How bad was Katniss?” he asked sharply.

“I think she had a few hours left. We could have given her a quicker death but Johanna was a present threat, so...” She was bleeding but strong enough to have gotten up and moved after Brutus and Enobaria found her. Trackerless too. He hoped like hell that Plutarch was watching her onscreen aboard that hovercraft, trying to center right over her.

“Katniss!” he hollered out into the thick jungle air, praying she’d answer and prove she was alive and strong enough for it.

From far in the distance, somewhere uphill, he heard her calling back, “Haymitch!” He should get up, and get going, and find her but he didn’t know how long it was until twelve now and no, it was safer if he stayed here with Brutus and Enobaria and drew the attention away. The Capitol would come for them first, the ones who’d just told Panem to take their Games and shove them. “I’m here!”

He was just drawing breath to yell, “Stay there!” when the lightning split the sky, making his hair stand on end, and the eerie pink sky glowed a neon blue for a moment. Then the fire started raining down, and he caught the glimpse of the sky, the real sky, grey and overcast. He let out a laugh of triumph. “Fuck me, you two, it actually worked.”

“What worked?” Enobaria said suspiciously.

“What the hell is this?” Johanna said from the trees, approaching them with a drawn axe. “Are we having a happy little friendship and knitting circle with Two now or what, Haymitch?” Sensing Brutus and Enobaria ready to fight her, thinking she’d lost it and turned on her alliance partners, he waved a hand to calm them down.

“Johanna here cut out her tracker and Beetee just blew the forcefield around the arena,” he explained to them quite calmly, now that he was sure the arena feed was blown and the cameras weren’t working. He glanced up, his mind now making sense of the explosions up there and the rain of fiery debris. “Shit. It looks like they’re firing on the hovercraft that’s coming for her.” He saw the silvery hull of it off in the distance, searching for Katniss. No, it would take him far too long to make it there.

“Haymitch,” Brutus said, leaning on his sword and a baffled expression on his face, but looking at him with surprisingly steady pale blue eyes, “seriously, what’s the short version?”

“I’m throwing some coal on the rebellion by getting Katniss out of here alive to lead it, and if we don’t all end up dead here--pretty likely, sorry--you’re invited to join?” he said with a faint smile.

Johanna snorted and shook her head. “Latecomers,” she said dryly, but he could hear the satisfaction in her voice that at least the job had gotten done. “You’re a damn mess, Haymitch,” she told him, apparently now taking in the sight of all the blood. “Doesn’t do anything for your pretty looks. Enobaria, I’m not worried. You couldn’t make her uglier if you tried.”

“Fuck you, Johanna,” Enobaria snorted tiredly, waving a dismissive hand. “So. Between Brutus and me and now this, I assume we’re pretty much just waiting for the Capitol to come pick us up.”

“Pretty much.” Not unless Peeta got notions of being noble and stupid and ignored the promise he’d made to Haymitch to get Katniss and get right out of there.

“I suppose we could just kill ourselves off right now and spare them the trouble,” Brutus mused, glancing up at the bombardment above.

“Is suicide considered more dishonorable than treason?” Enobaria mused. “I think they’re both up there. What the hell, Brutus. Might as well stick around awhile and see what happens.” She grinned in a flash of gold-tipped fangs. “And if they execute us at least we get to show them we’re not afraid.”

They might have been talking about a picnic or something rather than the pending knowledge of likely torture and execution. They’d done what they’d set out to do and after that, there was the strange feeling of freedom. What came now didn’t really matter. He grinned at them. “Might as well stay alive. I mean, there’s never a good patch of nightlock when you really need it, right?” They all laughed at that, sharing in the dark gallows humor of it. He saw the hovercraft turning tail and retreating, knew Peeta had kept his promise, and pressed his fingers to his lips, knowing he’d never see Katniss again. Fly free, Mockingjay.

“At least I got to smack her in the head once, for all the times she’s been begging for it,” Johanna said with a snicker.

“Jo. C’mon.” But he couldn’t resist a low chuckle, because of course he’d wanted to smack Katniss upside the head more than once since last year, frustrating as she could be. “Lucky you.”

The shadow of a hovercraft darkened the sky above them, and as he looked up he knew this wasn’t Peeta coming back. “Well, looks like our ride’s here,” Johanna said, getting to her feet and dusting off the seat of her pants. “C’mon. Get up, assholes. We’re victors. Let’s act like it for this.”

With that they all got to their feet--himself and Enobaria a bit more slowly, but shaking off the offer of help. Frozen in place almost immediately after that, he watched the metal claw descend, closing around Enobaria, drawing her up into its belly. Brutus next. Then Johanna.

It plucked him up last, and he barely had a moment before the retrieval bay doors snapped shut before the sting of a needle in his neck and the spreading numbness of a sedative injected into his veins quickly made everything go dark.

Chapter Text

The Games were awful from the start, but she made herself watch, for Katniss and for Haymitch. She wondered about his claim that Katniss was his daughter, thought it made sense of a lot of things, and wondered about his budding romance with Johanna Mason, but mostly she just watched and felt sick. At the very end she watched Brutus and Enobaria refuse to fight, trembling fingers pressed to her lips, and then suddenly there was a white flash of light, so bright it almost burned her eyes, and the camera feed from the arena cut off.

Effie Trinket sat in her living room staring at the hiss of static, her heart going trip-hammer in her chest. They had done it. Her part in it was so small, so belated, just a few tentative messages taken to a few citizens on behalf of Plutarch Heavensbee. It wasn’t even difficult. She didn’t know most of what Plutarch had planned, and certainly nothing of what Haymitch had in mind, but it was done now and she’d been a part of it.

But then she’d spent most of her career as the escort for Twelve not being able to read Haymitch Abernathy. When she was eighteen and newly assigned to Twelve, Honoria Delight had given her some words of advice about Twelve’s only living victor.

”He’ll be a handful for you, Miss Trinket,” Honoria told her with a twist of her blood-red lips, quite obviously relieved to have her years as an escort over and done with. “He always has been. I admit ten years have somewhat civilized him from his tribute days--he ate with his hands then more often than not. But he still takes a childish glee in reverting to barbaric behavior when it suits him. He’s quite capable of gracing any Capitol citizen’s home with proper etiquette when he chooses. He’ll act the bumpkin only to annoy you, so don’t accept it.”

“Thank you, Miss Delight, I’ll do my best to keep him in line,” she said, but her mind was giddy and full of excitement at being an escort and being involved in the Games.

As they went to the train to head out to the districts for the reaping, she congratulated those who had One and Two and Four. But her own posting had its own very particular perk, for all that it was dreary District Twelve.

“You lucky, lucky girl,” Gemma Waltz said to her enviously, out on her way to rustic District Seven. “When you manage to get Haymitch in bed, I really expect a full report.”

“Gemma!” Effie squealed. “It’s highly unprofessional for an escort to sleep with a mentor!” But of course she’d talked about him at night with the other girls at the academy. They all knew they had their favorites among the victors, the ones they’d certainly consider kicking off their knickers for if they ever got the chance. Gemma’s favorite had always been Haymitch and she made no secret about it. Effie admittedly had inclined more towards Wy Ingersoll from Ten with his dreamy deep blue-green eyes and sun-streaked blond hair. But she’d always agreed Haymitch was attractive, of course, if you liked your men rakish.

“Oh, I’d happily be unprofessional for his sake.” Gemma grinned at her. “Good luck, Effs. I’ll see you back here for the Games.”

Twelve was just as drab as she’d seen on television, or at least, the little bit of it she saw on the way from the train station to the Justice Building. Depressing, dirty, a feeling of listlessness to it that bothered her. The train was delayed along the way so she barely made it in time and that had her fretting already, as did the run in the back of one silk stocking when she’d snagged it on the door on exiting the train.

Standing alongside the stage and hurriedly greeting the mayor and other officials prior to taking the stage for the reaping, Haymitch arrived. He was neatly dressed, a black frock coat and trousers, and a grey vest and striped ascot, polished boots, a crisp starched wing collar that made her smile to see it because it spoke of an attractive man who knew it and took pride in his appearance. Haymitch’s apparel was a welcome piece of utter elegance next to the shabby suit the mayor wore, let alone the well-worn shirts and trousers of the adult men in the crowd. He was like a songbird flown in among sparrows and she was relieved to see it because in this depressing, alien place he was something comfortingly familiar. But as she approached him she found that there there were wrinkles in his trousers and he smelled a little bit like alcohol as if he’d had a drink or two just prior to arriving. “Pink. Of course,” he said half to himself, looking at her pretty pale pink suit that she desperately hoped wasn’t stained with coal dust. Then his eyes snapped up and met hers, bright and intent, for all they were faintly bloodshot. “So dear Delight’s finally out and you’re the new handler,” he said with a smirk. “Welcome, welcome. What’s the name, sweetheart?”

“Effie Trinket.” She offered him her hand. Maybe he’d kiss it? She’d seen him do that once on television, kiss a girl’s hand and look up into her eyes with that knowing smirk of his.

“And you know who I am so let’s skip the pleasantries, mm?” He ignored her hand entirely and she hastily put it behind her back rather than let it hang there awkwardly in the air. “Well, Effie Trinket, you ready to go escort two poor young bastards to their doom?”

They’d giggled about Haymitch at the academy, about his wicked sharp tongue and the arrogance he had, the thrilling edge of danger. Not too much danger, of course, not the way some of the Two victors seemed like they would leave your body all bruises. The sort of danger where he might restrain you, yes, but only so he could kiss you all over with a passionate leisure and smile at you with that knowing look that said he knew your body better than you did.

The first time she woke him up from a sound sleep, thoughtlessly shaking his shoulder like she would to anyone else, he held her down all right. But it wasn’t to kiss her. It was with a knife held against her throat. Of course when the mad look faded from his eyes and he realized what he’d done, he apologized and looked upset. But it was then she realized perhaps Haymitch Abernathy really was dangerous, and not in the girlishly foolish way she’d imagined.

Over the years the realization slowly sank in more and more, especially once he really began to drink more and the veneer began to wear off in a hurry. There was a darkness to him, something rough and savage, and it had nothing to do with being from District Twelve because the children she met were shamefully ignorant of proper behavior but usually still sweet in their way. Every year it grew harder to know they’d be alive only a short while longer, and every year some parts of Haymitch scared her a bit more. She did as she’d been taught, did as Honoria told her and snapped at him when he insisted on walking around barefoot or when he ate with his hands, but the way he’d nearly killed her and the way he sometimes went on a drunken rampage when the tributes died wouldn’t be restrained by simple admonitions of manners. He laughed sarcastically and bickered with her but she wondered if he could see through all that to the moments when she crossed from being frustrated with him to remembering that darkness that lay beneath the surface of the cynical, lazy drunk. If so, he never took advantage of her fear and perhaps maybe there was a little bit of the gentleman about him in that. She came, in time to respect him for that and to feel a great deal safer around him, even trust him except for those occasions he was so drunk he barely remembered his own name.

Slowly, she was forced to admit that if it wasn’t something native to District Twelve, the Games had done this to him. It was a frightful thought and she didn’t dare speak it aloud. She tried to chase it out of her head too.

But it stayed with her and each year she watched two young children make a one-way trip to the Capitol and she’d fuss and try to give them the little treats they desired to make it special as long as she could, and Haymitch would head right for the bar car.

He’d rallied last year, pulled himself out of the cloud of cynicism and coarse laughter and liquor. Do you think this year they can do it? she’d asked him softly, the night before the Games began. She was tired of them dying too, and tired of how their names still stuck in her head despite how she ought not to get too attached.

He studied her, eyes as clear as she’d seen them in a long time, and he said Yes. He’d fought so hard for Katniss, and then just as hard for Peeta once the chance presented itself. He’d brought them home and she’d been proud to have been a part of that.

Then they tried to take them away this year. She wasn’t sure whether she’d more dreaded pulling his name from the reaping ball or Peeta’s. He stepped in to prevent it, as much as he could. Foolish, stubborn man. But she could see that it mattered to him, and when she finally admitted to him those thoughts she’d buried deep, he sent her to Plutarch, who welcomed her with open arms. I had a feeling you might be joining us, he told her.

Now she waited, a small part of a rebellion but not nearly deep enough in its heart to even understand fully what had just happened. All she knew was that in some small way, she’d hopefully helped save Katniss and Peeta. What would become of Haymitch she didn’t know.

She found out soon enough what would become of her. The sharp knock on the door came scarcely fifteen minutes after the television went to static. She answered it and found two Peacekeepers standing there. “Euphemia Trinket?”

“I am,” she said, trying to draw herself up with as much dignity as she could. “What may I do for you, gentlemen?”

They refused to answer any of her questions as they escorted her from her apartment, led her out into the street for any of her neighbors or a random stranger to see. She tried to not let the waves of shame she felt cover her at that paralyze her. They took her to the Detention Center, took photographs and fingerprints of her like she was a common criminal. She was entered into the records upon suspicion of having assisted in a treasonous rebellion. She protested it, but her voice sounded shrill and false in her ears even as she did so.

They took her wig, her shoes and her jewelry. Then in a drab tiled bathroom they took away her clothes and they didn’t even have the decency to have a female Peacekeeper keep an eye on her as the man ordered her to shower and to scrub her face clean. The water was cold and refused to warm. She turned her back to him but she could feel his eyes on her, looking her naked body up and down, and she suppressed a shudder as for the first time, she was actually afraid of a Peacekeeper which was absurd because they kept order and enforced justice. But when she was suspected of having broken the Code of Conduct, she had apparently placed herself outside their protection. She showered as hurriedly as she could, watching the streaks of her makeup wash down the drain around her bare feet, feeling her skin prickle from cold water and from fear of what might come next.

They forced her to scrub the pretty gold polish with the design of flames off her nails and then clipped the nails ruthlessly short, almost like a man’s. Given a rough pullover shirt and trousers in a tired, almost colorless grey, and a pair of soft slippers, they told her to put them on. There were no mirrors in that bathroom but she had the feeling with her short, plain brown hair clinging damply to her scalp, her bare face, and the detention uniform, even her own friends wouldn’t have recognized her. She felt ugly and pathetic, stripped of all her defenses. She supposed that was why they did it.

“Please, won’t you tell me wha--” Couldn’t they at least tell her what had happened at the end of the Games?

“Be silent or else,” the Peacekeeper told her with a scowl. Remembering how he’d looked at her, she shut her mouth.

They photographed her again, and she felt as naked as she had in the showers. Then they put her in a windowless cell and said nothing about what she could expect next. The only thing she knew was that they hadn’t done the one thing that would have made her certain of her own imminent execution. While they’d stripped her of all her glamour as was part of the standard procedure for the condemned from the confessions prior to execution she’d seen on television and in the plaza, they hadn’t shaved her head.

She sat on the narrow bunk and occasionally brushed her fingers through her hair with shaking fingers as if to reassure herself it was still there. Haymitch Abernathy had indeed been dangerous after all. If she’d never met him, she’d never have woken up to uncomfortable realizations. She wouldn’t be in this place, would she? She didn’t know if she regretted it yet. She only knew that she was even more frightened than she’d been the time he had a knife to her throat, because this wouldn’t end with dawning horror in someone’s eyes and an awkward apology for a terrible mistake.

Lucius Sixleigh had been an attending physician for the victors for nearly thirty years now. That meant that every year, he was usually called upon to assist in the surgery as each new victor was pulled from the arena and their wounds stitched up, their life carefully snatched back from however close to death it had come, and in some cases it was truly a near thing. He was pleased to say they’d never lost a one yet in all his years, and there had been severe cases indeed. He then handled the care as they rehabilitated to a state for their public crowning.

After that, when they returned to the Capitol, he was still responsible for their general health. Some of the victors had been his patients for years now. If anyone asked him about Albinus Terrelle or Chantilly Forbes or any of the others, he could probably recite the litany of their treatment over the years with ease. Not that he would, of course. It would be highly unprofessional to do so.

Seeing them enter the arena again and knowing so many wouldn’t come out alive had hurt. Losing people he had come to think of as old friends, people he’d seen in extremis and whose wounds he had healed, was a blow he didn’t like to think about. He was a physician, a healer. He didn’t revel in the kills of the arena the way some of his friends did. Perhaps that was why he secretly never much cared for the Games, for all he reluctantly accepted their necessity in keeping order in Panem, just as he accepted the necessity of executions.

But to have saved those young men and women fresh from the arena and kept them whole all these years only to watch the candles of their lives snuffed out over the last few days had kept him sleepless. It felt as if something had been put out of balance.

He couldn’t afford to think of that now, though. At this point they had pulled four from the smoldering ruins of the arena. Beetee Chen, severe myopia, developing arthritis in his hands, remarkably even blood pressure for a man of his age, Finnick Odair, a quite extensive file over the years beginning with that infected spear wound in his side and progressing through the lifestyle of a popular young man living a dangerous life, and Katniss Everdeen, she'd been unusually well off on retrieval, mostly just cuts and malnutrition, were apparently nowhere to be found. Lucius hadn’t asked where they were, nor had they been told.

As it was, they settled in to try to triage the four victors they did have in the surgical suite, and he followed Penelope Mace’s directions as he had all these years, letting her direct the prep for the surgical suite as they assessed their patients.

They all could use a good meal, were sunburned and dehydrated to varying degrees, and had assorted minor cuts and bruises. Johanna Mason: moderate to severe lacerations, a couple of potentially broken fingers. Keep her under and treat her later. Brutus Allamand: moderate to severe lacerations, a deep knife wound in one shoulder. Keep him under and treat him later. Enobaria Reska: early stages of shock from blood loss, potential broken wrist, numerous severe lacerations and incisions, one troubling deep incision over the right hip that was still steadily bleeding. Keep her ready and take a look at Haymitch. Haymitch Abernathy: post-cardiac shock, early stages of shock from blood loss, a puncture wound beneath the ribs that made Lucius suspect a lacerated liver from its location. It’s a toss up, Nell, they’re both bad. But I think that stab wound’s got priority because of probable organ involvement. Pack Enobaria’s wound and monitor it and we’ll get through him as quickly as we can.

They fixed Haymitch up, though it was no easy task. As they were wearily rescrubbing and sterilizing things anew for Enobaria’s surgery, he was informed that President Snow wanted to see him.

Stepping out of the surgical suite, drying off his hands and spying the white-bearded form of the president standing there he said politely, “Sir?”

“How is Mister Abernathy?” Snow inquired with equal politeness.

“Stable. That stab wound was tricky, and well, it doesn’t help his liver isn’t exactly in the best shape.” Lucius gave a wry smile, remembering all the times over the years he’d advised Haymitch to lay off the drinking. Of course, in the early years after Haymitch’s victory he’d advised him to lay off the party drugs and lay off the sexual partners with a clear taste for the sadistic. Apparently Haymitch was unfortunately one of the types who gravitated towards the dangerous side of life--not uncommon in victors. He’d done his psychological rotations, of course, as part of medical school and he could easily speculate on the root causes there, but he declined to do so. He just treated them when they came in and advised them to please think of their health next time.

“Of course it isn’t,” Snow said with a tight-lipped smile. “He’s been doing his best to drink himself unconscious for years.”

He didn’t much know what to say to that. Somehow it made him uncomfortable, hearing Snow’s casual insult like that. It wasn’t like all of Panem hadn’t seen how drunk Haymitch could get, but still, it seemed like their leader should be above something that petty. “It’ll take a good long while for him to recover, of course, mostly because of the liver trauma. But in the meantime we’ll get him on scar reduc--”

“He keeps the scars this time,” Snow interrupted him coolly. “As will the rest.” He didn’t have time to ponder the unusualness of that order, when Snow added, “And you have three days to return him to sufficient health, Doctor Sixleigh.”

“Sir?” He didn’t understand. “I can’t accelerate--”

“You can’t?” Snow raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Do you mean to tell me that with all of our technology, you can’t do anything to speed the process?”

“Not with the liver he’s got, sir, no. I can’t coax rapid healing out of it, fragile as it is. From the lack of inflammation it seems he probably vastly reduced his drinking for the Quell, maybe even stopped it entirely, but it’ll take a long time for it to return to normal function.” He paused, thought of the scarring he’d seen and added reluctantly, “If it can even fully get there.”

“Then you get him a new liver. I believe we have more than a few victors on hand who no longer require the need of theirs.” Lucius stared at him, aghast. Of course organ transplants were done on a routine basis, people in the Capitol wore out livers and hearts and everything all the time. But to just casually tell him to harvest it from another victor's body, and when Haymitch wasn’t even in actual liver failure? It was a bizarre and vaguely uncomfortable notion. “That man,” Snow informed him tersely, obviously seeing something in his expression, “is a primary suspect in plotting a rebellion, Doctor. I need him alive, and I need him fit for questioning, in as timely a manner as possible. Whatever measures it takes. The information he could provide is essential and we need it as quickly as it can be obtained.”

“I see.” He nodded slowly. Haymitch was involved in the district rebellions? Well, the victors had seemed fairly unruly and even defiant before the Games so it was possible. The president wouldn’t entrust him with confidential information like that unless he had very good reason to believe it to be true. “I can...tell Doctor Mace that’s next on the list after we take care of Enobaria and make sure she’s stable,” he said slowly.

“Very good. As I said, don’t waste time with scar treatment. Only focus on returning them to general health.”

He was about to remark that Haymitch hardly needed a liver replacement just to be questioned. He only needed to be conscious. But then he thought about questioning as opposed to what he’d heard about “questioning” when it came to traitors, the potential influence of drugs that Haymitch’s damaged liver definitely wouldn’t withstand, and various vigorous interrogation methods he was better off not considering, and decided not to ask. The president had informed him he had a duty to the state. He had best get to it. “The others too, you mean? Enobaria, Johanna, and Brutus?” He was pretty sure he already knew. He’d seen Brutus and Enobaria rejecting the Games at the very end there, and while Johanna was more uncertain she was apparently romantically involved with Haymitch, which was a good indicator of her loyalties.

“Also under suspicion, yes. I’ll be stationing Peacekeepers to keep them under guard until you can formally release them into the custody of the Detention Center. Good day, Doctor. Keep me informed, particularly if you feel any of them will be available ahead of that three day mark.” With that, Snow inclined his head politely, then turned on his heel and left.

Lucius tried to not want to shudder at the man’s coldness that came in this time of crisis from the ruthless necessity of the demands of state. He was glad to be a doctor, not a politician.

Pushing his way back into the operating suite, he told one of the surgical residents to go check the files for a blood-type match with Haymitch against the recently deceased victors. Nell looked at him and he told her quietly what surgery was on the list next and why. Her green eyes went wide and she nodded. “Enobaria first, though,” she said firmly, looking at the young woman with her gaping side wound. “Dax,” she addressed the anesthesiologist, “make sure Haymitch stays under for the next few hours. We’ll have to bring him back in.”

There was a beautiful simplicity to sewing up torn flesh and preserving a life, a sense of satisfaction. But as he assisted Nell with Enobaria’s wounds, her hands steady and sure, Lucius tried to put thoughts of where these four victors’ lives were bound aside. He couldn’t grasp how it made sense that he was healing four bodies with all his skill and knowledge simply so they could be turned over to be stressed and possibly even tortured, and so he didn’t even try.

Chapter Text

Haymitch woke up with his cheek pressed into the soft, worn fabric of the old green couch in his living room, the one his mother had picked out herself all those years ago and never gotten to use. The way his head felt a little bit fuzzy and aching he could almost believe it was like plenty of days when he finally got to sleep around dawn on this same couch. If he chanced to wake up in the afternoon, the sun would always be far too bright in his bleary, hungover eyes. But this was different, not the least because the moment he sat up and put his head in his hands with a weary groan, he heard the distinct click of a weapon’s safety being undone. Glancing up, he saw two Peacekeepers standing there with their guns pointed at him. Well, that definitely wasn’t a usual feature of his house.

It all came back to him, or at least enough. The last he knew was the hovercraft retrieving him, bleeding and badly wounded, from the ruins of the jungle in the arena. Enobaria, Brutus, and Johanna had been with him. Now he was here, back in his house. He felt tired, stiff, and there were aches that told him some wounds were only half-healed. His stomach in particular where Enobaria had stabbed him was tender still. “What am I doing here?” he asked, looking down and seeing he wasn’t wearing his clothes from the arena, the trousers and t-shirt. Instead he had on a loose grey pullover and trousers, drab and almost colorless. The wound on his arm where Brutus had flung the spear at him back at the Cornucopia was visible just below the edge of the short sleeve. Somewhat healed, yes, but unusually for the Capitol, the scar was still there, raw and puckered and purple. Of course. They’d set the doctors on him when they pulled him from the arena. That was why he wasn’t dead already. So he was dressed as a patient. But he thought he had seen these clothes before, and not in terms of a hospital. Where had he seen this kind of uniform before?

Trying to rack his brains for that answer, that was when he smelled the thick smoky smell of something burning. His eyes went wide as he tried to lunge for the door, suddenly deathly terrified that Snow had healed him up just enough to drag him back here to lock him in his house and burn him alive as punishment for his defiance. The man had done exactly that to everyone else he cared for twenty-five years ago, hadn’t he? Oh, he’d planned on dying in the arena or maybe being tortured and executed when that plan hadn’t panned out, but Snow doing this was one last gesture of deliberate cruelty beyond all reason. He couldn’t help the pang of fear at it.

“Hold it right there,” one of the Peacekeepers growled, grabbing his arm and apparently he was about as weak as he thought since he ended up pinioned like a trussed turkey. “You don’t go outside until you’re authorized to do so.”

Authorized? That word punctured through the fear. If, supposedly, he’d be authorized to go outside, then they weren’t going to roast him in here. What was this? Confinement to house arrest? But what was that out there that was burning? “What’s with the smoke?” he asked them cautiously. “I mean, you can smell it, right?” They’d have to have no sense of smell whatsoever to ignore it, because even inside it hung in the air, thick and acrid.

The smaller one, the one that had grabbed him, now raised an eyebrow at him. He looked about ready to answer but then paused and listened intently, and Haymitch saw he was wearing an earpiece. “The president’s ready for you outside.” The way he phrased that, it definitely wasn’t a request.

Snow was here in Twelve and that was alarming enough without the lingering concern of not knowing what was on fire. But he was starting to have a dreadful suspicion, lurking at the corners of his mind, unwanted and thus unacknowledged because of it. He’d heard what they supposedly did to District Thirteen back in the Dark Days. Firebombed to ashes, no living thing remaining.

When the Peacekeepers escorted him through the door, Victors' Village looked much the same on first glance. The neat circle of a dozen houses, the well-kept grounds, the village green and the pond in the middle. Idyllic and peaceful. But when he looked closer he saw a good deal of the grass was scorched dry and brown, and there was a gritty grey layer of ashes on the ground. He could see there was smoke still rising lazily on the horizon, down towards the town and the Seam. Leaning on one of the posts of the porch, hearing the eerie stillness where there should have been distant voices and the songs of birds, he felt like he could do nothing but stare and try to process what he knew must be true. Twelve was gone. Had anyone survived at all?

“Well, Mister Abernathy,” Snow said from beside him, and he jerked instinctively and turned at the sound of that voice since he hadn’t even noticed him standing there, “I’m pleased that you could join me for this tour. The firebombs burned for several days and I’m informed there are areas that still aren’t safe, but enough of the fires have died out to still see a great deal.”

“We’re gonna take a walk, are we?” he said, trying to not ending up shying away and whining pathetically like a kicked dog at the mere thought of going down there, at seeing the devastation first hand. He’d seen the ashes of his house all those years ago. To multiply that on this unfathomable scale, the entire district? Snow picked his torture quite well. He wished it was just broken bones rather than the awful smell of smoke and the way the ash sat on the ground even here, which made him only imagine how bad the fires must have been. “Why did you bring me here?” he insisted.

“So we both could see it firsthand,” Snow told him, standing there in his neatly pressed suit with the white rose in the lapel, breathing his blood-rose breath on Haymitch. “In case you get ideas of attempting escape or harming me, please note the cuff around your ankle.” He’d noticed the pressure of something there but hadn’t looked. “Our escorts,” Snow nodded to the two Peacekeepers, “have the controller and will be able to send a rather severe jolt of electricity through your body should you choose to misbehave.” Misbehave. He was standing there in utter horror at the devastation of Twelve and Snow made it sound as if he was of no more consequence than some kind of errant pet that had pissed on the carpet.

So he started to walk with Snow, and the Peacekeepers fell in behind them just out of earshot, but Haymitch could feel their eyes boring into his back with every step. “So I could see it firsthand, you say. Why?” he pressed again.

“You appear to have not learned your lesson all those years ago, when I told you that there was a price to be paid for your actions. This time, I admit that you’ve truly outdone yourself. Causing the destruction of your entire district is quite a feat, even for you.”

The guilt of it hit him, the knowledge that he’d caused it. He hadn’t even thought ahead to the severity of the consequences that might fall once he got Katniss out. He’d just sort of assumed that in his being captured or killed, Snow would have somewhere to vent his rage. After seeing the winter Twelve had endured he should have known better. He should have thought. He should have seen it, but he’d been so damn busy with eyes on the prize to the exclusion of everything else. “You’re the one that dropped the fucking bombs, not me,” he snapped harshly, trying to scrabble feebly for some kind of cover for how badly the guilt cut him. “Maybe I figured after how you screwed us over last winter, they were better off not being used as leverage any more.”

Snow gave a soft, almost amused snort, as if he’d said something inadvertently hilarious. “If I actually believed for a moment that you were convinced that some sacrifices are necessary, Mister Abernathy, you would finally have become a dangerous man.”

“I managed to get her out of the arena under your nose.” There was no point in denying it, not really. After this long he knew Snow’s ability at bullshit detection was uncanny. Maybe if he confessed they’d just kill him quicker anyway. He almost let it slip that he’d gotten the majority of the victors to ally with him to do that, but he held his tongue. Better to not hang all of them along with him. “And you didn’t have a clue about it. I think that probably qualifies me as dangerous.”

“It qualifies you as precisely the same short-sighted fool you were at sixteen. You make your little defiant plans, and perhaps they’re clever, but then you’re somehow continually startled at the fact that your actions come with severe consequences. Since you’ve always been one to only appreciate the value of a lesson after the fact, I made certain you’d be here to see this one.”

So they walked, and he tried to not breathe deeply because of the ash stirring in the air. Even several days later, the latent heat still radiated from the ruins in a way that had him sweating beyond the usual summer humidity. They saw the still-smoking ruins of the houses, the twisted and blackened trees. Most of all they saw the dead, the charred curve of a skull half-buried in a pile of ashes by a broken rafter beam, a huddle of tangled bones and ashes where a family had apparently all died together. The bodies on the road lay there where they had fallen, pathetic and vulnerable, reduced to heaps of blackened and seared meat rotting away in the summer heat and picked at by scavengers, the remains of those who had died desperately trying to escape the inferno. He saw how small some of them were. Children. I killed all of you. He made himself look because Snow would see if he looked away or if he puked or shed a tear, and he would be merciless about it. He ought to look anyway. He’d had his hand in causing this so he didn’t have much right to turn away from the terrible thing he’d wrought. He didn’t dare ask what he desperately ached to know: did any of them survive? Or had he killed them all off?

He wanted to close his eyes, sit down, and try to keep it together somehow. For so many years he’d had enough deaths on his head, people he’d killed and people he’d failed to save. That toll had just risen so high that he couldn’t bear it. Thousands of them, all dead because of a call he’d made to Plutarch Heavensbee. The weight of dozens had been crushing. The weight of thousands made him feel like he could barely breathe. He’d thought he’d cut himself loose from debt to Twelve by sacrificing his own life to save Peeta and Katniss. He knew now that when he died, and he was under no illusions it wouldn’t be soon and it wouldn’t be painful, he’d go to it knowing he could never hope to answer for this. “Are we done?” he said, and his own voice was harsh in his ears. “Or were you looking for some personal narration here? This is the yard where I played my fiddle for Dee Hawthorne’s wedding, this is the butcher where I used to work when I was a kid, that’s the schoolyard where I beat the shit out of Dougless Cartwright, that’s the field where I lost my virginity to Briar Wainwright?”

Snow smiled idly. “I think we both know that at least the last one’s not true.”

Oh, so he was paying attention. Haymitch wasn't sure he was or if he was too busy gloating to himself, so he'd checked. “Isn’t it?” He and Snow both knew it wasn’t. Though he’d hardly been as innocent as some of the others since then. He and Briar had done a good bit of fooling around with each other, but they hadn’t risked the chance of a baby, not when they were still young enough to get reaped. He smiled back, trying to grasp some edge of ruthless nonchalance, some distraction from the apocalypse right in front of him. “But does it actually matter whether it was true?" he challenged him. "All that matters is you managed to sell me off as a virgin because Gloriana Frill believed it when you told her."

"Perceptive of you, Mister Abernathy."

"And I know exactly how much you made whoring me out to her and to the rest.”

“Do you now?”

“I have my sources. I have to say, it’s impressive how much people were willing to pay.” He tried to think about how many Seam families it would have fed for how long, but that thought came to a stuttering halt when it hit him hard that there were no more Seam families to feed at all. “Hell, your profit off that first week alone was staggering. I’ve always sort of wondered. What did you do with all the money anyway? Take a vacation to some resort down in Four? Give all your staff a nice annual bonus? Finance a good chunk of the 52nd Games? Buy your daughter some pricey designer horse mutt?” By this point he was almost snarling at the man, feeling the agony of being here so acutely that he wanted to tear Snow to shreds. If he actually thought he had a chance to get away with it, he might even risk it. But the knowledge of two Peacekeepers with twitchy fingers kept him from it.

Instead those unnerving eyes studied him and Snow asked, “How does it feel, Mister Abernathy? To have submitted yourself to anything demanded of you for all those years in the interest of your district’s safety, only to finally be their undoing in the end?”

“Oh, fuck you,” he said raggedly, because he honestly couldn’t come up with a better answer than that. From Snow’s expression, he knew the older man sensed he’d handily won that exchange. “You enjoying this?”

“Hardly.” Haymitch actually believe it. There was no hint of excitement or lust in his eyes, only business as usual. He’d looked just the same all those years ago telling him exactly why his family and Briar had burned. Just the same too, telling him that he could expect his body to be sold off to Capitol buyers. He thought he’d almost have preferred Snow to be getting off from this. It would be more human, more understandable, than this cool detachment. “But I’m satisfied that you now appreciate precisely what your defiance cost you this time.”

“So what’s next? You send me on my way and tell me to be a good boy?”

Snow carefully stepped aside of a body right in the middle of the road. “You expect me to simply tell you?”

“Oh, I imagine you want me to know,” he answered, trying to not imagine who that body had been. Whose mother or father, lover, son or daughter. What they’d thought in those horrible last moments as the firestorm finally caught up with them. If they were lucky they died of smoke inhalation first. He prayed that was the case because it was the only mercy that could have been given in this situation. “What’s the point keeping me in the dark?”

“Miss Everdeen is out there. However, even if she’s not your daughter--”

“You so sure she’s not mine?” He gave a snort of amusement. “Never mind. We both know she ain’t. I imagine there’s no way I could have had a woman here in Twelve without you knowing about it. Much as you’ve breathed down my neck all these years, you probably have a file with dates and times of every time I’ve ever jerked off in that house.” He saw the way Snow still winced at deliberate crudeness, this hypocrite of a man who’d sold him off to anyone with the cash for so many years, and felt a very slight sense of satisfaction himself. Not that it was more than a minor point scored. It barely stirred the scale at all, let alone tipped it.

“You asked me years ago if we might be honest with each other. Shall we?” Haymitch raised his eyebrows and made an exaggerated gesture of go on, by all means. “Even if you didn’t father that girl, clearly she shares your same weakness. If I were to make the suffering of someone be upon her account, I imagine she’ll fold just as easily as you have all this time.” His fingers tightened, clenched halfway into fists at hearing Snow describe so casually how deliberately he’d yanked him around by a chain for so long, knowing how he could make him dance whatever tune he chose by it. “Particularly someone she cares for as much as she does you.”

He gave a bark of laughter at that. “Oh, bullshit. The girl doesn’t even like me most days.”

“She trusts you and feels she owes you. That’s far more significant.” The trouble with Coriolanus Snow wasn’t that he was unscrupulous and ruthless. All that wouldn’t have been a problem if he could have just been stupid in addition. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The man was clever and perceptive. Already he felt himself being drawn into this little chess game between the two of them. Not that it was much of a match. By this point Snow was holding almost all the power. About all he could do was do what he’d already attempted: protect Katniss if he could. “So today you’ll give an interview regarding her escape from the arena and the destruction of District Twelve. I imagine you won’t be stupid enough to say anything untoward.”

“And why is that? What have I got to lose?”

“I expect you wouldn’t want Miss Mason to suffer unduly on your account.” Snow shrugged. “Given your romantic involvement.” Yeah, well, if the man could see through Peeta and Katniss, he ought to easily see through the quick smokescreen he and Johanna had put up there. The fact that he didn’t struck him as odd. “Beyond her, I do also have Mister Allamand and Miss Reska, and Miss Trinket and Mister Locke, in Capitol custody. So choose your words on the air carefully.”

He gritted his teeth, because this was always how it had gone with them and they both knew it. Snow threatened to hurt someone and he folded. “Like you weren’t intending on torturing us already?” he said defiantly.

“Of course. The others are already being questioned back at the Detention Center. We do have to obtain whatever information they have to give.”

“They don’t know anything. I made sure of it. Even I don’t know exactly where she is and what she’s doing. You think I didn’t plan ahead just in case this happened?”

“It’s quite possible you did. Though you must admit my skepticism on your truthfulness at this point is probably justified, so I intend to put all of you to the question anyway.”

“Oh, of course.” It wouldn’t do to not torture them, of course, and getting their pound of flesh in revenge. That was all right. After everything he’d endured already in life, physical pain by this point held little weight with him. It was psychological mindfucks like this, staring at the destroyed ruins of his home, that he couldn’t bear. It made him want to go to the remains of the black market and pray some of Ripper’s bottles had somehow improbably survived. Something in him laughed silently and grimly. You don’t even need to torture me. Just give me enough liquor to make this go away, and eventually I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I’ll tell you anything you want to hear. So maybe Snow hadn’t fully perceived one glaring weakness in him.

“As to you, I intend to put you on television at certain intervals after that. When your Mockingjay sees that you’re suffering, eventually, she’ll be unable to bear it. It may take a week. It may take a year with us healing you up at intervals enough to endure another cycle. But eventually, she’ll give way and come for you, Mister Abernathy, and when that happens, I’ll be ready for her. Once I have her in my custody, I’ll grant you the courtesy of a shared execution. She won’t have to watch you die, nor will you have to watch her.” The casual way he said it, the exquisite cruelty of it, made him catch a startled breath. This was Snow after all. He should have figured out the old man had it planned down to the last bit.

“So I’m the bait for your little trap.”

“You were something of a hunter and trapper in your youth, as I recall. You understand how it works.”

He nodded curtly. He understood, all right. To be reduced to this, a pawn in one last game, made him think he’d much rather just be dead. Worse than that, to potentially be Katniss’ undoing--damn it, he hadn’t come this far just to be the thing that dragged her down. Much as it galled him, standing there among the ashes of his people, he glanced over at Snow and asked, “And what terms would it take for her to live through this?” She was seventeen, for fuck’s sake. She had no clue what she was getting thrown into. This was on him, not her.

“You think you have actually anything to trade at this point, Mister Abernathy, to buy her life?”

“You tell me,” he said with a snort of irritation, growing tired of the games.

“If,” Snow said carefully, emphasizing the word, “she were to be convinced to lay down arms and surrender, I would accept that she’s seen the futility of rebellion and allow her to live. Mister Mellark also.”

It seemed too simple, and he thought about it as they walked through what had been the town, feeling the stones of the marketplace beneath his feet. He glanced briefly at the bakery and wondered if the Mellarks died quickly. Liam, at least, had been a good man. It didn’t take him too long to figure it out. The Girl on Fire would need to be extinguished. “Of course. You’ll need a new example to hold up,” he said wearily, “since I’ll be dead.” Her family wouldn’t survive, of course. They’d kill Gale Hawthorne. She’d be sent to anyone’s bed that Snow chose. Having lived that life for so long, the thought of her being subjected to it hurt. But looking at the destruction he’d helped cause, he didn’t much feel like he had the right to assume the power of life and death and just say she was definitely better off dead. At least he could maybe offer her a choice. “Not much of a life you’re offering.”

“It’s the best offer she’ll get. And somehow you’ve persisted in living it all these years.” Snow looked at him, a long and sharply inquisitive gaze. “Why is that?”

He smiled, just a little. “Maybe because I told myself if I had to die I was damn well going to make you finish the job you started in the arena. Looks like it worked.” To be honest, even he didn’t know the answer to why he’d stayed alive so long. It wasn’t like early on, when he’d been determined to not be like Nualla Clearly and just go walk out beyond the fence into the wilds, because back then he actually thought he could make a difference. Maybe it was simply reaching the point where everything was so numb and meant so little that he didn’t even care enough to summon the sharp misery needed to kill himself.

As they walked back up the hill towards Victors' Village, Snow asked him, “Tell me, did you imagine yourself to be the Boy on Fire all those years ago? Have you lived all this time believing someday the chance would come for you to prove yourself the phoenix that would rise from the ashes?” He nodded back towards the devastation. “There are your ashes, Mister Abernathy. Perhaps we’ll see if you can burn.”

He knew right then that Snow knew. Whether it was hearing something cried out in a nightmare or something he’d said while drunk or just noticing him flinch at something to do with fire, Snow was aware that he had a particular horror of it. So of course that was part of what he could expect back at the Detention Center. Well, he hadn’t expected this would be easy or painless. He’d just been fool enough to believe it might actually be quick.

Back at the house, he saw a camera crew had assembled out on the green. Escorted back to the house, he saw a familiar figure in the living room, dressed in the same prison greys as him. Cinna. Thinner, tired-looking, with healing cuts on his face and the odd slackness of cheek on one side of his mouth that he’d seen in people here in Twelve--when there had been people here in Twelve--that spoke of some missing teeth. “You’re alive?” he said in astonishment. Snow had mentioned him, yes, but he hadn’t been fully willing to believe it.

“No talking,” Shorty growled, brandishing a controller that obviously went to the cuff around his ankle. “He’s here to prep you for your interview and that’s all you two get to discuss.” They’d flown Cinna all the way here? Why? Just to show off that he too had been arrested? To force Cinna to play his part in this last act of the farce? To show him District Twelve and what his fiery costumes had finally cost? Probably all of those things.

Shorty nodded to Haymitch. “You. Upstairs. Shower first, because you’re dirty and you stink.” Yeah, well, you try sweating your ass off and bleeding in the jungle for three days straight and then still going without for however long it’s been since then. “Then the president says dress appropriately.”

Up in his bedroom Shorty opened some of his drawers to satisfy his curiosity. Haymitch stood and watched, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of being upset. It wasn’t like there were many things in this house he cherished. The way the man insisted on standing right there in the bathroom with him too also barely registered. Presumably it was so he wouldn’t overdose on the bottle of sleep syrup or break the mirror to get a shard to slash his wrists. He’d been forced to undress for people times beyond measure in his life so Shorty watching him do it and seeing him naked didn’t matter either. Mostly it all just didn’t matter because these small humiliations were nothing against what Snow intended.

He showered, trying to not think what--or who--the traces of ash that were already on his skin and in his hair from their walk had been. He ran his fingers across the new thick, ugly scar on his stomach, learning its shape, and knew it must have been an unusually big repair job on that stab wound. Too bad Enobaria hadn’t just killed him. He tried to not think about what she and the others must be enduring. Glancing at himself in the mirror, he saw the scar on his right cheekbone, the half-healed scrapes and bruises, and knew Cinna would have a job of it hiding them. The weariness in his eyes couldn’t be hidden easily. The stuff they’d slathered on his face had done its job and he didn’t need to shave yet. From long experience he knew it couldn’t have been much more than two weeks since he’d endured prep, which meant it had only been a few days since they blew the forcefield. The still-smoldering ruins and the state of his scars supported that.

Dressing didn’t take that long, silently selecting from the things available in his bedroom. But holding his hands steady long enough to do up his tie was difficult, and he left the watch off. No point to it. Heading back downstairs, he sat there in the living room and let Cinna pull out the makeup and do his best to conceal all the flaws currently on his face. Cinna’s fingers were gentle and he was absurdly thankful for that, not because having a bruise grazed would be anything of note against what was to come, but simply for one last moment of friendship, of human touch that wasn’t meant to inflict torment. After the arena and before the torture, that was something of infinite value.

“Thanks,” he said, reaching out and pressing Cinna’s hand with his own for a moment, returning the favor. Cinna looked at him with those calm green eyes, so like his mother’s, and nodded. There was a lot he’d have liked to say and a lot to ask but the knowledge that they couldn’t kept both their tongues silent. Chances were they’d never see each other again after this. At least they would die knowing they'd set something important in motion.

Then there was nothing left to do but go try to potentially undo what he'd bled for in the arena, say the right little lies on camera for this interview. How he’d had no idea what was going on and if he had, would he ever have left Katniss’ side? How of course Peeta probably had no clue either and he’d likely just been desperate enough to respond to any offer someone would make him to help save the woman he loved. How Katniss didn’t know what she was getting into--well, that one was true. How he worried about her, and Peeta--also true.

After he did this, if the worst came to pass and the rebellion failed, they could still live. He was being their mentor all over again. Spinning the lies, appealing to people for their sake, enabling that chance of survival. But in the end, just like in the arena, they would have to choose whether they were willing to pay the price to live.

Chapter Text

It was the seventh day when she finally ran into another tribute. Pinned down, she struggled, but she was weak from a lack of food and he was older and bigger and stronger to begin. He easily ground her down into the dirt until her shoulders and back were aching with it. “Let’s give the sponsors a show, huh?” he said. “Maybe then we’ll get something from them.” Something about the wild look in his pale blue eyes scared her just as much as how she felt the hardness of him as he was grinding his hips against hers, forcing her legs even wider apart.

He reached down and fumbled one-handed to undo her zipper and this was actually going to happen to her, he was going to rape her on television for everyone to see and her mom and dad and Bern and Heike would see it. He was going to do this and then he was going to kill her and that was worse than she’d ever imagined.

She yelled something wordless, and her flailing fingers found the peculiar-looking hand axe he’d laid down to have both his hands free to control her. Too frightened to aim and too restrained to have much leverage anyway, she hit him with it in the side first and he grunted in pain, jerked back just enough for her to hit him again, this time in the shoulder. From there she drove him off her and hit him over and over and over so he couldn’t get her down again.

She hit him until his face was nothing but a carved-up mess of blood and brain and bone and meat, not even recognizable as human. Until she finally looked down at him and realized that he was dead and that she’d killed him and that his blood was warm and sticky on her face and her hands.

Johanna woke up clawing at her face, trying to wipe off the blood. It was nothing but sweat on her fingertips and slowly her mind settled down from its dizzying whirl, and she remembered they’d injected her with tracker jacker venom again before they dumped her back on her cot.

It wasn’t enough they tortured her. Beat her. Burned her. Cut her. Whipped her. Threw water on her and applied bare wires to watch her jerk and scream--just regular skin if she was lucky, more sensitive areas if she wasn’t. Sometimes they took the notion to inject her with venom and turn the time away from the physical torture into a psychological one.

That was the third time by her count that she’d relived that moment in the arena, the one where she snapped and killed that boy. Clark. That was his name. Like she could forget it. Like they’d ever let her forget it either. The moment she stood over Clark’s dead body the Capitol started spinning the tale of the clever, manipulative girl who’d tricked them all by playing weak and then showed off a talent for murder. They’d sold the story so well that it was apparently the truth to everyone now. She hadn’t told anyone the reality. Not Finnick, even when they were together. Not Haymitch, not even as drunk as she’d gotten with him sometimes. She wondered if either of them even realized. Her family, who knew what had really happened and who she’d really been back then, were all dead.

Truth was, scrappy tomboy Johanna Mason who was tough enough to run with the boys back in Seven had been scared ever since the reaping. She hadn’t really faked how out of it she’d been. She’d just gone into a tailspin of panic once her name was drawn and not managed to get away from her mind telling her, I’m gonna die and I’ve barely even lived and I haven’t even been kissed and it’s not fair it shouldn’t be me, to a place where she couldn’t breathe or think or do anything to claw her way out of it. No girl from Seven had ever won anyway, Cedrus and Blight weren’t exactly known for producing victors, and she was short but still strong enough to work with chopping and logging but she wasn’t big, not like the Career girls, let alone the boys. It wasn’t like she could fend them off at a distance like Katniss fucking Everdeen had with her bow. Even thrown axes were a relatively close-up weapon and the moment it became actual hand-to-hand combat she was dead.

But after lying there in the dirt struggling with Clark from Five who’d obviously broken under the strain just like she had, she’d realized that hiding and trying to just stay out of the fight hadn’t helped her. She’d killed and she got a silver parachute full of food for it and she understood. They wouldn’t let a simple survivor win, only a killer. Giving them death would be rewarded with them giving her life, first with food and eventually with being taken out from this arena. If she wanted to make it out alive she’d have to kill so now that her mind was clear of the terror she just let her feelings go dark and she went and she did it. She played the helpless, terrified girl she actually had been up until Clark caught her, and drew them in thinking she was an easy kill. Once that happened the prey became the hunter, and she killed four more tributes in the next six days and became the girl they admiringly called a vicious, cunning little victor.

So the next year when Snow told her that she was effectively going to be raped on a regular basis her mind went back to that moment and she tried to refuse. They’d taken enough away from her already, turned her into a damn killer. They weren’t going to take away more choices from her. She’d been too stupid to realize that it wasn’t an offer that could be refused, that even after taking away her family he’d still manage to make her do what he wanted. At least she didn’t last long as a whore because she did her best to make herself undesirable. Now the only people she fucked were the ones she chose, and she damn well made sure she had control of it.

Not that she had much in the way of control now. She was at their mercy. She relived Clark under the venom and she relived the four others she killed that her mind had tried to bury but who still cropped up in her nightmares. She relived killing Sandy at the Cornucopia, Sandy who she'd snarked at just the night before at the interviews about how she'd better hurry up and get in a good lay while she still could, and Gloss with her axe buried in his chest. She saw the site at the summer logging camp where her family had died and imagined their suffering and their pain and their screams. Stupid Haymitch and his whole rebellion, getting her into this. She sort of wished she’d just managed to die in the arena because this was far worse. Wished they’d just kill her already, but this was the Capitol. They never made anything easy or painless, not while there was still an ounce of suffering or humiliation left to be extracted.

Haymitch was quiet right now in the cell next to hers. She knew he hadn’t been in there when they first started in on her. But eventually they’d put him in there from wherever they’d had him, and she could hear him clearly now because there was an air vent between the two cells that passed sound pretty readily.

Not that either of them had really said anything. She didn’t know how many days it had been since the lighting was on twenty-four hours a day, probably to disorient them. She wouldn't complain about that given that the idea of total darkness freaked her out after that pitch-black zone where Blight had died. They also didn’t feed them on a regular basis. They mostly just heard the sounds of each other in pain. She dimly heard some others further down the hall sometimes, probably Enobaria and Brutus and maybe others, but the sound of him was right next door so that was sharpest.

When she wasn’t with her own torture team or under the venom, she could hear when they were working on him. She could judge how bad a session was going by the sounds he made, because they mirrored her own so well. Grunts and gasps were mild pain, slaps and punches and the like. Suppressed moans meant it was getting bad. When the pain eventually overcame his resolve and he progressed to outright screaming that meant it was unbearable and they’d stopped screwing around and started going at him in earnest with whatever tool they chose--electricity, fire, whatever. Once it even got past that point, all the way to strangled, raw sounds that were more animal than human, and when the noises stopped she’d been convinced he was dead until she heard when one member of the torture team informed the others he’d just passed out. They threw water on him to wake him up and from the sounds they presumably gave him a few last shocks before they quit.

The worst to hear, though, was when they apparently injected him with venom just like her and left him to suffer through the memories and nightmares and hallucinations. He’d probably been through enough in his life, like her, that physical suffering wasn’t nearly so bad as a mindfuck. She’d also learned that yes, he definitely had more years of nightmares to draw upon than her. She didn’t know many of the names he said aside from his mother, his brother, the girl he’d liked when he was a kid. But the pure terror in some of his screams and the way he pleaded with the phantoms and apologized to them over and over and begged them to forgive him and to leave him alone chilled her to the bone.

This was maybe the first interval since they’d started in on her that there was the silence of no torture and no venom-induced nightmares from either of their cells. Nobody was yelling from down the hall either. “Haymitch?” she ventured finally, her voice rasping through the air like a saw against bark, harsh from the screaming. There was a sour-sweet taste from the venom that had been rushing through her veins all thick and dry at the back of her throat. “You there?”

“Still here,” he confirmed after a few seconds, his own voice equally hoarse and rusty-sounding. Trying to place him by the sound, he was right on the other side of the wall. Apparently his own sleeping shelf was right there by the vent. “How are you holding up?” he asked softly.

“Oh, you know,” she said with as much of her old flippancy as she could muster at the moment. “Great accommodations. The food could be better. No alcohol, too bad for you.”

He laughed, or rather he started to laugh but it cut off abruptly as he started coughing. Once he could speak again he said, “So nice of them to put this vent here so you and I could talk sweet nothings, huh?”

Oh, she knew it couldn’t be kindness on their part. That vent and its ability to carry sound had a purpose. Just like she was sure they’d deliberately put her next door to him rather than the likes of Brutus. When she thought about it, they were probably hoping that after being forced to listen to their supposed lover being tortured, the two of them would be talking just like this and the worry would make them stupid enough to reveal something important. But she rolled with it, just like he’d stepped gracefully into that dance she’d led back in the arena. She’d half expected him to tell her to go to hell with that plan, but apparently they’d sold it well enough that the Capitol believed it. Go figure. But then, he’d probably had to prove over the years to any number of Capitol people that he could fake a romance when called upon to do so. It was a lie but it was one last little bit of defiance left to them, so she clung to that. “What, you randy bastard, you want me to start in on what I plan to do when I get you in bed?”

“Tempting. But unless we end up sharing a cell that ain’t gonna happen, sweetheart.” Not to mention even if they did, and even if she wanted to fuck him, they’d probably be too tired and too injured for sex to happen anyway. The thought of any pressure at all on the bruises and burns made her cringe. “We both knew back in the arena this wasn’t going anywhere anyway.”

“Probably not. I mean, considering we only ever see each other at the Games....” That was true enough. No inter-district travel without authorization, and unless it was to travel to the Capitol for the Games or to the districts as a mentor of a victor on their Tour, it wasn’t going to get a stamp of approval. Going and visiting someone else’s district just for fun was unheard of, even for a victor. Maybe that was part of why Finnick and she hadn’t worked out. Annie Cresta could have him for eleven months of the year, all to herself. Those few years they’d been seeing each other, Johanna had him for a month only and during that time both of them had their patrons in the bargain.

“What?” he said with the first spark of something like his usual snarky amusement. “So I was just gonna hand over Twelve’s mentoring to Peeta and Katniss and come live with you in Seven?”

“Well it’s not like I could just fucking well move to Twelve, not when I’m Seven’s only female victor,” she snapped, not sure why she was suddenly irritated with him when this was all fake bullshit anyway but certain that she was. Haymitch had a way of being annoying.

She half-expected him to keep goading her and that would be a relief because it would be like old times, rather than this dark place they were in right now. But instead he was frighteningly silent for a long time. Then finally he spoke up. “That’d be a feat anyway. There is no more Twelve.” Her eyes went wide in shock as she listened to him say it, but the weary sound in his voice told her it was the truth. “They firebombed it right after the arena went down. The Justice Building’s only a bit damaged and the Victors' Village is intact. That’s it. The rest is all ashes and corpses. Like Thirteen in the Dark Days.” Her mind replayed the footage she’d seen of the wreckage of Thirteen on the television. She’d only been to Twelve once, on her Victory Tour, and the woods visible beyond the fence had seemed comfortingly familiar but it wasn’t home and the people weren’t hers. To think of it all just gone, though, thousands of people just wiped out in an instant--it wasn’t like she was all that closely attached to people in Seven any longer but the notion of it turned to ashes was unthinkable.

“M’sorry,” she mumbled, and it was such a stupid, simple word for a thing like that but it was all she had to give. She doubted he’d planned on that when he was selling them on his plan of breaking Katniss out. She drew breath to say again, She’d better be worth all this, just like she’d muttered to him after the jabberjays. But she realized they were being overheard and that would be confessing, and so she paused and put those words aside. “So, should I get comfy here and plan on a long stay?”

“Probably so.” She nodded, expecting about as much, though it made her close her eyes, head tipping back against the rough, damp cinderblock of the wall. Of course that was the case. She wasn’t sure why she’d thought he’d somehow have some way out of this. Probably because Haymitch was always the planner. She'd seen what a clever little bastard he’d been even back at sixteen. When he was sober, the man could pretty much outwit anyone around him. Even tipsy he was still formidable enough; when actually drunk he was useless, of course. He was the one they turned to with a problem because unlike others who gave platitudes, he usually had some kind of real answer to offer, or at the very least, sheer honesty and a bottle of whiskey. If he was that resigned, she knew this really was the end of the line. She’d be listening to him scream for a long time yet.

He had to be listening to her cries as they tortured her just the same way in his own cell that she heard him. The thought would have alarmed her once, leaving herself so raw and naked in front of anyone. But even as she was pissed off with him for landing her here she was also glad he was there, that someone who wasn’t a sick Capitol bastard heard what they were doing to her and gave a shit. “All right then. I’ll just go ahead and ask for a pillow next time the staff comes around to check on us.”

“Make sure you ask for some of those little mints too like we always got at the Training Center,” he drawled and she laughed at that, even though it hurt. Pretty much everything hurt now, but at least laughter was worth it.

The hovercraft had arrived in Thirteen two weeks ago, with Peeta sporting a beautiful black eye. It was hardly the first one of his life. His mother had given him her fair share in the past, but she never would any longer. When they arrived and heard there were survivors from Twelve that would be picked up soon, he’d put his names on the lists. Liam Mellark, Jinny Mellark, Bannick Mellark, Farl Mellark. Once the hovercraft started picking up the Twelve refugees making their way north on foot and transporting them here, there had been some tearful reunions. There had been many more than hadn’t happened. None of his family had made it in the eight hundred or so. Katniss’ family made it. Gale’s family made it. He wondered if the exclusion of his parents and his brothers had been deliberate on Gale Hawthorne’s part, since he apparently got the laurels as the hero who evacuated those who he could before the bombs fell. Only a bare handful of merchants had made it to Thirteen, maybe a dozen, and he remembered the older boy’s snide comments about the merchants of Twelve during training. But that was a low thought, and one that Peeta knew came from the angry and jealous part of him that recognized Gale as his rival and really wanted to find excuses to give him ugly motives and nasty attributes.

Chances were since Gale was in the Seam he’d just evacuated the closest people he could, as quickly as he’d had to do it. The fact he’d gotten anyone out at all, let alone hundreds, and managed to oversee at least efforts towards food and medical treatment and travel towards Thirteen was admirable.

That still didn’t mean he liked Gale. Particularly given how, looking at him now sitting with Katniss in the cafeteria, eating their turnips, they looked so cozy and comfortable. Like they were the married couple. He was getting tired of the questions from people about his “wife”.

But then he’d caught himself in this trap, getting Haymitch to say that at the interview. So he deserved it. Just like he’d deserved Katniss punching him.

The start of it had gone off without a hitch. He’d looked at the clock anxiously while Beetee was festooning the lightning tree with all that wire, and went to leave, giving Carrick and Annie the nod. They knew that meant Annie should follow him out the door a minute later. They met the hovercraft with Plutarch and were in the air before anyone even knew they were gone. The Gameskeepers probably thought they were meeting with some sponsors or something.

They watched on the hovercraft’s television feed as the alliance broke apart. Johanna attacked Katniss, bashing her over the head and cutting a deep gouge in her arm, and his cries of shock and fury at that were only alleviated by Plutarch explaining what had really happened: Johanna dug out her tracker.

Haymitch outfought Enobaria but got badly wounded in the process himself, and surprisingly, Brutus and Enobaria looked poised to join the rebellion. That was when the forcefield blew and the feed went down.

They found Katniss, readily visually centered over her as they had been, and Beetee unconscious right by her feet. Finnick was close by too and Plutarch didn’t hesitate to scoop him up, and Annie let out a cry of joy and folded him into her arms the moment he hit the retrieval bay. “We have to go,” Plutarch told Peeta anxiously, as another Capitol artillery shell exploded uncomfortably close and shook the hovercraft like a child’s toy.

“We have to--” Another explosion and the lights actually flickered. Annie yelped in alarm, and he heard Finnick soothing her in words too low for him to hear. He remembered what Haymitch had made him swear: get Katniss and leave. Hating himself for that promise, he nodded and said stiffly, “Let’s go.”

He watched the ruins of the jungle recede behind them and knew even if he didn’t have to ask Haymitch’s forgiveness for it, he’d have a hard time ever finding his own. Katniss’ too, because when she woke up and he told her what had happened, that he and Haymitch had been planning this for months and that he’d left Haymitch behind and possibly dying of his wounds, she screamed in raw fury and grief and she punched him. “You and your stupid lies, Peeta!” she snarled at him, her entire body shaking at what he guessed was an effort to not just tear him apart. “Well, are you happy now?” He knew much as she and Haymitch butted heads and were unwilling to admit they cared about each other, they did, and they’d just gotten closer in the arena. Telling her that he’d left behind the closest person she had to a father wasn’t something he enjoyed.

Hearing on arriving here in Thirteen that it was confirmed that the Capitol had picked up Haymitch, Johanna, Enobaria, and Brutus made him regret that promise all the more.

The bureaucracy here had been confused at what to do with himself and Katniss in terms of living arrangements. Married and supposedly expecting a baby which was officially now lost due to a miscarriage in the stress of the arena, of course Plutarch tried to argue they should have living quarters together. Right, that’ll go over well.

But since his claim of them just having had a toasting meant it was an irregular marriage, not legally registered at the Justice Building with the proper paperwork filed, Thirteen didn’t want to recognize it. They were informed that if they wanted to undergo a quick ceremony right then to rectify the problem, of course then it wouldn’t be an issue. From the way Katniss shot him a look of death that said Don’t even think about it, it was a good thing he hadn’t considered it for a moment.

She blamed him for his lies but when he smoothly said, “Katniss and I had planned to marry back home in Twelve. I imagine she and I would rather hold off until after the rebellion succeeds and decide then, in hopes Twelve may rebuild,” she hadn’t faulted him for telling a lie that set her free to live with her ma and sister rather than him. Twelve, rebuild from what all the refugees reported was likely to be just a smoking ruin? That was unlikely to happen in a hurry. Maybe not at all. But it worked and they didn’t ask more questions. The story quickly made the rounds around Thirteen that the Mockingjay and her beloved refused to allow themselves the happiness of marriage until the rebellion succeeded and that just won Katniss even more respect in their eyes.

Whenever someone asked him how he and Katniss were doing, he could hear the suspicion that the two of them were acting cold as ice to each other. He just smiled and said, “Well, the arena was very hard on her, of course, and losing the baby. Plus she’s very focused on the present issues.” She hadn’t agreed to be the Mockingjay for them yet and he knew, looking over at her there eating and chatting with Gale, that he wasn’t going to be the man to do it. He’d saved her life but maybe in doing so he’d lost her forever.

The thought of that kept him awake at night, lying there by himself in his quarters and wishing, at the very least, that Nick and Farl were there to tease him. He’d never felt so alone in his life. The entire experience of mentoring had given him a new appreciation for the reality and hardships of Haymitch’s life. Being alone like this now just took it to a new level. At least Thirteen didn’t have alcohol at all, because if they did he might seriously consider the merits of it the way he felt in some of those long and unbearable hours, missing his brothers and his father with a pain like the cut of a dull blade, and wondering if Katniss was busy kissing Gale Hawthorne’s lips even now. Probably not. She still seemed in shock from the arena and the firebombing and the stress they were putting on her to become the Mockingjay and lead the rebellion. He wanted to be there for her but she wouldn’t let him in.

It was Annie that saw the sleepless circles under his eyes, how he was pushing his strictly allotted food rations around his tray rather than eating them. She reached out across the table and laid a hand on his. She didn’t say anything, but just looked at him with steady sea-green eyes and a soft little smile and he tried to swallow down the lump in his throat at that kindness. From then on at least Finnick and Annie ate with him and talked to him, and gentle Delly Cartwright joined in once she got out of the hospital and so he wasn’t totally alone.

But that didn’t change the knowledge that for the second time he had saved the woman he loved, but this time he lost everything in the bargain. Rolling onto his other side and turning over the pillow to press his cheek into a cool part of it, he thought once again about Haymitch held prisoner in the Capitol and tried to not imagine what they must be doing to him and how it was his fault.

Chapter Text

Life wasn’t so much the difference of “day” and “night” for Haymitch any longer. The dim lights were on all day long. He could have been down in this cell for days since they dumped him in here after his trip back to Twelve. He could have been here for months. No, probably not months. They’d have pulled him out for that promised television spot first. But how long it had been exactly, he didn’t know. He was living purely on Snow’s schedule now.

There were four divisions to his existence down in this cell and that was about all he knew.

First, there was the torture team. They always came in brandishing their toy of choice for the day. It might be blades. It might be electrical wires. It might be flames. It might be ropes. It might be a whip. It might just be the simple uncomplicated brutality of closed fists and heavy boots. He usually held out as long as he could. Maybe he was weak but that was neither here nor there since he knew everybody broke and cried out in the end. Even Brutus down the hall ended up shrieking eventually. If they ever wanted to send Katniss some more jabberjays to fuck with her mind, they wouldn’t even need to use technology to make a recording of him. He gave them plenty of authentic screams freely enough. After the first few sessions they never asked him any more questions. Of course not. This was just meant to try to break him, not to extract anything useful.

Second, there was the induced time of delusion, riding high as a kite on tracker jacker venom and seeing all the dead on his account written there in bloody red ink. Ash, an unsettling vaguely human form made out of ashes. Larkspur Taylor, with her gaping axe wounds. Jimmie Aberforth, the tip of the knife protruding from his chest. Maysilee, with her gashed throat and accompanied by pink birds. Chaff, a skeleton bare of flesh with insects crawling around the ivory columns of his bones and recognizable only by his missing hand. Mags, torn to shreds by horrible teeth and claws. And the murky shadow of thousands and thousands of dead in Twelve, burned beyond recognition. All of them looking at him and saying what he knew was only the truth: he never saved a one of them. He made his little schemes and then he let them die for it.

When he was seventeen and drunk he’d tried to call up some of his dead out in the graveyard one night, a stupid game they used to play when they were kids, hollering out for ghosts. He’d done it hoping to talk to them, hoping to plead with them for forgiveness. But he’d understood even then that absolution wasn’t something he could ever earn. Not when his body count went up every damn year. He’d still tried, pathetic as it seemed. He’d saved two last year, all right, and that was something but against all that red racked up on the other side of his accounts, maybe he might as well have not even bothered. Look how many people he’d killed off this time simply trying to keep those two alive.

Sometimes he even imagined Peeta and Katniss were dead too. The gruesome death wounds his mind conjured varied but their accusing stares never did. Sometimes he relived his Games, and watching that tape on the train had just sharpened some of the gory details for him in a bad way. Sometimes he relived some of his worst appointments, both the ones that left his body bleeding and battered and the ones that forced him to tear up another little piece of what he had left of a soul.

The venom delusions were hell. But it was a familiar hell. It was pretty much what he used to be able to drink in order to drown away. It was what he’d experienced over the winter with the withdrawal and again when Peeta dumped all the liquor down the drain. That didn’t make it any less awful but at least it meant when he woke up, shaking like a leaf, at least he had prior experience at carefully grounding his mind back in reality. That was something at least. Too bad he didn’t have the alcohol to help chase it away again.

Third, there were the periods when they weren’t working on him but he’d have to listen to Johanna right next door. After a while of that, he was about ready to yell at them for another dose of venom because at least with that he would eventually wake up and at least try to convince himself that what he’d heard and seen during it wasn’t all real. Johanna’s screams, the pain of torture and the terror of her own venom delusions, were all too real, and those were his fault too because he’d drawn her into this plan.

Fourth and finally, there were the rare occasions when neither of them was whimpering or out of their mind. They talked through that air vent then, but there wasn’t much to say. Not like they could even discuss the weather or books or something like that. Personal stuff was off-limits because both of them were all too conscious of people listening in. Usually they tried for a few snarky comments to try to bolster spirits but as time went on, he knew they could both sense its effectiveness was diminishing. Both of them were fading. The others down the hall must be fading too, Brutus and Enobaria and Cinna and Effie. He knew them by the differing sounds of their screams and at least he knew they were still alive. But he was helpless to do anything about it. Snow had told him exactly what he could expect. That wasn’t going to change.

They brought in a new toy the next session. Oh, it was the electrical wires and those were familiar, but along with that they brought in Lavinia, the little redheaded Avox girl. The one he’d hand-signed to now and again, the one Peeta claimed looked like a ringer for Delly, Dougless Cartwright’s daughter back in Twelve and even without having been in Doug’s class as a kid he’d have known that was utter bullshit. Nobody in Twelve looked like Lavinia, all flawless porcelain skin and dark red hair. She’d told him she was from the Capitol. Katniss had told him eventually about finding her and her brother out in the woods and seeing the boy killed and the girl captured.

They hooked her up to the wires. He noticed they didn’t jam the leather strap between her teeth as they did for him but then she had no tongue to bite, did she? Apparently, used to using their equipment on a grown man, even if he wasn’t the biggest, they hadn’t planned on the effect it would have on a tiny teenage girl. One garbled moan from her as they threw on the power and they were rushing her out of the cell, swearing as they couldn’t resuscitate her. It happened so fast that, strapped down to the chair as he was as a captive audience, he couldn’t do more than catch her wide, terrified eyes for a split second before they went blank. He knew how quick it must have been for her--one moment of alarm and then simple nothingness. He tried to not think about himself hitting that forcefield and maybe how it would have been better for him if Finnick hadn’t successfully brought him back.

Next session they brought in Darius, and as they dragged him in, the former Peacekeeper’s eyes went wide, seeing him there. This time they played it smarter. They put the wires away and made do with fire and with knives. At the first cut and Darius’ choked whimper of pain he spoke up and said calmly as he could, “Just watch me. Not them.” He got a backhanded slap to the face for that and was gagged by a kerchief shoved in his mouth so deep he almost choked on it.

“Shut up, Abernathy, unless you want to lose your own tongue,” one of the guards informed him roughly. Oh, no, they wouldn’t do that. Not yet, at least. Not when Snow still wanted to put him on television and make him plead with Katniss to lay down arms. He’d managed a tricky piece of equivocation in that first interview in Twelve, ostensibly fulfilling Snow’s demand by urging her to think about what she was doing and why, hoping that she understood him as she always did. Think for yourself, girl, and fight because you know it’s right, not because they tell you to. But someday when Snow no longer needed his words, he was pretty sure they’d take his tongue. Maybe he wouldn’t survive the operation. He’d heard that sometimes happened. He’d spent a lot of time lately thinking about some way he might actually manage to die ahead of schedule.

Right now, he and Darius were both rendered equally mute and helpless, but the boy’s terrified eyes turned to him. This was all he could do for him, let him know that someone was watching this who actually gave a shit, who hurt for seeing his suffering. It wasn’t nearly enough. He watched as they burned him--he knew they were experts at that--and cut off pieces of him, toes and ears and worse, cauterizing along the way as needed. If he hadn’t grown too used to the smell of his own burning flesh by now, the scent of it would have made him gag after that visit to Twelve.

He didn’t ever turn away from Darius’ eyes, forced himself to listen to the guttural wordless animal sounds of an Avox in excruciating pain. He didn’t have the right to shut it out, given that this too was on his head. Eventually, they wheeled Darius out and then they untied him from the chair. They didn’t go to work on him or stick him with a syringe of venom. Apparently watching someone else be tortured and leaving him alone to process that was considered bad enough.

They brought Darius back for another two sessions. Each time, Darius watched him, until in the middle of the last session he finally fell unconscious. About the only mercy was that they finally cut his throat at that point rather than keeping him alive to continue another day. Though maybe it had as much to do with the fact that there was nothing left of him to cut off unless they had wanted to actually start flaying his skin piece by piece.

“Who was that they had in there with you?” Johanna asked him quietly when he was back sitting on his cot, staring at the drying stains and pools of blood on the floor that they hadn’t bothered to hose down the drain like they did when they worked on him. Obviously they wanted him to see it and to smell it. He’d already told her about Lavinia and he’d have told her about Darius before but she’d been a little busy shrieking at her own phantoms. From the sound of it he’d guessed she was reliving the arena this time and all its horrors. The bitch with the axe that she pretended to be shouldn't have had nightmares about it, clever and deliberate as she'd been. But watching her Games live, dealing with her the next year as she got broken in to the experiences of the harsh life of the whoring circuit, Johanna wasn’t nearly as hard as the Capitol persona they stuck her with, the woman she’d been forced to become to survive.

“The other Avox. But he was a Peacekeeper in Twelve before that.” Johanna kept saying something but he didn’t answer her, just looking at all the blood and remembering Darius’ teasing laughter around the Hob, bleakly writing yet another red entry in his mental ledger: Darius Law.

He didn’t want to speak up either because suddenly, he was afraid for Johanna herself, more afraid than he had been in having to listen to her suffering. Killing someone like that right in front of his eyes was taking it to a whole new level of torment. He wondered when they would resume it with a new victim. How long before it was Effie or Brutus or any of the others tied down in front of him and being slowly cut to ribbons before his eyes? It wasn’t like Snow needed them alive. He was just biding his time in keeping them here. With sick certainty he knew that because they still believed she was his lover, they’d definitely save Johanna for last. Even if he told them she wasn’t, he wasn’t sure they’d even believe it by this point and just assume he was lying in an attempt to save her. Frankly, even if they believed him, they’d see that he wanted to spare her the pain and that would make them even more determined to hurt her.

All six of them were going to die. He accepted that fact, knowing there was no bargain he could make that would buy their lives and their freedom. The only way he could see escaping the worst of it was finding some way to die himself so Snow would hopefully just kill the rest of them because with their ringleader gone, they became useless. Unfortunately he couldn’t get his hands on a knife or anything like that, and they’d gotten too good with the wires relative to him to accidentally kill him like they had Lavinia. The burns wouldn’t kill him. He’d certainly thought about it but they hadn’t even left him anything to try to hang himself with. The fabric of his prison uniform, even twisted tightly, was treated with something a little too slippery to hold a knot.

Much as he hated to give them any credit, he had to admit they’d been thorough. They’d really thought of everything in this prison when it came to keeping someone alive. Maybe they should have been mentors for the Games instead of him, and he startled as he thought he saw Deliah Marten from the 58th Games in the corner with a spear through her, fingers clutching the shaft of it as she stared at him with angry, accusing Seam eyes saying, You let me die. He looked again and she was gone.

Apparently they’d pumped him so full of venom that his residual levels were high enough to be causing the occasional flicker of hallucination--and really, after all the years he spent beating the crap out of it with the booze, he was surprised his liver hadn’t just caved in yet under the strain. Or else, and probably equally likely a possibility, he finally was losing his anchor on reality. Given how little stake he’d had in anyone back in Twelve prior to Katniss and Peeta and much he dwelled in nightmare most the year, maybe his footing in the real world hadn’t been all that firm for years now anyway. So it was definitely possible he’d lost it and he was finally going crazy. Snow would enjoy that, taking one last thing from him.

Katniss came back to the hovercraft over Twelve wearing her father’s old coat, clutching the squalling game bag underneath her arm. Glancing at the hissing, shrieking thing, Gale recognized it had to be the ugly old cat Prim adored so much. “Now I know why you had to go back, huh?” he asked her.

She didn’t smile back at him. That wasn’t a surprise. Twelve looked horrible enough from the air. To actually be down there, walking among the ashes, had to be a thousand times worse. “Had to, if there was even a chance of finding him,” she answered, dumping the bag on the seat beside her and sitting down heavily.

He sat down next to her, risking putting a hand on her shoulder. “How bad?” he asked her simply.

“Bad,” she answered, and in the flicker of weary grief in her expression he read it all. It had been a month and the fires had stopped burning. But that didn’t matter. He’d been there that day. Gale knew until he died he’d never get the memory of the scorching heat that had followed them all the way into the woods out of his head--that, and the screams and cries for help that gradually died off as trapped people were overwhelmed by smoke or by flames.

Her hand found his and he gripped it tightly. Ever since they’d met up again in Thirteen she’d been leaning on him a lot. It seemed Peeta had been cut out of the loop, from the way she didn’t speak to him and the way the baker-boy’s eyes followed her across the cafeteria. Grateful as he could have been for that, Gale’s only thought on the matter was a glum, This isn’t how I’d have wanted it to happen. If she was going to choose him he wanted it to be honest and open, not something that happened only because she’d rejected Peeta for deceiving her and because she was in pain.

But she was his friend, even before he’d started to fall for her so he would try to be there for her because of that. The districts were rising, some of them fiercely and some of them more halfheartedly, but the rebellion was underway and couldn’t be undone. All they needed was to pull together and for that they needed her. There were days he wanted to look at her and say, You have to do it, Catnip. Look what happened. This is the Capitol we’re talking about. They just take and take and take and they’ll keep doing it until we finally stand up and say No more. He knew Plutarch and some of the others were looking at him to push her into it because he was her best friend, maybe her new lover. Yeah, right. If he could tell them anything, it was that Katniss Everdeen never did a thing people told her to do. It was part of why he liked her. Loved her.

When they arrived back in Thirteen she got Buttercup underneath her arm and he walked her back to her family’s compartment. “What should I tell them?” she asked him bleakly.

“I don’t imagine they’ll ask you much,” he answered her. “They were there and they saw it. They know.” She flinched at that, and just then his communicuff beeped. he glanced down at it and saw the bright green letters giving him the message from Command. “We’re needed.” He knocked hastily on the door and Mrs. Everdeen opened it. Katniss hastily shoved her backpack and Buttercup-in-a-bag towards her.

“Here, have your stupid cat, we’ve got to go,” she told Prim, and her little sister’s cry of joy actually had the hints of a smile on Katniss’ face. But it faded quickly as they turned to head for Command where they’d been summoned.

Peeta was there already, along with red-haired Finnick Odair and his girlfriend Annie, all staring at a television. Gale didn’t even know how that worked, considering how Finnick got around. Though maybe it was like him. Maybe he just couldn’t say it and in the meantime there were others. Peeta turned at the sound of the door sliding open and then shut again, and his eyes pleaded with Katniss as usual to forgive him, but Katniss ignored him. “What’s up?”

Plutarch Heavensbee urged her forward. Gale stayed back because tall as he was, he could see over some shoulders. The initial shots of the rubble in front of the Justice Building were familiar. They’d been seeing shit like this for the last month as the Capitol featured shots of the devastation in Twelve, showing the bombs falling and bursting into flame, showing the burned and lifeless ruins after. He was just glad his ma and his brothers and sister weren’t having to see it the way the people in Command were. It would break their hearts. Twelve hadn’t been much, but it was his home, and the Capitol just destroyed it like they destroyed everything they touched.

“What the hell is Caesar Flickerman doing out in District Twelve?” Finnick asked curiously, seeing the blue-suited goon in what Gale recognized as the mayor’s office of the Justice Building, with the desk and the district seal behind it. Except for a crack in one window, the office looked virtually untouched.

“Don’t know,” Plutarch answered. “It was just advertised as special programming but if it’s Caesar, you know it’s an interview.”

The camera panned and they saw it was old Haymitch. Katniss and Peeta let out matching gasps of shock and something almost like pain, staring at their mentor on screen, seated in one of the mayor’s chairs.

Gale studied him as he sat there. He didn’t look too bad. Dressed fancy, well-groomed. Obviously they’d patched him up well after the Games, treated his injuries and erased his scars. No, a victor like that, he’d never have to worry about the marks of a flogging staying on his back for life.

Caesar looked at Haymitch for a few seconds before speaking up. “Well, Haymitch. I have to say it’s probably a surprise to both of us that I have a chance to interview you again.”

A trace of a smile was on Haymitch’s face. “It wasn’t my plan, that’s for sure.”

“I think your plan was fairly clear to us, yes. To sacrifice yourself so that Katniss and her child would survive to return to Peeta.” Gale tried to not give a snort of irritation at that, because even now all the lies Haymitch had just effortlessly spun during that interview were holding Katniss hostage.

“That was pretty much it, yeah. But obviously some things happened I didn’t expect.” Given that Gale knew by now the entire plot for the arena escape had been Haymitch’s baby, obviously the man was picking his words very carefully right here.

Peeta let out a faint, shaky bark of laughter and that and said, “Oh, Haymitch.”

“Why don’t you tell us about that last night in the arena?” Caesar suggested almost gently.

Haymitch sat up a bit, glancing up and aside for a minute as if carefully gathering his thoughts. “Imagine this. You’re trapped in a jungle with all sorts of dangers, triggered on schedule by Gamemakers sitting in their Control Center above you. Of course, that’s just the Games as usual.” Not a hint of sarcasm in his voice, which was a little disappointing. Gale would have taken that chance to make the point. “Over a dozen people have already died in that arena. All of them are people you know somewhat. A lot are people you called friends. Even close friends in some cases. Some of ‘em even took the fall in defending you and yours. Some of them are still around you in an alliance and you know it can’t last because there’s got to be one victor and it’s not going to be you. And there you are, just waiting for that point where your allies become your enemies and you’ll all have to turn on each other. There’s only one person who makes it out alive. You all know that. If you’re smart, you break the alliance early enough so it doesn’t come down to you and a friend at the last.”

“Like you and your district partner in the 50th Games. It was quite a heartwrenching moment for audiences when she broke your alliance by expressing that same sentiment.”

A flicker of something crossed Haymitch’s face, but it was gone before Gale could fully read it. “Exactly. And at that point, if you haven’t already, you’re gonna be doing some killing soon enough. Because by then, you can’t let anything else matter if you want that one person to make it out alive. Not friendship, not alliances, nothing. There’s just survival and what price you’ll accept to buy it. There’s just the Games and you’re in there playing ‘em. And in the end you either pay enough in their blood and your own soul to win, or you die.” They were all silent, listening to that assessment. It wasn’t an open condemnation of the Games. It was just bleak honesty about what it was really like.

“You win or you die,” Flickerman repeated thoughtfully, of course completely missing the point.

Haymitch himself looked a little dazed, like he was shaking something off, and his voice returned to its usual rough, almost brisk tones. “So yeah, I was ready to do what I had to do. Katniss and me, we were about to split from the alliance once the electrical trap worked. But then, well...” He shrugged.

“Katniss blew out the forcefield surrounding the arena.”

“I saw the footage,” Haymitch snapped, grey eyes flashing. “You saw it too. All of Panem’s seen it. You think she had some kind of big plan there, Caesar? Tell you what I see. I see her standing there just staring at that wire without a damn clue until finally she saw that knife in Beeetee’s hand with the wire around it, all ready to jam into the forcefield. Maybe she figured that was some kind of trigger point for the trap so that’s why she fired that arrow at the forcefield. I mean, shit, they don’t exactly teach us about the workings of electricity in Twelve!”

Flickerman held up a hand to halt Haymitch’s temper. “Of course, Haymitch. I believe you. But what about Peeta, who disappeared with the rebels who retrieved her? Do you believe he was part of the rebel plot?”

Haymitch threw up his hands in an impatient gesture. “He’s a seventeen-year-old who thought he was going to lose the girl he loved. Were any of us smart when it came to people we loved at that age? He was desperate. I doubt he even really knew what he was getting himself into. All anyone had to tell him was ‘We’ll get her out alive for you’ and he probably didn’t even bother to ask who they were and what they wanted her for!”

“So you believe the rebels...”

“Probably told him as little as possible. Look, Peeta’s a good kid. You saw how far he was willing to go for her last year. He wouldn’t want to see anyone get hurt, that’s all. And if he had some kind of actual plan prior to Katniss and me being put into the arena, he probably would have tried to involve me in it, don’t you think? Given that we both were doing our best to bring her home?”

“Certainly. We all saw how much he loves her. It’s certainly within reason that the rebels could have kept him in the dark.”

There were some noises of temper and impatience in Command right then. A faint mutter of, “Traitor.” Well, that was hardly worse than what Gale knew they’d called him in Twelve over the years. Useless. Drunk. Worthless. Capitol pet. But why was he lying like this? He’d planned the whole thing himself. Why shouldn’t he step up proudly and claim what he’d done, given a ready audience like this? He could do more for the war by rallying people like that, by letting them know how deliberate the plan had been, rather than by cringing and lying like this. Gale just didn’t see the payoff to it. It seemed cowardly.

“Our time is about up here, but do you have anything to say to either of them?”

Haymitch stared into the camera, Seam grey eyes bright and intent. “Be careful. Don’t just be pawns. Think about exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Make your own decisions.”

As the broadcast ended, Command exploded with more accusations, Thirteen natives yelling at Plutarch. He saw Katniss slip out, followed closely by the bright blond hair of Peeta. One of Coin’s lackeys caught him. “We’re going to need your communicuff,” he said.

Gale calmly unfastened it and handed it over. So apparently Thirteen gave, and Thirteen took away on a whim. But at least they were determined to fight. “Fine. Take it. Now let me go.”

The hand on his arm didn’t let go. “President Co--” Gale elbowed him in the nose in the still-surging chaos to give him the slip, and got out the door. Finally he caught up with Katniss and Peeta a corridor away.

“...you see what he’s doing?” Peeta was telling her, an intense look on his face.

“Gale!” Katniss said looking at him in shock. “You’re bleeding.”

He glanced down to see a few drops of blood on his grey uniform shirt. “I just hit one of Coin’s men in the face when he tried to stop me leaving.” He held up his wrist. “Took back my communicuff for some reason.” He shrugged. “I felt like a jerk walking around with it anyway, always beeping.” Always on leash for Thirteen, always at their beck and call. It was a little annoying. “It’s a good demotion.”

Peeta sighed, shook his head, and resumed his explanation. “He’s giving us a chance, Katniss! If it all goes wrong, he’s trying to give us room to claim we didn’t know anything.”

Much as it galled him to agree with Peeta Mellark, when he thought about it, the other boy was right. “He’s still trying to keep you alive,” he told Katniss. “Same technique he had you use after the last Games. You get to play ignorant and he,” he nodded to Peeta, “plays so lovestruck he was easy pickings for anyone who’d just tell him they’d get you out.”

“What’s he want me to do? Wander around aimlessly and behave and sit out the war in hopes Snow will keep his hands off me if we lose? We can’t go back to before, with the Games and everything! We can’t undo the destruction of Twelve!”

“Of course we can’t,” Gale agreed. “Everything that’s happened, losing Twelve, is totally worthless if we just surrender. He was there in the mayor’s office! He has to have seen what they did to our district.” That was the frustrating thing. Having seen the devastation, suddenly the old drunk lost all his will to rebel? A sight like that should inspire them all even more to go out and get the job done, to make the sacrifice worth it.

“It doesn't make sense. He put in that much effort to get you out, Katniss,” Peeta said with a shake of his head. “All those months, pushing himself so hard, losing all those people in the arena, just to get you out alive and get this rebellion started. I don’t understand why he’d suddenly backtrack like this. Not unless they’re threatening you in some way and he’s trying to protect you by suggesting you stay safe.”

Katniss was scowling in concentration. “Haymitch and his damn messages,” she mumbled half to herself. She shook her head. “Think about what you’re doing and exactly why you’re doing it. Make your own decisions,” she quoted him slowly.

Suddenly she sucked in a sharp breath, obviously having come to some kind of important realization. “He was there in Twelve, Gale, you’re right. He saw exactly what they did to it. I don’t think he’s trying to scare me off from the war. He’s telling me that he’s giving me the option to stay out of it if I want, but that...that I need to choose this for myself.” She looked up at the two of them and her grey eyes burned with a fierce passion that made Gale smile. “So I’ll do it. I’ll be the Mockingjay.”

Chapter Text

Annie visited Finnick in the hospital every day now, and every day he looked a little stronger, a little more settled. It was unusual that after five years of him being her anchor, right now she was the one filling that role for him, but it seemed like that was the case. She hadn’t seen the moment it happened, but apparently he had endured a severe electric shock when the forcefield went down. When they retrieved him and she rushed to hold him, she was as much holding him up as embracing him. “Finnick, it’s me,” she told him, watching for a sign of recognition in those green eyes. “It’s Annie.”

His fingers slowly curled into the fabric of her blouse and he mumbled, “Annie.” That was when she knew that no matter how injured he was, she could still pull him back. Some days were better than others. She would eat her meal because they wouldn’t let her bring her tray down here and go to see him, and he’d be waiting for her with an eager smile. Days she’d just sit down on the edge of his bed and he always ate his meal so slowly because he had an arm around her, telling her, “I don’t want to let you go again.”

There were other days that weren’t so good, days when she’d get there and he’d look at her with a blank, confused expression. She could just see that in his mind he was trying to swim, to fight his way up through the dark waters and find the light of the surface. On those days she’d take his hand and sit down and gently remind him, “It’s Annie, Finnick.” Telling him some of their memories until finally he surfaced and he’d look at her with recognition and love and she knew it would be all right. She didn’t realize how difficult it must be for him to watch her slip away until she’d undergone it herself. But unlike her, at least the doctors expected Finnick to eventually make a full recovery.

She wished she could be strong enough to always be there, but sometimes the dark waters came for her again. Even a small flicker of a reminder could do it sometimes. She’d been lucky so far. Finnick had always been aware when it happened and he called her back like he always had. She didn’t like to think about what it would be like if they both were in the flood and drowning at the same time. She had come to think of Peeta as a friend but their acquaintance was so new. She didn’t know if that was powerful enough to call her back, not in the way Finnick was a stout, strong lifeline.

There were no other Four victors in Thirteen. None of either of their families and President Coin had informed them that shortly after the arena went down they’d been executed. Taken out and shot. When that happened she’d imagined it, her mom and dad and Branna and Unalla and Cormack all bleeding out their lives on the paving stones of the square, thought about their blank and lifeless green eyes and Finnick’s family too who’d always been so kind to her...she’d felt the shaking of another attack as it came over her but she couldn’t fight it off because she was screaming, inside and out.

She and Finnick held on to each other that night in his hospital bed and they grieved for their dead kin, shedding their salt water tears for them. It was only the next morning that she realized Greggory, the night nurse, didn’t do his usual bedtime check of Finnick and she was grateful to him for that, for letting them have the privacy of their tears. Maybe there were people with a heart here in Thirteen, because sometimes they seemed so cold and sterile and industrial, like the artificial steel walls and fluorescent lights of their home had sapped all the natural things of feeling from them. The people of Thirteen were grey and cold and the people of the Capitol were colorful and decadent but they both alarmed her because it seemed like they had forgotten how to simply be human.

The next day, after Doctor Aurelius did his daily psychological exam, Finnick told Annie that Katniss had gone to District Eight to visit a hospital there filled with wounded from a Capitol attack. “They wouldn’t let me go,” he said glumly. “She told me Beetee had a new trident for me. I only realized when I was down there what she did. She...she let me down easy and let us both save face.” But the shame of it was there in his voice, the knowledge that he’d been judged and deemed unfit and left behind.

She reached for his hand and held it tight. “You’re still healing, Finn,” she told him. “You can’t rush these things.” She smiled at him, reaching out with her other hand and rubbing his arm lightly in a soft caress. “You’ve been patient with me all these years. So be a little patient with yourself, OK?” Over the years of her own mental issues and Finnick’s being taken from her and sold, she’d had to learn the value of waiting and having faith in the sheer power of time.

He obviously took that to heart because she felt him relax. Then he chuckled softly and said, “I pulled off my hospital gown when she asked me to put on pants. Asked her if she found that distracting.”

She laughed out loud, a sound that brightened up the dreary hospital and drab Thirteen for her, just imagining it. “I don’t know about Katniss but I’d find it really distracting,” she promised him, wishing they weren’t in a public hospital ward right now.

He smiled that smile of his, the one that had nothing of the Capitol heartthrob and everything of the young man from Four, a smile that was in the warmth of his eyes too. Honest desire, not fake seduction. It was a smile that promised he’d do his best to get better and move out of the hospital, because he really wanted to get her alone.

Peeta came after dinner just as she was teasingly coaxing Finnick into finishing his turnips, and found them talking. The look on his face was distressed, and he didn’t waste time with preludes. “President Coin wants Katniss to rewatch the tape of the Quell in the morning.”

Both of them looked at him incredulously. Forcing a victor to watch their Games again was a level of cruelty even the Capitol hadn’t quite managed. Annie had never, ever done it. Any time even a clip came on, she turned away, hoping she’d done it in time to prevent an episode from starting. “Why?” she finally ventured carefully. Clearly there had to be some reason.

“She and I were telling them that what Haymitch said in his interview from Twelve wasn’t necessarily what he actually meant--I mean, Haymitch always has had this way of saying things behind what he puts right out there and she and I both know that and Katniss has always been really good at figuring--” Peeta shook his head, obviously hearing that he was rambling, and gave a deep breath as he forced himself to gather his thoughts. He tried again, more cautiously. “Coin believes Haymitch could have said something during the Games that’s of some strategic importance. Some kind of hidden message to Katniss or even me. So she wants both of us to watch it just in case.”

“I’ll watch with you,” Finnick said almost immediately. Annie squeezed his hand lightly. There were some things he wouldn’t want to see. Mags’ death, for sure. He looked back over at her and there was no confusion or uncertainty in his eyes. He’d been Katniss’ ally in the arena and obviously he meant to continue to be there for her now. “I might as well. I’ve known Haymitch long enough that I might pick up on something too.”

She didn’t know Haymitch all that well but she said she’d do it also. She’d already managed to watch most of it once already on a mentor console, and she wanted to be there for Finnick. Besides, it ought to be as true here as in the Capitol: victors protected each other.

The next morning she sat there and held Finnick’s hand while they watched the Games. She’d have preferred it was just the four of them, the victors, but one of Coin’s higher-up men was there, and Katniss’ cousin Gale too.

Finnick watched himself kill Laurence Talbot from Five at the Cornucopia and there was no expression on his face but she felt the sudden pressure of his fingers in hers.

When the massive white bear mutt finally was racing towards Mags, standing there defiantly and refusing to run, she saw Finnick closed his eyes, just before she closed hers, and they were holding on to each other’s hand for dear life. The sounds were bad enough, the growls and the horrible crunching noises and the way Mags’ cries faded to moans then faded to absolute silence.

Well, Coin, she said in her head, trembling as Mags died all over again, immortalized on tape, I hope us watching this is actually worth it.

Peeta watched, just like he had in Mentor Central. Not because he was fascinated by the violence of it like a Capitol citizen would be, but because someone needed to bear witness to Mags’ death and obviously both Finnick and Annie couldn’t stand it right now. He understood that. Watching someone they loved die was almost impossible. It was the fear he’d lived with every minute of sitting at his mentor console with Katniss being in that arena.

She died bravely. That didn’t mean she died well. At least it killed her relatively quickly compared to how the mutts had chewed on Cato for hours and hours and they’d heard his strangled animal moans all through the night.

Katniss was obviously struggling with it too, sitting next to Gale, and he would have reached out for her but he was almost certain it wouldn’t be welcome. He’d been watching her just as much as the Games, and saw how tense she was when she and Haymitch talked about her father. Gale hadn’t reacted to the mention that Haymitch knew his father too, not that Peeta saw.

She did react to Johanna Mason declaring her affections for him when they were both trapped in the thermal extreme zone, and Haymitch apparently returning them. “What?” she said, turning to stare at him. “You didn’t tell me about this?” Of course he didn't. She hadn't exactly been talking to him of late. He’d seen it live on his screen, although something about it struck him as off.

“I didn’t because it felt odd. It’s not like him,” Peeta said, as confused by it now as he had been then. Haymitch really never came across as recklessly passionate. Or secretly in love, for that matter.

“Oh, no, he’s definitely acting,” Finnick said flatly, but his tone betrayed no doubt about it. “So is Jo.” Obviously thanks to a longer acquaintance he was familiar with whatever tells Haymitch had.

“What for?” Gale asked in irritation. “Trying a repeat of his little ‘star crossed lovers’ act from last year to drum up some sympathy for the two of them?” There was definitely some venom in his tone, and Peeta was getting really tired of how openly bitter he was about it now that they weren’t in Twelve and he could speak his mind more freely. It kept Katniss alive. Would he rather she died?

“Not likely,” Finnick told him. “I know how convinced we all were that we probably wouldn’t survive. So I imagine Johanna did it only to mess with a few Capitol heads, and Haymitch agreed.”

Gale gave a snort of amusement. “Then that’s the first thing that man’s done that I actually like.”

“I wasn’t aware he needed to ask for your approval on everything,” Peeta snapped. Gale turned in his seat and glowered at him.

Annie said mildly, “Now isn’t the time. We’re supposed to be watching for messages. If you’re going to forget that and insist on fighting, take it outside this room so we can keep doing our job and so you don’t make Katniss a part of it.”

Embarrassed, realizing she was right, Peeta looked at Katniss’ awkward expression at being caught in the middle of this, nodded, and sat back in his seat.

After the jabberjays, Gale asked Finnick nonchalantly, “Acting?” when Haymitch’s arm went around Johanna out in the woods after she yelled about having nobody left to torture. But he was trying a little too hard to act like he didn’t care. Peeta had noticed Gale had been sitting there looking pained himself at some of the jabberjay screams, and he recognized the names Katniss was saying onscreen as some of Gale’s younger siblings.

“Real,” Finnick said, a little shaky himself, and Annie’s arm was tight around him as they’d listened to her voice in jabberjay throats and Finnick on the ground screaming for her. “I’m pretty sure. They’re friends, after all.”

“I’m not hearing anything yet that sounds like a message from him,” Katniss said with a sigh. “No matter how hard I try to read something into it.”

“There’s a bit left yet,” Peeta said, trying to encourage her.

Katniss watched Johanna bash her over the head, dropping her to the ground like a rag doll, and cutting out her tracker. For a split second, the silver shape of it was visible in her hand, bloody as it and her fingers were. Claudius and Caesar were speculating on it, confused. Maybe she’s hoping to confuse the moment of death by taking away the biostatistic capability of the tracker?

I don’t know, Claudius. The hovercraft will have a far more difficult time locating Katniss’ body without it. Particularly if Johanna hides it. Maybe that’s the point.

“So that’s how they knew she was a rebel,” Katniss said softly. “They saw her dig the tracker out.”

Chaff got eaten by the shining silver insects, screaming as their pincers stripped him down to the bone. The cannon shot rang out and with that back at the lightning tree Haymitch’s head whipped up and there was a look of undisguised horror on his face.

Peeta had seen this aboard the hovercraft but he watched it again now: Johanna avoiding Enobaria and Brutus, Haymitch finding Enobaria and attacking her with sheer ferocity and rage, Enobaria and Brutus suddenly refusing to fight. Then, as Finnick’s feet tangled in a coil of the wire as he tried to get back to Katniss, and Katniss fired her arrow, the lightning struck and the screen went blank.

They all sat there in silence until finally Katniss said wearily, “I didn’t see anything from him. No messages.”

“Me either,” Peeta was forced to admit. He’d seen a lot more than usual from Haymitch, often such a closed book except for cynicism or irritation, but no sense of any veiled messages to either of them.

The blank screen flickered and the anthem of Panem played as the Capitol seal was displayed. Caesar Flickerman appeared on the stage of his studio, grinning his dazzling white grin, and as Gale reached for the remote with a snort of annoyance, Katniss waved him off. “It’s an interview. Let’s see if it might be Haymitch again.”

It was. But he heard Katniss’ cry of dismay. When they’d seen his previous interview only a week ago, he looked a little tired but in reasonably good shape. The man on screen now looked terrible. He’d probably lost a good twenty pounds, and Haymitch had never been a big, strongly built man like Brutus or Gale to begin. The bones of his face were too visible under waxy skin that even prep couldn’t quite fix, all sharp angles. The way he moved carefully spoke of a great deal of pain that even a small shift of position cost him. His hands shook and twitched restlessly. The worst part was his eyes, though. Even when he was drunk there was usually a sense of awareness there. When he was sober, looking at those eyes, Peeta couldn’t help but be aware of the intelligence and cleverness of the man. Now his eyes were strangely blank. They wandered all over the studio, and occasionally he’d stop and stare at something, expression alternating between confusion and alarm.

Caesar usually had to repeat his questions more than once. Haymitch’s answers were usually dazed, sometimes trailing off in the middle. Caesar seemed to recognize it and throughout the interview, his questions became simpler. “Is there anything you’d like to say to Katniss?” Caesar asked him almost gently.

Now there was a flicker of awareness, as if he was struggling to maintain it against whatever had him in its grip. “Be safe,” Haymitch murmured tiredly.

“Be safe,” Caesar repeated. “The sentiments of a concerned father for his daughter.” Haymitch didn’t bother answering, by now staring off in the distance in the studio.

The seal displayed again and Gale shut the television off. None of them stopped him. “What are they doing to him?” Katniss said in a bare whisper. “I know they must be torturing him, but...I’ve never seen him that out of it. Even drunk.”

“They must have taped that interview in Twelve shortly after you got rescued.” It had been almost six weeks since then. Plenty of time to slowly torture him into the state they saw him in now.

“Drugs of some kind,” Finnick said quietly. “That would be my guess. Maybe it was just a sedative to make sure he didn’t say anything too inflammatory.” He sounded doubtful, though.

“Well, they screwed up the dosage,” Gale observed. “The way he was acting, he could probably barely remember his own name. Not that I’d put good odds on that most days, the old waste case.”

“Stop it!” Katniss snapped at him.

“Have you forgotten he just let forty-six of our kids die?” Gale snapped. “You used to say plenty against him! Look, I appreciate he helped get you out of the arena, and I’m sorry he got captured because I wouldn’t wish the Capitol on a dog, but we can’t do anything about it. And now he's upsetting you and--”

“He saved your life too,” Peeta said. “He’s one of the people who actually managed to get Thread to stand down and keep you from getting whipped to death.” He understood the Seam sense of debt enough to know that Gale probably ought to be grateful for that.

“He had friends once, Gale,” Katniss told him. “Your pa, mine too. You heard him say that, same as I did. He wasn’t always like he is now. I’m sorry, Gale, but you don’t know what it’s like--”

Gale looked at them. “Fine,” he told Katniss, his tone harsh and hurt. “I see how it is. Only the people that have been through the Games are allowed to have opinions that count. Too bad I made it through six years of reapings, huh?”

“Gale...” But he was already on his way out the door. Katniss was hard on his heels. Peeta instinctively followed her.

“Let him go,” he told her, catching her by the wrist. Gale was too far gone in temper and hurt. He could see that talking with him would just upset Katniss more.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she snapped at him. “No more Gale, you think I’m just gonna come right back to you? I haven’t forgiven you yet for lying to me, Peeta.”

He was on the verge of apologizing again but a month of apologies had gotten him nowhere. She seemed to be just as annoyed with him as ever. Haymitch would confront her. The two of them would butt heads and then apparently just get over it. Maybe he needed to try that and see if it worked. “So hit me again or say whatever you have to say, Katniss,” he said. “Get it over with. I’m tired of waiting for it and I’m not ever going to apologize again for saving your life. I’ll apologize for lying, but we did it in case you got captured. You see what they’re doing to Haymitch, because of what he knows. We were trying to protect you by not telling you what was going on.”

She looked at him for a few long moments, grey eyes searching him as if trying to see if he was lying again. He wouldn’t tell her how he and Haymitch both also agreed she was much better off-script. “I care about you, and I know this isn’t easy for you. I want to be there for you. Even if just as your friend.” It hurt a little to say that but obviously entertaining hopes she was falling for him was stupid right now.

She sighed, arms folded over her chest, weighing what he had said. Finally she spoke. “Just don’t lie to me again, Peeta,” she said quietly. “I’m not some little girl who can’t handle the truth. I can’t keep walking into things blind and you and Haymitch just expect me to be able to handle whatever plan you two come up with because you think my reaction will look better when I’ve been kept in the dark. I’m not going to be a stupid propo for you.” He remembered himself shouting at her and Haymitch in the dome of Eleven’s Justice Building on the Victory Tour and how angry he’d been at being shut out by the two of them. He realized she was right. “We’re lucky I figured the thing out with the arrow and the forcefield in time. It could have easily gone wrong.”

“It could have.” She was right. With Beetee down for the count, the chance could have passed them by with Katniss not understanding the plan and what it required.

“I need to be able to trust you.” She looked at him again, more directly, and added, “I want to trust you. Haymitch isn’t here,” her voice wavered a little bit, “so I really don’t want to lose you too.”

“You’ll be in the loop,” he promised her. “Just let me help you with this.” She shouldn't be left to just the mercies of Thirteen and Plutarch searching out great camera opportunities, or even Gale's apparent growing need to hurt the Capitol in any way possible. She needed someone who just cared about Katniss herself, not the Mockingjay.

She stepped forward and put her arms around him. It was the kind of rough hug of a friend, the sort where she didn’t let her body relax into his at all so there was no mistaking romantic intent, but a hug nonetheless. “Thank you.”

Chapter Text

In her dimly lit cell, Enobaria waited. Waited for the interrogators to come again, waited for her execution. She didn’t wait for forgiveness because of course that would never come. Why would it? She had failed in every way. She had become the one thing a citizen of Two should never be: a traitor. Least of all a victor, someone who’d been such a recipient of the Capitol’s generosity and its affection over the last thirteen years.

She had been weak. She freely admitted that, to herself and to those who questioned her. She knew nothing at all about supposed “rebel secrets” and soon enough they stopped asking, but she had been soft and sentimental and stupid. The burden of killing the only friends she’d ever had, of seeing Cashmere and Gloss die in front of her eyes--though at least she hadn’t had to kill them herself--had weakened her resolve. By the end of the Games she wavered, and seeing that Brutus had decisively put down his sword, it introduced one critical moment that made her follow suit, relieved to put down the burden of it.

Not that she would blame Brutus for it. She heard him sometimes, yelling in pain from down the hall, and knew he was still alive too. Heard other voices too that she couldn’t place. But early on in Two they learned that fuck-ups were something a child was expected to claim for themselves. As tribute trainees it only intensified. The punishment for failure was harsh enough to make sure they learned to not make the same mistake twice. The punishment for trying to blame failures on others, sniffling that it wasn’t your fault, was far harder. You fucked up, Candidate Reska, the instructors would bark, so let me hear you say it! You and only you!

I fucked up, sir! she’d yell as she was running the gauntlet, dodging and defending against the blows as best she could. Me, and only me! She and Brutus may have shared the same weakness but at the moment of decision, the choice had been only hers. They were even more disgusted with her, of course. Brutus had never been beloved here in the Capitol or in Two, but they expected better of her. The fact her head interrogator was a Peacekeeper from Two was deliberate, she was sure, and she knew she deserved every moment of how he sought to punish her for betraying their district.

She wouldn’t blame Brutus for this. She had the feeling he was blaming himself plenty down in his own cell, wrestling with a deeper disgrace than he had ever known. She wouldn’t even blame Haymitch, even if she maybe could have made them believe that clever Haymitch with his seemingly harmless words, like silk scarves that hid their purpose as a garrote, had twisted her mind all up. The only thing she could perhaps fault him for was not killing her when he had the chance. She had underestimated him, which Brutus warned her not to do. She’d watched his victor tape with Brutus and seen that at sixteen he’d been formidable with that knife. Now he was naturally a bit less agile, but still remarkably quick, and with as calm and precise as the tribute training made her in a fight, she hadn’t calculated on the edge his sheer wild rage would give him over her. The sort of fury where he would gladly step right onto the blade of her knife and die himself, if only he saw her destroyed in the bargain.

She should have figured. She’d even told Brutus she thought he’d do anything for the girl. He had defeated her fairly with knives and not words, and then he let her live, to become this. Traitor, disgrace. She should have died there in the arena rather than see herself live under this kind of shame. A moment of weakness, that was all it had been. But she knew letting her guard down even for an instant could be deadly. She’d just gotten soft, encouraged by the Capitol that loved her to care about other victors in turn, to befriend them. They had wanted it of her so of course she would do what they asked. It was her duty to serve. In time it became less about duty and more about actually liking the others. Maybe she should just have kept duty at the forefront of her mind and she’d have avoided all this.

They made her cry out in pain with the things they did to her, but that wasn’t something that intensely bothered her. Candidates in training yelled out in pain too and it wasn’t considered a failing. The instructors taught them that to withstand the pain as long as possible was admirable and they should strive to always push that limit further. But in the end to cry out was only natural. It was only when the cries turned to sniveling tears or pleas to make it stop that it became being weak. She stayed silent as long as she could but eventually the pain became too much. She never blubbered and she never begged.

Someday, maybe someday soon, they would take her from this cell and execute her. She would go willingly, no whining and pleading for her life, no excuses. Accepting her punishment with the stoicism of a Two citizen, she would finally die. It wouldn’t wipe away the sin of treason from her name but it would end the guilt of her having to live with it so that would be a welcome thing. “I fucked up, sir,” she said to the empty air with an empty laugh, staring up at the steel ceiling of her cell. “Me, and only me.” The trouble was she thought she might make the same mistake again, given the chance.

They killed Portia next. She died faster than Darius and Haymitch didn’t think that was weakness on her part. They’d probably just killed her quicker having seen with Lavinia and Darius that while seeing them in pain on his account was bad enough for him, death was what made it really sink its claws in. Death was irreversible. Death meant another face that he’d see sometimes when he looked up, standing in the corner of his cell and looking at him with that judgmental expression.

Portia was standing there when they came for him again, her pale skin and her turquoise braids all spattered with blood. This time he wasn’t quite as out of it, because last time when he was still coming down off a venom episode and started protesting and saying things about it, they’d just shot him full of sedative so he could go on camera. They’d given him too much, because even trying to process Caesar’s questions to him had been like trying to do anything at all while roaring drunk. It didn’t help that he was seeing the dead even at the studio, though, and every time he saw one he’d end up looking at it and trying to tell himself the ghost wasn’t real, it was just the venom.

It would have been nice if sedatives got rid of the ghosts. Now, a nice bottle of whiskey would probably do it. At least, he was pretty sure it would. Though he’d never seen ghosts this bad before when he was wide awake. Maybe even that wouldn’t be enough now.

Too much venom. Some days he could still taste it at the back of his throat. The worst part was that he was still aware enough to know he was gradually going crazy and that the line of reality was blurring. He was starting to wonder sometimes if Johanna’s voice in the next cell was just in his imagination too, except they hadn’t killed her in front of him yet and she hadn’t appeared as a ghost so it had to be real. He was losing his grip by slow inches. They’d taken his body from him when he was seventeen--no, to be honest, they took it from him when he was sixteen and they claimed it as their right when he was reaped. What they did to him starting when he was seventeen was just a continuation of that claim. They’d taken his body but they had always left him the privacy of his mind, but this time the punishment was that they’d take that too.

Eventually there would be nothing left of him. He didn’t doubt that Snow would still be dangling him in front of Katniss on television at that point. He hoped she had the good sense to realize she was being baited even now and to keep away. If she did that someday Snow would realize he was worthless as leverage.

But for now they’d continue to play their little game. At least this time he was more aware and he was careful to not say anything to make them think they had to shoot him full of drugs so he wouldn’t go raving insane on camera. He wouldn’t, he was confident of that. His mind and his reasoning were pretty sound right now because it had been a few days since they gave him a venom dose. He’d even try to ignore any ghosts that popped up.

They took him to Cinna for prep. This was part of the routine too, he supposed. Letting both of them see how the other had deteriorated in the period since the last interview. Cinna looked rough, he had to admit. He looked at the other man, comparing notes to the vague impression he got at the last interview prep, even as out of it as he’d been. Compared both of them to how he’d looked in Twelve. There was no clear sense of time but Cinna was his clock right then, the comparison of his state becoming Haymitch’s measure of time passing. He’s not dying yet but he’s getting close to the tipping point. After all, they didn’t need to keep Cinna alive the way they did him. That meant he could probably expect them to bring Cinna to his cell soon to finish him off and make Haymitch watch.

“Portia’s dead,” he told Cinna, his voice husky and rough in his own ears. Cinna probably didn’t know. He should. Portia had been his partner, in all ways.

“No talking,” the guard growled at him, but he didn’t risk hitting him, not when he was being made camera-ready. Well, that was really a joke. A bit of paint and powder and nice clothes weren’t going to hide that he was in bad shape himself. He suspected Cinna deliberately did the absolute minimum required to hide his injuries rather than actually using all his art to conceal them. That was good. The truth got buried under Capitol lies far too much.

“We’re just having a friendly conversation,” he told the guard dryly, enjoying the fact he knew the man couldn’t beat on him at the moment. Not that he wouldn’t pay for it later, but the momentary immunity was a pleasant thing. So was consciously gathering up his will, presenting his usual casual insolence. “So, Cinna, your take on the Capitol hoopball league this year? I think the Jabberjays look pretty strong.” He glanced up at the guard. “How about you? I’d take you as more of a Tormadillos fan.”

The guard gave a low bark of laughter. “Real cute, Abernathy. They told me to tell you this. My brother’s in the air defense wing. They’ve got orders to bomb your little rebel alliance in Thirteen tonight. We did such a good job on Twelve that you know they’re good as dead. So now you get to sit there all night imagining that. Enjoy.”

He hadn’t been stupid enough to imagine they wouldn’t figure out where Katniss was. Obviously Snow knew Thirteen still existed. But that they were that ready to go after her--shit, he should have figured Snow wouldn’t have just one plan in line. They’d done a good job on Twelve, all right. Attacked with no mercy and no warning.

No warning. He tried to control his reaction so the guard wouldn’t see a flash of inspiration had just struck him. They were going to stick him on national television in just a few minutes. Assumedly, they were even seeing this in Thirteen that Snow imagined Katniss was seeing him on the screen. He wanted to laugh in sheer delight. It wasn’t much but it seemed for this moment he was still in the game as a player rather than a puppet, with one last useful hand to lay down. He’d pay for it later, he was sure, and after this there was no chance in hell they’d tell him anything of use. But it was something at least.

Waiting backstage, presumably for Caesar to do his introduction, he smelled blood and roses behind him. His fingers curled into his palms, forming tight fists so his hands wouldn’t shake even worse. “Your last interview left something to be desired,” Snow informed him softly, staying right behind him. Haymitch didn’t turn to see him. He didn't want to see his face because if he did he'd feel the usual mixture of rage and loathing and fear, and he couldn't afford that right now, not when he needed his mind as clear as it could be. “So this time, there will be a prompter for you. You’ll read the lines given to you. Then you’ll plead with your dear daughter to give up the fight before it’s too late. Is that understood?”

Insolent Haymitch would snort and ask, Or what? You’ll kill someone else in front of me? We’re all dead anyway. The temptation was right there, the words on the tip of his tongue. He put them aside. If he showed he could still come out fighting, even a little bit, that might slam the door of this chance in his face. So instead he only murmured a distracted, “Yes.”

As he walked slowly out onto the stage, seeing it was set up with an impressive podium with a heavy mahogany lectern bearing the Capitol seal and another chair alongside, he was surprised to see that apparently Snow was there as the host, rather than Caesar. Perched in the chair as Snow took his place at the lectern, he suppressed a smile. Look, it’s the puppeteer and his little dummy. He’d been a real boy once, long time ago. Then he got turned into a puppet. No, it wasn’t so bad right now in his mind. He could still glance around and see a ghost here and there, staring at him from out in the empty audience seats but it was like balancing on the far edge of tipsy. Things were a bit fuzzy but with some effort he could focus. He’d done this before. Hell, he’d done this through most of the Games last year.

Snow gave his introductory speech which he deliberately didn’t listen to, trying to gather his thoughts and shove the fog in his mind aside. He’d need to be as sharp as he could be to find an opening and pull this off. Then the prompter flickered to life and he read the lines they gave him. Talking about all the things destroyed by illicit rebel activity. Communications in Five. Grain shipments from Nine. All the while he was trying to not break out into a smile. Good on you, Mockingjay. You’re pulling ‘em together.

Suddenly then the screen showing the feed where he was discussing a broken dam in Seven showed a scratched and tired-looking Katniss saying, “...District Eight where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of wounded people. There will be no survivors...”

After those few seconds they returned to himself and Snow. “Keep going,” Snow hissed at him in a low undertone, too low for the cameras. Obediently he started talking about destroyed train tracks in Four, disrupting the food supply. Then Finnick was there, talking about Rue, the tiny little girl Katniss had covered in flowers last year. Haymitch had shoved a bottle in Chaff’s hand when the girl died, knowing this one would hurt more than most.

It went back and forth. Him droning on about rebel damage and all the while using the information to piece together a portrait of what districts had rebelled up since the Quell and concluding with something close to utter delight that almost everybody but Two was in to some extent. The rebels--and if that wasn’t Beetee manning the console to cut into the Capitol feed he’d be surprised--countered with their own shots and reports, and everywhere, Katniss leading the charge.

The screen went blank and the broadcast booth slapped the seal of Panem on the screen as Snow called up to them, “Keep control of this!”

“We can’t, sir,” they said apologetically. He sat there, doing his best to not start laughing in sheer relieved glee. She was out there, and they were winning. Snow had screwed up, assumed he was a bit more beaten down than he apparently was. Giving him this, letting him see exactly how well the rebellion was going--hell, he could almost kiss the bastard for it.

When the feed resumed Snow said coldly, “It seems the rebels are attempting to prevent the dissemination of truth about their destructive activities. Their fear of incrimination only proves the lawlessness of their actions, but I promise that truth and justice will find them and order will be restored to the citizens of Panem. The recitation of their crimes will resume once security has been restored.”

A cold stab of fear hit him then, feeling his chance slip through his fingers to warn them. If they were ending the broadcast here, that was it. But then there was a gift, a little piece of grace that might have as well been sent in on a silver parachute. Snow turned to him and said, “Given the demonstration of her so-called cause shown tonight, do you have any words for Katniss Everdeen?”

Pick your words carefully, he told himself. He needed to do it so Snow wouldn’t cut him off for it being an obvious warning to her, but he needed to make it so that Katniss would listen up and hopefully get the message. “It’s got to be getting up on autumn now,” he said. “That means winter is coming. I saw you were in Eight. So you’re up in the north? The cold comes early there. Even now it’s coming. It’s inevitable. It’ll be there before you know it, before you’re ready for it. You remember how hard it was in Twelve last winter. How hard snow came down on us. How we all suffered because of it. You really want to wage a war through all of that? Think about what that’ll mean and how tough it’ll be. You’re not a fighter for the fight’s sake. I imagine you’re fighting right now because you think it’ll protect people. So do that. Don’t just fight because they tell you to and ignore the hardship that’s coming. You need to do what you have to do to keep people safe. You always have.”

With that they sat there in silence and apparently the rebels were done breaking in. Snow apparently was pleased with his supposed appeal to Katniss’ softer, humanitarian side. “Heed his advice, Miss Everdeen,” he advised Katniss.

They weren’t in a hurry to cut the cameras, though, maybe hoping he’d continue his plea with Katniss and do further damage to her resolve. Snow was right there, not Caesar. Anything he said right now the man would have to react to directly and on the spot with the whole of Panem watching it, not from the leisurely safety of his office after he had time to ponder a message delivered by someone else. He’d likely never get a chance as golden as this again. Snow wanted to make him into leverage to use against Katniss. Even if she didn’t much care for him, she was Seam and he knew damn well how powerful guilt and obligation could be. How, even lacking anyone he directly loved or cared about, that been used against him to great effect for years and years. So if he removed himself from the picture, that would certainly help Katniss, and it would certainly help him escape this cycle of tired bullshit, of being just a plaything for Snow’s purposes. He spied the opening when Snow’s guard was down and the cameras were still rolling. Even if he was absolutely making it up on the spot and praying it would work out like he anticipated it would, he leaped to seize the opportunity.

He glanced over at Snow. “By the way,” he said, “I’m absolutely guilty. I made contact with the rebels. I thought up the whole plan to get Katniss out of the arena. I convinced others to go along with it. I’ve wanted to overthrow you for years now, you malicious bastard.” There was no audience out in the seats. If there were people out there, he didn’t know if they’d be in an uproar or absolutely silent. He made it short and sweet so Snow wouldn’t have a chance to cut the cameras in the middle of it. Though he probably couldn’t risk that, or else it would look like he was the one had something to hide, trying to conceal a man attempting to confess to high treason on national television for all to see. A confession that now couldn’t be undone, ignored, or covered up, one that demanded swift and decisive action.

Snow didn’t bother concealing his fury and dislike as he stared at him. Only Haymitch knew it was a fierce rage at being unexpectedly outplayed by someone he’d thought effectively beaten down rather than the expected disgust at a traitor. “Then I have no choice but to sentence you and your fellow conspirators to death. The execution of yourself, Johanna Mason, Brutus Allamand, Enobaria Reska, Euphemia Trinket, and Cinnabar Locke will be in one week, and it will be public.” He almost spat the last words, held captive by his own Code of Conduct and its clear punishment for those convicted of treason. He couldn’t do anything else or else he’d have to answer to his own people wanting to know why he wasn’t following the law and executing a band of confessed traitors. “To all citizens of Panem, and particularly to the rebels, the execution of these six traitors will be mandatory programming for all to consider the price of treason enacted against a just and lawful government.”

So it would be a swift, public execution by hanging, rather than lingering and dying by slow torture in the Capitol prison. Katniss would be free of any shackles to him or the others. That was the best any of them could hope for now, and he’d just managed to secure it for all of them. Feeling a bit cocky at having at the very last outwitted the man who’d tormented his life for so damn long, he laughed and said mockingly, “Well, you’ve had two tries already to make my death a public spectacle. Let’s just hope you do better on the third attempt.”

“End it,” Snow growled up at the booth, giving an angry wave of his hand.

He saw the Peacekeepers coming from the corner of his eye, rifle butts at the ready, and knew he’d pay for those last words. Actually, chances were they’d all pay over the next week. He was under no illusions that he wouldn’t suffer a good bit in that span of time, but this time he knew exactly the boundaries of how badly they could hurt them and still have all six of them be presentable for the pageantry of a public execution. There was some comfort in that.

Twenty-five years ago the old manipulative bastard had put a twisted metal crown on his head and called him a victor. Last year he’d come close to feeling like he’d won in saving two kids, but finding out what lies and danger he’d condemned them to had dampened his elation somewhat. Right now, having finally cut the strings and with nothing left Snow could do to him, he actually finally felt victorious.

Chapter Text

They had announced a special presentation on Capitol programming that night, so Peeta was now with Katniss, Finnick, Annie, Gale, and the others in Command to view it. They’d all guessed that it was some kind of message on the war. Beetee was seated at his console, ready to try to disrupt the feed and strike with some of the propos they had ready. The new footage from Twelve was making Plutarch crow like a proud papa. Shut up, Peeta wanted to bark at him in agony, that was peoples’ lives! Going back there and walking through the ashes, seeing the ruin of the bakery, praying their bodies weren’t buried underneath the ruin but knowing they probably were, had been one of the worst moments of his life. Of course Plutarch asked him to talk about it. He could hardly believe it, but he was angrier at the Capitol than at Plutarch so he did it anyway.

Katniss had held him while he cried like a baby for his parents and his brothers, and he couldn’t thank her enough for that. She was all he had left now. Not a lover, and maybe it was better they both finally let go of the lie that had saved them both last year, but she was a friend at least.

Seeing President Snow, looking genteel and harmless as ever with his white beard and mustache and hair, like someone’s kindly old grandfather, made Peeta shudder. The times he’d seen the man up close when he was crowned victor and on the Victory Tour, it was only right near him that the cold cunning was visible in his eyes. Standing behind an imposing lectern, immaculately and formally dressed down to gloves on his hands, his signature white rose was in his lapel again. The Capitol seal was behind him. The camera drew back a bit to show the guest seated beside him: Haymitch.

None of them said anything for a minute. “He looks a little better?” Annie ventured carefully. Studying him, Peeta was inclined to agree. He still looked tired and roughed up, no question, but he didn’t seem as lost and dazed as last time. The sense of focus was back, as he started briskly reciting damage done around the districts by the rebel forces making significant gains.

“I’m in,” Beetee announced, just as the feed cut away to a shot of Katniss at the hospital in Eight, angry and hurt and defiant as she talked about the hospital.

“Good on you, Beetee!” someone called happily. Beetee waved a quick hand up over his shoulder in acknowledgment of it, but his focus was obviously on the broadcast.

The Capitol fought back and soon enough Snow and Haymitch returned, and Haymitch picked up where he’d left off. But there was a flicker of something there, almost a trace of a smile at having seen Katniss on screen. Or had Peeta just imagined that because he wanted it to be true?

The battle was on and Beetee and the Capitol traded blows, sometimes holding the attention of the nation for only ten seconds or so, sometimes half a minute or more. Finnick talked about Rue. Katniss walked through the ruins of Twelve. Then there was his own propo, standing in front of the ashes, the twisted iron of the oven visible behind him. “...where my father used to bake bread every day. Liam Mellark was no rebel. He was a kind man who gave treats to the kids of the district when my ma wasn’t looking. He’s dead now and this is all that’s left...”

“Oh, Peeta,” Katniss said sadly, and her hand slipped into his. The cheers around the room as Beetee kept seizing control of the broadcast contrasted with the two of them, still and silent and watching Haymitch as he almost boredly talked about the rebel damages.

When the Capitol broadcast came back again, Snow irritatedly tried to end the presentation, and then turned to Haymitch and asked if he had anything to say to Katniss.

Katniss drew in a tight breath and both of them were straining to listen as Haymitch spoke up. “Why is he talking about winter?” someone muttered. “It’s only the end of August.”

“Shut up, we’re trying to listen!” Finnick hissed at him, and Peeta was grateful to him for that.

Peeta could read from the way Haymitch was right now, the deliberate way he was choosing his words and how he looked directly and intently at the camera that he was saying something behind his words. He could read the older man’s body language in a way Katniss apparently couldn’t, but she could decipher his words in a way he couldn’t.

She looked at Coin, took a deep breath and said in a shaky voice, “I’m pretty sure he’s saying we’re--”

Just then Haymitch spoke up again. I’m absolutely guilty. How he could be so utterly calm admitting to treason and then hearing Snow sentence him to death, Peeta didn’t have any idea. If anything, he looked almost relaxed, able to laugh and deliberately prod Snow with that quip about failing to kill him twice already in the Games.

“That man’s got fucking balls.” He didn’t see who said that admiringly, because his eyes were riveted to the screen as Beetee flashed still shots of Katniss, Gale, and Peeta all in the ruined square in Twelve. Katniss let out a cry of alarm as the camera cut off just as a Peacekeeper was raising his rifle butt to hit Haymitch.

“You were saying something about what he was telling you?” Coin demanded of her, and Katniss stared at her.

“You can do it,” he told her softly, squeezing her hand, knowing that the horrifying thought of Haymitch being beaten, due to be executed had to be in the front of her mind. It was right there in his, in vivid and terrible colors like a painting that he never wanted to put to canvas.

Katniss struggled with it for a minute then finally said, “He’s saying we’re going to be attacked here in Thirteen. Tonight, I think.”

“Explain.” The single sharp word from Coin was a command, as she put her hands down on the table and leaned on it, studying Katniss with those unnervingly pale grey eyes.

“He said...he said,” again she had to take another ragged breath, forcing herself to go on. Peeta just kept hold of her hand. That apparently was enough.

“He said I needed to remember how hard snow came down on us last winter in Twelve. How much we suffered. He didn’t mean snow, because he didn’t say the snow, so he meant President Snow,” she explained. “And he said winter is coming here and that it’s already on its way. So that means they’re going to attack us. They’re going to bomb us like they did in Twelve. Probably very soon. I don’t know how long it would take the Capitol bombers to get here.”

“About twelve hours,” Boggs said grimly, and Peeta could see from his expression that he was listening and he was believing it.

“You’re very certain about this?” Coin said doubtfully. “It’s perhaps a stretch to get that interpretation. All I heard was him urging you to not wage a war in winter. And it seems as though the Capitol launching a direct strike against Thirteen is somewhat counterproductive.”

“You don’t know him,” Peeta told her firmly. “We do. So I would advise you start evacuating people as quickly as possible.” Seeing her expression he threw up his hands. “It’s not like he could just say it openly on the air, not without them cutting him off halfway through! They’re already beating him senseless for taunting Snow at the end there.”

“How do we know we can trust him?” another of Coin’s staff insisted. “He hasn’t exactly seemed on our side since his capture. Maybe he’s feeding us false information.”

“He just confessed to being a rebel on national television, and obviously that wasn’t faked, so what more proof do you need?” Finnick said fiercely.

All eyes in the room turned to the president, and Coin finally nodded. “Of course we’re prepared for a scenario like this. It’s been a good while since we’ve had a Level Five drill anyway, so even if Mister Abernathy’s information is mistaken or false, perhaps it’s time we conducted one anyway.” Casual as anything, pretending like Haymitch’s information had nothing to do with it. Heading over to a console beside Beetee, she began typing on a keyboard. “I’ve authorized the lockdown. All of you, report to your evacuation stations.” Just then the ear-piercing wail of the sirens began.

“Follow me,” Boggs said, gesturing to the two of them, and to Finnick and Annie. Wordlessly, they followed, and once they hit the crush of the crowd heading down flights of stairs, Katniss’ hand tightened in his own. There was no alarm or disorder, but she kept hold of him anyway.

Down, down, down, deep into the earth, deep as the coal mines they’d visited on school field trips, the mines Gale worked in and Katniss would have too if not for the Games, the mines where her father had died. The mines that were now a black, smoking ruin in the distance from the remains of Twelve. Coal fires burned for years, for centuries even. There had been a mine to the west that people in Twelve could see smoking on a clear day, one that had lit on fire in an explosion even before the Dark Days and it was still burning.

Boggs kept directing them on, through checkpoints and the like, down to a cavern with signs with letters and numbers. “Report to the sign matching your compartment,” he advised them.

“Peeta’s staying with me,” Katniss said firmly. Boggs raised an eyebrow. Katniss stared at him stubbornly, not backing down. “He’s got no family here like me or like Gale to be with during this. So he’s staying with me and with my ma and my sister,” she insisted. He wanted to look at her, questioning it himself, but if she was going to claim him as hers in whatever way, he wouldn’t argue. It would be nice to not have to sit with strangers during all of this.

With that, Boggs shrugged and said, “All right. If they give you grief, tell them I authorized temporary transfer of Peeta to Compartment E for the duration.”

Once they got to the space marked with the big “E” and he helped her prepare it, reading the printed instructions left for them, they went and got their packs from Supply. “Colonel Boggs authorized Peeta’s transfer to Compartment E for the lockdown,” Katniss told the clerk, who sighed and had her sign a form for it.

Making the two bunks in their marked space with the thin mattresses and blankets in their supply packs, they sat down to await further instructions. Finally she spoke up and addressed what neither of them had time to think about in the rush to get down here. “They’re going to execute him. Execute all of them.” She drew her knees up to her chest, arms wrapped around them.

“Yes.” There was no point denying it. Snow had said it on television, set the date and everything.

“Why?” she burst out fiercely. “After all this, why would he just give up? Why would he want to make me watch him die like that?”

He thought about it himself for a long time, trying to reason it out. Haymitch had survived for years under pretty miserable conditions. He didn’t seem like the type to just surrender. Not if there was any hope at all. “You gave me a handful of berries when you saw there was no other way out,” he said finally, remembering that moment, how steady her eyes had been as her fingers pressed the dark purple fruit into his palm. “I think this is him taking the berries, because death is the only answer left to him.”

“From the torture? Peeta, he survived the Games. We saw how horrible they were for him.” Of course they had. It made Haymitch’s nightmares make a lot more sense. She thought about that herself, then shook her head, reaching out with shaking fingers to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. “Oh,” she said faintly, with a note of surprise. “Oh, Peeta.”

“What is it?” he asked, moving now to sit beside her so they could talk more quietly with more people coming into the other sections of this particular ward. The edge of the metal slab of the bed was cold and hard against his shoulders.

“I think Snow is trying to use him to get to me,” she said flatly. “Why else would he be plastering Haymitch all over the television looking that terrible, after that first interview in Twelve when he looked OK? You know Capitol people can’t stand anything unless it’s primped and polished. Snow wants me to see that they’re torturing him.” Her fingers clenched into fists on her knees.

What she said made sense to him, and he knew her enough to know that to see someone made to suffer for her sake would be something that cut her deeply. To have it be someone like Haymitch that she actually cared about on a personal level made it even worse. The entire country saw how unbearable the jabberjay attack had been for her in the arena, imagining her sister and others being tortured for their screams. But this wasn't something the Capitol faked on a computer. The torture was entirely real. “It may be worse than that,” he said, taking it to the next logical step, not wanting to tell her but keeping in mind his promise to not lie and to not protect her from the truth. “He probably wants you to be upset enough about it to make a mistake. Go to the Capitol to rescue him, or try to bargain for him, or something like that. He was probably intending on doing it as long as he had to until you reacted.”

“Yeah, like anyone here in Thirteen would let me do anything. He’s probably considered useless--no, not useless. Sorry, I meant ‘non-essential’,” she mimicked the nasal tones of Thirteen’s native accent, “to them now that he got me out of the arena alive. And for Snow he’s just bait,” Katniss said with a wild laugh. “He knew it and he just went and deliberately killed himself off so he wouldn’t be used against me.” Her tone, hurt and angry and weary, asked Peeta, How am I supposed to live with that?

He reached out and he put an arm around her shoulders. “He did it because he cares about you, Katniss. Because he wouldn’t want to be the thing that breaks you.” But as he looked at her he suspected that might be the case anyway, just not in the way Haymitch had probably thought.

Prim and Mrs. Everdeen arrived safely shortly after that, Prim toting a squalling Buttercup in her hands. A little while later Gale dropped by with some of the belongings he’d scrounged quickly from the Everdeens' compartment, and Katniss thanked him for that. Peeta just nodded acknowledgment. Seeing him there, Gale seemed in a hurry to get away.

The first bomb hit soon enough, shaking the bunker all around them to a degree that he felt the rattle of it deep in his bones and in his teeth, right after Coin made an announcement that it actually wasn’t a drill and that Thirteen was under attack. “They must have spotted the bombers and confirmed it,” Katniss said wearily.

“So you did just right in figuring out what Haymitch said,” Mrs. Everdeen said encouragingly. “Thank goodness he managed to warn you. But he’s always been clever.”

“Not clever enough to not be executed,” Katniss said roughly, and with that Mrs. Everdeen’s expression fell and she went glumly silent. Peeta gave her an apologetic smile, sensing that Katniss’ rebuff had hurt her.

The next few days were hard going. More bombs fell and each time Peeta’s heart was in his throat as he wondered if the bunker would collapse on them. He slept restlessly, dreaming dreams of the arena, and more than once he woke up with Mrs. Everdeen’s hand on his shoulder, rousing him out of a nightmare with a look of concern on her face. He and Katniss didn’t discuss Haymitch, knowing that the clock was running out on him. Tick tock. Except this horror wouldn’t end after an hour passed.

It was Prim and her ugly cat that seemed to lift Katniss' spirits in the end, and eventually he saw her talking softly to her sister, a small smile on her lips. Meanwhile, the cat became the favorite of everyone around, bored out of their minds and entertained by even the slightest antics. Eating packaged rations, even if they were sort of tasteless, he got a laugh out of Katniss by joking at at least it wasn’t tesserae mush for her and for him it wasn’t stale.

On the second day Coin made another announcement over the address system, her sharp, nasal voice filling the cavernous spaces of the bunker and echoing eerily. “The information given by Haymitch Abernathy on Capitol television helped give early warning of the pending attack. We owe him a debt of gratitude. None of the bombs have been nuclear warheads, but we anticipate more may yet come. Citizens are to remain in the bunker until further notification.”

Finnick and Annie came visiting in what Peeta judged must be the evening. Sitting there by the dim flickering glow of the safety light as another bomb shook the bunker, Katniss whispered to him what they thought was going on, that Haymitch had grabbed the chance to eliminate himself as leverage.

“You’re probably right,” Finnick said simply. “That’s how Snow operates.” There was a weary world of certainty in his voice that Peeta was almost afraid to ask about, sensing it came from personal experience.

“It’s what they would have done with me,” Annie said softly, brushing a hand over Finnick’s, “if Carrick hadn’t asked you to make sure I came along with you, Peeta.”

“Thank you for that,” Finnick said sincerely, looking at Peeta. “I should have said that to you long time ago.”

“We’ve all had a lot on our minds,” Peeta said, dismissing it. Seeing Finnick and Annie together, nobody could doubt they were deeply in love. The question of how that fit with Finnick’s Capitol heartthrob reputation was on his mind but that was another of those things that he sensed was personal. Maybe it was just as simple as finally falling for the right girl, the love-you-forever kind of girl, quite recently and trying to ease out of the lifestyle he’d created for himself.

“I’m sorry I didn’t find a way to warn you about it,” Finnick told Katniss. “That this might happen.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said softly to all of them. “I can’t just let him die.” Her voice wavered a little. “Not with everything I owe him.”

“Katniss,” Peeta said with a soft sigh, “you don’t have to pretend it’s just about owing. It’s OK to admit you love him. We all know you do.” If she was going to be this upset about it, and so long as they were in the spirit of not lying about things, she might as well be honest about her own reasons and feelings.

She glared at him, but eventually her expression softened and she looked away. “OK, so maybe I love the stupid old drunk a little. But he’s not my father,” she said fiercely, “in case any of you actually believed a crazy lie like that.”

“Nope,” Finnick said simply, fingers weaving his rope in and out into ever more complex knots. “I don’t think he’d want to take the place of your dad either. I imagine he’s more like your sometimes-annoying uncle.”

“The one you can’t always take out in public,” Peeta chimed in with a chuckle. They all laughed a little at that, and it helped relieve a little of the tension.

“So what’s your relationship to him?” Katniss asked Finnick. “You know him pretty well. He said he took on you and Johanna both as kind of an extra mentor when you were new victors.”

Finnick nodded. “He did. He did a lot for both of us those first few years. And for that, I owe him.” Katniss raised an eyebrow at him. A faint smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Point taken. And yes, I love him. He’s pretty much a brother to me.” He sighed quietly. “The only one I have left, I suppose, and now he’ll die too.”

“Finnick,” Annie said gently, seeing his expression and squeezing his arm, “don’t go away on me.”

“I won’t,” he murmured to her. He looked over at Katniss and gave her a soft smile. “Don’t give in to despair, hard as this is. Trust me, I know this much. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”

“That’s fine and good,” Katniss told him, “but is that really it? I just sit here and take it and watch that execution, try to convince myself it’s what he’d have wanted?” She shook her head. “I can’t live with that.” Her voice wavered.

“Any rescue mission is going to be insanely high risk,” Peeta pointed out to her. “Because they might well be anticipating we’ll do something, knowing the execution is coming.”

“We have to at least try,” Katniss said, the ferocity of certainty in her voice. “We left him behind in the arena, Peeta. If we can’t do it that’s one thing but I’m not giving up without at least trying.”

“Then your first step is to convince Plutarch and Coin that he’s a necessity,” Finnick said. “That he’ll be an asset. That the cost of rescuing him in Plutarch’s rebels in the Capitol and the soldiers from Thirteen will be worth the payoff. Because this won’t be simple. Covers of rebels in the Capitol will be blown. People might well die.”

“Would it help bringing up how they now massively owe him because he got me out of the arena in the first place and then he saved lives when he tipped them off to the attack?” Katniss ventured.

Annie was the one who answered thoughtfully. “No. They do their best to not feel things here in Thirteen. This isn’t Twelve. They don’t take debts to heart like you do. Even what they owe you for what you’ve done so far won’t sway them.” Peeta was startled at the insightfulness of that comment, but decided she was right.

“What will it take to make him worth it?” Katniss asked them plainly.

“Convincing them you need him,” Peeta said bluntly, seeing the answer right there in front of him. Katniss and her worth as the Mockingjay was all they really cared about, whether she could perform or not. “That if he dies, you’ll be upset enough that you won’t be able to do your duty as the Mockingjay.”

“That might even be true,” Katniss muttered, and the way she said it and how upset she’d been at the notion already told Peeta that actually was the truth.

Two hours later Peeta found Plutarch Heavensbee in his own area of the bunker. “There’s a problem. Katniss has figured out how Snow’s using Haymitch.” Apparently for this Katniss agreed he was allowed to stretch the truth a bit and twist it to his purposes. Because Thirteen’s rules were unfair, they wouldn’t acknowledge anything except cold, spare necessity and people just couldn’t survive like this and still be people. Katniss needed Haymitch. Peeta and Finnick did too, for that matter. Annie said that didn’t know him but she owed him for Finnick. But it was Katniss who took the brunt of it, Katniss who wouldn’t be able to take the stain on her conscience of him dying for her sake. Thirteen owed Haymitch Abernathy a great debt and the four victors had all agreed they would do what it took to make them pay up on it and bring the man back alive if at all possible. It was that simple.

Once the all-clear was sounded in the bunker on the fourth day, Plutarch apparently went to Coin. Things moved fast from there. There was a meeting in Command the next morning. Boggs called for volunteers for a mission to rescue all six prisoners due to be executed in two days. All four of their hands shot up, even Annie’s. Even Finnick looked at her in surprise.

“You love him,” she told him, “so if they’ll let me go along, that’s good enough reason for me. Besides, I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”

“No victors on the mission,” Boggs said calmly, looking at them. “Too much risk. I’m not trading one valuable prisoner for another. Sorry. You four will all sit tight on this one. No arguments.” He glanced over at Beetee. “We’ll need you to help coordinate some of the logistics, though.”

“Done,” Beetee said instantly. “Of course I’ll help.”

Peeta looked around to see there were other hands in the air, though, and one of them was Gale Hawthorne’s. Katniss obviously noticed it too. “I thought you didn’t like him,” she said in confusion.

“You do, and he just took a big risk to save all of our lives, and that’ll be reason enough for me,” Gale told her. Peeta wanted to be jealous of the smile she gave Gale but given the gravity of the situation, he tried hard to not make it about that. Gale was laying his life on the line for this. He should be grateful for that much.

Boggs shooed them out of Command with, “Anyone not along for the mission, scram. We’ve got a lot of planning to do in a hurry.”

“But what are we supposed to--” Katniss started to ask plaintively as the Command door slammed shut in her face with a whirr of the door’s mechanics, “--do until then?” she concluded with some irritation.

“We do like we have for the last few days. We wait and we hope for the best,” Peeta told her with a heavy sigh. “Maybe I ought to finally get that archery lesson you keep promising me.”

“I can’t help you with how loud you walk in the woods.”

“Well, maybe I can shoot something from my front door.” He smiled at her. “Let’s at least give it a try, huh? You can tell me how terrible I am.” If nothing else it would take care of a few of the endless hours until they heard back on whether the rescue had succeeded or not.

Chapter Text

The guards came once again, the usual tired old remarks about treason and being scum and all of that and Haymitch just cheerfully ignored it. They didn’t matter by this point. But this time after they tied him down in the chair as usual, they only laid hands on him to shave his head. “Aw, boys,” he said dryly as they did it, feeling the razor scrape over his scalp none too gently, “I’d have just sat still for this if you asked nicely.”

Almost like it was instinct one of them raised a hand to hit him but the chief interrogator barked at him, “Not the face this time, Bolton, you know that!” Bolton drew back, his face a mixture of irritation and chagrin, and recovered enough to hit Haymitch in his much-abused ribs. Rewarded by the expected grunt of pain, which Haymitch didn’t even have to act to produce, he quit.

Playtime was over after they finished shaving off his hair and the days of stubble on his chin and they left. Rubbing a hand over his head, finding a few cuts, he called after them wryly, “Well, don’t expect a tip.”

Shambling his way back over to the hard slab of the cot, he sat down, and as usual drew himself up into a huddle as best as the pain would let him to help keep whatever warmth he had. The cinderblock walls were damp and cool so there was a pervasive chill and of course they didn’t even give prisoners a pillow, let alone anything like a blanket. The thin fabric of the uniforms didn’t do anything for it either.

Johanna was obviously awake because her tired voice came through the vent as she said, “Haymitch?"

"Still here," he said wearily. It was what they always said first. Still here, which really meant, Still alive, still a little bit sane, still not a venom delusion in your brain.

"You got the new haircut too?”

“Yeah. Bet it doesn’t flatter either of us.” With the end now clearly in sight both of them had managed to recover enough strength to have some humor. He'd welcomed it over these last days. It was something that helped him to not think about the execution or worrying about whether Katniss and Peeta had survived the bombing in Thirteen. The fact that the guards hadn't gloated to him about her death made him think that they were both still OK.

A wet, crackling laugh answered him, and then she remarked, “Well, they shaved our heads so at least that means this bullshit will be over soon.” There was a note of relief in her voice at it.

“We’re within twenty-four hours of it, I’m thinking.” He didn’t know exactly what time of day it was, of course, but they had to be getting close if they were shaving their heads and avoiding obvious facial injuries. So obviously she was familiar with some of the procedure of a Capitol execution. The prisoners had almost always lost their fine clothes, their makeup, and any jewelry and wigs or the like courtesy of the Detention Center stay. But at the very end, they’d shave the prisoner’s head, cover up tattoos and remove or destroy any body modifications as best as they could. The condemned man or woman who left the prison door would be drab and ugly by Capitol standards, stripped of all color or glamour or individuality.

That was so they could be dragged to City Center, to walk through the crowd to the steps of a platform where they’d publicly confess their crimes, and the whole world could see them laid low and jeer them as they did it. He thought a little irreverently, Do I get out of the public confession part since I already did it on television? He’d have to come up with something new to say for tomorrow. After all, Capitol audiences hated being bored by the same old thing. Maybe he ought to take the chance to tell them just what all his years of being a Capitol rakehell had really been about. Perfect opportunity; he wouldn’t be around to be embarrassed by it after that. If Snow didn’t like that dirty little secret getting out, what was he going to do, hang Haymitch for it? Finally having nothing left to lose was a strange kind of freedom.

After that bout of public humiliation, most prisoners bound for execution then took the prison transport back to the Detention Center where the execution by injection of lethal drugs was made private. Treason, though, that was a different matter. They wanted everyone to see the penalty for it. They hadn’t hanged anyone in the Capitol for treason in years. “You’ve never seen a treason execution here.” There hadn’t been one in over twenty years, he was well aware. It was always a big deal when there was one.

“No. You?”

“Yeah. One of Snow’s own cabinet got caught plotting with a group of rebel spies.” Or so they said. He had his doubts it was true--a little too convenient that the woman that people were saying might challenge Snow if there was a call for an election ended up a dead traitor. “I was nineteen and it was one girl’s idea of an exciting date for the two of us.” Johanna would know exactly what that meant. “Her family was important enough to get two tickets to the confession and the hanging that followed.” Tickets to a circus, that was how he thought of it. He remembered how excited she’d been that her family had enough pull to get her in for the execution. Do you have any idea how exclusive entrance is to the event, Haymitch? Shaking that memory off with an effort, he went on, “So, yeah, if you’ve seen the public confession before, you’re familiar. The only difference is we’ll be wailing out all our sins on the scaffold where they’ll actually hang us, instead of just the usual platform. I imagine they’ll do all six of us together. Bigger spectacle that way.”

There was a long moment of silence from Johanna’s cell. “We don’t hang people in Seven to execute them,” she said finally.

“No?” He actually didn’t know that. Hanging was the preferred method in both Twelve and Eleven. That much he did know. He thought Mags had mentioned once them using firing squads in Four, but a richer, more favored district like that, maybe it wasn’t surprising.

“No, idiot,” and in spite of himself he smiled a little to hear she was enough of herself to insult him, “we don’t get to just waste wood like that, and that scaffold sounds like a bitch to try to move anywhere. It’s executions by beheading. All you need is an axe and a stump and we’ve got plenty of both everywhere the logging camps go.”

“Sounds delightful.” Suddenly Lorna Hawthorne peered at him from the corner, tiny and fifteen, swollen tongue protruding from between her blue lips. Jonas’ little sister. Hanged for poaching back when he was seventeen, on the last day he ever went hunting. He’d never known for sure if she was one of Snow’s “lessons” to him or not, but obviously the doubt was reason enough for her to appear as a piece of his guilt.

“When it’s some dumb Peacekeeper who doesn’t know how to swing an axe right, yeah. There was one when I was thirteen where they botched it so bad one of the loggers just stepped in, grabbed the axe, and took one last swing to end it for the poor bastard. Got himself flogged for it, of course.” She went quiet for a while. Maybe a minute or so, and all he could hear was his own soft breathing. “How bad can we expect it to be?” she asked him.

He closed his eyes against the ghost of Lorna because right there was how bad it could get. Though Johanna’s words and the note of uncertainty she was trying to hide pulled at another ghost for him anyway, memory rather than hallucination.

Her eyes were wide and brown but not doe-like at all as she asked, “So, how bad is this gonna be?” Trying too hard to pretend she was tough and she wasn’t scared at all, but hell, she was seventeen and facing some terrible shit and naked in bed with a man who she’d just formally met a couple hours ago, no matter she must have been seeing him on television since she was a little kid. If she wasn’t afraid at least a bit he’d think she was an idiot, and he was sure she wasn’t.

He sighed and told her honestly, “It might hurt a little.” Though given an active girl like her, he doubted a hymen was much of an issue, more just the sheer stretch of having a man inside her the first time. “Not much, though. Maybe more uncomfortable than actual pain. But we’ll take it slow and I’ll make sure it’s good for you after that.”

“That’s...” She nodded and glanced up, actually meeting his eyes. “Sure, that’s good. But I meant...everything.” He understood. She didn’t mean what would happen to her right now in this bed in this little apartment. She meant tomorrow night with Gaius Luna and after.

He understood and he didn’t have a good answer for it. What would he say? Tell her that he’d been doing this almost as long as she’d been alive? Talk about when he was young and the nights he’d spent showering and drinking and sometimes even giving in and crying until he made thick enough armor to not let it hurt, talk about the pain from the ones who injured the body and the pain of the ones who twisted the soul? Angus had slapped him with utter reality when he was the one who was seventeen and nervous and he asked how bad it would get. Even the brutal honesty he'd gotten in reply hadn’t prepared him.

“Oh,” she said softly, obviously understanding his silence. “Yeah, OK.” There was a little quiver in her voice as she wrapped her arms around herself, covering her breasts and hugging herself tight, and looked away.

She was so damn young. Her and the Odair boy both. The Capitol’s supposed cunning psycho axe killer was seventeen and he could tell she’d barely been kissed. At least from how she responded to his touches she was used to touching herself so he wasn’t dealing with a total innocent. But even he’d learned back in the day that he didn’t know as much as he thought he did, that some pretty hot and heavy fooling around with Briar meant nothing against all this.

From the look on her face as she tried to deal with what was happening to her he almost reached out to put an arm around her. Damn it. He should never have let Johanna talk him into this. No, actually, he should never have let Mags and Blight talk him into looking after the two of them to begin. What were they thinking? He couldn’t even keep a single tribute alive. Her and Finnick both, how young and vulnerable they were, it was yanking at him and trying to find the cracks in the shields he’d put up over the years at such high cost. They were both reminding him too much of who he’d been once, when he was young and new, and how much it had hurt and how much he’d lost or locked away simply to be able to cope. With Johanna in particular; he looked at her and saw far too much of himself at seventeen, right down to the smart mouth and the executed family.

What was he going to do anyway? Comfort her like her daddy and then turn right around and bed her like her lover? He was thirty-three and she was half his age. He really wasn’t in the mood to make himself feel like a pervert, like the people that were going to buy her, and if he let himself feel anything about her, even a desire to comfort her, it wouldn't be just a simple professional favor any more. Besides, he’d paid far too much in order to be able to finally not feel things, he wasn’t going to just give that up now. He'd kiss her and touch her in the ways he knew would give her pleasure. But he wasn't going to kiss her for the sheer joy of it, caress her skin simply to feel it under his fingers, or touch that pretty, wavy brown hair that was all down around her shoulders. If she’d wanted something real, something with emotions involved, she should have picked Finnick. All he had to offer was a good meaningless but pleasurable fuck. Still, she understood far too much already about things, had lost too much, and so in spite of his resolve he found himself telling her gruffly, “It’s bad. But you made it through the arena.” Like any victor she knew a bit already about selling pieces of herself. “So you’ll survive this.”

Sitting in the cell he sighed and said to himself, Damn it, Johanna. Asking him a question like that again. He hadn’t wanted to get attached to either her or Finnick back then. Gone and did it anyway, stupid as he was, trying to protect them and teach as best he could, little as that turned out to be. He watched them disappear into the Capitol’s games, form their own shells of lies as best they could. At least he hadn’t had to watch Katniss and Peeta fall to that fate, because that would have hurt even more.

This time Johanna wasn’t a kid who still had some innocence left to her. She was a grown woman and she’d been through enough, suffered enough, that he didn’t hesitate to be honest almost to the point of bluntness. There was no point trying to hide the truth from her. He’d seen enough hangings in his life to know how they went. “If they do a hanging right, the neck breaks in the initial drop and it’s pretty fast. Be nice if that’s the case but I don’t know we can count on them being that kind.” They’d probably want them to die slower. “So if not, we strangle to death. It’ll take a few minutes until we pass out, though they’ll have to leave us hanging even longer until our hearts actually stop. Seems the bigger and heavier you are, the faster your own weight does the work. So Brutus would probably go quickest. You and Effie would probably take the longest.” He’d likely be somewhere in the middle. Brutus was a good bit bigger than either himself or Cinna, but all three women would probably die hardest.

He did hold back some details, mostly about how the bodies looked after death. She didn’t need every gory bit of it to weigh on her tonight. It wouldn’t matter anyway. She wouldn’t be around to know about it.

“So a few minutes of hell and that’s it. Not so bad.” He could hear how she was trying to sound strong. “We’ve taken worse than that since we got here, right?”

“Right.” He opened his eyes a peek and looked at the corner. Lorna was gone. A few more minutes of pain, against years and years of it. She was right. Not so bad at all. Then they’d finally be free of the Capitol and all its games and lies and torment. Where I told you to run so we’d both be free... That tugged at one of his the memories of the old days, of Burt singing in the woods and the mockingjays echoing his notes, of that page in his Grandpa Tad’s music journal that he’d never been able to play again after Lorna died, and idly he found himself humming. Are you, are you, coming to the tree... Oh yes, someone from District Twelve long ago understood the way of things far too well. "The Hanging Tree" was an old song, from the Dark Days at least if not even before that, according to his grandpa’s notes.

There were even a few songs in that journal from way back, even before the days of Panem. To judge from those songs that had stuck around for centuries, Appalachia hadn’t been all that much different for their ancestors than things in Twelve. There was the coal and the hardship that pervaded everything in their lives. People still fell in love. People saw the beauty in the spring after a hard winter. People went crazy from the suffering. People went and died too young. So some things apparently never much changed.

“What’s that?”

“Old song we’ve got in Twelve.” He corrected himself. “I suppose now it’s an old song we had in Twelve.” She didn’t reply to that as if she was waiting for him to explain more, but saying things like that in his own words, maybe it was really just easier to sing it. So he sang it for her, all four verses of the slow, sad tune. The first couple of notes were a bit rough and uncertain but eventually his voice smoothed and evened out. He’d never quite had Burt’s voice, something fit to make the mockingjays listen and girls sigh, but he could carry a decent tune. He hadn’t sang for anyone in years, or played the fiddle either, just another thing he’d kept locked away and private. Snow and the Capitol took so much, over and over, that eventually he jealously guarded the few pieces they left him with to still claim as his own. No point hiding it now.

Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me. Not his love, never his love, not like in the song. But then again, he’d killed seven people directly by his own hand rather than three, and they were being hanged at noon rather than midnight. So the lyrics didn’t need to be literal. Johanna had been a good friend all these years in her prickly, pain-in-the-ass but utterly reliable way. Finnick and Peeta and Katniss got away safely from the arena and he was grateful for that. He wished like hell Johanna had made it out too. But she hadn’t, and to have had her talking to him from her cell and keeping him from being alone, and knowing he’d wouldn’t die alone either tomorrow, was a comfort for him.

He finished the song and in the silence he waited for her to say something snarky like, Seriously, Haymitch, that’s fucked up even for you. Instead she was quiet for a long time and finally she said, “Whoever that was that wrote it, they knew a thing or two.”

“So it would seem.” So she’d understood, though maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise.

“You’re not a bad singer. Hidden depths, huh, Haymitch?” Now there was a teasing note in her voice that told him he was doing her level best to bite back any fear she was having, to get her brave front ready to withstand tomorrow morning. Instinctively, in that animal part of him that wanted to survive at any cost and had saved him in the arena, he wasn’t looking forward to the pain and finality of it, even as logically he knew it would be a relief in the end to have it all over and done. But right now existence was like the actual moment the executioner sprung the trap, and the last hope of life fled. For a moment the person being hanged was just weightless and rootless, free falling in empty air. There was no hope, no potential reprieve or rescue, nothing but the reality of the jerk of the rope waiting at the end of the fall and the darkness of death. This right now was that narrow space between life and death of simple, sheer inevitability. He was trying to not be afraid but he knew he was, and she was too. On the scaffold he could afford to be brave, when it was all happening and moving forward in a hurry. It was this waiting that was the tough part.

“I’m all right. Katniss’ daddy was always better,” he remarked. Better men than him in pretty much any way possible, Burt and Jonas both.

“Yeah, well, he’s dead,” she pointed out sharply.

“And we will be tomorrow too,” he fired right back, because her dismissiveness, like Burt hadn’t mattered at all, annoyed him. Then he sighed. He really didn’t want things between them to go out on a fight. “Yeah, I can sing. Played the fiddle as well. I didn’t claim that as my talent. They took enough. I wasn’t giving them that.”

“Good,” she said lowly. They went quiet again after that. Not much to say, apparently, except maybe trying to find the right words for a goodbye. But then getting sentimental had never been his strong suit.

“Jo...” She said something too soft for him to catch. “What?”

“You need to clean out your ears better or something?”

“Don’t mumble like some silly district savage,” he chirped at her in a Capitol accent. She laughed at that and he smiled a little to hear it.

“Hanna.” She said it and he raised an eyebrow she couldn’t see, waiting for her to explain. “Back home. They always called me ‘Hanna’. Not ‘Jo’.”

She hadn’t ever protested her nickname before. It was probably Finnick that started calling her “Jo” and he just went along with it. But he could recognize the trust she was giving him, telling him that, something about her real self. It was her own way of saying goodbye.

The best way he could acknowledge that was to not make a big deal about the meaningfulness of it. “Yeah, well, I’m not fond of ‘Mitch’. And ‘Mitchie’ is definitely not an option.” He’d put a stop to that right quick when Chantilly tried to stick him with that nickname.

“So what, it’s ‘Hay’ then? As in, ‘Hey, Hay’? As in ‘Hay is for horses’?”

Now he was the one that laughed at the disbelief in her voice. “Pretty much, yeah. They tried to make it a joke early on in school so I eventually just stepped up and ran with it so they couldn’t.” Being from the poorest part of the Seam and with them knowing he'd had a lousy dad, he was already a target to get picked on. So he learned to fight, to outsmart people, and to act harder than he really was pretty young.

“Bet you were a little smartass brat and the despair of your teachers.”

“I’ll just bet you were too.” He really hoped she wasn’t going to open up enough to ask something like whether he thought there was some sweet hereafter where their families were even now. Maybe there was. Maybe there wasn’t. If so, he was pretty damn sure the likes of him would never see it anyway so it didn’t much matter.

Right about then was when he first smelled the odd, sickly-sweet scent wafting into the cell, but before he could figure it out it was everywhere and making his head swim until finally he slid down into nothingness.

Chapter Text

The hours crept by on the morning of the rescue attempt. After breakfast all of them gathered up outside Command, hoping for any kind of news or update. Eventually Plutarch came and collected them. “Would you be willing to go shoot some footage topside?” he asked Katniss, blue eyes intent. “We’re thinking to put some propos on the air during the actual time of them attacking the Detention Center to serve as a distraction, and fresh material from you would be a big help.” Then he had to go and ruin the mood by adding, “And of course it’s absolutely essential that people see you survived the bombing here.”

Katniss didn’t hesitate to nod. “You mind if we come along?” Finnick asked. They had finally allowed him and Annie to go walking, with tracker anklets, during Reflection, after the doctor advised them that fresh air would do wonders for their mental health. A few minutes a day wasn’t much but it meant the world compared to being cooped up in this stale steel pen, so spying another chance right here, he eagerly seized it. Looking over at Annie he caught the answering glimmer of excitement in her.

“Of course,” Plutarch said cheerfully. “Maybe we’ll have a propo opportunity for you, Finnick. Your ‘We Remember’ spots have been fantastic.” He looked thoughtful. “I wonder if Haymitch would be willing to do some too. He’s older so remembers even more tributes and victors than you do.”

He caught Peeta’s eye and the younger man gave him a wry smile of, Well, Plutarch’s not going to change so what are we going to do about it? Pretty much just try to steer the man in helpful directions if they could, and otherwise try to not let his single-minded focus on the appearance of things annoy them too much.

Topside, they walked around the huge new bomb craters. Seeing how deep they were, Finnick took in a shocked breath, relieved that nobody had been in those top layers. There was no chance they would have survived the attack. Well, old friend, he thought towards Haymitch, you did just right, warning us like that. Carefully stepping aside from Snow’s control, just like Finnick had all these years, gathering secrets from Capitol citizens in hopes it would be of some use when the rebellion finally came. Knowledge was power, after all.

Haymitch had gone further than that, though, at the very end. He’d seen a chance and seized it, trying to escape in the only way that he could. After so many years, finally he’d refused to be another bit of leverage to be used against someone else, just another pawn on the chessboard. He’d spoken up, faced down Snow directly, and in a way he took back his freedom. So Finnick prayed like hell he’d get rescued today to enjoy it.

He and Annie leaned against the broken pillars of the former Justice Building of Thirteen and watched while the camera crew taped Katniss. Apparently the notion of freedom was on her mind as well. “Seeing how the Capitol works, knowing that they’re torturing him to try to make me give up, isn’t have the effect they want. Haymitch was willing to pay the price to warn us here in Thirteen, and then he was willing to die just he wouldn’t be something to use against me. Now I’m going to do whatever it takes to destroy the Capitol. I’m free, and I’m not afraid of them, for the first time in my life. I finally see that they do this to us, that all of it from the Games to the Peacekeepers to the way they isolate the districts and try to make us enemies, is because they fear us a lot more than we fear them. They need us, for the things we send to them--the coal, the textiles, the food, the tributes. So they have to control us. But here’s the thing. We don’t need them. I’m declaring my freedom today, and I hope everyone in Panem will join me.”

With that, Katniss went to join Peeta, who put his arms around her in a hug. Plutarch’s gaze flicked over to Finnick and he came over. “Finnick,” he said, “what Katniss said got me thinking...you maybe have your own sort of freedom to declare.”

“No!” Annie snapped immediately, her green eyes suddenly hard as a raging wave, moving in front of him as if she had to physically protect him from this. “No, Plutarch. He’s had to sell enough of himself already over the years. Now you want him to sell a little more just for some nice camera opportunity?”

“It’s not like you’re the only one, Finnick. We both know how long it’s been going on. Isn’t it time that Panem got told the truth about how bad Snow’s abuses really are?”

“Get out of here before you make me very angry, Plutarch.”

Finnick stilled her with a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll do it,” he said, even though his stomach was churning sickly at the very thought of it, of being more naked on camera than he ever had before, even filming some racy pay-to-view video. That was all a lie. But this would be all too real.

He moved towards the seat in front of the camera, his rope clenched tight in his first. “You don’t have to do this,” Annie told him one last time.

He turned, cupped her face in his hand, and leaned down to kiss her gently. When he drew back he told her, “Yes, I do. Not for Plutarch. But for me. For Haymitch and Johanna. For Mags. For all of them.” Saying that, now he was certain. “I need to be free of it and I never will unless I speak up.” If he kept it secret, he’d always be the whore that was under the Capitol’s thumb, rather than a man in his own right.

But it was so hard when Cressida gave him the thumbs-up to know the camera was rolling. “I won the Hunger Games when I was fourteen,” he said, trying to give himself a place to start. “For a while I was popular and beloved in the Capitol because I was something special, the youngest victor ever, the one that people had liked enough to send me that trident. When I was sixteen, I finally found out what being a popular and attractive victor really meant.” He thought of Katniss, boldly declaring her independence. He thought of Haymitch, bravely and calmly stepping up to meet his own death. District Twelve didn’t make many victors, but the ones it made were something. He wouldn’t let their courage down. “President Snow used to...to sell me. My body, that is.” He stumbled over the words. “I wasn’t the only one, and I understand even President Mackenzie did it before him. The victors that were considered desirable, the attractive ones whose victories made them popular...we were given as a reward to the president’s friends and allies. Others he let buy us for very, very large sums of money. If we tried to refuse, we were told that someone we cared about would be killed. So we just submitted and we did what they demanded.”

Looking aside for a minute, he saw Annie there, looking back at him steadily. She was his rock, and he let his love for her try to counter the shame he was feeling right now. “I wasn’t the only one but I was one of the most popular. Maybe the most vulnerable too, because those I loved were so defenseless.” How many patrons had he taken that Snow claimed were on Annie’s behalf? How many had he taken to protect his dad and Keith, to say nothing of all those cousins? “To make themselves feel less like I was their whore, my patrons would try to give me gifts. Jewelry, clothes, money, that sort of thing. Eventually I found a much more valuable method of payment. Secrets.”

He took a deep breath and faced the camera squarely, now finally feeling a flicker of power where for so long he’d been powerless. “So stay tuned, President Snow, because I've got more than my share about you. But let’s visit some of the others first, shall we?”

From there he named names ruthlessly. He named the patrons, named their perversions, named the secrets they had told him. Parthenia and Servilius Moon. They liked to hire me, claim they wanted to have me together. It was a nice cover story. After a few minutes I usually ended up off to the side while the loving brother and sister turned to each other.

Thalius Eland. Our clever and quiet little Secretary of Education. I don’t think there’s been a victor offered for sale in the last twenty-five years that he hasn’t bought and then sent home bruised and bleeding. District children too and Capitol orphans, so I hear, since victors do get quite expensive as a habit. Only before they reach nineteen, of course. Once they’re legally an adult they’re no longer interesting to him. Isn’t it fascinating he reached his post as secretary so young? Perhaps it was to keep him away from all those children at the school where he was headmaster.

The fire at Lucretia Fawkes’ house that killed her? How tragic. Even more tragic that it was set by Hermione Lore when Lucretia stole her fiance.

Paulus Tyree’s sudden fall from political grace when it was discovered his sister was mad? She apparently went mad because she was taken one night on her way home from a club and repeatedly raped and beaten by half a dozen men sent by the opposition.

On and on he went, pouring out all the sickness and perversity the Capitol had to offer, secrets of disgusting and inhumane acts given to him on damp sheets with whispers and giggles and delighted smiles. Strangely, letting it all out into the open, he felt purged of a poison he’d been carrying around.

Thinking of poison, he moved on to the feature event. “Now, on to our good President Coriolanus Snow.” Ruthlessly he struck at the author of all the misery and horrors of his life since he won the Games, telling Panem just how he’d grasped power, how he’d climbed over corpses and stabbed backs to do it. Told them just what he’d done to keep it. “For forty years he’s kept tight rein on Panem with poison and with manipulation and with fear. A coward’s weapons. But now all of Panem knows who he is. He can’t hide any longer behind his lies, and I promise him, he can’t hide from the fight that’s coming.”

The camera crew stared at him, apparently shocked by some of his revelations. Of course they hadn’t known. “Cut,” he said finally, seeing none of them move to do it. With that the crew hurried off with the tape to the editing room as if it was burning a hole through their fingers.

Annie’s arm went around him as he went to her, and Katniss and Peeta came towards him. He could see from the gentle understanding look on Peeta’s face that he would be willing to let it go with a simple, “I’m sorry.” He nodded in acknowledgment of it, understanding it was sympathy.

Katniss, though, with her awkward, troubled look was going to be more difficult. “I’m sorry,” and hers was an actual apology, and Finnick could easily anticipate for what.

He held up a hand to stop her, feeling a little too shaky himself to withstand her begging him for forgiveness for thinking he was really a dedicated Capitol playboy. “You only thought what I had to make you and everyone else think. That’s their fault. Not yours.”

She nodded, but the pained expression didn’t leave her face. “Peeta and I saw the tribute features on the television when we got to the Capitol. Haymitch, he was popular too.” Her voice was growing thick as she said, “And I got so pissed off. I snapped at him and said he was just like you, and he said I had no idea, and...Snow did it to him too, didn’t he?”

The bitter regret in her tone was all too obvious, and he could almost hear the note of fear there that Haymitch might die and she might never get to tell him she was sorry for thinking the worst of him. He hesitated. This wasn’t his story to tell, not his pain to share. Though thinking about his family shot down like dogs in the square in Four, how only having Annie and friends like Katniss and Peeta kept him going these last weeks since Coin gave him the news, he could now imagine what agony Haymitch had been in for all these years. “I think you’ll have to ask him about that when they bring him back,” he said delicately, even as he knew that in not denying it, he was pretty much confirming that it was true.

Peeta walked Katniss back over to the shaft down into Thirteen, leaving him and Annie in the morning sun for a few minutes. Standing there with rubble and bomb craters, praying that two of his best friends would make it out of the Capitol alive, he felt a little forlorn. But above that was the feeling of freedom, of shedding chains and shame that had bound him for years. He finally felt like a man rather than a slave with nowhere to turn and no way out. He turned to Annie and said, “It's high time you and I got married, don't you think?” Her delighted grin and how she kissed him said it all.

They had put a rifle in his hands and sent him to the Capitol, and this was something Gale had been waiting for ever since the day his father died. Even more since they flogged him in the square. He’d been training for this in Thirteen, waiting for the chance to finally strike back, to do something to the monster that hurt so many people and took so many lives.

Too bad they weren’t there to actually try to take down the Capitol, but he was confident that day would come. It was enough to be sneaking in and stealing prisoners from under their noses. Their team of ten, led by Boggs, would have to execute everything with precision to get all six of them out alive and safe, but he had confidence in their plan.

He’d told his ma that he was going, knowing she’d worry about him. She’d worried ever since his pa died in the mines, worried every day that Gale had to go to work.

Rory and Vick were busy with their homework and Posy was playing with a rag doll on the floor of their compartment. They’d just settled back in after returning from the bunker. ”So you’re going to get Haymitch back. Good,” she said, and there was an odd note in her voice he didn’t quite place.

“Hell, Ma,” he said with a frustrated sigh, not able to figure out why everyone, from Katniss on down, was so fond of the old wreck. “I heard him say that he knew Pa and all that, but that was ages ago. He’s not that kid now.” He hoped she didn’t feel somehow beholden to him for hiring her on over the winter as a housekeeper. Keeping house for a useless, rich old drunk was only doing what she had to do to survive. The fact it kept her from something desperate as the beds of Peacekeepers was no reason for Gale to feel any kind of debt to Haymitch. He’d maybe thank him but that was it. “You’re not in love with him, are you?” he ventured with some horror.

“What? No! You’re alike enough in your ways,” Ma said with a soft sigh. “He was the one who knew traps inside and out--he was the one that taught your daddy.” Gale gave a snort of irritation, not liking having been played for a fool, because the old man had seemed to pick up on snares a little too easy. “Too smart for his own good too and he ended up frustrated with the way things were, just like you.”

Yeah, but Gale wasn’t a washed-up old drunk who didn’t give a damn about anyone, so that pretty much put paid to comparisons in his mind. Looking at his expression, she said, “And he knew Briar too.” He’d noticed the name when Haymitch brought the girl up in reminiscing with Katniss, since “Wainwright” was her maiden name.

“Who was she anyway? Your cousin?” He had more than enough cousins on the Wainwright side of things. He honestly didn’t remember either of his parents mentioning her when he was a kid, but then, there were plenty of cousins and the like who died young. His pa’s sister Lorna had gotten hanged for poaching when she was fifteen. Capitol bastards.

“She was my big sister,” Hazelle said roughly. “Three years older.”

“You never told me about her!” Gale said almost defensively.

“Because she died in a fire along with Haymitch’s ma and his little brother Ash not too long after he came back from the Games. The Capitol didn’t like him making them look dumb with how he won. And we knew better than to talk about it after a demonstration like that.” How had he won? He’d never seen Haymitch’s Games, except for a few clips they showed during this Quell. “He loved her, Gale. And between that and being friends with Jonas, he would have been your uncle, had things gone different. But instead he got to watch Briar and his family burn. So,” Hazelle took a deep breath, “I ain’t in love with him and he’s not in love with me either. But he’s kin enough that I’d be grateful if you can get him back alive.”

Guided by the Capitol rebels gaining them entrance under the ruse of hiring new guards, they’d taken the central control room of the Detention Center without too much fuss. Gale had gotten shot in the arm but it wasn’t too bad. It just stung a bit. Moving cautiously, watching as Boggs opened the ventilation system so they could throw the canister of knockout gas in there, Gale thought that after that talk with his ma, all right, he now comprehended Haymitch Abernathy a good bit better.

Though the trouble was he knew he’d never be able to understand Haymitch, not really. A man like that who’d shown such steely courage on television to laugh in the face of President Snow, to coolly try to kill himself off just to not be a liability to the war, had qualities Gale had to admire. He’d gotten Katniss out of the arena alive too, made the whole plan to get her in the hands of the rebellion and kick things off. So he’d admit that was the kind of man worth saving for the war effort, to say nothing of how both Katniss and his ma both wanted him back alive, and he could hardly deny them.

But that kind of man should be the type to be brave and determined enough to make his losses count by taking on those who hurt him. If he’d lost Katniss in the arena, if the firebombing in Twelve had killed his ma and his siblings and he watched them burn, he wouldn’t stop until he made the Capitol pay for it. He wouldn’t flinch away from the fight to go drown himself in drink and fail everyone around him. Hazelle Hawthorne might think they were alike enough in cleverness and guts and ability to understand their prey and trap it, and Gale trusted her judgment enough to believe maybe that was so, but Gale had the fire to keep up the fight and get things done and Haymitch apparently had just lost it somewhere.

Well, at least his ma wasn’t in love with him and that was a relief. Grouchy old Haymitch for a stepdaddy. What a notion. He grinned a little to himself underneath the rubber of his gas mask as he followed Boggs down the corridor to where the prisoners were being kept. “You,” Boggs said, his voice muffled behind the mask, pointing Gale to one of the cells as the door slid open. “You’re big enough to carry him out alone.” Who? Haymitch? Yeah, OK, he was definitely bigger than the older man.

He saw the figure on the metal slab in the corner, and paused only long enough to see the caramel-colored skin of his freshly shaved head. Must be Cinna, he decided. Getting the unconscious man over his shoulders, trying to not wince at feeling how oddly light he was, he headed out of the cell.

Standing there in the corridor, Boggs gave the command to move their asses once he got confirmation all his soldiers and all six prisoners were gathered together. Jackson in the command center turned off the power to all the cell blocks at Boggs’ radioed command, and as they hurried out Gale heard the hiss of the cell block door sliding shut behind him with a resounding thump. Any guards in the cell blocks were now on lockdown, unable to get out until power was restored and the doors would work again. By then the rescue team would be long gone. He hoped there was no trouble along the way because with him carrying Cinna like this, he could hardly use his rifle. They were sitting ducks, unable to fight back, if they were caught right now. It was so dark they wouldn’t be able to see enemies until the bastards were there yelling at them. On the bright side, it worked in their favor too: they could hopefully slip out unseen.

As they passed the stairs to the command center, the lights went out there as Jackson hit the switch and Gale heard the heavy pounding of boots on the metal steps as he rejoined them, presumably helping shoulder the burden of one of the six prisoners. They kept hurrying for the exit, following the emergency lighting strips in the floor that showed the way for them. He thought he heard someone stumble behind him from a muffled curse along the way, but didn’t stop to check. His wounded arm burned but he couldn’t put Cinna down, not until they were out of here.

Even through the tinted lenses of his gas mask, the sunlight was far too bright after the dark of the Detention Center, but they didn’t stop until they were safely on the hovercraft and on their way out of the Capitol. Finally able to have a free hand to rip off his gas mask, Gale gasped in a breath of cool, clean air and used the sleeve of his uniform, the one on the uninjured arm, to wipe the sweat that was dripping off his face.

Boggs handed out canteens of water. “Nicely done, soldiers,” he said. “Textbook. Caught ‘em with their pants down. Not one of you lost or captured and all six prisoners retrieved safely. Any wounded?”

A few hands went up. Gale sighed and raised his, because he could tell the arm had been made worse by all the exertion and he was starting to feel a little dizzy. Boggs glanced them over. “Can it wait until we get back?” Ready affirmatives answered him. “Are any of you bullshitting me? Be honest about your status. If you need medical attention now, there’s no shame in that.”

One of the women sitting next to Gale, a woman of about his ma’s age now wrapping a kerchief around her bleeding hand, ventured quietly, “I think the prisoners are worse off than us, sir. We can wait.” Gale glanced back to the receiving bay, where the two medics they’d brought along had set to work immediately. He’d been able to only glance at Cinna as he put him down, but that was enough to see the cuts and bruises and half-healed scabs on his too-thin face. He didn’t even want to think what his body might look like under that prison uniform.

He sat there and feeling himself a little shaky from blood loss, took deep breaths and kept his head down. The pain wasn’t so bad, not nearly as rough as the stripes on his back when they’d flogged him and he’d shown those off for the camera. Have you ever been tortured? Cressida asked him. They’d obviously tortured Haymitch from how he appeared on television and he was sure the others hadn’t escaped that treatment either. He wondered if they’d whipped Cinna or any of the others as part of the torture or if they got more creative than that. He wouldn’t be surprised. That was how the Capitol worked, brutal and merciless and sadistic. Today they’d won, at least a little. Walked right into the Capitol and taken some people back that Snow obviously wanted dead and said, They’re not yours anymore. It wasn’t taking down Snow and the Capitol but it was a good strike at them right where they lived. When the actual final assault came and they aimed to capture the Capitol, Gale knew he had to be part of it. He’d gotten involved with this and the Capitol had gone much too far. He had to see it through now.

Chapter Text

Haymitch opened his eyes, groggy and fighting every step of the way for it, to see the bright lights and a face hovering over him in a surgical mask. He’d woken up like this before, after his Games, his first Games, and a couple times since after really bad nights with a patron. This wasn’t his cell, this was a hospital.

This was a hospital. But they were going to hang him in a matter of hours. There was no possible reason on earth for him to be in a hospital right now and immediately his mind seized wildly on Snow lied, motherfucking bastard lied, he somehow got out of following his own precious legal code and he’s having them patch me up so they can just start taking me apart again and he’s going to do it over and over and over just to prove to me that I can’t ever get away.

He waited until the doctor turned his back and glanced over to the instrument tray on the bedside, seeing a syringe sitting there near the edge. Forcing his hand to stay as still as he could, he reached up and grabbed it, hiding it in his palm. One little shot of air into his veins and that ought to kill him properly enough. He’d just have to hide it until they left him alone for a minute or more because he knew the minute he tried to stick the needle through his skin they’d be all over him if they saw.

Him and a syringe against the Capitol. Crap. He really wished he had a much better plan than that--a scalpel at least--but he was fairly desperate here. Not much for him left to work with at this point. It didn’t need to kill him all pretty so long as it just did the damn job right.

Of course, that was right about when Katniss and Peeta came into sight. He stared at them, really confused now. They looked ridiculously healthy. Not Capitol polished, no, but like two teenagers that were in good shape. No gaping wounds or bloodshot eyes or necks at odd angles like when he saw his nightmare visions of them in his cell over and over and he was afraid they were actually dead and somehow his subconscious knew it. His mind never conjured them up looking uninjured and whole.

They looked concerned, but not dead. Following basic reasoning here, they weren’t ghosts. He must be dead and this was some bizarre after-death thing. Well, at least that meant he’d see Ash soon, right? Apparently in an additional plus he’d also blocked out the memory of the hanging. “Well, you’re not dead. So that means I’m dead.” He realized he’d said it aloud after the two of them looked at each other and then back down at him.

“Uh, no,” Katniss said. “We’re still alive. And you’re not dead either.” Peeta eased the syringe out of his fingers and carefully placed it back on the tray, fending off Haymitch’s clumsy attempts to resist him easily, just as another doctor came back, minus the surgical mask. Nobody he recognized at all, and not altered and tattooed like a Capitol dweller either.

“Oh, you’re awake now, Mister Abernathy,” he said. “Well then. Do you know where you are?”

“Apparently I’m in the hell where doctors ask you stupid questions.”

Katniss snickered. “I’d say he’s there mentally, doctor.”

He’d liked to have agreed but seeing Rye at his bedside too, glaring down at him while bleeding from his gut and his throat, his orange shirt slowly turning red with it, told him he wasn’t all there, not quite. “Anyone care to clue me in?” he asked, and shit, he was so weak, the grab for the syringe and now talking felt like about all he could do and he really just wanted to fall asleep for a few days now.

“You’re in District Thirteen, Haymitch,” Peeta said. “You and Cinna and Effie and Johanna and Enobaria and Brutus. The rescue team brought you all back OK.”

“OK?” he echoed doubtfully. “Alive” might work. “OK” was probably a big stretch of the imagination. Alive. He could barely believe it. He’d been so ready to die, mentally resigned himself and been prepared, and now what the hell was he supposed to do with himself?

“Well, you and your friends have something of a road to recovery,” the doctor admitted. “You and Miss Mason in particular registered as having high levels of tracker jacker venom in your systems. Are you experiencing hallucinations?”

Trying to not look at Rye, he said to the doctor, “So if I tell myself you’re not real, does that make you disappear?” Maybe he was acting like a rude bastard but to have the man hovering over him with that probing gaze, dissecting the way they’d abused his body and his mind both, he felt like he had to struggle to get some kind of hasty, flimsy defense up in place just to be able to handle this. He simply wanted the bastard to go away for a while.

A polite chuckle answered that. “We’ll have to observe you, of course, and obviously your wounds will require care. It appears that the transplant assimilated to your body quite well, though, so--”

He held up a hand to shut the doctor up, or more likely, weakly flapped it and let it drop again. “Sorry, transplant?”

“Well, yes. We saw the scar and our examination confirmed it.” The scar on his stomach, the one he’d thought was awfully big for repairing Enobaria’s stab wound. “I’d guess you sustained some significant liver injury in the arena from your stab wound to the point where they had to replace it with a transplant. It’s probably fortunate because,” a faint whistle, “processing that much venom would have been really rough on you, given your alcohol intake and the effect it would have had on your liver. Your original one, that is.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake, give me back the syringe so I can stab this idiot. The notion that he had a piece of someone else inside of him now and not knowing who it was but knowing they had to be dead, and that they’d gone and deliberately replaced one of his damn organs just so they could torture him that much more effectively, was too much. Something of that must have showed on his face because Katniss and Peeta suddenly looked concerned and the doctor muttered, “Mentally disoriented,” and the sting of sedative was in his veins and then there was just blackness again.

There were no windows in the hospital but at least they told him the date and answered his other questions whenever he woke up and wanted to know how much time had passed. Then he found out why there were no windows and while it made sense Thirteen would be hidden underground, it was too much like the prison and he tried to not let that alarm him. There were tubes in his arms for morphling and for extra fluids and nutrients because even once he’d passed beyond eating only broth he still couldn’t eat much yet. Nurses came to check on him and Peeta and Katniss and Finnick and Annie came and he knew they were real because they weren’t gory with death. The ghosts were still there, though, popping up sometimes when he was distracted or when he was just waking up. Johanna was in the next bed. He didn’t know if that was deliberate or just luck but it meant he could talk to her when the hospital staff weren’t right there waiting to descend with medications or water or the like. “So it looks we’re alive,” he said the first night.

She gave a short laugh. “Brilliant as ever, Haymitch.” He smiled, because the sarcasm was welcome and it was blissfully normal unlike everyone else hovering and treating him like a fragile, half-cracked egg.

Finnick told him two important things when he came to visit next, and they let him out of bed enough to go sit in a chair like a normal human being. First, that he and Annie were getting married. That was a bright ray of hope even for him, to know that the two of them could finally have some happiness.

“Congratulations to you both,” he said. “When’s the wedding?”

“We don’t know yet.” Finn’s face was a picture of a young man eagerly in love, unable to believe his good fortune. Haymitch grinned to himself, sensing Finnick just wanted to bask in it a little bit first. Let him. He’d earned it.

The other thing, though, wasn’t quite so pleasant. Finnick told him what he’d said on camera. “Katniss and Peeta put the pieces together. I told them it wasn’t my business to tell them, but...you’re going to have to say something eventually.” He sighed, not liking it at all, feeling backed into a corner by it. It was none of the kids’ damn business in the first place. “Haymitch. C’mon. Telling it like I did, I realized I have nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s all on them.”

“Annie already knew,” he said roughly in return, irritated Finnick didn’t get it. “It wasn’t going to change her opinion of you, learning that.” He already saw plenty of how Katniss judged him for his weaknesses. Being turned into a Capitol plaything, submitting to anything they told him to do, it didn’t get much weaker than that.

“You think they’ll think any less of you because of that? I don’t know if it’s because you’re usually so fucking bright, but when you’re being oblivious, Haymitch, you really do it.” Finnick sighed and ran a hand through his bronze hair, leaving it in messy spikes. “She loves you. They both do. Maybe you’ll even let yourself believe it someday.”

His mind couldn’t quite fit itself around that and it wasn’t just the tiredness and the venom working its way out of his system. “Get a haircut before your wedding,” he grumbled at Finnick, because saying he was grateful for the honesty and for not being treated like an invalid was a bit much to handle.

Finnick laughed. “Yeah, I will.” With that he turned to go talk to Johanna, slowly taking a walk around with her pole holding the bags of fluids and drugs dripping into her veins.

“Finn,” he said, thinking of one last thing. Finnick turned back. “Don’t know how you do it in Four, but if you’d want a fiddler for your wedding, for the dances and all, be my pleasure.” He smiled ruefully. “You’re gonna have to give me advance notice. I’m a bit rusty and I ain’t in any shape for it at present. And I don’t know any music from Four.” But for Finnick he’d do it, and gladly.

“I’ll take you up on that,” Finnick said. “So long as you promise to actually dance with someone rather than sulking in the corner with your fiddle the whole time.” He tried to not scowl, because yeah, it was mainly about doing it for Finnick and for Annie but there went his slight ulterior motive. If he was the one playing the music he could hardly get dragged out into the celebration where he didn’t belong.

“You really are a manipulative asshole sometimes.”

“I learned from the best.”

Katniss finally came back and he could see by her face that she was trying to ask the question he didn’t much want to answer. “It’s stuffy in here,” he said. If he was going to talk about this crap it wasn’t going to be with the whole ward listening. Johanna and Brutus and Enobaria and even Cinna knew the score on that matter but he wasn’t going to put on a show for the hospital staff.

The awkward look of concern and even pity faded to something intent as she nodded and said, “Yeah, I know what you need.” She left him there in his grey hospital pajamas--a little too much like the prison uniform for his taste--and came back in a few minutes. “I got permission to take you topside for some fresh air.”

“Oh, good.” He held up his arm with the neon yellow bracelet proclaiming he was MENTALLY DISORIENTED to anyone remotely in the vicinity. “I’m the crazy one here, you know. So if I get lost or start thinking I’m a squirrel, it’s totally your fault for taking me up there.” She raised an eyebrow at him like she used to do and that was a relief. He sighed. “Let’s get Peeta.” If he was having this conversation he was having it only once.

Breathing in the scent of woods and grass and pretty much anything that wasn’t stale refiltered air, and really seeing the actual sun and blue sky and clouds, helped more than maybe anything they’d shot into his veins down in the hospital. He realized with some wonder this was the first time he’d been able to stand underneath the real sky and the real sun since that last day in the Training Center, the first time he’d seen real trees rather than Gamemaker mutts since leaving Twelve. It was September now, so it had been close to two months that he’d been living in artificial places. He totally forgot about Peeta and Katniss standing there and just closed his eyes and let himself feel what freedom was like, breathing in the air, feeling the warmth of the sun on his skin.

Eventually, though, he had to admit his little fresh air therapy session had to end and he found himself a rock at the edge of the woods to make himself comfortable. They hadn’t walked far. He wasn’t up to that yet. “So, questions,” he said lightly, folding his arms over his chest. “You must have ‘em.” Doing his best to maintain some control of it, to not feel like he was utterly exposed because they must have heard from the doctors how he’d been tortured and now they wanted to hear all about his illustrious career as a whore to boot.

They loved him, Finnick said. The thought still made him look at it suspiciously, but he’d go so far to admit that it wasn’t just about debt and they must care at least some to have wrangled Thirteen into rescuing him. Suddenly he hoped that this wasn’t going to turn into some big emotional thing where they talked about how much they all loved each other and how scared they’d been and all that kind of shit. Shaky as he still was, that would be even worse.

“We have a no-lying policy now,” Peeta said. “By the way. She wasn’t too happy that you and I kept her in the dark.”

“She is standing right here, you know,” Katniss grumbled at him. “But he’s right. I don’t need to be protected from the truth, Haymitch. Neither does he.”

The way she said it, calm and level and certain rather than with the whiny tones of a little girl frustrated at not being let sit with the adults, told him that Katniss had done some growing up while he was away. So he gestured, Go on to them. Though she didn’t come up with the expected first question, the basic one about whether Snow had sold him. “You didn’t have anyone that I can remember, ever since I was a little kid. Did Snow kill your family because you wouldn’t cooperate?”

It was actually a little easier that they were just leapfrogging right over, Were you a whore too? and just assuming it was true. “No. My ma, my little brother Ash.” He took a deep breath. “My girl. Briar Wainwright." Their expressions said that him giving that piece of the puzzle made some things finally make sense. "Snow killed them all eleven days after I was crowned victor. Because of that stunt I pulled with the forcefield and how I made the Capitol and their Games look stupid. Even that was too rebellious for him.”

“You tried to tell us,” Peeta observed. “On the train. When you said it was almost as bad as the berries.”

“Yes.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t just kill you,” Katniss said.

“Oh, no. That would be far too easy. Not enough suffering. I became the example of what happened to a victor who caused trouble. The one he could hold up to the young Johannas and Finnicks and Cashmeres and say, ‘Defy me and you’ll pay for it.’ It was pretty effective.”

“But if your whole family was dead, how did he...”

“Briar had a sister. So did Maysilee. I had cousins then. Friends. People I didn’t want to see hurt. The leverage ain’t a thing that quits when you don’t have family, Katniss.” He sighed, letting out a slow breath. “Beyond that, he pretty much threatened to put the screws to Twelve with the same hardships we got to experience last winter. So given all that as incentive, I fell in line like he knew I would. That was what was meant as the real punishment. He took away the people I cared about and then showed me he could still do whatever he wanted to me. So the smart thing was to not give him anyone else he could use against me.”

“Until Peeta and me,” Katniss said softly. He didn’t answer that. He couldn’t.

“How long?” Peeta asked.

“From the time I was seventeen until,” now he had to think about it, place it by the exact Games where he’d last had a patron by remembering the arena and the tributes of that year, and he felt his fingers clench as that memory of the tributes and how they died made the bloody ghosts of Hyacinth Foster and Ronnel Thornapple appear over Katniss and Peeta’s shoulders, “six years ago. I finally got a little too old and drunk and mouthy. Plus they already had the novelty of younger victors to replace me.” Go away, you’re not real. It’s just venom.

“Is that what was going to happen to me? To us?” Katniss corrected herself.

“Maybe. I think the lovers angle would chase off most people because being the one to break that up would piss a lot of people off.” He sighed, remembering that he wasn’t supposed to lie and said, “Probably. They kept it quiet for me for a few years before I was old enough for them to flaunt me in public. So Snow would definitely sell you both under the table. Some people would even enjoy it more being with someone who’s in love with someone else and married, since that was the plan back then--you two marrying and all.” He glanced over at Katniss who was looking back at him with sober grey eyes. “That was about the best protection you could get from most of the buyers, Katniss, but I didn’t want to say so at the time. I aimed to keep an eye on it during the Quell, before they read the card and we found out we’d be in as tributes rather than mentors, and try to see what I could do to dissuade who I could. It wouldn’t have been everyone, of course. But until that point came, I figured you had more than enough to worry about given dealing with all the crap of the arena and trying to be in love and keep Panem from rebelling.” To be perfectly honest with himself, he hadn’t wanted to have this conversation with them either unless he absolutely had to do it and explain just how he knew.

“That’s what you did for Finnick and Johanna. You looked after them when Snow started to sell them.”

He nodded. “Because I was still in the game and I knew how it was, knew who the patrons were and what they were like, all of that. I was probably going to have to ask Finnick to do the same for you two when the time came.”

“Haymitch...” Katniss’ look started to soften a little bit.

He couldn’t stand that so instead he just twisted the conversation away from it and put it back on the track of what was actually important. “I don’t believe Snow when he said he’d execute you if he caught you. I believe what he said he’d do if you surrendered is his real plan.”

“And what’s that?” Her eyes had sharpened again and he was relieved to see it.

He smiled grimly. “Why, make you the new example, of course. It wouldn’t do to just kill you. Peeta too, I imagine. He’s not just some district romance. He’s a popular victor too, and you two having to watch that happen to each other would make it even worse, and that’s what he would want.” He watched their faces as they reasoned it out, saw the dead families and the friends they’d have to shove away to keep them safe and the endless nights of shame and horror. They thought it through and didn’t have to have him spell it out for them and he was grateful for that. Pulling out his nightmares in detail for them was something he really wasn’t in the mood for at this point. They were smart kids. Smart enough to have survived the arena.

“So that means we can’t lose,” Katniss said steadily. “Because damn if I’m letting Snow do that to me or to Peeta, and I’m sure he’ll execute you.”

“Just because you got me rescued doesn’t mean I don’t still have an execution order out there in my name, no.” He smiled at her wryly. “Even if I didn’t, I think the fact I still keep coming up and causing trouble every time Snow tries to swat me back down finally pissed him off a little too much.” He looked over at the two of them. “So what’s the status of the war? I got some of the update during that last little presentation from Snow, but might as well hear it from you.”

“Are you sure you want to get into...”

“If I have to lie there one more day stuck in that hospital bed with nothing to do but listen to the head doctor assuring me I’m completely safe I’m going to stab him with a fucking fork. Gotta have something to do.” He smirked. "I get bored and get into trouble when I'm not kept busy. Start planning rebellions and things like that." He needed it, needed to keep busy and keep his mind off how he could still lose both of them in the war and off the arena and all the friends he'd left dead there that he still couldn't bear and off that little cell in the Detention Center and what pieces of himself he'd left there too. If he didn't have something to keep his mind occupied, something to keep the horrors and the ghosts at bay, he really would go insane.

“About the only things left are finishing securing Six and then taking on Two, because they’re holding out.”

“Of course they are. Well, having Enobaria and Brutus on our side now may help with that.” Though the two of them mostly kept to themselves in the hospital. He wondered if they were having second thoughts about the whole thing. Two’s mentality of devoted Capitol loyalty in all things was pretty damn hard to just shrug off all at once. “Or it may shoot us in the foot, who knows. As for Six, it’s a big place and given it’s the transportation district, I imagine the Capitol’s fighting hard to hold what they can.”

“Well, it sounds like you’re on top of things already,,” Peeta said encouragingly. “I’m sure I could use the help in Command when Katniss goes out into the field.”

"I’d feel a lot better right now if I could have a drink.” Talking about all that crap hadn’t been quite as bad as he’d thought because they’d kept it pretty matter-of-fact between adults, sticking to the essential facts, rather than getting all weepy about it, like that asshole head doctor asking him, But how did that make you feel? Maybe Finnick was right, he didn’t feel as ashamed as he thought he might. He’d still really like the drink, craved it. He could stop at one or two. He was sure. No point getting roaring drunk when the ghosts were already there when he was stone sober. Though when he glanced back over to where he'd seen them, Ronnel and Hyacinth had disappeared. That was a plus.

The two of them glanced at each other and then looked back at him with almost apologetic looks. “There’s no alcohol in Thirteen,” Peeta informed him.

“Bullshit. Even if they don’t have it out in the open, someone’s got to have a still somewhere for the black market.” There was no way to enforce a total alcohol ban. He knew that.

“There’s no black market either,” Katniss said. “And don’t think to try something like rubbing alcohol again. It’s locked up tight and anyway, we didn’t rescue you just so you could make yourself go blind by being stupid.”

He grumbled at her a little but said, “I got sober for the Quell and I stayed that way. Didn’t get drunk even at the Capitol when I could have. So quit acting like my disapproving ma and give me some credit, sweetheart.”

“Yeah, OK, you did it. But you’re going to find things are...a lot tighter run here than we’re used to from Twelve.” She showed him the inside of her forearm, the numbers and letters written in purple ink on her skin. “Schedules. Strictly rationed food at each meal. It’s definitely an adjustment.”

He stared at them and suppressed the urge to let out a groan. “No alcohol and they’re enough of freaks for control that they actually manage to totally enforce it? This place really is hell. Let’s hurry up and win this war already.” He wasn’t fully kidding because the idea of a place that stifling bothered him, particularly when he was this weak and struggling to get back on his game, but when they laughed like he’d made the most hilarious joke they’d heard in weeks, it seemed like things were apparently going to be OK with them.

Chapter Text

Almost two weeks had passed since they got them out of the Capitol alive. They still kept Haymitch and the others in the hospital while the wounds healed and until they could determine he was psychologically sound. “What?” he’d asked the doctor in amusement. “Making sure I’m not a danger to everyone around me?” He’d started laughing, because the damn fool was too stupid to realize that he’d been a danger to everyone around him for years. Got his family killed. Saw forty-six dead tributes. Convinced his friends to die in the arena. Threw Katniss and Peeta into a fake romance with the responsibility of keeping the lid on a rebellion and then later turning around and starting the rebellion. Dragged other friends down into the torture cells with him.

Apparently they took his laughing at the irony of it as a mark of his mental instability. Along with alcohol, seemed like they didn’t have a sense of humor in Thirteen. So the neon yellow bracelet stayed firmly on his wrist, and they didn’t even know he was still having the occasional ghost pop up, even though they assured him the venom had worked its way out of his system.

All six of them continued to heal up as best they could. Given his role as their ringleader, he’d tried to go around and make sure of them as best he could. Brutus and Enobaria didn’t say much, and he knew they were still struggling with the notion of having severed all ties to the Capitol by being rescued. That was something they’d have to figure out on their own and he sensed him yammering in their ears about Capitol cruelties and the like might not be too well received.

Cinna took his injuries and his recovery like he did most everything else: quietly and without drama. He seemed the most sound, but then, he’d always had the most level head on his shoulders of the six of them. Not to mention he’d been a part of this since the very beginning, been arrested even as Haymitch was getting tossed in the arena, so at least he’d somewhat knowingly chosen his own fate rather than been talked into it and it lessened Haymitch’s guilt somewhat.

Effie, though--he didn’t recognize her at first because she was bald, bare-faced, dressed in Thirteen’s hospital pajamas, the furthest thing from the painted and colorful Capitol clown that she'd been. Then he didn’t recognize her because he looked at her blue eyes and saw they were horrifyingly empty. She hadn’t been a part of it the same way, fired up by injustices. She’d come in at the end and done whatever small things Plutarch gave her, and this was how she’d been repaid. Arrested and tortured by her own people, forced to see how cruel they really could be. At least Twelve had only rejected him. She’d been a colorful little pink bird, but not razor-beaked and vicious like the mutts. Just a silly, harmless fluffy little bird, constantly twittering and restlessly hopping around, and now gone totally still and silent. Seeing her that far gone yanked at the feelings of guilt and horror and grief in him. He tried to tease her into snapping at him by making some remark about how even now he didn’t know her natural hair color and rather than putting him in his place with some sharp remark about how a lady would never tell and he was no gentleman for asking, she just ran a dazed hand over her shaved head and cried.

That made him shy away like nobody’s business. Better he have the sense to back off for now than say something stupid again and just deepen the hurts. He knew how to try and protect someone ignorant of the dangers ahead. He usually failed, granted, but he knew how to give his all in the effort. But to help pick up the pieces in the aftermath, to offer gentle comfort and somehow help them rebuild, he was pretty clueless. All he knew was how to offer, Have a drink and break something and maybe you’ll feel a little less shitty about it, because that had been his coping mechanism for years. Well, there was no alcohol here in Thirteen and breaking things would probably lead to disciplinary action. All he knew how to do was help someone build walls to protect what was left of their inner self, and she’d been shattered. So it was with relief that he saw Cinna talking to Effie a good bit after that because that man knew how to build someone back up, how to gently encourage. He’d done it with Katniss, gotten her to keep going when Haymitch just managed to get her prickly and pissed off.

Katniss and Peeta had nagged enough to finally get the medical staff to sign off on daily walks, so long as the patients were supervised, of course. Finnick and Annie usually traded off duties with Katniss and Peeta. Finnick and Annie had the job today, and he found he was impatiently waiting for it like a dog scratching at the back door. He needed to get out of this damn place for a little while. Tiny, dead Dean Gordon was over by where Brutus sat in a chair talking softly to Enobaria, but he wasn’t staring at the man who’d killed him twenty-four years ago at the Cornucopia, he was staring at Haymitch.

They wouldn’t let him have a knife either, wouldn't have done even if he wasn’t already apparently classified as halfway to nuts. Apparently all weapons were locked away in the armory except during training. Instead he found out they'd been sedating him at night so he didn't wake up the entire ward with his screaming. Because that was clearly so much different from him drinking away the night terrors.

Spying Katniss and Peeta come to visit--probably Cinna and Effie while he and Johanna were out getting the fresh air--and Haymitch saw how Katniss’ hand was slipped into Peeta’s and in spite of himself, he smiled, he was about to speak up. But Johanna’s voice piped up at his shoulder. “So I heard you got the sordid story on the whole victor-whoring bit, huh, Mockingjay? Well, if you ever want any advice on how to fuck Peeta senseless, come see me. Someone might as well benefit from all that shit I learned.” With that, Johanna admitted she’d been part of it and slammed the book on further questions, defending herself from it. He had to almost admire how neatly she did it. He was even more surprised when Katniss just acknowledged it without stammering or seeming embarrassed like she would have before.

After the first few years when all kinds of buyers made the purchase out of sheer novelty, all of them had been thrust into their particular niche of Capitol expectations, complete with the buyers who were into whatever persona was on offer, or into loathing it and wanting to deal some hurt out for it--there were always a few of those types. Under the pressure of Capitol spin, Finnick became forced into the role of the dreamy lover, the romantic type who was expected to woo with pretty words and poetry and flowers and then with fantastic bedroom skills. He knew with glum certainty that Peeta would have been something like that, except perhaps even more emphasis on the wholesome fantasy of a storybook romance than Finnick's languid sensuality.

Those who’d looked at him as a new victor and said his wit and charisma gave him an edge of danger apparently knew what they were talking about. He’d become the whore serving the needs of those who wanted to be outwitted and overwhelmed, who wanted to be made trembling and helpless by the hands and words of someone who was clever and arrogant and experienced enough to know their desires better than they did themselves. Someone who’d tell them what they wanted and then give it to them. In short, to use a term one of his patrons used that made him hoot with laughter later over a glass of whiskey with Chaff, he got the ones who didn't just want to be seduced, they wanted to be thoroughly ravished. Of course on the flip side of the coin he inevitably got those that wanted to prove Capitol superiority, to punish him and show him that he was just another district hick putting on airs. Generally not too rough sex in either case, though; they wanted the feel and the drama of danger without real risk. Actual brutalization would have been Johanna’s to handle.

Johanna, viewed as the cunning vicious axe killer, was someone he would be eternally grateful managed to extricate herself from the game early. She’d been smart enough at least to do it not by failing to satisfy patrons, but by just overplaying her supposed aggressive role so much that she appeared dangerous and flaunting her body to the point that it became offputting and nobody was paying for her. He was honestly surprised she hadn’t been made to pay for it in the end, though. But if she hadn’t managed that, he could tell what would have been in store, the sorts that were gravitating to her even then: the ones who wanted to either receive or dish out hurt and humiliation. Johanna had been cast as the bloodthirsty villain and that was the part she'd have been forced to play. Katniss, he suspected, as the deadly huntress with a caring heart who was neither considered dangerous as him or violent as Johanna, would have probably been the unfortunate role of managing to appeal to most everyone, just like she had as the Mockingjay. She was the heroine to them.

He hadn’t been able to do much for Finnick and Johanna, not nearly enough. He looked at Katniss and Peeta and thought that if he’d done one thing in his life right, it was keeping both of them alive and then managing to keep them from Capitol beds. That was two things he’d have thought himself absolutely incapable of managing even a few years ago.

Johanna snapped her fingers in front of his face, and he glanced over to see Finnick and Annie had arrived. “You daydreaming or what, Haymitch?” She scowled. “Let’s get out of this frickin’ tin can.”

On the surface, Johanna marched right past Finnick and Annie. He hurried to catch up to her as best he could. Let the engaged pair have their privacy, let him and Johanna have some too so they could talk or not talk or whatever. Walking right with them and seeing them so obviously in love made him happy for them both, but he couldn’t help that it was a happiness that twisted inside him nonetheless. For Johanna, who’d loved Finnick, it had to be even worse.

“So once they found out you were a whore did they start scrutinizing you?” Johanna asked him suddenly. “Questions about your sex life, all that shit?”

By now he’d known her long enough the sudden bluntness of it didn’t much throw him. “Oh, yes. Never mind I didn’t ask for it.” They’d asked him how many people he’d been with in his life. How long it had been since he'd slept with someone. The sort of “behaviors” they’d made him engage in. “I told them it was none of their fucking business. No pun intended. They still apparently ran tests on me while I was doped up on morphling.” He gave her a wry smile. “They were very pleased to inform me that despite my sordid past and being shot up with contraceptives for years apparently I’m not diseased or sterile. Though they made sure to stress that if I want to have kids--excuse me, more kids, after all, I do have my dear sweet illegitimate daughter already--apparently I’d better get on that in a hurry. I’m past forty now and all that, although they said my having a younger partner certainly helps the chances.” He didn’t bother hiding his incredulity and even contempt that of all things they might focus on in his life, they felt like they had the right to pry like that and then inform him of the results like it was some kind of gift he should be grateful to get. Like he could ever trust himself in raising a kid.

“Younger pa--” She scowled over at him as she understood. Apparently Thirteen took their hasty little romantic act in the arena as literally as the Capitol had.

“It was your idea in the first place,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m already on the hook for finding the right moment for fixing the whole ‘Katniss is my kid’ fiasco. Fixing that one’s all yours.”

“Shut up,” she grumbled, rubbing a self-conscious hand over the back of her head. All of them were getting the first traces of downy fuzz back as the hair started to regrow. Well, he definitely wouldn’t have to worry about his own hair getting in his eyes for a good long time to come.

He laughed, knowing from that reply that he’d pretty much won that exchange and enjoying it. “It ain’t an issue, Johanna. We both knew it was an act. Once we get out of that hospital just throw a fit in the cafeteria over what an insensitive and uncaring ass I am, and they’ll understand that shit you say on television when you think you’re doomed doesn’t mean anything when you survive. Problem solved.” It wasn’t like the hopes of a nation or the suppression of a rebellion hung on himself and Johanna pretending they actually had something together. She was a good friend and he was happy to have that.

“It’ll probably be the most entertainment they’ve had in years.” She shook her head with a snort of disbelief. “But yeah, like they did with you, they made sure to tell me the system’s all good to go down there still. Urging me to consider utilizing my peak reproductive years or whatever.” She leaned back against a tree, breathing a little hard from the walk already. “Felt as creepy as the annual exam in the Capitol,” she told him, awkwardly looking away. He remembered those exams and how degrading they felt. Yes, Johanna understood how pissed off and embarrassed he felt at the doctors' news, because she apparently shared the same feeling. Losing everything made them both naturally suspicious. That was a good thing when it came to the Capitol. Apparently it was useful here too.

“You heard why that is?” Katniss had told him about this and it made things make a lot more sense to him. “They’re desperate for new citizens. Apparently there was an epidemic that left most of the native Thirteens unable to have kids. They were probably horrified at the thought that after being whored out, you and I might be sterile as a couple of mules.” He laughed grimly at the thought. “In which case I guess we’d better try and be of some military use to them. If we couldn’t manage to either breed or fight I’m not fully sure they wouldn’t bring us up to these woods and shoot us as a useless drain of resources.” Granted, he hadn’t seen the general population to know if there were any oldsters around, but just the sheer utilitarian way of life they had and how harshly they followed the rulebook on everything set him uneasily on edge. He felt like even now they were looking at him and demanding that somehow he’d better prove that the cost of rescuing him would balance off neatly in some mental ledger of theirs, and that they were keeping exact score. He’d spent so long already struggling to meet an impossible standard, to prove he was worth something, and now it was like he was in that fight all over again.

“Screw them,” Johanna snapped bluntly, and only the tension in her broad but currently too bony shoulders told him how upset she was about another group of people looking at her and just seeing what use they could make of her body. “The Capitol wanted my cunt and these assholes want my womb. Both of 'em want me to have kids for them to use.” He realized that she was right. Tributes for the Capitol, soldiers for Thirteen. “If they think you and I are quits they’ll probably just be hovering waiting for me to move on to someone else who might knock me up. So what’s the difference?”

He ignored the obvious answer of, Thirteen never put us in the Games to die. Deliberately, he was flippant in his reply. “The Capitol actually has alcohol unlike Thirteen, though Thirteen wouldn’t get all hysterical at our kids--purely hypothetical kids, mind you--the way the Capitol would with them having two victors for parents and all. But I’ll say I think the accents are equally annoying.” She looked over at him, her brown eyes wide and huge and with a trace of the dreamy haze of morphling fading from her veins, and she laughed, at first harshly but then more easily. He found himself laughing along with her because it was that or giving in to the stress and worry. "There's not enough difference to matter, I think. Neither of them gives a fuck about us, just as what use we have for 'em," he said, giving in and saying the honest answer.

“You’re the one that put us in bed with these control freaks,” she reminded him, not exactly blaming him but not dismissing it. Thirteen already was turning out to be nothing like he’d imagined and Katniss and Peeta had confided it made them a bit uneasy too. He should have thought ahead more to the nature of a place that kept itself hidden away all this time. He’d just had too much on his mind about the Quell to consider it. Frankly, he’d been desperate enough to probably not care.

“I know,” he said with a frustrated sigh. “But Plutarch and I didn’t exactly get into what this place is like. All I knew going into the Quell was they’re here and they’re willing to fight the Capitol. They have the tech and weapons that the districts don’t.”

Looking at her expression he knew he wouldn’t really have to explain his lack of comfort with things. He’d talked to Peeta and gotten some honest answers about this place. In the Capitol the victors talked secretly about the notion of freedom. Freedom to not have to escort children to death or try to dangle them enticingly in front of Capitol buyers. Freedom to not fear for their districts or their families and friends if they said or did something a little stupid while in the Capitol. Freedom to travel between districts or call each other on the telephone and have those friendships and support from people who understood the reality of being a victor more than one month a year. Freedom to give their own bodies where they wanted, rather than to whom they were told.

They were free in Thirteen, all right. Free to the point it was freedom from: the freedom from having to make choices. He’d spent so long under pressure and fear, watching what he said and did. He’d have the luxury of simple choices, though. To ate what he wanted. To drink if he felt like it. To go to bed when he wanted and clutch a knife if it helped him sleep. To wear whatever he wanted that day. To not cut his hair or shave if he didn't feel like it. To be able to walk outside at night and look at the stars to try to calm his restless mind. To spend the day doing whatever he damn well pleased. To not fill out a stupid form in triplicate for everything. To not be expected to dedicate a life to being another little cog in a military hierarchy. Their rigid ways made things equal, he would admit, because children didn’t starve or lack for education because they were poor. But with their schedules and their grey uniforms and their cafeteria food and their classifications of everything, expected to obey it and even embrace it, he was chafing at the notion already.

He’d spent too many years watching that serpent Snow sweetly promising the country that he always acted in their best interest to believe that any place that the government had control to the point of making life stifling and rigidly controlled was a mindset to embrace. He cherished the freedoms he’d been permitted far too much to just give them away like that. In addition to all that, to be constrained to the hospital and pumped full of morphling and sedatives and even antipsychotics, and then have the doctors not so subtly urging him to get right on the business of fathering kids on Johanna the moment they were both healthy because he was apparently already past his prime, set his teeth on edge.

Idly, cynically even, he wondered what happened if a healthy couple refused to have a baby. Would the brass just let them get away with it or would the badgering and guilting of them selfishly not doing their duty for Thirteen begin? If they were even enthusiastic about the chances of an old ex-whore like him he had to think two young things like Peeta and Katniss where they didn't even have to bother fretting about their fertility were pretty much the jackpot. He doubted the two of them had gotten to the point of sex but she’d told him once she didn’t want kids. Whether that was fear or actual conviction talking, he didn’t know. If Peeta was smart, he was claiming the supposed miscarriage and the demands of the war kept them from thinking about kids. But the fact she and Peeta had apparently managed to extract themselves from their romance for the time being rather than keep up a constant front was a relief. When he saw her smiling at Peeta, now he knew it was genuine.

This place was supposed their savior and yet he felt as wary and suspicious here as he had in the Capitol. “I don’t trust them,” he told Johanna softly, and got an answering nod of acknowledgment for it. “Or Plutarch’s camera for that matter. But they’re the best allies we’re gonna get. So I say we use that but stay cautious.”

“Well,” she said, giving him a crooked smile, “if it sees Snow dead in the end, that makes it worth it. So we’d better get on the mend here so we can get away from the doctors and be there to see that bastard take the fall.”

“Solid plan,” he nodded. The sooner he got out of the hospital the less shaky and vulnerable he’d probably feel. Having people treat him like an invalid and constantly check the healing of his scars and everything, seeing the marks the Capitol left on him and knowing what he’d endured, made him want to just get away from it.

The next week, Katniss went to Six for propo filming as they finished up the last of securing the district for the rebellion. Peeta managed to get him into Command for it. “Don’t worry,” he said dryly as they headed there, “when they hopefully sign off on me as no longer potentially insane, I’ll take over working things from this end and you can go be out in the field with her.”

Peeta nodded. “It’s not easy from this end of things,” he admitted. “Just watching on a screen, having to be so hands-off about it. I saw that in Mentor Central firsthand.” He looked over at Haymitch and the look in his blue eyes said clearly, I don’t know how you stood it for all those years. He hadn’t withstood it. That was the point. It broke him to bits in the end.

He reached over and gave him a clumsy pat on the shoulder. “You did a good job of it during the Games. Apparently here too.”

“At least here we can actually talk to her directly rather than sending gifts in a parachute and hoping she figures it out,” Peeta said, the tension in his expression easing as he joked. “That’s as well. She’d never have figured out my messages the way she could yours.”

“How quick did she pick up on the one about bombing Thirteen?” he asked, curious. Obviously fast enough to have made it of some use, and that was a relief.

“She pretty much got it by the point you launched right into trying to get yourself executed,” Peeta said bluntly. “Figuring that one out took her a little longer, I’ll admit. We sort of had to reason it out together.”

Haymitch shrugged. “But you got it in the end.” He allowed himself a slight smile. Good girl. You got it done. Peeta got them entrance through the security of Command and soon enough he was staring at it, trying to not think of it as being like the Gamemakers’ big Control Room.

As he glanced around at the grey-uniformed Thirteen citizens sitting at the consoles, calling out the results of area sweeps and the like, Peeta touched his shoulder to get his attention. “Haymitch, may I introduce you to President Alma Coin of District Thirteen? President Coin, this is Haymitch Abernathy. I realize you already must know who he is from his leading the plan in breaking Katniss out of the arena, but of course you haven’t actually met him.”

The subtle way Peeta made sure to remind Coin of Haymitch’s essential role in getting Katniss here to begin, made him want to chuckle at the boy’s sheer cleverness, if that and the utter formality of his words didn’t warn him that something wasn’t quite right here. He looked at the woman, ten or fifteen years older than him, grey-haired and with unnerving pale-grey eyes. He held out his hand. “President Coin. Obviously I have you to thank for getting me and my allies out of the Capitol.”

“And apparently I have you to thank for getting the Mockingjay out of the arena,” Coin returned, inclining her head slightly, though there was a lack of sincerity in her words, as if she was just responding by rote to Peeta’s cue as expected. She shook his hand briefly and then dropped it.

“So let’s call it even,” he said sweetly. I don’t owe you a damn thing that way. She could hardly claim now that he owed her without looking like an ingrate. Peeta apparently had learned quite well how to play the game while he’d been away. He had the feeling being up against the likes of Coin, it had forced him to figure it out pretty damn fast.

“Yes, of course.” Her almost colorless eyes raked him up and down. He had that same sense of when he was in Snow’s presence, of being ruthlessly sized up and classified according to his usefulness. It set him on edge. Accordingly he instinctively played possum, slouched tiredly just a bit, let his eyes go a little heavy and distant. Looking weary and distracted; his current physical frailty probably helped the impression anyway, that and that neon yellow bracelet around his wrist. Letting her hopefully underestimate him just enough to give him a potential edge when he might need it. All the while, he tried to remind himself that just because she was as objective as Snow about people didn't necessarily make her evil. “We look forward to your contributions to the war effort, Abernathy," no overly formal Mister like with Snow and that was enough difference to make him relax a little, "given the potential you showed in the arena.”

Well, crap. Apparently she had his measure, or enough of it, and already there were expectations to perform put right on the table. Nothing to be done for it except smile and nod and follow Peeta as the younger man led him over to the console and gestured to a headset and a microphone. Clipping the microphone to the lapel of his hospital pajamas--seriously, couldn’t they have at least given him clothes for this--he put on the headset. Peeta jabbed a couple of buttons on the console, making sure he was watching, and nodded. “Katniss?” he queried. “You there?”

“I’m here,” she confirmed. “Plutarch doesn’t have the cameras up but I’ve got the earpiece in.”

Peeta nudged him, sitting in the next chair with his own headset in hand. He plucked one side of the headset off and glanced over at him. “She tends to yank out the earpiece when she gets a mind to do something against advice,” he told Haymitch. Haymitch snorted and resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Katniss being rash. What a surprise. Her impulsiveness constantly managed to show her at both her best and her worst.

He smiled back at Peeta. Watch and learn. ”Well, sweetheart, let’s get this straight. You can damn well try to argue with me and my advice all you like. I’ll even listen. I’ve got the better information and vantage up here but I figure you’ve been the one down on the ground getting the experience these past weeks. But if you get a notion to yank that earpiece out like a bratty little kid just to shut me up, I’ll treat you like you’re still a kid. I’ll make sure removing the thing becomes an impossibility for you. We need to be able to know we can relay information to you and make sure you’re OK and alive. We clear?”

There was silence for a few seconds. “Gee, Haymitch, I’ve really missed you,” she said sarcastically. Then she sighed and said, “Yeah, got it.”

“Good.” He gestured for Peeta to put on his headphones.

“OK, showtime, Plutarch, let’s hurry up," Katniss muttered. "I want this out of the way so we can start to focus on Two.”

“Let me worry about talking to Brutus and Enobaria, see what that situation is like there. I think you saw they’re kind of in the balance here.”

“Oh, I fully intended to leave that to you. After all, you’re good enough with that knife they respect you in that weird Two kind of a way. He’s your crazy friend who wanted to kill you because you’re an actual challenge and you were good enough you nearly killed her. So they might actually listen to you.” Well, that actually summed it up in a nutshell.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” he chuckled. He didn’t tell her that he knew Brutus was actually a little grateful to her for ending Cato’s misery. She didn’t need to remember that.

“All right, let’s do this and get you home in time for dinner,” Peeta said, his voice coming in loud and clear over Haymitch’s headphones too. “I hear it’s chicken.”

The feed flickered to life as Plutarch’s cameras turned on. He saw her there in Six, dressed in her black suit with its white accents, Maysilee’s gold pin shining bright. The Mockingjay, sprung to life, ready to rally a nation. Cinna should see this at some point, he thought, because he kept a girl from District Twelve alive, but it was in Cinna’s hands that she’d become something fit to inspire a nation. “Cinna did a good job on planning the uniform,” he told her.

“Yeah, he did.” Her smile was slight but it was real. “Cinna, if you’re getting to watch this, I owe it to you. Thank you for believing in me back when I was just a kid from District Twelve.” Haymitch glanced over at Peeta, unable to resist the urge to grin. Impulsive girl all right, but those genuine moments were damn well unbeatable.

Chapter Text

As usual Johanna was the first one ready for the daily walk. Sure, it meant a break from the morphling drip but they were trying to take that away from her more and more anyway. Saying she didn’t need it for the pain. Like they knew anything about it. They hadn’t been there when they turned her into just a raw, screaming animal. But the control freaks had spoken. At least she knew after talking to Haymitch she wasn't the only one who was a little creeped out by this place.

They got the lovebirds today. The fake ones. By now they were almost easier for Johanna to stand than the real ones. Finnick and Annie obviously wasted no time getting engaged now that they were free to do it and she wanted to just be happy for him but every time she looked and saw them holding hands or giggling or simply looking into each others’ eyes, she had to look away. It hurt too much in a way that had nothing to do with scars.

Peeta went wandering off to keep an eye on Haymitch while he tried to talk some sense into the idiots from Two. Good luck to him there. Haymitch could talk a good game when he tried but when it came to the oh-so-simple realization that the Capitol was full of liars and monsters, she knew Enobaria and Brutus had skulls as thick as fucking rocks.

So she got Katniss. Goodie. “Well, too bad the Two folks are spoiling bonding time for your husband and your daddy,” she said sweetly, jerking a thumb towards the retreating figures of Haymitch and Peeta, closely following Enobaria and Brutus. “I’m sure they’d love to get that on camera.”

Katniss gave an irritated sigh. “Peeta’s not my husband and we both know Haymitch isn’t really my dad.” She leveled Johanna with a intent grey stare that, for her not being his kid, did echo Haymitch pretty neatly. The eyes, though--definitely a couple shades darker than his. “Just like we both know Haymitch isn’t really your boyfriend either, so cut the crap with that.”

“Oh, now that we’re not in the arena with the cameras rolling, he hurried to explain that one to you, did he?” Figured; Katniss probably threw a damn fit at the idea of anyone else getting the spotlight but her.

“No, Coin made us rewatch the Games for anything valuable and Finnick saw you two getting cozy and tragic,” Johanna almost laughed at Katniss having the guts to get that bitchily sarcastic, “and he said you both were acting.” Seriously? Coin made them rewatch the Games? Sick old biddy. Katniss scowled fiercely at her. “So what’s your problem with me anyway?”

She knew exactly what the problem was, that mingled jealousy and anger. Katniss was everybody’s sweetheart. The girl who saved her sister. The romantic figure who almost lost her beloved. She became the heroine of the story and everyone bent over backwards to protect her from harm or from loss, and the stupid little twit didn’t even realize how lucky she was, how much pain she’d been spared by it. Nobody had lifted a fucking finger to save Johanna any kind of hardship. Instead they shoved her deeper into the shit by deciding she’d been malicious and bloodthirsty all along. Even people in Seven believed it by now. Nobody loved her, everybody loved Katniss Everdeen, and how the hell were the two of them all that different?

She snorted in amusement, sitting down underneath a maple tree, on a carpet of crimson and gold fire from the fallen leaves. The air was cool but without the nip of frost. Winter wasn’t in a hurry to arrive. “Aside from your annoying little romantic melodrama?”

“Says the woman who tried to duplicate it,” Katniss fired back.

“Oh, grew some claws finally, huh? About time.” She grinned, enjoying that. It was so much better to not just have the girl sputtering and glowering at her. “Thanks for toning the whole lovebirds bit down here, by the way. It was really getting nauseating. Your little defender-of-the-helpless act, though, that’s even worse because it’s not really an act, is it? You really are Katniss Everdeen, the savior of kittens and orphans,” she mocked her. “So yeah, I’ll admit, jealousy plays a part. We’re all just the people trying to keep you alive so you can keep looking good on camera.”

“Maybe you should have been the Mockingjay. Nobody would have to feed you any of your lines. You’re the one who was gutsy enough to challenge the Capitol in the arena with what you said about my sister.”

She laughed in Katniss’ face at that. “Problem there is nobody likes me.”

“They’re afraid of you.” Well, wasn’t she the observant little girl. “That can be useful too.” It was useful except when it couldn’t be shut off and that became everything, her entire identity.

“How about you, little Kittycat? You afraid of me?” She stared at Katniss, daring her to deny it. “I might snap and kill you in your sleep someday, you know. I can’t be trusted.”

“Finnick trusted you. Haymitch trusted you. To get me out of the arena, I mean. He picked you and Finnick over all the others to get the job done and you did it.” Katniss blew out a slow breath. “You saved my hide in the arena and you got me out of there when it cost you weeks in a Capitol torture cell and almost got you hanged. You’re abrasive as all hell but you’ve probably got the right to that after what’s been taken away from you. So no. I ain’t afraid of you. I trust you, and I owe you. And if Haymitch is your friend you know we don’t forget that easy in Twelve.”

“Oh, hell,” Johanna muttered. What was she supposed to say to that, anyway? It wasn’t trite and fake and it wasn’t sickly sweet or anything she could tear apart. It was just honest and that annoyed her even as it sort of touched her. She really wished the whole earnest bit was an act because then she wouldn’t almost want to halfway like the stupid little idiot. “Yeah, fine. You got me rescued, so maybe I owe you too. Just don’t expect us to be best friends giggling about boys and braiding each others’ hair,” she warned Katniss crossly. “When I have enough hair to braid.” Right now it was just a soft stubble. Because right there, she’d apparently decided, fuck the Capitol, she was letting it grow out this time. The rebellion was going to succeed so she was taking back that one little thing they stole from her.

“Fine. Finnick told me it was your birthday in August, by the way.”

She realized Katniss was right. She’d turned twenty-six in that stinking cell and didn’t even know it. She hadn’t even thought about it to this point. Now that was sort of depressing. “Yeah, and what about it? Peeta gonna bake me a cake or something?”

“No idea. He might, if they’ll let him have the ingredients. But me, when they’ll let you out of the hospital for it, we can go to the practice range and talk about how much the Capitol sucks and you can throw axes and I can shoot arrows. And we won’t mention even one tiny bit at all about any kind of romantic melodrama. Deal?”

Johanna smirked at her, actually rather pleased at the idea. “Get ‘em to put some Snow faces on the dummies and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

Brutus noticed that Peeta hung back during their walk. He glanced over at Enobaria, sensing what was coming and deciding to just preemptively cut Haymitch off at the pass on it. Victory often depended on the first strike, after all. “You hauled us up here to try to pump us for information about Two, didn’t you? It’s the only district left for your little rebellion to manage.”

Haymitch still looked tired as they all did but his eyes were lively and dangerous as ever. “Yep, that pretty much sums it up.” To his credit, at least he wasn’t trying to lie about it. “So what, you two just planning to sit the war out? That ain’t like Two.”

“You know nothing,” Enobaria hissed, turning to glare at him. “What we did was unforgivable.”

“Unforgivable? Knowing how y’all grow up in Two, I’d say it proved you’ve got even more guts than the rest of us.” That was the trouble with Haymitch. He could talk circles around a thing if you let him, and Brutus wasn’t inclined to let that happen.

“We had a moment of weakness, that’s all. We got soft over the years.” He glared at Haymitch, willing the other man fiercely to shut up about it because he didn’t want to deal with this and he didn’t want Enobaria to have to deal with it either because this was even harder on her. She’d had so much more to lose than he did. “We didn’t even ask to get taken from that prison.”

“Well, while they were so busy torturing us constantly they didn’t exactly give me a chance to see you and ask you if you wanted to get hanged, so pardon Katniss and Peeta for assuming you didn’t want to die and putting you on the rescue list,” Haymitch drawled.

There he went again, with his irritating habit of twisting the way of things to suit him so there was no good ready comeback. “Maybe we didn’t want to kill you, Haymitch, or the others, and maybe I’ll go so far to admit that still holds true. But being willing to be executed for failing Capitol expectations is a far cry from taking up arms against the Capitol. We’re not joining this rebellion.”

“Like it or not, you’re in the middle of it now. The war’s coming to your district. And I know Two. You won’t be able to sit a fight out, especially one over your own home. It ain’t in your nature to not fight. So you’re gonna have to pick your side, and if you’re going to fight for the Capitol you know they’ll probably execute you here in Thirteen.”

“And?” Enobaria said curtly. Her gold-capped fangs winked in the autumn sun as she scowled at him. “After being willing to suffer execution for failing the Capitol, we should fight for these rebels out of fear of execution? For you being a smart man, that’s an incredibly stupid argument, Haymitch.”

“Well, you realize if we return you to the Capitol, supposedly to fight for them, they’ll just execute you too.”

“So that’s it? 'Fight for the rebels because it’s your only chance to live,' really?” she snapped at him. “I’m not going turncoat just to save my own skin.”

He could see Enobaria’s temper was up and tried to calm things down a bit. “She’s right. You should know better than to try to sway us with something like that.”

“My point is that even if you choose to be loyal now the Capitol won’t care! Why the hell a pair of fighters like you would want to go do battle for the sake of someone who doesn’t give two shits about you,” Haymitch said, obviously getting frustrated himself, “is beyond me.”

“It’s our duty.” It boiled down to that, didn’t it? It was the duty and loyalty they owed to the Capitol that protected them and favored them.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Brutus, be smarter than that,” Haymitch snapped. “Like the Capitol’s done the first damn thing for you ever since you won.”

“I failed...”

“All you failed to do was to be enough of a standout for them to whore out,” Haymitch cut him off abruptly. “Shit, I only wish I could have managed that trick." His voice took on an odd tone as he said, "But yeah, you know what? They whored you out anyway.”

“What?”

“It had nothing to do with sex but they whored you out anyway,” Haymitch repeated it slower, with an almost thoughtful frown as if he was figuring the thing out himself even as he said it. “All of us. Before Katniss and Peeta, mine all came pretty cheap for the price. Just a train ride, a week of good food, a few pieces of clothing, and they got used up and thrown away quick enough once the gong sounded. Yours? Yours cost more. All those years of training beforehand, sponsorship gifts, maintaining the ones that became victors, all of it. I didn’t have any of that, not until last year.”

Something in his voice shifted and took on a strange tone as he said, “I finally did it with Katniss and Peeta, got so damn proud of myself for bringing them home alive. But really, I sold them to buyers for that fucking love story left and right. So there we were, year after year, the mentors, peddling our little tribute-whores out hard as we could. Being their pimps,” he said with a guttural laugh. “Making them pretty and pleasing and turning them into the lies the Capitol wanted just so we could convince them to open their wallets a little wider to pay for the pleasure of that tribute’s company gracing their television for just a while longer.” He looked over at Brutus, at Enobaria and along with the anger there was something tired now in his voice as he said, “There’ve been, what...seventy-three Games times twenty-four, and then forty-eight in my year. That’s 1800 tributes sent to the Capitol in the history of the Games. 1800 children. And not a one of us, from the ones that died in the first minute to the oldest victors we’ve got, was really anything but a whore. Because we were all just nothing to them but a warm body brought there to be paraded and priced and then sold for Capitol pleasure.”

He found himself staring at Haymitch, the words in that rough Twelve voice running dizzily through his head. He was a mentor. He wasn’t a damn pimp. He prepared his tributes for the trial of the arena as best he could. “Maybe being from a failure of a district made you think that way,” he said sharply, “but they always care about the tributes from Two.”

“No, they value them,” Haymitch said flatly. “And they can tell you exactly how much money that means for them. What price it took to send you a sponsorship gift in the arena. What price it took to buy Enobaria, or me. Value’s all about price, Brutus. Money. That’s it. We all had a value for them but not a damn one of us had any inherent worth.”

“We trained,” Enobaria argued. “We trained for it all of our lives, and they only fault Brutus because he didn’t deliver what he should have in terms of a quality fight and a memorable finish worthy of Two.” She didn’t give him an apologetic look as she said it. He knew she was his friend in spite of that, but they both knew it was only truth, even if after all these years it still hurt to hear it.

“All they cared about was how much we could entertain them. They valued me more than you because they expected less from me to begin and so I amused them more. They valued Enobaria more than you because she gave them a little more spectacle. That’s all.”

“You’re wrong.” When that was the best defense he could muster obviously he was losing ground fast.

“They’ll clap just as hard for some poor scared shit who gets in a lucky shot with a rock as they will for the best Two has, because all they care about is the spectacle and the blood. Not your skill, not your honor, not your skill as warriors. None of it really matters to them except for how it can amuse them. Year after year you give them the very best Two has, the pride of your district, and you actually let them say not good enough even when you win? They want to say you’re not worthy of them, Brutus? Fuck them. They’re not worthy of you or the way you can fight. They’re not worthy of any of us. They’re not worthy of any of Panem’s children, damn them.”

It would have been much easier to say he was deliberately trying to confuse them if he’d been standing there, full of the appearance of dramatic wrath, berating them with some kind of speech. They both knew Haymitch could be quite the actor and his words had been full of ferocity and anger. Instead, there was defiance in his face, yes, but it was intertwined with something so unutterably sad that it caught Brutus in the gut like a punch. It was the look he caught sometimes only in a brief flicker as Haymitch watched his tributes die. He knew deep down Haymitch wasn’t faking that.

The words had cracked something in him, broken the lock on that dark place that had been trying to ask why things were the way they were and he always tried to answer, Because it’s our duty. But suddenly that answer wasn’t good enough, a weak and feeble parry at best. “Is this where you put on the heat and urge us to join you in your fight?” he asked wearily.

A faint, faded smile touched the corner of Haymitch’s mouth, as if having put all his rage into his words, he had nothing left but the sorrow. “Nah. Only if you join up because you believe the cause is worth it. Not because I spun some nice words that make you believe you owe something or whatever. I do that, I’m no better than the Capitol.”

“And what do you fight for?” Enobaria asked, folding her arms over her chest, her face carefully blank of expression. Not resisting him, but not embracing his words either. He had gotten them to the point of listening. That was all he could expect at the minute. “Precisely?”

“For the right for our kids to be able to grow up and not have to continue to die for something that happened generations ago,” Haymitch said simply. “I think we’ve all paid enough by this point. Hell, Two didn’t even join the rebellion the first time and you still were punished for it along with the rest of us. You can be sure if this thing fails, you’ll all be punished again. Whatever excuses the Capitol makes for them, the Games aren’t any kind of justice or common bonding experience or celebration of district pride. They exist only because Capitol citizens have gotten used to watching our kids die for their amusement. That’s all.”

Put that baldly, it was something that lingered in Brutus’ mind. The notion of it, that the shame wasn’t his, was difficult to accept, though. It had been so long that he’d had to live with it that it wasn’t so easily put aside. “Capitol aside, why should we turn on our own people in Two if they want to stay loyal?”

“Because the Capitol enslaved you hardest. Maybe because even then they saw what a threat the fighters you produce could be. They worked you over so hard they made you believe you’re nothing except what the Capitol gives you. You’re just as afraid of their anger as any other district, but they made you actually want their approval. They told you you were worthless, Brutus. They told you that your body was theirs to do what they wanted with it, Enobaria. Two should be free like every district should, but most of the people aren’t ready to accept that notion yet. They’ll need some of their own believing it first for that to happen.”

They all stood there for a long while, three haggard and tired figures lost in their own thoughts. Brutus heard Haymitch draw in a breath a few times to say something further, but he always let it go, apparently in favor of letting the point stand as given. The idea was seductive, he had to admit. All the things he’d wanted his entire life, the things he had been taught were the things worth having: honor, a worthy fight, district pride. All he had to do was knowingly choose to turn his back on everything he’d ever been told.

Enobaria glanced over at him, deep brown eyes asking him what he thought. Maybe Cato had been right. He had looked at the Games and their supposed honor and said, Not that it matters. In the arena he had seen there was no glory and no justice in that fight, only punishment and grief. He wasn’t slaying his enemies. He was killing his friends simply because he was afraid of the price of failure.

So maybe Haymitch was right about that. But this time he drew the line. This wasn’t a decision to be made in a hurry or purely off the weight of emotion. At the end of the Quell they had both acted on gut impulse and instinct, and in the dark of a Capitol cell, they both came to regret their haste. “We’ll think about what you said,” Enobaria said. “That’s all we can give you for now.”

Haymitch nodded and deliberately stepped back from the two of them, clasping his hands behind his back. “That’s all I’m asking.” There was a trace now of his familiar wry smile. “And I didn’t even have to defeat you in combat to get you two to listen. That’s a good day in my books, considering I’m not sure I could beat a nine-year-old little girl right now.”

“Shut up and quit talking while you’re ahead,” Brutus advised him. “We’ll let you know.”

Chapter Text

They had sent Katniss, and Peeta along with her, to Two, several weeks ago in hopes of having some effect on the fighting there. Haymitch had apparently taken over duties of relaying information from Command in Thirteen to his kids in the field, and every day when he came back down to the hospital, they waited for his report.

Largely, it was, No change. The fighting continued day by day. More died on the sides of both the rebels and the loyalists. The Capitol fighters had dug in tightly into the mountain that was the stronghold of the military. When the rest of them were asleep, Haymitch and Johanna both heavily doped up to stave off their nightmares, Enobaria and Brutus talked quietly by the dim glow of one of the few lamps lighting the ward.

“They’re trying to take Eagle Mountain. It’ll take them years to directly assault it and conquer it,” she observed flatly. “Years and countless lives on both sides.” The place was a natural fortress to begin, the place the rebels had broken during the Dark Days, and after that the Capitol just made it all the harder to take, digging deep into the mountains.

He was silent for a little while. “Lyme’s leading the rebels. Haymitch told me.” Enobaria was startled at that. Ever since Haymitch talked to them when the fighting in Two was about to start, they’d slowly gone around the subject, agreeing that he had a point. They both had seen the greedy glint in the eyes of people in the Capitol, how they celebrated a lucky kill just as much as a skilled one. It really was all about the bloodshed.

She’d gone to the surface that day expecting a fiery speech from Haymitch, something prepared just for this occasion, and she was ready to guard against him and his clever tongue. He’d managed to survive as a companion--a whore, all right, to be honest--for eighteen years. Nobody made it that long without learning the ways of deceit and concealment. Even she had been forced to bend and to lie in some ways to please the people of the Capitol, as she had learned from childhood that duty was far more important than truth. But instead he gave them honesty.

Both of them realized as they talked about it what they were moving towards but neither of them wanting to be the one to speak first and take that irreparable step. Apparently Lyme had found the nerve. “You were going to tell me this at some point?” she asked him sharply. She was no mewling baby, needing to be protected from something.

“I didn’t want it to influence your decision,” he explained. Well, it had and it did also for him, that much was clear. If Lyme, who they both respected, had summoned the guts to name herself a rebel and be leading in the field, there was really no excuse left to not declare themselves.

Haymitch had observed, it wasn’t in the nature of a victor from Two, raised to be a warrior, to sit out the fight. Particularly not when it was their own home at stake. “Lyme probably needs some allies.” She looked up at him, letting out a slow breath. “Someone has to think about Two’s interests out there, Brutus, and try to get this thing over. Or eventually the rebels will just firebomb everything and we’ll be fucked as Twelve.” They’d both seen the footage from there and seen how Haymitch didn’t want to talk about it. The thought of their home reduced to that was the deciding factor. The rebel cause was maybe justified, but right now the rebels could be just as much danger to Two as loyalists. So they’d fight for the sake of their home and the people of their district. They had been raised for this battle ever since they were selected for tribute training at six, the fight the arena lied about and hadn’t really given them.

So Haymitch did the necessary convincing, the doctors signed off on them--”No combat, you serve in an advisory capacity only,” they warned sternly--and along with Beetee and several others, they found themselves on a hovercraft headed for Two to see what they could do to help shorten the fight.

Arriving at Eagle Mountain, she made a face to hear the rebels had nicknamed it “The Nut”. Leaning over, she muttered to Brutus, “So are they trying to kick us all in The Nut or are they just trying to imply that everyone in Two is nuts?”

He guffawed at that, causing the boy sitting next to Beetee to raise an eyebrow at the two of them. She thought he had to be from Twelve with coloring like that, but he was big for it. In any case, once the hovercraft landed, they found Lyme quick enough. She looked tired, her blond hair was limp and her skin was dusty with the toil of a few days without a bath, and Enobaria’s eyes readily picked up on the way she was slightly favoring her left leg.

“Baria,” she said with a smile, the two of them clasping forearms in the way of a Two greeting. “Brutus,” she did the same to him. “We’d heard they got you out of the Detention Center OK.” No apologies or claims she meant to get in touch with them. She’d had bigger things on her mind and they all understood that. “Good to have you here.”

“How bad is the situation?” Brutus asked gruffly, standing back and nodding up at the mountain towering over them. As ever, she was aware of the history between these two that she wasn’t a part of, it having happened before her time. She remembered seeing them regularly come watch the tribute candidates during training, and how the eyes of two victors right there, even two who hadn’t matched up to the highest levels of the Capitol standard, made all of them train just that bit harder. He’d never said it outright but she knew they’d been lovers, and the ease with which they communicated even now as friends, like she'd seen back on Victors' Mountain in Two sometimes, made her once again see the truth in it.

Lyme grimaced. “We’re having a strategy meeting tomorrow morning--you’ll be in it, of course--but unless we take the mountain in a hurry this is going to get ugly. Particularly with winter coming.”

“And if that happens our district is the only one that really loses in the end,” Enobaria observed. “Well. Then we’d better figure this one out. Don’t tell me they’ll be stupid enough to think sending the three of us to try to negotiate with the forces in the mountain will work.”

“They tried to suggest last week that I go talk to them and appeal to their reason,” Lyme told them dryly. All three of them laughed at that idea. As if there would be any kind of talking or negotiation without one side having the clear deathblow all lined up. Two didn’t talk. Two fought. Anyone who didn’t understand that was in for a hopeless fight.

“Fucking idiots,” Brutus said with a roll of his blue eyes. “Like you’d get a hundred feet inside that tunnel without a bullet in your brain.”

“Oh, one of the captains from Thirteen insisted on believing it could happen and he managed to talk the rest into supporting the idea,” Lyme said with a sigh, “and he found that out in a hurry. What a waste.” She raised an eyebrow. “At least it shut up any brilliant suggestions they send in the Everdeen girl.”

“Where is she, anyway?” Enobaria asked her.

“Hunting for dinner, I think. Come on. Let’s get you settled in.” They ate goose that evening shot by Katniss and spent the time swapping stories and enjoying the night air and the night sky instead of the artificial world of Thirteen. All in all, it was the best night Enobaria had passed in months.

Of course payback came in the morning at the strategy session. She found out the glowering Twelve boy was Gale Hawthorne, Katniss’ cousin. Apparently his idea of strategy was “Just kill everyone in the mountain.” Not that she couldn’t see the logic to it but the way his face was twisted in anger and hatred, it was obvious he wasn’t just being cold and impersonal about the decision. He wanted revenge, and when Beetee remarked that trapping people in the mountain could result in them suffocating, his response was a brusque, “Not if we blow it up.”

She glanced aside at Lyme and Brutus and saw the same neutral expression on their faces. A less disciplined district’s people would have been exploding in rage and asking what the fuck he was saying. But Two was tougher than that. “It’s mostly workers in there,” Peeta Mellark said, looking disturbed at the thought of it. “Not soldiers.”

“So what?” Gale retorted. “We have to take the mountain. And they’re from Two. It’s not like we’ll ever be able to trust them.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve got people from Two sitting right at this table,” Enobaria told him curtly. “Lyme’s been busy leading this fight for weeks while you were in Thirteen. Brutus and I are here. We’re trying to get this over with and keep the dead to a minimum on both sides.”

“They should at least have a chance to surrender,” Lyme pointed out, looking at Gale carefully, but Enobaria could see the flicker of dislike in her expression.

“They didn’t give us that chance when they blew up Twelve,” Gale snapped.

Brutus was the first to lose patience. But then his temper had always been shortest, and all three of them knew it. His hand slapped down on the table, causing several people to jump in their chairs. “You just want to punish people, boy,” he barked. “If you can’t take your losses and not make it all about a need for revenge, you need to shut your mouth and leave until you can.”

“Who are you to tell me what to do? You people in Two are so cozy with the Capitol anyway. Always hurrying to get down on your knees to be obedient and suck their cock.” Gale made an obscene gesture that brought back a few too many nights for Enobaria, the things she'd done to prove her loyalty to the Capitol, things that now turned hard and sharp inside her. With that her own temper frayed and snapped.

“Don’t you even go there, you smug little shit,” she hollered at him, “or you and me, we take this outside right here and I’ll kill you, I swear.” Brutus’ hand was on her thigh then with a grip like iron both restraining her and pushing her back down in her chair.

“Everybody shut up!” Katniss hollered over the commotion. “This isn’t helping at all.” Taking a more conciliatory tone, she told Gale, “It’s an old mine in there. You may say that now but you don’t want to have to deal with trapping people in there to die like our dads did.”

“That’s the problem? They suffocate instead of blow up like your pa and mine so that’s why everyone’s so squeamish?” Gale snorted derisively. “We can blow the whole mountain up if that’s the problem.”

Peeta must have sensed that the Two side of the table was ready to start things up again at that because he spoke up. “We don’t know how they all ended up in there, and who’s a civilian and who’s not. I don’t think we should be so hasty to just kill them all because they happen to belong to District Two. We need to remember who the real enemy is here.” He looked at Katniss clearly as he said that, and she gave an almost imperceptible nod, obviously understanding what message he was trying to give.

Boggs, Coin’s chief colonel, spoke up now, sensing the lull and apparently trying to introduce actual strategy rather than yelling accusations. “Rathbone,” he looked at Lyme, “it looks like we’ve got two options like Hawthorne said. We trap them in there or we flush them out.”

“According to my figures, flushing them out is rather impractical as the quantity of irritant gas needed for the ventilation system would be so high that it would become dangerous to everyone in the area. It also would take too long to disperse throughout the entire mountain and thus offer safe havens inside as some areas clear up,” Beetee interjected. “The area is simply too massive.”

“All right, so that’s a no-go,” Boggs nodded. “That leaves us with trapping them, but I agree that minimal casualties would be advisable. I think Hawthorne’s plan to avalanche the mountain is probably the quickest way to make it unusable and minimize casualties, if we rig the avalanches to leave the train tunnel open for people to escape. We can do that, right, Chen?” Beetee nodded to confirm it.

“And how do we keep them from escaping then?” Gale insisted.

“Set up a perimeter around the square near the Justice Building,” Brutus said simply. “The tunnel exits there and soldiers can be waiting.”

“Projected casualties?” Lyme asked brusquely, all business now.

“Minimally, probably several dozen in the mountain which is inevitable given the collapse of some structures within,” Beetee said. “Potentially higher than that, of course. The terrain is so unstable that precision in the avalanches will be difficult. But if the bombs avoid the slope with the train tunnel that should keep it largely clear and give at least some of them a chance at escape.”

Boggs added, “Anyone who doesn’t surrender in the square and tries to raise a weapon will be a casualty--how likely is that?” he addressed the three of them, a look of actual interest on his face rather than just cold calculation.

“The civilians will probably surrender easily enough,” Enobaria told him. They hadn’t been trained to fight and to stay stoic and strong in the same way the Peacekeepers and the tributes had. “The soldiers--hard to say. At least some will probably recognize they’re outgunned and stand down.”

“There’s been enough killing each other already, I think,” Katniss said wearily. “Too many in the hospital. Too many that never made it that far.”

“If we try to take down Two by killing everyone in that mountain, we’re just setting ourselves up for the next war by making them resent how excessive and cruel we were,” Peeta cautioned, looking around the table. “Tell me that’s not the case, Brutus, Lyme, Enobaria.” His blue eyes flicked over to the three of them.

“We’ll remember it for a long time,” Lyme acknowledged. “Despite what some of the other districts may think, we’re not raised to be just mindless bloodthirsty savages. We’ll accept necessary deaths and generally put down our weapons when there’s no need to fight.” Knowing Gale was probably rolling his eyes at that, Enobaria knew she was right. Two tributes were prepared to fight and to kill, but their training gave them the ability to generally handle it coolly and rationally compared to the others and to not go insane. So it wasn’t Two that did crazy things like go turn into cannibals and rapists in the arena.

Peeta nodded to acknowledge that. “We’ve all heard how bad things were before Panem, and how few people are left compared to then. How many wars is it going to take before we just kill ourselves off entirely?”

“So we end it as quickly but bloodlessly as we can. Good,” Boggs said. “I’m going to have to make the call and get approval. Rathbone,” he nodded to Lyme, “you’re with me for that, and I want Chen there to explain the plan.” Beetee flicked a nervous hand in acknowledgment, already scribbling away on the notepad in front of him. “The rest of you, you’re on liberty around the camp until you’re summoned.”

Dismissed, she followed Brutus out, watching the form of Gale Hawthorne storm off, his anger written in every line of his body. “That one’s dangerous,” she said shortly. “I’m glad he’s not on the phone call to Thirteen.”

Brutus nodded and grimaced. “He’s turned savage.” Of all people, Two would understand the difference between necessary bloodshed and sadism or revenge. Gale was fueled purely by emotion.

“Losing people he cared about didn’t do that to Peeta--he was the one in there helping call for sanity. Hell, it didn’t even do it to Haymitch, and you and I both know how bad he got it.” She’d just spent years telling herself he’d earned his punishment for his defiance, because if he earned it that meant it would never happen to her because she wasn’t rebellious or disobedient at all. Look how well that conviction turned out.

Brutus watched Gale disappear into the distance, into the trees at the base of the mountain. “Just be thankful that boy was never in the arena. I don’t know if he was like this before Twelve got destroyed but you can tell he wants to deal out the pain before he gives them death.”

Lyme came back to the tent that night, dropping down beside them at the campfire while they were enjoying as much of the air as they could. She ran a hand through her short blond hair and there was something like satisfaction in her expression. “It’s done. They’re dropping the bombs to set off the avalanches in the morning.”

None of them grieved too much at the news, taking it in a matter-of-fact way. They’d known wrestling Two from Capitol control would cost lives. It already had, because people died in battle. But with this plan they’d hopefully helped keep it to a minimum and that was a victory of a sort.

Advised of the situation, Haymitch was back up in Command the next morning with his headset on. This time he got actual clothes; just the same belted dark grey trousers and button-down pale grey shirt as everyone, but apparently he was moving up in the world.

“Katniss?” he asked, as the first bombs exploded and on camera, he watched the mountain start to slump and slide. He could hear the rumble and he could only imagine what it must be like live. He remembered the last big mine disaster, near to six years ago now, how the ground had shook, how even being tipsy already he’d felt it and he knew what it meant. He’d closed his eyes and reached for another bottle. They didn’t want him there at the mine trying to help rescue efforts or the like. He didn’t belong any more. But knowing men and women were dying down there cut him deeply anyway. He’d been still more than Seam enough to feel it. He hadn’t been out at the mine for that one and he’d been too young for the one that killed his own father, but he remembered the one from when he was a kid. The grief, the horror, the uncertainty. The widows and widowers crying out their grief as their loss became real, or worse, finding out that there wouldn’t even be a body to bury.

“I’m here,” she said in a soft, distracted voice. “Peeta’s a little ways back with Brutus and Enobaria since they won’t let those two into the square. He’s OK too.”

“Don’t be thinking about the one back home,” he advised her, hearing the shaky sound of her breathing through the microphone, something that sounded almost like sobs.

“How do you--” She cut herself off as she realized it must be on his mind also. “You lost people in that one too,” she said. “My daddy. Gale’s. They were your friends.”

“They were,” he said with a tired sigh. But were he to be honest, he’d really lost Jonas and Burt in his life both long before that bright winter day they died down in the mines. That had just been the loss of any chance of ever finding reconciliation, however ridiculously small that chance had been to begin.

“What did we just do, Haymitch?” she whispered. He was glad Plutarch wasn’t capturing her on camera right now. He could only imagine the look on her face but that was terrible enough of an image he didn’t want to see it for real.

“The best we could under the circumstances.” There had been no winning this situation. He knew Two well enough from its victors and years of talking with Brutus to understand that. They wouldn’t just let themselves be talked nicely into surrender. “But something we’ll still have to live with anyway.”

“Like the arena,” she said flatly, understanding what he meant. Living with the person it revealed inside, what it had turned you into in order to survive and to win.

“Yeah.” On the phone call last night Peeta had told him how hard Gale was pushing for wiping everyone in The Nut out in one fell swoop. He’d been incredulous, sort of wished he didn’t now owe the boy for helping rescue him from the Detention Center, because had he been there, he’d have wanted to smack Gale. How any kid of Hazelle’s had grown up to have that little sense and compassion was beyond him. Hadn’t there been more than enough blood already with Twelve burned to ashes? Did they really need to destroy two whole districts to prove, what, that they could be vicious and petty and vengeful, sink as low as the Capitol? Take down all the innocents in the mountain along with those the Capitol had forced to do their dirty work in bombing Twelve by raising them in such a fucked up way that their fear had warped in their minds to somehow become an example of Capitol love and kindness?

Then he’d just taken time to be thankful Peeta and Katniss both were apparently still good enough kids, arena or not, to see the wrongness of it and speak up against it.

One of Coin’s minions leaned over. He pulled off one earphone. “There’s some remnants of the Capitol air force detected. No signs of launch yet, but no point taking chances.”

Nodding and putting the earphone back in place, he told her, “Katniss. Get inside now. There might be some of their planes still ready to fly.” It was probably a sign of how unsettled she was that she didn’t bother to argue.

The hours passed. Reports flew around Command of pockets of resistance here and there. He heard Boggs’ voice vaguely now and again but couldn’t make out what he was saying. But if the man was looking after Katniss, he was sure she was in good hands. He might be Coin’s right hand but Peeta and Katniss both assured him that Boggs was one of the good people, and having met him, he agreed with the impression.

Evening came, and so did dinnertime. He tried to argue he didn’t need food--hell, he’d had occasions where he sat in a mentor chair for something like thirty-six hours straight except for a couple of brief bathroom breaks. Coin stared at him and ordered him to go eat something before he fainted, and if anything happened he’d be called. Sighing, he went back down to the hospital for the damn tray of food he didn’t really want, wishing that if he had to eat they’d just let him eat in Command. But once again, the rules had to be observed. Food was to be eaten where it was issued.

“What’s the story from Two?” Johanna asked, sitting on her own bed tucking into the beef and gravy and glancing over at him. She tried to act casual but he knew she was starved for information. Starved for anything, really, because this hospital was boring as shit, particularly now that they were all coming down off the drugs and recovering their strength.

“Bombs got dropped on the mountain, fighting’s ongoing, we’re winning. Slowly.” He gave her an apologetic smile. “I’d get you up there if I could.”

She smirked. “I’ll just go try to wheedle Cinna into designing me a dress to pass the time. Always did want one from him. Lucky little Mockingjay, getting a whole wardrobe from him.”

He laughed in spite of himself, handing over his slice of bread. “Here. A little extra for you. Gotta be able to fill out that dress to make it worth it.”

“Oh, don’t worry. The good ol’ Johanna Mason tits and ass will be back before you know it,” she promised with a grin.

“Sadly, nobody’s gonna get to appreciate that in full because I’m sure they have some kind of anti-nudity rules here in Thirteen,” he teased her, and it was good because it was taking his mind off the situation in Two and he really needed it. She knew full well he got why she’d done the naked thing in the Capitol and that he wasn’t being serious.

“Oh, I don’t doubt it for a minute.” She glanced around and smirked, lowering her voice to a dramatic stage whisper as she asked him, “So what, you think they just tug aside their pajamas enough to fuck? Actually getting naked is probably too wild for them.” Her grin went wider. “Foreplay? Probably consists of him warning her, ‘I’m about to enter you now, spouse!’ ” Considering she did it in a dead ringer for Thirteen’s accent, he couldn’t help but crack up.

He waved a hand, trying to not keep laughing, telling her, “All right, I’d better get back. Go get that dress planned. You can wear it for the Victory Ball once we take the Capitol.”

“There’s gonna be one?”

“With Plutarch around? Please. It’s inevitable.” He knew full well that to give a Gamemaker any opportunity to throw a lavish party meant he’d be all over it.

He took the elevator back up to Command and while the teasing with Johanna had been a welcome respite for him to the point he was actually oddly grateful Coin made him go eat, it faded fast as he stepped back in the tension and seriousness of the matter at hand.

The evening passed. He started downing black coffee with the rest of them. Situation reports became fewer and farther between as the action died down. There were no signs of life from The Nut. Anyone who was getting out was out. He checked with Katniss now and again to make sure she and Peeta were OK inside the Justice Building. A couple of the technicians were surreptitiously playing a game on a pad of paper when Coin wasn’t looking and he smiled to see that. So maybe Thirteen wasn’t entirely full of rulebound humorless types.

Finally Plutarch popped up at his chair. “I’ve talked to Cressida and we need Katniss to make a speech, Haymitch. We’ve all but won, but it’s the best way to possibly get the last of them surrendering without bloodshed, and I know that’s what we all want.”

He sighed and tipped back the last dregs of the latest cup of coffee. “Let me talk to her.“ Calling her up on the headphones, she answered, and told him they’d given her a new microphone.

Telling her briefly what the thought was, he ended it with, “You could save some lives here. I’ll give you the lines Plutarch's got here, but,” ignoring the face Plutarch made as he said it, he told her, “if something better strikes you, go with it.”

“You trust me that much to not stick my foot in my mouth, huh?”

“Haven’t let me down yet with it, sweetheart,” he assured her. “Let’s hurry through it. You’re too exposed for it to be really safe.”

The image of her flickered on the screen, looking tired. He gave her the lines as best he could and then the trains arrived from The Nut, bearing the last people evacuated from the mountain.

When he’d told her to go with an inspiration, he didn’t mean for her to go running for a young man from Two with a bandage and a gun, holding her bow high and making herself vulnerable. “Katniss,” he said warningly, “be careful.”

“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

She was quiet for an eternity while he watched the gun in the man’s hands, afraid that any second now he would twitch it up and shoot her dead. “I can’t,” she said finally. “You blew up my home, we just blew up yours. We’ve got every damn reason to keep killing each other over and over and over. Making the Capitol happy when we do it. I’m done being their slave.”

“I’m no slave,” he insisted, and in that Haymitch heard Enobaria and Brutus and Lyme and all the other people from Two he’d met, so dazed and so enslaved they couldn’t even realize it without help.

“I am. A lot of people I know and care about are too. You kill me, someone kills you, and it just keeps going. They turn us against each other, make us think this district or another is the one that’s out to get us. I watched your mountain fall and I thought about the mines collapsing at home. District Twelve and District Two, we’ve got no quarrel except the one they give us, in the Games, and now here in the war. They make us hate and fear each other so we don’t realize they’re using us as shields. Well, I’m done being made to protect them. Why are we fighting each other? Why are you making Lyme and Brutus and Enobaria fight against you, fighting against your own victors and maybe your neighbors and your family?”

“Because they’re trying to kill me,” the man said tiredly.

“Then we stop killing each other!” Katniss yelled defiantly. “Someone has to decide to stop.”

“They’re miners,” he reminded her quietly. “Like us.” He remembered talking about this to Brutus so many years ago, realizing that Two and Twelve had something in common, breaking a hard life out of unforgiving rock and risking a bad death underground.

“Twelve’s a mining district. So are you here in Two with your quarries. We shouldn’t be trying to kill each other in the aftermath of a collapse. We should be reaching out to help each other, rescue each other, make the recovery together. We should be helping each other, period.” She reached a hand out to the man. “I’m not your enemy. You’re not my enemy. The only real enemy we all have is the Capitol that tries to make us hate each other, so please, join us and help us.”

Haymitch saw the young man reaching for her hand and let out a slow breath of relief. It was actually going to work, and once again her speaking off the cuff was what had carried the day. The words Plutarch gave him weren’t nearly as good as this. And it hadn’t been anything ready-made that got Enobaria and Brutus listening to him either. So maybe he’d learned a little something from Katniss there. He was about to relax and call it done when the shot rang out, the crack of it audible even through his headphones.

Chapter Text

After Two officially joined the rebel forces, there were some reports of isolated pockets of resistance remaining. So long as they didn’t join together for a big push against the rebel forces, they were just pesky nuisances, like weeds to be pulled out one by one. Haymitch wished Lyme best of luck on that venture when he talked with her on the phone, and back in Thirteen things settled down to a period of the calm before the storm. Right now the Capitol was isolated, cut off from all supplies and aid, and he hoped like hell that the plan wasn’t simply so starve them into submission in a prolonged siege.

True enough, that had been the Capitol game long enough, particularly in the outlying districts. Holding them hostage by fear and by the need for food, for the pitiful tesserae that were bought at the potential price of a child’s life. Some might say there would be a certain poetic justice in forcing the Capitol to live in terror and hunger--Gale, for one, would be one of them. But it was on his mind more and more of late that winning this by becoming like the monster they fought was no victory at all. The bombing in Two made him see that pretty clearly. The notion was etched into his mind all the sharper by the shot that hit Katniss, that someone in Two was filled with enough hate and fear from what had just been done to try to kill the messenger.

Listening to the headphones and hearing nothing but a grunt of pain and then silence from her, watching her tumble to the flagstones of the square like a limp, broken puppet, had been some of the longest moments of his life. Somewhere in his mind, he’d been instinctively waiting for the sound of a cannon, which was stupid because this wasn’t the arena but in his panicked mind all he knew was there was no cannon and that had meant she was still alive, right?

It was Cinna that saved her ass, him and his carefully tailored uniform with its layers of body armor neatly fitted to her that took the force of the bullet. They’d wheeled her into surgery the moment she got back and none of them could get a damn thing out of anyone. Finally it had been Perulla that wheedled it out of Alliver Harcourt, one of the doctors. Harcourt actually had something like Haymitch’s respect because he didn’t bullshit or condescend like most of the others. He told Haymitch when he was being an idiot and overextending himself to the point it would set his healing back, and that was pretty much that. He trusted the information Harcourt gave to be accurate enough.

Harcourt’s report was Katniss had a cracked collarbone, some broken ribs, and she’d have a colorful bouquet of deep bruises for a while--some surgery and recovery time needed, but in the hands of skilled, professional medicine here, unlike apothecaries and praying for the best like in Twelve, she’d be just fine.

They hadn’t brought her out of surgery yet but already Peeta was down in the hospital along with Prim, Finnick and Annie, and Perulla was making her rounds as a nurse but the anxious lines of worry in her space spoke loud enough. Cinna and Effie were already joining the party, a short walk from their own hospital beds, and Johanna was there too, attempting a look of total disinterest that didn’t quite pass muster. Even Brutus and Enobaria made a pass by the group occasionally to check in. Looking at them, Two and Four and Seven and Twelve and Capitol alike, it was obvious Katniss’ knack of drawing people together from all walks of life was in force even in this situation.

From the looks of it, Plutarch came to join the vigil too. Though when he paused in front of Haymitch and said almost apologetically, “President Coin wants to speak with us,” he quickly added, “Is there any more news on Katniss?” There was a glimmer of concern in his blue eyes.

“Nothing,” Haymitch said. “Just waiting for them to bring her out and then after that for the knockout gas to wear off. So let’s get this meeting over with.” He’d like to be there when she woke up if he could, to reassure himself she was alive and mentally all there and all of that.

“We really ought to get you a communicuff,” Plutarch said with a sigh as they headed down for Command. “It’d make things easier than someone having to come get you for these things.”

“Oh, hell no. Keep that thing off my wrist.” He’d finally lost the MENTALLY DISORIENTED bracelet, somewhat to his chagrin. It was such a nice little prop to have and wave at people on occasions that being thought loopy was a useful excuse. But the thought of having one of those damn infernal devices on his wrist and having Coin or her lackeys be able to find him anytime, anywhere, and make him at their beck and call whenever they wanted to summon him? No thank you. He liked being able to escape it. “So why me?”

“Haymitch,” Plutarch said, giving him a slight smile, “really. It’s pretty obvious you’re the ringleader of that group down there. So it’s assumed they follow your lead and you speak for them on whatever matters are necessary.”

At the door of Command already, he paused and stared at Plutarch, simultaneously entertained as hell and incredulous. “They follow my lead? Have you ever tried to get that damn girl to do anything she didn’t take a mind to do herself?” he asked dryly. Such as not put herself in situations to get shot?

“Well, all right, she’s probably more comfortable dealing with you than Peeta too.” By which Haymitch pretty much assumed Peeta had outmaneuvered her at least once and that thought made him chuckle. “They do follow you, though. Look what you got them to do in the arena! I wasn’t sure you’d manage to form an alliance and a plan quite the way you did. It was brilliant.”

Yeah, I got them to willing to die on my say-so and it worked in a lot of cases. Congratulations to me on that one. Trying hard to ignore the sudden appearance of a Seeder-ghost with her golden brown eyes and the wounds from Cashmere’s hookblades gaping wide and red like Peeta told him had happened, he stepped into Command, following Plutarch to one of the small conference rooms.

Coin was already sitting down in the chair at the head of the table. Trying to not roll his eyes at the obvious powerplay of it, he took a seat. She glanced over at him, and as usual he got that sense of assessment. Yeah, he knew what she probably saw. Nothing too impressive. A lithe man of middling height at best, with his best years behind him, still too thin and too tired, hair even shorter than the severe Thirteen military cut, his drab grey clothes worn with barely a nod to the shirt being tucked in as per regulations. He was forty-one damn years old and being told to tuck in his shirt irritated him enough to try to flaunt the rule as much as he could.

“Soldier Abernathy,” she acknowledged him with a nod. “Soldier Heavensbee.” I’m not your damn soldier, he thought crossly. The trouble with sudden alliances with unknowns was figuring out the balance of power and the ability to trust. So far Thirteen held the power and as to how far he could trust them, he’d believe they’d act in the best interest of the rebellion. Whether that held to Katniss’ best interest he wasn’t quite sure. “Doctor Fox,” the idiot Haymitch woke up to on his arrival here in Thirteen, “has informed me that the Mockingjay will recover.” Well, that ended that subject neatly. Obviously there wasn’t going to be any discussion on it. “He also says that all six of you will be ready for release from the hospital soon enough. You and Soldier Mason might need a bit longer than the others as your wounds were more severe.”

He smiled wryly. “Rest assured Johanna and I are doing our best to get healthy as quickly as possible so we can be released,” he said. He thought he heard Plutarch suppress a chuckle at the thinly veiled sarcasm.

Coin brushed it off as he had the feeling she would. “Along with those picked up by our hovercraft from the arena, you, Mason, Allamand and Reska are covered under what we termed the ‘Mockingjay Accord’. Now, you probably aren’t aware of its provisions, being as the deal was brokered between myself, Mellark, and the Mockingjay in your absence.”

“I might have missed a few things here and there while I was away.”

“Essentially, no prosecution by the War Crimes Council that’ll be set up after the war ends will be undertaken against you for any actions you were forced to take by the Capitol. That includes during your own Games, during your years as a mentor, and during your captivity.” Her almost-colorless eyes met his. “Effectively, all of you have general immunity for your actions from the moment of your initial reaping as children until your recent rescue, provided those actions can be directly proved to result from Capitol force or threats.”

“That’s generous,” he said flatly, incredulous that anyone would even have to think of that but it was probably a good thing it was on paper. “I’ll pass that on to the rest of them.” It probably did Brutus and Enobaria the most good, being as Two in its role as the Capitol’s pet tended to give a veneer of complicity to its citizens and its victors.

“That does not, however, address the matter of Locke and Trinket, as they weren’t covered under the deal. As Capitol citizens directly involved with enabling the assorted crimes of the Hunger Games, they’ll be eligible for prosecution. After their release from the hospital they’ll be taken into custody and detained here in Thirteen until the War Crimes Council hears their respective cases.”

Now he really was staring at her, thinking of what Katniss had said about her prep team being locked up in a cell down in the depths of Thirteen. He hadn’t seen much of them himself but he felt a hell of a lot of empathy for them, considering he’d been locked away himself in that time. “So let me get this straight. You actually put in the effort to rescue them from Capitol detention and execution so you could bring them here to Thirteen detention and eventual execution?” Why hadn’t they been included in the pardons? He realized why almost instantly. His capture, along with the other victors, was obvious. Effie and Cinna weren’t quite so clear. Katniss probably hadn’t even known they were in Capitol custody.

“At the time of the rescue their legal status hadn’t been determined.”

“We actually had intelligence that made us think Cinna was already dead until Snow announced he was up for execution,” Plutarch said apologetically. “I had told Katniss that around the time of the Accord.” He looked frustrated with himself, obviously recognizing he had screwed up and that it could cost Cinna now.

“And as we were already there to rescue four of you, Colonel Boggs and I agreed to add two more wasn’t that difficult. However, since we’ve looked at the facts...”

“The facts?” he said, leaning forward and cutting her off abruptly. “Lady, the facts say pretty clear with Cinna he was in as a revolutionary right from the start.” Even before him, for that matter. He might have been the one who made the strategy, but better, braver men than him had dreamed up the rebellion. Finnick had been gathering his secrets and Cinna had been trying to create a spark while he’d been too broken and too drunk and too weary to really give a shit about anything except where the next bottle came from and how much oblivion it would buy him.

“He’s a Capitol citizen fathered by Snow’s Secretary of Finance, who chose to make his career as a stylist in the Games.”

“He’s the child of a victor who got sold to said Secretary of Finance as his mistress, and if you’d ever met both Taffeta Locke and Solonius Trove, you’d see straight off whose son he really is, regardless of his father’s blood.” He gave an irritated snort, not even believing they actually had to have this conversation. “He joined up as a stylist to try to find a way to change things, not because he loved the Games. And oh yeah, another small point in his favor: you wouldn’t even have a damn Mockingjay without him and his talents. She’d probably have been just another anonymous, dead Twelve tribute.” He raised an eyebrow as he had another thought, adding, “She’d definitely have been dead in the square in Two without the uniform he made her.”

“Now, President Coin,” Plutarch said, “obviously Cinna’s been very valuable to the rebellion and I think Haymitch is right. We couldn’t have done it without him. You saw the way he transformed her wedding dress into a symbol of rebellion right on television and all.”

“I can’t just sign a pardon based on an appeal from you two gentlemen based on your emotion and vague presentation of facts rather than clear legal proof,” Coin argued, a few small lines of temper showing around her lips. “There’s a protocol, and if we start making exceptions everyone will expect one.”

Maybe it was a good thing they weren’t going to let him have a knife ready to hand because if they had, he’d be sorely tempted to attack her in that moment. He could barely restrain himself from snapping that she had no right to coldly pass judgment, sitting here safe in her secure bunker untouched by the filth and corruption of the Capitol, she’d never been involved with the Games, never known the suffering of it, never sent any of Thirteen’s children to die in them. Sitting there trying to not think about how much he wanted to go off on her, Plutarch continued to try to be rational. “Well, given his recent suffering at the hands of the Capitol, maybe we could agree that Cinna’s case will be revisited at the end of the war but until then we should presume his innocence and his commitment to the cause and allow him to not be imprisoned further?”

Coin’s face was impassive as ever. Oh, fuck this. He pulled out the card that by this point he was pretty sure was always a winner when it came to carrying an argument. “Katniss already knows Cinna’s here and if you arrest him as an accused war criminal, I guarantee once she’s up out of that hospital bed she’s going to be here in your face yelling at you about it. Our little Mockingjay gets very protective of people she cares about, and if you want to keep her effective...” He shrugged, letting the obvious implication stand.

“Very well.” Coin nodded and he felt a sense of relief at finally having gotten her to budge. He didn’t even feel sorry for having been pretty ruthlessly manipulative in having done it. “I’ll allow him to remain free on your mutual guarantee of his probable good behavior.” In other words, if Cinna misbehaved, the burden of it was on him and Plutarch for assuring her there wouldn’t be any trouble from him. Nicely played on Coin’s part. Fortunately, Cinna was about the man least likely to kick up any kind of fuss about things. She did add, “I do believe you in general about Locke and his part in things--I’ve seen some of his work, of course--but realize that you’re going to have to present clear, legally defensible evidence of his involvement in the rebellion from the start, and his lack of involvement in the worst excesses of the Games, in order to get him exonerated.”

“Noted,” Haymitch said dryly, already resolving to get his hands on whatever books were necessary when it came to the Code of Conduct of Panem so he knew the letter of the law backwards and forwards. Because he’d be damned if he saw Cinna imprisoned or even executed because they assumed he’d gotten involved with the Games as a willing and eager promoter, rather than someone who’d joined up trying to give the kids from the dark horse districts a slightly better chance. Someone who’d taken a small, skinny girl from Twelve and turned her into a symbol. Maybe I just need to get Katniss to demand he get a pardon too. Shit. No, that probably wouldn’t work. If the pardons for him and the others had already been a big public to-do, amending that with further names was going to just look like favoritism and pandering to Katniss’ demands and he could tell Coin wasn’t going to let that happen. She wouldn’t let herself look weak like that, subject to the whims of a seventeen-year-old girl.

“As for Trinket, I think that’s a pretty open and shut case. She was an agent in the death of twenty-eight children in the arena.”

“How the hell do you figure that?”

“She became the District Twelve escort during the 60th Games, isn’t that correct, Abernathy?”

“Correct,” he agreed dryly. “I was there to meet her.” Silly, annoying Effie in that light pink suit cooing about what an honor it was and looking at him like he was some kind of god of the arena to her, like she was hoping he’d whisk her off to bed right then and there. He’d hated her then. Later, after Finnick and Johanna, after he really fell apart and she was there every year in her chirpy, nagging prim way, he’d come to tolerate her like an annoyance that managed to be weirdly comforting in its sheer reliability. It was only recently, after seeing how she’d taken to Katniss and Peeta and started to let the blinders come off her eyes, he’d started to respect her.

“Of course you were. So between the 60th and 73rd Games, that would be fourteen Games and twenty-eight tributes.”

“She picked their names from the reaping ball and took them on a train ride. That’s hardly something on the scale of a Gamemaker,” and he didn’t glance over at Plutarch when he said that.

“She was the agent that selected the names of the tributes,” Coin said, eyebrows raised, “and then acted as their personal guard to ensure that in their captivity, they reached the Capitol as planned. I’d say she had her fair share of responsibility in enabling the Games.”

“She just swanned around in high heels and those stupid wigs!” he snapped, flinging a hand out in impatience. “You might as well say I’m complicit because I was on that fucking train also every year and didn’t let them escape!”

“Your actions were presumably performed under threat of Capitol punishment, however,” Coin reminded him coolly, “and therefore are rendered immune by the Accord.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” As an unconscious gesture he ran a frustrated hand through his hair, except with as little hair as he had it was more like ruffling the short bristles of it. “Effie’s harmless.”

“Twenty-eight dead children would say otherwise.” Don’t you talk to me about those kids. You don’t even know their names, you frosty self-righteous bitch. You didn’t watch them die because you couldn’t save them. You don’t see them in your nightmares or sometimes when you’re awake thanks to tracker jacker venom making you half-crazy. You didn’t have to hand their coffins back to their parents year after year after year.

“She did join the rebellion,” Plutarch pointed out.

“She asked me on the train what she could do.” It hadn’t been so direct as that, but he wasn’t going to say that. “Said what was happening was wrong, obviously she wanted to get involved, so I told her to talk to Plutarch. I figured as she’s a Capitol citizen he’d be able to utilize her more than me.” He could see that pointing out that Effie had been flighty and sort of blind about the reality wasn’t going to help things. He’d blamed her for her willful ignorance for years, after all.

“Heavensbee?” Coin asked. “She became your agent? What was the level of her involvement?”

Plutarch looked glum. “She came in late to become deeply involved. Mostly I utilized her as a messenger to other rebels in the Capitol.” His mustache twitched nervously as he added, “But of course her role as an escort was extremely valuable since it meant I readily could be seen talking to her and she could go carry those messages with almost unparalleled access and freedom of suspicion. She took on a great risk to act as she did.”

Coin’s expression didn’t change but Haymitch had the feeling that in her mind she was calling bullshit on Plutarch trying to paint Effie as suddenly having been a vital part of things. “The Capitol arrested and tortured her,” he said, a rough note in his voice. “That pretty much tells you right there that she wasn’t exactly playing along like a nice little compliant kitten.”

The pale grey eyes bored into him. “Were you romantically involved with her?”

“What?”

“You seem very vehement in her defense.”

“So’s Plutarch but I don’t see you asking him that. Or asking me that about Cinna, for that matter.”

“Unlike Plutarch you have every reason to dislike her and condemn her, and yet here you are defending her.”

He gave a snort of disgust and shook his head. “I fucked only the Capitol citizens I felt that I had to given the situation, ma’am. Not a one that I ever wanted and chose as a lover. That’s it.” As to why he was defending her, he wasn’t going to pull that out for Coin to examine and judge. That growing respect for her was something personal and he didn't feel a need to explain it to her. “Have you seen her? What they did to her? She’s not going to be causing you any problems.” Hell, she barely talked to anyone but Cinna and Katniss and Peeta that he saw. He hadn’t really tried again yet because honestly he didn’t even know how to relate to her without their usual snark and he wasn’t just someone who could drop that considering it was about all he had right now to keep himself together. The doctors who commented approvingly that he seemed to be adjusting so well had no idea. He wasn’t adjusting. He was used to existing in a state of being broken into brittle shards, so being ground down just that bit more underfoot didn’t much matter. It was simply becoming smaller pieces; he could still make a good front and make them not see how bad it really was.

He couldn’t help heal her up but he could at least not abandon her in this. “If you’re releasing Cinna you might as well release Effie too.”

“Or else,” Coin said with a sigh, “once again, I assume the Mockingjay will be displeased.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Fine.” She gave an impatient wave of her hand to say the matter was closed. “But their cases will still be heard when the time comes. If the two of you are taking it on yourselves to advocate for them, I suggest you be prepared.”

“All right,” Plutarch said, exchanging a worried glance with Haymitch that told both of them they’d better be ready for that fight and for keeping their allies alive. Plutarch in particular was probably wondering if every Capitol ally he had was going to end up on trial for their life. “On another note,” a tone of forced cheer entered Plutarch’s voice, “I thought we might discuss the details of the Odair/Cresta wedding? I think a propo like that is just what Panem needs right now. We’re tired from the fighting, and seeing someone like Finnick, with the hardships he told them in his story, finding happiness in a way the Capitol would never allow him? It’ll be a powerful statement, as well as a touching one.” Haymitch shook his head slightly. Plutarch as usual, trying to find the entertainment value. Still, the change of subject to something much lighter than trials and executions was a good one. It readily cut through the tension in the room which had been about as thick as mud.

“Whenever you want the official to perform the ceremony, let me know,” Coin said with a shrug. “I have no objections to the camera crew filming it.”

“Uh...” Plutarch said. “I mean, it’s a wedding. There’s so much preparation that goes into it.”

He tuned out as the two of them started bickering over the logistics of Finnick’s wedding--and shouldn’t Finnick and Annie be planning this anyway? Maybe they were just so pleased to have the chance to get married they’d blissfully said however it happened was OK. Not that he wasn’t thrilled for Finnick but he found his mind returning to Cinna and Effie and already turning the problem over, trying to think of a strategy. Yeah, studying the legal code was definitely in order. Pretty much all the actual legal experts were from the Capitol and they’d be useless against a tribunal that was biased against anything Capitol. He glanced into the corner, saw the nightmare vision of a ghost Cinna and Effie summoned by imagining the consequences of failing to protect them, because he’d already failed so many of his allies. They’d been shot, a single large bloom of red on each of their chests. That was what Thirteen did for executions. He shut his eyes for a second, feeling his pulse pounding in his ears, willing them to go away, willing them to not exist.

He realized in between Plutarch’s raised voice and Coin’s low answering drone they’d gone silent. “Haymitch?”

“Sorry,” he drawled, opening his eyes and forcing himself to put on a nonchalant tone, “I figured I’d just catch a nap while y’all talked wedding plans.”

“You’ve got no input?” Plutarch said with something like frustration. “President Coin’s agreed that Peeta can make a cake and that given access to some fabric from Eight, Cinna can design Annie’s dress for her.” He was surprised she’d allow that, though he supposed so long as it wasn’t taking supplies from Thirteen, she probably didn’t give a crap if a bolt of silk from another district got used for the purpose.

“Ain’t my wedding, now,” he said with a shrug. “Whatever Finnick and Annie approve of, that’s what you should do. But that sounds good.”

“Well, Finnick had mentioned you’d volunteered to handle music?”

Oh, right. He had said something about that, hadn’t he? “How complicated are we talking?” Coin asked wearily.

“I need a fiddle. Which means either finding one here in Thirteen that I can borrow if there is one, or letting me go back to Twelve to pick mine up from Victors' Village.” He really sort of hoped the former case might be true. He was in no mood yet to return to the ashes of Twelve. Not without a bottle in hand to be able to face it and he wasn’t going to get that in Thirteen, was he?

“Oh, good, finally something simple,” Coin muttered with actual relief.

“There’s a wedding song for Four,” Finnick had mentioned it last week, “and I’ll need the music for it. Any other Four music you can get your hands on too.”

“I can make that happen,” Plutarch said happily. “And that’ll be excellent too, you being involved in the wedding on camera. Snow will hate a show of solidarity like that, people like you and Peeta being involved in Finnick and Annie’s special day.”

“He’ll mostly hate that I’ve gotten healthy enough to do it,” Haymitch muttered wryly.

“Exactly! Though we ought to make sure you keep eating before that. You’re still too thin.” All right, now he sort of wanted to punch Plutarch, at least a little.

With effort, he let it go. “And obviously I need time and a place to practice.”

“Time isn’t an issue,” Coin told him. “As you’re still on medical leave, your day is still mostly unscheduled. A location, though--I can’t have your fiddle music disturbing our citizens at their work. Even if I were to assign you a living compartment ahead of your medical release for this purpose, that’s not soundproof, and I’m sure something that loud will carry through the living quarters.”

“So put me topside.” Plenty of that wonderful fresh air, privacy, practicing out among the autumn trees. He could really get behind that idea.

“I can’t authorize that level of liberty for hours on end, and causing that much racket on the surface is a security risk.” She frowned. “Really, the only soundproof rooms we have are on the detention level. I can instruct the guards to allow you free access.”

And just why are your prison cells soundproof, ma’am? He didn’t ask. He didn’t want his worst suspicions confirmed. “So you want me to go practice my music in a prison cell,” he said with a dark chuckle. Not like he hadn’t recently spent six weeks in a prison cell being tortured. Not like Cinna and Effie hadn’t just now been threatened with the possibility of being put in that very same detention level.

Plutarch obviously got the sick joke. “I’m really not sure that’s an appropriate situation, given his recent...”

“It’s really the only place I’ve got that I can permit that kind of noise,” Coin said curtly, “so take it or leave it, Abernathy.” She looked at him, and it wasn’t even like she was taunting him with it, openly daring him to be too afraid to take her up on it. He saw a total disinterest; the only emotion a gathering irritation that he and Plutarch kept causing her problems today. She wasn’t trying to fuck with him. She really just didn’t care. That was what she had to offer and if it somehow bothered him, clearly that was his problem to address, not hers.

Underneath the table, out of her view, his shaking fingers were forming a fist. “Finnick deserves me not sounding like shit when I play, so I’ll take it,” he said coolly, unwilling to let her see him sweat. He’d played this bluffing game for years with Snow and knew the only way to get these icy, objective types to offer any respect was to not blink. More so than the fiddle for the wedding, he had to stay strong now so the point of his readiness to go fight for Cinna and Effie would stick hard for her. “Get me that fiddle and let the guards know I’ll be there.”

Chapter Text

Effie tried desperately to not remember, but it was etched into her mind with permanence like a dark stain on silk that simply wouldn’t shift, ruining it forever. There had been the cell, and the pain as they hurt her with their knives and their cigarette butts, mocked her as they did it, knowing they had already made her vulnerable and soft by taking the armor of her clothes and her makeup and her jewelry, and now they would make her ugliness last by disfiguring her permanently with scars. She had sat on her cot and brushed her fingers over the healing wounds, trying to accept the reality of her body, knowing that there would be no trip to a remake surgeon this time in order to restore her.

Worse than that was the way they hammered her with what she had done. She knew the Peacekeeper interrogating her, and she was fairly certain that was deliberate. She and Victoria Cuff had been in school together, and she’d smothered giggles with the other girls when after graduation Vicky had to take a position as a Peacekeeper, how humiliating, when her father died and his gambling debts proved enormous. They’d been just stupid girls, not realizing how powerless and ashamed their former friend had been made by circumstances, and how being shunned had only made it worse.

Now Vicky Cuff had held all the power and she’d reveled in wielding it to address an old hurt, her dark brown eyes studying Effie as she called her a traitor and a disgrace. Now we both know what a reputation Haymitch had when we were kids. Bad enough if you let yourself be seduced by him making you witless with great sex. But if you betrayed your home and your people by just letting a drunk district hayseed talk you into it, that makes it all the more pathetic. So which is it? Are you a shameless slut, Euphemia, or are you just shamelessly stupid?

Somehow she’d managed some shreds of dignity and said, I’ve never bedded Haymitch and he never talked me into anything. I’m sorry for you that your life’s been so harsh that your mind’s become so grubby.

Peacekeeper Cuff had broken her nose for that, she remembered distantly, reaching up even now to finger the faint bump of it. After that there had been one of the male Peacekeepers, the one who'd watched her shower, and pain and shame and a hiss in her ear of You like this, don't you? Better than slumming it, being a filthy slut letting herself get fucked by district cock. Say you love it. Say it! She shied away from that because of course that hadn't been her, she hadn't been the one hurting and saying very prettily that yes, of course she loved it. It must had been someone else. All she had confessed to in the end was growing too fond of her tributes, of Katniss and Peeta, and wasn’t that just the same as anyone else in the Capitol? Didn’t everyone love them and want to keep them alive? She knew what she had done for Plutarch had gone beyond the line, though, and so she knew she deserved the blows and the insults. She had betrayed her people, after all. When Cuff told her that she was going to be executed, she’d just nodded idly, accepting it. It would be a release from the torment, from having to think about what they'd done to her.

But then they rescued her and brought here here to Thirteen, and Katniss and Peeta were here, darling as ever even if seeming a bit older in more than body, and they didn’t hesitate to greet her like she was their own. Plutarch was kind too, albeit obviously quite distracted by the rebellion, and she was grateful for that, as she tried to find ways to cover that ugly stain on herself so it wouldn’t show.

Haymitch was of no help there. He’d tried to joke about her shaved head and it hit her in a moment of weakness, of feeling ugly and ruined and lost, and the stupid man made her cry. He scurried off like a frightened little boy and he hadn’t said much to her since. Well. Haymitch never had been one for kind words. She shouldn’t have expected them, even if she felt a bit sorry that things were so awkward between them currently. He looked so worn and tired himself, but theirs had never been a relationship of anything except a charmingly reliable sort of exasperation.

Instead, she found herself talking to Cinna, calm and gentle Cinna who they put in the bed next to hers. Cinna, who understood at least in part what it was like to struggle with things as she did now, because he was from the Capitol they must have shamed him too. Haymitch was still a victor and a part of District Twelve--even if it was destroyed, and she’d been horrified to hear it. But she’d rejected her home and her upbringing and all of it so what now? Who was she and where did she belong, if anywhere?

He talked to her about clothing and that was something that even a prison cell hadn’t changed. She’d always loved pretty clothes, even as she sat there in the stark grey hospital pajamas that reminded her uncomfortably of the Detention Center uniform. Cinna would come show her a sketch of something, a dress or the like, and he’d ask her what she thought. Like that, she’d be drawn in, talking to him with excitement about ruffles and jewels and beads and sky blue and carnelian red and satin and doeskin wool, about lovely things, about the softness and colors that were nowhere in existence in sterile, cold, industrial Thirteen. Talking about beautiful things and even if some of the natives snorted that had no use in the middle of a rebellion, she’d manage to inform them as calmly as she could, trying to not shake like a leaf as she felt the weight of their disapproval, “Beauty always has a place in things or else it’s not much of a world.”

Portia had died in Capitol custody, and now apparently she was acting in that role as Cinna’s sounding board, even if not quite to the level of an equal fellow designer as Portia had been. Poor man. He must be missing her so, and she tried to not think too much what had happened to the brilliant young woman in those dimly lit cells. It hurt too much to remember her own ordeal, let alone imagine Portia's.

By now she and Cinna must have designed wardrobes for Katniss and Peeta for the next ten years. So next they turned their eyes on the others around them. “I try to bring out the natural qualities in a person,” Cinna said, fingers flying over the sketchpad as they looked at Johanna Mason, discussing the precise shade of blue that would complement the tones in her golden skin in lowered voices like they were conspiring their own little rebellion via fashion. Something rich and jewel-like, Effie thought, strong. Johanna wasn’t soft enough for gentle girlish pastels. “Are they tall and dignified? Short but shapely? The eyes, there’s so often a lot you can work with in the eyes too, the color and shape of them, the demeanor and the way that person looks at things.”

His eyes were gold-flecked green, soft and calm but with a level gaze that spoke of a thoughtful mind that missed little of things going on around him. She did miss his gold eyeliner; for all she had thought him so dreadfully plain before for a man showing such genius with clothing, she would readily admit it had highlighted those magnificent eyes so beautifully and made them his distinctive feature. “How’s Annie’s gown coming along?” Oh, she was proud of that one, felt so honored when Cinna let her play a part in its creation. He was the one doing the sewing of it right now, of course, and they wouldn’t authorize her to accompany him into his workroom since she’d guiltily admitted she had no talents in that area and couldn’t lend a hand in the work. But she’d helped dream it up, at least, and that couldn’t be taken from her.

A wedding gown, of all things, for Finnick Odair’s bride. She’d heard what had been done to him and felt the hot stab of shame for how she’d looked at him sometimes, handsome as he was and how it appeared he enjoyed the attentions of Capitol citizens. But once she knew that it was no difficult thing to extend her mind and realize that it must have been done to Haymitch also. Suddenly it had become another barrier between them because how on earth could she apologize to that impossible man for not realizing it, and for being one more Capitol woman who’d thought about him like that, even if she’d been a silly girl at the time?

Well, never mind that for now. She had focused instead on Annie’s dress because that was something hopeful and positive. On Cinna’s sketch pad, they created something gorgeous. It was absurdly simple compared to all the confections Katniss had modeled that spring, but it was so beautiful. Seafoam green with discreet small ruching on the skirt edged with a green so pale it was nearly white. It echoed the breaking crests of a series of waves. The whole thing was to be done in a fine silk that would naturally drape Annie Cresta’s slender body and move with her, just like the flow of water. Fortunately Annie hadn’t been imprisoned with them so her long dark hair was still there and it would make her all the more beautiful on her wedding day.

“It’ll be ready for final fitting in a few days,” Cinna said with satisfaction. He gave her a smile. “I’m trying to convince them that you ought to be there for that, at least. I do really need the opinion of another woman on it.”

She couldn’t help but smile in return, touched at his thoughtfulness. “I’m sure it’ll be as beautiful as I thought.” She imagined it again on the bride-to-be, so often down here visiting the patients. “It’ll make Annie look gorgeous, not having to wear that disgusting boring grey to her own wedding.” She thought about it a moment and allowed, “Even if I’m sure she’d look lovely all the same despite that. She’s a pretty girl and she loves Finnick so.” Anyone seeing the two of them together couldn’t doubt it.

“We won’t be here in Thirteen forever, Effie,” he told her gently.

“What? Of course we won’t. The war will end soon enough,” she said with false brightness, trying to not imagine who she might know in the Capitol that might die in the final attack, or if any of the people she knew here, Katniss or Peeta or others, might die too. “And things will be much better then.” Never mind that she had absolutely no idea what she would do with herself.

“Well,” he said, “I imagine you’ll need something pretty for the victory celebrations, or after.” She looked at him, at the way his eyes looked at her and didn’t recoil at her broken nose and the scar on her chin and her bare, makeup free skin, and her ugly stubbly brown hair. As if she were still beautiful, still a woman worthy of esteem. “You do have rather stunning eyes. That pale blue-grey color is unusual.”

He liked her eyes. Of course that was because there wasn’t much else of her to look at right now worth mentioning. “Oh, don’t waste your time with that,” she said with a dismissive wave, feeling herself want to quiver in fear at the thought, wanting the safety of her pretty golden wig and her shoes and everything, because if she had those she would be herself again, and the Effie from down in those cells would be a bad dream cast to the winds. The moment she could get her hands on them she’d feel safe again. “I’m sure I’ve got clothes enough already, as Haymitch is always so fond of complaining!” She’d clearly spoken up a little too loudly to chase Cinna off the subject since Haymitch, busy talking to Peeta down the way, apparently heard his name and glanced over at the two of them. An odd expression, or series of expressions, crossed his face in the space of a few moments and then he nodded to her and went back to his conversation.

Cinna murmured faintly in acknowledgment, and with that she distracted him by asking what he thought about how to best dress big, muscular Brutus with his auburn hair and blue eyes. It worked, much to her relief.

Plutarch asked around like he’d promised and sent Haymitch to see the apparent sole possessor of a fiddle here in Thirteen. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised she was from Twelve. Somehow he was even less surprised that it was Mol McCrory. After she lost half a leg in the mines, pinned under a support beam that collapsed, she’d made a living trading on the Hob as well as being the fiddler of choice playing weddings, wakes, and the like. He’d traded game for soap and candles with her when he was a kid, years before he paid her for the fiddle lessons that helped get him through that first long autumn and winter after his family died.

With the usual ignorance of a kid, he’d thought she was old back then. He realized now she’d probably been only about forty or so. In her late sixties now, she’d still been playing some special occasions last he heard, though her son Ren took over a lot of that, and she looked full of piss and vinegar in a way that reminded him achingly of Mags. Finding her in her compartment, she looked at him with her Seam eyes in her lined, seamed face and raised an eyebrow. “What, now you come on back and need some more lessons, young fella?” she asked, as if he was still seventeen.

He smiled in spite of himself, because hell, it was the first time he’d been called that in forever. “Plutarch Heavensbee talk to you?”

“The Gamemaker with the fussy little mustache?” He laughed, because it was true. “Yeah. Asked if I had a fiddle on hand and if it might get borrowed as there’s a wedding to happen here. I said whoever wanted to do the borrowing could damn well come do his own asking.”

“So I’m asking.”

“What happened to your granddaddy’s fiddle that you ain’t got it? You up and break it some occasion when you got too drunk and probably started smashing random shit in your house?” she asked bluntly. He actually managed to not wince. There was a weird comfort to the honesty of her saying it to his face rather than behind his back, because it wasn’t like people in Twelve hadn’t known what he was like.

“No. Still at my place in Twelve, but I can't get back there for it just now. I put it away safe a few years ago.” He smiled ruefully. “Wasn’t playing much anymore, and I didn’t want a thing like you're saying there to happen.” The fiddle was from before the Dark Days, and it was one of the few things he actually gave a crap about in that house. Probably because it was a piece of Twelve and from his family even before he won the Games and thus it had absolutely nothing to do with the Capitol.

“Then you’ve got at least the sense of a goose to keep a good fiddle like that from becoming kindling. Congratulations.” She stood in the doorway, not inviting him in but not slamming the door in his face either. “You haven’t played a wedding since, what...”

“Dee Hawthorne and Fred Griffiths.” He wanted to ask if either of them had survived the firebombing but he had the feeling they hadn’t. Even if they had there were so many people that had been at the wedding, some of them girls he’d danced with, that had died in the firebombing, or before that in the mines or of illness or starvation or hanging. Anticipating the next question he added, “Last gathering I played was Lorna Hawthorne’s wake that autumn. So yeah. Been a while.” It wasn’t like he’d been enough of a part of the Seam since then that people would have asked him to play at their weddings or funerals or the like.

“Have you even practiced since then?” she asked with a sigh.

“Yeah.” He’d kept up with it some some long years. After finding out music kept the silence at bay that first year, it had worked even after that, until finally it was all so much that the alcohol and its talent at blotting out everything became his refuge. “Not for a few years though.” The fiddle stayed safely tucked away in his closet. “So, Mol, look. I’d promise you my firstborn here, but we both know I ain’t got one.” He wasn’t ever going to have one, for that matter, which she had to be well aware of anyway.

“Oh, the little Everdeen girl ain’t actually yours?” she said with mock surprise.

He’d once again forgotten about that. He sighed, rubbing a tired hand over his eyes. “One of these days I’m gonna have to go on television and make a damn announcement to fix that, I swear. In any case. Can I borrow the fiddle so I can get practicing? I’ve got less than a week.”

The rough amusement in her face softened. “Finnick’s your friend?”

“Pretty much like my little brother,” he said, seeing no point in not being honest. Knowing too that she knew he’d had a real little brother once; he’d brought Ash on his Hob trades often enough.

“All right. You can borrow it. You were one of the quickest students I had so I imagine you’ll shine back up fast enough to be ready. If you want me to play a few songs to give you a break, let me know.”

It was a generous offer to make for a young man she didn’t know, someone from a different district. “I might do that.” Considering Finnick was pretty much demanding he dance at least one dance. Taking the fiddle in its battered old case when she handed it to him, he told her, “Thanks,” knowing it would be better if he didn’t make a big deal of it.

Plutarch came through on the music as promised, handing him a sheaf of paper that he leafed through briefly, relieved to see the notation in Four was similar. “All right, I’m off,” he said brusquely, not even willing to let Plutarch see him bothered by the notion of his designated practice room.

He took the elevator down to level 39, asked for compartment 3910, and the stony-faced guard unlocked it to let him in. “Let’s be clear,” he said with a smirk he had to force. “I’m only under arrest if I play badly.”

The guard didn’t respond and just swung the door open. He saw the familiar dim light, the chair in the center of the cell they must have placed there for him. No restraints on it, but still, the sick feeling started to churn in his stomach. Stepping inside, the guard started to close the door behind him. “Hey, leave that o--”

“It’s not soundproofed if I leave it open,” the guard said irritably, “and President Coin said that was the point of your access here. It’s a one-week access authorization and that’s it, so don’t try it after that.”

“Trust me, I won’t want to get in here after that,” he snapped. The door clicked shut behind him. It was faint; they’d obviously cleaned it well after its last occupant. But the scent clung to the steel walls--not damp cinderblock at least, but the smell was the same. Stale unwashed bodies and sweat and urine and blood and fear, that smell he’d come to identify as nothing less than sheer human despair.

He dragged the chair over to the cot in the corner and laid the music out there so he could read it over, trying to steady his shaking hands. He glanced up at the access panel next to the door, the palmprint reader that was just like the Capitol one. Stared at it until he felt about ready to puke down the drain in the middle of the floor. He got up, went over to it, and pressed his open hand against it, gratified when the lights flashed green and it flashed a message that access was granted. All he had to do from there was touch the bright “OPEN DOOR” button--he noticed the other buttons like the “LOCKDOWN” one were greyed out as inaccessible to him--and he’d be free.

A little calmer, he sat back down and reached for the fiddle. He got as far as ascertaining it was in tune, his hands shaking so badly he could barely manage that much, before he was jumping up again and checking the access panel to see that green light. Then again, and again. He lost track of how many times he restlessly ended up with his hand on that panel in the first hour or so, needing to assure himself anew that he wasn’t stuck in here, pacing nervously back and forth before drifting back towards the chair and forcing himself to sit down and try to focus.

“Fuck it, enough,” he finally said irritably as his shaking hands turned the first couple notes of something called “Blue Moon Bayou,” one of Four’s songs, into a terrible strangled screech like when he’d first been learning to play. At least it didn’t sound enough like a person screaming that his mind tried to turn it into that. Realizing that between his pacing, his messing around with the access panel, and his unsteady fingers he’d barely be able to get a basic scale out by Finnick’s wedding, let alone any kind of actual song, that wasn’t reassuring. But there was no way in hell he could look around this bleak cell and not be reminded too keenly of the situation he’d been in all too recently. Especially when Portia was right there in the corner staring at him and reminding him that when he’d seen her last she’d been killed in his cell.

He closed his eyes and tried to simply clear his mind and pretend he wasn’t here in this particular place. He’d used that technique to great effect in his years of being sold. It didn’t get rid of the smell tickling now and again in his nostrils, but without the look of the cell to accompany it, that was a simple nudge of unease bumping his consciousness every now and again rather than a panic fit to drown him.

Of course that introduced the problem of not being able to read the music with his eyes closed. So instead he turned away from Four’s songs, back towards the ones he knew like the back of his hand, the old Twelve songs he’d learned by heart. Not “The Hanging Tree”. He wasn’t sure he could easily play that one again after singing it for Johanna like that, and coming so close to that rope necklace himself that he understood the song in such a painful, personal way.

He couldn’t play “The Valley Song” either, simple and ideal as the tune was as a starter. There was too much there also. He remembered his ma singing it to him and Ash when they were just kids, nights after she came back from Peacekeepers’ Row. Remembered those short few nights after the Games of her humming it softly after he woke screaming from another dream of the arena, comforting him like he was still just her baby and not a sixteen-year-old who’d never be a kid again. Remembering Katniss singing it to Rue in the arena as the little girl slowly bled out her life from that spear wound.

Deliberately he turned away from all that and tried to play the liveliest, happiest songs he could remember, sounds for dancing and laughter and hope, ones with good memories of weddings and festivals and the like. He was terrible at first, both out of practice and out of balance, his notes rough and jerky and whining. By the end of the first day he found he could at least stutter his way through most of his former repertoire, his fingers remembering the notes even if they needed more practice to regain their former polish. He could still play and that was a good start. He was still glad to leave for his lunch break in the hospital, and then again to leave for the day when it was dinnertime. He read the Four music late into the night, fingers moving against an imagined fiddle, practicing notes and drones and double-stops and trying to hear the sound of it in his head. If opening his eyes in that cell was going to be too tough he’d try to make it so he didn’t have to do too much of that, and he’d come with the music in his head.

Day two he felt good enough with that mental picture that he gave the Four wedding song, “A Star to Steer By,” a try. The rhythm was a little different and the words, all full of images of the sea and of ships and of the bridal couples’ each being the star that kept a person steady and true on course, were unfamiliar, not like the songs from home that he’d grown up around and so they were like instinct, but they were similar enough that he adjusted eventually. It was a beautiful song, he had to admit, and thinking of how Finnick and Annie were around each other, it was entirely apt. They kept each other steady about more than about any other couple he knew. To be needed and loved like that--Finnick was a lucky man. Though he’d well earned it a dozen times over.

Steadily he improved and he picked up the songs, memorizing them in his mind and his fingers both. He got to the point where he could open his eyes to read the music in that depressing cell, albeit only for short stretches for quick reference. It wasn’t like he’d be able to just blithely volunteer to spend the night down here to prove he was OK. He knew full well he wasn’t and he hadn’t been for a long time anyway. But at least he could still scrape enough together to manage something like this, to make Finnick and Annie’s day a good one. Crap, he hadn’t even been invited to a wedding since Dee got married, since he pretty much realized the best thing he could do for Twelve was stay away from them and turned himself into a hermit that autumn. Twelve was gone and he’d almost died again. Maybe he might die yet in this war because hell if he knew what he’d do when it was done, when there was nothing much left for him except to count the costs and try to bear them. But that was something he’d worry about later. For now the immediacy of something so pleasant as music and his friend’s wedding was a welcome distraction from both the war and its aftermath.

Chapter Text

It was his wedding day and Finnick felt like he could hardly breathe. All the arguing he’d heard about from Haymitch between Plutarch and Coin regarding the details of the wedding didn’t matter. Even the simple promises certified by a Thirteen official would have been enough for him because all he cared about was that Annie was safely out of Snow’s hands and he was free from whoring himself out and they could finally, finally be together. Six months ago it had been an impossible dream for them, but things were changing in Panem.

They had a compartment together waiting for them already. It was nothing to crow about, no sight of the clean salt sea like back home, no way to sit on the porch and watch the sun over the water together like they had back in Victors' Village. Their new home was a grey steel cubicle much like the one he had by himself now, and Annie was over there most nights anyway sleeping in his bed rather than her own, so it wasn’t as though that much would change. But it was there on paper already as being registered to Finnick and Annelle Odair. It wasn’t much but it was something that was finally theirs, together. His bags were already packed here with his few belongings and he would officially move them to the new place after the wedding. He was under no illusions he and Annie would unpack quickly. He intended to be much too busy making love to his wife, savoring the sound of the word, to do anything else for the next few days.

He was fumbling with his tie, growling about it because he’d been tying knots since he was a little kid on his dad’s boat and it was ridiculous that he couldn’t manage something this simple, when the knock came at the door. He stepped over to answer it and saw Johanna standing there. She looked him over, seeing the tie and his bare feet and she smirked at him. She’d put on weight since being rescued but she was still a little too thin, but the expression and the eyes were all Johanna, total brass and sass. “Shit, Finn, you’re getting married in half an hour. Pull it together.”

Her fingers reached up and she was the one who did up the tie, her fingers as steady as his were clumsy. “Jo,” he started, not sure what he meant to say. He knew things for her had lingered, that while they’d been there to support each other in those early years she’d ended up deeper into it than him, and he hoped she wasn’t going to plead with him now. She was his friend, one of his best friends, and she’d been hurt enough already. He knew full well that her sharp words and sharp eyes hid a woman still trying to cope with all the shit life had dealt her. He’d been luckier. He’d had family, at least until recently, to help him through it, and then he’d had Annie. Johanna had ended up with none of it and on a day like this he didn’t want to be the one to deal her another painful blow. He loved her always, but not in the way she had obviously wanted him to love her.

She gave an impatient snort and said, “Yeah, what?” She finished the tie, her fingers not lingering on his chest beyond a friendly touch, and stepped back. “There. Now get dressed already.”

“Why did you come here?” he asked finally, just going with bluntness.

There was something like a flash of hurt in her eyes but it vanished almost instantly, swallowed up behind her shields. “You’re my friend, ass. Problem with me wanting to wish you well when you’re getting married?” She scowled at him, her shoulders set tight and tense. “Or are you afraid I’m going to go be a bitch--sorry, more of a bitch than I am to everyone--to Annie?”

“No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. You’ve got every right to be here, and I’m glad you came, and...”

She shook her head. “Oh, stop it.” He realized he was rambling and it was awkward. She stepped forward and she hugged him, and he felt some of the softness a seventeen-year-old girl had hidden well coming out in the gesture, how it wasn’t stiff and forced. “Haymitch and I always agreed you were of the best of us anyway so you deserve it. So go be happy and you two give a big ‘Fuck you’ to Snow with it, huh?”

He hugged her back, unable to keep from smiling at the thought. He hoped Snow saw the propo of this after Plutarch aired it and that he’d know that both Finnick and Annie were well and truly out of his reach and daring to grab the happiness he’d denied them for so long with his manipulations and threats. It was a really satisfying thought. “Yeah. I’ll do that. Maybe you and Annie can even--”

“Don’t push your luck too far,” she grumbled. “And it’s not ‘cause it’s her. You haven’t heard I don’t have any friends, I just have people I haven’t gotten around to killing yet?” He laughed at that old joke, both of them knowing it wasn’t true, and let her go. He was watching as she walked away, feeling relieved that with that, low-key as it had been in Johanna’s typical style, it felt like the door was finally shut and they could just be friends without the awkwardness. He didn’t want to lose her like that, not with as much as he cared.

Realizing he still didn’t have his socks on yet, he let out a yelp of surprise and tried to find them, hoping he hadn’t packed them already.

Peeta finished up the cake just as the wedding was about to start. Stepping back quickly to study it, he decided there was nothing else to do. No touch-ups to make, no last minute details to add. It wasn’t perfect because he was a little out of practice and with the cooks breathing down his neck for every little bit of butter and sugar and cream he’d used like he was a Capitol guy shamelessly wasting it, he’d felt like he couldn’t use supplies on trial runs to make sure of some of his more advanced techniques. So he’d kept it a bit simpler than he might have, not wanting to ruin the whole thing by attempting something he wasn’t quite sure of going into it. But that was OK because maybe, knowing Annie from Mentor Central and their time here and coming to know Finnick too, fussy and fancy wasn’t really their style. The open expanse of waveswept beaches and endless clear waters of Four really was more of who they were.

The scalloped piping and seashells and the like had come out beautifully, and he grinned in satisfaction, happy that he’d managed to make something for an occasion like this. He wished Farl and Nick could have seen it, given how they always knew he was the best of them at decoration and they’d have to grumble and admit it was nice. With a sudden lump in his throat, he wished his dad could have seen it. He could almost hear the soft words of, “Well, Peeta, that’s your best one yet,” and feel his dad’s hand on his shoulder with a pat of approval. He thought about the bodies that were probably in the rubble of the bakery still, left for the scavengers and the elements in empty, lifeless Twelve. Or maybe they’d been all burned to ash and scattered in the wind. He hadn’t stepped into the ruins to check because he couldn’t bear it, not with Plutarch’s camera crew right there to watch. But they were his family and he ought to take care of them and the thought of them unburied, as if he didn’t care, settled on him like a heavy weight. Leaning on the table, he looked at the cake again and pride was mingled up with grief now. He wouldn’t let it show out there at the wedding and spoil the day for Finnick and Annie.

Hearing someone come up behind him, feeling the tingle of alarm and fear the arena always produced at the sound of footsteps sneaking up on him, he was about ready to turn in a big hurry to confront the potential danger when Haymitch announced himself, “It’s only me.” Relaxing, he turned around.

Haymitch looked at the cake over and nodded. “Nice one. You’ve still got the touch.” It was enough unlike his dad that it didn’t hurt to hear it.

“They deserve it,” Peeta said. “And at least it’s not something that got voted on by the Capitol.” He still remembered the bitter frustration of the Victory Tour and after, how having Katniss say Yes had been like ashes in his mouth because he knew it was all a lie. His wedding being a lie spun out of pure Capitol crap from the dress to the music to the cake seemed only fitting.

Haymitch actually looked a little awkward in response. “I didn’t mean to get the both of you stuck in it like this.”

“You didn’t imagine we’d ever both survive for that to happen,” Peeta shrugged. “Neither of us did, that day we were planning my interview.” He held up a hand, anticipating the possible protest. “And it’s not like I’m pissed off that you did manage to play the Gamemakers into the rule change. You know that. Being here in Thirteen with the war and everything, it’s let us take a step back from all that anyway.”

“But she’s still about all you’ve got right now anyway, so that ain’t easy.” Peeta couldn’t answer that, knowing it was true. She was the closest friend he had left, the one he trusted most, and the thought of her picking Gale in the end, shutting him out even in small ways, hurt far too much. “I’m sorry about your family.” From Haymitch, who’d lost so much himself, that really meant something. “I saw the bakery when I was there.”

He sucked in a shaking breath, looking away. “I keep wondering if...if they’re still there in the ruins.” He wouldn’t be able to properly move on in mourning them until he knew. “It’s not that I don’t care,” he burst out, “but they might think that I don’t, you know?” Which was stupid because the dead didn’t really think anything anymore, but sometimes in his dreams they were there, accusing him of just abandoning them, in life and in death. “I mean, I helped get Twelve bombed. I didn’t even think about what Snow might do to them.” He’d been so fiercely caught up in saving Katniss that everything else faded to background noise, so those phantoms in his dreams were right. Maybe he hadn’t given up caring about them but he hadn’t cared enough to be able to save them.

“We all missed it. Me most of all. That was a whole new level for Snow, I’ll admit, but I knew better than you two how he works.” In its way it was a relief Haymitch didn’t try to totally excuse or absolve any of them. “But he’s the one that dropped the bombs at the end of the day, and if we hadn’t saved her from the arena we’d all still be under the Capitol's thumb. It wasn’t only for Katniss’ life that we did it, Peeta. Snow hit us hard where we didn’t expect it. Now we have to make they didn’t all die only for us to lose because that makes it all the worse.” At least he didn’t say make them dying worth it by winning or something like that, as if the loss was something coldly balanced off against victory. Even if they won all those people would still be dead and that couldn’t change.

“Yeah.”

Haymitch’s voice went softer, albeit still with his usual gruff edge. “Snow burned down my house with my family in it. So...I get it.” Peeta tried to imagine Haymitch, young and standing there bleakly staring at the ashes of his own life. Having seen Twelve now it was a hell of a lot easier than it would have been. “When this is over, I’ll go back there with you and we’ll look. We’ll see them buried proper if they’re still there. If they’re not, we’ll put up the markers anyway so you have a place for them. I promise.”

“Thanks,” Peeta said, not able to quite look at him because the tears were stinging his eyes at that promise. He hadn’t been to the cemetery much, not since his grandma died when he was little, but he knew Haymitch must have had his own markers there, all these years. Probably even good solid stone markers rather than the wooden ones that were all most people in Twelve except the very richest could afford, those and the ones in the tributes’ section paid for by the Capitol, stark rows of white marble put there to constantly remind a district of the price of rebellion. He wanted to ask if Haymitch had anything to bury or if there were just markers but it was too much and he choked back a sob.

He felt Haymitch’s arm go around his shoulders, solid and strong, pulling him close for a moment. Not his dad--Haymitch was about the right height, granted. But compared to Liam Mellark, stocky and cheerful and easygoing, he was too lean, too quick, too sharp. Haymitch may have said Katniss was all Peeta had, but this man was his family too. The sometimes-grouchy uncle, they’d said during the bombing of Thirteen, and Peeta was glad to have him. As Haymitch let go he teased Peeta lightly, “C’mon now. Are you gonna be this bad at your own wedding?”

“Probably,” he said with a watery laugh. He didn’t even think about whether his wedding would be to Katniss. He hoped so but the silliness of boyish dreams had been burned away in these last months. “But at least I’ll have you to tell me I’m being an idiot.”

“Oh, I’m actually invited?”

“Of course you are. You’re family.” Something in Haymitch’s face softened in surprise at that, and now he was the one looking away, and Peeta recognized the need now for him in turn to break the moment with something humorous. “I’ll be restricting your drinks, of course.” Though maybe given how long he’d managed sobriety already, and drinking like a sane person during the week before the Games, maybe it would stick. He hoped so. A sober Haymitch was someone he actually liked a lot more than a drunk one.

“Overbearing little prick,” Haymitch snorted, but he was smiling as he said it. “All right, get going out there so you’re not late.”

“You coming with me here?” Peeta asked, untying his apron and leaving it on the table, shutting off the lights in the kitchen. They’d wheel the cake out when it was time, but for now Haymitch was right.

Haymitch bent down and picked up a battered brown case that had been by his feet--a fiddle? “Nah. I’m actually providing the entertainment. For which I apologize in advance.” Well, that was a surprise, though maybe it shouldn’t have been. There was plenty about Haymitch that was well hidden.

With that he headed for the Conference Hall, but Katniss found him first, waving Johanna and Cinna and Brutus and Effie and Enobaria on as they’d all apparently had made their way up from the hospital together. “Got a minute?”

Looking at the crowd of people heading for the wedding, he figured they had a few minutes still while everyone took their places. “Sure, what’s up?” He steered the two of them aside, into a quiet corridor.

He wasn’t sure what he expected. Maybe something about the war, or her being the Mockingjay, or talking about Finnick and Annie, asking if he’d seen Haymitch, or even asking about the cake. What he didn’t expect was her fingers gripping in the fabric of his shirt as she leaned in and kissed him.

His eyebrows probably shot up nearly to his hairline but given it had been months since they’d kissed each other, not since that last afternoon at the Training Center up on the rooftop, he couldn’t help but kiss her back. For all his family was in his nightmares, that afternoon was in his dreams. Her grey eyes looking up at him from her head in his lap, how she’d let him unbraid her thick, long hair and it fell halfway down her back like wavy black silk and he wove yellow flowers into it. Sometimes in those dreams he couldn’t help but imagine her hair all down again, but around the two of them and how all her skin would look in the sunlight and feel underneath his fingers as she moved on top of him, her slim body full of hunter’s grace. He’d always wake up frustrated and aching from it, because it felt so real.

We’ll bring you back alive, he promised her that day. Me and Haymitch. They’d both done that but he’d lost her, that laughing girl with her crown of flowers. First she hadn’t trusted him and then when she did there were the demands of being the Mockingjay, things that turned her into a girl who didn’t have any time or space to laugh. He’d backed off and given her space to be free. But now she was kissing him, and he wanted so desperately to believe but he couldn’t let it hurt again like it had after the arena when he found out it was all a lie.

“Was that...real?” he asked her hoarsely when she leaned back but her fingers stayed clinging to him. He had to know.

“What, do you see any cameras?” she asked him with a raised eyebrow.

“What about Gale?” he blurted. He’d seen with his mother how bitter and terrible being second best could be. To hear her, Jinny Barrington always knew she hadn’t been Liam Mellark’s choice and she resented it. Peeta remembered being little and hearing her yell at his dad about how if she hadn’t been knocked up with Farl, she would never have married him. He knew from how his dad had talked about Perulla Everdeen that she’d stayed his one great love for life. He didn’t want to be second choice and always feel the weight of someone else in between him and Katniss. He hoped it wouldn’t turn him bitter and aggressive toward everyone like his ma but living on only scraps of affection would be too tough to bear.

She looked somewhere in the vicinity of his grey shirt collar rather than his eyes. “He’s my friend, Peeta, has been for years. I care about him.” Warning him that she wasn’t going to kick Gale to the curb, and OK, he got the message. “But it’s different with you. I’m different with you. And...I like who I am then.” He tried to not interrupt or question, knowing she wasn’t always the easiest with words and terrified if he tried to grasp hold of this too hard he’d shatter it and she’d back off in a hurry. She wasn’t going to give him a big romantic speech and that was fine because that wasn’t who she was anyway.

Haymitch had been right; he’d fallen in love with the idea of her, the happy and plucky little girl with her red plaid dress and black braids and golden voice. Little five-year-old Peeta desperately needed to believe in love given his life at home, and so he’d found someone to adore, even if it was from afar. When they became the star-crossed lovers from Twelve, it was as if the fairytale was coming true.

But he hadn’t been ready to see the reality of Katniss, all tangled up in his dreams and illusions as she was. He’d had to give up all that when he thought he’d lost her forever. He saw it now. She was brave and she sang like an angel, true. She was also stubborn as a mule and scowled impatiently as often as she smiled. For so long with her he’d been convinced he had better just become eager-to-please Peeta, unwilling to kick up a fuss because it caused trouble, and in his life causing trouble had usually led to bruises and insults and loud voices. It was easier to just give in. He hadn’t had that option here, forced to step into Haymitch’s usual role and sometimes bring her back to reality for her own good. So he’d found out that he could stand up and argue with her and not be terrified he’d lose her. “I like who I am with you too,” he told her softly.

She smiled then. “Good.” Then it turned halfway into a frown as she almost glared at him. “But just so we’re clear and all, we’re not engaged or married or anything like that, no matter what’s been said on camera, so don’t you start going crazy with the plans here, Peeta Mellark.”

He laughed quietly. “I won’t. Swear.” No, this time if he proposed, he wanted it to be real, and just for them. Leaning in, he kissed her this time, wanting to pull her close and hold her tight but knowing that her still-bandaged and abused ribs probably wouldn’t thank him for it. It wasn’t the ready and quick happily-ever-after the Capitol demanded of them. It was a chance for the two of them to see how they worked together after seeing each other clear-eyed, a possibility of hope for the future, and that was far more valuable than the fairytale would ever be.

One of her best friends was getting married and Johanna was happy for him. Really. That wasn’t even lying to herself saying it. Finnick deserved it and looking at his face, the boyish excitement in it as he took Annie’s hands in his, she really was happy for him.

It wasn’t even letting him go that stung. She’d known years ago that she’d lost him, if she ever really had him as more than a close friend and fuckbuddy, and she’d probably fallen for him because he was the only person she could trust that intimately. She hadn’t seriously kidded herself that he’d ever pick her, not with how he always said Annie’s name with all that love. Going to talk to him today had just been making sure it was final and done with for both of them and they’d know it. It was more seeing that Finnick had somehow figured out how to deserve the good things in life despite all the shit he’d been through, and realizing that she’d never have anything like that herself, that hurt.

So she sat with Katniss and Enobaria, ostensibly in the “bride’s” section of things according to Plutarch. She had decided it wasn’t worth kicking up a fuss and complaining she was damn well there for the groom. It was a stupid chair and that was all, and anything else about it was just idiotic Capitol pretense. Peeta and Brutus were across the aisle, Haymitch not with them since he was sitting up front with a fiddle in his hands ready to provide the music. Apparently Haymitch hadn’t been kidding that he could play the fiddle, explaining to Johanna where he kept constantly disappearing off to for the past week. “I always wondered how they did weddings in other districts,” Katniss murmured with interest after a woven seagrass net was laid over Finnick and Annie’s shoulders and they touched saltwater-wet fingers to each others’ lips, making their vows. “In Twelve we have the toasting.” Johanna was happy to tune the droning of the official from Thirteen out at that point and ignore whatever he was saying. Finnick wasn’t from Thirteen anyway so obviously he was only putting up with this shit in order to get married here; it wasn’t like it was important to him. Therefore she didn’t feel the need to pay attention to it.

“What, like you up and raise a glass of alcohol?” she smirked. “Haymitch has to be good at that one.”

Katniss let out a snicker which she quickly stifled with her fingers, which still made one of the guests in front of them turn to stare disapprovingly at the apparent breach of decorum. Enobaria smiled widely at her, showing off her fangs, and the woman’s eyes went wide at the sight of them up close and she turned back around in a hurry. “What a nosy bitch,” Enobaria muttered.

For a second there Johanna actually liked Enobaria. That right there meant the world really was going to hell, although from what she’d heard Brutus and Enobaria both had joined the cause pretty firmly, done some good work in Two. So they’d stopped marching to the Capitol drum and started using their own brains. “No. We usually have wine, though, and cake if they can afford it. But the couple go to their new house, and their friends and family sing the Twelve wedding song for them. They go inside, light the first fire in that house together, and they toast some bread in it. We make sure it’s some nice sweet-bread from the bakery so it’s not those crappy tesserae biscuits.”

She’d only seen Twelve on her Victory Tour and knew what Haymitch told her, but that sounded really simple. Maybe because a lot of Twelve was desperately poor--or more rather, had been poor. Now they were just dead. “Nothing to do with coal, huh?”

Katniss gave her a look. “Would you want your wedding to have anything to do with coal?”

“Point taken.”

“So what do you do in Seven?”

She really didn’t want to think much about that, given how it was never going to be an issue for her, but the girl had asked. “The bride wears something blue because it’s lucky. Even if it’s just a kerchief she borrowed.” A new blue dress was luckiest but not many girls could ever afford that. Something like Annie’s gorgeous green silk dress, obviously made by Cinna, would have been unthinkable. “The two of ‘em go home and plant a pair of trees in their new backyard.” People in Seven spent their summers out at the various lumber camps, but winter was a time for the settled fires of home and the paper mills. “And they’ll have built something for the house together in the couple months before that, assuming it’s not a quick wedding because she’s knocked up.” It was an important thing, proving they could plan and agree and then work as a team to make something for their new home, something meant to last the length of their marriage and beyond. She grinned wickedly. “Usually it’s the bed that they make, if they haven’t inherited one.”

“Well, it’s the most important piece of furniture for two newlyweds,” Enobaria cracked. To her credit, Katniss didn’t die of embarrassment, even contributing a bit of a grin at it.

“What the hell do you do in Two anyway?” she asked Enobaria, actually interested. She was sort of wondering if it involved a blood vow of eternal loyalty to the Capitol or something creepy like that.

“The friends form a sword arch for the couple to walk through and there’s the fight after that for who supposedly gets the upper hand for the wedding night and throughout the marriage. With the quarry workers, it’s usually just kind of a play-wrestle for show and it’s declared a draw. Peacekeepers and former tribute trainees and victors, though, that’s actually with blades and done to the point of first blood.”

“So what, wound the new hubby and that means you get to be on top?” she asked Enobaria with a sly grin.

Enobaria smirked in return. “Pretty much.”

“And what do they do every night after that? Keep fighting for it?” Well, if like she'd joked with Haymitch Thirteen maybe had no foreplay at all, humorless as they were, apparently fighting was what got the juices flowing for Two.

“You’d probably do well with that.”

“Ha. I’m always on top.” After she’d been pinned down under her share of sweating, grunting bodies those first few years, hell if she was giving anyone that, especially not when it was some Capitol asshole she was fucking only to prove to herself that she could turn the tables and have that power over them. At least being on top she had the control and then it was OK.

“Bet you are.” She sounded pretty amused at it and Johanna decided Enobaria might actually not be totally unbearable.

“What? Not like I’ve found a man who can actually keep up with me, why the hell should I just agree to flop on my back for him? And seriously, I’m surprised you can get that imaginative in Two. I figured you for straight-up vanilla and here I find out you’re impressively kinky.” She turned and grinned fiercely at Katniss. “We making you uncomfortable here, Mockingjay?”

“Oh, no. Listening and learning here, that’s me,” she said, and even if there was a hint of color in her cheeks, she was still looking kind of amused. Points to the girl, then; she’d definitely gotten a thicker hide. Particularly since if she was still being the skittish little virgin around Johanna it would have irritated her, Katniss having the right to that naivete.

At that point, Finnick and Annie kissed to seal their marriage and the cheer went up, a little ragged because the Thirteen citizens looked startled at the ruckus from the other districts. Neither of the happy couple showed any signs of paying attention to it. Haymitch struck up the fiddle for the Four wedding song and the kids in the choir joined in. “He’s actually pretty good,” Katniss said with something like surprise. “Never knew he played.”

“Yeah, well, you and the rest of us,” Johanna said idly. He’d never mentioned it to her before this last week. Obviously he’d practiced his ass off because it sounded good. After the song was over she was about to go get up and get a cup of apple cider, congratulate Finnick and Annie, and then head back to the hospital because the good cheer was starting to give her a headache.

Then as the choir filed out Haymitch had to go pull another fast one on people and start to play another song, quicker paced compared to the almost-stately wedding song, and she’d swear some heads perked up like a dog smelling a juicy bone. Looking around, she guessed most of those suddenly pleased faces were from Twelve. Even Katniss drew in a breath and said with some excitement, “That’s ‘Cherry Blossoms’ he’s playing.”

“And?” she said, not getting it. The name meant nothing to her.

“It’s one of our wedding dances from Twelve,” Katniss explained, watching as Peeta headed her way.

“So get your ass out there,” she said with a snort. “Gonna miss a chance to let Snow see you dancing?” Even with her cracked ribs she could dance, and as a middle finger to the Capitol, stacking Finnick and Annie’s wedding with the crowning gesture of a happy little Mockingjay laughing and dancing with her lover couldn’t be beat. Katniss grinned sheepishly and let Peeta take her hand and lead her out. Snagging a cup of cider and watching the dancers twirling around the floor, some of the Twelve people showing the steps to the other guests, she decided she might as well stick around for the cake. It wasn’t like she’d get cake again anytime soon.

Chapter Text

As weddings went, it was a pretty good one, Finnick and Annie making a beautiful couple. Gale was actually sort of grateful to Haymitch for the whole music thing he’d managed. Twelve hadn’t had much to be too happy about lately but the familiar sound of their wedding songs drew them in, made them smile and show off and teach the others the steps, and when the tricky old bastard apparently switched to some songs Finnick and Annie recognized as being from Four, the bride and groom returned the favor and taught their own steps.

He’d danced until he was dizzy, various girls laughing and reaching for his hand, but he’d only wanted Katniss to dance with him and she had and that was a good feeling. After Two things had been awkward and he’d wondered if that distance he felt sometimes was getting too big to be bridged and was afraid that it might be. He didn’t know exactly why she’d started to drift away from him, but ever since the Games and Peeta, she had and he didn’t know how to bring her back. Most of the time these days they alternated between the moments of the old comfort of not having to say stuff and bickering with each other about the war. She just didn’t understand. War sometimes made things necessary to get it done, and why shouldn’t they turn the tables on the Capitol that had been tormenting them for decades? If he could just find words to explain he felt like he could make her see his point, but every single time he just got so mad about the way things were that he just ended up nearly yelling. He really didn’t want to fight with her. She’d been his best friend for years.

Snagging one last cup of apple cider, he caught up with Katniss, glad that it seemed like things were OK now. She looked good tonight, laughing and happy, despite her injured ribs and all. “Hey, Catnip,” he said. “Can we talk, about Two and all?”

She followed him out into the hall and leaned back against the steel wall, looking at him with interest. “What is it, Gale?”

He wasn’t good with words so he just went for it and kissed her, hoping that would make his apology and tell her that he still cared about her and everything. Except unlike before, she wasn’t even hesitantly responding, confused and the like. She just went stiff and her hand found his shoulder and pushed him off, gently enough but it still felt like she’d struck him. “Gale,” she said, glancing away, her tone now all full of apology.

He knew exactly what that meant and he felt the rejection of it slam into him hard. “Yeah, OK,” he said, trying to not give in to feeling like she’d just carved up his heart as he held it out to her. “I get it. You’ve picked him.”

At least she didn’t try to lie to him and claim it was early days or something like that. “Yeah. I told him we’re going to give it a try. But you’re my friend, Gale,” she protested, “you were my good friend back when I was only another Seam brat and I want you to stay that way. Does it have to be one or the other of you?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t know. Maybe it does. You think I really want to sit there and watch you getting all lovey-dovey with him?” He saw her flinch in return and felt almost satisfied. Good. She’d hurt him so it was only fair. Though immediately on the heels of it he felt guilty because he didn’t really want to hurt her, he just wanted her to see how she’d hurt him and how it was impossible to just smile and say of course it would be OK, he’d right away be able to forget about how he felt for her and like the snap of the fingers it would all be normal. “I need some time with it, Catn--Katniss,” he corrected himself.

“Do you want me to--” Even now her expression was pleading with him. Maybe he could still be her friend and everything. But he couldn’t do it tonight. The wound was too fresh and he needed time and space to think about it.

“No, I’ll come find you,” he said, adding silently, if I can, and with that he left her there in the corridor. She’d be fine, he was sure. She obviously had Peeta to comfort her.

Mol took over the fiddling from Haymitch after he played the Four dances and Finnick flashed him a grin of gratitude in recognition of the first tune, turning to take Katniss by the hand and show her the steps. “Have a break, boy,” Mol said, “you did it pretty good.” With that approval duly offered he was happy to hand the fiddle back over to her. Somehow he was unsurprised to see that once he’d grabbed some cider, Annie was waiting to ask him to dance. She and Finnick were avowed co-conspirators for life now, after all, and they’d obviously wasted no time in it since at the same time he spied Finnick dragging Johanna out there too.

“Thanks,” Annie said softly to him during the dance. “For everything.” He understood what she meant. For Finnick, and what he’d at least tried to do, even if sometimes he failed miserably.

“Just take good care of him,” he muttered quietly to her, knowing she would. He might have said something about the other mentor, the one who’d looked after Finnick even more than he had and taken to Annie too, because even he was wishing Mags could see the two of them like this but he let the remark die unspoken. No point letting grief taint such a hard-won happiness; it wasn’t their fault that he was screwed up enough that even on a day like this some of his thoughts ran so darkly.

Trying to set it aside for a few hours he danced with Annie. He took a turn around the floor with Hazelle and then with Perulla for the memory of absent friends. Katniss snagged him and he hid a smile to see her young and happy like this.

Even Effie seemed to perk up on a happy occasion like this, and when he had her hands in his and saw her short hair was light brown, he dared enough to say, “Looks better on you than the wigs, princess.”

He was gratified she had rallied enough to sigh in exasperation with him and say, “Oh, but there’s no helping these awful uniforms.”

“Finally something you and I agree on.” It only took fifteen years too. Cinna stepped in to claim the next dance with Effie and he looked over towards the side where the cider was, wanting to slip off the dance floor and thinking another drink was a good excuse, but wishing like hell someone would throw some liquor in that bowl already. Wedding dances were fine and good and he’d fulfilled his obligation to Finnick by doing a few like he’d promised, but he didn’t belong in this.

Johanna caught him by the wrist before he took three steps, and she muttered as she strong-armed him into the dance, “If I’m stuck stepping on anyone’s toes it’s absolutely gonna be yours because this whole dancing thing is your fault anyway.”

He sighed and agreed with her. “Can’t hardly argue with that.” She wasn’t half so bad as she was claiming, he saw. Though the dancing broke up pretty soon after that in favor of the cake, and that was a saving grace because then he could stop with the front he was putting on and just eat the damn cake.

After the cake, Plutarch rushed off to edit the footage, beaming at Haymitch, “You Twelve citizens. When you just surprised everyone with the dancing music like that, and putting some of the dances from Four into it--genius, Haymitch! I had no idea you were so moved by weddings.”

“I’m thinking I’m generally more moved by funerals with all the practice I’ve gotten,” he said dryly, and the sarcasm went right over Plutarch’s head because he was probably so focused on how he'd make the propo, but Johanna, sitting beside him and scraping her plate clean after both of them managed to get Peeta to give them second helpings of cake, snickered.

Finnick and Annie left soon after the cake, heading for their new compartment. The crowd started to bleed off after that, slowly thinning out. He stayed, not quite ready yet to go back down to the sterile boredom of the hospital for the night. Johanna stayed there too, sprawled out loose-boned in her chair and they talked about nothing much, not weddings for sure.

Truth was, he wished he could just either be happy or hate the whole damn thing. To be happy for Finnick was easy and instinctive. But at the same time, he couldn’t help that feeling of emptiness inside himself, trying to hide it well with the smiles and the dances.

Once before he’d felt like this, as a younger man with Burt and Jonas. Their friendships had been pretty much over by the time Haymitch turned eighteen except for the occasional nod and hello when they ran into each other at the Hob, but he knew what was going on in their lives after that. Knew when they got engaged and when their wedding days came, knew when they’d had a kid.

He’d watched as his friends grew up and moved forward in their lives, brought home a wife and fathered kids. They took on full, rich lives and they became men in a way he glumly knew since he was seventeen he never could and never would. With that, they left him and their shared childhood behind for good.

It was happening now with Finnick. Oh, he didn’t doubt they’d always be friends; family, even. The loss wouldn’t be as sharp as the total breach with Burt and Jonas had been. But it would be different from this day forward. Annie would always naturally come first for him, be the first person he turned to for his troubles, and from now on he’d always have less need of the old friends who’d seen him through the rough years. He felt Finn slipping away, knew he was once again being left behind on the other side of a big divide, and knew he had to let Finnick go live his life and be happy. But doing it, accepting even that lesser loss, made him feel so damn old and tired and alone.

Even now he could look ahead and see it coming up again because Peeta and Katniss wouldn't be teenagers forever. Already they were having to grow up much too fast. Maybe they’d turn to each other and he was suspecting that was likely, maybe it would go all to hell and they’d end up with others. But either way they’d get married and they’d leave him behind too.

This was why he shouldn’t have been dumb enough to let anyone in. Damn. It hurt too much when he had to let them go. He wanted a drink so badly he could practically taste it. He wanted a warm body beside him tonight in a way he hadn’t in years. He wanted his sorry life to just be over already rather than facing more decades of quiet lonely desperation, his only worth in what little use he could still be to friends who’d once needed him.

As everyone finally cleared out, Johanna toasted him with a glass of cider with a smirk curling the corner of her mouth. “Well, congratulations, Haymitch, our little boy’s finally all grown up.”

True, the two of them sort of made a pact once they were both out of the game that they’d mutually look after Finnick as best as they could. So while she was only a year older than Finnick she was older in some ways. But still young, he thought. Not like him. She still had a chance, and he hoped she’d take it even if it meant she’d leave him too. He managed a smile and joked at her, “And they grow up so fast.”

“Well, whatever.” She waved a dismissive hand and tipped back the last of her cider. “You and me, we can always be the odd ones out after they’re all done getting cozy and coupled up. Sitting here drinking and bitching just like old times. There’s something nice about reliability.”

“Nah,” he said, finishing his own glass and standing up to go get more, scooping up her own glass to refill it too while he was at it. “You’re young,” he told her, trying to sound good-humored and encouraging. “So I’ll be playing your wedding someday yet.” There were good men out there who’d be patient enough to see beyond the front. She’d find one, he was pretty sure.

She laughed but there was something wild about it, a guttural sound. “Shut up, Haymitch.” She caught his shoulder and spun him back to face her, turned him right into the kiss she pressed on him, hard and insistent, her hands catching in his shirt. He dimly realized he'd dropped the cider glasses when he heard them breaking on the floor as his arms went around her in return.

He couldn’t even think right then how long it had been since he’d kissed a woman in earnest, one he’d really actually wanted to kiss for the sake of it. Over a decade, that much he knew for certain. He didn’t want to try to place it by referencing it to a year of the Games and whatever horrors he had associated with that year from two more dead kids and assorted Capitol bedrooms.

In the early years when he couldn’t lock it all down it had helped to sleep with a friend sometimes, to regain some sense of balance and sanity, to feel kindly meant touches and kisses. He and Chantilly had pretty much reliably leaned on each other back then for that purpose. But there reached a point where he got good enough at shutting it all down when he was with patrons that trying to open up again and let it be real when he was with another victor just got too difficult. It wasn’t like Finnick’s case, where he could totally shut it down for a month of patrons and then open up and make it real for eleven months of the year for Annie back home. Going constantly back and forth over the course of a month left the door pretty much half-open all the time. Either he was too closed off when he was with Chantilly to make the sex worth having or he was too vulnerable again when he was with a patron. So in the end, he just did what he had to in order to continue surviving it and chose to shut it all away permanently. By the time he got kicked off the circuit, years later, and could have safely had a sex life again if he’d wanted one, alcohol was his coping mechanism of choice anyway.

To his surprise, apparently somewhere in the intervening years, some of those defenses had worn down and that door had cracked open again. Probably had something to do with how Katniss and Peeta got past his guard in general and forced him to feel things again that he’d figured were well buried for good. In any case, he felt this plenty, and he was kissing her back because he could recognize that it was more desperation than desire in her lips and her hands running up and down his body, feel the answering echo in her of that same simple aching I want to not be alone that he was feeling. That was OK, he didn’t need her really wanting him passionately, he wasn’t exactly sure he was capable of actual passion anymore. At least this proved he could feel something more than the old numbness and he was oddly grateful for it.

His hands were up under her too-large shirt now, running over the soft warm skin of her back and he could feel his fingers moving over freshly healing scars there, from what exact torture he didn’t know but he knew that he’d heard her screaming while they were made. She gave a low sound of something like pain or irritation against his lips at that and kissed him even harder, body pressed up against his insistently like she meant for them to end up against a wall or down on the floor right there.

Somewhere in the daze of his reeling, touch-drunk brain he realized, Hell, we’re in the middle of a public hall here. He caught her shoulders and couldn’t quite bring himself to draw back from her enough to speak up because if he did there was the fear it was like some spell might be broken by it and the moment would pass. Instead he eased up how he was kissing her, but if anything that just seemed to make her go after him all the harder, her fingers grabbing for his belt, her kiss turning rough and almost angry.

Sure, he knew why she was like this. He’d seen that in those first few years, between running around half-naked and trying to chase patrons off, she’d come in to Mentor Central some days with long sleeves and colorful silk scarves knotted around her neck. He didn’t have to ask to know there would be dark bruises showing the grip of fingers and hands on her arms and her throat and that talking would hurt. He’d just handed her a bottle because it was unfortunately the best he could offer. He couldn't kill the bastards for her.

Though understanding why wasn’t enough to counter the flash of instinctive recognition, pain about to be unleashed if he didn’t just give in and do what she wanted, and the fear and anger he couldn’t help but feel at it. His hands on her shoulders gripped hard and he pushed her back, stepped away, needing to get out from it to something safer. “What the hell was that?” he snapped at her, breathing hard and hearing his own voice harsh and angry in his ears, and he didn’t mean to sound like that but it was out there in the air before he could control it better.

She stared at him, a flicker of something like pain crossing her face but then that sharp, challenging smile was there to replace it as she retreated behind her own defenses. “Can’t take a little heat, old man? Afraid you might fall and break your hip?”

“Maybe I’m not into the fact I can’t figure out if you want to fuck me or punish me.”

She cocked her head and folded her arms over her still-heaving chest. “Don’t you even know the difference? Or what, you turned into such a complete whore you can’t be a man anymore? Can you even fuck for yourself, or do you really need orders from Snow?”

He really wished she’d just slapped him because that would have hurt less, and if she was out to hurt him he’d do his best to keep her at bay. He had to or he wouldn’t be able to bear one of his few friends turning on him like this, especially when he was already feeling the cracks in his armor so keenly today. So he turned his own tongue back on her, unguarded and sharp and and angry. “Better a whore than a cheap slut. At least I never screwed someone from the Capitol just for the hell of it. You were taking them on left and right anywhere there was a wall handy to try and prove that Johanna Mason does the fucking rather than being fucked.” He laughed at her, wishing that they could step out of this but it was like they were locked into one of those kali fights, all attacks and growing pain until one of them finally couldn’t go on any longer. “You think it proved anything but that they broke you in so well that even after the money and the threats stopped you were actually still doing their bidding?”

“Oh, if I got broke in right I have you to thank for that, don’t I?” She smiled at him, more like a baring of teeth, gathering up whatever attack she was readying to unleash on him, but her eyes were full of rage and hurt both. “Oh, my. Maybe that’s the problem--I’m too experienced now and you can’t handle that. Have you turned so Capitol that you only like ‘em when they’re ignorant little virgins, Haymitch? You had Finnick and me both, and you’ve got two more on the line all ready to go, don’t you? I mean, that baby she supposedly was having was obviously bullshit for the sponsors, so I doubt they’ve fucked each other yet. Saving them both for yourself?”

There was a moment there where he honestly wanted to kill her, at least a little. He definitely had to fight the urge to punch her, and for someone raised Seam that showed how far he'd fallen as a man that he'd even have to think about hitting a woman. To accuse him of that, of being just the same as the leering old perverts that had bought a victor’s virginity, was too much. He hadn’t been thinking about her at seventeen when she was kissing him because the two situations were nothing alike and to be honest, it wasn’t a memory he liked to dwell upon. He didn’t exactly consider it one of his prouder moments. There was no fully escaping the vague notion of guilt he still had about her and Finnick both. He’d maybe saved them from a truly horrible first time with patrons but it wasn’t like he kidded himself that it had been anything truly memorable for them. It was the least shitty option, that was true, but in doing what he’d done he’d become an actual participant in the process of turning an innocent kid into a whore. That still sat uneasy some days.

This was the problem with provoking someone who knew him so well. She knew much too well how to hurt him. She was pushing his buttons much too effectively because his temper was already barely being held back with that last one. If this kept going he was probably going to let her push him into saying or even doing something he wouldn’t be able to take back. If she mentioned anything about that cell in the Capitol he thought he really would lose it. “Fuck you, Johanna,” he said, pulling out the only thing he could think of that might hurt her equally in return even as he knew it was as untrue as she had to know accusing him of being addicted to virgins was total bullshit, “if you’re just desperate for another cock to use because you’ll never have Finnick’s again, find someone else. I’m nobody’s whore.”

Then he walked away before he ended up saying something even worse, knowing he’d lost the fight by being the first to flinch and not much caring about that. Even if he’d won it wouldn’t have been worth the cost. The regret was filtering in already and he knew the blow to his pride was nothing against the hurt of having a friend turn and wound him unexpectedly like this, and knowing he’d done the same to her. He was hoping he hadn’t lost her with it but he was afraid that maybe he had. He couldn’t fix it right now because they both were too pissed off and too hurt but he was already trying to think ahead, to a time of cooler tempers and trying to see something he could say or do that could lead to a path that didn’t end with them just telling each other to permanently take a hike. He’d lost Finnick today in a way and maybe he’d lost Johanna too right there, and he could barely stand that idea. Well, fuck weddings. He obviously wasn’t meant for them.

Chapter Text

Johanna watched Haymitch stalk away, feeling the sting of the parting words about Finnick and about just wanting to use him like a whore and she wanted to find something to yell back at him but she let it go. She let him go because pissed off as she was the sick feeling was there because she hadn’t wanted to hurt the stupid idiot, all she’d wanted was a simple fuck and that was it and he had to go and make it complicated.

She shouldn’t have kissed him to begin with, she thought. But hearing him talk, seeing how he was trying to prop her up with some encouraging lies of you’re still young and you’re a good person and of course you’ll find someone to love you, she knew it was total bullshit, and all the while she could see the glimpses of the weariness in him that had been hinted at with how he’d been trying to sneak away from the wedding too. It felt good, in a way, to find a solitude that fitted her own, to know she wasn’t the only one who wasn't deliriously happy on Finnick’s wedding day. So she’d shut him up from keeping going with those meaningless words the best way she knew how, the best way to banish the loneliness for at least a little while.

He’d surprised her with how he’d reacted. When she was seventeen and convinced him to fuck her before she endured her first patron, she’d been too ignorant to know better and so he’d simply seemed careful and gentle and so reassuringly calm to a kid for whom it was all new and a little overwhelming. It was only later with more perspective, of seeing what a man all caught up in lust was really like, that she realized that the sheer calm he’d showed was more like the weird absence of him feeling anything. He’d touched her to arouse her and to guide her but his hands didn’t stray even once out of any kind of desire or urgency. He was strangely quiet the whole time too, though she’d seen that too in Finnick later and gotten the explanation. Oh, they don’t like all that grunting and groaning in a man. So I learned to keep that quiet and then throw in some moans and maybe say their name, because that’s all they want to hear. If they could find a way to make me not sweat either they’d probably do it. They want a pretty fantasy with a victor, not actual sex with a person. Too messy. Too unrefined.

She hadn’t run into that, though she knew from the gossip that Chantilly from One had a niche back in the day of playing the sweet little good girl, so maybe they’d wanted it all pretty and fake-romantic from her. With Johanna they almost never wanted her to keep quiet, unless it was with an actual order of, Shut up, bitch. The ones who beat the hell out of her usually wanted her to cry or beg for mercy or admit she’d been a bad, bad girl. The ones who wanted to get beaten usually wanted her to insult and mock them and really, that was no hardship for her. If the whole thing hadn’t been so nauseating in general she could have actually enjoyed that part a little.

She’d kissed Haymitch in the arena, seizing the chance on a lark to give the Capitol one last gesture of defiance. After his initial startle, he’d immediately stepped up and put on a good act. Good enough that he’d probably fooled a lot of patrons with it back in the day, good enough that plenty of these Thirteen morons thought it had been real. But from that past experience with him, she had the perspective to see that it was all flash and no substance, and that behind the act the whole thing was as empty and dispassionate as when he’d fucked her.

He hadn’t been calm and controlled tonight. She could have laughed at him and said he was embarrassingly desperate from the way he reacted but she was obviously desperate too. Because they’d turned her into a vicious little monster years ago and then they’d taken her apart in that cell, shredded what was left of her as a person, and was it really so much to want to have even an hour with someone who could make her feel something besides pain? Compared to what other people had, looking at them at the wedding all happy and oblivious, it seemed like not much to ask. She’d expected his usual emptiness and even that would have been OK because she understood, that was a necessary defense for him and she wouldn’t mess with it so long as he was willing to make her feel good, because all that she wanted to matter tonight was her body anyway. In the morning he’d be the same old Haymitch again anyway, reliably sarcastic, because it wasn’t like that would make things awkward.

But then he had to go kissing her back and it overwhelmed her, unexpected as it was. She hadn’t planned on it but it was so damn good, feeling some heat in him and thinking with relief that this could actually be much better than she’d thought. He’d been caught up enough in it that he hadn’t been thinking and touched the scars and she’d tried to get him away from that because it was a little too much to stand. He knew too much about how they’d happened, about what they’d reduced her to down in that cell.

Then the moment came when he’d started to back off, his hands and his lips suddenly going gentler. She didn’t wait to see if he was easing off to look at her and say This is a mistake, or if he realized he’d shown too much to her and was scaredly hiding back behind that old defense of careful, meaningless finesse. Either way, she felt the spark of alarm at knowing the moment was retreating and after seeing something unexpected like this from him she didn’t want to just let it go. So she’d pushed him, trying to get it back, and instead he’d pushed her away and snapped at her, and of course her first instinct was to cover her ass and her wounded pride by snapping back, and they knew each other well enough to make it hurt.

What had she been thinking anyway? He was one of the few people she actually trusted and this had fucked things up. Of course her bed was right next to his too in the hospital. Shit. Even a privacy curtain didn’t seem like nearly enough right now.

But she was walking the corridors still restless and frustrated and lonely and now she was pissed off to boot, so when she saw Katniss’ cute fake “cousin” swiping his access card on his compartment, with a face like someone just killed his dog, she decided she wouldn’t let Haymitch keep her from getting what she needed tonight. So fine, she was a slut. At least she wasn’t too afraid to screw someone. She went up to Gale and nudged his thigh with her hip. “Sleeping alone tonight, gorgeous? What a shame.”

It was so easy. All it took was a few words and a knowing smile from her, the invitation offered, and he was all over her. He kissed like someone who knew how and he wasn’t trying to make it sweet. But when he tried to unbutton her shirt she wasn’t going to stand for that so she pinned him down to the bed and straddled him, not wanting him looking, not wanting him touching, just wanting him to get busy with it and fuck her already. Looking down at him, the black hair and the grey eyes strikingly familiar, she heard that acerbic laugh in her head and could just imagine that rough voice saying with amusement, Now it’s funny that you run right to pick someone who reminds you of me, sweetheart.

Yeah, right, she snorted right back. Twenty years younger, three inches taller, less mouthy, less afraid to admit he wants a good fuck. Maybe I just upgraded to a better version of you, huh? Should we see what he’s got below the belt? Though hard to say with you since hey, anything would have felt big to a first-timer, whether you really are or not.

You actually think insulting my cock’s going to bother me? Try harder. No, it wouldn’t, she realized with annoyance. He simply didn’t care enough to let something like that upset him. She’d had to pull out much worse to get a reaction, but she didn’t want to do that again.

Apparently right now she couldn’t even win an argument with Haymitch in her own head, and that bothered the hell out of her. Looking down at Gale all she could hear was that knowing chuckle in her mind and it pissed her off, because it evaporated any desire she had to fuck him because it would simply prove the old annoying bastard right. “Sorry, gotta go,” she said with a smirk, patting him on the cheek and climbing off him. “Been fun.”

“Johanna, c’mon, what’s with the hot and cold thing?” he protested, looking confused at her sudden reversal here, and it just irritated her.

She snorted in amusement with him. “Does your ‘cousin’ Katniss know you’re fucking around or does she actually believe you’re waiting for her? Or when the time comes are you gonna pull the good ol’ ‘None of those girls mattered to me, it was just sex, so you can’t blame me for it’ card?” It was one thing to casually fuck around when there were no strings, but if he was actually in love with the little idiot, that was another thing.

“You’re the one that threw yourself at me here,” he said defensively.

“Yeah, and I’m not the one claiming to be in love while I’m busy screwing someone else,” she told him sharply. Shit. She should never have even tried to sleep with him; it would be just putting herself in the middle of that whole mess and she didn’t want any piece of it.

He gave an irritated grunt at that. “Doesn’t matter, does it? She told me tonight that she picked Peeta,” he said glumly, a little bit sulky too like a child denied a toy, sitting up and getting that dead-dog look on his face again.

Yeah, OK, that explained the expression pretty neatly. He was so young still, she realized with some amazement. Nineteen, maybe twenty? She felt ages older than him. Her nineteen had been a hell of a lot different than his. “Sucks to be you,” she said lightly, not willing to give him anything more than that because it tugged painfully at thinking of Finnick and how she’d lost out there, and about how Haymitch showed tonight he would rather choose to be alone than be with her. Even with Gale she’d have been the girl he was fucking because Katniss wouldn’t sleep with him. She was so used to being a distant second best that she didn’t have much sympathy for his discovering that it was a really crappy feeling. “Welcome to the losers’ camp, kiddo. It’s a tough place to leave.” No use sugarcoating it for him. With that she straightened her own shirt and sauntered out of his compartment.

She wandered the halls for a while but eventually she had to admit that wasn’t going to help and she’d be damned if she’d let Haymitch Abernathy get to her enough to have her doing something stupid like trying to sleep out in a corridor just to avoid him.

Heading back down to the hospital, the closer she got the more determined she grew to just tell him fine, he could keep his precious self-control, she didn’t much care, but he damn well better not judge her in that case if she slept with someone. He’d had his chance right there and he gave it up. Mostly, she admitted quietly to herself, she wanted to simply have it out with him so maybe they could move on and it wouldn’t mess everything up between them.

He was already asleep when she moved past his bed, though, curled half in on himself and giving a twitch or two as she watched. But the bedside lamp was on and she saw there was a book under his arm, one that was hefty enough to probably qualify to be included in the Cornucopia as a bludgeon. Moving closer and wondering what the hell he was reading that was that thick, her eyes instead went first to where his still-untucked shirt and undershirt had rucked up a bit in his restless movements, exposing a bit of skin above the waist of his trousers.

An old scar was there just over his hip, faded and white and well-healed. That must have been from after his whoring days, when they no longer bothered with the effort of remake on his skin. Who knew how he’d gotten that one? Probably falling over something while he was stumbling drunk, she thought disparagingly. But what she expected was there too, what she’d been curious to see. There was a long, thin scar that was still purple as it healed from where they’d cut him. A soft-edged black smudge too, like someone had dipped a fingertip in the coal dust from Twelve, and touched it to his skin to leave a mark. Except it wasn’t on the surface of his skin, it was underneath it, like a tattoo. She knew from experience that was from where they’d gotten a little too vigorous with the wires and left an electrical burn.

Yeah, even that little bit of his skin matched hers. She wasn’t sure whether that made her feel better or not. Mostly it just made her feel pissed off at the Capitol. Stepping forward, she leaned down to see the book.

She didn’t know how he sensed it while he was asleep, just like she didn’t know how she did it either. But like that, he was awake in an instant, and the arena was right there in his eyes, gone all hard and fierce, before he saw her and recognized her and it faded. “Any reason for the wakeup there?” he said tiredly, shoving his shirttail back down and sitting up.

“I’m not gonna fucking well attack you here and rip off your clothes,” she snapped, feeling irritated that he did that, sitting up in a hurry like he was afraid she would. “I can take a hint." Asshole, she added silently. "I was trying to see what you’re reading, that’s all.”

He handed over the book and she let the solid weight of it settle in her hands, glancing down at the text. Even that little bit she read, thoroughly going into what exactly the definition of "theft" was, was fit to make her eyes cross. Shutting the cover with a solid, weighty thump, she glanced at the gold lettering. “The Code of Conduct of Panem? Looks like it works just as good as the sedatives to make a person go nighty-night in a hurry.”

He smiled in response and that was gratifying, but she asked him, “So why the hell are you reading this anyway?” She assumed it wasn’t just to knock himself out at night. Warily, he glanced around down towards the bed where Katniss’ privacy curtain was pulled, and then even further down the way. “So don’t tell me,” feeling shut out all over again, and it was such a stupid little thing for him to make her feel that. But she wasn’t seventeen and naive like Katniss. She didn’t need to be protected from things because there was no point in her case. The Capitol had made sure of that already.

She was about ready to go to her own bed and pull the damn curtain and shut him out when he said her name softly, "Hey, Johanna," and that somehow stopped her from leaving. Looking back at him, she saw that he had shifted towards the head of the bed, inviting her to sit down beside him. She did, but made sure she didn’t sit too close in case the touchy paranoid moron thought she was trying to make a move on him. “Cinna and Effie,” he said, and suddenly looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with lack of sleep. “They’ll be put on trial after all this is over as Capitol conspirators, enabling the Games and all that crap. So I figure I’d better be ready and know the law damn well for it.” Stupid Haymitch, trying to save everyone as usual, but she couldn’t quite find the sarcasm needed to give him hell about it. Not after that Capitol cell and knowing how even with being as beaten down and broken as the rest of them he’d managed to somehow scrape together enough resolve to provoke Snow to try to give them all the only remaining mercy of a quick death.

“What the fuck?” she said, too loudly, and then she realized it and lowered her voice. “You’re serious?” He raised an eyebrow and looked at her with that sarcastic expression that told her it was a stupid question. “Shit.” Cinna definitely didn’t deserve that and while she was of the opinion Effie Trinket was kind of a moron, apparently Haymitch felt like there was reason to get her off the hook. “Let me guess. This is a ‘don’t tell them’ thing?”

“I’ll figure out how to tell ‘em, but for now they need to just focus on getting better. And don’t tell Katniss either because I don’t need her in there yelling at Coin about it, because I already tried talking sense into her and that didn’t work, so Katniss getting pissed off definitely won’t work.”

“Yeah, got it.” At least he still trusted her enough to tell her a thing like that, and she let herself believe that maybe somehow it would be OK, that they could simply forget the hurtful crap they’d said and those few moments when both of them had let down their guard enough to admit they really weren’t fine like they pretended.

She was about ready to get up and head to her own bed and call it done, when he spoke up again, even quieter. “It’s not like I enjoyed it.”

She turned back and looked at him. “What?” What the hell was he talking about--the two of them earlier tonight? If he was talking about the arguing, sure, she hadn’t enjoyed that either. If he meant the kiss and all, she wasn’t sure “enjoyed” would have been the right word. It was too light, too trite, for something like that. It wasn’t about simple enjoyment, it was about sheer overwhelming need.

“You and I, back when you were seventeen. It’s not like I actually enjoyed that,” he repeated. Oh. That. So he was upset about the whole "you don't like them unless they're virgins" thing. Then he made a soft irritated noise. “OK, bad word choice, that didn’t sound right.” She waved it off, knowing he hadn’t meant to make it sound like she was so bad that fucking her had been a chore.

“Yeah, I know you didn’t enjoy it.” At his quizzical look she sighed and said, “Didn’t realize it right then. But later, when I knew more, it was pretty damn obvious when I looked back at it.”

He nodded, sparing her from having to explain. “I’m sorry.”

“For what, idiot?” she said with a snort. “I’m the one that asked you to do it.” Haymitch was usually pretty realistic and practical, so it was annoying seeing him caught up in this self-imposed guilt for some kind of imagined sin against her.

“Yeah, and when you asked, you were a kid who didn’t know any better. Maybe it should have been Finnick. At least then you’d have had something real to hang onto. I’d been doing it too long. Real...wasn’t an option anymore.” It’s apparently an option now, she wanted to say, I felt it tonight, same as you did, before you ran away, but she didn’t because it wasn’t just about that.

Oh, he wasn’t going to do this to her, use some bizarre twisted notion of his having hurt her with that to put a wall up between them. She wasn’t going to let him. If he was so determined to push her away it was going to be for good reason, that she was an unbearable pain in the ass or something like that. “Oh, right, Finnick and I could fumble our way through things and how was that going to help me the next night when I was with Gaius fucking Luna?”

“Johanna...” he protested, giving her a guilty sidelong glance. I don’t want your damn guilt, Haymitch, so don’t you make yourself bleed with it and make me watch.

He wouldn't believe her trying to reassure him anyway, and she couldn't do something that soft. Instead she did the only thing she knew how and she pushed back. “So tell me, who was your first?”

He shrugged dismissively. “It was so long ago. I don’t even remember.” The flat way he said it told her plenty. He wouldn’t have forgotten something like that.

“Liar.”

Now his eyes snapped with temper and at least that was better than misplaced apology. If he was going to be sorry it ought to be for something worth being sorry about. “Gloriana Frill,” he said harshly, face all full of anger and shame and hurt. “I was her daughter’s birthday guest but really I was sent there to be Mommy’s present, OK?”

Gloriana Frill. Damn. She’d been Secretary of Communications for forever--that bitch was ancient, had to be almost as old as Snow. Doing the math, Johanna realized she had to have been at least forty when Haymitch was first forced into turning tricks at seventeen and the thought of it made her skin crawl. But then, for her, Luna had been almost fifty. “So, was it any good for you?” she asked him, crossing her arms over her chest and raising an eyebrow as she asked.

“What kind of fucking question is that?” he snarled at her. “You need the play-by-play here of how it happened? Wanna know how many showers I took when I got back from it? How many drinks Chantilly and Blight and the rest shoved at me that night? That’s the first time I ever got totally stinking drunk, idiot, doesn’t that tell you enough?” It told her plenty about how bad it had been for him, and she didn’t doubt that no matter that more than two decades had passed that he helplessly remembered every moment of it still. She tried to not think about him at seventeen getting completely blitzed with a younger, still-sane Blight and the other young victor-whores of that time, just another overwhelmed kid trying to hold it together after getting raped by some Capitol pervert and struggling with it. She didn’t want to imagine him that young and that vulnerable. Remembering herself and Finnick at that age was hard enough.

She stared him down, not willing to let that gathering rage make her blink. “At least the way it went, I had one time where it was all about me and making it feel good. Because Gaius Luna didn’t care, and I'm sure that bitch Gloriana Frill didn't either. What you did for me, it was a hell of a lot more useful than something all sweet that I was just going to never have again.” Romance would have hurt more in the end, because it would have been something she’d had for a moment and then lost as it got torn apart by the reality of her life. Pleasure, at least, wasn’t that fragile. “I shouldn’t have said that you like fucking virgins, OK? I knew it was bullshit when I said it. Sorry.” She didn’t apologize lightly or often so he’d better appreciate the worth of getting that out of her.

Those blazingly angry eyes settled down and finally he nodded, a tight motion. “All right. Shouldn’t have said what I did about Finnick. I knew that was total crap too.” She noticed neither of them was in a hurry to handle the first round of the fight, the one where she’d accused him of being too scared to feel anything and he’d thrown back at her that she was too scared to not have total control. Apparently they weren’t going to touch that yet because, she admitted glumly, there was probably some truth in it and that was why it had hurt. Which was pretty much why they’d hit back all the harder on the next exchange. He blew out a slow breath. “I’m running short on friends here. Especially after the arena, and here in Thirteen it’s an even tighter list. So I ain’t in a hurry to just write one off if I can help it.” His eyes met hers, calm and level now, asking, Are we going to be OK here?

“Please,” she said with a smirk, “I’m not some whiny little crybaby, moron. You have to try harder than that to run me off.” She wouldn’t have to say she was relieved, and that she needed him around as a friend too. She was pretty sure he’d understand.

Chapter Text

When Peeta came down to the hospital ward to visit, he found the victors were about ready to induce a riot. Given it was Haymitch and Johanna and Katniss, and Enobaria and Brutus having gained a recent reputation as being rebellious, that was something to take seriously. “Trouble?” he asked Finnick, who looked about as dazed by it as Peeta felt.

“Uh, as I follow it, Katniss was talking with Boggs about the assault on the Capitol and made the assumption that of course she was going to be involved, and...yeah, apparently that wasn’t the case.”

“She’s not?” He had to admit he was surprised by it. Given how important Katniss had been in propos, he would have readily assumed she was going to be a part of the final stage of the war in taking the Capitol.

“Coin said it was too dangerous for an untrained soldier to be in actual combat and that if she wanted to be involved like that she’d have to pass the training regimen here in Thirteen. We’ve got about three weeks to pass the training.”

“We?” He definitely caught the use of the plural there.

Finnick smiled broadly. “You didn’t really think we’d all just sit back for that fight, did you? We’re all in, all us victors except Beetee.” Well, Beetee was past sixty, so Peeta was pretty sure that was a good excuse. Not to mention his role in getting propos out was invaluable. “Even Annie wants to be a part of it.” He glanced at Finnick’s wife, sitting on the edge of Katniss’ bed with a fierce look of concentration on her face. She seemed so gentle most of the time, but she’d been a Career once, survived the arena. Obviously she had the strength to do what needed to be done, and if she wanted to be with Finnick and protect him, he would be the last person to try to talk her out of it. “We all need to see it through to the end.”

He looked over at Katniss. “If she’s going, then I’m going,” he said, not even having to think about it. If it involved combat, he had to be there to help guard her back, because Katniss didn’t think of her own safety sometimes when she was in the fight. “So, sign me up.” He just hoped the hospital contingent could stand up to the challenge. None of the former Capitol prisoners were the ragged scarecrows they’d been on their rescue, but he couldn’t imagine they were fully healed yet, and Katniss’ broken ribs had to still be paining her.

Crossing to the gathering around Katniss’ bed, he was just in time to hear Haymitch groan, obviously annoyed, “I trained myself like crazy once this year already. I’ve been through two fucking Quarter Quells. I think that should qualify me as knowing how to handle myself in combat, thanks.”

“I’m a year older than you,” Brutus said with a lack of sympathy, though Peeta could see the glimmer of wry humor in his eyes. “So unless I quit you’ve got no excuse.”

“You’re never gonna quit,” Haymitch scowled, “you’re from Two.”

“So don’t make Twelve look bad in comparison by quitting,” Brutus shrugged.

“Asshole.” Haymitch jabbed a finger at him. “Keep it up and you’ll get that fight from me yet.”

“All right, if you’re both done waving your cocks around,” Johanna said dryly, “let’s go sign whatever stupid forms we have to do for it.”

There were forms, of course, which Peeta had come to expect from Thirteen. After that, it was a matter of taking the forms to Doctor Harcourt to get a medical clearance to begin training. In his case it was a pretty cursory basic physical to make sure he was in shape for it. “Be careful of the artificial leg on distance runs and the obstacle course,” Harcourt warned, “but I don’t see a reason it should disqualify you. You’re young and in good health.” Signing the form with a flourish, he handed it back to Peeta. “There you go. Good luck.”

After her physical, Katniss got some injections to speed the healing in her ribs and he wished he could stay in the hospital with her overnight, because it was obvious she was in some pretty deep pain from it, but rules were rules in Thirteen and so he was sent back to his solitary compartment to sleep. Haymitch promised him that he’d keep an eye on her for the night but it wasn’t the same.

At 7:30 the next morning they reported for training as ordered, Peeta sighing that he was forced to be obedient as ever to the purple ink on his forearm. Considering he and Katniss were the youngest victors there at seventeen, and they were with a kids’ class of thirteen and fourteen year olds, the awkward look on the faces of the likes of the others was priceless. Enobaria turned to Brutus and said with something close to an irritated growl, “We’ve got to train our way out of this group as quick as we can. It’s embarrassing.” He could imagine for people from Two, trained since they were in kindergarten or whatever, being stuck with the little kids was particularly humiliating.

Glancing around, he saw a bleary-eyed Katniss looking like she hadn’t slept at all, a tired Haymitch and Johanna, Finnick looking ready to go, and Enobaria and Brutus looking pained. “Annie?” he asked with some surprise, noting her absence. She was slender, true, but obviously strong enough to swim and everything. He didn’t see any reason she shouldn’t have passed the physical, especially if the rest of them had given how they were still recovering from their time in the Detention Center.

“Didn’t pass the physical,” Johanna said, rubbing her eyes and stifling a yawn. “They won’t let her in combat because she’s knocked up.” Pregnant? But she and Finnick had only been married a couple of weeks. Well, he realized, suddenly spotting the ridiculously obvious, Annie and Finnick had come to Thirteen along with himself and Katniss. There had been a long time before the wedding where they easily could have been having sex, and obviously they had.

“Jo,” Finnick said, looking exasperated with her.

“What? Sorry. Let me rephrase. She’s expecting the inevitably gorgeous firstborn child of Finnick Odair,” Johanna said with a smirk. It struck Peeta that Finnick probably wished he could have broken the news rather than her, although looking around at the others and their lack of surprise, it looked like he was the only one who hadn’t known. Obviously it had made the rounds of the hospital last night. It felt odd to be left out by sheer virtue of not being wounded.

He smiled at Finnick, though, genuinely happy for him. Ever since the wedding both Finnick and Annie had been practically radiant every time he’d seen them, and now they had an additional bit of happiness to celebrate. “Congratulations to both of you,” he said. “That’s wonderful.” He managed to not imagine what kids with Katniss might look like. The relationship was so new anyway, and he was trying so hard to not leap ahead with things. Trying to take it as it came was something he struggled with, and he could sometimes sense Katniss’ impatience with that, but he was learning, and she was learning to open up a bit more. All in all, he had to say that since Finnick’s wedding and her telling him they could be together, he’d been pretty damn happy himself. They’d learned that his having a solo compartment was nice for stealing a kiss in privacy.

“Thanks, Peeta,” Finnick said, shooting him a grateful glance, but conversation after that was cut off by the instructor, an older woman who informed them to call her Soldier York, showing up and telling them to start stretching.

He could see the others slowly flagging throughout the morning during the stretching and the strength training. Then came the running, though his stump, chafed and abused, wasn’t thanking him for it. This was even worse than the running he’d put them all through during the spring for the Quell, and seeing the Thirteen kids just treating it like it was nothing only made him realize that this wasn’t going to be the simple lark they’d all thought. His Capitol-made prosthetic wasn’t made for this kind of sheer prolonged physical punishment, and he knew he’d have to find some kind of better padding for the cuff tonight to help ease things.

He passed Enobaria and Brutus around the three mile mark, and Brutus was snapping at her, “You want to be weak? You want to be an embarrassment? Then go ahead and quit!” But he could see that both of them were trembling hard, maybe on the verge of passing out.

“You were imprisoned and tortured, so you’ve got reason to take it easy,” he tried to tell them. Passing out wouldn’t help them. Though he’d seen from how he tried to curb Haymitch during the Quell training and how the older man would just grimly pause for a minute then force himself to get right back to it, there was no talking sense into someone whose mind was that made up.

Enobaria’s dark eyes flashed as she looked at him. “You mean well, Peeta, but stay out of this,” she advised him, not entirely unfriendly. He nodded, not liking it but accepting that apparently that was Two’s method of motivation and he was being invited to butt out of it.

He and Finnick were the only two of the victors to make it the entire five miles. He didn’t ask the others how far they’d made it before a sheer inability to go on forced them to quit. Their tired, glum faces as they ate the bowl of chicken and vegetable stew provided for lunch said enough. After eating, Haymitch quickly bolted for some bushes to puke his back up. It was like spring training all over again, except Haymitch had taken enough physical punishment since then that he was far closer to the ragged edge this time and that worried Peeta. As they trudged to the shooting range to learn about firearms, he asked Finnick quietly, glancing back over his shoulder at the already-exhausted looking victors, “Do you think they’ll make it through?”

Finnick sighed. “I hope so or they’ll never forgive themselves.” He spied Katniss leaning over and helping Johanna assemble her rifle when Soldier York’s back was turned. The afternoon dragged on interminably. He got his rifle together and actually managed to hit the target consistently, which surprised him.

After dinner he went down to the hospital to visit Katniss and the others. She sat up against her headboard and told him, her entire body slumping with exhaustion, “Brutus pointed out that as long as we’re still patients living here, we look weak. Nobody’s gonna take us seriously. We’re trying to get authorization to move out of here.” She sighed and her voice went low. “They won’t let Johanna and Haymitch go and live alone, though. Sounds like they took the worst of the torture but the head doctor called them both ‘extremely uncooperative’ and said he couldn’t appropriately assess them.”

“Imagine that,” Peeta said, unable to help a chuckle. It was no stretch of the imagination at all to see Haymitch or Johanna determinedly playing mind games with the head doctor out of sheer stubbornness. Haymitch had even been joking about it.

Katniss smiled a bit in return. “Look, I’m gonna put in for a shared compartment with Johanna, OK? She really needs to get out of here or I think she might start threatening to kill people.”

He nodded, seeing the sense in that. “Then...yeah, looks like I’ll put in the paperwork to get one with Haymitch.” Haymitch for a roommate was a somewhat strange thought. “I owe it to him to look after him.” After what he’d done with the Quell and the rebellion for the sake of both Peeta and Katniss, he could hardly refuse Haymitch anything. It felt odd, the two of them being responsible for two older adults like that, but they obviously needed some looking after right now.

“At least he won’t be drunk and breaking things?” she teased him gently, reaching out and taking hold of his hand with her own. “So he’ll be a better neighbor than back in Victors' Village.”

“There goes our privacy,” he mumbled with some regret. He’d really enjoyed that short time they found every day to simply be together for a little while. They’d even fallen asleep for a short nap a couple of times and it was like during the Victory Tour when they’d shared a bed but without the desperation and the tension. There was only the soft pleasure of her in his arms, her breath on his neck and her hair tickling his cheek. He wanted a lot more, of course, and hopefully it would happen but that didn’t mean he couldn’t find the enjoyment in what they had. Gradually, he was learning patience when it came to love. When she was ready. He could wait for that because she was worth it.

“We’re probably gonna be too busy and too tired for much kissing anyway,” she said, and he thought he wasn’t imagining the regret in her own voice.

“We’ll have plenty of time,” he promised her softly, “after we take the Capitol.” He leaned in and kissed her softly on the cheek, trying to be satisfied with that for now.

After Reflection, he and Haymitch were left staring at their new compartment. Moving didn’t take long. He didn’t have much to move. The gold mockingjay pendant he’d had as a token to wear during the Quell as a sign of team unity, and a few small keepsakes from home that he’d grabbed during Plutarch’s propo trip. The picture of his family, a sketchpad and some charcoal and pencils, things like that. But only thing he saw Haymitch had aside from his Thirteen-issued uniforms were a few books, mostly concerned with the laws of Panem. He must have even borrowed the fiddle he’d used at Finnick’s wedding.

Haymitch stared dubiously at the tattoo on the inside of his arm. “When they say ‘Lights Out’ at 2230...I mean 10:30...” His voice trailed off. Peeta realized that the hospital always had some kind of light available for the staff to see and tend to the patients. He remembered nights in Victors' Village, looking over at Haymitch’s house and always seeing at least one light was on no matter the hour. He remembered watching the tape of Haymitch’s Games and seeing what kind of nightmare mutts the Gamemakers had routinely sent after the tributes once the dark of the night fell. No wonder he didn’t like sleeping when it was dark out, but Thirteen didn’t care. He would be expected to follow the schedule.

“They mean it. The lights on the wall go off and they stay off. There are no light switches in the compartments. You have a flashlight issued to each compartment if you really need it during the night, but keeping the lights on is considered wasteful.”

Haymitch nodded tiredly and said caustically, “Of course it is.” He shrugged, like it was no big deal to him, shoving his uniforms in the drawers provided. “Don’t worry about it. Won’t be keeping you awake. On the bright side, if I get tired enough from training I’ll sleep like a damn baby.” Peeta realized he must have figured that out this past spring. “But just in case, got Harcourt to prescribe some sedatives to knock me out.” He raised an eyebrow and gave him an almost apologetic look. “Means you might have a tougher time waking me up, sorry. Those things really put me down for the count.”

He wasn’t kidding. The next morning at 6:50 he was still desperately trying to wake Haymitch up, knowing he’d better manage to eat breakfast before heading to training, but he was dead to the world. When Katniss and Johanna arrived, ready to walk to the cafeteria, he was still trying to shake him and yell at him loud enough to rouse him. “He took a sedative so he could sleep,” he told them with a deep sigh, not knowing what to do.

“Yeah, then he’s probably gonna be out for most of the day,” Johanna said, folding her arms over her chest.

“We don’t have time for this,” Katniss said impatiently, “and if he wants to make it to the Capitol he can’t skip training.” Stepping forward, she seized the glass of water on the nightstand and dumped it on Haymitch’s head.

He’d seen her wake Haymitch up with water once or twice before when he was dead drunk and there was no other way to rouse him, and like her he was prepared to jump out of the way of the usual explosively violent response, let him spring up and make that harsh growl a bit until he woke up enough to realize he wasn’t back in the arena. What he didn’t expect was that Haymitch would just fold into a tight huddle and the sound he’d make was more of a low moan than anything.

He also didn’t expect Johanna to suddenly have Katniss by the collar, shaking her like a rag doll. Her face was twisted in fury as she yelled. “You brainless bitch! You know what they did to us in those cells? They soaked us with water and then they shocked us with electrical wires. And when they weren’t doing that, they’d cut us and burn us and when we passed out they’d throw water on us to wake us up so they could do it all over again!”

Katniss looked ready to throw up herself, and he felt his own stomach churning to hear it, not wanting to imagine it. “I’m sorry,” Katniss stammered. “We’ve had to wake him up like that before but I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t know...”

“Don’t you ever do it again,” Johanna said, letting go of her, but her eyes were still fierce and furious. Apparently hearing the yelling had snapped Haymitch out of it because when Peeta looked back at him, he was already getting out of bed, not quite looking at the three of them.

“Get out of here and give me two, three minutes to get dressed,” he said quietly. He was as good as his word, joining them in the corridor and running a hand over his short, damp hair. When Katniss tried to apologize he simply waved a hand to silence her. “You didn’t know,” he said tiredly. “Obviously I’m gonna have to do without the damn sedatives.”

“Or maybe get something less strong,” Katniss suggested tentatively.

“It’s called ‘alcohol’ and they don’t have it here, sweetheart.” He smiled bleakly over at Peeta. “So you might wanna see if you can get issued some earplugs.”

Training was tough once again, and the way Haymitch and Johanna both flinched hard when a sudden cloudburst of a cold autumn rain started falling was painfully obvious. “Don’t,” he advised Katniss when he could see she wanted to say something to them. “Trust me, they want you to ignore it.”

“She didn’t shower last night,” Katniss said lowly to him as they ran side-by-side. “It sounded like she was taking a spit bath with the sink.”

“I didn’t pay enough attention to notice with him. Well, it’s not like we didn’t all grow up with baths rather than showers. We’ve gotten spoiled, that’s all. At least there’s hot water from the tap rather than having to boil it in a kettle, right?” Her smile in response to that was half-hearted. It was a bad attempt to cut through the seriousness of it.

He listened that night and noticed that no, Haymitch hadn’t used the shower either to do his bathing. Apparently Harcourt gave him a bottle of sleep syrup, and Peeta had earplugs just in case. It only took a few shakes to wake him up the next morning, and Peeta didn’t even mind when he gave a token sarcastic, “Yeah, I’m not dead yet, all right?” On the whole, though, he was a pretty quiet and undemanding roommate. It wasn't as though they spent all that much time in their room anyway, given the busy training schedule, except for the few hours of the evening after dinner but before lights out, and in that time Haymitch would usually be reading from his books while Peeta went to go take a walk through the halls with Katniss.

But they were all improving, not the least because they all encouraged and insulted and nagged each other into giving just a little more every day. At the end of the week they were all managing the full run, and the rifle work was easier. Katniss’ aim was clearly the best, which surprised nobody, but they were all deemed “up to standard” by Soldier York, who gave them an approving nod.

“So ‘up to standard’, that’s what, a training score of four, five? Not too impressive,” Haymitch muttered as they sat scraping the last of their soup from the bowls, and they all gave a snicker at the dark humor.

“I don’t think flirting with York’s gonna get us sponsors,” Finnick said with a laugh.

At the end of the day, though, York informed their group that she was recommending them to be passed on to the next phase of training. “You’ve completed Basic Fitness and Firearms, soldiers. Next it’s tactics, advanced weapons practice, hand-to-hand combat, and Simulated Street Combat. Congratulations, and good luck.” She gave them an actual half-smile. “I also hear there’s fresh beef in the stew in the cafeteria tonight, so enjoy that. You’ve earned it.”

Katniss grinned at him as they headed back from the training field. “Looks like Haymitch and Johanna are always taking their Reflection time for a walk up here on the surface,” she said, nodding back over her shoulder to the two of them, “so maybe you and I could have a few minutes alone before dinner.” She leaned in and said softly, “I’ve missed kissing you.”

“I’ve missed kissing you too.” He really had, even with as tired as training had made him every day that week. “Come to my room?”

“It’s a date,” she told him with a smile, slipping her hand in his.

Chapter Text

Haymitch would actually admit, at least to himself, that he couldn’t keep doing this. In the last eight or nine months his body had taken far more physical punishment than a man of forty-one ought to ask, and here he was pushing it too far once again. He’d had three months to train for the Quell. He’d been given three weeks here. One more time, he promised himself, even as he could see that the training was killing him every day while the younger kids just breezed by, this is the last time. I just need to see this through and then I can sit on my ass on my porch and not do anything for the rest of my life.

Assuming, of course, he was alive by that point. If he was lucky, maybe not. The prospect of after loomed up in the distance, an almost frightening thought, because he couldn’t even see how it could be much different for him from before. He loathed the Capitol with every fiber of his being because after so many years and so much damage he didn’t think he knew how to live in a place that wasn’t the fucked-up world that made him that way.

But never mind that for now. For the moment there was the training and the Capitol to capture and then there would be Cinna and Effie to defend so at least he had purpose in his mind right now, fixed and all crystal-clear. That more than anything kept him from slipping like he had in the years where it was just the same cycle of bullshit over and over where he was only a helpless prop.

It wasn’t raining today. That day of running in the rain had been miserable, especially after he woke up to Katniss throwing water in his face and then Johanna furiously giving her the riot act about it. He wouldn’t say it was all water that bothered him. If there’d been a bathtub that would be fine. He could probably swim if called upon to do it. But something about falling water, and the cold rain in particular like the icy water they threw on him, touched off a nerve.

Johanna fell in step by his side as Reflection started and they took the chance for a last half-hour of fresh air before getting stuck in the stale tin can of Thirteen for the night. Breathing in the crisp air and stuffing his hands in the pockets of his standard-issue jacket, he said, “We’d better finish this war pretty quick.” It was nearly the end of October already. “Winter’s later than last year but it’s still coming.”

“Might even be snowing in the Capitol soon,” Johanna said with a nod, “being in the mountains and all. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s snowing already back home in Seven.” He wasn’t sure if there was a wistful note in her voice at the thought of home or not. Blight had died in the arena. They hadn’t been able to find out about the mentors from the Quell, but he honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Cedrus and Carrick had possibly been captured and possibly executed as part of the arena conspiracy. He tried to not think about whether it was snowing in silent, dead Twelve right now. “But yeah. We don’t want to be trying to take the place over when it’s January, February, and we’re freezing our asses off up in the mountains.”

Now, granted, he hadn’t sat through their supposed tactics class here in Thirteen yet, but he was pretty sure one of the first rules of warfare was taking into account the fact that winter could fuck your army up. Think about the arena every bit as much as you do your opponents, he’d told Katniss and Peeta while they’d been watching those victor tapes back in the spring. The hostile terrain of a mountain stronghold, possibly hard in the icy claws of winter, was just going to make the job that much harder.

Coming back inside as Reflection drew to an end, he thought about that promised beef stew for dinner, thought with relief about the prospect of no punishing five-mile-run tomorrow, and all in all, felt pretty good about that. Heading to his and Peeta’s compartment to drop off his jacket before going to dinner, he swiped his access card and opened the door.

The sight that greeted him on entering Compartment 809 wasn’t exactly what he expected. Granted, he wasn’t flustered by walking in on anything sexual. His years as a whore definitely assured that much, especially when it had been a group situation. His years as a mentor had too, for that matter. Before Blight and Clover’s noisy antics got the Gameskeepers complaining enough that the victors were offered a discreet apartment for their trysts, the lounge had seen plenty of action. Unfortunately, as Twelve’s sole mentor, unable to go back to the Training Center to a real bed instead of napping on a couch in that same lounge, he’d gotten used to sometimes walking in on things, simply saying, “I’ll come back when you’re done,” and promptly walking right back out. Though it got to the point where he’d staked out one of the couches and requested everyone to please avoid fucking on that particular one, because that was pretty much his bed. To their credit, they did it.

So he’d certainly been confronted by a lot raunchier sights than two teenagers with their shirts shoved up and their hands all over each other. His own lack of shock was more than offset by their stunned faces, and how Katniss scrambled to yank down her shirt to cover her breasts, and Peeta was stammering something. Deliberately not looking at them so they didn’t die of embarrassment, he tossed his jacket in the general direction of his bed and said, “Sorry ‘bout that.” Well, at least they were on Peeta’s bed, so he really had nothing to complain about.

He closed the door behind him and pressed a fist against his mouth, holding it in until he got far enough down the corridor to let the laughter roll out of him. He laughed, deep and honest and without a shred of sarcasm, like he probably hadn’t in years. He shouldn’t laugh. He really shouldn’t, and he’d made sure they couldn’t hear it because he knew how fragile dignity was at that age. But oh hell, their faces were priceless.

Admittedly he was laughing mostly from sheer relief. Because it was so reassuringly normal in the middle of all this crap to see them simply being two randy, romantic seventeen-year-olds. Having that chance to be young and in love, and not have the Capitol or the war steal it from them like had happened to so many others--yeah, he was relieved.

After all, he knew what that was like. He could still remember, even if it hurt now to recall, how it had been to be young and innocent and with a girl he loved. Moving beyond those first shy, fumbling kisses. How much in awe he’d been at finding out how he could make Briar feel with his mouth and his hands, how amazingly powerful he had felt to be able to make her arch and cry out with sheer pleasure like that. How unimaginably close he’d felt to her when she did the same for him. It had all had such an incredible sense of wonder to it, discovering that new territory together. He’d dreamed about what it would be like to actually make love to her, when they were eighteen and could safely get married and run the risk of a kid without facing any more Reaping Days. He never got to find out. By the end of the Games when he was eighteen, he’d already been fucked by more people than he cared to remember and he most definitely no longer had any sense of joy in touching another person.

At the memory, the laughter rapidly turned to that tight, thick feeling of grief in his throat. Well, never mind it. He’d lost his chance, but Peeta and Katniss still had theirs. When he thought about that more, he aimed to do something about it.

Sitting with Johanna at their assigned table in the cafeteria, he asked her lowly, “So, you up for changing rooms?”

“What?” she asked, shoveling in another forkful of beef stew and sighing in something almost like pleasure. “Finally, some real food.” He had to agree with that. The stew, rich and hearty, tasted amazing after all the weeks of generally tasteless crap.

“Walked in on the two of them,” he told her, and he expected her bark of incredulous laughter. He also wasn’t surprised when Peeta and Katniss’ heads both shot up at the sound and they looked over at him and Johanna with looks of guilty embarrassment. “Just getting a little handsy, mind,” he explained, not wanting to give Johanna more cause to go give them shit, “but...” He shrugged. That was pretty much the start right there. If they’d taken that definite step beyond kissing, chances were they were headed for much more eventually.

“No shit?” Johanna grinned broadly at him. “Good on her. I didn’t think Miss Mockingjay actually had it in her.” She swiped her bread in the stew gravy. “So what are you proposing here?”

“You move over to my place, Peeta moves over with Katniss, you two just swap access cards, and we don’t tell the brass about it so they don’t get hysterical.” Thumbing his nose at Thirteen’s rules in a small way like that definitely appealed to him. He kept his voice low as he said, “Look, I know you and I both got a lousy deal when it came to sex, but no reason to keep them from having better.”

“What, you’re actually asking me to move in with you? You sly dog.” She laughed as he rolled his eyes.

“No worries. The Capitol assured me that I’m appallingly rustic and old-fashioned in my views on living together,” he assured her dryly. It wasn’t done like that in the Seam, close-knit as it was with everyone knowing everyone’s business. It was so easy to fill out the forms at the Justice Building, and being married legally secured the right to widow or widower’s benefits should disaster happen at the mine. Pitiful as the benefits were, it was a few weeks of some income that could make all the difference for survival to a freshly bereaved family. So it was considered sort of selfish to set up house with someone and not marry them.

“Yet you’re gonna just let them live together?” She gave him that Make sense, moron look she had.

He sighed and tried to explain. “We’ve got a couple weeks left before we move out for the Capitol. It might be all they’ll ever get. And they’ve been jerked around enough about marrying I ain’t gonna be the one to demand it.” What he was proposing was only meant to give them a little time together, as free of obstacles and concerns as it could be. If they both survived the war, and he damn well aimed to make sure of it if he could, then it was up to them what they did with respect to each other after that. Marrying, not marrying, whatever. "Besides," he joked, "I really don't want to have to worry about walking in on them every time I go back to the room, you know?"

“Ah.” Johanna looked like she was considering it. But when she saw Katniss glancing over at her again, Haymitch watched as Johanna picked up her gravy-covered spoon and licked it in a deliberate, suggestive way that had him cracking up and Katniss hurriedly glancing away. “Oh hell, why not. Maybe it’ll get her loosened up some more.” She shrugged. “Moving won’t take me long. You want to get it done tonight, right after dinner?”

“Let me go talk to Katniss’ ma first.” He gave her a wry grin. “I don’t want her yelling at me that I’ve enabled her baby girl to misbehave.” That was putting it a bit flippantly; he didn’t really think Perulla would be like that. But he figured much better to be safe and have her on board with this plan than have her discover later it had happened behind her back. “If it’s all good, I’ll let you know.”

She shook her head, eating the last bites of her gravy bread. “Told you last year that those two were making you soft.”

“Oh, shut up.” He grinned at her, unable to help it, and went to go find Perulla. Knocking on the door of Compartment E, she answered, and he spied Prim behind her on the floor, playing with that shit-ugly tomcat of hers. “On your way to the hospital again?” After having passed weeks there himself, he knew her shift schedule full well. He tried to not think about how, thanks to that, she knew full well the list of his injuries and frailties by this point. “Mind if I walk with you?” he asked her pleasantly as he could. He didn’t need a thirteen-year-old overhearing this conversation.

Perulla nodded, brushing back a lock of her blond hair from where it had strayed free from her white nurse’s kerchief. “All right then. Good night, Prim,” she called in towards her daughter. “Sleep tight.”

He quickly outlined the notion to her, explaining, “I think you know Peeta’s not a boy who’s only out to get l--” Too many years with other victors being too blunt. He corrected himself, “Out to sleep around. He loves her, I imagine if she’ll have him he’s going to ask her after the war’s over. But I’m of no mind to force them marry here in Thirteen to suit some petty rules. They’ve gotten jerked around enough on the relationship thing I figure they’ve earned a few weeks to call the shots on their own terms.”

“It’s been a good while now since anyone asked me what I think about anything to do with Katniss,” she said tiredly. He could see from the flicker of hurt in her expression that it had cost her to realize that. “I suppose she’s grown up beyond needing my permission for something.”

“I doubt it. She’s having to take things on too fast, yeah, but that doesn’t mean she’s got no use for a mother.”

“No, but when I made her take on too much too young because I was too weak, it does.” Perulla said it matter-of-factly. “She doesn’t much need me, Haymitch. She goes out to shoot those propos and doesn’t even bother to tell me.”

He sighed softly, not liking the wrenching feeling of trying to reassure someone and knowing he was about as deft at it as an elephant. “I’m about the last one in the world out to judge for coping badly, trust me.” Though he liked to think that if he’d had two little kids dependent on him, he could have kept at least shreds of himself together for their sake. It was difficult to say for sure. He took his losses hard. He knew that full well. “And you’ve taken your losses. Even before Burt.”

She didn’t quite look at him, knowing what he was referring to, who he was talking about. “Peeta’s a good boy,” she agreed softly. A faint, faded smile touched her lips as she said, “He’s Liam’s son for sure.” He remembered. Liam Mellark had been her suitor once, before she lost Maysilee. Before Burt Everdeen stepped in to color her grey, grieving world with his gentleness and his singing voice. Both of them were dead now, poor bastards.

He remembered another walk they’d taken once. He’d seen her back safe to her house from the Seam a night long ago, the night of Dee Hawthorne’s wedding. She’d tried to get him to talk about the golden-haired girl they’d both lost in the arena the previous summer. But he’d been reeling, barely keeping it together after losing his first two tributes and enduring his first year as a whore, and realizing that night after a joyful wedding that kind of life would never be his, that he had to push everyone away to keep them safe. He’d been hurting too damn bad. Perulla Banner with her healer’s ways and how she understood his loss had been a threat to that shaky, newborn resolve so he shoved her away hard as he could. “She was really something,” he said quietly, giving her now what he couldn’t give her twenty-four years ago, and hoping she could forgive the kid he’d been. “Maysilee, I mean.”

“She was,” Perulla said with a soft nod. Her eyes told him that she missed her best friend still, every day. “You did the best you could for her. And you got Katniss out of the arena, twice now.” With that, apparently she let him know she forgave him for being the one that survived rather than Maysilee.

“I’ll be going to the Capitol with her too.” He made a face. “After we all pass this idiotic training, that is.” Assuming he didn’t flunk out. Though having passed the initial killing punishment of constant training for basic fitness, he figured from here on in he could handle it. He’d always handled afternoons easier in the spring, when they moved on to training for actual techniques and the like rather than just running their asses off.

“You’re obviously exhausted. You’re pushing yourself too hard for your age and how you’re still recovering from your wounds,” she chided him in that stern healer’s voice. But her face said she’d feel better if he was there to try and keep her safe. Even if that faint spark they’d felt for a moment that night had somehow survived this long, Burt would always have been too much of a reminder to both of them to make it work. So it wasn’t as though she cared for him as a man, that he could actually step into the role of Katniss’ father. He didn’t much want that to happen either. Aside from how screwed up he was in general when it came to sex and love, he had enough ghosts in his life and appearing before his eyes without taking on a relationship with one at its very heart. But he could see in Perulla’s eyes, she’d accepted that he was a part of Katniss’ life as family all the same. “I’ve got no objections to her and Peeta having some time together. And...thank you for thinking to ask me.”

“You’re still her ma,” he told her simply. “She may not know how to say she needs you, but she does. So you’ve got a few weeks yet. But you’ll probably have to be the one to go to her.” Everyone said he and Katniss thought plenty alike, so he could see that she wouldn’t be the one to reach out and mend the gap. She wouldn’t know how. It would have to be Perulla, the healer, that tried.

They were at the hospital now so he nodded goodnight to her as she said, “We’ll see how that goes.” But she looked a little more optimistic than she had.

Heading back to his room, he resisted the urge to knock, knowing it would probably just embarrass Peeta even more. Peeta’s face still had that awkward, guilty expression when he walked in and before he could stammer something, Haymitch just waved it off and told him, “Pack up your things, you’re moving down the hall.”

“Down the...” Peeta stared at him in confusion.

“Johanna’s moving in here, you’re moving in with Katniss, you two are gonna swap key cards, and we don’t mention this little switch to anyone because I really don’t want Coin yapping at me about rules and protocol of relationships and housing arrangements and how you have to get married to share a room. Understood?”

Peeta’s face registered surprise and gratitude, but then he raised an eyebrow and said, “Fine, but you and Johanna are still going to the hospital for your appointments with the head doctor and all of that. Don’t think that just because Katniss and I aren’t there as your roommates you two are off the hook and can hide in this room to avoid it.” Actually, he hadn’t even considered that angle, but hearing it slip away like that even as Peeta brought it up, he had to admit it was really a wonderful idea. Too bad he wouldn’t get to take advantage of it.

“Brat. I think Johanna and I can get by just fine without a couple of horny teenagers babysitting us. So shut up and pack already, or I can undo the whole plan right here,” he grumbled instead, grateful Peeta wasn’t making a big deal about it.

Peeta’s things were already almost all prepared to go. Life in Thirteen tended to not come with too much baggage in the way of tangible stuff. “Fine. But I promise you, I am gonna marry her after this is all over, if she’ll have me,” he said almost defiantly.

“Yeah, I’m sure you will. But at least this way you get to pick that for once.” He thought for a moment. “Since we went down this road once already at the Quell as a cover story, I’d suggest you make sure she doesn’t actually end up pregnant. I don’t know how they handle that here--”

“Uh,” Peeta said, fair skin flushing bright red, “there’s shots they’ve been giving her for that since we arrived, since they assumed that even if we’re not married by their rules, we’re still...”

“Having sex,” he supplied neatly. To be so young and innocent that even saying that much was hard--he turned a chuckle into a cough. The word fucking didn’t exactly suit this situation, plus it would probably make Peeta choke. “Fine. So you’re covered there. Got any questions for me or what?” Maybe he didn’t enjoy how he’d gotten the experience, but yeah, he knew plenty about how to please a woman. How to please a man too for that matter, though he thought if he mentioned that Peeta, currently obviously totally overwhelmed with how fast this was all happening, might really have a heart attack and die.

Peeta gave a great impression of a fish right there, goggle-eyed and round-mouthed. He recovered admirably and said, “I had older brothers and all, so the basic...uh...anatomy and all, I get. Anything you think I should know?”

In spite of himself he wanted to smile at least a little, because this was all advice that was from what he’d learned with Briar, something clean and honest and nothing at all of how he’d been trained by the Capitol. “You’re not just gonna magically figure it out, so listen to what she needs and tell her what you need. You ain’t getting it perfect right away either so don’t worry when it isn’t. Be patient and just enjoy that you’re together.” Because you can think your thoughts about forever but it might not last.

“Haymitch...” Peeta spoke up awkwardly, and he really didn’t want to hear what came after that, what expression of gratitude for this or condolences for his own losses or whatever. He’d really rather they simply let it go at that.

So he took it on himself to cut the conversation short as he reached down and shouldered a bundle of Peeta’s things. “All right, let’s go talk to the ladies and get you moved in.”

Chapter Text

There was a familiarity to this, Brutus had to admit--the uniforms, the critical eye of the training master, the sweat and the sounds of exertion and pain and all of it. Something comforting, even; he’d spent twelve years of his own life as a tribute candidate in training and then after that as the chosen male mentor for Two he’d always had a hand in the development of future tributes. Idly he wondered what had happened to Marcus and Octavia, the tributes who would have been for the 75th Games, who’d been shoved aside once the card was read and only past victors were up for the arena. Because of course if the Capitol fell there would be no more Games anyway, and like the failed tributes from every year maybe then they’d all become Peacekeepers. Of course who was to say what would happen when it came to Peacekeepers after the war was over?

Everything was changing. He shouldn’t be thinking about candidates anyway, or what would become of them, or the way of life in Two. Like it or not, so much of what they were was shaped by Capitol demand, and that wouldn’t die down easily. What little he heard from Lyme, filtered through Haymitch, was that things were uneasy back home as everyone tried to figure out what the hell to do now.

As for himself, he had more pressing concerns. After twenty-four years of instructing, even being one of the lesser lights of Two as a victor, he’d always been respected as a mentor. To be thrown back in as a trainee was more than a little embarrassing. At least they’d been advanced to more demanding training than running laps and assembling a rifle, though reluctantly he had to admit the latter wasn’t his strong suit. Throwing knives and spears were about the most Two would nod to distance weapons. Kills that weren’t close in and personal weren’t considered flashy enough for the arena, not for the district that was famed for its warriors. Two had been expected to produce better. It was acceptable to take some of the weakest ones out in a hurry at the Cornucopia, but after that initial flurry Two was virtually expected to make their kills clean and close-up. Clove had tried to do that with Katniss last year; downed her with one thrown knife, then moved in to finish the job. Dawdled too much, cost her in the end.

He wished he had a sword or a knife in his hands when they went through the simulated combat scenarios rather than a rifle. He also wished the enemy dummies weren’t wearing the proud, pristine white uniforms of Peacekeepers because in the back of his mind there was still that nagging, instinctive reluctance to fire on those he’d been taught to respect from boyhood. He was overcoming it--Two was nothing if not pragmatic when it came down to matters of combat--but he could sense that split-second hesitation still there that he was gradually training out. He hadn’t asked Enobaria about it but he wouldn’t be surprised if she was encountering the same.

At least the morning tactics classes were a breeze. Easier by far than the tactics and philosophy classes he’d had to take as a candidate, but then, he could see that Thirteen was different from Two. They wanted pure obedient squad-based soldiers, not warriors who respected duty but who could manage the forced autonomy of the arena.

Here in the afternoon too, everything was pretty simple. Hand-to-hand combat, something he’d always excelled at in training. Their instructor, Soldier Shagreen, a tough old bird if he ever saw one, was once again releasing them from demonstrations to go stretch and then practice their sparring. Plutarch Heavensbee was lurking nearby with his colorful troupe of camera personnel as ever, presumably to get more shots of Katniss Everdeen and the rest in action.

As usual he was paired up with Haymitch. “Oh look, it’s us old bastards again,” Haymitch said with a sarcastic drawl, coming up to him. “Think she’s worried if the likes of Peeta hits me I might not recover.”

Brutus had to admit, he had noticed that Shagreen cautioned the two of them to take it easy if they needed to do it. Which pretty much just spurred him into going full bore no matter what. “I’m forty-two, I’m not dead,” he growled irritably. He could still fight. He’d proved that in the arena, even if the cause hadn’t been the right one.

Haymitch stretched his back out a bit, though he did it carefully. “No, but we’re low on their list here, Brute,” he pointed out. “They like ‘em young and spry.” He smirked. “One thing they have in common with the Capitol. Not saying you can’t fight, but neither of us is quite like we used to be.”

He’d be damned before he’d openly admit it, but after the arena and the Detention Center, he wasn’t healing up quick as he had before. The wound in his shoulder from where Haymitch threw a knife at the Cornucopia ached most mornings, visible for anyone to see in the sleeveless undershirts they wore for training, and overall he woke up with some stiffness in his joints and his muscles that he had to deal with before getting going for the day.

Haymitch was the same. Still healing up, he was moving with more care most days that Brutus could see, eyes well trained to spot physical weaknesses. His hair, while still drastically short, was long enough to show that the black was now sprinkled with a few threads of silver here and there that hadn’t been there before the Quell. Brutus had found some bits of grey himself in the last few years, and especially of late it was harder to look at himself in the mirror, the grey and the scars on his body, and glumly admit, I will never be young again.

Bad enough to face that but to have it be the basis for getting kicked out of a combat slot in the war--no, that was unbearable for anyone from Two. “So what, you’re thinking we’ll get cut?”

“I don’t think either of us is gonna be high on the list.” He grinned wryly at Brutus. “Even Plutarch’s keeping the cameras off us during training, have you noticed? He only wants the young and attractive victors putting on a good show, not our two sorry asses dogging it. Yeah, we’re meeting the standards. Barely, in some cases. Even in the stuff we’re doing well at, someone’s always better than us. That’s not gonna look too impressive on our reviews.”

“I’m not giving up,” Brutus told him stubbornly, looping one handwrap over his thumb and starting to weave it in between his fingers, the motion purely instinctive after his years as a candidate. “It’s one thing if they reject me, but I’m not quitting.”

“Oh hell, neither am I.” There was steel in Haymitch’s tone at that. “I’m seeing this thing through. But it’s like trying to impress those fucking Gamemakers all over again.” Kneeling down, Haymitch started doing up his own wraps. “Now, you may not realize it, hailing from glorious Two as you do, but for those of us who were tributes from out in the sad sack districts, you gotta put on a really good, memorable show to get them to rate you high.”

Haymitch’s tone was that dry teasing that he had, and Brutus rolled his eyes and gave it right back. “Or, hey, just maybe I spent twelve years as a tribute candidate where we had to impress our instructors constantly to stand out rather than only looking good in one private session,” he pointed out. “So are we having this conversation solely to bitch about how stacked the deck is against us, or are you actually going to get to whatever scheme you’ve got?”

A low chuckle answered him. “What are we good at, Brutus?”

“Besides making shitty romantic Capitol films into drinking games?” Too bad they didn’t have either of those here in Thirteen. He could do with a night of that to just blow off some steam.

“Besides that. They ain’t giving us any blades here in training, but you and me both, we always did our best fighting close in. So.” Wrapped hands resting on his knees, Haymitch raised an eyebrow, smiled that cocky smile he had. “We’ve got cameras and everything. Let’s give these idiots a good fight. Show ‘em we’ve still got something that’s worth keeping us in the game.”

He thought about that. It wasn’t quite like tribute training and the Gamemakers, where fights between tributes were prohibited. It was more like back in Two, where under the eyes of the instructors, choosing the right moment to make a memorable impression was something of an art. Haymitch was right. With the camera right there, in this area that was probably the best for the two of them, was the correct time to show off a bit. He acknowledged he wasn’t going to readily impress them on the firing range. ”Don’t expect me to go easy on you because it’s sparring,” he warned Haymitch. If he wanted a fight suitable to show Plutarch and the eyes of the review board in Thirteen that two middle-aged men would make proper soldiers, it had to be real enough to matter.

Haymitch grinned, getting carefully to his feet. “Fuck it, Brutus, you’ve been waiting twenty-four years for an excuse to fight me anyway. I expect it to be something impressive.”

“Of course,” he said, really entertained by the idea now. Considering he had five inches and probably a good sixty pounds on Haymitch, not to mention he could tell Haymitch was recovering slower from more severe wounds, this looked utterly lopsided. But then, it had looked lopsided to see a small, wiry boy from Twelve walk into a clearing against three Careers with only a knife as a weapon, and yet he’d been the one that walked away in the end. This could be a good fight, he thought with some anticipation. Maybe not as purely physical as when they were both teenagers, but both of them were a hell of a lot smarter and more strategic than those days, and that definitely counted for something. To have a good fight against a worthy opponent--well, he’d wanted that for a long time, hadn’t he? Didn’t even need to be deadly combat to count. He’d thought the arena was the answer, but it hadn’t been. This just might be it.

“Nothing that’ll put either of us in the hospital, mind.” Well, admittedly that would be counterproductive to keeping them in training. Besides, having just got out of the hospital last week, he was in no hurry to return. So no dislocations, fractures, or the like. Still plenty of room to work with in terms of a fight that was real enough, but not mortally real.

So when Haymitch wasted no time and threw a left jab his way, he was ready for it.

Talking to Plutarch earlier, the Gamemaker chattering away about the training propos he was filming of Peeta and Katniss and Johanna and Finnick and even Enobaria, Haymitch had gotten the distinct impression that it was already assumed that he’d end up sitting this one out.

It was nothing stated so boldly as You’re forty-one, Haymitch, and you still look like you’ve been through hell recently, but he heard it loud and clear just the same. He admitted it touched a nerve because he knew he was struggling with some of the training, pushing himself this much while he was still healing up. It was one thing when it was back in Twelve and it was just Katniss and Peeta rolling their eyes at him.

To fail now and be left behind when it all went down in the end, to be denied the chance to be a part of the final push against the Capitol, would be a hard blow to take. When there was no rebellion it had been one thing, but there was now and he wasn’t going to be simply watching it happen. It would mean that the Capitol had won, that it had beaten him in a way that still mattered, by shoving him down long and hard enough that his chance to be a part of striking back had been taken away from him. After everything he’d lost thanks to Snow and the Capitol, he had to be there for it, end of story. Nobody had as much right to that, not some random Thirteen goon who’d never suffered at the Capitol’s hands. If it meant training and pushing himself to the edge to get them to sign off on him, so be it. He’d make it happen, no matter the cost.

Apparently Plutarch Heavensbee didn’t realize that probably the surest way to get Haymitch to do a thing was to tell him he wasn’t capable of it. So when he went to training and got paired up with Brutus again in sparring, Shagreen apparently convinced he couldn’t match up to Finnick or the like, he wanted to bark at her, Did you not see me enduring a second turn through the arena there? Trust me, lady, I ain’t gonna forget it soon, so you’d better not ignore it.

If there was one thing he could rely upon from Brutus, it was that he readily understood the notion of being labeled a second-rate fighter for no good cause. So getting him on board with the plan had been simplicity itself.

Of course, taking on a big man like Brutus hadn’t been the smartest move he’d ever made, but he could trust the other man to make it a good fight without actually trying to kill him or incapacitate him. Two and its fighters were talented enough to walk that line with precision.

At least he still had speed on his side, dodging and ducking most of the punches, dealing some out in turn. Brutus wasn’t dumb enough to stand flatfooted, even big as he was, or dumb enough to just throw wild haymakers, and he got his punches in, but Haymitch was still faster than him and he used that to his advantage, trying to turn out of the blows to avoid the worst of the impact, planting his punches with precision a half-beat ahead of Brutus’ blocks, blows meant to cut away at his focus and his breathing, leave him gradually gasping and dazed. Weaving and moving like this, he couldn’t keep it up forever but long enough to put on a good show would do. He’d learned to fight like this long ago in the schoolyard and not being the biggest in the fight didn’t matter so long as he was the fastest and the smartest.

Shagreen hadn’t stepped in to cut the fight off, even though she must have recognized it had taken that step up from intense sparring. He heard some of the other victors around them, realized they must have stopped to watch, but he didn’t have time to look or listen.

Then someone hollered something and it held his ear and just enough of his attention that Brutus caught him half-aware with a solid right that left him shaking his head with his ears ringing and with the rusty taste of blood in his mouth. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, seeing the red smear on the white handwraps, he simply laughed and moved in, caught him by the shoulder and the arm and shoved, getting one leg in position to buckle a knee out from under him at the same time, using the momentum and leverage to dump Brutus down on the ground. “Timber,” he called as Brutus hit the mats, hearing what he thought was an appreciative laugh from Johanna behind him.

Of course it was Brutus so he immediately lunged up to tackle Haymitch at the knees to bring him down too in order to continue the fight down on the mats. At that point, though, as they were about to start wrestling in earnest, he saw the pair of worn boots approaching. “All right,” Shagreen said with something almost like amusement, “so you can fight. Well done, Soldier Allamand, Soldier Abernathy.”

“Thanks,” he said cheerfully, getting up smoothly as he could.

Brutus, bleeding a little from the nose, shrugged. “Good enough,” he said, hitting Haymitch hard on the back in a way that was a bit past a friendly tap, a hard thump that resonated all the way down his spine. Glancing back over his shoulder at the other man, Brutus smirked at him. Score one last hit for me, Haymitch.

So for that Haymitch just nailed him in the leg with a heel without even looking, taking a page from the bad-tempered mules at the mines, and he gave Brutus a smirk of his own as the redhead stood there scowling and rubbing his shin. A draw, I’d say. He needed a drink of water because he was breathing hard from the exertion and the blood in his mouth was a nasty taste to have linger, but at least he felt like the two of them had proved that writing them off was to the risk of whoever was dumb enough to do it. Something had changed in the way Shagreen looked at them, that much was obvious.

Walking back from training with him, Johanna asked him with a snort of amusement, “And the point of your little demonstration today?”

“Proving I ain’t dead yet. I can still fight.” I can still hit back against the Capitol one more time with more than plans and schemes. Nobody tried to claim he wasn't a strategic genius or whatever, but damn it, he could back up his plans with actions himself. He had to, in this case. It meant too much.

“Your method of that is deliberately taking on the biggest, strongest guy in our group?” She laughed. “Poor Brutus.”

“Worked pretty well,” he said with a grin, even if he was feeling the bruises now and debated whether he could endure the shower to help soothe them or not. “Hey, not like he didn’t get anything out of it. He proved he’s still a force to be reckoned with too.” Brutus had needed the boost in the eyes of Thirteen too. “I fight smarter than you kiddies do, just fumbling away.”

“Speaking of fumbling kiddies, the lovebirds look pretty cozy.” Yeah, Katniss and Peeta looked happy these days, even with as hard as the training ran them. He’d obviously made the right call in giving them that room together. “Must be getting the hang of it, huh? Didn’t even need advice from me.” She said it casually but he thought he could sense the hurt and anger at what she’d been denied herself. They hadn’t talked again about what happened after Finnick’s wedding. There hadn’t seemed to be a need, mutually agreeing that they meant more to each other as friends rather than as a casual fuck. So he knew better than to try to reassure her that she could still find somebody because it would only piss her off.

“Yeah, well, you know my evening’s gonna be full of the thrill of law books as usual, that and tactical review for you and me both. At least someone out there gets to have some fun,” he shrugged. Law books and popping a few aspirin on the sly so he could get out of bed in the morning. At least they had tactics class first. Boring as hell, unimaginative as anything, but it was time where he could sit still and allow himself to more fully wake up and let his body settle before the physical training came into play.

She snickered at him. “If they’re imaginative they’d manage to make those tactical books a little less boring by making it actually worth getting those stupid quizzes right.”

“What, answer right and you get to be on top?” he joked.

“More like answer right and you get one piece of clothing off me,” she answered with a smirk.

“Tempting offer,” knowing it wasn’t actually a serious offer, “but we both know you hate wearing clothes anyway, so you’d probably just skip the quiz and make some excuse to get naked.” She didn’t pad around their shared compartment naked, though, unlike when she’d run around the training gym brazen as anything because it was the Capitol. She had no point to prove to him by it, and he had the feeling her skin had to be as scarred up as his.

“If you’ve got it,” she shrugged, stretching her shoulders in a way to push her breasts up and out for ready notice, “might as well flaunt it.”

Knowing this was about as honestly meant as Finnick’s breathy heartthrob bullshit, he shook his head and laughed. “Once we pass this training, you can storm the Capitol naked if you want.”

“Oh, being out of uniform?” She turned and gave him a look of mock surprise. “That would be against Thirteen rules.” She snickered, swiping the access card in the door. “But you may be onto something. Bloodshed’s hell on your clothes, after all.”

He remembered watching the screen and seeing the girl they’d pulled from the arena in the 66th Games with her face and hands and clothes striped and spattered with blood, her tangled hair and half-wild brown eyes. He remembered wanting desperately to wash his face and his hands in his first arena, never mind cleaning his blood-stiffened clothes. Twelve’s black fabric hadn’t shown the bloodstains but he could feel it and smell it, had lived with it for days. He’d wanted to wash Rye’s blood right off him this time, and he looked away as the thought of the Nine victor he’d killed instantly summoned him in the shadows of the compartment as Haymitch stepped in through the door and looked to see if he was there, knowing he would be.

Bloodshed was hell on a lot more than clothes.

Peeta buried his nose in her black hair and breathed in the scent of it, and even if it was only the vaguely harsh shampoo from here in Thirteen that filled his nose, it was the smell of Katniss’ hair, and it was soft and thick beneath his fingers.

He nuzzled his way down her throat, kissing her breasts and feeling the way she clutched at his hair, arched her back into it. He loved her breasts, the softness of them and how they fit his hands and how they felt against his mouth. He loved touching her any way he could.

He touched her by the harsh fluorescent lights of Thirteen and wished that someday he could see her naked in the sunlight, but the sheer amazing feel of touching her and kissing her was more than enough that hell, he wasn’t going to complain.

They’d shared the compartment for four days--four nights now. That first night he’d had been embarrassed enough at Haymitch walked in on us and then he told us to go have sex and gave me advice and she’d been flustered enough at Oh shit, Haymitch actually saw my breasts that they’d awkwardly slept in separate beds.

The lights had clicked out and he could finally speak up because somehow it was easier without seeing how red they both would get at it. “I don’t think it bothered him, Katniss, so you don’t need to worry it’ll be weird with him.” If anything he’d just shrugged, turned around, and walked out, made the arrangements to take care of it. He’d been matter-of-fact, brushing off Peeta’s attempts to thank him. But that was infinitely better than him freaking out about it. Or offering up one of his usual sarcastic wisecracks, like something Johanna would probably say. You call that making out? Need an advice manual?

She had been quiet. He’d counted twenty of his own heartbeats in the dark before she finally replied. “I really doubt much about sex can embarrass him now, Peeta. Not after what he must have been through all those years.” Peeta had thought of the years he was growing up, seeing Finnick in his barely-there clothes on his television and Johanna in her skimpy outfits, and wondering how anyone could stand to be on display that blatantly. There was being squeamishly prudish like Katniss had been , washing him off by that stream, and then at the other extreme there was what Finnick and Johanna, and probably Haymitch too, had probably been forced into--a state where they’d been pushed so far that ordinary shame at something like being naked in front of strangers wasn’t even possible any longer.

“Probably not,” he’d agreed softly, feeling like that made Haymitch doing this for the two of them, recognizing that sex still meant something to them, made it even more valuable of a gesture. He’d heard the rustle of Katniss’ mattress, and then she was sliding into the bed next to him, her lean body pressed up against his. Not urgent and wanting to arouse, just wanting to be held.

“We probably should take advantage of the time,” she’d told him, her fingers toying idly with the shirt of his pajamas.

“We will. But we don’t have to do everything right now.”

“You don’t want to?” she asked, her tone puzzled, her breath tickling against his cheek.

“I do,” he’d assured her in a rush because the very thought of it was sending the blood south in a real hurry, remembering how she’d felt against his hands earlier that evening and multiplying that, “but, I mean, I want to see you and everything when it’s happening, and I want to touch you all over and have you touch me, and...” He’d realized he was babbling and was glad she couldn’t see the hot embarrassment in his cheeks. “So, we’ll see where it goes.”

Take their time and just enjoy being together, Haymitch told him. It was good advice. They had started the next night where they’d left off with Haymitch’s interruption and went from there. They hadn’t done it all the way yet, but Peeta was OK with that. That would happen in its own time and he definitely wanted it, but he was enjoying the journey to get there.

If they’d hurried, if they’d yanked off their clothes and got right to it, he would have missed all this, these little things that were only them. The ticklish spot just underneath her breasts and the sound of Katniss giggling helplessly. The surprised but pleased smile on her face when she’d learned how to touch him and first made him come. Just the right way to stroke her in return to make her buck against his fingers, and how she looked when she finally let go, gasping his name. The feel of her hair brushing his skin. What it felt like after, no more heat or need or tension, only the simple pleasure of lying there skin-to-skin with someone so loved, and how they fit together to go to sleep, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. How different the days were now, spending them with her and knowing that deeper bond was between them, knowing what the night would be like.

If they’d slept together that first night, if he’d slept with anyone else, he would have learned what sex was like. But he wouldn’t have learned how to be with her, with the girl he loved, with the full reality of Katniss. Watching her face and her grey eyes as she got that mischievous look that he already knew meant she was about to sneak her hand down to touch him, he thought if these days and nights before they took the Capitol would be the only time that they had, he’d have honestly loved and been loved more than he had in his entire life.

Chapter Text

Near the middle of their third week of training, Class 10 Delta, as they’d been dubbed, was informed they’d be up for the exit exams the next day to be graded ready for combat. So they’d all done it, quick enough to make it to the Capitol. They were definitely smiling some that evening, relieved to have accomplished that much. Haymitch spent a little time going over the tactics again with Johanna, though quickly enough she prodded him into the two of them going into scenarios far beyond the dry textbook crap, which pretty much boiled down to “listen to your squad leader and be prepared to do what they say”, so far as Haymitch could tell.

In the morning they ran and huffed their way through the obstacle course one more time, thankfully without any rain. They sat in for the written tactics exam, and he was done with that one in a flash, bored by it, giving the rest of them a flourishing bow on the way out as Brutus showed him a middle finger and bent his head back down to his paper. At the firing range, he was deemed qualified for the middle-grade “sharpshooter” rating. Not the dead-shot “sniper” rating Katniss was almost guaranteed to have earned, but certainly more than acceptable for Thirteen’s standards, and considering how hard it had been to hold his hands steady for a while after they rescued him from the Capitol, he was pleased.

The last test was on the Block, and they joined the seated crowd of prospective soldiers waiting for their turn through. Apparently everyone was eager to get in on the Capitol assault. A grey-uniformed official would call a last name, and the candidate would go take their turn through the simulation. No hint of how it went.

The whisper going around was that the Block ferreted out the weakness of a cadet and tested it. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. So what were they going to throw his way, an open bar? Being more realistic, they’d likely try to exploit his age and his still-recovering physical condition. He’d be ready for that. Already he was trying to think of ways to be smarter and work around whatever obstacles they might put in his way to try and wear him out.

Finally, he heard “Abernathy.” He was the first of the victors to be called, and he gave the rest of them a nod as he left. Abernathy, Twelve, he thought, unable to help the echo of private sessions with the Gamemakers being in mind right now. Strange. Both times before he’d been the very last one in, and now he was the first of their group. Well, hell, that left less of an obligation to make an impressive finale. Not that he had to be memorable. He just had to be adequate to their standards, follow their rules closely.

He put on a headset and verified that it was working, that he heard the voice from the control booth and they could hear him. The test overseer handed him the usual rifle loaded with paint squibs for this purpose and herded him through the door. He knew the review board must be up there watching him, even if he couldn’t see them. Oh, just give me a forcefield already. A knife too. He would feel a lot better with a knife in hand than a rifle.

It wasn’t like their training sessions in here, with the others. This time he was alone, and suddenly the voice of his supposed squad leader was in his ear. “Abernathy. Come in.”

“Check, read you,” he said calmly, realizing he was standing in the open, and he ducked into the shadows of an alleyway.

“The squad must have gotten separated.” He told Haymitch the details of their planned rendezvous point and that they would meet up there as quickly as possible.

“Yeah, got it.” And this is where I endure various attacks by hostile forces on the way there that I’ll have to overcome. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Shit. Be a little more imaginative, people. He wasn’t some Thirteen teenager, unable to think for himself. Then again, “more imaginative” would be getting into real Gamemaker territory, and that was a whole barrel of crap he really didn’t want to get into again, did he? Maybe boring wasn’t so bad. No nightmarish owl mutts or volcanoes.

Checking in with Squad Leader every now and again for progress and confirmation of directions, he made his way through the streets, keeping to the shadows where he could. Encountering Peacekeeper dummies along the way, exactly as he expected, he was a little irritated at having to use a rifle and call attention where a sneak kill with a knife would have made a lot more sense. If he was trying to stay stealthy, the report of rifle fire wasn’t helping him. Scooping up a length of wood from a shattered crate, he tucked it through his belt as his "knife", and at the next Peacekeeper, standing with his back turned to him, he crept up and stabbed him in the back with it. “That one’s dead,” he informed the review board dryly, because did they really need an explosion of red paint in this case?

They didn’t deliver any orders to quit it and go back to the rifle, and there were other enemies where it made more sense to just take the shot. Getting closer to the meeting point, he wondered, Is it really that easy?

Then there was a scream over his headset and Squad Leader yelled, “Soldier Pengelli, report!”

A young voice piped up, tired and strained, gasping with pain. “I’m down, sir. They shot me in the leg, and I see them moving in. I count three hostiles.”

“Where are you?”

“Two blocks north of the rendezvous.”

Two blocks north of that? He calculated quickly. Not too far from him and Pengelli’s hard breathing and whimpering were making it evident that he was in severe pain, and he might be captured besides. The next move here was obvious. He glanced that way, seeing nobody in sight, and darted across the street, heading for the injured man.

Squad Leader’s voice rang out in his ear before he’d gotten half a block. “Abernathy. Where are you?”

“Three blocks west of Pengelli.” But already his mind was racing ahead, sounding this out. Maybe it was having lived so much of his life on camera, but he could easily imagine he was being watched and Squad Leader’s chime-in there had been due to the direction he was heading.

If they were checking in that meant they were waiting for him to speak up, to argue, to say he was going to get the wounded man and protect him from capture because there was no fucking way he was leaving anyone to Capitol hands, especially not a kid who sounded like he was maybe twenty if he was lucky. They were waiting for him to disregard the order and simply go charging in himself.

“Permission to go after Pengelli?” he asked tightly, already knowing what the answer would be and hating them for it. Actually being forced to asking permission to save someone felt too much like trying to get something out of Snow and knowing it would be withheld.

“Negative, Abernathy. It’s too hot. Too many of them moving in. Continue to the rendezvous.”

Color him totally not surprised. They wanted to see if he could follow their orders, even if it meant consciously leaving someone behind. If he could leave a kid behind. Which meant they’d done it deliberately and specifically for him, knowing that would be the one order where he would really want to tell them to fuck off and simply act. This was another game being played with him, using his own weaknesses as leverage to try to break him down. They might as well have used jabberjays or tracker jacker venom on him and been honest that they were trying to screw with his mind.

Hating them utterly in that moment for how coldly deliberate they were, how manipulative after all the years of being made into the Capitol’s toy he thought angrily, You fucking bastards. If they could have used Katniss or Peeta or Finnick or Johanna, and had him believe it, they probably would have, and he knew he would never have been able to leave. It was only in fiercely focusing on clearing his mind and being able to say, This is only a simulation, Pengelli’s just a voice on the radio and he doesn’t even exist anyway, that he could nod curtly and say back to Squad Leader, “Understood. I’m proceeding to the rendezvous.”

But he looked, knowing they’d be there, and of course he saw them there in the shadows of the buildings, the ghosts of his dead tributes there as he passed them. They saw him abandon yet another kid to die. Their eyes watched him and each block brought more of them, judging him.

Where were you when we needed help, mentor? they whispered to him like the rustle of dry autumn leaves. You watched and you listened while we died too.

I tried, I tried, I couldn’t... Watching and listening was all he could do. What sponsors he could get were too few and too miserly, no matter how much he’d tried to play up the tributes in their eyes to open their wallets more. He could remember the things he’d done to try to get money in the early years, sometimes just a smile and a charming word, sometimes so far as letting one of them take him home for the night and that felt like the worst, most shameful kind of whoring because he was the one that made it happen, he didn’t have to be ordered by Snow to do it. He hoped to hell Finnick had never needed to do something that desperate and disgusting. But even selling himself like that was never enough to keep a tribute alive and so eventually he just couldn’t do it anymore, and he couldn’t stand to care any longer because he was so helpless to do anything. I let them have everything and it still wasn’t enough. That pretty much told him right there how little his general worth was.

If you had any guts at all you’d tell them to go to hell. That this time you won’t just watch another kid die because they say that’s how it has to be.

I have to. It’s to take down the Capitol, to stop the Games. So no more kids die. Only way to make sure I don't lose anyone else doing that is to be there. Each block was worse and worse and he was gritting his teeth and looking straight ahead so he didn’t see them there and saying in his mind, Make it stop, for fuck’s sake. Every step was like agony because they were right. He could abandon someone to save his own skin, to make Thirteen like him enough to give him permission to go to the Capitol. Only telling himself it was just a test and a deliberate mindfuck made him keep going, but each step became a struggle to not just turn around and throw himself at the mercy of the tribute ghosts, tell him that of course he’d never leave someone to die, not after how he’d failed so many times already.

By the time he made the rendezvous point and Squad Leader, a burly, silver-haired man, told him, “Congratulations, Abernathy,” he was struggling to keep it together and to not end up screaming in agonized rage or weeping like a damn baby or outright attacking him because it wasn’t a fucking victory what he’d just done, nothing worthy of congratulations. The man stamped something on his hand and ordered him to report to Command. So he’d passed. Oh, hurrah.

Pushing his way through the exit door and hearing it bang off the wall with the force of his shove, he made his way to Command. He stared at the bold “22” inked on his hand, where Thirteen now had marked him as theirs, and for a moment he wanted to spit on it and rub the ink off. Hell, he didn’t even need the regulation military crop haircut that he spied some others getting just past the exit--his hair was still a little shorter than that. Short hair, ability to follow ruthless orders, wasn’t he the perfect little soldier? He’d whored himself out to Thirteen, become what they demanded, for the chance to take down the Capitol. Well, he’d paid the price. He’d better follow through with it now.

At Command, he found Boggs waiting, examining the stamp on his hand. “Squad 22, Abernathy, you’re with me,” the man said, giving him a calm nod, and his eyes gave away nothing. The lack of anything except simple acknowledgment settled him down, that and the fact that at least Boggs had proven himself a man worthy of trust. “Let’s wait to see who else they send to join up with you, and then we’ll have our first briefing.” It would be the other victors, of course, so he waited to see who showed up first.

It was a long wait. Gradually Haymitch’s mind was easing, away from the tension of the Block and the pressure of what they’d put him through. He realized how close he’d come to losing it and that sat uncomfortably with him. So once again he’d had to smile and nod and parrot what they wanted to hear but at least this time it might actually produce positive results. They’d take down the Capitol and after that he could wave a relieved goodbye to District Thirteen and go somewhere they weren’t so damn controlling.

Someone was talking to Boggs in a low voice and Haymitch, busy staring off into the distance and thinking furiously, hadn’t even noticed. Boggs’ face went tight at the news, though, and once the messenger left, he came over to where Haymitch was leaning on the edge of the conference table, arms folded, back from being lost in his own mind. “Mason...Johanna,” he corrected himself, a courtesy Haymitch was grateful to have him offer, “is in the hospital.”

He stared at Boggs, incredulous. “What?”

“In the Block, they put her through the same make-the-rendezvous scenario every cadet gets. But in this case she apparently panicked at being isolated and potentially being left behind, and they had to pull her out and sedate her.”

Johanna, terrified and back in the hospital. He thought of her screaming in the cell next to his. He didn’t even have to debate about it in his mind, knowing immediately he had to do something to fix this. Ready to go see her and take care of it, he had a thought that made him pause, already trying to find the loophole because he’d be damned if he was leaving Johanna behind in this place while he went to the Capitol. Especially hearing that had been what broke her down on the Block. “What happens if a cadet fails on the Block for medical reasons?” It had to have happened before.

“They can request a retest after a minimum of forty-eight hours to allow their condition to improve.” Boggs raised an eyebrow. “That’s usually cited for a touch of the flu, Abernathy, not in the case of psychological breakdowns.”

“If she has the right to request a retest, she's gonna want it. Call whoever you have to and get her lined up for one in two days.” It didn’t strike him at that moment that issuing an order to the man who was technically in charge of him was a little arrogant. All he was thinking was that he had to make a move to protect Johanna right now before it had a chance to sink in and hurt her. Seeing her chance yanked away would be the worst thing that could happen to her right now. “I’m going to the hospital ward,” he said roughly, virtually daring Boggs to stop him. He didn’t hear his new commander shout an order to stand down and stay put, which made him like the man all the more.

Johanna woke up feeling thick-tongued and with the fading remnants of terror in her mind. The Capitol soldiers were closing in, she was all alone and going to get left behind, she’d be captured and tortured again, and stuffed in that cinderblock cell all alone, and this time there wouldn’t be any Haymitch talking to her to help keep her even a bit sane. She’d break in there and then she’d die. She’d kicked and screamed and fought as they captured her and she felt the sting of a needle in her arm as they sedated her just like they had on the hovercraft when they pulled her from the arena.

But the bland white walls rather than cinderblock weren’t the cell she’d woken up in last time, and suddenly Haymitch’s face appeared in her vision as if she’d somehow wished him there. “Wha?” she said clumsily, wondering if she was maybe already dead.

“You’re in Thirteen. Back in the hospital,” Haymitch said quietly but firmly, willing her to listen. “They’ll release you tomorrow morning. You went into the Block for testing and apparently,” he leaned closer and his voice went quieter and tense with anger, “the bastards mindfucked you, and they had to sedate you because of it.”

She’d failed. Her mind had fled utterly from her grasp. Just like at the reaping nine and a half years ago now when her mind had gone into a spiral of panic that she hadn’t been able to recover from until she was standing there in the arena with Clark’s blood all over her. The hot shame and humiliation of it hit her like a stab in the heart. The heartless, tough bitch with the axe went into the Block and she’d been like a helpless, whimpering baby in their hands. It was only a stupid test and she hadn’t been able to get hold of herself enough to know that.

“You passed.” Her voice was flat. Fucking Haymitch had passed and she hadn’t, and that just dug the knife in even deeper. The man who’d been so pathetically lost that he drank himself into oblivion during almost all of the summers that she’d known him had somehow pulled it together, and she couldn’t. “Well, good for you. Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

He touched her shoulder and she snarled at him, wanting him to just leave so she could wallow in her misery already. “Barely,” he told her, and there was no bullshit in his expression when she looked up at his face. “Another minute and I’d have been done for, I promise you that.” He looked steadily at her and there was maybe some trace of concern on his face but no pity and she was absurdly grateful for that. Pity would mean that he saw her all frail and weak, that she was capable of being pitied, and from Haymitch of all people that would be the kiss of death.

Next he told her, “Tomorrow morning, once you get out of here, you go ask them to go running or whatever. Show them this was just a little blip in things, that you’re still in the game here.”

“Why?” she asked him, angry he was trying to get her to put on some kind of front here. “I failed, jackass. That’s it. I’m done.” She wouldn’t be going to the Capitol. Wouldn’t be able to help be a part of taking down Snow. The old rose-loving bastard had evidently broken her too much for that, and the thought of it made her want to die. She didn’t have family or love or anything like that. All she’d had left to her was her resolve to not give up and let the bastards win.

“I asked already. You can retest after two days, claim a medical condition made you fail. I told ‘em you’ll be ready,” he told her. “And I know you. You’ll pass. You don’t fall for the same crap twice.” Startled, she looked at him. He’d created a chance for her, and he actually believed she could get it done. Stupid sentimental bastard, she didn’t want to owe him for that. But it made that guttering spark inside her chest suddenly flicker with new life and she bit her lip to keep from saying something incredibly stupid or maybe just starting to cry because that hope was everything right now. “So here’s the thing. I’ll tell them it was water that was the problem,” he told her. “They flooded the street in the Block and it made you freak out because of that. Katniss and the rest know about the water thing, thanks to you screaming it at her.” Asshole. Like he had cause to growl at her for having done that, not when he had been on his bed jolted awake and panicking, expecting to be tortured.

“Like that’s any better,” she scoffed at him. But of course it was better than the truth. The water was as much a physical weakness as a psychological one. Saying she was afraid of water because she’d been tortured with it was easier to say than the truth of, I went crazy because I thought they were going to abandon me.

“Sweetheart, why the fuck do you think I didn’t tell people why I drank all those years?” he scoffed right back. He was right. Letting them think it was simply because he was rich or bored or lazy or pathetic was easier than trying to explain what she’d eventually come to understand, that he drank so much to try to drink away everything that hurt. “Of course water’s a better excuse and it gets them off your ass.”

“Fine,” she snapped, and she was glad he was willing to bicker with her like normal because it was so much better than him being all soft and pitying would be. “So I’m totally terrified of water. Ponds make me cry. Washing dishes makes me snivel. Got it. Now fuck off, you’re killing the nice buzz I’ve got going from the sedatives.” It was the best she’d felt since they cut off her morphling, at least physically. Her mind was a totally different matter.

“Yeah, got it.” He leaned down close for one last thing, barely above a whisper. “They tested me to see if I could abandon someone. To my mind, I flunked by giving in and doing it. So don’t you screw up that fucking retest, because I’m not in the mood to fail again by leaving you behind. You’re on that squad with us going to the Capitol, got it? Make it happen, Johanna.”

“Got it,” she said with a nod, happy for that even if his eyes were much too soft for his words because right there he gave her something fierce and even annoying to push back against, rather than sickly softness that she’d charge into and manage to smother herself. He left then with one more press of her shoulder.

Katniss and Peeta came next just before dinner, and both of them had that cloying pity that made her drown a little in it, start to panic and doubt she could do it after all. She found herself clutching at Katniss and demanding, “Swear to me on your family you’ll kill him,” suddenly convinced she wouldn’t be there to be a part of it. She promised, but in a way Johanna was relieved when they left, both of them and their awkward sympathy.

But what Katniss had brought with her as a gift was far more welcome, and as she lay there in bed that night, she breathed in the clean, sharp scent of pine needles rather than the stale hospital air. It smelled like home and it brought hot tears to her eyes from that, because she wanted to go home. She wanted to get out of Thirteen. She’d prove to these idiots that she could do it. She wouldn’t fail a second time. She wouldn’t let the Capitol break her down here at the very end, and she wouldn’t let Thirteen break her either.

You’re on that squad with us going to the Capitol, got it? Make it happen, Johanna.

“Damn straight I will,” she said softly, willing herself to stop the tears now, breathing in the calming smell of pine, the smell of freedom.

Chapter Text

Out on a walk again during Reflection, Haymitch huddled deeper into his jacket against the autumn chill, walking in the woods with Johanna. He’d never been much one for the forest after the arena, after the way the too-perfect place turned it into a nightmare. He’d gone out running traps the day his family and Briar died. Then he’d gone hunting with Burt the day he found out how disturbingly familiar deer guts felt, the day they hanged Lorna Hawthorne. So given that plus his Games, the woods became no friendly place to him. Not alone, especially, and he’d always been alone after that.

But he wasn’t alone now and so there was the comfort of knowing Johanna had his back as his friend, his ally, should any threat present itself. Not just up here on the surface, but in most anything, because after that cell in the Capitol if there was one person he trusted implicitly, it was her. She’d seen--all right, heard--him at his utter, raw limit as he had for her and they’d tried to keep each other at least a little sane as they faced what had seemed like the inevitable end. That meant something. The notion carried the faint echo of the last time he’d felt like that, pushed together with someone by ordeal, and learning to trust Maysilee with his life. But the way she walked through the woods, pointing things out to him and making remarks about trees and their woods and what they could be used for making, some of the plants too, that carried the echo of Briar and all those days out in the forest with her teaching him about the plants.

Though she wasn’t Maysilee or Briar, not beyond those faint ripples of similarity. Johanna was just herself, gutsy and sharp-tongued, brown eyes and that short, sleek cap of brown hair. He was thankful for that, because such stark reminders of what he’d lost hurt too damn deeply still. Sometimes looking at Katniss, her looks and that Seam way she had about her that sometimes caught him with painful reminders of Briar and Ash and Burt and Jonas, was too much. “...really need is some fine-grained cedar.”

“That’ll do it, yeah.”

“And you have no idea what I just said.”

No point denying it, not when she was looking at him with that smirk that told him she knew damn well he’d been only half listening, lost in his own thoughts. “Nope. Something about wood.” She did woodworking and carpentry, though he didn’t remember what her actual victor talent was supposed to be. Just like nobody probably remembered his was supposedly butterfly collecting, the first thing he saw on the list of suggestions. Naturally the irony of him picking a hobby of sticking harmless things under glass to put them on display and thereby killing them was totally lost on the Capitol.

“Ah, never mind it,” she said, waving hand impatiently. Apparently it hadn’t been that important or she’d have taken the chance to mock his hearing or his attention span.

“What’s your official talent anyway?” he asked, curious.

Now she actually laughed, a sharp bark of amusement. “Embroidery. I picked that just so they’d have to wrap their tiny brains around the idea.” Yeah, he could see the Capitol would have had an interesting time with the incongruity of that supposed narrative: vicious, bloodthirsty Johanna Mason delicately sewing tiny pink flowers on baby clothes or whatever.

“Well, you can embroider your uniform before we head to the Capitol,” he teased her lightly. “Sew some cute little bunnies on the cuffs or whatever. You’ve been complaining the clothes here suck and you’ve got nothing to do evenings anyway.”

“When I’m reduced to reading those law books of yours to pass the evening, it’s a sign I’m bored shitless.” He’d admit they made for dry as dust reading that was hard for even him to sit through, but it kept his mind busy and that was the important part. Though at least with her there and having read through the books already, it had become sort of a collaborative project, finding references and arguing with each other about the various laws. “Maybe I ought to get on that embroidery. I’ll get my uniform tomorrow, after all.” After her retest on the Block. He thought he heard a faint note of uncertainty in her voice.

“You’ll do fine.” Though given how badly she’d freaked out he wondered exactly what she’d seen and experienced in that place. Boggs had told him she’d lost it at thinking she’d be left behind. But that cell was right there in his mind and hearing her calling names, pleading with her family to not go or begging that boy in the arena who’d had her down in the dirt to stop or the names he assumed from their sound must be the tributes that she’d killed in the arena to leave her alone. She yelled for Blight to come back sometimes, to not die and leave her alone with Nuts and Volts. She'd pleaded with Sandy, said she'd only been kidding about how she needed to get laid. She apologized to Gloss. She’d been shot up with venom like he had and given how he still had some waking hallucinations spurred on by thoughts of one of the dead or about his guilt over them, he had to think she might have the same. Sometimes she seemed to be staring off into the distance at what looked like nothing to him, but he suspected she was looking at some of her own private ghosts.

They hadn’t actually talked about the torture. Having been through it together there seemed to be no need to relive the details of it. But now he cleared his throat a bit and asked quickly, “The tracker jacker venom. Does it...do you...still see things sometimes?”

She stopped in her tracks then and the lack of a smartmouthed comeback about him simply being crazy and her dark scowl told him clearly that yes, she did, and no, she didn’t want to talk about it. “You too, huh?” was all she said, irritably scuffing the toe of one boot into the dead dry leaves, making them crackle.

It wasn’t an invitation to talk about it, to tell her about the dead. Even just thinking about them he caught a flicker at the edge of his vision and deliberately didn’t turn to see who it was come to call. “Yep. I know it ain’t real but...still there. So. Tomorrow you get through it. With your eyes shut if you have to.”

“Don’t you tell that fucking head doctor on me,” she snapped at him. “He doesn’t know.”

“Yeah, like I would,” he snapped back, irritated that she’d assume he’d do that. Even if betraying her trust like that wasn’t an option, didn’t she have the wits of a damn goose to see that if he sold her out, he was pretty much screwing himself over by telling the doctor he had the same problem?

Then again they’d kept each others’ secrets well enough. She didn’t tell anyone he needed to knock himself out at night with sleep syrup. Or how his still strained body pretty much needed a hot shower after training to be able to get up in the morning. He’d be damned if he’d ask for painkillers from the hospital and have them write it down. The toll of the daily aches finally overcame the trepidation and while it still took some carefully easing bit by bit into the water rather than simply ducking in, he’d managed it. Then of course, Johanna being Johanna and being unable to stand being the one who couldn’t do something, she’d stubbornly made herself accomplish it too. He’d heard plenty of swearing from the bathroom that night though.

Of course, showers taking more time than Thirteen’s impatient schedule led to the incident several nights ago where she’d still been showering at the point of Lights Out and the lights and the water both shut off in an instant. Given her ordeal in the blackout zone of the arena, and the torture by water, it was a bad combination. She didn’t scream, but dosed up and slightly groggy already, he’d heard the choking, gasping sobs and that woke him up in a hurry. Finding the flashlight with clumsy fingers he’d found her huddled on the floor of the shower. He’d crouched down beside her, tried to reassure her. He didn’t remember much about after that because the sleep syrup finally kicked in hard. He’d woken up back on his bed with a blanket thrown over him and he figured that she must have somehow gotten him there. She wasn’t a frail woman, and he knew growing up chopping trees had made her strong, but dragging his sorry ass was still quite a feat. Neither of them made a big deal about it with thanks or the like, because that wasn’t how it worked.

Essentially, they were getting by. Barely, some days, but faking it well enough to fool the rest of them. He wouldn’t tell on her and she wouldn’t tell on him, and they’d help shove each other through the hoops Thirteen insisted they jump through, because they both needed to be there at the Capitol when the end of it finally came. That was the unspoken agreement.

“I’ll buy you a drink in the Capitol once Snow’s dead, Jo,” he promised. That was an occasion worthy of the best bottle of whiskey he could find. Not champagne. Johanna wasn’t the champagne type.

“I’m gonna hold you to that.” But her eyes were glancing around down by their feet and she dropped to her knees suddenly, pawing at the ground. “Help me out here.” She pointed to a small green heart-shaped leaf barely poking above the fallen leaves. “Those. Dig out the roots.”

A minute later he stared at the thread-like root. “And this is...?” Learning about plants and herbs and that was shades of Briar again, and he pushed that back with an effort, eyes down on the ground and the leaves so he wouldn’t have to look up and see her ghost standing there.

“Wild ginger. My dad," he caught the second of hesitation, "used to find it out in the woods, make us kids chew some of it when we were puking. Settles your stomach down.”

Well that would have been useful all those years he was drinking far too much. Although given most days he didn’t give enough of a damn to care that he was puking, he wasn’t sure it would have done much good. “Lovely. I only puked once in training, you know. C'mon. It was the first day.”

“For Annie, idiot,” she said impatiently. “Finnick says she’s puking all the time.” That was true. When he thought about it she looked thin and tired since finding out she was pregnant. Guiltily he admitted he hadn’t paid as much attention to her since his focus had been on those on them in training, on getting them ready for the Capitol. In his mind, Annie was staying in Thirteen safely out of danger, so she’d sort of taken lesser place in his attention aside from polite nods and the like. Granted, not like he had much experience with something like pregnant women either to be aware of that. “It’ll kill them both if she gets sick or if she loses that kid because she’s starving.”

So he dug more of the stuff up himself, fingers pushing through the chilly earth to help get to the roots, and he handed them over to her. “Hide it in your pockets on the way back in or you know they’ll confiscate it for the communal food supply,” he warned her, thinking ahead. They’d probably claim it was food hoarding, maybe even punish them. It was too late in the game to get taken off the squad for something this stupid.

“This is something I’m doing for my friend’s wife, so fuck them and their rules,” Johanna said shortly. That about said it all.

They had all passed the exams and been assigned to this so-dubbed Squad 22, except for Johanna. As Haymitch had explained it at dinner last night, it was water. Having been subjected to that particular torture in the cells of the Detention Center, Enobaria could at least understand how it could have caused the other woman to have a freak-out. That didn’t mean it wasn’t still an obvious weakness, though, and one that Johanna damn well better overcome in time for a retest.

Somehow Johanna had gotten permission to join them in the afternoon for specialized training, though, as if she had passed her retest. Presumably it was to keep her up to speed so that she wouldn’t be behind the curve. Enobaria noticed her axe throws were particularly savage, splitting wooden targets like paper, and she didn’t much seem to want company.

That was fine. Johanna had something to prove now and Enobaria wasn’t about to distract her from a task that important. She was staying busy enough practicing knife fighting with Haymitch, and the familiarity of a blade in her hand compared to the rifle they’d foisted on her was a relief. After the two of them trying to kill each other in earnest in the arena she had to admit it felt a little weird to be in these circumstances, and she’d see a flash of recognition in his face sometimes that made it obvious he was aware of it too. But she wasn’t about to apologize or stammer about it. She’d done what she had to do and so had he and that was an end of it.

“I suppose I have Brutus to thank for teaching you some kali technique,” she said dryly as Haymitch deftly dodged her strike.

Brutus glanced over from where he was practicing his sword technique and gave a shrug. “We were bored up in Mentor Central. You know how it goes. Start putting shots up as bets and he taught me some dance from Twelve and I taught him kali.”

“I think I won that little dancing contest, and I probably got the better end of that deal,” Haymitch remarked with a smirk. “I don’t think anyone’s ever saved their ass in the arena with a good jig.”

“Oh, shut up, Haymitch,” Brutus grumbled, hitting the dummy with a particularly savage strike.

All in all, though, the group of seven victors training together, planning to be allies in the battle to come rather than enemies, was strangely comfortable. It would be nice to not have to constantly watch her back against everyone. Even Brutus would have eventually become an obstacle in the Quell, if it had come down to the two of them in the end.

In less than a week they would be going to the Capitol again. But they wouldn’t go as tributes or mentors, rather as invaders trying to take it down, and she couldn’t help the part of her that still looked at the idea and was horrified. Loyalty was too instinctive, much too ingrained in her from birth to entirely leave her thoughts.

Still, as she wove her knife dances with Haymitch, the familiar motions of it helping calm her frustrated mind, she knew that what they were doing was the right thing. Two would decide its own destiny, pick the struggles that were worth fighting, choose what would be worthy of the fierce pride and loyalty of its children. Being here in Thirteen, seeing the mindless obedience expected in training contrasted with her own candidate experiences, she realized that they had been encouraged to be able to think and act for themselves, but at the end of the day, they were still Capitol soldiers expected to obey without question, rather than warriors in their own right. The Capitol had been able to rely on Two and its Peacekeepers and its tributes and its victors as the instruments to enforce its will for far too long.

At dinner, they sat down with the shapeless would-be pork chops--apparently the recent weeks of better food had taken a big step back here tonight. Trained to observe even little things, she had noticed before that at meals, the differences in district cropped up. She and Brutus usually prodded curiously at it for a few seconds to identify it as not poisoned and then started eating. Two’s rations were generous, that was true. But candidates in Two were tested and expected to be able to eat crap food and sometimes go hungry as part of their endurance and survival training. It might not be an ideal meal, but to refuse the food that was available and make themselves physically weakened was considered a sign of selfishness and mental weakness.

Haymitch, Peeta, and Katniss didn’t even hesitate to start eating but they were from dirt-poor Twelve where any food at all had to be welcome, to judge from how small and pathetically underfed their tributes always were. Always had been, more like, now that Twelve was currently more of a concept on a map than an actual district. But if it wasn’t moldy or rotten they’d inevitably hurry up and eat it. She suspected if it was moldy or rotten they probably would have just cut off the bad parts anyway.

Johanna usually complained that the meal wasn’t as good as the communal stewpot at the summer lumber camps in Seven, apparently full of whatever they’d trapped or gathered out out in the woods in Seven during the day along with their Capitol-issued rations. But once she took the opportunity to get a little wistfully nostalgic about home behind the cover of bitching about things, then she ate the meal all the same.

Finnick and Annie were the ones who usually hesitated and prodded the meal suspiciously for a while before eating it. But then, Four was sort of spoiled in having both fresh food and Capitol favor to enable better eating. Granted also, they now had other things on their minds. Annie’s stomach these days was obviously touchy--she’d appeared ready to puke a few times by the end of the meal that Enobaria had seen--and she looked a bit tired even now. These early weeks of the pregnancy were obviously wearing hard on her. Finnick was usually there holding her hand and quietly encouraging her to keep eating, because this was the meal that was available and she had to keep her strength up. Apparently Thirteen didn’t much care if the provided meal sat ill in a pregnant woman’s stomach and she threw it up and therefore effectively didn’t eat dinner.

She was a little surprised to see Johanna hand something to Annie under the table. “Here. Haymitch and me, we found this during Reflection up topside. Wash it well and chew it, since fuck knows you can’t make it into a tea back in your room. A piece about the length of your thumb. Have some water ready because it’s got a sharp taste.”

Annie glanced around, seeing nobody looking who wasn’t at the table. Enobaria couldn’t see what was happening but she looked puzzled when she saw whatever it was. “What is it?” she asked.

“Wild ginger. We used to find it out in the woods sometimes.” Johanna glanced away from them for a moment, and Enobaria wondered what memory of home was going through her mind at that. “It’ll settle your guts down, so just chew it already so you don’t faint, because your skinny ass can’t go without eating for the next couple months.”

Annie hesitated a few moments, looked at Finnick then back at Johanna and then said, “Thank you for this, Johanna.”

Johanna shrugged dismissively and scowled, turning back to the pork chops. “Just don’t do anything dumb like name the kid after me for it,” she said dryly.

“I might have to get you to show me that plant, Jo,” Finnick commented, forking up some of the stewed apples. “Can’t ask you, or Haymitch, to keep collecting it for us.”

“You’ll be in the Capitol within a week, Finnick,” Annie pointed out calmly. “And Johanna too. If one of you two,” she addressed Haymitch and Johanna, “would show me, I’d appreciate it. I can collect it myself after that.”

“Annie...” Finnick protested.

“I’m pregnant,” she told her husband with a sigh of exasperation, “not dying. I can take a walk for myself!” She looked down at her tray, and a vaguely glum look crossed her face. “I miss the fresh air anyway. This place...” Privately Enobaria thought the close quarters and steel walls of this place were enough to drive anyone nuts, even if they weren’t already a little off-kilter like Annie. Still, she seemed to have gotten better grounded with Finnick around all the time than the brief glimpses Enobaria had gotten of her leading up to the Quell.

“We’ll be home soon,” Finnick reassured her quietly, one hand rubbing her shoulders.

Finishing the meal, Enobaria was surprised when Plutarch found her and Brutus on the way back to their respective compartments. “There’s some bad news from Two, I’m afraid,” he said, blue eyes apologetic above his carefully styled mustache.

Brutus gave a faint growl and she felt him tense beside her as he said, “So tell us.”

She listened as Plutarch explained that some of the remaining Peacekeepers and trainees, unhappy at Two’s joining the resistance, had joined together to attack staging areas for the planned Capitol assault. “This is old news, Plutarch,” she said. They’d been hearing that ever since Two’s surrender.

“Yes, but not on this scale,” the Gamemaker said. “We didn’t have any camera crews in the area, unfortunately,” Enobaria suppressed a derisive snort, “but apparently there was an organized push by numerous renegade bands of Peacekeepers on the area near Granite Pass and they’ve taken other areas back too.”

Granite Pass guarded the main railway leading up towards the Capitol, and most of the passenger traffic and goods from other areas came through there. It had been a great victory for the rebels to capture it. It was a large blow to them now to lose it. “That’s a problem.” To hold control of Granite Pass was to hold the most direct gateway to the Capitol. Without it they’d be stuck trying to make their way through the mountains on foot with winter fast approaching, or else dropping from hovercraft directly into the Capitol. Casualties would be absurdly high.

“I suppose given our role at Eagle Mountain you want us to advise on the counterassault,” Brutus took the next natural step in reasoning, arms folded over his chest and looking intently thoughtful already. "Or even lead it, given that we're now cleared for action by this place."

Now Plutarch hesitated. “There were no survivors at Granite Pass.” He was trying to say something but Enobaria didn’t quite understand it. She could easily imagine the fighting there would be brutal, though no survivors spoke of deliberate executions of any wounded and any who had surrendered. Maybe they hadn’t been able to imagine the logistics of dragging them back to the Capitol, but it was a stark, bleak picture all the same.

“You mean to say Lyme was among the dead,” Brutus said flatly. “She was commander of the forces in Two. She would have been there leading the preparations for staging the assault on the Capitol.”

“Yes,” Plutarch mumbled, and at least he had the decency to look away.

“So sorry you didn’t get that on camera for the propo,” and Brutus’ voice took on a nasty, sharp edge with those words.

Looking at him and readily seeing his temper was rising, his hands flexing and tensing like he wanted a weapon in them, Enobaria took it on herself to try to defuse things before it ended with blood spattered on the steel walls. Plutarch might be a clueless Gamemaker but he wasn’t the one who deserved killing in this case. “We’ll talk in the morning. Tell President Coin we want to be in on the forces that retake Granite Pass.”

Plutarch had enough sense to hurry away and she managed to herd Brutus into her room. He was all tense muscles and gritted teeth, grief transmuted into fury. He cared deeply for Lyme, she knew that, even if the romance had been over and done with for years now between them.

For her part, she felt the spark of it too. Maybe it wasn’t quite like the intense, almost familial bond Haymitch had made with Katniss and Peeta, but Lyme had been her mentor, someone Enobaria had admired and counted as a friend. For Peacekeepers to openly kill a victor spoke plenty about how topsy turvy things had gotten, because if anyone had been untouchable in Panem, it was the victors. Only President Snow himself dealt out their discipline.

But this Quell had stripped away that illusion. The Capitol didn’t care. It had sent them into the arena to die, and losing Lyme pulled at echoes too of those short, terrible days, of watching Cashmere and Gloss die at the Cornucopia. She had forgiven Katniss and Johanna for that, just as they seemed to have forgiven her for her kills. They’d done only what they had to do, but the loss of her good friends remained an ugly, puckered scar anyway.

She remembered how Brutus had been there for her over the years in his understated way. Never clinging, never cooing and fretting and thus never letting his concern make her weak, but he had handed over drinks or put on stupid Capitol movies with obviously staged fights they could mock for their sloppy technique. He offered up his own body sometimes, when her frustration and rage at what they had made her into gave her a need to fight or to fuck, or even both at the same time. He’d been there for her as a friend, asking nothing in return. She’d be there for him now, wildly on the edge as he was, before he did something truly stupid and destroyed himself by ending up in a cell here in Thirteen. After the Capitol’s cells, he couldn’t take that.

“We’ll go there,” she promised him, her hand hard on his shoulder, making him pay attention to her by it. “We’ll take the Pass back and avenge Lyme, I swear it. Then we’ll find the rest of the skulking bastards out there in the mountains where they’re hiding, and we’ll drive them all out so they never think to fuck with the people of Two again.” The Capitol was important, but she would trust once the Pass was retaken, others could handle that job. Lyme had been theirs, her and Brutus both, and it was Two that was in danger of being torn apart in a prolonged civil war, before more villages were destroyed by the Peacekeepers that had once protected them. This was personal in a deeper way than the Capitol. They needed to take care of that while they still had a home worth saving. Haymitch, at least, would understand that.

His blue eyes, when they met hers, were still full of anger and sorrow both, but there was determination there too. He had calmed down as she knew he would, given direction and purpose for his wrath. “For Lyme and for Two,” he agreed with fierce satisfaction. “Even if it takes us the next ten years.”

Chapter Text

Brutus and Enobaria didn’t show up to the firing range in the morning as per the usual training schedule, and the others looked surprised at that. It was only at lunch that they were all together again, the two victors from Two dressed in the field greys of the Thirteen battle uniform, their too-short hair not needing the standard haircut, and Enobaria told them in spare terms what had happened.

Haymitch couldn’t help but look away, thinking of Lyme, remembering the years of her as Two’s female mentor. Another victor, another friend, among the dead. Chaff, Blight and Angus dead in the arena too, memories of laughter and of bad jokes and drinks all he’d ever have left of them now, and who knew what had happened to the likes of Clover and Chantilly in the chaos after the arena blew. At least One and Nine hadn’t had their tributes in the alliance so maybe the mentors hadn’t been punished the way he suspected Three, Four, and Seven had. They hadn’t told him about that while he was in the Detention Center and he hadn’t been able to obtain information on it since. He suspected that any victor deaths that had occurred during the war were being kept pretty damn quiet. They’d all seen from the Quell how affected people could be by one of Panem’s victors being killed.

This was a personal thing for Brutus and Enobaria, he easily understood. They had Lyme’s death that called for a reckoning, and their home to look after. That came before bigger concerns like the Capitol. After seeing the ashes of Twelve, he wouldn’t wish that destruction on any other district and he had the feeling the fanatically loyal Peacekeepers wouldn’t hesitate to take down anyone or anything in their way. Apparently the two of them had already gotten approval to transfer out of Squad 22 to a unit bound for Two to recapture those critical staging areas in a hurry.

So they said their goodbyes after that. Katniss, Peeta, and Finnick quietly wished them well. Johanna surprised him by telling Enobaria, “You brainless fang-toothed moron. Go give them hell.”

Enobaria blinked and said in answer, “You crazy naked idiot. You do the same with the Capitol.” From the way they smiled at each other, almost a smirk, Haymitch sensed they might actually not want to kill each other now. Didn’t that beat all.

At that point he held his hand out to Brutus, about ready to bid his own goodbye. Brutus surprised him by gripping his forearm, not his hand, and Haymitch remembered this was a gesture from Two, a mark of respect between fighters. Returning it, his hand tight on Brutus’ arm, he said, “She was a good woman. You two give ‘em a fight worthy of that.”

Brutus nodded slightly. “A good fight. Finally.” Even if his eyes were intense, the agitation and self-consciousness Haymitch had seen in him for so long seemed to have eased. He knew what he stood for, what he fought to defend. “Seems to me that you’d been looking for an opportunity to fight back all these years too. Maybe you’ve found it.”

“Maybe so.” Maybe that was why he broke himself down so badly over the years, denied the chance to do anything but endure loss after loss and be expected to face it all over again the next year. He’d leaped at the chance last summer to do something more, fought and cajoled and manipulated his way into bringing two tributes home. Pushed by the challenge of getting Katniss out of the arena alive and now with the rebellion, he’d found resolve that he’d thought long gone. He knew what he stood for too. Freedom for Panem, yes, but first of all the sake of those that he would go to the Capitol with, continuing to keep them alive. After all, he’d kicked the whole rebellion off far too soon only when it seemed like the only way to save Katniss’ life. “Try to keep your sorry ass alive out there, and Enobaria too.” He wouldn’t be there to help them with that.

Like that, they were gone to go retake Two, and Haymitch wondered if he’d ever see them again, or if he would only hear about their deaths from Plutarch or someone else. In the Capitol it would be Katniss, Peeta, Finnick, himself, and Johanna once she passed that stupid Block exam. Come what may, at least he would be there to help defend the four of them, and that eased his mind. That meant he would never have to hear news of their survival from someone else. But he only hoped to hell he didn’t have to watch any of them die because he wasn’t sure he could stand it.

Johanna went to go take her exam in the afternoon while the rest of them did Special Weapons. Haymitch trained some with Peeta in knives, mostly trying to keep his mind off the Block and what she must be enduring right then. Once through had been bad enough for him. Twice would have been an ordeal. He had the feeling they’d probably change things up on her to try and trip her up again now that she knew what to expect.

He noticed the way Peeta’s eyes would stray to Katniss when they were taking a break, and the way she’d look back at him, both of them with silly little smiles on their faces. Ah, young love. Obvious and somewhere between sickening and adorable, depending on his mood. At least they’d had a bit of time together. He hadn’t asked what they’d done with it and neither of them approached him for any kind of advice, and far as he was concerned, that was perfectly fine.

But given that they were finally together now he’d have to do what it took to keep them both alive again. Because he could see every feeling they had written in their eyes and those dopey grins, and he knew that neither of them could bear to lose the other, not when their hearts were all tangled up together like that. It might be a first love but it would be a forever love for them both. Forever, or as long as fate and the Capitol allowed them, he admitted wearily.

Johanna came back, picked up her axes, and started going after dummies with a vengeance. “So?” Katniss said, coming up to her, asking in a low voice. “You passed?” Haymitch paused, listening carefully.

“Oh, like you ever doubted it, Kittycat,” Johanna said with a snort of satisfaction. Though when he watched her he thought she was throwing axes with the same pissed-off edge she had before the test, as if it had been no relief for her. They must have put her through hell in there.

They walked with Annie during Reflection and Johanna showed her the ginger roots. She didn’t say anything to him about the Block and he knew she wouldn’t, not with Annie right there. But he thought he could sense the frustration in her throughout dinner. If Finnick wasn’t so busy with Annie at the moment to not be paying much mind to other things, Haymitch would have wanted to corner him and ask if he’d picked up on it too. He could hardly blame the man. He only had a little while longer with his new bride before he’d be going off to battle. Same reason he wasn’t going to come down too hard on Katniss and Peeta these days.

The moment the compartment door closed behind them, the tension in her finally exploded as she hurled her jacket, and he had the feeling she really wished she had something breakable to throw. “Fucking bastards!” She stalked over to her bed and sat down heavily, fingers clenched into white-knuckled fists.

“How bad?” he asked simply. If she wanted to rant about it, fine. If she wanted to tell him to mind his own business, equally fine.

She looked up at him with something like mingled rage and despair. “I passed. I nailed that damn thing and they said oh no, standard procedure for a medically unfit retest, the review board has to consider my case tonight, and they’d notify me of the results tomorrow.” She aimed a kick at the nightstand. “Might as well have not even bothered.”

He sat down beside her, trying to imagine it. Flaying herself open again on the Block and enduring whatever they threw at her, and having them stare down their noses and say that she still fell short. Dangling the chance she desperately needed just out of reach, like the Gamemakers did with their scores and their judgment. Giving it everything and having them still able to say with a dismissive scoff, That’s not good enough.

“Fuck ‘em,” he said simply. “You’re worth a dozen of anyone they’ve got.” He put a hand on her shoulder, feeling the tension in her there, risking that much. He was pretty sure it might end with her throwing the hand off. “Hell, I’ll smuggle you on the hovercraft if I have to,” he suggested. He actually would try. He was losing patience with Thirteen and their petty rules. Johanna, of all people, had the right to see this through. After everything she’d had taken from her, after everything she’d been through at the Detention Center, she was owed this much at the very least.

She laughed, though it hitched suddenly in the middle, and then she was giving more of those rough, angry sobs, a harsh noise that was without tears as if the heat of her anger had burned them all away. His arm went around her shoulders and she let him do it, and he let her lean into him. He wouldn’t tell. Shit, to be pushed that far, to put it all out there, and still maybe be rejected was too much.

Her balled-up fist thumped him in the shoulder each time she let out another of those racking, choked sounds and that was all right, he could take the force of her anger. She was pissed off and that was a good sign because if she’d finally lost even that and been entirely broken down he wouldn’t know what to do. If she was strong enough to be upset she was still Johanna.

Hell, he wasn’t good at feeling things himself, let alone expressing them in offering comfort to someone else. Not except in the most basic physical way. But she was hurting and she needed something after taking that kind of blow. So before he thought better of it he’d leaned down to kiss her.

Her hand clasped the back of his neck and she kissed him fierce as her fury had been. Before long she was on his lap like it had been in the arena, but there was nothing faked in this kiss, and they weren’t in the middle of a room like after Finnick’s wedding either. She wasn’t awkward and self-conscious like when she was seventeen either and he was absurdly grateful that this was nothing at all like that.

She pressed herself against him, hips moving hard against his, and instinctively he bit back a gasp at the way it was just right, rousing him like wildfire rather than a slow burn. She obviously heard it. Suddenly her hand was hard on his jaw, holding it as she stared at him, and her eyes burned fiercely as she half-snarled at him, “Damn you, I don’t want you to be quiet.”

As if he could help it, like he had chosen to be the way he was. He’d become what he had to be to survive and that was it and she of all people ought to get that. Almost immediately, embarrassment and anger were mingled with the arousal and he snapped back harshly, “Tell me what you want to hear and I’ll deliver in spades, darlin’. Won’t even make you pay for it.”

She actually flinched a little, and her eyes slid somewhere past his shoulder, staring at what he knew must be the blank steel walls. Once again, they’d run into what seemed like an impasse. Too close to simply fuck each other casually, not close enough to not automatically start to throw walls up against someone who could actually manage to hurt them. He sighed, glum at the thought. “Jo,” he started carefully. She still didn’t look at him. “I can’t...” He groped for an explanation. I can fake things for you all night long but if you want something real...

“Just shut up already,” she said, but almost softly, and she was kissing him again. Maybe she had the right idea there. The only way this might actually happen was if both of them stopped talking so they couldn’t say something stupid. And he wanted this, because even if he was too fucked up to make it what it should be it, even if it would never be something sweet and grandly romantic like Katniss and Peeta or Finnick and Annie, it was some small thing that wasn’t for anyone else but the two of them. Proof that he could at least have this and give her this, and that was more than he’d thought when he was busy screaming his throat raw in that cell, taken apart to something that wasn’t even human any longer.

After that they apparently mutually decided that the best way to proceed was to make sure neither of them found room to hesitate and sabotage this. There was nothing leisurely about it, nothing really soft, only a few hard kisses and hastily fumbling with their clothes. Their eyes met, held for a moment long enough for him to see the raw desperation of just let this happen, let this work that she must likewise be seeing in him, and then both of their gazes skittered just far enough aside so it wouldn’t happen again.

It had been a long time, and from the moment she settled herself on him, slick and ready and making him give a soft noise at the feel of her in spite of himself, he could tell he wasn’t going to last. He tried to warn her, his hands at her shoulder and her hip tightening and urging her, “C’mon, take it easy here,” but she either ignored him or didn’t care, moving insistently against him, and even as he attempted to slow things down he knew that wasn’t happening. It was definitely too soon for her when he came. Frenzied as the whole thing was, it was like being slammed hard with overwhelming sensation rather than experiencing the relief of pleasure. He honestly felt dazed more than sated as he panted an apologetic, “Sorry, sorry,” in her ear, trying to collect his wits. Running off instinct that had been trained over the years under the notion that he was expected to please every time, his fingers slipped between their bodies with barely a pause, stroking between her thighs to fix his not doing it right to begin.

At first she moved with his touch, hips pushing against his hand, but then suddenly, with an odd expression he’d describe as something like embarrassment, she quit, her hand coming down to grip his wrist and stop him. She climbed off him, and watching her touch herself to do the job was arousing like it would be to any man, but at the moment that was far outweighed by it being confusing and more than a little humiliating. Apparently she didn’t even trust him to do that much. “Yeah, fine,” he grunted irritably at her, turning his back and hearing the low gasp of her finding the pleasure she hadn’t let him give her.

So she was feeling rejected by the review board and she took out her frustration by shaming him in turn. Classy move there, and he was trying hard to not feel like a whore again, used and then discarded. He willed his hands to work, getting his trousers back in order so he could go back to his own damn bed and start to pretend this hadn’t happened. He’d had plenty of nights he wanted to forget but this was going to rank up there, because she was the last person he’d expected to make him feel like he’d been--what? Not gutted, because oh, he knew what being gutted felt like, desperate and terrified and faint from dying by inches, trying to hold greasy, slippery ropes of intestine in his body where they belonged with shock-numbed fingers. This wasn’t being gutted. This was more like being stabbed in the back, left bleeding and breathless and betrayed.

Her hand landed on his shoulder and he shrugged, trying to shake it off and demand she fuck off and leave him alone, but her hand tightened. “I didn’t...” She stopped, tried again. “You went away. I saw it. And I’d rather not come at all than have you just fucking service me,” now she sounded almost defiant, challenging him to deny it. The fact he didn’t, because he couldn’t, probably told her what she needed to know. At least the explanation eased his temper and his embarrassment some. What she was saying was reasonable enough, though it got back to her complaining that he had problems letting himself feel things. Yeah, well, he had his own bickering to do about her and her control issues, and it seemed like now was the time.

“And you were in your own little world there ‘cause you weren’t even listening when I tried to get you to slow down,” he pointed out in turn. “I’d rather not bother if you’re just gonna use me as what you need to service,” he deliberately used her own word, “you.”

She stared at him, irritation on her features slowly fading to something like acceptance. “OK. Well, that was...”

“We’ve both had better. Leave it at that,” he said gruffly, not in the mood for a detailed analysis or even worse, some awkward attempt by her to reassure him. That wasn’t Johanna and he’d know it was bullshit.

She shrugged lithely. “Give it a second round before we call it a dud?” Her voice was a little too casual. At least they’d proved they could actually make it happen and it wouldn’t be too strange. That was one big obstacle out of the way. She cocked her head to the side a little bit and smirked at him. “See if you can actually make me holler this time, mm?”

That was about as overt a peace offering as they would get, and it was enough. He’d try to not resort to mindlessly doing things by rote and she’d try to not get freaked out about control. No guarantees, of course. It wasn’t like everything could change in five minutes with wishful thinking. But they could at least try and see. At least they’d know for sure if this was a terrible idea. He turned back towards her. “Why not? It’s that or the law books again.” He’d made much worse decisions in his life, that was for damn sure.

She fingered the edge of his collar. “We’re still pretty much dressed and it was quick and lousy. Great. We’re turning into real citizens of Thirteen here, Haymitch.”

“Shit. Can’t have that,” he agreed, because hell, why not laugh about it. With a chuckle, her hands moved to his shirt buttons, slipping the first one loose. That caught him a little off-balance because giving her that would leave him too exposed in a way that had nothing to do with skin. Her slightly unsteady fingers told him it might be a bit much for her too, something too deliberate and intimate. Careening from one extreme towards the other, totally defenseless and fumbling with being unable to quite handle that, wasn’t going to help this. He caught her wrist and smiled at her, trying to defuse it with joking snark rather than blunt honesty. “Let’s just have me handle that. I know how impatient you get, and if you start pulling the buttons off, do you have any idea how many forms I’ll probably have to fill out to get replacements?”

Laughing at that, she dropped her hands and said, “So quit talking and get naked already or I start yanking buttons to hurry your sorry ass up.” He obliged, starting to undo the buttons, glancing over briefly to see she was doing the same.

“Oh, look, now I’m getting stripping tips from Johanna Mason.”

“Damn straight. I’m an acknowledged master at it. I want any tips on drinking games or secretly plotting revolutions, I’ll come to you.”

He shrugged the grey shirt off and threw it somewhere towards his bed. “I think these are clothes are ugly enough they belong on the floor rather than on a person,” and he heard her snort in amusement at that. Slipping his sleeveless undershirt off, a simple white cotton bra came flying past his face where she’d probably winged it without looking. He doubted she was looking towards him, watching him undress. Not with as skittish as they both apparently were about this right now. “That? Probably looks better off you anyway.”

“Oh, my my, you devil.” This was familiar territory for them, the banter that was sarcastic armor but friendly meant all the same, and the comfortable nature of it was helping ease things here. “You use that tongue for anything besides smooth talk?”

You ought to know what I can do with it, but he wasn’t going to think about that, because that afternoon years ago had nothing to do with the two of them now. She wasn’t an overwhelmed virgin and he wasn’t the burned-out whore who wanted to make sure the whole thing didn’t affect him enough to hurt. Dealing with his trousers and undershorts, he answered, “Charming the knickers off the ladies.” Somehow he wasn’t surprised when in answer to that she tossed hers--also plain and white, standard Thirteen issue--where he could see them.

Neither of them stared at the other while the clothes were coming off. The concept of being naked didn’t bother him exactly, not after all those years of being up for sale. But it wasn't like just casually showing off the scars as yet another example of Capitol cruelty. It was her that was looking, someone who already knew too much of him and what state he had been reduced to in that cell. He looked over at her and saw she was looking back at him.

He’d known she had to have some of the same scars that he now saw on his own body every day. He’d felt a few of them on her back after Finnick’s wedding. She did. There was the spiderweb of dozens of careful, thin knife cuts that would someday silver and fade, but right now stood out in a bold network of still-healing pink, criss-crossing her chest and probably her back also, just the same as his. Shiny pink blotches from burns and even a few of the dark smudges of electrical burns too.

But seeing the exact nature of the scars made it real all at once, and seeing where the pain that he had been forced to overhear was written indelibly on her skin, it was fixed now in his mind. Given his own scars, he could read her own marks like a map of those weeks of torture. There would never again be a point where he wouldn’t have seen this and know exactly what had been done to her, and where and how.

It made him want to kill them all. Looking at her, though, risking a glance up at her face he saw her stare back at him with her brown eyes glittering fiercely as if daring him to make something of it. Right now what was needed was for those weeks and these scars to not matter. If she tried to treat him gingerly, tried to touch the scars and go out of her way to reassure him it was OK or even to swear vengeance, he’d know that those fucking scars and all the ways he’d been broken were all she could see. He’d be a victim, not a man, and that would be more unbearable than her being repulsed.

There were the scars, the too-short hair and she could still use a few more pounds, but he looked beyond that. That scarred skin covered a woman’s body with the lush swell of breasts, the neat curve of waist and hip, and most of all, the smirk and the sass and the eyes that were pure Johanna.

Though she was the one who reached out, teased him a bit, “So you do actually have chest hair when they’re not ripping it out?" while tracing her fingers over it almost curiously. For all he knew, maybe she’d never been with a man who did. The only other time she’d seen him naked, of course, they were both in the endless cycle of wax-and-polish, skin ruthlessly kept up to the ideal Capitol state of being perfectly flawless and hairless.

He laughed as much in relief as in humor. “Yeah. No more Beauty Base Zero for me.” He looked at her and his tone was more vehement as he said, “Ever.” This is me, take it or leave it. The way he’d be for the rest of his life. For years they’d had their fun and then erased the scars so he wouldn’t be damaged in their eyes, the hypocrites. He’d wouldn’t let them take these ones.

“Good,” she said with a sort of fierce satisfaction. Nobody Capitol would want her now, of that he was sure. She was probably glad of that. He kissed her then, hands moving over her, smoothing over her shoulders and then the warm softness of her breasts, thumbs stroking her nipples, reminding himself this was Johanna he was touching, feeling how she arched her back into it and trying to let himself find again what it was like giving pleasure for the sake of it rather than out of expectation or threats.

It wasn’t an easy thing. Old habits were hard to break so he’d have to tell her to ease up or she’d have to call him back to reality, and there were barriers still, things that were too much to handle. When he moved over her thoughtlessly, because of course in his assigned role of the seducer he’d been expected to do all the work, she hit him in the shoulder. Not an irritated little idiot, you’re not paying attention again smack, a full-blown shove with all her strength that was going to bruise hard.

He was about ready to snap that she needed to cut it out with the rough stuff, but the split-second of unveiled fear he saw in her before she ruthlessly composed herself said plenty. He remembered what sort of patrons she’d been expected to service. He remembered Dazen's boy in the arena pinning her down in the dirt and yanking at her zipper.

But if he tried to be soft about it he’d only humiliate her with the vulnerability of it. “Ease up there,” he said with a mock heavy sigh, getting an arm around her waist and rolling onto his back, tugging her on top of him, feeling all that warm bare skin against his own. “Let me guess. I screwed up the first round, so now you’re claiming the indefinite right to be on top until you say I’ve paid my dues off enough?” It would be easier that way, if they kept this up, than the awkwardness of asking every damn time if it would be OK or if she needed to keep the upper hand again. It wasn’t like it cost him any pride to do it this way.

She looked at him, startled, obviously getting that he understood and he was trying to handle it in a way that wouldn’t embarrass either of them, but she recovered quickly. Shifting, hands braced on his shoulders, she said sweetly, “Yeah, sure, I get it. You want to be lazy and make me do all the work.” But her expression said clearly enough, Thanks.

He folded his hands behind his head and grinned up at her. “Knew you were smart. That means I’ll just be enjoying the view here.” He would, really.

She rolled her eyes and smirked back. It wasn’t going to be easy, no, since it wasn't like either of them could be an open book enough to just say a thing or ask outright. But if they could keep the vulnerabilities safely covered with snark here like they did everywhere else, rather than falling back on aggression or indifference, he thought this just might work. Mostly it meant maybe they could forget her medical review and the war and the Capitol and everything, at least for a few hours.

Chapter Text

Johanna woke in the middle of the night, confused by the heat of another body against hers, the breath tickling against her brow, the strength of the arm that was tight around her waist. She never slept with anyone, really slept, not since Finnick when she was young and stupid enough to actually fall for him. Usually there wasn’t even a bed involved anyway because she didn’t want even that illusion of intimacy. Bathroom stalls, closets, backseats of limos and taxis, alleys, countertops, she’d used whatever surface was handy to get the job done. Her haste usually was directly related to how pissed off she was and how much she’d had to drink that night. She wanted to just fuck the guy--or girl, in some cases--and prove to herself that they didn’t matter, that she could use them for her pleasure like they’d used her and they didn’t have the power to hurt her anymore. They were usually so pathetically grateful to have a victor tearing off their clothes that they didn’t ask too many questions, and all starstruck they always touched and licked and moved the way she told them to do. She didn’t feel guilty being rough and impatient with them either. They wanted to fuck the victor of the 66th Games, that vicious girl with her hard eyes and her nails and lips painted a bloody scarlet. They knew what they signed up for in taking her on. After all, they’d been the ones that created her.

But on the occasions there was actually a bed involved, she was always dressed and on her way out the door quickly enough after the sex was over. She never stayed, even when they asked, because no way in hell was she letting some Capitol freak have that from her. Not when they’d already taken the best of her and then some.

It was dark and she couldn’t see, which was all the better to not be looking at tattoos or puce-dyed hair and think I actually fell asleep with someone who looks like that?

Even without the covers she was warm from the heat of him and pleasantly groggy. Fuck it, she decided, letting herself slip back down into the comfort of sleep. She’d still be able to sneak out in the morning before he woke up. If she didn’t and he wanted to make a thing about it, she’d just cow him into never mentioning it again. They all knew better than to piss Johanna Mason off because they expected they might end up with an axe in the skull.

She woke up fully when the lights clicked on at six thirty as usual, orienting herself as she did every morning and remembering she was in Thirteen and it was time to get up for training. She sensed someone else in bed with her, heard the soft sound of something breathing. It took her a second to recall the night before, her brain still settling in from the last remnants of sleep. Oh, right, Haymitch. She half-rolled over and saw him there, still dozing.

They must have simply fallen asleep after the second time, before she could think ahead enough to tell him to get his ass back to his own bed before Lights Out. She spotted a smear of purple on his chest and shoulder. Bruise? No, he had a definite bruise on his other shoulder, dark and vivid, from where she’d panicked and hit him so hard to get him off her last night. Suddenly, it clicked in her mind and she glanced down at the inside of her left forearm, seeing the smudges from where the ink had broken down last night as scheduled, except she hadn’t washed it off as usual.

Looking down she saw the purple on her hip and belly from his own arm, and no, obviously she hadn’t dreamed those moments in the middle of the night. Great. She’d rubbed ink all over him because apparently not only had they spent the night sharing the same bed, she’d actually been all snuggled up to him. He’d know what had happened when he woke up and saw that. The trouble was Haymitch wasn’t stupid enough to not figure it out from those ink smears, and he might try to yank her chain with it.

Scowling, she got up, scooped up the covers from where they’d ended up on the floor, and flung them back on him. “Wake up,” she snapped, “we’ve got breakfast in half an hour and we both need a shower.” She needed to get that purple shit off her skin, and anyway, she wasn’t going to breakfast smelling of sex and sweat where everyone would know what had happened, and it was people she actually gave a crap about. Not any of their damn business what she and Haymitch had gotten up to last night.

His eyes opened, he swiped a hand out as usual for the knife that wasn’t there; his gaze settled on her after a few moments, and he relaxed. He pushed himself up from the mattress with a faint grunt. Now that she was sure he was awake and aware, she turned for the bathroom. The lazy drawl of, “That an invitation to share?” followed her.

She showed him a middle finger over her shoulder. He laughed, and after she had inched her way into the water and was scrubbing herself down quickly, she glanced through the blurry panel of the shower door to see he was busy shaving. Obviously by this point he’d noticed the purple on his own body. “Check my back,” she grumbled at him, opening the door and turning away from him so he could check, “make sure you didn’t leave any fucking ink on it.” Because it was his fault anyway, sticking around like that. She didn’t care that he was probably like most men and thus was probably inclined to fall asleep soon after sex. Never mind that she had passed out too. It had been her bed so she had the right to do that.

She felt his hand on her hip, his touch surprisingly light. “Are you just using this as an excuse to grope my ass, Haymitch?”

He gave a rough grumble of amusement low in his throat. “Trust me, sweetheart, the shower ain’t my ideal place for seduction. Shut up and hand me the washcloth, you’ve got a little bit here.” Handing it over to him, he wiped the ink off. “There.”

She turned and glanced at him, seeing the few white flecks of shaving soap left on his face he hadn’t wiped off. The scars, the ink, the bruise on the other side, the way he was looking at her as if figuring out what to say. “All yours,” she muttered, stepping aside and grabbing a towel, leaving him the shower. She hastily brushed her teeth and padded back into the compartment.

So what now? This was why she didn’t sleep with friends. She’d found that out after the 69th Games, the year Finnick broke things off between them with I’m in love and Her name’s Annie and I don’t think we should sleep together anymore, Jo, it wouldn’t be fair to her. At the end of the day, she wasn’t good enough for him to love and she wanted to yell at him And how’s that fair to me when I’ve got nothing? She’d gone off and fucked a few of the other victors to try to show Finnick that fine, he didn’t matter to her that much anyway, she could just replace him. That accomplished nothing much except leaving Mentor Central awkward as hell for her when the likes of Rye were trying to turn that into a regular thing and she didn’t want him, she wanted Finnick back.

She’d even tried to get Haymitch to fuck her again, she remembered with embarrassment, showed up at the Twelve apartment because in her mind, maybe her fucking someone Finnick looked up to would get to him. Haymitch was already tipsy and dressing up for an patron--it must have been one of his very last ones since that was his final year on the books--and instead he’d gotten her good and drunk and she’d ranted to him about Annie and she woke up in the middle of the night on the sofa with a blanket carefully draped over her. She’d sneaked back down to the Seven apartment before he came back from his appointment.

Finnick hadn’t cared, or at least, not the way she wanted. She was only making herself pathetic and burning what few bridges she had, so after that year she stuck to screwing Capitol idiots who she never had to see again. It wouldn’t be awkward and there was no need to give a crap about anything when there was no morning after.

Oh, what the fuck, why was she even worrying now? She’d gotten a little edgy over the whole review board thing and because of that she’d had sex with Haymitch and it was fine, the second time was even pretty good, but it wasn’t like it had been mindblowingly fantastic. Not with the awkwardness of every so often having to pull each other back from instinctively resorting to the same old pretend bullshit. The trouble with Haymitch was that he didn’t panic or get violent or anything so obvious as that. She’d only managed to notice he was hiding away inside himself again when she forced herself to pay attention and felt the subtle difference in how he touched her, when she looked at his face and saw he didn’t really see her.

Hell. It had been all right but it wasn’t worth losing him over if he decided to get all weird on her about it. When he came back, running a hand through his damp hair, she did her best to sound it out, test if he was the same old Haymitch or not. “I realize at your age successfully getting laid is probably a big deal but try not to get your hopes up, mm?”

“And here I was picking out our perfect wedding colors and everything,” he said lightly. Wedding colors, just another piece of ostentatious Capitol bullshit. “Naming the children.”

She threw her balled-up towel at him, though now catching sight of his turned back and the scars on it, she knew where those came from, just like seeing the others last night had been like hearing him in pain all over again. She knew they’d used a whip on him too and that made it obvious. She’d been listening when he grunted in pain, laughed condescendingly, and told them, They whipped me the first time when I was twelve for poaching. Did a much better job than this. Y’all just trying to tickle me?

That gave her guts enough to laugh at them and say Do you idiots need lessons in how to use that thing? I can teach you, I’ve never had complaints from anyone who wanted some stripes along with a fucking, when they came for her later. That had been early on, when they’d both been stubborn and defiant rather than the later days, simply trying to endure and not completely break before the end.

No, they’d gotten it right last night--don’t dwell on it, don’t talk about it, don’t cry about it. They’d lived through it together. There was no need for the two of them to talk about how it made them feel. Haymitch already knew from experience.

That was the thing with Haymitch. He could be a pain in the ass but when he wasn’t making her want to tell him to shut the hell up, he was easy to be around. He’d been there through the worst times of her life and he knew what it was like to lose everything. With him she’d never need to explain or apologize for how messed up she was, in bed or out, because he already understood and accepted that.

Slipping on her sleeveless undershirt, her stomach growled loudly. She sighed, and asked him flippantly, “You think they take sex into account here on your daily workout to figure out your food ration?” Sex worked up a sweat, and she was definitely hungrier this morning than some others.

He chuckled lowly. “Bet they only approve that if you’re married. They probably put it on your schedule too. Should we ask to check Finn’s arm today at breakfast to make sure?”

She snorted in return. “Annie’s already knocked up, Haymitch. They’d consider that wasted effort. So what, wanna ask them if I marry you, will I get an extra daily scoop of turnips?”

“Please.” He passed by her and snagged a fresh grey shirt from the hook on the wall. “You should at least hold out for an extra pork chop, darlin’, if you have to earn food by screwing me regularly.”

A friend making jokes about fucking someone for the sake of food was something even Finnick, living as he did in the relative abundance of Four, couldn’t have gotten away with when it came to her. But she’d let Haymitch do it, because she’d heard from him how desperate it could get in Twelve. He’d told her once about his mom--he was drunk, of course---and how she’d sometimes had to go to the Peacekeepers after her mining shift to keep food on the table, how he’d learned to go trapping when he was still little so he could at least contribute and ease her burden.

In Seven, hunting with bows and the like was forbidden, of course. But whatever they could trap or nail with an axe or gather up out in the woods was overlooked by the Peacekeepers and it got thrown in the community pot. Kids too young to really swing an axe and join the work crews but too old to be under constant supervision usually got that task. She’d learned to set a snare the same age she was first learning to chop wood with a hatchet. Squirrel, mushrooms, wild garlic, every day was sort of a surprise as to what they’d find. Everyone ate well at the summer lumber camps, going to bed in their tents with a stomach full of a rich hearty bowl of stew and some of the dark, malty bread native to their district.

Winter, though, back in their homes and working in the carpentry shops and paper mills, they shivered through the bitter cold and ate their meager Capitol rations that were never enough. Everyone inevitably got thinner as winter went on, piling on more and more clothes to try and keep warm. Some of the hungriest people went and sold themselves to the Peacekeepers to make up the extra. It happened every winter, and the idea of Twelve being a place where they were that miserable and desperate the whole year made her instinctively cringe.

She’d been lucky. Two parents living, an older brother who’d landed a good job as a journeyman carpenter and hadn’t left home yet to marry--they’d gone hungry some during winter, but they’d never been as hard up as Haymitch’s family, or some of the others in Seven. “Fine. I get an extra pork chop, you get to marry me. Which pretty much proves you’re crazy if you think that’s you actually gaining something.”

He shrugged. She snorted and said, "Don't worry, it's not like I'm gonna fall in love with you." Just like she'd told him years ago when she was seventeen and stupid and trying to crawl back in his bed after those first few appointments. He'd turned her down and she'd been embarrassed and snapped at him.

"Smart girl," he said with a faint smile, like he had then, and she saw the glimmer of recognition in his eyes and she knew he remembered. It was a relief to see that apparently things hadn’t changed between them this morning. He wasn’t going to get all clingy or soft on her because of last night. With that in mind, sitting through breakfast, she almost managed to forget that her fate was in the hands of the review board and they could still turn her down on a whim.

But her schedule informed her to report to Command along with everyone else, and she took that as a promising sign. When she got there, Boggs pulled her aside for a second and muttered, “You passed, Mason, congratulations, take your seat,” and that was that. He didn’t make a big deal of it or make sure everyone heard she could have still flunked and she was grateful to him for that. Taking her seat with the others, she looked around the table at her assigned squad. Katniss, Peeta, Finnick, Haymitch, herself, and three people who must have been from Thirteen.

Plutarch was there too, but it was Boggs who spoke up first to inform them crisply, “With Reska and Allamand reassigned to the task force operating in Two, we’ve filled in the ranks of Squad 22 with some replacements to make a full complement of eight. Soldiers Homes,” he nodded to a grey-haired man who gave them all a laconic nod, “and Leeg and Leeg,” two women of about Johanna’s own age who must have been twins, “will be joining us.”

“Do you have first names we can call you?” Katniss asked Leeg and Leeg curiously. ”I’d feel weird just calling you ‘One’ and ‘Two.’”

“We go by first names in our squad,” Haymitch piped up with a sly smile. “We’re odd like that. Except Boggs. I don’t think he even has a first name.”

“It’s Corriden,” Boggs said back dryly to him, obviously used to Haymitch’s antics by this point. “But it’s ‘Boggs’ or ‘sir’ to you lot.”

“Samira,” one of the Leegs offered hesitantly, obviously moved to it by Katniss’ spontaneously reaching out to her like that. Johanna had to admit it was damn effective. “And my sister’s Pardala.”

“Tobias,” Homes grunted, surprising them all.

With that settled, Plutarch popped to his feet, beaming. “This is wonderful, all of you bonding together as a team, I only wish we’d had it on camera.” Johanna wondered at what point Plutarch had lived his cover of a Capitol Gamemaker so deeply that he actually fell into it for real. “In any case, I’ve spoken to President Coin and Squad 22 has been chosen as the on-air faces that we’ll follow to get the story of the invasion. Given that most of you are victors, your story will be inspirational to all of Panem. And so we’ve also decided to dub you ‘Victory Squad’.”

“Lovely,” Finnick said with a sigh. “Smile for the cameras and look pretty shooting your guns, everyone.” Johanna wanted to put her head down on the table and groan. She’d lived enough of her life on camera already. She wanted to just get to the Capitol and get Snow and not worry about inspiration or looking good or any crap like that.

Haymitch snickered. “Don’t worry, Plutarch, I’ll let the young and attractive ones be your film crew bait. I’ll stay towards the back of the shots with Tobias, right?” Homes gave him a bit of a wry smile in answer. “Finnick’s more than pretty enough to make up for me anyway, and of course our adorable little lovebirds,” a smirk at Katniss and Peeta, “are so attention-worthy.”

“You should probably be on camera, though, Haymitch,” Peeta pointed out. “You are the guy who pretty much challenged President Snow to his face on live television and seeing you alive and recovering and out there fighting will be useful.”

“Of course!” Plutarch crowed. “You’ve got a great mind for propos, Peeta,” Haymitch shot Peeta a look of irritation. Peeta stared at him with a serene expression of, If I have to suffer through it you do too. Johanna repressed a snicker. Had to hand it to Blondie, being willing to try to keep up with Haymitch was a full-time job, but it looked like he’d gotten the better of it there.

The “briefing” really consisted mostly of explaining to them what their role would be, and Johanna glanced around the table and saw none of them looked too thrilled about it. Looking good on camera. What a novel concept. Oh well. At least she wasn’t going to have to wear her usual wardrobe for that. Capitol viewers might actually be disappointed to see her in the loose-fitting grey field uniform, which actually pleased her. Not that she was happy at being marked out as Thirteen property either. Mostly she’d just be happy when this crap was all over and done with and she could avoid both the Capitol and Thirteen like the plague.

“We all know how to work with a camera, Plutarch,” Haymitch finally said, pausing in boredly drumming his fingertips on the tabletop to speak up. “Most of us, we’ve been doing it for years, and even Katniss and Peeta are getting to be old pros. Don’t need to tell us twice.”

With that, Plutarch sighed and said he’d have more information in the morning for them about the actual attack plan. As they filed out of Command Johanna muttered to Katniss, “I say we ditch the cameras first chance we have. Maybe ‘accidentally’ smash them while we’re at it. Oops, clumsy me, kicking a camera down the mountain.”

Katniss actually smiled at that. “Good plan there, brainless,” she teased. “Glad you’re coming with us.”

“Someone’s gotta actually get to the fighting while you bunch of cutie-pies are busy mugging for the cameras,” she mocked her back in return.

Training passed by easier that afternoon, given the assurance that yeah, she was on the team and she’d get to go. Working at the targets with Finnick, throwing her axes while he hurled his trident, he commented, “You’re looking pretty pleased today, Jo.”

“Hey, I get to go kill Snow,” she said, flashing him a grin. “Of course I’m pleased.” He looked at her a few seconds longer, just shook his head with that enigmatic little half-smile of his, and turned back to his trident.

Dinner they spent talking mostly about the situation in Two, trying to predict how long it would take to recapture those areas and let the attack proceed. “It’s those two crazy idiots leading the charge,” Johanna pointed out. “They’ll get it done in a hurry.” Or get killed trying, for that matter.

Katniss grumbled faintly and said, “I asked to get transferred there and Coin turned me down.”

“Well, you did get shot in Two last time you were there, and if that sniper was smart enough to have gone for a head shot, you’d have been dead,” Haymitch pointed out, forking up more of his turnips. Katniss glowered at him and Haymitch spread his hands and shrugged. “You’re a big target, sweetheart. Admit it and pick your risk opportunities a little more wisely.”

Peeta, as usual, stepped in to be the peacemaker. “I imagine it’s because they really want you to be ready for the Capitol, Katniss, and focusing on that.”

“Oh yeah, they need their little Mockingjay all primped to prance around the streets,” Katniss groused.

“They’re not going to be in a hurry to let us see real combat,” Finnick said. “Not with the cameras rolling and all five of us together in one squad where one lucky bomb kills us all.” At that mental image, Annie’s face went pale and her hands went over her ears. Finnick turned to her and put an arm around her shoulders, quietly apologizing for upsetting her and trying to coax her back. Johanna tried to not roll her eyes. Some days Annie was just fine but other days it was damn hard to see the strength of a victor in her. I got tortured and nobody’s busy cuddling me and telling me it’ll all be OK, so stop sniveling. She ate the rest of her dinner in a hurry and headed back to the compartment, restless and a little bit irritated now.

When Haymitch came in and stretched out on his bed with one of his law books, that was admittedly sort of a surprise. She’d just assumed that given they hadn't sworn off a repeat of last night...well, never mind what she’d assumed, apparently that wasn’t the case. Still, this could be one of his little mindgames, and she'd be damned if she'd dance around the matter all night.

Leaning down, she put a hand on the edge of the book and pulled it down out of his range of vision, her other hand landing just above his knee. He glanced up at her and raised an eyebrow. “Tell me,” she said with a smirk, “do you find this,” the hand on his knee stroking up his thigh, “distracting?” That had been an old joke with her and Finnick.

He let out a sharp bark of laughter at that. “Oh, that’s great, Jo. Thanks.” Suddenly his expression changed, in the blink of an eye, and he was looking at her like he knew something important she didn’t and he was really getting a kick out of that. His voice, when he spoke up, smoothed out some of the hardest edges of his twang into something velvet rough. “I’m sorry,” and his expression made it clear that on the contrary he was actually enjoying it, “this is obviously distracting you. Tell me if you want me to stop, but oh, you don’t really want me to, do you now? I know you want this. You want even more too.”

She stared at him in genuine confusion now because yes, she recognized his persona from his days on the circuit, the arrogant amusement. She’d seen it often enough on the occasions she’d been sent along with him to a patron’s house in those first couple of years. But what was he doing that for at a time like this? Just like that it was gone and Haymitch was back, and he shrugged dismissively, “Of course, the actual show itself was a lot more hands-on, you know.”

“What the fuck?” she asked him incredulously. Yeah, sure, she could imagine it was a lot more hands-on, could practically imagine the kisses and caresses that must have accompanied it and it made her weirdly uncomfortable in the way it combined arousal at the thought of it with embarrassment at knowing it was all a forced act. But what was his point here, pulling that crap?

“Don’t pull the shit that I taught Finnick,” he told her bluntly, and why couldn’t he have just said that rather than being an ass about it?

“You’d rather I pull out the stuff you taught me?” she threw back at him defiantly. That had been his role--seducing them into submission. So he’d advised Finnick about seduction, she’d known that. He’d given advice to her about the submission part of it, weary with years of experience.

Yeah, well, screw him if he was going to be like this. All she’d wanted was to see if he wanted a repeat of last night and he was the one getting his undershorts all knotted about it. He knew what she was like and if he couldn’t deal with it, one night was all he was going to get. Turning back towards her own bed, she gave him an irritated, “Looks like it’s back to jerking off for you from now on.” He could talk to her once he was done being a moron and they could be normal again, which apparently wasn’t going to involve sex. His loss, that was what she figured.

His hand caught her arm, and she was smarting enough from him giving her that verbal smack that she wanted to yank it out of his grasp. “Let go or I’ll rip your fucking hand off,” she told him, making the threat without a flicker of temper, because oh yeah, she knew about power and control and submission, and he wasn’t going to exert even that little show of dominance over her.

“We’ve already got more than enough of all the old whore crap coming up without trying,” he said, letting her go but meeting her eyes with his, “so let’s not make it happen deliberately too, all right? That’s all I’m saying.”

Standing there left looking at him, she nodded. “Fine, whatever.” So where did that leave this anyway? It seemed like everything was a potential minefield waiting to be stepped on without warning, and the weight of the moment hung there like a physical thing. She didn’t know how to be openly serious with him. It was still much too high of a toll. So as usual, when in doubt, she could either try to bust his chops or just shut up and act. She opted for the second, leaning down to kiss him, trying to get across what she couldn’t put easily into words: that she wanted him, that she was relieved to not face it all alone, that she was happy that at least someone out there could accept her as fucked up as she was and not expect something she couldn’t possibly give. He kissed her back, so it looked like he understood.

Chapter Text

Finnick woke up with Annie’s hair tickling against his cheek, long silky seaweed tendrils of it. It wasn’t as though that was an entirely unfamiliar sensation. They had slept in the same bed in Four too when they could get away with it, but this was different. This was the certainty of knowing they were together in every way, they were married, that he’d never have to feel another person’s hands on his body except for hers. That there would be so many more sunrises together, for them and for the baby too, as a family.

He’d heard that pregnant women had a glow, and while he and Annie were both excited, he worried about her. She was tired, she had a hard time keeping food down. The doctors had shrugged and said there wasn’t much they could do for it--their medical supplies were reserved for “essential cases”, not simply a pregnant woman who was a little bit miserable. She seemed to have improved thanks to that wild ginger Johanna and Haymitch had found, and the two of them usually went to collect more of it during Reflection. Getting out of the stale air of Thirteen for a little while probably did Annie as much good as gathering the herb for her to chew on.

At least the war would be over soon, even if retaking Two was delaying things a little bit. They would be back in Four in time for the baby’s birth, of that he was confident. Home, the clean salt sea and the waves sweeping the sand, and their child wouldn’t have to start training at eight for the Games, would be able to celebrate turning twelve and never have to endure a reaping. The shadow of the arena would never hang over their life the way it did for him and Annie, and he was so grateful for that. This world they were fighting for even now was the best gift he could hope to give his child, a place where a little boy or girl would be able to laugh and splash in the waves on the beach, maybe even travel to see other districts and have friends there without having to murder other children for the privilege, and not fear the cruelty of a distant Capitol.

Six months ago he would never have believed this life might be his, and some mornings he still woke up, reaching out for Annie and needing to assure himself it wasn’t a cruel dream. She was his wife and they’d have their child around June of next year, so the doctors said. Every morning, every day, was a blessing.

That was why he was going to the Capitol. His friends were going to fight, and he couldn’t simply leave them to make that world happen for him. He couldn’t be a coward like that. Besides, after what Coriolanus Snow had cost him and Annie both, in years past as well as recently, he wanted to see this through. They would go home and make sure their murdered families had proper memorials, and make a home for the two of them and the baby, but this had to be taken care of first.

Still, leaving Annie behind made him nervous. He’d had to leave her behind where he went into the arena for the Quell and if not for Carrick and Peeta, she might have been in a torture cell or dead. The conflicting duties to family and to justice pulled at him even now, even if Annie had reassured him she knew why he had to leave and go fight. He still saw the shadow of worry in her green eyes, the fear that he wouldn’t come home.

He leaned down and kissed her, smoothing the tangled strands of hair off her brow. “Morning,” he said softly, hand moving down to lightly caress her shoulder. If it had been up to him he’d have let her sleep in as long as she needed because she so often looked tired these days, but Thirteen’s schedules were going to let that happen. Once they were back in Four she could sleep until noon or even two if it suited her, and he’d bring her breakfast in bed, eggs or toast or whatever she liked, and then they could sit on the porch with its view of the ocean and talk about names for the baby. They could start to really have a life together. Just this one bit of unfinished business first.

She smiled sleepily and reached up to cup his cheek in her hand. “Morning, Finn,” she said, and he thought he’d never get tired of saying good morning to her like this, and seeing the simple gold bands on her finger and on his. Coin had grumped and said that it was a useless affectation to include in the ceremony. Well, fuck Thirteen and fuck Coin on that point. Even dirt-poor Twelve had wedding rings, so Haymitch had told him, even if they were often the ones that were handed down in the family.

They went to breakfast, Annie chewing a piece of ginger on the way, and Johanna snickered and elbowed Haymitch lightly when Peeta and Katniss came rushing in nearly ten minutes late, looking flustered. “Looks like you decided to go for the morning quickie?” she asked them sweetly. Haymitch shook his head at her and smiled. “Eat up the calories, kiddies, you’ll need them with the exercise you just got.”

“Very funny, Johanna,” Katniss grunted, though she wasted no time tucking right into the eggs like she was ravenous.

Though Finnick noticed Johanna was eating pretty much on pace with her, and that when Haymitch wasn’t looking, saying good morning to Peeta, she reached over to snag a piece of his toast. Haymitch turned back just in time to see her hand retreating with it, and gave her a look. “What?” Johanna said innocently. “Hey, I work harder than you. Pick up the slack if you want to keep your damn toast.”

Haymitch gave a snort of irritation and rolled his eyes as he reached for his coffee, as if to say he didn’t care. They could be talking about training, that was true. Johanna had really gone at it with a frightening intensity since her first encounter with the Block and her near-brush at getting cut from the squad. But Finnick noticed as he had yesterday that the two of them looked to be a little more at ease than usual. And for the second morning in a row, even if it was harder to tell with as short as their hair still was, it looked damp like they’d showered just before breakfast rather than at night as per their tattooed schedules. The faint suspicion he’d had yesterday blossomed more.

He knew those too much too well to not notice a change in their demeanor. He hadn’t been kidding when he told Peeta and Katniss that what the two of them had pulled in the arena was obviously an act. They were friends on entering the arena, that was all. But he’d started to wonder about them recently, if what they’d been faking there was maybe turning into something real. They’d leaned on each other a lot since their rescue from the Capitol, shared ordeal apparently drawing them together. Those walks during Reflection and everything, sharing a compartment so Katniss and Peeta could likewise do the same, how he’d apparently been the first one to go see her in the hospital after her breakdown on the Block--Finnick had only vaguely noticed, busy with things with Annie and with training. But he was seriously starting to wonder if he hadn’t missed a lot going on right under his nose. It didn’t help that neither Haymitch nor Johanna was exactly an open book, even to a close friend.

Thinking about it, about the two of them, once he got past the initial surprise it made some sense. Honestly too, he’d sort of hoped for years that Johanna could find some kind of happiness because he was guiltily aware of how much he’d hurt her by falling in love with Annie instead of her. As for Haymitch? It wasn’t as though Finnick didn’t know how bleakly lonely he was, and even having Katniss and Peeta there now wasn’t the same thing as having something for himself. Though he could only say, They’re either going to keep each other sane or kill each other. Not much in between. Well, if they were keeping it quiet he’d respect that, but he could at least try to let them know he was on to it so if they needed someone to talk to or the like, he’d be available. After all, they knew full well how good he was at keeping secrets, he thought with a wry smile.

All right, so there was also some self-interest in getting involved in this and trying to sound it out. He didn’t want to end up caught in the middle of it, stuck uncomfortably between two people he cared about, if they fucked the whole matter up.

He kissed Annie goodbye as she went to go help out in the hospital ward, learning from Katniss’ mother and from the doctors here, and he went to training as usual. They were due for a briefing again that afternoon with an update on Two, but for now it was the same stuff as ever, field training and the like. The morning they spent on hand-to-hand combat, and Finnick grabbed Haymitch for it, spying the opportunity and seeing Haymitch eye Homes, figuring he’d better speak up.

Wrapping up his hands, Haymitch said lightly, “Taking it easy today by tackling the old fella, Finn?”

“Oh, you’re a crafty bastard in hand-to-hand,” Finnick returned. “We all saw you and Brutus, after all, and he’s no slouch.”

Haymitch shrugged, stretching out his shoulders. “And what you’re really wanting to ask, the reason you jumped all over a chance to talk to me pri--all right, sort of privately,” he amended, glancing around at the others busy with their own preparations, “is what, precisely?”

No bullshitting Haymitch, as usual. “You and Johanna. You’re...involved?”

Haymitch gave a low sigh, looking again to see if anybody was close enough to overhear them. “It’s sex, Finnick, that’s all. Don’t think you can much begrudge us that.”

He didn’t. After everything they went through in the Capitol, to say nothing of before that, he wasn’t going to judge on that basis. But his glib assessment of it didn’t quite ring true. “You seem a good bit closer than only fucking each other, Haymitch.”

Grey eyes flashed in irritation and Haymitch’s shoulders tightened as he said sharply, “You looking to plan the wedding or what? There ain’t gonna be one, so you can just relax. She’s my friend and we happen to be sleeping together at present. Case closed. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what you told yourself back when it was the two of you. You definitely didn’t fall in love with her, now did you?”

It was a deliberate blow and Finnick couldn’t help the spark of temper, at being reminded of how he’d hurt her. He’d been young and stupid and he hadn’t realized exactly how much she cared for him behind her indifferent facade until after he told her about Annie and it was too late to fix things. “You’re not eighteen and dumb like I was, Haymitch,” he snapped back, “so you’ve got no excuse to hurt her by making her th...”

“She doesn’t think I love her,” Haymitch cut him off neatly as they stood and started practicing the fighting techniques. “And she sure as hell doesn’t love me. She’s thankfully a lot smarter than that.”

“You’re seriously not even entertaining the idea?” Finnick asked, throwing a jab that was neatly blocked.

Haymitch’s voice went lower as he replied. “OK, so apparently being happily married and all that has you wanting everyone to go out and have the same. But any woman thinking I’m enough obviously needs her sanity or her standards questioned.” He said it matter-of-factly, not looking for pity or the like. “I’m forty-one, Finn. That’s about ten years past the notion of reasonably starting over. I left too much in the arena and they took even what I had left after that. If there was alcohol in this miserable shithole of a district I’d probably be drinking. I can fuck just fine but trying for anything real ain't happening easily--you already know that from experience, sorry about that.” Yeah, Finnick remembered, and he knew how Johanna had coped too when it came to sex. “They put so much venom in me that sometimes I still see shit that isn’t there.” That was news, though given Annie’s episodes and how he’d been dealing with them ever since she came out of the arena, because he loved her, he was hardly going to kick up a fuss about it. “So no, I am not seriously entertaining the idea of putting any woman through that, let alone one like Jo that’s already been through plenty.”

Put like that, as things Finnick had to accept were in fact true, it was hard to argue, but it was such a bleak portrait, all the very worst of Haymitch and none of the good. “You don’t put much faith in yourself, do you? You took Jo and I on and tried to protect us as best you could. You got Katniss and Peeta out alive from the arena. You started a fucking revolution, Haymitch, and put yourself in that arena to keep Peeta alive for her. You’re obviously capable of caring, and protecting people, even if you don’t want to admit it.”

“Sure, I’ll be good to her, as best I can. That doesn’t mean I’ll be good for her,” Haymitch insisted. “I’m too old. Mostly, I’m too fucked up. Maybe that’s what she needs right now, to get through some of what we went through, but it ain’t gonna help her in the long run.” He shook his head, giving Finnick a faint smile. “You’re still good enough to be able to be happy. To hope for things, to get married, have a baby, all of that. Don’t take it as an insult. I’m really fucking glad you can. But you went back to Four after you won, and you had your family and the rest of your district, you had multiple other victors there to help you cope, and then soon enough you had Annie to get you through the eleven months of the year you weren’t at the Games. You always had a good shot at producing another victor each year too. You’ve never had to know what it’s like to be alone.”

That was true enough. He had been the sixth living victor from Four when he moved into the house in Victors' Bayou. With Annie and then Darla, there had been eight and they all looked out for each other, Mags obviously the head of things. He’d had his family in those years, though the thought of them now brought such a swell of grief he could barely handle it. And he’d had Annie, her smile and her touch helping wash away the filth he was forced to wallow in while he was in the Capitol. “Now, Johanna. Dead family, of course. Her entire district sort of moved away from her once they started believing she was vicious and unhinged. Blight was barely able to handle her those first few years because anything to do with the whoring circuit was prone to give him an episode.” Finnick remembered seeing the big Seven victor and how he freaked out like Annie sometimes, and he’d heard why. At least he’d never been misused quite that badly by any of his patrons. “And Cedrus was past forty even when I won, so he’s a good forty-five years older than her, and he’s never really understood women.” Given that he liked other men, that was sort of understandable. “So, not like either of them was really there for her as regular support. No boyfriend either, for that matter, and Seven's tributes are usually almost as bad as Twelve's. She had nobody.”

“And then there’s you,” Finnick said, figuring that was all that needed to be said. Dead family, dead girlfriend. The only Twelve victor, totally alone in the Village, rejected by his own district, his tributes' gruesome deaths every year pretty much a foregone and hopeless conclusion. His sheer isolation over more than twenty years was something that pretty much everyone in Mentor Central had expressed sympathy for, given that they all figured it was a good bit of why Haymitch was so badly broken down.

“And then there’s me,” he agreed with a wry smile. “Being left alone to deal with everything, it fucks you up plenty, Finn. She and I, we both know what that’s like and we’re not prone to criticize on the results. So that’s what we’re doing, especially after all that crap in the Detention Center. Just...not being alone. It ain’t love, no, but it’s something at least.” He looked Finnick in the eyes and admitted, “It’s about what we can manage. Hopefully she’ll move on to better than that eventually, find someone who can actually make her happy.”

The way he immediately dismissed that it could be him made Finnick think he was possibly selling himself short, but he wasn’t going to start an argument about it. Not when he’d been respectful enough to offer it up pretty straightforward like this, rather than deflecting the question by being cynical or sarcastic. It was opening himself up a bit to scrutiny and Finnick could see by the tension in Haymitch that maybe some part of him was afraid that Finnick was going to judge or ridicule.

He was trying not to, even if he wanted to say, And I know how both of you are under your oh-so-tough bullshit, how badly you both coped with being lonely. She fucked around and you drank yourself stupid because of it, and you think after that you won’t get attached to someone who understands you, who accepts you? You’ll be able to just walk away? How the hell do you think this ends without one or both of you getting hurt? But he could see Haymitch was going to be stubborn on it, refusing to consider the idea seriously. Finnick could talk at him all day long and get nowhere. He’d have to come to believe it for himself, if possible.

He sighed and nodded. “All right, I get it.” It struck him that in offering up an open answer like that, explaining it that thoroughly, it was maybe even possible Haymitch was looking for some kind of advice or opinion on it. Not that he’d admit it openly. “So out of curiosity, what happens when she does move on and hopefully gets married, and Katniss and Peeta are married too, having kids, all that?” He couldn’t resist challenging him a little bit, seeing if clever Haymitch had looked ahead enough to figure that one out.

Haymitch shrugged diffidently, though the way he didn’t quite look at Finnick said plenty. “Suppose I’ll get a dog or something, I don’t know. Least now I’ve got the kids so I know they’ll take care of things when I die, and I actually managed to do something halfway worthwhile with my life in the end, so all in all, it’s not looking too bad compared to a few years ago.”

“For fuck’s sake, Haymitch.” It was so depressing Finnick could barely stand it, to try to give hope and freedom to so many people all across Panem and be so willfully unable to take any at all for himself. “Tell me you’re not planning on dying in the attack.”

“Nah. I’ve got Cinna and Effie’s trial after that to deal with,” Haymitch reminded him. Admittedly Finnick had forgotten about that. Haymitch hadn’t really mentioned it lately. He wondered if he’d been talking about it with Johanna.

But Finnick didn’t ask the obvious question in reply: And what then? When there’s no urgent cause that needs you? When it’s just you alone again watching everyone else have lives and raise families and you’re left thinking about the life you never got to have thanks to Snow? He didn’t ask it, because in some ways he was afraid of the answer. Having seen Haymitch so focused and lively of late, it was going to be hard to see him start to fade away again, and Finnick suspected that was what would happen. “Take it from me, thinking you’re just leaning on someone because you’re not capable of better can become a lot more than that.” Annie had crept up on him too, slowly making him realize how much he needed her and how much he cared for her, how much he wanted to be good enough for her given what he’d become, and eventually coming to see that in her eyes, he was worthy of love. After her own Games he’d had to do the same for her, be her anchor and convince her that she was still someone worthwhile. After that, there had never been need for doubt. They had saved each other. “If you need to talk or the like, “ he offered, trying to let it go at that. "After all, the way I see it, if you're happy, you're not going to be filling your time with your usual crazy schemes, so there you have it." He couldn’t force hope on him. That was going to have to be up to Johanna.

Unfortunately, after catching up with Johanna after lunch and pretending he hadn’t talked to Haymitch, he pretty much got the same story from her. It’s just sex, Finnick, because he can handle how messed up I am. Besides, he already has those two kids to deal with, and what we have between us isn’t ever going to become important enough to matter more than that for him. He pretty much told her the same--she was better than that, if she wanted to sound him out on things later, just ask.

With that on his mind, he wasn’t sure whether to feel frustrated or depressed for them. They obviously both cared more than they realized, and there was enough trust between them they turned to each other while they were trying to rebuild what they could of how they’d been broken down in the torture cells. He also wasn’t sure whether he could do all that much to help things out at this point, given how adamant they were about not believing in anything beyond just helping each other cope for the time being. It wasn’t like either of them was the sort to talk about it either, so he resolved to check in on it, see if he could grease the wheels a bit in the future by helping the two idiots get some points across. Right now there was no use in pushing it, and mostly he was left just sitting back and hoping they didn’t accidentally hurt each other in the bargain.

Left considering all the ways the arena and Snow had taken two good kids and turned them into two utterly messed-up adults who’d been beaten down enough that they were too closed off and afraid to even accept a chance maybe existed for them to be happy, he went to Plutarch’s briefing. What they saw there didn’t help, coming into it with that frame of mind. Seeing the holographic display map of some of the Capitol streets and hearing Plutarch talk about the defenses contained in the pods denoted by candy-bright dots, some of which he had designed, he almost wanted to laugh at the sick irony of it.

How many pieces of themselves would they have to leave behind to get out of this new arena? He’d lost Mags in the last arena, a wound that hadn’t healed, and he was so thankful in that moment that Annie had been deemed unfit for field combat and he wouldn’t have to worry about losing her too.

But what would it cost the rest of them? Peeta and Katniss could fall prey to the snare Haymitch had carefully helped them escape twice before, of a situation where the two of them couldn’t possibly both survive. Haymitch and Johanna had so much taken already, but love or not, they were still good enough friends he knew one of them watching the other die might be the one final, unbearable thing. Given their attachments, he suddenly wondered how the hell had they ended up as a squad together in this place where duty and detachment were everything. It must have been Plutarch pushing for it, looking for the great propo angle. “Mutts and traps. Well, you’ve got the right team for the job, Plutarch,” he commented, trying to not let on about his feelings on the matter. “We five,” he nodded to the victors,”are all veterans at that.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, let the 76th Hunger Games begin,” Johanna added with a cynical laugh, folding her arms over her chest and sitting back in her chair.

Plutarch looked a little unsettled at the dark mood liberally tinged with anger that was coming from his so-called Victory Squad. “Well, it’s not quite like the Games. Of course you’ll have knowledge of where the pods are going into it, and what danger they contain, so that’ll help you. And naturally you’re not going to be expected to be the lone survivor at the end, the objective here is totally different...” He trailed off, glancing around and seeing that he’d obviously lost his audience.

“Oh, naturally,” Haymitch said mockingly. “Killing your squad members on camera is probably frowned upon in this case. All right, Plutarch, good enough, we’ll take it from here.” With that, Plutarch beat a hasty retreat, and Boggs instructed them to all start studying the map. Peeta asked for paper and a pencil and Finnick saw that he immediately began making a sketch of it.

“You’ll have to leave that drawing here in Command, Mellark,” Boggs told him. “That holo-map is considered confidential information.”

“Yes, all right, I get that,” Peeta said distractedly, pencil flying over the paper, “it’s just that this helps me visualize it, get a better understanding.”

When he and Katniss stepped forward to more closely study the holo-map, he asked her quietly, “How am I supposed to tell Annie about this?” About him going back into yet another arena with its dangers? She’d already told him that watching him from Mentor Central had been almost unbearable for her, and she worried about him going to the Capitol.

“You don’t,” she muttered back. “I’m not gonna tell my ma. They already know we’re going into a combat zone, Finnick, and it’ll be dangerous. Even if we’re just there for the propos. No cause to make ‘em worry all the more.” She was probably right about that.

With his mind full of those far less lucky in life and the situation he’d be facing in the Capitol, his hug for Annie in their room after dinner was particularly lingering. “I love you, and I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he told her, because it was true. Without her he would have been so lost, and he could imagine now how dark a place that would be.

He found himself lying on the bed while she rubbed his tense shoulders, commenting teasingly, “You’ve got enough knots in here to make an entire net, Finnick.”

So he told her about Haymitch and Johanna, knowing she wouldn’t tell anyone else, but she was his wife and talking to her about something like that nagging his mind helped. He didn’t tell her about the pods, though. That was a problem she couldn’t help him with, and Katniss was right, there was no point making her worry. “Well,” Annie said thoughtfully, “they trust you enough to talk about it with you a little. They’ll probably come to you again if need be. Best thing to do is wait and see, let them work it out at their own pace. Didn't happen overnight with us either. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it usually doesn’t much hurt either.”

Chapter Text

Mornings for them, after close to two weeks, were pretty much routine now. Wake up, shower, being sure to scrub off the purple schedule ink from wherever it had ended up, be ready to go in time for breakfast. This morning, Johanna had her back turned to Haymitch so he could wash the ink off from where it had smeared just under her shoulders. “They must not even sleep in the same bed,” Johanna joked, “or else the laundry workers would probably be bitching so much about purple on their pajamas and their sheets that they’d have to do something smarter for schedules.”

He had been surprised they ended up in the same bed after that first night when they accidentally fell asleep together, but neither of them questioned it since then and so it continued. To be honest, it meant he slept pretty well, even without sleep syrup. He could remember the dreamy haze of half-awareness, waking enough to feel someone else there, knowing he was safe and she had his back, and being able to go back to sleep. No, he wasn’t going to bring it up, insist on knowing what it meant, and possibly have her put an end to it in an ensuing awkwardness. Some things shouldn’t be questioned, simply accepted.

So instead he shook his head, laughing a little, wiping the ink off her scarred skin and watching the purple-tinged swirls of water go down the drain. Sex Thirteen-style and how awful it must be was becoming an old joke with the two of them. “I’m sure there’s an adjustment period for immigrants from other districts, sure. I’m surprised they don’t have a training class for appropriate sexual protocol.” He brushed his fingertips over the spot where the ink had been, resisting the urge to kiss her there. “All clear, by the way.”

Johanna snickered. “You mean telling people from Two that combining fighting and sex is a breach of protocol? Love to see how that goes down.”

“They do that?” he asked, reaching for the washcloth himself, rubbing at the smear of ink on his shoulder.

“It’s part of their wedding rituals, apparently. Enobaria told me at Finn’s wedding.” Well, Brutus had never told him, but then, they’d never talked about weddings. Given that Haymitch was never going to get married and Brutus didn’t feel like he had the right to marry, it wasn’t exactly a popular topic. “Kittycat told me about your thing too, with the toast. They’d scream about that here. Wasting food, consuming it in your living quarters, and all that crap.”

Johanna and him talking wedding stuff. Finnick would be beside himself with joy at that notion. Not that he didn’t appreciate the attempt at a pep talk and the offer of some support, but Finn was young and he was in love so of course he was optimistically trying to see love all around him. To still be like that after all he’d been through was a gift so Haymitch wouldn’t knock him for it. But it meant he didn’t quite understand that some things were too broken, too ragged, and they didn’t mend. Steering it back off weddings carefully, not asking what they did in Seven because he’d find out someday anyway when she got married, he backtracked. “Yeah, I could see fighting turning into sex with Two easy enough.” Given their pride in their fighting prowess and how courtship pretty much involved both parties proving they could keep up with each other, it wasn’t a big leap of logic.

“You think in Four their thing is having sex in the water?” she joked.

“Gotta be. Or something really kinky with all those fishing knots.” Warming to the joke as he rinsed the soap off his skin, he said thoughtfully, “Three. I’m betting on sex in a simulator program.”

“Ugh, don’t make me think about Beetee fucking someone, Haymitch. Ten. Absolutely gotta be doing it dog-style. Though with them it’d be cattle-style or horse-style or whatever.”

“Nine. Out in the fields.”

“Six. On a train or a hovercraft. Extra points for doing it in the bathroom.” She shut off the shower and tossed him a towel.

“Seven,” he said, “is pretty obvious. Up against a tree. Or maybe under one.” He had a flash of memory then, of pinning her up against a tree in the arena and kissing her, and it had been totally an act. But the idea of doing that for real now stirred a definite sense of interest.

“Yeah, you’ve got it. So, Twelve?” she asked, cocking her head aside and looking at him with an amused smirk. “You guys have what, rolling around in coal dust?”

With that he was remembering the slag heap, how kids ended up kissing and fooling around out there, and remembering too the chariot “costume” of nothing but black powder-covered skin. Not an avenue he wanted to pursue mentally. “No,” he said idly, turning towards another notion. “Working down in the mines with those lamps that go out sometimes, and given how we had to ration out the candles at home, we’d definitely be the district that does it by touch, in the dark. Or blindfolded, I suppose." She’d look good by candlelight, or sunlight too, he thought, wanting to imagine seeing her in anything that wasn’t Thirteen’s harsh, artificial fluorescents.

She turned away then, digging through the drawers for some clean underwear, but not before he saw some of the humor had faded from her expression. He realized what he had said and mentally slapped himself for an idiot. He never knew what stupid little thing could shatter the good mood of a moment, but it happened. Things would go well and then suddenly they wouldn’t, tipping over into awkwardness or even anger.

After Lights Out, they always just went to sleep. It was difficult enough still, even if they were slipping back into the old defensive habits somewhat less. Though it happened anyway and they were getting better at drawing each other back from it. But that was because he could see her, watch for the signs of her starting to lose it, and she could do the same for him.

Blind in the dark, he felt like anything could happen, and most any option wasn’t a good one. They both hated the dark anyway. They could forget themselves. Mostly, they could forget who they were with. Unable to see her, he might not always remember he was with Johanna. He could end up mocking any protests at how he touched her or fucked her because with his patrons the resistance was always just for show, they wanted him to laugh and insist, Oh, you’re saying no but we both know better, don’t we?. She could flip out and end up more violent in bed than anything Two could dream up. Or, hell, she could cry out Finnick when she came, and somehow that would be worse than any bruise or scratch she could deal out.

He’d learned in his arena the dark was no friendly place for him, that he could only sleep well given the knowledge he wasn’t alone and defenseless against whatever might come for him. Somehow, the curve of her body against him gave the same certainty the hilt of a knife in his hand had before, and a deeper comfort besides. Without having to discuss it they’d apparently agreed to stay away from the issue of things in the pitch-black after ten thirty, and he’d just opened the door again with a thoughtless comment. He also knew trying to salvage it was only going to make things worse, so he just sighed and got dressed, wishing he hadn’t opened his mouth there.

At Command for the morning briefing, they sat in on a feed from Two. Apparently the loyalists had already been thrown back from several of the villages they’d captured, including Granite Pass. Their squad leader let Brutus and Enobaria on the comm for a minute after her report, and the two of them had dirt-smudged faces that were bruised and scratched, but they looked satisfied as two well-fed cats. They were in their element, fighting for something worthy. “Well, hurry up and get your asses out here to finish the job,” Brutus said with a grin, “we’ve got you that window of opportunity.”

“We’ve got ‘em on the run for now,” Enobaria agreed. Unspoken was the notion that if they delayed too long and the loyalists made another strong push, they could possibly recapture the Pass again, so getting the attack going was a very good idea. “Colonel Klein says we’ll be following them and trying to mop them up some more before they can regroup. There’s some places they might try to hunker down to ready for winter.”

“May the odds be ever in your favor,” Johanna called back lazily to her in an overdone Capitol accent.

Enobaria laughed in reply at that. “Fuck the odds, let’s go make our own. Good luck.”

With that the feed from Two cut out and Coin looked around the table. “Clearly the time to strike is now, so with that, I’ll be issuing an order for all available squads to ship out in the morning. Including yours, Squad 22.”

Haymitch looked around and saw the looks of satisfaction. This was what they’d been waiting for, endured all the crap here in Thirteen in order to have. “Colonel Boggs, to preserve the chain of command in case of your death or injury, Soldier Homes is to be considered your official second-in-command.”

Homes usually looked pretty unruffled, but a vague expression of surprise flickered across his face at that. “I would have figured you’d have wanted H--” Katniss started, but Haymitch cut her off with a sharp gesture, sensing what she was going to say and seeing from the look on Coin’s face that she was apparently expecting and even wanting an argument. “Homes,” Katniss recovered admirably and immediately, which must be Peeta’s influence on her lately, “because Tobias is the most senior soldier of the squad next to Boggs, and he knows how protocol of your squads works.”

“Of course,” Coin said briskly. “Squad 22 dismissed, be ready to report to the hovercraft bay at 0730 tomorrow. I imagine Heavensbee will have instructions for you during your training today regarding your on-camera duties.”

Haymitch was sure he would, but up on the firing range, as they all hurriedly pulled on their leather shooting gloves against the chill of late autumn creeping in their fingers, Homes and the Leeg twins moved immediately to the targets. The victors dawdled at cleaning and assembling their rifles, being excessively thorough. That was mainly so they could talk.

Now Katniss spoke up in earnest the thing she’d been trying to say back in Command. “I’d have figured you for the logical second-in-command, Haymitch.”

“Me in a position of authority, sweetheart?” he said lightly. “I do a lot better rebelling against it.”

“She’s right, though,” Finnick said. “You’re senior victor here, you and Plutarch worked together to plan the extraction from the arena. You’ve been involved in some of the high-level stuff in a way none of us have, and Homes certainly hasn’t. When it comes to making the plans, you’re the guy for the job.”

“I’m not sure how Homes is at strategy,” Peeta agreed, “but he doesn’t seem like he’s in favor of stepping up and taking charge. He’s an incredible sniper, don’t get me wrong.”

Haymitch just shrugged. “So Coin’s pulling rank and making sure one of the natives gets the job. Whatever. Doesn’t really matter, because are any of us really planning on sticking with this little propo squad past the first good opportunity to make a break for it and go after Snow?” He glanced around him and saw the expressions: Johanna’s satisfaction, Finnick’s amusement, Peeta and Katniss’ surprise and guilt. “Oh come on,” he told them, “as if I don’t know how you two work.” Katniss in particular made it pretty obvious how pissed off she’d been at being stuck on propo duty.

“You actually weren’t going to invite us on the assassination squad?” Johanna mocked. “I’m hurt, Kittycat. You too, Hotbuns.” Katniss let out a little squawk of indignation at her nickname for Peeta, though Haymitch was chuckling. Or was that actually laughter from Katniss? “We’ve got just as much right to be there to take him down as you.” Maybe even more, Haymitch thought, but he wasn’t going to start the argument. They all deserved a share of that mission, that much was clear.

“All right, so we’ll just wait for an opportunity,” Peeta said. “Maybe try to get our hands on that holo because it’ll be so much better than our paper maps, but...” He grinned in satisfaction. “I recopied the holo-map back in our compartment, and that’ll be better than nothing if we can’t.” They all stared at him in amazement. “I wasn’t kidding, you know. Drawing something really helps fix the image of it in my head.”

“He’s really good at it,” Katniss said with an obvious smug pride in her boyfriend and his abilities. Kids, Haymitch thought with a snort of amusement. Though he couldn’t help the followup thought to that of, Don’t ever change.

“All right, so we’ve got our plan at least,” Finnick said cheerfully. Haymitch didn’t point out that with several of them wanting to kill Snow, who actually got the honors when the time came was going to be interesting. Didn’t much matter to him, honestly--so long as Snow ended up dead.

The rest of the day passed by with the usual training, the Peacekeeper dummies out on the range covered with a flood of red as their shots burst the bloodbags in the chinks of their body armor. He was pleased enough with his improving accuracy, but on the whole he’d seen too many bodies bleeding out on the screens of Mentor Central in so many ways to take much pleasure in the sight itself.

In the afternoon they got to deal with the hassle of Thirteen bureaucracy again, forms in triplicate and everything, at the quartermaster’s. They each got issued a field uniform, and he was relieved for that because it didn’t have the high collar of their training jumpsuits. He hated that fucking collar, pressing in tightly on his throat and making him think of the rope that had almost been there. He’d gotten yelled at by the trainers for not having it zipped all the way up, just like he got chewed out for not tucking in his shirt.

Issued their clothing, boots, general survival kit, and an actual rifle meant for live rounds rather than the fakes with squibs they’d been firing up on the range, they were told to keep back one uniform and a pair of boots for the morning. The rest got handed right back to the quartermaster as they signed the forms, and with that they each received a metal tag on a chain engraved with their last name and a number. His, he saw with a glance, was 22-001. Squad 22, first member listed on the roster, presumably. “Abernathy” was pretty high up in the alphabet, after all. “Keep this with you to find your pack in the morning from the cargo hovercraft. Your gear packet will be there with the rest of your squad’s shit, and it’ll be tagged with your serial number.” The harried-looking man gestured behind him to the walls filled with numbered cubbeyholes, many of which were now stuffed with gear. “We’ll be getting this all to the loading bay for the morning, and I’ve got plenty behind you to add to it. You’re done, so scram.”

They all had a sign-off to skip the standard haircut. That exception had Plutarch’s fingerprints all over it. Wouldn’t do for the Mockingjay to show up on camera with a severe buzz cut rather than her signature braid, and of course making Finnick look less pretty was never a plus in the eyes of a Capitol camera. “Not like Haymitch and I need a haircut anyway,” Johanna observed dryly, running her fingers through the short spikes of her hair.

Dinner was pretty quiet. Cinna and Effie joined them, maybe seeing this was the last chance for a meal together for a while. Effie looked better, Haymitch noticed. She was burbling excitedly to Katniss about the outfits she and Cinna were designing for the victory celebrations. “Because on a day like that you should look better than these dreadful uniforms.” Nobody pointed out the fact that there was always a chance one of them wouldn’t come back alive for that celebration. It would be too much of a smack in the face at this point.

Peeta put an arm around Katniss’ shoulders and smiled. “I’ll look forward to seeing it.”

“Of course we’re working on one for you too, Johanna,” Effie said next, and the excitement she was showing at that was bigger than any enthusiasm he’d ever seen her show for escort duties. Johanna’s eyebrows rose and for a split-second, there was an expression of giddy enthusiasm on her face that she quickly concealed, but not before Haymitch saw it. He wanted to laugh, remembering her talking to Katniss about that blue dress in the elevator of the Training Center. So even tomboy Johanna liked the idea. Good for her. That he could recall, she hadn’t gotten to wear anything simply pretty and flattering; it was either taken from her aggressively showing off her body to dissuade buyers and therefore it was skimpy and skintight like her interview dress, or else it was something taken from the “dominating bitch” look they’d made her adopt as a whore, leather and corsets and things like that.

He leaned over to Cinna. “Looks like you’ve worked wonders on someone else,” he said softly, nodding to Effie, describing the dress to Johanna, who was making only a vague pass at pretending to not be interested.

Cinna smiled. “She needed to feel like she could make something better in some way, that was all.” And obviously training for war wouldn’t have been her thing. He wouldn’t have been the person to help pull her back. Hell, he could hardly manage himself some days, so he was glad Cinna could be that person. “She’s actually got a really good eye.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” he said dryly, remembering all the years of comically overdone wigs and makeup.

“If you somehow happen to see my mother while you’re in the Capitol?” Cinna said carefully.

“She’s still there?” he said with some surprise.

“As far as I know. I haven’t talked to her since before the Games, obviously, but she had said my father was obliging her to stay. He was irritated she even had to go to Eight and risk the Reaping.”

“If we see her we’ll do what we can,” he promised. He hoped like hell that having an important politician as her protector would have kept Taffeta Locke alive and out of suspicion, when having a son arrested and sentenced to execution for treason couldn’t help her case.

“I made sure to keep the traces of what I did away from her,” Cinna assured him. “That way the only person that would get hurt was me.” Then you’re a smarter man than I’ve been all these years, he thought tiredly.

That wasn’t quite true. Portia died for it, of course, and he glanced away as she appeared right on cue, standing behind Cinna, looking at her lover sorrowfully. But she had gone into it willingly, knowing what it might cost. She’d been an actual participant, not just an innocent victim like those Haymitch apparently kept getting caught in his web of intrigue.

He nodded, not wanting to argue the point on it, not at a time like this. “If I see Taff, I’ll give her your love, of course. Let her know you’re safe here.”

“Thanks,” Cinna said, grasping him on the shoulder for a second, looking at him with those calm green eyes. “Stay safe out there, Haymitch.”

“Apparently I’ve got a victory celebration to attend, so you know I will,” he said, not telling Cinna about the trial that would happen. He had enough worries on his plate right now, just trying to recover from what had been done to him, taking on the responsibility of looking after Effie too. He’d tell him after the Capitol was taken, and tell Cinna that he’d been preparing for it, ready to help however he could. He wasn’t willing to lose on that score and see a truly good man sacrificed. But that could keep for now. There was the Capitol to deal with first.

He didn’t say anything about the whole misstep in the morning discussion to Johanna, trying to sense whether it really needed an apology or not. Usually it didn’t, they preferred to simply move past those awkward moments, and back in their compartment she kissed him so apparently it was forgiven.

She definitely surprised him not too much later, though, when instead of things going as usual, she rolled onto her back, pulling him over her. From the glimpse he caught of her expression, she maybe even surprised herself, but she quickly buried her face in the crook of his neck. For a second he lay there, stunned, feeling how tense she was, how her fingers were so tight on his shoulders even her short nails were digging in, how she was breathing hard and quick in a way that had nothing to do with arousal. “Jo,” he said, trying to ease off her but her nails only dug in deeper, gouging in to the point of pain, holding him there. He was stronger and he could have pushed away easily, but mostly he was trying to figure out what was going on in her mind. “Jo, hey, you don’t have to...” he tried again. She made an impatient, guttural noise in her throat, hips rising in wordless insistence against his: Fuck me already and get it over with.

Not like this, where she was simply rigidly enduring it to prove some kind of a point. No pleasure to be had in that for either of them. But wherever she’d retreated mentally, even hearing him say her name wasn’t helping call her back like it often did. Maybe they’d called her Jo too, he didn’t know.

But it tugged at a memory, words said raggedly through that air vent to him the night before they thought they were going to die. So he tried again. “Hanna,” he said in her ear. None of them would have called her that. He didn’t even know if she’d told Finnick that. He wouldn’t say she exactly snapped out of it in full, but the worst edge of panic seemed to disappear. When he raised his head and looked at her, she was looking back and she was here instead of lost in her own head. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, “to prove something to me.”

She gave a grumble of irritation and her response was all Johanna. “What makes you think I was doing it for you, idiot?”

He was glad to hear that. If she was doing it for her that was a lot easier to bear. “Fine, got it.” They’d try, at least, and he’d do his best to go easy on her. To be honest, that would be going easier on him too, to avoid echoes of all the patrons who’d wanted him to be just rough enough to be a little wicked. Though once he was inside her, weight up on his hands, wanting give her more room so she wouldn’t feel pinned down or stifled by him, she cocked an eyebrow and smirked at him. I don’t need you to go too easy on me, her expression said.

“What’s gotten into you tonight, eh?” he asked.

“Looks like it’s you,” she cracked, raising her hips and settling him in even further. With that he just laughed, willing to let it go.

The whole thing didn’t go perfect, as with anything with the two of them. They were too broken down for that, and though it was slow and careful because it had to be, there was a certain self-conscious awareness to that they couldn’t help, anxiously watching for where it got away from them or became too much to bear. Besides, anything really sweet and fine would be too much to withstand, pushing too hard at the aching and battered parts of them. Gentleness was something neither of them was supposed to want or to have, not knowing how to accept it, and so there was some care that it didn’t slip too far into that realm and wreck things in another way.

Still, they had learned to read each other somewhat, to say things with no need for the open vulnerability of words that made their damage all too embarrassingly obvious. They weren’t talkers, at least not when it didn’t involve the security of sarcasm. So when she nudged her hips hard against his, off the rhythm and catching his attention, and he looked down and saw the look on her face of Where are you? he realized he’d been slipping away again, his movements becoming automatic.

He kissed her, letting her know he was back. Here. Sorry.

When she tensed again, hands gripping too hard, he paused, not moving, looking at her. You all right? Need a minute?

After a little while her grip eased, and she moved a hand down his back in an idle caress, urging him on again. Yeah, OK.

It didn’t happen easily but the fact it could happen at all was a small victory for them both. Piece by piece, it seemed like they were slowly putting back together what remained of each other. When she was lying there, falling asleep with his arm around her, he tried to not think about what Finnick had kept trying to insist, that he was stubbornly ignoring a genuine chance. He wished there was more left of him to stitch up again because he couldn’t bear that growing longing that given time somehow he could become enough to have more, give her more than this. He couldn't even trust himself to be capable of giving Johanna one night without running into the burden of all his failings and frailties, how the hell could he think beyond that to something big as a lifetime? Senselessly howling at the moon like that was a lot more hurt in the end than simply accepting reality.

About the only thing left was to go to the Capitol and see those who’d ruined him taken down. He’d have be satisfied with justice for the past, if nothing else.

Katniss clung to Peeta as they moved together, as if she was trying to meld the two of them into one in every way tonight. Strands of her braid worked loose and falling down around her shoulders in black ribbons, her grey eyes were intent on him. Hearing her breathing change, feeling the way she gripped his shoulders harder and how she moved faster on him, he knew she was close. It didn’t take her long to cry out, movements becoming ragged against him, and he followed her soon after.

They lay there tangled together and tangled in the covers, breath slowly returning to normal. Thinking back on the ferocity of their lovemaking, he spoke up hesitantly. “You’re acting like you’re afraid we’ll never get to do this again, Katniss.”

“We’re going to war, Peeta,” she pointed out, voice barely above a whisper, “and even if they think we’re just a propo squad, we’re gonna have to fight to get to Snow. It’s going to be dangerous. They all know we’re coming there. They’ll be ready.”

He knew that. He’d known it when he signed up for training alongside Katniss. The thought of actually consciously taking a life still sat heavy on him. It troubled Johanna and Finnick and Haymitch and Katniss too, but they had crossed that bridge and knew what it was like. He was still on the other side of it, not wanting to go there but knowing he might have to do it. He had to keep Katniss and the rest of them safe, and he couldn’t ask them to do all the killing for him to spare him, not with everything they’d already been through. He wouldn’t buy his own soul at the price of someone else’s.

At heart he knew he’d kill if he had to, if someone was trying to kill him, and this was different from the Games. But the thought haunted him all the same, just like it had that night before they first went into the arena, wondering how it would change him if he somehow improbably survived. How it had haunted him too when the Quell card was read, before he and Haymitch came up with their plan and he was afraid he might be forced to fight again. This time, at least he knew what he was fighting for and why, and who his allies and his enemies were. That was a certainty that he could build upon in a way he couldn’t with the sheer madness of the Games.

“We’ll fight, and we’ll win,” he said. “Because we’ve done this before, Katniss, we’ve tried to say goodbye because we thought one or the other of us wasn’t coming back alive.” Once as awkward district partners, once as friends and almost-lovers. “But this time we’re together, and neither of us has to die, and I am not letting this be the last night we have together, do you hear me? So I’m not saying goodbye, and I’m not making love to you afraid it might be the final time. I’m saying I love you, Katniss Everdeen, and I want to have a very long, long life with you.”

She looked startled to see that kind of intensity from him, but then something in her expression shifted and she was smiling at him almost bashfully, seventeen and lithe and utterly gorgeous, and he loved how far down her blush went. “Is that a proposal, Peeta Mellark?”

“No,” he said honestly, smoothing a hand over her hair. “Not yet, because I don’t want to remember proposing to you in this stupid depressing compartment because we’re going to the Capitol tomorrow. I want it to be just us and no pressure from anything else.” He wanted to propose to her in Twelve, somewhere green and sunlit and familiar. He knew Twelve wasn’t much right now, but it was home and he wanted their life together to really begin there, for them to make it a place to believe in, together. He wanted to someday sit in the Meadow and weave flowers into the black waves of her hair again. He wanted to paint that picture too that was vivid in his mind of laughing, loving Katniss on the roof of the Training Center with her tumbledown hair and her crown of flowers. “But I love you, so much. And tonight isn’t going to be it for us, OK?”

She grinned at him, fingers tracing lazy patterns on his chest. “I do like hearing you talk like that, Peeta.” She propped herself up on a hand and leaned over him to kiss him. “I could stand to hear some more about how much you love me, though.”

He told her, with words and soft kisses all over her body, just how beautiful she was to him. This time, he felt the difference, the ragged edge of urgency relaxed as once again he felt her love rather than her fear. No, this wasn’t going to be the end. They’d keep each other alive in the Capitol, protect each other like they always had ever since she found him concealed on that riverbank. He’d keep faith in that.

Chapter Text

The first snow fell on the third day after their arrival at the Capitol, and they woke up to find the soldiers’ tent city faintly dusted with white, their footprints still easily scraping away the snow down to the ground. Haymitch had never seen the Capitol in winter. In a strange way it was almost a comfort, because they’d pitched the tents within sight of the train station where he’d never, ever arrived every summer without knowing he’d always leave a bit more of himself behind each time he left. That had been the case ever since he’d first been dragged here and not a damn thing had changed about that in two summers as a tribute and twenty-three as a mentor.

The rebel forces huddled around the space heaters and ate hearty stews and drank hot coffee and burrowed deeper into their heavy wool uniform overcoats during the day and their down-filled sleeping bags at night. Winter had come now and they still hadn’t captured the Capitol, but the air forces were grounded, so this would be a war gradually conducted by ground captured building by building, street by street.

“Victory” Squad, however, was left out in the cold, literally and figuratively. The only action they saw, aside from taking out a few low-level pod traps for propos, was taking the occasional potshot at windows and the like as footage to be spliced into the more exciting sections of the newsreels. If he got told one more time by Cressida what shot or action or expression, precisely, they needed from him, he was about ready to tell her where she could shove that fucking camera. To judge from the increasingly mutinous expressions on the faces of the other victors whenever the camera was shut off, they were feeling the same. Yeah, well, they’d all had to act for the cameras in their day, even Katniss and Peeta, and obviously they were all sick of it.

Then Soldier Tobias Homes died on the sixth day. They were out disarming yet another pod, one with muttation gnats of all the idiotic things, and the crack of a shot rang out. As they took cover, Haymitch saw that Homes’ blood and brains were spattered on the wall, and there wasn’t much where his skull had been. No hope for him. Apparently the Capitol sniper’s aim was true but he hadn’t been able to distinguish who was who in the squad, bundled up as they were, and had simply hoped that with a five of eight chance at taking out a victor, the odds were in his favor to kill a prime target.

Standing there plastered against a wall in the shadows of safe cover with Katniss looking at him with wide eyes, he wondered why the sniper hadn’t fired at the slighter, obviously female figures in hopes of killing Katniss. She was obviously the priority target for anyone from the Capitol, right? He looked at all four of the women. Samira and Pardala Leeg were rail-thin and almost as tall as him. But Johanna and Katniss were roughly both of a height, in their heavy winter layers and bulky grey overcoats Johanna’s recently recovered curves and Katniss’ lithe figure were hard to tell apart, and the knit caps they were all wearing neatly covered both Johanna’s sleek, short brown hair and Katniss’ long black braid. It would have been hard to tell them apart at a distance.

When they got back to camp and he spied the fine mist of red on the sleeve of his coat, he shuddered and reached down to grab a handful of snow and scrub at it. He’d been the next closest target to Homes. It could easily have been him. As he looked up the ghost of Homes was already there with his shattered head, his intact lips silently saying And it should have been you, and Haymitch felt the weight of him settle in to stay along with all the others.

But he realized maybe the sniper had seen exactly who he was shooting after all, and deliberately chose one of the non-victor members of the squad. Someone not too close to Katniss, someone therefore more emotionally expendable, but still capable of sending a sharp message. He probably didn’t aim at the women because they want to put a scare into Katniss by showing they can pick off her allies and still get to her when they choose, he realized. How very Snow-like.

Later that evening, back in the tent he’d shared with Homes, he was packing up his things, what personal items he had. Packing up for the dead was like instinct for him by now. He’d collected the few paltry items belonging to his tributes so many times over the years back in the Twelve apartments. Handed them back over to the families along with the white Capitol coffins. Not much, really, for all Homes had lived close to forty years past tribute age. A book, a few old photographs, an old and well-worn embroidered handkerchief with Homes’ initials and a herringbone pattern in black and red, maybe made by the hands of his wife who’d died years and years ago. Johanna embroidered, he remembered idly, or at least that was the story. Homes had a wife once but he’d never had any kids, like so many in Thirteen.

The standard Thirteen gear would be cleaned and reissued, of course. The things that mattered to Homes, the remnants of his life, fit into one box Haymitch got from the supply tent that was labeled on the side as being for “field issue boots, 1 pair, size 10, black”.

He wondered what it would be like someday for Katniss and Peeta when he was gone, packing up the few things that mattered to him. A braided leather wristband. A carved wooden pendant. A fiddle. The knife they’d given him from the arena. The quilt his ma had finished the week before he was reaped. So few things for his accumulation of years--nothing that had really come to matter to him since he was sixteen either. Everything he’d had since then was purely Capitol. No wife. No children. Nothing significant at all. His life could almost fit into “field issue boots, 1 pair, size 10, black” also.

Sitting on his sleeping bag, trying to not dwell on how the damp cold was reminding him of how he’d never been able to get warm in that cell either, he stared at Homes’ box and wondered who would claim it, if anyone. When Boggs came into the tent, he nodded towards Homes’ side and asked the colonel, “Did he have kin?”

“They checked the records when I made the notification. He’s got a sister.”

“Good.” Someone who gave a damn. It struck him then that Boggs had actually come to visit. “I assume you’re not just here to help pack. Didn’t take long.”

“Thank you for doing that,” Boggs said with a slight nod. “You’re official 2-i-c now, Abernathy.” At Haymitch’s uncomprehending look at what he heard as too I see he explained, “Second in command for the squad. The approval came on it. You’re pretty much the logical choice.”

“Wonderful,” he muttered, feeling the heaviness of that, the knowledge that he was officially responsible for getting them all back alive now rather than just pushed to it by his own conscience and its obligations, but too tired to argue with Boggs about it tonight that he was anything but the logical choice. Not with the shadow of death so close and so dark as it was, looking at that sad, small box that represented a man’s life. He’d protest it tomorrow, tell him that anyone would be more suited, Finnick or Peeta especially, someone who was patient and compassionate and mostly, someone who they could actually trust to keep people alive.

Boggs gave him another long look, hesitated for a minute as if wanting to say more, but said, “Report is that we’ll get a new squad member tomorrow. Good night.”

“‘Night.” His watch wasn’t for a few hours yet. He’d deliberately picked the middle of the night for it, knowing the worst terrors would come in the dark. Look how even in the jungle arena he’d been woken up in the middle of the night by those Gamemaker-controlled jets of flame. Even with a watch posted everywhere around the camp, knowing nothing should be able to surprise him here in the tent, he still slipped the knife loose from its sheath, feeling the solid security of its handle tight in his grasp as he curled up in his sleeping bag, not wanting to sleep.

He missed Johanna, had gotten used to her being there and sharing a bed with him. The sex, sure, he missed that and how they’d gradually been getting less anxiously self-aware at it. But he also wistfully remembered falling asleep with the reassuring warmth of her right there too, and the way he could actually pass the night soundly because of it. She was sharing Katniss’ tent now, though, and so he went to sleep holding a knife again instead of a woman, just like he had for so many years.

After Homes’ death and a man down, they were held back even from taking potshots at windows the next day. Boggs said irritably it was for “security reasons”, obviously growing as annoyed as the rest of them. Haymitch was pretty sure he saw some rolled eyes from some of the other soldiers, newly arrived on the train and heading right into the city, when they marched past Squad 22’s tent sites and saw the film crew having them all simply crouch around a space heater. They were doing their best to look fierce and intent on discussing something of gigantic importance to the battle plan. In other words, anything but themselves.

Their new member found them, and a familiar twang said, “So I’m joining your squad.”

Katniss’ head whipped around so fast it was a wonder the girl didn’t give herself whiplash, and she gasped, “Gale,” looking up at the tall figure standing there with his pack and his rifle.

Gale nodded to her. “Katniss.” From how tonelessly he said it, she could have been anyone to him, and he didn’t quite look at her either.

What the fuck? Not that he’d asked, but Haymitch had the impression that Gale and Katniss hadn’t exactly been too friendly-like since she chose Peeta. It was an unusual choice, to say the least, and one that gave him an odd feeling that he was trying to sort out. He didn’t like it, put it that way, and the almost palpable awkwardness as Katniss tried to tell Gale she was happy he was here and he answered her with monosyllables only increased his unease.

Boggs stared at Gale incredulously, growled, “I’ve got a phone call to make,” and stormed off towards the command tent, obviously ticked off. Apparently that left Haymitch in charge. Oh, goodie.

“Well, Finnick, hope you don’t feel threatened by someone almost as pretty as you being here,” Johanna mocked lazily.

Trying hard to not feel irritated at that comment from her and what it implied about himself and about Gale and the unsettling notion that maybe she’d be better off with someone like him anyway, he nodded to Gale. “Come on. You’re in my tent.” Gesturing for Gale to follow, he pulled back the flap and followed him in.

Gale dropped his pack and Haymitch wasted no time on bullshit. “Are we gonna have a problem here?” If Katniss wasn’t going to do it because she was too caught in the middle and Peeta was too nice, Haymitch could play the asshole. It was his natural role anyway.

Undoing the top flap of his pack, Gale gave a snort of amusement. “And why should we have a problem, Haymitch? It’s only my former best friend, the guy she dumped me for, and three other frickin’ Hunger Games victors who’ll always have their backs on anything, no question.”

“Not answering the question, boy. Let me rephrase. Given the incentive for you to have him out of the way, are you going to be reliable to protect Peeta like anyone else in this squad, or not?” It was a really rough question to have to ask, but it had to be asked with as awkward as things were. Haymitch could easily see a scenario for a ruthless mind to conjure where a grieving Katniss would turn to her old friend. He’d kept Katniss and Peeta two alive this long. He couldn’t lose either of them, and especially not like that. Yeah, Gale was Hazelle’s kid and Haymitch owed him for being part of the rescue team, but any Seam kid learned that their list of debts of honor to people had to come with a sense of priority, and Katniss and Peeta commanded a higher place. They always would. Simple as that.

“I can’t believe you even have the balls to ask a thing like that,” Gale snapped at him, pushing up off his knees and heading for the tent entrance. “You of all people, walking around and mouthing off to me that I’d better not have it in mind to let Peeta die, like you’re some fucking great protector of people yourself. How many kids did you let die over the years?”

After some seconds of grappling with the coals of his temper and losing, Haymitch followed him through the tent flap. There had been nothing self-serving at all in losing his tributes. He’d flayed himself for it so many times over the years, and now it was being used against him again, someone else from Twelve judging him for his utter helplessness. He was so damn sick of it, and some arrogant kid thinking it was remotely comparable to what he was asking and then casually blowing him off and walking away tipped him over the edge. He would never stop feeling the guilt of it on his own, so he hardly needed people who didn't have the first clue using it as a club to beat him down further.

Before he could even think about it, one flick of the wrist and now there was a knife quivering in the side of the space heater Gale was trying to warm his hands at, and it sparked briefly and died, with a faint burning smell rising in the air.

One of the Leegs protested, “That was government property!”

Finnick sighed, looked at it, and said, “That’ll be fun to explain to Supply.” Typical victor deadpan remark, so nonchalant about some destruction of property. That was pretty much a regular evening in Mentor Central towards the end of the Games, after all.

But Haymitch barely registered that comment because he’d caught Gale’s attention again and said, “You’re good-looking enough. Ever sell yourself to a Peacekeeper?”

“I would never...” Gale started angrily.

“You would never,” he agreed caustically. No, he had too much pride to sacrifice himself. He wondered where that line was drawn, where he would strip away his pride in order to avoid the suffering of someone else. Not other districts, that was for sure. Not the merchants of Twelve either, apparently, from Katniss’ remarks about him. The Seam? His own family? Would he refuse even then, too proud to bend even if it meant it broke everyone else around him?

“You had your hunting to keep all those siblings of yours fed, after all. Well, boy. Until you’ve been there, where you’ve got no choice left but to give up your pride and beg from the very people that you hate, where you’d say anything, where you’d do anything, where you’d submit to anything no matter how disgusting or degraded it is, just on the small off-chance it’ll please them and maybe get them to give you what you need to help keep someone you’re responsible for alive, you don’t get to fucking judge me.” It felt good, venting off all the frustrated and shameful years of being judged and disdained by people in Twelve for the things where they had no idea what the reality was like, things where he had to keep his mouth shut or risk all of them getting hurt. He only realized he was yelling at the very end of it, and that mostly from Katniss and Peeta’s startled expressions.

Gale was staring too, his expression a mix of chagrin, anger, and awkwardness. Haymitch sighed to himself, feeling the awkward tension of the moment hanging right there and knowing the thing wasn't finished yet, but this wasn't something they all needed to hear. “Let’s go take a walk, you and me.” He raised an eyebrow. “Unless you want to continue this discussion with an audience?”

“Haymitch,” Peeta started, looking concerned at the thought of him and Gale walking off alone.

Haymitch waved him off. “There’s probably too fucking many forms to fill out if he and I beat the crap out of each other.”

“Fine, whatever,” Gale bit off the words angrily, heading for a deserted end of the enormous tent camp, well out of earshot of the others, their small figures barely visible in the distance. Once he was there, he turned on his heel and snapped, “Believe me, I don’t want to be here either, old man. This squad is just camera bait, I’m never going to see combat here and I know you’re all in it for each other, to hell with me. I’m never going to be able to do a damn thing here to help take down the Capitol.”

Hearing the rage in Gale’s tone, the disillusionment at being part of their glorified propo squad, it struck a chord, helping calm his own anger somewhat as he puzzled it over. “You weren’t this pissed off when we were training for the Quell,” he said. “Not that you were a sweetheart even then, mind, jabbing at Peeta and me as you were the whole time. Who did you lose in the bombing?” His rage was too hot and too specific, in a way that was utterly familiar. He’d lost and he wanted vengeance. Not on Peeta, but on the Capitol. “Not your ma. Not any of your siblings either. So...a girl? Katniss ain’t here to hear it, and I won’t tell.”

“Like hell,” Gale scoffed. “My ma may think well of you, but...”

“You don’t like me, I get it,” Haymitch said almost boredly, because if he made it more obvious he might as well just tattoo it on his forehead. No, he’d never have made a good victor, not with as proud and angry and lousy at concealing his feelings as he was. “So. It was a girl.” A girl who’d actually mattered to him. Thinking back, he remembered being at Katniss’ house and Gale lying there with his striped-up back on the kitchen table. The blond girl bringing the morphling that Haymitch had been supplying to Maribelle Undersee for years. He knew why she claimed she needed it for migraines. He’d been chasing oblivion at the bottom of a bottle. Hers just came in a syringe. He’d been supplying her because with his victor’s wealth and his Capitol contacts, he was one of the few in Twelve that could readily get regular shipments of the drug. After how he’d failed to save Maysilee, he could hardly deny her twin her chosen method of coping with the loss.

He remembered the girl. Blond, obviously merchie, and Gale made his disdain for them obvious. But even a young, stupid Haymitch had taunted Maysilee for being a merchie girl, before he found out she was made of stern stuff. The mayor’s daughter, but hauntingly like her mother. Like her aunt. He thought about how she’d run all the way up the hill to Victors Village through the shitty winter weather just to bring the medicine for Gale to cope with the pain, how she’d looked anxiously like she wanted to ask about Gale but hadn’t dared, giving an awkward glance at Katniss and then fleeing back towards her own house. The girl Katniss had eventually told him was her friend and gave her the gold mockingjay pin that he’d seen shining on her shirt on that train, like a bad memory put there just to fuck with his mind. “Maribelle’s daughter,” he murmured. “The Undersee gal. What was her name?”

“Madge,” Gale finally said into the silence, looking at him with a wary surprise like he’d pulled a fucking rabbit out of a hat in deducing that. “Her name was Madge,” this time he said it almost defiantly, “and I know she would have wanted to be here fighting too. She believed in a free Panem.”

“Well, she gave Katniss that pin. I reckon she was something of a rebel. Runs in the family, apparently,” he said dryly. At Gale’s questioning look--someone who hadn’t seen his Games, how refreshing--he said, “Her aunt, Maysilee. We were in the arena together. She wore that mockingjay pin.”

“The blond girl they showed clips of you being allies with,” Gale guessed. Haymitch should have figured digging out some of his greatest moments would have been too juicy to resist, particularly given that they had occurred during the previous Quell. Some of those clips would have inevitably involved Maysilee. Most of them, likely, since until she saved him in that clearing, most of his early days in the Games had consisted of keeping away from the others and staying stealthy and trying to stay alive. Nothing too thrilling for the cameras there.

“Yeah.” He glanced over at Gale. “So you couldn’t save her. Welcome to my life.” I couldn’t save Maysilee either. He wasn’t going to ask what exactly he’d had with the pretty merchie girl. That was his to keep to himself, because Haymitch wasn’t all that interested in the details of others’ love lives. His own supposed romances had been the topic of too many tabloid features. “We all lost something thanks to the Capitol. They killed my family and they sold me as a whore. They killed Johanna’s family and sold her too. They sold Finnick and they killed his family a few months ago now. Peeta’s family died in the firebombing.”

“And Katniss?” Gale asked levelly. “What did she lose?”

“She had to become Peeta’s girlfriend and fake that act for months. Then she had to become the Mockingjay. She’s got countless people she’s had to keep alive by being what they insist she has to be.” She’d had to whore herself in some ways. She had faced possibly having to marry Peeta and fake a romance with him for the rest of her life. “I think that’s more than sacrifice enough,” he answered. “So. You’re here to make them pay. Good. We all are. You’ll fit right in.” Better than he would in some squad of Thirteen people, for whom the stakes were just ideological rather than acutely personal. Victory Squad could deal with anger at the Capitol for things taken away.

“And how are you proposing to do that when we’re stuck in front of cameras and they won’t let us anywhere near a fight?” Gale asked him scornfully. “Act our way to victory?”

He looked at Gale again, weighing the matter in his mind, trying to decide which side of the line the boy fell on. Whether he could trust him enough to let him in on the vague plan. “I’ll ask again. Are you going to have our backs out there or are you going to let your personal shit get in the way?”

“The rest of them I don’t have much quarrel with. Katniss I never want to see get hurt. I don’t much like you but I came to rescue you once, so no, I’m not going to let some Capitol prick shoot you now,” Gale said bluntly. “As for Peeta, I wouldn’t let him die. It would hurt her too much. But it would really be easier if he made himself someone I could hate.”

“Not damn likely. Besides, he earned her loving him. We all saw how you didn’t exactly step up on Reaping Day to volunteer for Peeta in order to keep Katniss alive.” Granted, there had been no notion of the possibility of two victors there. That gesture would have been with the knowledge of his own death in trade for her life, but Peeta had been willing to make that trade. Eager, even, from the way he jumped to tell Haymitch that during their interview prep. “So yeah, she picked Peeta and Madge died. It’s hell to lose like that.” He knew that better than about anyone. He’d lost Maysilee and then Briar in the space of mere weeks. Maybe that was part of why Gale had apparently come on so strong with Katniss. He’d lost one girl to the flames of Capitol firebombs, and he was loath to lose the only other person he felt so keenly about in his life to another boy. “But you still have chances in the future to find another girl.” He wouldn’t be trapped by Capitol designs, knowing anyone he dared to love would suffer. He still had his family. He could still marry, still be happy, get over these early losses. “But either you can be a man and get over your losses enough to come be part of this squad and get something back for Madge and for whatever else needs a reckoning in your books, or you can go sit in your tent and sulk like a little boy. And I’d love to know what way you’re inclining so we know what we’re dealing with in terms of our allies here.”

Gale didn’t answer immediately, which was almost a relief because if he instantly chirped that of course it was all fine, Haymitch would want to call bullshit on him and that barely-concealed rage of his. It was a long minute or so as he paced and muttered to himself and glanced occasionally back down towards Katniss and the rest. Finally he stopped and looked back at Haymitch. “If we can somehow get into the fight,” Gale said, “I’m with you guys.”

“Good.” Then apparently he wouldn’t have to worry about Gale stabbing him in his sleep. That was a plus. “And me, I owe you for the rescue team and I don’t aim to have to explain to your ma that I didn’t see you back safe, so you know I’ll look out for you. We’ll get into the fight, though. I aim to make sure of it.”

“Care to share, Haymitch?” Gale mocked. “I keep hearing about you and your genius plans. About time I finally got involved in one.”

“Work in progress, boy,” he said with a smirk. “When it’s good to go, I’ll let you know.” When the chance came and he could seize it, it would probably be something he’d have to adapt to rapidly and make things up on the fly. Oh well, he worked best that way anyway. “But be ready to move.” Glancing back towards their tents, he nodded towards the others waiting for them. “All right. Go get your shit unpacked and settle in. Welcome to the squad.”

He wouldn’t say the two of them walked back to the tents liking each other, but at least they seemed to be able to agree they had mutual interests at heart and they’d cooperate for it. Not a friend, but an ally. He would settle for that much. He wished it could be so much better than that for him with Jonas’ son, Briar’s nephew, a boy who might easily have been his own kin. But he’d known for a long time the world wasn’t the place he wished it would be, it was the place he’d have to accept things as they were and deal with them. He didn't bring up Jonas or Briar, knowing that trying to tug on shared threads like that was a desperate move and would just make things worse between them. If they came to have more than a grudging respect as allies, it would have to be for more cause than Haymitch's ties to the previous generation.

Though his mood didn’t improve when they arrived back and he saw Boggs was standing there in front of his and Gale’s tent with his arms folded, waiting with that steel-rod-up-the-ass posture even in the bitter cold. From the look on his face, he wasn’t pleased. Maybe from the Haymitch threw a knife at Gale and started bitching him out tale he’d probably heard from the others already. Yeah, well, some people could be reasoned with and others needed a bit stronger handling. Gale wasn’t going to be convinced by a nice sympathetic talk, of that Haymitch was damn sure. One of the few things he and Haymitch apparently had in common. Part of being Seam, he supposed. “Abernathy, you’re with me,” Boggs said, jerking his head towards the path. Oh lovely. Time for a walk-and-talk, and probably, It isn’t appropriate protocol for the 2-i-c to greet new squad members in such an unprofessional manner.

“Uh-oh, now I’ve done it. Daddy’s mad,” he said flippantly, waving to the rest of the squad and moving to join Boggs. “If I don’t come back, Finn’s in charge, and y’all try to avenge me.”

“Go easy on him. Fucking space heater was asking for it, Boggs,” Johanna called, her words half-snatched away by the wind as the two of them disappeared around the bend.

Chapter Text

About as soon as he was sure they were out of earshot of the others, Haymitch decided to take the situation in hand as much as he could, sensing the bitching out that was coming and not willing to cringe and whine. He’d handled it like it needed to be handled, swiftly and yes, even aggressively. “Giving him a lecture on appropriate unit protocol of being with the girl who dumped you and the guy she chose wasn’t gonna cut it, Boggs. I handled it.” Handled it like they would in the Seam, direct and no bullshit, even if there was more heat to it than he’d expected. Well, OK, throwing a knife wasn’t exactly usual back home either, but what the hell. He’d been provoked. Katniss apparently went with that method of sharply gaining attention too from someone who’d dismissed her, and oh yeah, he remembered how she’d tried to stab his hand on the train way back when. Well, when a thing worked, he stuck with it.

“Hawthorne won’t be a problem?” Boggs asked him abruptly, pausing on the path and jamming his gloved hands into the pockets of his overcoat.

“He won’t be a problem,” Haymitch assured him. “He’ll work with the rest of us.” So long as the prospect of a real fight and payback was there. It was on Haymitch now to deliver on that promise, but he was hardly going to tell Boggs that.

“Good. Nice job. Knew I did the right thing making you the 2-i-c.” All right, that left Haymitch staring at him incredulously, not expecting a pat on the back rather than getting his ass chewed for his method of pulling the new squad member in line.

“So if this wasn’t a chitchat about my greeting methods, what the hell did you yank me out of camp to talk about?” he asked bluntly, dusting the snow off the top of a boulder beside the path and sitting down.

Boggs let out a long, slow breath, misty white in the chilly air, and obviously was gathering his thoughts. Meticulous as ever, that man. “I called President Coin to ask why Hawthorne was assigned to this unit, given the potential for some obvious issues with the Mockingjay and Mellark already here.”

So he and Boggs were on the same page, more or less, in recognizing the potential danger. Probably why Boggs wasn’t pissed off that Haymitch had just handled the issue while he was busy talking to Coin to get the story. “And what did dear Alma say?” He caught the half-wince from Boggs at Haymitch casually, and even sarcastically, just using Coin’s first name.

“That it was a move to improve the propos, and she figured having her ‘cousin’,” that might be actual sarcasm from Boggs, Haymitch thought with a certain sense of wonder, “there would be of use to the Mockingjay.”

“You don’t agree.” Obviously Boggs was trying to say a thing here, and Haymitch was cautiously circling the matter, trying to draw him out and give him the opening to spill the whole messy thing out to him.

“This squad, by Thirteen’s selection protocol, should not even exist,” Boggs said, his ice-blue eyes staring directly at Haymitch. “Not a damn one of you can take orders except ones you feel like following. Allamand and Reska were better at it than the rest of you, and amazingly, their transfer was quickly approved.”

“It’s their home they’re fighting for. Why shouldn’t they be able to go?” Haymitch shrugged. Sure, he sort of missed the two of them, but he knew the fight they were involved in was the one they had needed. No reason for them to be denied that right.

“That’s not how it works, Abernathy. You don’t just get to go do whatever the hell you feel like once you’re a soldier assigned to a unit. The usual protocol is to preserve the integrity of a squad that’s trained together.” Boggs shook his head. “I read all your assessment files during your training period. By our standards, all of you were marked to be specifically assigned to separate units. You’re too close to one another, and if one of you dies, the others are going to be too affected by it to be fully effective. As for combat readiness? They wanted Mellark to train as a field medic because he hesitates to kill. Mason had a fucking breakdown on the Block and they recommended she wash out, and then you came storming in insisting she get the medical retake. You they definitely wanted to keep back in Command and out of field operations.”

“And why is that, Boggs?” he asked calmly, trying to not react. If he just kept Boggs talking he could get a lot of information here, things the other man obviously wanted known if he felt like he could open up and say them.

“Your psych assessment says that you’re clever, Abernathy. Mistrustful of authority.”

“Given our illustrious President Snow and how he fucked my life up over the last twenty-five years, can you really blame me?”

“And extremely manipulative.”

“Ruthless too, I suppose,” he said with a smirk.

“No,” Boggs said sharply. “Opposite problem. Aurelius was of the opinion that you’d get out here and probably do something suicidally stupid in the effort to protect your squadmates, particularly ones twenty and under. He also speculates that after all that tracker jacker venom, you still appear to be having some occasional hallucinations.” So the head doctor, for all his bullshit about droning you’re completely safe and asking how things had made Haymitch feel was apparently a little more perceptive than he seemed. Interesting, and more than a bit disconcerting. “You and Mason in particular weren’t supposed to be in a squad together because of your romantic involvement.”

Caught aback, Haymitch stared at him. “How did you...” He thought they’d kept it discreet. No giggling like idiots in the cafeteria. No kissing in public. It wasn’t like they were stepping out together anyway. What they had was friendship and, in the privacy of their compartment, trying to help put each other back together little by little, night by night.

“You two broadcast that little declaration all over Panem, Abernathy,” Boggs said dryly. “Did you think it was remotely going to stay a secret after that?” Oh, fuck, he’d forgotten about that stuff in the arena, now that they actually had something going on together. She’d never called it off in public like they’d joked she ought to do and he tried to not read anything into that.

Smiling sheepishly, he shrugged. “Yeah, well. So I’m a headcase unfit for field duty and yet I passed the training. And here I stand.”

“Here you stand,” Boggs agreed wryly. “And all the rest of you too as a single squad and isn’t that a marvel? Heavensbee has some pull with President Coin, mind, but not enough to force her to form a unit with a combination of personnel that goes against all our established protocols. No, Squad 22 is the brainchild of President Coin, no question. You’re a timebomb, just waiting to explode. If one of you victors dies, the entire unit is deeply emotionally compromised and is prone to get all of you killed with an inability to focus and a desire to avenge that person’s death. And then into this steps Hawthorne, who has his own reasons to throw the entire squad into chaos.”

Hearing Boggs rattle that off so calmly, Haymitch thought he finally saw where he was going, and it wasn’t a pretty picture at all. He risked stating it plainly. “You’re afraid Coin is sabotaging the unit.” It was a shocking kind of thought. Granted, he didn’t much like the woman, but he wouldn’t have chalked that much spite up to her.

“Yes.” A look crossed Boggs’ face, a nervous expression almost like he’d seen on Effie’s face when she’d said This is wrong on the train months ago. He knew it well now; that was the look of a seed of doubt finally having worked its way deep enough into fertile ground to sprout into treason. “I’m afraid she is.”

“And why would she do that? Convince me.” Oh, he wanted to be convinced. He’d never really wanted to trust in Coin, and he’d thought it was mostly his natural suspicion of politicians and leaders after Snow. She was a pain in the ass for protocol too, and it had given him a certain pleasure to be able to thwart her and find ways to work around it. But here Boggs was confirming suspicions he hadn’t even fully wanted to admit to himself.

“Outwardly, the most you, or the Mockingjay for that matter, have ever done is tolerate her. You in particular seem to delight in challenging her and crossing her at every turn.”

“It’s my deep-seated authority issues,” he said sweetly.

“I saw your Games,” Boggs told him.

Haymitch threw up his hands. “Why the fuck do people always say that to me like it means something profound? It was mandatory viewing. Boggs, seriously, I assume everyone I meet over thirty saw them. Anyone over thirty-five probably actually remembers them. It’s like saying you sometimes need to take a shit. It’s so self-evident it ain’t a thing that needs to be said.”

“I meant I watched them recently,” Boggs said, totally unruffled by Haymitch trying to provoke him. Did they not get pissed off in Thirteen either, in addition to having no sense of humor? “Do you know how you won?”

“Outliving forty-seven other children,” he said peevishly, pointing out the patently obvious, not liking being forced to discuss his Games. At Boggs’ pointed look, he tried again. “My smartass mouth and decent looks.” He’d been no Finnick, but he’d been considered attractive enough. Well, for undersized Twelve trash anyway. “That and an alliance with a girl that made them hope we might spark a little arena romance for them to sigh over.”

“Some of that, perhaps,” Boggs acknowledged, “but what really saved you was your ability to think on your feet. To adapt and make a plan based on the situation given to you and not just give way to panic, no matter how dire things got. All the way up to that trick with the forcefield.” Ah, the infamous forcefield. “You’ve gotten better at it since then. Seizing a moment on camera with Snow to try to warn us in Thirteen about the bombing and then force his hand towards your own execution was pretty smart, not to mention it won you more than your share of admirers here and in other districts.” That last word, “admirers”, caused some instinctive dread before Haymitch realized he didn’t mean it in a sexual way. “Being a man who can consistently strategize quickly and under pressure makes you very dangerous, Abernathy. Not to mention you’re so closely tied to the Mockingjay and her ability to win people over, and Mellark and his gift with words. Any one of you probably exerts a good share of influence in Panem right now, the Mockingjay being the greatest factor. The three of you together are a true force to be reckoned with.”

“All right, so we’ve got power and influence and Coin’s aware of that,” Haymitch said, following his thread again, starting to suspect where Boggs was going with this but not wanting to lead him on and possibly trip up the conversation.

“When this is all over there’s going to be a new leader chosen.”

“Well, shit, it ain’t gonna be me they want for the job,” Haymitch said with a snort of amusement. Cynical old drunks didn’t make good presidents, on the whole. “And Katniss and Peeta are too young and green for it, popular as they are. However, if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that Coin is worried that we three and our sway with the people won’t choose to throw our weight in her corner for Snow’s successor.”

“If you don’t automatically make that your plan, you’re a threat,” Boggs said levelly.

“And you’re warning me that she eliminates threats,” Haymitch guessed, suddenly tired at the thought of it, folding his arms tighter over his chest at a sudden chill gust of wind blasting around the side of the hill. He’d thought there were echoes of Snow there, but so tired and loopy and wanting to not seem paranoid about the ally who’d just rescued him from a torture cell, he hadn’t followed through on them too deeply. Apparently he should have done that. Boggs might be complimenting him on his ability to strategize, but too much had slipped by him while he was recovering.

“Why else would she place all three of you, plus your girlfriend Mason and your good friend Odair, together in a unit against advice, a unit that seems designed to turn into a catastrophe? Then add the boy the Mockingjay rejected to the mix? The next sniper shot could easily be you, Abernathy. They have to fear you in the Capitol after the stunt you pulled to taken down the arena and then to Snow’s face. If Hawthorne puts petty concerns in front of the unit, if one of you should unfortunately die...”

“Or if a Thirteen sniper should unfortunately shoot us in the chaos of laying siege to the Capitol and make it look like it was Capitol forces,” Haymitch said sarcastically. “We’ve united the districts in a rebellion. Us being here is pretty much because we whined loud enough that we deserved to be in the fight rather than any actual tactical advantage. We’re not of any use to her any longer.” He should have seen it sooner, given how they were being kept out of the fighting, stuck with camera duty. He should have seen a lot of things, but he’d been so damn focused on getting here and taking Snow out, on pushing all of them through the training and keeping them together.

“Exactly.” Boggs looked at him soberly, scratched at the growth of stubble on his cheeks. Even having camera bait duty didn’t lend them extra water for shaving. Besides, Haymitch would bet that Plutarch loved the rumpled, gritty “field-worn” look anyway. More authentic and all. They got a sparse water ration daily for a basic spit bath and that was about it. He never thought he’d actually manage to miss the shower, given how long it had taken him to grow used to the damn thing again without flipping out. “I made you the 2-i-c because they’ll follow you, Abernathy.”

“I don’t give them orders, Boggs. Doesn’t work like that.” Even when he was her mentor, Katniss couldn’t listen to him worth a damn. The thought of trying to bark orders at any of them made him want to laugh. Johanna would definitely tell him to shove it. “I think you said something about us all having a little authority problem, mm?”

“I didn’t mean they’d obey you. They’re your friends. They respect you. They believe in your ability to read a situation and make the plans.” So did a lot of my other friends, and they ended up dead in a nice little steaming jungle-slash-beach hellhole under a creepy pink sky, Boggs. They trust me to make the plans. If they’re smart they shouldn’t trust me for them to succeed with them still alive. “So my advice to you would be to clear the hell out of here before this ‘Victory Squad’ ends up dead in an unfortunate accident, because it will happen. Sooner, later, I’m not sure which, but it’ll happen.”

“Oh, but that would be desertion, Boggs.”

“It would.”

“You won’t come with us?” He already sensed Boggs wouldn’t, but he had to ask.

“I can’t desert my post, Abernathy. I’m sorry.” He’d warn them, but that was as far as his loyalty could be tested. Haymitch nodded, understanding, and grateful that he would give them this much. It was a thing of such value, to shake off blind loyalty to Coin and to Thirteen.

“If I were to desert, along with my friends, I’d probably be smart enough to come threaten you into giving me your holo. I know the Capitol but I ain’t familiar with the pods, and only your holo would give me that.”

“That would be the wise move, yes.”

“I would probably do it after the Leegs have their watch together to give us a good head start before we’re discovered missing at breakfast.” Already his mind was racing ahead, trying to think of everything that would be involved, everything they needed to bring with, how to slip out of the camp unnoticed. They couldn’t bring food, of course, since they wouldn’t be able to smuggle any from the evening meal--fucking Thirteen and their rules, eating was only allowed in the mess tents with their iron-fisted control of the food supply. But they could all go hungry for a day or two if need be.

“You’ll take Hawthorne with you?”

“I think we can trust him enough to include him. He wants his slice of the Capitol, if nothing else.” He hesitated, looking Boggs square in the face. “This will probably wreck your career.” The best case scenario there; the worst being he was shot for aiding them in desertion. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’ve all done enough for Panem that you deserve to live your lives out after this war. Granted, if that was your aim you’d take all of them, leave, and head down that mountain away from all this to make sure that happens. But I imagine you’ll be going after President Snow. So you deserve to have that opportunity. I’ll answer for it however it requires.”

“It’s what we have to do.” That was all that had to be said about it, in his opinion. They couldn’t back down now, not right on the edge of it.

Boggs nodded. “Then be ready at eight when Leeg and Leeg turn in for the night.” He hesitated a moment and added, “I did watch your Games, though, as a live broadcast.”

“Oh?” It seemed odd that they would have routinely watched the Games in Thirteen, but Boggs’ nasal Thirteen accent was less thick than some of the others. He remembered the little boy with light brown hair that had rushed up to tackle Boggs in the cafeteria. Son? Nephew? In any case, probably a child of someone who wasn’t a Thirteen native, given their fertility issues. “Did I kill any of your tributes that year?” If so that would mean he was originally from One, Two, Four, Eight, or Nine. Hell, he hoped this wasn’t going to turn into another case of Romulus fucking Thread where he’d killed the man’s brother.

“No.”

He saw it in Boggs’ eyes, a familiar thinly veiled grief that he’d spied so many times in grey and blue eyes back in Twelve. He’d been touched by the shadow too. “Who did you have in there?”

“My little sister. Channi. From Ten. I was nineteen, the oldest. I was safe from the reaping ball. She was fourteen and she wasn’t. Died a couple nights after the volcano erupted when one of those cat mutts got her.” He remembered those mutts, one of the horrors they released only at night. Remembered hearing the first hissing snarl nearby and not wasting time, running through the darkness, hearing the growls and howls behind him and the all-too-human scream as they caught some other hapless tribute. It might have been Channi Boggs they ripped apart instead of him, because he was one of the fastest runners at school and because he’d been too unsettled to really fall asleep and be caught by surprise. But it might not have been. He’d deliberately tried to not watch all the deaths they showed on tape at his victory recap. “That autumn we heard a rumor about Thirteen and we made our way there. Because I had two more sisters and a little brother still eligible the next year and I wouldn't let that happen.”

He didn’t remember Channi. There had been so damn many of them that year, and he was just one overwhelmed sixteen-year-old boy. Almost none of them made a deep impression except the ones he actually encountered in the arena. But his mind cast back to the victor reel the kids had been playing on the train, and seeing himself running for his life, and the glimpse they'd showed of those so-cute so-deadly cat mutts piling onto a girl with light brown hair. Light brown, like the little boy in the cafeteria, and he had the sinking suspicion that had indeed been Corriden Boggs’ younger sister. He’d never even seen what he was running from while he was in the arena, only on the recap tape weeks later on Caesar’s stage. The damn things had been in his nightmares ever since. “Then they’ll pay for Channi too,” he said simply, making it a promise. Boggs nodded, looking satisfied.

They walked back to camp and Haymitch held up his hands towards the others, quipping, “Still alive, kids, no worries.” As Cressida and Messala directed them in the last shots of the day, he cautiously made his way around to the others, giving them all a message in a low undertone. ”We’re leaving tonight after eight. Pack like it’s the arena.” Packed to move light and swift and most definitely with weapons and some survival tools.

“About fucking time,” Johanna said softly. That done, Victory Squad filmed a lovely shot of all sitting on their haunches around a non-broken space heater, and warmly welcoming Katniss’ “cousin” Gale to their ranks.

All the while he was looking around the camp, spying a potential route back through the train station, their exit into the hills hidden by the building. It would involve trekking a bit around the mountain because cutting right into the city risked discovery. Capitol forces would shoot them, of course. If they ran into other Thirteen soldiers without their commander and several of their soldiers and their camera crew, it would look mighty suspicious. It might cost them a good bit of time of making their way over rougher terrain, but he thought that was an acceptable loss compared to the risk of a straight shot into the Capitol’s streets.

Packing his own backpack, he made sure to take all of his knives, the ammunition for his rifle, the pistol he’d kept from Homes’ things that he’d carried as their 2-i-c. It was technically his now anyway, right? Glancing over at Gale, doing the same and throwing most of the crap stuffed in his pack aside, he advised, “Take what you need to fight and to do some basic care. It ain’t gonna be heavy wilderness survival.”

Gale nodded. “Didn’t take long for the plan to come forward, huh?” he said in an undertone that wouldn’t carry through the canvas of the tent.

“I work fast,” he said with a shrug. Granted, it definitely helped when the squad commander was on their side to pretty much hand them a gift-wrapped opportunity here. Rising to his feet, he said, “I’ll be back. Be ready.” Seeing the Leegs disappear into their tent for some rest, and glancing over towards the two tents for the Capitol camera crew, he was relieved to see the flaps were all tightly fastened. Hopefully none of them would desperately need to wake up and go take a piss in the middle of the night to see the supposed watch members were missing. Well, he couldn’t anticipate everything. Best he could do was account for what was in his control.

Stepping into Boggs’ tent, he found the other man already waiting for him. “Holo?” he asked simply.

Boggs held up the device. “Transfer of prime security clearance for Squad 22 to Soldier Haymitch Abernathy. Authorization code: nightfall.”

“And what did that just do?” he asked suspiciously, the thought suddenly crossing his mind that Boggs could have been playing him and just warned Thirteen what he’d planned. He couldn’t help it.

“Gave you the ability to issue the thing voice commands,” Boggs said dryly. “The auto-destruct can still be accessed by any squad members, obviously. If I were you the first command I’d give it would be to disable the location beacon, unless you want other squads making the hunt for you all too easy.”

He held the holo up and said, “Uh, Abernathy here.” He was talking to a damn machine now like it was a person. Lovely. It was one thing to talk on the telephone of the console at Mentor Central, but this was something totally different. Next thing he knew he’d be turning into Beetee.

A wash of green light from the screen hit him, moving up and down as if scanning him. “Identity of Soldier Haymitch Abernathy confirmed, acknowledged,” it chirped. “Transfer of prime security clearance completed.”

“Deactive location beacon.”

“Location beacon deactivated. Automatic reactivation in t minus twelve hours.” Haymitch raised an impatient eyebrow and stared over at Boggs. Twelve hours before Thirteen would know their exact location? Not a hell of a lot of time before they’d have to worry about being hunted down by two opposing forces.

“It’s a function for advanced orientation training,” Boggs explained, not rising to the bait. “It automatically comes back on so that if the squad hasn’t completed the objective within twelve hours, they can be quickly located and rescued. Just keep commanding it every few hours to keep the beacon deactivated and it’ll restart the twelve hour clock. The trouble with that deactivation is that obviously it doesn’t automatically know your location. You’ll have to command and direct the mapping function manually. Tell it what blocks or areas you need it to display, that sort of thing. I hope you’re familiar enough with the city to do that.”

“Fortunately,” Haymitch said dryly, “we have three of us who are pretty familiar with this place.” Granted, he and Jo and Finn were mostly familiar with bars, nightclubs, and the homes of sponsors and patrons rather than much of the city sectors a native would know well from living and shopping and socializing there year-round. Still, after so many years he knew a good bit, and it was something. It was much better than going in blind.

“All right,” Boggs said, holding out his hand. “Good luck.”

Haymitch took it, grasped it firmly in his own even through the gloves, and shook on it. Then he let go, tucking the holo in the pocket of his overcoat so the glow of it wouldn’t be visible once he stepped outside the tent.

Once Boggs’ back was turned, he carefully slid the knife from his pocket where he’d stowed it to come to this meeting. I’ll answer for it however it requires, Boggs had said so matter-of-factly. Well, maybe Haymitch could do at least one small thing to aid that. Moving forward as quietly as he could in the thick-soled military boots, he reached out and put his left hand on Boggs’ shoulder, as if to catch his attention. “You’re helping us. So hopefully this’ll take some of the blame off you in return.”

As Boggs turned at the touch and the words, Haymitch’s hand tightened, holding and steadying him as he rapped him smartly on one grey-haired temple with the heavy hilt of the knife. Boggs’ eyes rolled back in his head and Haymitch dropped the knife, caught him with his other hand too, and helped him down to the floor of the tent so he wouldn’t give himself another blow on the head. He was pretty sure the one he’d dealt out wouldn’t give too bad a concussion, but he’d done it hard enough to make it undeniably authentic.

Glancing around, he spied a skein of rope leftover from rigging tent lines, and in short order, he had Boggs tied up hand and foot with strong knots that he knew from his boyhood snares wouldn’t pull loose no matter how much the man struggled, and a kerchief bound around his mouth as a gag besides.

This way, it ought to look like Haymitch had threatened Boggs into handing over the holo, and knocked him out, bound and gagged him to keep him from raising the alarm. Far better than Boggs just nonchalantly admitting come morning to being an actual willing aid to the desertion of most of Squad 22. This might save him from the worst of it, the debt Haymitch and the others suddenly owed for what he was putting on the line to help them repaid as best it could be. Not like it cost Haymitch anything to become more of the villainous bastard in Coin’s eyes, not if she was already out to get him.

While he was at it he helped himself to the remaining rope as well as Boggs’ pistols and ammunition. Undoubtedly, they’d be useful. If they had to sneak through parts of the city without attracting too much attention, a pistol was going to be a hell of a lot more sensible than a rifle, or Finnick’s trident, or Gale and Katniss’ bows. Yeah, well, the grey Thirteen overcoats were making them pretty obvious too, but not much he could do about that right now. He was mostly trying to prepare for as many possibilities as he could.

Leaving Boggs’ tent, he found the others all waiting for him alongside Peeta and Finnick’s tent, hiding in the shadows between the lights rigged to illuminate the camp. Finnick held out his pack for him, trident already bound to his own pack, and Haymitch slipped it onto his shoulders, settling the weight of it comfortably there. Finger to his lips, he jerked his head in a Follow me gesture, and quietly the six of them slipped through the shadows, away from the watch posted at the camps of other squads, into the dark silence of the train station.

Soon enough, making their way up over the hill alongside, Peeta stumbling occasionally on the loose rock given his artificial leg and Haymitch instinctively wincing, he figured they’d come far enough that he could speak up just loud enough for them all to hear and say, “We’ll stick to the hills until close to morning and then get down into the city before they spy us up here in daylight.” He grinned at them. “Hope y’all don’t mind the prospect of a little sewer-crawling after that.” They’d have to resort to the tunnels beneath the city to get around unnoticed by either Thirteen or the Capitol, and obviously he had no experience of those. They’d have to rely on the holo for that, and comparison to where they were in relation to what was aboveground.

“Oh, good, slogging through bilge water,” Finnick said wryly. “Bloodthirsty rats the size of cows, probably.”

“It’ll probably be warmer down there,” Peeta pointed out with a wry smile. Staying on the move was keeping them all warm enough, but the bitter cold of the night was still slowly seeping into his body. He wondered how Brutus was coping with this weather out in the mountains of Two, and if he was remembering his own frozen wasteland of an arena.

Katniss and Gale turned and gave him a wary look of Underground tunnels? He spread his hands and shrugged. He didn’t much like the notion of it either, knowing from Twelve that too many that went into underground tunnels died down there, but he could see no other option for them, not dressed as they were. With that he saw Katniss turn to Gale and start quietly talking to him, probably convincing him of it. Better her than him.

Johanna, bringing up the rear of their party, caught up to him. “Kittycat distracted the guy at the mess tent after dinner and I managed to make off with a crate of the field rations. They’re in my pack.” She shrugged. “Means only two meals for each of us and I don’t want to hear any bitching about it being beef, rice, and vegetable hash, but it’s something.”

He really could have kissed her in that moment, for thinking of something he’d been ready to just write off as an impossibility, but he refrained. “Nice job,” he told her, sincerely meaning it. He smiled wryly at her. “We’re already screwed for desertion, and I’ll get nailed for attacking my commanding officer to boot, so you engaging in a little theft of food on top of it ain’t a big deal, right?” Not that he considered it really theft, any more than he considered what he or Katniss had done out in the woods to be poaching. It was simply being sensible and getting what they needed and had a right to have in spite of a government that was unfairly trying to deny it.

“If they catch us, can we at least get cells next to each other again?” she asked with a smirk. He might have pointed out if they were caught they were likely dead, but looking at her face, she obviously knew that.

He chuckled lowly and put an arm around her shoulders for a minute, squeezing. “Maybe. We could hope.” Watching to the east for the first wash of grey signaling pre-dawn, he pulled out the holo and asked it to display the nearest sewer access hatches based on the landmarks he spied down below. Moving his gaze over the map and looking for one on a street close to the edge of the city and not too far away from them, he was gratified to spot one that fit the bill. “All right, we’ll move quietly--Peeta, quieter in your case--”

“Ha ha,” Peeta said with a sigh, looking embarrassed at knowing the stiff sounds of his artificial leg were a definite liability.

“Sewer entrance should be right there,” he pointed down the hill towards a narrow alleyway between the rooftops of two rows of rundown houses in what was obviously a seedier part of the Capitol, “so let’s pop it open and get down there in a hurry before we’re spotted.” He hadn’t seen any military uniforms, either Thirteen’s grey soldiers or the Capitol’s white Peacekeepers, prowling around the area, which was part of what he’d wanted to avoid by skirting around on the mountain for most of the night. If they were lucky nobody would be stirring at this hour. If they were unlucky, well, they’d have to deal with that in a hurry.

Chapter Text

“We have no idea where we’re going,” Gale stated flatly as Haymitch checked the holo once again. Unfortunately, he had to at least slightly agree with him--without the locator beacon activated, the holo wouldn’t be able to readily reference their exact location with respect to the stuff aboveground, and he couldn’t command it to link up the two without knowing their exact location underground as reference. But he could see where they were in relation to the main underground thoroughfare, the one that he’d heard they built to keep the streets free of the annoying and noisy clutter of delivery trucks. Knowing that route ended in City Center, they weren’t lost.

“If only your brains matched up to your looks,” Johanna said to Gale with a sigh of mock disappointment. “We know exactly where we’re going. Snow’s mansion.”

They were just trying to find a route that didn’t involve much use of the wide-open Transfer. When they’d first dropped underground into the dank smells of mildew and sewage, the Transfer was lit up on the holo with a burst of multicolored lights, like the garish neon signs of the Capitol’s nightclub district. They’d scanned them: flesh-eating rats, something called “ooze”, hallucinogenic gas. Johanna muttered lowly in his ear at the last one, “We’ve had enough of the imaginary head trips, so let’s skip that one, thanks.” Some of the pods weren’t labeled at all, and that was even more alarming.

But even as they sat there scanning their route and making plans, most of the pod lights faded as daylight arrived, indicating they were deactivated. “It’s probably Peacekeeper patrols now,” Finnick said. “Can hardly keep all those pods on with trucks driving through.”

“Not so many trucks lately,” Peeta said quietly, “from the sound of things.” True, with the siege and with the supplies from most of the districts cut off, deliveries were probably few and far between.

“There’s probably cameras there too,” Haymitch pointed out. Cheaper than Peacekeepers and easier. “So we stay off the Transfer as much as we possibly can.” Glancing at the holo-map with its twisting maze of tunnels leading away from the Transfer, like an infinitely messy tangle of vines, he said wryly, “Well, this is going to be fun.” None of his experience with the Capitol, or Finnick or Johanna’s, was going to aid them too much in this case. It wasn’t like sewer-crawling had been part of the job description of either a mentor or a whore.

The hours went on as they slowly made their way through the underground system. Tunnels, sometimes so narrow that only one of them could squeeze through at a time, sometimes so wide all six of them could almost have walked side by side. Bridges over flowing rivers of waste-water, making them gag with the smell. Sometimes they caught the whiff of something that made them reach for their gas masks, and whether it was natural or a Capitol trap, it was better to not risk it. There were the sounds of something out there in the darkness now and again, the scrabble of claws or a faint squeak--that must have been the rats. But the moan that could have either been the pipes or something alive sent a chill prickling along Haymitch’s spine. They didn’t even stay on the same level, forced sometimes to go up and down ladders and through hatches, and they lost time trying to find their way back to the main level as quickly as possible.

They were forced to backtrack. They hit dead ends that on the holo-map, from their proximity to another tunnel, looked like they actually connected, and were probably separated by nothing more than a single thin wall of brick or metal. They were forced to hide, trying to cause no sound, trying to not even breathe too loudly, as occasionally a human figure appeared. Compared to how Haymitch knew the workers in the mines sang to while the day away, they were eerily silent.

“Avoxes,” Finnick explained softly at Katniss’ questioning look. “Some of them are sentenced to work down here.” The ones that didn’t end up with a job as servants at the Training Center or in the homes of the Capitol elite. Or else, forced into a life of stripping or whoring in the red-light district. Pretty much the most degrading, shameful positions available in the Capitol belonged to the Avoxes, part of the penalty of their treason. As if taking their tongues wasn’t enough. But then this was the Capitol that had long enjoyed punishing children who could never have had any role in a rebellion generations ago.

The Avoxes might be able to help them but after so long tortured and oppressed by the Capitol, they might be too afraid to stand up and get themselves killed for it. No, the risk was too great, and Haymitch closed his eyes for a moment as Darius and Lavinia were right there in the gloom, reminding him of just what a dying Avox sounded like. Go away, please, I don’t have time for this. There were more than enough real dangers down here that he didn’t need to be distracted by his ghosts.

Moving on, making slow but steady progress, after spying the Avoxes they resorted to hand signs as much as possible. He and Finnick could actually somewhat converse to elaborate on things, stepping up sometimes to where Finnick had taken point for the group as one of their strongest fighters to talk to him and guide him with the next turns in the route, walking alongside where their hand signals could be readily seen in the dim light. He wondered if Finn was thinking of Mags and Woof when he did that.

But for the rest they devised a few quick signals, most of them pretty intuitive. Stop. This way. Follow me. Climb. Slow. Quiet. Things like that, and they used them pretty readily. After that, they were mostly silent as the Avoxes themselves, the hissing of the pipes and outflow of the water covering most any noise they may, from the quiet sounds of their breathing to the scrape of their boots against the floor.

They called a halt, sat down shortly after noon, and Johanna pulled out the field rations, passing a packet around to each of them. Back against a mostly slime-free wall, Haymitch checked the holo again to take this time to try to better plan a route, and Katniss scooted over to sit next to him. “How are we doing?” she asked quietly, and he almost startled at the unexpected sound of a human voice for the first time in hours.

He glanced at their location in relation to the Transfer and its termination at City Center. “Well, sweetheart, distance that would have taken us about an hour to walk up on the Avenue of the Tributes has taken us close to six. The side routes get fewer close to City Center too, unfortunately.” He shook his head. “But we’ll have to brave it aboveground eventually anyway. There’s no route directly to Snow’s mansion down here.” It would have been really stupid oversight on the part of the builders if there were, given what a massive security risk to Snow it would present.

At least she didn’t ask So what do we do then?, which would have been the logical question. He was still working on that plan. The fact she didn’t even ask, demand to know what he was thinking to do, bothered him a little. She ought to be more suspicious, ought to question him more. Katniss, of all people. She would have done that back in the arena and it would have annoyed the hell out of him but at the same time it told him she was smart enough to question things. Simply trusting him to make it work out put too much pressure on, made him think of Boggs saying they believed in him to construct the plans that would work. They were trusting him to get them through this alive, and he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and insist she not just shrug and apparently accept that he had it covered.

They ate with their weapons close to hand, just in case. It didn’t take too long for all of them to consume their packets of lukewarm hash, make the plan for the next segment of things, and they set off again, Finnick in the front and Gale in the back.

They made better time in the afternoon, Haymitch now more able to see the twists and turns in the holo-map and decipher them. Calling another halt after several more hours, taking a few sips of water and regrouping, they were confounded by what seemed to be the end of their possible route. Hunkered in close to keep their voices low as possible, the screech of steam venting from somewhere covered most of the noise anyway. Haymitch risked briefly projecting the holo-map for them. “We’ve got to hop onto the Transfer for a minute to get around to this next set of tunnels,” he explained, tracing the route with his gloved fingertip. “Eyes peeled for Peacekeepers. There’s a couple pods right there,” he said, pointing them out. “Looks like,” a blue pod, so it was some some kind of physical obstacle, “nets--”

“Oh, hey, nets, Finnick’ll love that,” Johanna said softly with a snort. Finnick rolled his eyes and shoved her lightly on the shoulder.

“Razor wire nets, it says, so Finnick might not love ‘em so much,” Haymitch continued, turning next to a blood-red pod that by now he knew denoted an animal of some type, "giant mosquitoes here, what a treat--”

“They ought to fire Plutarch for recycling ideas,” Peeta joked softly, and Haymitch couldn’t resist a chuckle at that.

“And,” he checked the intel on one pod that glowed a vibrant green, “the very lovely, non-specific chemical menace of ‘ black goo’. Katniss, Gale, you’re our crack shots so be ready.” Either to take out a pod or a Peacekeeper, as the case might be. They had their rifles and their bows both for that purpose. He didn’t miss the fleeting look of satisfaction on Gale’s face at being deemed most useful when Peeta wasn’t also included.

Cracking open the hatch connecting the tunnels to the Transfer, Finnick peeped out and gradually opened it more, carefully glancing around. He gave the all clear sign back over his shoulder, motioning for them to follow, and they slipped out into the open. After hours of the dank tunnels, the bright lights, the white-bricked walls, and the clean streets with their pastel-colored paving stones, were almost disconcerting to him.

Keeping their eyes open for Peacekeepers, there appeared to be none right now, and Haymitch scanned ahead for the entrance to the next set of tunnels, spying the metal of the hatch against the bricks. It was only a few hundred yards up from them, but totally exposed like this and obliged to go careful and quiet, it felt like it might as well be miles away.

They avoided the net pod easily. But then Gale hissed “Peacekeepers!” and just like that, a white-uniformed figure dropped with a stain of red blossoming around an arrow in his chest. He’d been turning out of a main tunnel shaft, obviously on his routine patrol.

Immediately a dozen more Peacekeepers poured out right behind him, and Haymitch could hear on on his comm relaying, “Transfer sector 17-G, spotted six h--” The crack of a rifle cut off the rest of his message, and he heard Peeta make a stunned, choked noise behind him. Had Peeta actually taken that shot and killed that Peacekeeper? No time to think about it, though, and suddenly a wave of thick, tarry dark goop poured over the Peacekeepers as someone, either Katniss or Gale, managed to detonate the pod near to them with a well-placed arrow. Well, so that was what “black goo” was. Their feet were virtually glued in place by the stuff that was nearly knee-deep, and even a few of them had a hands caught in it. Unfortunately the others, though stuck, could still fire their own rifles in return.

The Peacekeepers were sitting ducks, though, stuck in place as they were, but there was no cover for Katniss or any of the others to hide behind either to effectively snipe them away. He heard Gale say, “So let their own mutts distract them here,” as he nocked another arrow and aimed at the mosquito pod.

It wasn’t a bad idea, actually. The Peacekeepers were the closest to it and would be the first targets, and trying to not get drained dry they’d be too busy to really fire back. But they’d have to deal with the damn things after the Peacekeepers were dealt with if they didn’t reach the hatch in time. They’d just have to move fast.

“Gale, w--” Katniss started, but it was too late and the arrow was already on its way. What came out of the pod wasn’t the iridescent blue mosquitoes from Finnick’s arena, from the Quell too. Instead, the boldly striped green-and-ivory hide of four massive cats with eerie dark eyes greeted them.

“Oh, shit,” Johanna said, voice a little unsteady. “Great. Forest cats.” Apparently it was something they had up in Seven, and looking at them, at the uncanny malicious look in those eyes, Haymitch was glad they didn’t have them in Twelve. “Now would be a really good time to run,” she yelled, already doing just that.

Two of the cats busied themselves with the ready, captive audience and Haymitch’s ears were ringing with the cries and screams of the Peacekeepers as they were being mauled to death. The other two, though, apparently wanted to chase their toys before the kill, and Haymitch could easily see with a quick glance over his shoulder they were too slow, they weren’t going to make it. Even he and Johanna, the fastest of them, weren’t as fast as the speed of those cats, and he could see that Peeta was stumbling, faltering in a hurry, because he was unable to sprint properly with his artificial leg.

“Get that hatch open!” he yelled to Johanna, waving her on ahead as he turned and dropped down to one knee to provide a steady position to provide cover with his rifle. He saw that just like that Finnick and Katniss had dropped back to protect Peeta, Finnick trying to attack the cat with the long reach of his trident, like he had gone after tributes in the arena as a fourteen-year-old boy, while Katniss scrambled to help get Peeta to safety.

Gale got an arrow into the other cat, heading for the vulnerability of Katniss and Peeta making their agonizingly slow retreat, a good solid chest shot that should have at least staggered it some but that didn’t even seem to be slowing it down. Its head whipped around and it saw who’d wounded it, and let out a snarling roar, charging at Gale. Trying to keep his hands and his breathing steady, Haymitch sighted along the barrel of the rifle, and shot it. Perfect shot in the region of the lungs, the sort he’d have been thrilled to make as a kid with a bow and arrow. But the cat didn’t even break step at it. What the hell were these things?

Retreating, Gale was already aiming another shot with his bow and Haymitch wanted to shout Forget that, run for it, but it would be no use, the thing was already virtually on him. He fired another shot, hitting the cat squarely again but knowing it was already too late. The cat pounced, and suddenly there was an explosion, too bright for his eyes and echoing off the walls of the Transfer, making his ears ring for a moment.

When he looked where Gale and the cat had been, all he saw was a blackened stain on the pastel bricks, and the spray of blood and chunks of flesh and bone in a huge gory halo out from the center of the explosion. Nothing left of anything recognizable as either a man or an animal.

He heard Katniss’ piercing shriek of, “Gale!” only distantly. In an instant he realized what must have happened. Gale had fired one of his explosive arrows into the mutt at point-blank range. He must have known the resulting explosion, big and powerful as it was, would certainly kill him too. But then, staring at the thing handily outracing him, Gale must have known he was a goner anyway. He’d chosen to make sure he took the bastard with him when he went.

Right then Haymitch spotted a chunk of flesh barely three feet in front of him, blown there by the force of the explosives. Raw and bloody in some places, seared black on one side, a splintered chunk of white bone in there too. He couldn’t even begin to fathom what part of the body that was, let alone whether it was something that had come from the cat or from the young man. It was impossible to know, simply a chunk of unidentifiable dead meat.

He’d lost one of them, one of the squad. Not his favorite of the group, by any means, but that didn’t matter. He’d hadn’t much liked some of the tributes the reaping ball had thrown his way either--a couple were outright little bastards--but he still wouldn’t have ever wished them dead or failed to do whatever he could for them, had there been anything at all. They were his to try to save, that was the point. That was the point here too. Gale had come along and trusted him to help keep him alive, to get him through to make the Capitol answer for what they’d cost him. He’d botched it with yet another kid, another boy from Twelve now gruesomely dead and all Haymitch had been able to do was watch it happen. He’d failed again.

More than that, he looked at that piece of flesh and he thought of explosions down in the mines, of that winter morning near to six years ago now. He realized that Gale died far underground, blown to bits too small to identify. Just like Jonas. He’d never asked what they had been able to recover to bury--or hadn’t--of his own family, of Briar. He wasn’t sure at sixteen he could have withstood that answer. Maybe they’d just buried coffins weighted to feel like there was at least something in there and never told him. How he’d explain--no, how he’d answer for it--to Hazelle Hawthorne, come there to tell her that her oldest boy had died just like his daddy had so for the second time in her life there wouldn’t even be anything that she could properly bury, he didn’t even know.

“Let’s go!” he heard Johanna yell behind him, heard the creak of the hatch opening, and that more than anything snapped him out of his daze. He looked up to see Katniss and Peeta steadily making it closer, the two cats still occupied with the Peacekeepers, and an alarming amount of red around where Finnick was fighting the other cat. He didn’t know which of them was wounded, but from the way both of them seemed to be flagging, he’d bet it was both. “Katniss, use an explosive arrow for the two over there,” he snapped to Katniss, pointing at the two of them still busy tearing up their Peacekeeper feast, getting bogged down in the black goo as they did so. He wasn’t going to bet on that being enough to hold them. “Jo, cover me. I’m getting Finn.” He was stronger than the two of them to help a wounded man back. He’d just lost one member of the squad, be damned if he’d live to see a second die. So he ran for it as quickly as he could.

When he got there, the pale areas of the cat’s fur were stained mostly red from where Finnick had stabbed it repeatedly with his trident, but at a glance he could see that Finnick himself was in rough shape, his uniform torn and reddened, his face covered with blood from where a swipe of one clawed paw had apparently caught him. The cat hissed at the new challenger, its sides heaving, obviously gathering its strength for another attack. Haymitch answered that by raising his rifle and firing three shots right in between its unnatural navy blue eyes. He would have done more but he watched as it swayed in a crumpled heap to the ground, so apparently that was enough to kill it. “Finnick,” he said, as the booming echo of another explosion down the way told him that Katniss was taking care of the other two cats, “still with me?”

“Yeah, I'm still standing,” Finnick said, though he was leaning on his trident. “Too bad I didn’t have a net,” he said with a weary smile. Haymitch saw the way a gash on his neck was oozing in an unsettling way, probably from the same swipe that had torn up his face. Not as bad as Maysilee, where the wounds had been steadily pumping blood out from her throat with every beat of her heart, but not good either.

Steeling himself, trying to keep it together and not think about Jonas or Maysilee or anything else but getting Finnick back to that hatch and getting the hell out of here, he got an arm around Finnick’s shoulders. “Let’s hurry up and scram before we have more company, huh?”

Once they had the hatch closed behind them, back in the dim light of the tunnels, Haymitch used some of the rope in his pack to help tie the hatch shut. Not that there weren’t alternate routes and not that rope would hold for long, but even thirty seconds could potentially make a difference. Johanna was helping Finnick, wiping away the blood, and Haymitch could see the gashes in his face weren’t pretty, the stroke of the cat’s claws tearing him up. He turned away from the appearance of the ghost of Larkspur Taylor, one of the first two tributes he lost, with her own torn and bleeding face. Too many reminders of the dead right now and he couldn’t give in to them. The neck wound they packed with what kerchiefs and the like they had to help sop up the blood. The wounds on his arms and one small gash on his side were inevitably painful, but not seriously life-threatening.

“I can walk,” Finnick said, waving off Haymitch’s attempt to get an arm around him. He tried to knot one last kerchief in a headband around his forehead, obviously trying to keep the blood from flowing down into his eyes, and it was Peeta that stepped forward to help him do it.

Haymitch looked them over. Katniss looked shell-shocked, like she was doing her best to shut out what had just happened to her best friend. Finnick was badly wounded. Peeta was trying to pad the cup of his artificial leg with the sleeve of a spare shirt, because he’d pushed it too hard today already with all the climbing and then the running, and rubbed his stump raw. In short, they were a mess. “Let’s get topside,” he said tiredly, pulling the holo out of his pocket and trying to keep his own fingers from trembling.

Johanna came up to consult while the other three were resting. “We need to rest up for the night if we can and take care of Finnick,” she said bluntly. “And hope they don’t find us, ‘cause with that partial comm message and the pods set off, they at least know someone was down here, even if they hopefully don’t know it was us.”

“I know,” he said with a tired sigh. “What were those things?” he asked, nodded back towards the Transfer.

She folded her arms over her chest, looking over at Finnick with concern. “Forest cats,” she said softly. “They don’t come south as far as the winter town in Seven. But out at the summer lumber camps, we have to keep an eye out. It’s a Capitol mutt they introduced to keep the deer under control, since they chew on the saplings from replanting, and we can’t hunt the deer ourselves. They have to have Peacekeepers go clear a lumbering ground before we’ll set up camp.”

“And if one shows up after they supposedly clear things out?” They were skilled with axes in Seven, but he was sure those wouldn’t kill that kind of mutt.

“An unfortunate but acceptable loss of some workers occurs,” Johanna said in a Capitol voice, eyes blazing with anger. She calmed herself down with an effort. “Their claw wounds usually fester, though.” That was bad news. He didn’t have experience with infection from cat wounds, but he knew about how touchy flogging wounds could be in the same way, and knew that proper care was needed.

“So let’s get to the surface. Try to find somewhere to hide out for the night.” It would be easier to not be caught once they were out of the confined area of the tunnels, and those hunting them would have no clue where they might have gone. Scanning the holo, he found what looked like an exit to the surface nearby.

Right now he was back in the mode of the arena, the basic instincts and strategies for keeping alive and keeping his allies alive as best he could. Anything in the way of feelings and horror and counting the costs and the losses would sink in later. He would worry about Finnick’s wounds then. He’d worry about Gale’s death. He’d worry about Katniss’ grief. He’d worry about Peeta’s leg. But for right now he was trying to ruthlessly armor himself against all of it so he could be effective.

On reaching the ladder, they made Peeta and Finnick climb up first, so that someone could help catch them if they stumbled or even fell. But they stubbornly managed the climb regardless, and soon enough they were standing in what appeared to be the utility room of someone’s apartment. Holding a finger to his lips, Haymitch stopped and listened for the sound of anyone moving around inside.

Only silence greeted him so he carefully pushed open the door and checked. Moving through the rooms of the apartment, the two bedrooms, the living room, the bathroom, and the kitchen, he breathed a sigh of relief to find them all clear. “Nobody home.” But they couldn’t stay here overnight, given the dirty dishes in the sink, the clothes in the hampers in the bedrooms. Someone still lived here and was planning to return, possibly at any moment.

Listening with a fearful ear for the sound of a key in the front door, Haymitch looked out the window, and was relieved when he recognized the area. They were in an area of comfortable apartments, belonging mostly to professionals. Close enough to City Center. “We can’t stay here,” Katniss said, confirming his own thought. “And Finnick needs medical attention.”

"Yes.”

“Do you know anywhere safe we can go? Someone’s house, maybe?”

He let out a sharp bark of sarcastic laughter. “Sweetheart, most of the houses I’ve been to in this city, or Johanna and Finnick for that matter, belong to people we’d definitely want to shoot on sight.” There was a dull flush of crimson staining her cheeks as she realized exactly what purpose they must have been at those homes for in the past to cause that much wrath.

He sighed, regretting already indulging in that moment of weakness because it didn’t have a place here and now. “There’s one place I can think of,” he admitted. It wasn’t even too far, for that matter. “But we can’t go outside like this.”

Some raiding of closets happened after that, though they were careful to not take too much, generally the stuff in the back of the closets that likely hadn’t been worn in several years. Meeting in the living room, they switched their distinctive Thirteen overcoats for winter wear in Capitol style, shoving their military boots in their backpacks and borrowing shoes from the owners of the place. The man of the house must have been quite big indeed because both his pea-green coat and his shoes were too large on Haymitch, but it would do for the time being.

“No rifles from here on in. And you’ll have to ditch your bow,” he nodded to Katniss, “and Finnick his trident.” There was simply no good way to conceal weapons that large beneath their coats. Nobody in the Capitol would be carrying rifles except Peacekeepers, and nobody would be carrying a bow or trident at all. It would be a glaring beacon announcing who they were. Katniss bit her lip, looking like he’d just asked her to cut off her own arm, but eventually she took the bow from over her shoulder and handed it over. He handed her one of Boggs’ handguns instead, knowing it was no replacement for the security of the weapon she would trust her life to, but it was the best they had.

Bundling the weapons with their Thirteen overcoats, they opened the hatch to the tunnels and dumped them back down into the sewers, along with the kerchiefs on Finnick’s wound that they had replaced with a few dish towels, more capable of absorbing the blood. They took a little food, but not so much as would be readily missed. A couple of kitchen knives from a drawer too, but none from the butcher’s block on the counter where an empty slot would be obvious.

Tidying up as best as they could to leave as little sign of their passing through as they could, mopping up a few spots of blood on the tile floor and shoving the dish towel in his pocket, Haymitch helped Finnick tie a bright red scarf around his face to hide any spots of blood and drew the hood down to help hide his wounds better too. He didn’t like how Finnick’s deep tan skin was looking alarmingly pale now. All of them hid their faces as best they could behind thick winter scarves, and used their hats and hoods also to help with the task. About all that showed now were their eyes. Those wouldn’t be enough of a giveaway. Johanna gave them all a heavy spritz of some of the perfumes from the bathroom. “We smell like sewer and blood and that’ll be pretty obvious out on the street there,” she pointed out. “Look, Haymitch, this one’s called Bay Rum. Smelling like booze--you’re used to that.”

He rolled his eyes and said, “Wanna let me try to drink it and see what happens?”

It was bitterly cold outside and everyone in the crowd outside was dressed warmly, and many of them were carrying belongings in their arms or in bags as they apparently evacuated their homes, so six more bundled-up figures with backpacks ought to blend in pretty well.

Closing the door behind them as they saw the coast was clear and slipped into the hallway and from there out the front door of the apartment building, they blended easily into the throngs of Capitol citizens. He hoped like hell the occupants of that apartment were scatterbrained enough to seriously believe that maybe they’d forgotten to lock the door on leaving home, because if not that would have Peacekeepers on their tail even sooner.

Chapter Text

Moving through the streets of the Capitol as dusk was starting to fall, Peeta kept trying to make himself not glance over at Katniss, not want to ask her repeatedly, “Are you OK?” She couldn’t be OK, not really. Not after watching her friend blow himself to bits down in the Transfer, trying to take out that cat mutt. Take it out so she could double back and help Peeta escape too, because there was no way he could have made it when people with two good legs weren’t going to manage.

So Gale died, in a way, to help save him, and there was nothing Peeta could do to pay him back for it. He would always know he had lived because Gale had been willing to die to help eliminate the threat. Maybe for Katniss’ sake more than his, but the point still stood.

For once in his life, Peeta finally thought he understood that mysterious, prickly sense of fierce pride and debt in the miners that Katniss and Haymitch navigated as easily as breathing. It was a way of thinking that had always been so foreign to him but no longer. A part of him would always owe Gale now. He would always owe Finnick too so he prayed fervently that he wouldn’t die, but at least with him up and walking, albeit a little unsteady here and there, Peeta thought his chances were good.

Haymitch kept them moving briskly as he could given Finnick’s injuries and Peeta’s leg, the stump of which felt like it was on fire, and he could tell that the extra padding in the cup of his leg was absorbing the blood. Everyday things were perfectly fine but this leg wasn’t meant for climbing mountains and crawling through sewers and outrunning terrifying cat mutts from Seven.

Still, he shut up and bore it as best as he could,gritted teeth behind his scarf and everything, and he risked putting an arm around Katniss’ shoulders for a minute as he walked beside her. He felt the tension locked in her frame as she was simply trying to get through this, trying to not let it in. He remembered how she’d been in the arena, that same fierce determination in the face of the unbearable.

It all seemed unbearable right now. He knew for the rest of his life he'd remember the grunt as that Peacekeeper's warning over his comm cut off, the blossom of white on his red uniform. Peeta hadn't even thought, he'd simply reacted. The Peacekeeper would have killed him given the chance, but he'd deliberately taken a life. Maybe more than one, because he thought more of his shots had connected too, but it was so chaotic he couldn't be positive. But he was a killer now and he was going to have to live with that knowledge, and it burned deeply into him so he tried to lock it away because he couldn't afford to get sloppy right now. He stepped on a patch of ice over the pastel paving stones, focusing on Katniss rather than watching where he was going, and he was unable to feel the difference like he could with his real foot and adjust for the suddenly treacherous footing. He slipped, went down hard and felt the knee of his trousers and the skin of his knee tear open, and now his good leg was bleeding too.

Johanna was by his side at an instant, a hand on his arm and helping Katniss get him up in a hurry, and there were enough refugees around them that one young man slipping and falling wasn’t enough to catch the attention of the Peacekeepers scattered along the street in their white uniforms, directing the flow of things. “Are you all right, Petrarch?” Johanna chirped in a decent approximation of a Capitol accent--the muffling of the scarff probably helped that. “Oh, be more careful!”

“Fine,” he risked a grumbled one-word answer, setting off again, and this time Katniss kept closer to him as they followed Haymitch in his ugly green coat, weaving his way through the streets. His good leg was on fire now too. He wondered how badly he’d gashed it open.

Finally Haymitch paused at one particular building, and pressed a button near the front door beneath a blue awning. “It’s very, very important news about your son,” he said, also adopting the Capitol accent like Johanna had, and it was almost eerie hearing that sound coming out of Haymitch’s mouth perfectly rather than the comfortably familiar Twelve twang, “so could we discuss this in person?” A buzzing sound rang out and with a click, the front door unlocked as Haymitch pulled it open, ushering them in with a quick, impatient motion.

It was a really nice apartment building. The lobby alone was nicer than anything in the Training Center, all plush carpeting and amber-colored carved wood paneling. “Nice pieces of oak,” Johanna mumbled, a gloved hand brushing over the paneling. The elevator took them to the third floor, and Haymitch paused in front of 305, knocking.

When the door cracked open, Peeta heard Haymitch tell whoever the occupant was, “It’s Haymitch, Taff.” With that he heard the rattle of the chain being undone and the door was opened wide.

The person there was familiar to him as well as to Haymitch--Taffeta. She’d been one of those who helped him in Mentor Central, the older mentor from Eight. He didn’t remember exactly what Games she’d won in, but they must have been close to fifty years ago. He remembered watching her victor tape during the spring at Haymitch’s house, and seeing a fifteen-year-old Taffeta hiding from other tributes in the ruins of an abandoned factory.

“Come in,” she said, and Peeta noticed how she was bundled up, at least one sweater on over her clothes. “The heat and the electricity are in and out, I’m afraid, and getting anything for the fireplace is damn near impossible.” Well, then it was pretty much like Twelve, though that must be part of the effects of the war, leaving people in the Capitol cold and in the dark at intervals.

He was asking himself why a Hunger Games victor would ever live in the Capitol, except for maybe one from a Career district, but just now he was grateful she was here and apparently willing to take them in. She’d been kind to him. “We came in through the sewers, ran into some mutts. Finnick’s pretty roughed up,” Haymitch said, tugging his scarf aside so he could talk more understandably. “How are your hands for sewing these days? Eight victors always could sew the finest stitches.” Well, that would make sense, giving that they came from the textiles and clothing district.

Taffeta smiled a little wryly and held up her hands, showing off the knobbly swelling around the joints of fingers that had once been slender. “Not too good. The arthritis is finally kicking in with a vengeance. Bring him to the kitchen, though. The lighting there is pretty good and the table will do.”

They followed her to the kitchen, tugging away scarves and the like but keeping their coats buttoned, because it was a bit chilly in the apartment. Peeta jumped forward to help her clear the table of a few things, some sketches and the like of what looked like clothing designs. “Katniss,” Taffeta said, taking a moment to say kindly, “I’m so pleased to meet you finally. Would you and Peeta mind putting the kettle on? You all look like you could use some tea.”

Katniss reached for the kettle on the stove and carried it to the sink, and after a few sputters of protest, the water turned on. “She looks familiar,” she said to Peeta in an undertone.

“Taffeta Locke,” he said softly to her. “Victor from Eight.” If not for having run into her in Mentor Central she probably would have just had that same sense of vague familiarity for him too, one of dozens of victors he’d watched on their tapes as child tributes, and then saw as adults at the recap of the reapings.

“You said you had news?” Taffeta was asking Haymitch as they helped get an unresisting and semi-conscious Finnick up on the table. She sounded anxious, though Peeta could tell she was trying hard to not show it.

“Cinna’s all right,” Haymitch reassured her. “He’s healed up pretty well, and he’s still back in Thirteen. Making designs for the victory celebration,” and there was a faint tone of amusement in his voice.

Wait, Cinna? Cinna’s mother? Peeta’s startled eyes flew to the old woman and he saw it now, the caramel skin, the cheekbones, the green eyes that if he looked closely, probably had gold flecks in them. “You’re Cinna’s ma?” Katniss croaked in surprise beside him.

“Yes,” Taffeta said, distracted with the task at hand. “I’ll answer your questions later if you like, but for now...” She gestured to Finnick.

Haymitch was busy yanking off his own huge coat, grunting with displeasure, “Too bulky to work in this.” He dropped it over the back of one of the chairs. Johanna was already down on her knees digging furiously through their backpacks and handing over the first aid kits with supplies for sutures.

“I thought you didn’t know how to sew,” Peeta said to Haymitch in confusion, clearly remembering him saying that to Maysilee Donner when she’d had to sew up the wound in his arm.

“I've had to learn a few things since I was sixteen,” Haymitch said tightly with an odd undercurrent of something almost like anger in his voice. He didn’t even look up as he said it, busy getting Finnick’s own coat and uniform unbuttoned. Finnick by this point had apparently passed out from the pain. At least, Peeta hoped he was out of it rather than sinking into shock.

Johanna was helping him do it, exposing the ugly wound on Finnick’s throat. She laughed tightly and glanced over her shoulder to look at Peeta and said, “Who the hell do you think sews up and cleans a dead tribute’s body so they can be handed back to their parents? The morgue fairy? Haymitch has twenty-three years of practice to go on.”

Peeta ended up staring at her, a sick feeling in his stomach at the thought of it. He’d never even thought about that aspect of being a mentor. Going down to the morgue after watching a gruesome death unfold on that mentor console, having to wash and sew and tend a dead child so they could be halfway presentable for their family back in the districts--it was a whole new level of horror he’d been spared.

Surprisingly, Katniss spoke up steadily to tell Johanna, “Jo, he’ll be all right. Haymitch will take care of him.” Given that she’d watched her own friend die badly only hours ago, Peeta was surprised she was that confident Johanna wouldn’t lose hers.

Johanna gave a snort of irritation, but there was less of a wild heat of anger and fear in her now and more of her usual sharp sarcasm as she said, “And who said you could call me ‘Jo’, Kittycat?”

“Haymitch and Finnick do.”

“Are you Finnick or Haymitch?” Another huff, and Johanna relaxed a bit more, maybe realizing everything she and Katniss had been through together. “Fine. Katniss.”

“That’s really touching, you two,” Haymitch said irritably, “but do you have any alcohol, Taff?” All the eyes in the room, except for Finnick’s unconscious ones, suddenly flew to him in surprise. Alcohol and Haymitch pretty much came with some natural assumptions, never mind that he’d been sober for the better part of a year now. Why he’d start drinking now, especially when he was being relied upon to perform surgery, and on a friend of his--maybe that was it. Maybe the stress of it was just too much to handle and somehow he thought a drink would steady his nerves, even if not his hands. Haymitch scowled fiercely at their expressions, jabbed a finger towards Finnick and snapped, “It’s to disinfect the wounds, all right?”

Peeta blushed in chagrin at that, having missed the obvious by jumping to conclusions. Taffeta pulled down a bottle of amber liquid, mostly full. She handed it to Haymitch with a faint smile and a remark of, “Solonius’ favorite cognac. It’s my pleasure to donate it to the cause.”

Haymitch chuckled softly and reached for the first aid kits. Then he glanced up at Peeta and Katniss, anxiously standing there as the kettle began to whistle behind them. “You two ought to see about getting Peeta’s stump and his knee looked at while Jo and I handle this.” Peeta could recognize they were being dismissed, but standing there anxiously watching Haymitch sew up Finnick wouldn’t help, and maybe Haymitch didn’t want an audience for it anyway. His leg did hurt, he’d admit.

Silently he and Katniss helped make tea under Taffeta’s direction while Haymitch and Johanna finished preparing Finnick for his stitches. Handing over the mugs of tea, Haymitch drank his down quickly and shooed Peeta and Katniss off the bathroom to take care of his leg. “Take whatever you need,” Taffeta called after them.

Dropping his trousers, he told Katniss with a rueful smile, “I’ve undressed for you in better circumstances.” He hoped they’d see those days again, days after this was all over. He’d meant what he said to her before they left. He didn’t mean for that to be their final night together. She gave a faint hiccup of laughter, though it sounded half like she was trying to not cry, and kneeled down and helped him undo the straps and buckles of the artificial leg while he sat down on the toilet.

They both stared at the raw, bleeding flesh of his stump, not paying much attention to the rapidly-scabbing gash on his other knee. “Oh, Peeta,” she said miserably. “Maybe you should have stayed...”

He reached down and took her hand. “I wasn’t going to stay in Thirteen,” he argued gently, “knowing you were coming here. We’ll look out for each other, you and I.” She was glumly silent and he could see from the way her grey eyes were lowered, not quite meeting his, that she must be thinking of Gale and how she’d tried to look out for him too.

Slipping off the toilet seat on the floor beside her, gritting his teeth as it jarred his stump, he got an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close, and she relaxed into his embrace, her arms sliding around him in turn. “We protect each other,” he said softly. “And that’s what you did. You came back for me.” I’m sorry, I know he died sort of because of me, he thought, but his throat was too tight to say it.

“I’m not letting you go,” she said lowly, voice thick and trembling, and while Haymitch and Johanna and Taffeta were busy in the kitchen, he reached over to shut the bathroom door and give them a little privacy. They didn’t need to see or hear this.

“I’m not letting you go either,” he told her, holding on to her and letting her have her tears for Gale, and shedding a few himself for what he'd become.

Somehow Haymitch managed to keep his hands mostly steady, which was a shock to him because he’d never taken sutures on someone before to help preserve life. He’d had the power of life and death in his hands so many times before and always fumbled it, and he couldn’t imagine how someone like Perulla managed that cool, ruthless detachment when faced with someone dying, able to set aside their fears and step in to save them. Maybe it was because they didn’t always fail like he had.

Sewing up the gash on Finnick’s neck first, he was grateful the younger man had passed out and wasn’t feeling this. He remembered Maysilee stitching up his arm and how it had hurt like hellfire, and that was a bad idea because the gashed throat made him think of Maysilee, and the ruin of Finnick’s face brought back memories of Larkspur and of Woof teaching him to sew up wounds on the dead all those years ago, because Eight knew how to take a fine stitch, remembering himself at seventeen anxiously saying he didn’t know how he would ever make her look presentable for her parents.

Presentable. Woof had sewn up Larkspur’s face himself, Haymitch’s crude and clumsy beginner’s stitches only good enough for the gut wound that would be hidden beneath her clothes. But this wasn’t Larkspur he was sewing up this time, and Woof had died in the arena months ago now--probably at the Cornucopia, he hadn’t asked Peeta because maybe he couldn’t bear yet to know how they all died--this was Finnick, and he was still alive, the warm air of his breath stirring against Haymitch’s fingers as he tried to sew those horrible gashes in Finnick’s face.

Taffeta gave him some suggestions and Johanna helped him where he could, handing over things and helping hold Finnick’s flesh together while Haymitch stitched it, her strong, quick hands surprisingly steady given how she must be feeling. But he could tell that despite his best efforts, without Capitol scar treatment, Finnick’s gorgeous looks would always be marred. Haymitch was pretty good at sewing by now as Johanna had told the kids, but even the finest stitches possible would have left the scars raking across his face, disfiguring it with subtle distortions, though he was lucky in that the path of the claws hadn’t cost him either of his eyes.

He could feel the tension in his shoulders from bending over Finnick for so long when he finally finished the last stitches. The last of the daylight was fading behind him through the living room window. Taffeta had flicked on the light switch fully half an hour ago and to his relief the lights responded, but he knew he couldn’t count on that to last, so he’d tried to sew quickly and neatly as he could. Checking Finnick’s pulse and breathing and skin color, he thought it looked promising.

“He should take my bed,” Taffeta said gently, “and then the rest of you should get some sleep too. You look exhausted.”

“We’ve been up all night,” he said, feeling the weariness of it seeping into his very bones now that the adrenaline was wearing off. He and Johanna carefully carried Finnick to the bedroom and laid him down on the bed. “Got it?” he asked Jo, and she nodded, distracted, already helping pull off the remnants of Finnick’s clothes, the pucker of worry in her brows undeniable.

He followed Taffeta back to the kitchen, putting the kettle back on. “I’m sorry to barge in on you,” he said with a sigh, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “We had nowhere else to go, though.” The apartment the victors kept for private trysts between themselves, or with patrons who wanted discretion, had to be under surveillance, he was sure. “Will we be safe here?” he asked bluntly.

“Yes. I’ve been away from Eight for so very long,” she said back, being equally honest, “that even their being on the forefront of the rebellion didn’t touch me. Cinna was careful to keep me away from his involvement, and Solonius swore up and down that I’ve been a loyal Capitol citizen,” now there was a hint of irony and bitterness in her tone, “for close to forty years now.”

“At least he’s useful for something,” Haymitch said dryly. It was more than he’d have given a Capitol politician credit for--he might even actually care for Taffeta that he put in the effort to save her like that. Too bad that his affection had been expressed in buying her away from Snow and the whoring circuit so he alone would have her, owning her like some kind of pet.

She nodded. “What happened to the Odair boy?”

“Mutts,” Haymitch said tiredly. “Giant cat mutts from Seven. We lost one of our squad down there too.” At her fearful glance, he shook his head. “One of Katniss’ friends from home. Not a victor. Beetee’s the only other victor that was with us and he’s back in Thirteen.” He hated to boil it down to that, not a victor, as if it made Gale’s death matter less, but they’d both lost so many friends lately in the arena that being able to reassure her that she hadn’t lost yet another one was a good thing.

“Oh, Haymitch,” she said with a soft sigh. Not much else to be said and he was grateful she didn’t go on about it. She’d always been one who could get the point across with few words or even silence. “You ought to get some sleep yourself, after I see what I can do for dinner for you and the rest. You look like hell.”

He felt about ready to drop, to be honest. “It’s been sort of a rough year,” he said, tongue-in-cheek, because if he didn’t joke about it the full weight of it would sink in and overwhelm him. It felt funny sitting here talking to one of the older victors, someone who’d known him that long and who he could still look up to in some ways. He’d been around Finn and Jo and Katniss and Peeta for so long, where he was the senior victor. “But at least it’ll all be done soon. And I can get rid of this fucking Thirteen uniform,” he gestured to it.

“It’s not a good shade of grey on you,” she teased him softly.

He couldn’t help but smile in return, the gentle humor of her stylist’s eye disapproving of the uniform he’d come to hate warming him as much as the mug of tea she now shoved at him. “And let me guess, my clothes are too big and baggy and are terrible colors,” jerking a thumb at the huge pea-green overcoat over the chair, “I’m too thin for my height, and my hair’s too short and severe for my face.” All true currently, of course, but considering it was what she’d told him on their very first meeting when he’d come to her for a new wardrobe, he had to admit it tickled him a little to quote it back at her. From how she smiled and her eyes lit up at it, she obviously remembered too.

“You’ve still got good bones, though,” she told him with some humor, finishing up what she’d told him all those years ago in her assessment of him. “I always thought you’d age well.”

Which is even more remarkable despite all the booze, he thought wryly, grateful she was being too kind to say it. “Apparently. It kept me going on the circuit until I was thirty-five, after all,” he said dryly. That was impressive in this place with its rabid fear of aging, since most victors were out of the game by thirty, or had only a couple of devoted patrons past that. “Probably could have been longer.” It hadn’t been his looks that got him kicked out in the end, it was his drinking and his increasingly cynical, rude tongue.

The look she gave him, steady and unflinching, made him blush in embarrassment, realizing it had been blindly indulgent griping about his own issues, given that she’d been forced to yield her own body at thirty-five and even past that. As bad as his own experiences had been, at least he’d only been forced to endure it one month or so of the year and then he could escape back to Twelve. After Solonius Trove purchased her contract, Taffeta was expected to live in the Capitol and be available to him year-round. He’d never actually risked that danger, since as Twelve’s only living victor he would always be needed as a mentor first and couldn’t be bought out and removed from the Games. After Taffeta mentored Georgette to a victory, she hadn’t been necessary in Mentor Central. “We’ll try to get out of your hair as quickly as we can,” he assured her.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Finnick’s not going anywhere in a hurry and I’m fairly sure Peeta could use a day of rest, the way he was limping. Most of my neighbors are already holed up at Snow’s mansion anyway.” He knew from previous visits, after Taffeta’s retirement from being forced to style for the victors in favor of some “fresh” and “youthful” perspective, that a lot of the people in this building were connected to Snow’s top politicians. “Well, those that don’t want to kill him after Finnick’s revelations.” There was something like fierce pride burning in her eyes at that, and Haymitch realized that after four decades as a politician’s forced mistress, hearing the dirty laundry of the Capitol’s elite aired so blithely by another victor-whore must have been a sweet kind of revenge for her. “Face it. You need time to rest and regroup if you’re hoping to get at that mansion. Nobody’s seen him publicly since the day Finnick denounced him and they rescued you from the Detention Center. He made too many enemies.”

“You’re right,” he agreed with a sigh. He’d been thinking towards getting it over with, pushing it to the edge, but that wouldn’t do them any good. He might be able to make good plans in a hurry but he could likely make better ones given some time to actually consider.

“Besides,” she pointed out, getting to her feet and fishing in the refrigerator, “you’re victors. We look after each other. So of course you’re welcome here. Eggs OK? I know it’s nothing fancy, but I haven’t been shopping in a few days.”

Eggs sounded fantastic, after the largely tasteless camp soup and the packets of hash they’d eaten down in the sewer. Katniss and Peeta finally emerged from the bathroom and Haymitch didn’t say anything about their red-rimmed eyes. Johanna came from the bedroom and said that Finnick was sleeping peacefully. They ate their eggs and then, after a brief argument about the spare bedroom, Johanna groused and said, “Just take it, Kittycat, your boyfriend obviously needs somewhere comfortable to sleep with that gimp leg of his.” It would give them some more privacy too, if Katniss had more grieving to do for Gale. Taffeta made up a pallet for herself in the bedroom with Finnick to keep an eye on him through the night, and Haymitch was relieved to know he was being left in good hands, because looking at the bleary eyes, he knew they’d all crash pretty hard.

That left him and Johanna and a heap of spare blankets to make their way as best they could in the living room. Staring at the two couches, he told her, “Those look uncomfortable as hell. Stick to the floor?” The carpet was thick and plush anyway. That would help.

She nodded, knelt, and started spreading out one of the blankets. “Are we sharing?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him as he tossed her a few of the throw pillows from the couch.

Surprised at the question, he was trying to not read too much into it. But they’d only shared a bed before with the understanding that after sex, they tended to fall asleep together and if that meant they slept well, that was fine. It was something they sort of stumbled into, a thinly veiled excuse for sharing the intimacy of it, but this would be nothing but deliberate. “You’re the one from the frozen northern district,” he said, trying to keep it light and not awkward and give them both a ready excuse for sharing a bed again, “so you tell me. It’d probably be warmer that way, yeah?” That was what she’d told him in the arena anyway, as she snuggled up to him in the cold zone of the clock. She’d been right, he’d admit. Uncomfortable as she made him during that hour, it had very little to do with the cold.

“Yeah,” she said. “Keeping warm tonight’s a good idea anyway.” Sitting down on the blanket she started to pull off her pointy-toed black boots, borrowed from the Capitol woman’s closet. For his part it was easy to step out of his too-large shoes. Tugging the other blankets over them, he moved closer to her. She turned on her side and rolled up against him, her body fitting against his with an easy familiarity by now, and without even having to think about it, his arm went around her. “Bet the arena cameras would love this too, the way they loved Peeta and Katniss getting all cozy in that cave,” she said with a wry smile. “At least our little bleeding-heart act never really took off. I mean, people bought it, sure, people in Thirteen were assuming it was real. But they didn’t get all atwitter about it like they did with those kids.” She sounded curious, and having lived with it day in and day out from the moment the 74th Games ended up until he entered the arena for the Quell, Haymitch was wearily familiar with just how popular the story of the epic romance of the star-crossed lovers from Twelve was all across Panem.

“Us supposedly falling in love at the eleventh hour was good television, sure,” he said thoughtfully, glad they were talking about anything besides Gale or Finnick, even if it was the strange topic of their non-existent fake arena romance. “You got that right. But no more so than anything else in the Games.” A One tribute wielding a novel weapon would have gotten as much interest. “We weren’t...” He groped for the right words.

“We weren’t pure enough to make it matter to them,” she said wearily. “Making us kill each other or watch each other die wouldn’t have been sullying something all innocent and soft and sweet like with those two kids. They love those two being in love and they couldn't stand to see that dream get killed off.” It gave them something to root for, like he’d told Seneca Crane. It had fired their hearts and imaginations. “And they love Finnick and Annie being in love too,” she added, softer now, and thinking of the wedding propo Haymitch had to agree. “You and me, for them we’ll always be the crazy bitch and the snarky bastard, and us claiming we’re in love, well, that was just one more act in the whole freak show of the Games.” He felt her body stiffen in his arms, then relax. “Well,” she said, voice a little too casual now, “I did the best I could on short notice there to make something up. Sorry.”

“Look at it this way. They’re not wholeheartedly into it so at least you’re not stuck with me the way Katniss had to fake it with Peeta all those months,” he said softly to her, wanting to somehow hold her even tighter as he said it. “We’ve both had to act our parts enough already.” The snarky bastard, the crazy bitch, the pressure of the arena turning them into something new. He wondered if anyone remembered anything but that about them.

Blight was in the lounge taking shots of kirschwater, Seven’s native liquor, and Haymitch sighed, knowing why. He’d run off like a shot yesterday the moment the boy from Five had tackled the girl down to the ground and started making his intents towards her clear enough. Blight had always been soft when it came to kids being hurt, always took the deaths hard, and Haymitch liked him for that. They’d drunk plenty of alcohol together over the years to cope with being two of the worst hard-luck districts when it came to hopeless tributes. But then when Blight endured that last appointment, when what he’d been forced to do to a kid broke him--well, no wonder he’d run like hell at the sight of what was about to happen to his girl.

“She’s alive,” Haymitch told him. Cedrus was taking care of her, sending food with the sponsor money that had suddenly started coming in when the feed of her killing the Five boy aired and a terrified, overwhelmed girl suddenly became a contender, hunting down the other tributes left. They'd aired it minus the boy trying to rape her, of course. It wouldn’t do to publicly broadcast anything as unsavory as that. The naughty voyeuristic thrill of teenage fooling around in the arena was fair game. One's tributes obligingly provided that show every few years, and sometimes scared tributes from other districts would provide a bout of desperation sex for the audience. But rape, prolonged torture, and the like, always got edited out. Haymitch was unspeakably grateful in some cases that the parents never knew exactly what their child had endured in the arena before they died.

“Alive and...?” Blight asked carefully, bloodshot hazel eyes looking up at him. Haymitch watched over and swiped the kirschwater bottle from Blight’s hand and took a swig of it himself.

“Alive, pants still on, and on the game with a fucking vengeance,” he said bluntly. “Starting with Dazen’s boy. But she chalked up another one. Took out Mags’ girl two hours ago.” They couldn’t be bothered to learn the names of all the tributes year after year. So it was always “Mags’ girl.” Or, for the inevitably short time they were in the arena, “Haymitch’s boy” and “Haymitch’s girl.” Both of which hadn’t made it past the first night this year, but fuck, Jonquil was twelve and Gerry thirteen, so it was more of a lost cause than usual.

Blight looked up at him with something like a spark of hope. “You think she was playing us?”

“No,” he said, taking another sip of the alcohol and handing it back to Blight, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I think she reached her breaking point, that’s all.” The point where, when pushed hard enough, a tribute showed what they were willing to do to live. A point where some people, gone beyond the point of panic and fear, found the clear calm of knowing how to survive. He'd found it himself, years ago. “She’s a victor, Blight,” he said quietly. He could see it. She’d managed to shut it all out, turned from something soft and afraid into something relentless as steel. “Only five of them left in there. But she’ll be the final one.” He could feel it in his bones. She was something unusual, enough so to make it to the end. He didn’t congratulate Blight. The lucky ones weren’t the ones that Snow crowned.

Blight took another sip and looked up at Haymitch with eyes as afraid as his girl’s had been prior to yesterday. “They like us Seven victors. Like to test us. Break us if they can.” It was true. There was something about the fierce, independent spirit of Seven that the Capitol generally liked, and the darker ones liked to try and shatter. Cedrus came through it mostly intact. Blight had broken. “They’re going to want her,” Blight said it plainly, even as an obvious shudder of revulsion went down his spine to discuss it. “First victor from Seven in twenty years, and the first female? She’s going to be too novel to pass up.” It was true, Haymitch knew. The Odair boy who won last year too, safe at home this year--he’d bet anything that next year when he was sixteen, he’d be on the circuit. He was too popular to not sell.

He couldn’t deny it or say anything about it that didn’t sound like trite bullshit, because he already pitied the girl for what was in store for her as a victor, so he said, “Might as well get your ass back out there so I can get some sleep here, Blight.” He didn’t tell Blight the announcers were already spinning her as a deceptive genius who’d played weak to lure in unsuspecting tributes for the slaughter, a cunning little spider weaving webs and lying in wait. The Games were over for Twelve as usual, and the Seven girl was Cedrus and Blight’s problem, not his. He just wanted to sleep and hopefully not dream of Jonquil or Gerry.

Things had changed since the 66th Games and the girl whose name he hadn’t even remembered at that point. Blight was dead and Cedrus might well be, and Johanna had definitely become his problem. The Capitol tested her, all right. But they hadn’t broken her, he thought, not even with everything they took from her, everything they forced on her. Feeling the warmth of her snug against him, secure in a way he hadn’t been since leaving Thirteen despite now being in the middle of the Capitol, maybe even after the day of blood and horror they’d endured he might sleep and not have Gale or any of the others fill his dreams.

Chapter Text

”C’mon, Nuts!”, Blight snapped in the pitch black, as Wiress’s whimpers and howls headed back down the hill, and he growled at Johanna, “Stay here with him, keep your axes ready,” as she heard the sound of Beetee’s body hitting the dirt down from where Blight had him slung over his broad shoulders. Funny how right here in the arena was the most alert and normal she’d seen him ever since she was little, but there were no kids involved in it this year. From how kind he always was to the kids in Seven, she’d come to realize over the years that he hated seeing children suffer, and wasn’t that what the Games were all about? Then Haymitch had told her what had made him break in the end and it all made sense, how he’d been terrified of her during her first few years as a victor, not because of the persona they stuck her with but what they were doing to her.

Blight and her had come to terms over the years and she’d halfway forgiven him for frantically trying to shove her off on anyone else early on. He wasn’t much compared to the likes of Finnick and Haymitch who’d been there for her through thick and thin, but he was from home, the only person she really trusted right now until she could find Haymitch’s alliance, and he was leaving her alone in this dark hellhole with an unconscious Volts. “Blight!” she yelled after him, but he was already gone.

She wasn’t weak, she might be short but lumbering had given her broad shoulders and there was strength in her arms and thighs, she wasn’t huge as a Career by any means but she wasn’t skinny as Haymitch’s little Mockingjay either. But she couldn’t carry Beetee and be able to fight whatever might be out there in the darkness. So she stood there with her axes in her hands and Beetee at her feet, waiting.

The hisses and scrabbling feet of the rodents out there suddenly turned into the coughing snarl that sent a chill down the spine of anyone in Seven, the sound of forest cats on the prowl. She heard them screaming then, Bern and Heike and her mom and dad, heard their pain and terror as the cats howled and growled and tore them to pieces. She ran for them, ran for the sound of their voices because screw Volts, this was her family, but she tripped and fell more than once over roots and branches on the forest floor, slamming into the trunks of trees, unable to see where she was going, and eventually their cries died down to a terrifying silence. Then she was alone and lost in the dark.

Blight won’t ever come back, came a familiar voice, sliding by her like she was close enough to touch, and Johanna couldn’t see Heike in the blackness but she knew her voice so well, and it made her heart ache to hear it, imagining her little sister with her riot of auburn hair, dead at fourteen. We won’t come back either. You’re going to be alone again.

Finnick’s voice came next, the honey-smooth drawl of it, You’ll always be alone because everyone leaves you in the end, don’t they? We just left you there in the arena to die, didn’t we? I wouldn’t have ever left Annie.

Her heart twisted to hear him say that, and there they were whispering in the darkness how little she mattered, Heike, Bern, Blight, Cedrus, Finnick, Katniss, Peeta, the tributes she’d had, Enobaria, Brutus, and like the final killing blow, even Haymitch too, You think we’d have come back to the Capitol if it was just you there? They came back because of me. She ended up with her hands over her ears just like Annie to block out the sound of them but somehow the noise echoed in her brain anyway.

She woke up gasping, knowing immediately it was a nightmare because those voices hadn’t been there in the arena, and neither had the forest cats, or the sounds of her family dying. There had been only the sounds of rodents moving in the darkness and her own harsh breathing. The darkness had finally lifted and she saw she was standing in a pool of Beetee’s blood. Alternately carrying and dragging him, panting in the steamy butter-thick air, it was close to an hour before she found Wiress walking circles and muttering to herself, beside Blight’s body from where he’d hit the forcefield. She wasn’t like Finnick. She couldn’t let it show on camera. Blight was no Mags but he’d still been something, and in the end he’d left her alone too, and he’d died in the dark. She’d been relieved when she found Haymitch and the others later that day and she didn’t have to spend the night alone, because the uselessness of an unconscious Volts and crazy Nuts didn’t count as company and reliable allies, far as she was concerned.

But the dream felt real and it was pitch-black too right now and she almost startled as she felt something stirring and an arm going tighter around her before her mind placed it. Haymitch said quietly in her ear, “You want me to see if the lights are working?”

It was the closest he’d come to openly letting her know he was aware that she was sort of freaked out by the dark now. Considering he hadn't said anything when she'd flipped out in the shower when Lights Out came and she was still in it, and his dumb joke back before they left Thirteen about sex Twelve-style being done in the dark, seemed like he hadn’t quite made the connection then, or maybe he simply forgot for a moment. Obviously he got it now, and surprisingly it didn’t bother her as much as it might have, him knowing about her being weak like that. Yeah, well, it was a weakness he obviously shared, given how she remembered how she’d had to wake him up out of nightmares even in the arena, and how they’d sedated him in the hospital, and how he’d had to knock himself out most nights before they started sleeping together, in both senses. “No,” she said. “I’m fine.”

She settled herself back down, groping to tuck the corner of the blankets back around them from where she’d thrashed free of it and started letting the chill air seep in. “It’ll be December in a couple of days. Coming up on New Year’s Festival,” she said, trying to think of better things than pitch darkness and the arena and being in the Capitol again. Or about the forest cats from that afternoon, who left Finnick sleeping in Taffeta’s bedroom with a badly torn face. Or about Gale, angry Gale so full of life, who she’d almost fucked after Finnick’s wedding because he was there and she was so pissed off and feeling rejected, and he was gone now. “Maybe we’ll all get to go home in time for that.” Home. Her lonely house in Seven, without even Blight or Cedrus there.

She didn’t mention, It’s Victory Tour time, because that always happened just before New Year. There wouldn’t be a Tour this year, at least. That was a mercy.

She thought about it, about home and the holiday when she was a kid. About Bern and Heike and decorating the tree for New Year’s with their family’s carved wooden ornaments, everything from ones made by her Great-Opa Tannen and her Oma Kirsten to the one her parents made to celebrate their first New Year’s together and the first New Year’s for Bern and her and Heike, to Heike’s own first clumsy efforts at carving. The tree came out of a family’s monthly firewood budget, though after the Festival was over they could chop it up and burn it anyway. But except for the most desperate, they all tried to make the firewood stretch for a week or two so they could have that holiday tree.

Her dad used to lift her up so she could put the star on top, she remembered. Then Heike got the job when Johanna got too big for it, and when Heike outgrew it, Bern, six years older and strapping like their dad, was tall enough to do the job himself. She remembered that last winter after she won the Games, the nice presents she’d actually been able to buy them, but how she wanted desperately for it to be like the year before, just a pair of hand-knit mittens as a gift or the like, but where she wasn’t a fucked-up mess with nightmares of the arena. She remembered the first winter alone, trying to forget the remote area of the north woods where they’d died and where only pieces of them were recovered after the cats and then maybe the scavengers too had at them in the summer heat, trying to forget watching two tributes die bad deaths and trying to forget the unclean feeling of other peoples’ sweat on her skin, retreating into the cover of the cunning, angry little victor they were turning her into.

Every year, every December since the 67th Games, she’d pulled out that box of ornaments from the closet. As a victor she inevitably got a nice tree from the lumber mill, even as she wished it could have been lopsided or with a gap on one side so it felt more like home. She hung the ornaments on it and remembered who made each one, remembered years gone by, and she missed them so damn badly. “We always had a tree each year,” she said, telling him about it and about the carved ornaments, not telling him about how lonely it was every year. She had the feeling he already knew. Who knew if she'd be home for New Year's this year?

“On New Year’s Eve, we’d all light a candle in the front window,” he answered, “and then the neighbors, they’d come on up singing one of the holiday songs, with a bit of coal and some bread. Hoping for enough warmth and food for the next year, you know? Give ‘em a shot of white liquor or a cookie or something to welcome them, and then your family would go do the same for the next neighbors.”

It sounded poor like everything involved with Twelve, but still nice, that sense of community and all. Seven wasn’t quite like that. Oh, they looked out for neighbors if they could, but Twelve--Four for that matter too--had that interdependence she’d never quite managed to understand, coming from a place where the ability to look out for yourself was so needed out in the woods. “So it was all about music and coal in Twelve,” she said a bit wryly, teasing him. “What a shock.” She didn’t ask if he’d been involved in that after he became a victor. She was sure of the answer, and that on New Year’s Eve his house in Victors' Village was as quiet and lonely as during the rest of the year.

“All about wood and trees in Seven,” he teased right back. “What a shock.” He shifted slightly, settling back down, his body against hers a welcome feeling right now even with the unfamiliar sensation of layers of clothes, but the sheer warmth and security of it was the same. “Go back to sleep,” he suggested softly. “Nothing else to be done tonight.”

She went back to sleep and she dreamed about that last New Year’s before the reaping, but right now it was comforting, even sweet, simply dreaming of Heike stare longingly at the pretty blue hair ribbons Johanna got from their parents rather than having it turn into a nightmare like when she had a venom delusion of the dead. “Hanna, please, let me borrow them?” she begged wistfully. “Blue’s actually a color I can wear in my hair.”

Her own hair, Oma Kirsten’s long wavy brown hair with its coppery highlights, was her sole concession to vanity. Otherwise she was tough as the boys out there and she reveled in that. Her fingertips ran over the silky fabric of the ribbons. “They’re mine, kiddo, no way.” Heike might ruin them or lose them. She was a good kid, her little sister, but sometimes she just didn’t think. She was clumsy, lost things, got distracted from what she was doing. She was getting better as she got older, because a lumberjack who couldn’t focus was in big trouble, but sometimes, even at thirteen, Heike was so flighty.

Maybe at the next wedding celebration or the like, wearing these in her hair she might actually get noticed. One of her friends, maybe Miller or Rhus or Franz, might actually see her as a girl for once rather than being the one they always told, “Hanna, you’re a great friend, I feel like I can tell you anything.” The girl they confided in, the girl they asked for advice about the other girls in Seven, but never the girl they wanted to kiss themselves. She was sixteen. She was tired of being overlooked.

“You can braid ‘em in for me, though?” she offered to Heike, willing to make that much of a peace offering.

“Gonna go catch the eye of someone likely with those pretty ribbons, Hanna?” Bern teased her with a broad grin, busy stoking up the stove for dinner.

“Shut up, Bern,” she said with a scowl, feeling her cheeks go hot with embarrassment, wondering if she was so easily read. “You’re almost twenty-two. Maybe you need to think about finally settling down with Linden rather than hoping Nyssa’s gonna stop playing the field and pick you.” Their dad had chortled with laughter at that.

She woke up again with the memory of Bern and Heike fresh in her mind and feeling warm from it, seeing the early light of dawn coming in through the crack in the curtains, and slipped carefully out from under Haymitch’s arm, trying to not wake him. He stirred a little, gave a low sigh, and his breathing turned back to the even rhythm of sleep. She decided to check on Finnick, trying to not think of how he too had looked at her once with earnest eyes and unknowingly cut her with the kind words, You’re my best friend, Johanna. That didn’t matter now. He was her friend and he was hurt. Not that she doubted Haymitch’s needle work--he’d gotten far too much practice over the years--but she wouldn’t rest easy until she checked on him. That dream of her family dying at the paws of the forest cats made her need to see.

When she peeked into the bedroom, Taffeta was bending over him with the bedside lamp on, smearing some kind of ointment on his wounds. Glancing up, her green eyes--bright green that made her think of grass and woodlands, not like Finnick’s sea-green--were intent and she gestured Johanna over to help her with the bandages.

The black lines of the numerous sutures marched up and down the raw lines on his face, and she could see that like with any stitches the scars would pucker some, pulling at the formerly clean and beautiful lines of his brow and nose and lips. But he’s alive, she reminded herself. That was better off than Gale Hawthorne.

Finishing the job in silence, letting Finnick continue his sleep in peace, she followed Taffeta out to the kitchen, where the older woman poured her a glass of water and handed it over. Sitting down in the chair, Taffeta said, “I’ve done about what I can. At least I have some morphling on hand.” She smiled with a wry twist of her lips. “Solonius has always been generous, at least, so I’ve got a supply of the stuff laid by from minor injuries where I didn’t much need it.”

Solonius Trove--the thought of the man made her shudder. She didn’t know Taffeta too well. She was more of Cedrus’ cohort of victors, won somewhere in the twenties of the Games, she didn’t even remember which year specifically. Not the 22nd, though, as that was Cedrus’ year. Taffeta mingled occasionally at the yearly victor functions but given she hadn’t mentored in a long time until this Quell, her contact with the younger victors was limited, and Johanna hadn’t really seen much to talk about with a woman forty years older. That plus hearing she’d been bought and forced to actually live in the Capitol as the mistress of one of Snow’s cabinet made the prospect all the more awkward. She’d since learned there were a handful of other victors whose year-round residence in the Capitol was obligatory like that, being the exclusive sexual pet of some Capitol citizen. “Good,” she said with a nod. “Thanks, I’m sure Finn will rest easier because of it.”

“Haymitch asleep?” Taffeta queried, and Johanna fought a weird urge to blush, because up in Mentor Central she must have seen that stupid act Johanna slapped together. It was one thing for idiots in the Capitol and Thirteen and whatever to believe that, but other victors, that was something else entirely.

“Yeah,” she said curtly. “Far as I know.” She didn’t add, If he wasn’t sleeping soundly we’d be hearing him talking and yelling in some kind of nightmare, because that would say a little too much about just how intimately she knew him. “He sounds pretty familiar with you.” That was a bit of a surprise, given that she had to be twenty-odd years older than Haymitch.

Taffeta took a sip of her water. “I used to be obligated to use my victor talent at designing clothing to style for other victors,” she said carefully. “Having me around meant more of the stylists could just focus on the yearly tributes rather than victor wardrobes. Mostly, though, they wanted me to dress those that Snow was going to sell.” She looked up at Johanna and those eyes that were the same as Cinna’s looked squarely at her. There was a directness to her that wasn’t there in Cinna’s quietness, but then, Cinna had never been through the arena and everything that followed. “So I styled for Haymitch. Blight too,” she said, with a wistful note in her voice, obviously remembering him.

“So you just dressed them up prettier for the slaughter,” she said, unable to help the heat in her tone, though not sure whether her anger was at Taffeta for being complicit in it or at the whole rotten system. ”You really think that helped them at all?” If anything it might have gotten them more attention.

Something hard and fierce crossed Taffeta’s face for a moment. “They used to auction us off, publicly. President Mackenzie was all about the angle of punishment and shame for the districts. Do you know what they had me wear when they sold me off?” Her voice was strangely calm. “They put me in a few bits of cloth for all of Panem to see. Lovely stuff, really fine silk like we send to One to be embroidered or painted, though it was pretty see-through and rather carefully torn. Because I was from Eight, of course. A couple years earlier they had dressed Cedrus with a few strategically placed leaves. Then the first Quell came and they got plenty of revenge. Snow took over the year of the 33rd Games. Started to try to erase the worst excesses, turn it from revenge into a ‘common bonding experience’ and ‘moving beyond our painful past’.” There was a note of bitterness in her voice as she quoted it.

Johanna stared at her, trying to imagine it. It wasn’t too hard, considering how they’d dressed her out, put her on display for everyone to see. But she said carefully, “OK, but what’s that got to do with dressing some victor-whores?” She didn’t see the connection here.

“They put me in an Eight costume,” Taffeta said. Her eyes met Johanna’s. “And that was all I was to them--a costume. Like you and that horrible sadistic domination getup they forced you to wear. You could never be anything else, could you? And Finnick couldn’t be anything but a half-naked heartthrob.”

“No,” she said, mouth suddenly feeling cotton dry. That had been some of the worst of it, being forced into the mold they chose for her, the persona they decided was the story of her Games and how she could never be anything else after that. There was nobody to catch her, nobody she could drop her guard around and simply be Hanna again, or what was left of her after the arena.

“I made them clothes,” Taffeta said almost defiantly. “Not costumes. They were going to be sold anyway, but at least I could dress them in a way so they could command a little more respect from their patrons by not being reduced to a caricature. That was the only power any of us could have.” She nodded out to the living room. “When he won, you know, they injected him with growth treatments to bring him up to a better height.”

Johanna could well imagine that. True, she hadn’t imagined Haymitch had been injected with drugs. But from what she’d seen of his Games, he was definitely one of the smaller tributes for his age, but she figured it was just a natural growth spurt and good food or whatever that caused him to grow up past that. It wasn’t like he’d shot up to an impressive height or stocky build compared to some of the others. She smiled wryly and commented, “No alterations on me besides fixing my nose." She'd broken it as a kid falling out of a tree and seemingly that little crooked bump bugged the Capitol enough to fix it. "Apparently my tits were big enough already to pass their muster.” She was kind of surprised they hadn’t altered Annie’s skinny frame like that, but then again, presenting her with a frail, waif-like image apparently was their chosen persona for her.

“Well,” Taffeta said equally dryly, “consider that a blessing. With Haymitch, when he won the Twelve stylist kept putting him in very baggy clothes. Doing that and emphasizing how small he still was compared to some other victors, I imagine she thought it supposedly would highlight how he survived by his cleverness.” She shook her head wearily. “It made him look like a child playing dress-up in his father’s clothes.”

“And your answer to that was to dress him like he has been ever since.” The elegance, the sober colors. Come to think of it, Blight had always dressed in clothes based on a sort of understated quality, stuff that showed off his broad, powerful frame but weren’t so tight or anything as to make him look like a hulking ox. Looking at it now and hearing it explained, she could see where Cinna had gotten some of his ideas about how to dress people.

“Subtle, classic, disdaining the trends of fashion,” Taffeta nodded. “It made them focus on his cleverness, yes, and a mental sophistication that was unusual in a boy from Twelve, but without making him look ridiculous or weak. It made it something to respect.” She gave Johanna a wry smile. “Eventually, they made me retire, because simple and elegant weren’t what they were looking for. Not with as flashy as the Capitol demanded their victors be at that point. Apparently things go in cycles. They made us mockeries in my day, and unfortunately, they did the same to you. Made the whole thing worse.”

Put that way, that she’d been doing her best to dress them in a way to make them people instead of complete whores, give them back at least a little self-respect, she couldn’t fault Taffeta. It wasn’t much different from what Haymitch had tried to do for her and Finnick, teaching them how to help make things go easier on them, spare them the worst of it. Besides, if she’d refused to do it, President Mackenzie probably would have made her pay pretty hard, especially since it sounded like he was even more of a rat bastard than Snow. “Mackenzie sounds like he was a real asshole.” Not that Snow wasn’t, of course. Kind of the point of the whole rebellion here.

“He was, but at least he was honest about his cruelties. Snow’s far more devious. Far more dangerous. He’s hidden it all so carefully under the mask of respectability and made us all keep his dirty secrets.” Taffeta shook her head, giving her a gentle, sympathetic smile. “Mackenzie would still have made an example of your family, yes, but he would have done it openly so at least you wouldn’t have the burden of keeping it quiet.”

“It’s not hidden any more,” she said with some satisfaction. “Finnick saw to that.” She hadn’t seen his propo yet but she’d heard about it, and to her mind it was probably the bravest thing the idiot had ever done. It was something probably only he could have done anyway, popular as he was. Johanna trying to say the same things, it would have choked her to begin, and they wouldn’t feel nearly as badly for her as they did for Finnick. She just didn’t have the power to move hearts.

“It’s as well this rebellion finally happened. I imagine Finnick could easily have become a kept man eventually, once he grew old enough that some of the interest waned and Snow would be willing to sell him for a more permanent arrangement. There were enough Four victors he could be spared from mentoring duties.” There was a glimmer of anger and pain in Taffeta’s eyes as she added, “It wouldn’t have surprised me if Haymitch found himself caught in the same, having neatly mentored two replacements for himself last year.”

“I’d have thought he was too old and too drunk for a Capitol woman to buy.”

“Maybe so. But he hasn’t been off the circuit that long to be totally forgotten, and if you saw the Victory Tour broadcasts last year, and the Quell previews this year, you probably saw he still has some admirers, especially after showing he wasn’t nearly as faded into the bottle as they thought. He’s old enough to be in a position where returning to the circuit wouldn’t happen, no, but finding someone willing to pay for a permanent arrangement probably wouldn’t be impossible.”

“Not to mention living in the Capitol full time would have been so very convenient for Snow to keep him on a short leash.” That would have been a golden chance for Snow, she was sure, to keep his original “problem victor” so tightly under his thumb. For once she had a chance to be thankful she had never mentored a female victor herself, because Taffeta didn’t have to say that Johanna could have been up for sale as some Capitol asshole’s mistress. She assumed it was true. Sure, maybe she’d gotten too troublesome for the circuit, but there could always be someone willing to pay at least something for her, one of the kinky bastards most likely who’d welcome the chance to possess her fully without the need to hold back to spare her for the Games. Remembering her nights with them, imagining years of it with no escape back to the clean air and trees and privacy of Seven, she couldn’t suppress the shudder that worked its way down her spine. She could never live in the Capitol, never live like that. She’d rather die first.

“Exactly.” Johanna wondered if Haymitch was aware he’d possibly been up against that. He was smart enough she wouldn’t put it past him--he wasn’t exactly the sort to show his cards openly.

“Well, I was busy thinking more about keeping Katniss and Peeta from starting a rebellion and hopefully off the circuit too while I was at it, to be honest, to put much thought into someone wanting to permanently buy my sorry ass this year. But you ladies have a good point,” came the sarcastic drawl, and apparently Haymitch had been leaning against the entryway of the kitchen listening in, so still and silent neither of them had noticed him.

“You gonna keep lurking like an eavesdropping asshole or you want to come sit?” Johanna demanded, and with that Haymitch slipped into the kitchen, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

“Taff,” he said seriously, glancing over at her with a frown, “I didn’t want to bring it up in front of the kids, and there was Finnick to handle too, but Cinna’s possibly in deep shit.” Explaining to her that Cinna would be on trial, possibly for his life, Johanna watched for her reaction.

She took the blow stoically, like a victor who’d taken a lot of hard hits in her life. “How are his chances?” she said, letting out a slow sigh.

“I don’t know, not till it happens and I can get a sense of how vindictive they’re getting at the expense of common sense.”

“It’s Coin,” Johanna said sarcastically. “I think none of us is gonna like the answer to that one.” The more she saw of the sour old bitch the less Johanna liked her.

“But I’m not giving up on him,” he assured Taffeta. “I’ve been studying up for the trial, me and Johanna both, actually, see if we can maybe help.”

Taffeta gave him a soft smile in return. “Thanks. Look, I’ve got to go out. It’s nearly six and the ration lines will be getting long already. I’ve got canned goods and all stockpiled here, but to buy bread or milk or meat, things like that, you’ve got to be there early to get in line.” Hearing that it was that bad in the Capitol, Johanna felt the initial reaction of a fiercely vindicated, Good, let them all finally know what it’s like to be cold and scared and hungry.

But it passed because it wasn’t Taffeta’s fault, and she was suffering once again in a way she didn’t deserve, and she guiltily offered, “I could go with you.” She grew up in Seven, she was more than used to the winter cold, and maybe Taffeta was too, being originally from Eight, but Johanna was younger and stronger.

“No, you all need to stay here and out of sight,” Taffeta said with a quick shake of her head. “I’ll see what I hear out on the street about the rebel forces, and you might try the television too if the power allows it, check out the news and all. Beetee might be breaking into the feed with updates or the like, if I know him at all.”

“Or we could see if they know yet who it was down in the sewers,” Haymitch pointed out with a weary sigh. “Caught us on camera, perhaps.”

“There is that,” Taffeta nodded, buttoning up her coat and pulling the hood up over her silver hair. “It’ll be easier if they’re not looking specifically for you five. I have my key with me, so do not answer a knock on the door.” Seeing a heavy-looking bulge in Taffeta’s coat pocket that she thought might very well be the size of a handgun, Johanna didn’t want to ask how bad it was out there that she needed that. The answer was pretty obvious.

After Taffeta left, there was still no sign of Katniss and Peeta yet. Haymitch put the kettle on for more tea, and sat back down across from her, looking at her with those steady grey eyes. “Finnick will be OK,” he said. “He’s a tough bastard. One overgrown kitty won't be enough to take him down.”

“It was forest cats that killed my family,” she said, not quite looking at him as she said it. “Or at least, that was the official story. They found only a couple pieces of them left to bury.” She was silent for a few seconds and grateful he let her have that time to gather her thoughts and settle her emotions, before she added, “I wonder sometimes if they were dead before they let the cats rip them up or not.” She prayed they had been.

They’d never talked about the actual details of their families dying, drunk as they’d gotten sometimes together. It was enough that it was a shared punishment, that Snow had them killed as a lesson. The details were too personal, or at least, they had been before this.

He nodded slowly, obviously seeing how the sewers had been a particular nightmare for her in that case. “Mine died in a fire. The official story is that an old house like that, coal dust worked in all the seams of the wood like it was over the years--one stray spark from the stove and,” he clicked his fingers, “went up like a torch.” He sighed with the weariness of all the years of grief from it. “I hope to hell they killed them first. I’ve wondered sometimes.” He looked over at her. “They probably did, you know. Too much chance for them to escape or attract attention with their screaming otherwise.”

There was something almost coldly matter-of-fact in that assessment, but she knew that was simply him dealing with the unbearable by trying to step away from the emotional firestorm of it and think in terms of pure logic. In its way it was a comfort because he was right. Snow would be thorough if nothing else.

“And then they firebombed your entire district.” No wonder he sounded so odd when he told her about it in their cell, something in his voice beyond mere shock of the massive scale of it. She wondered if times she’d heard him screaming louder if it had been him reacting worse to the tortures that involved fire. She wouldn’t be surprised. It must have all reminded him of his family and how they died. Katniss. Girl on Fire. Fucking irony that was, him being stuck mentoring that persona.

“Yeah. Ain’t that a bitch,” he said with a grim smile.

The kettle was whistling so she went to retrieve it, and she saw the bottle of cognac still on the counter, corked from where Taffeta had put it last night after Haymitch used it as disinfectant. Throwing the teabags in two mugs, she hefted the bottle in one hand. “Want some life in it?” she asked, nodding to the tea. He obviously hadn’t had a drink in months, and from what Katniss said he hadn’t been drunk since the night after they read the Quell card. So she thought he could be trusted to have a slosh of it in his tea without suddenly going crazy over it and lunging for the whole bottle.

He held up a hand, shook his head. “No.” He smiled ruefully, obviously acknowledging the strangeness of him turning down a drink. “I’m saving it for you and me having one when Snow’s dead, remember?” If there was any occasion worthy to break a long streak of sobriety, she’d agree that was a good one.

“Well,” she said, handing him one mug, “let’s go check what’s on the newsfeed and see what’s up. Because I want that fucking drink soon as possible.”

“You and me both,” he said with a smirk.

Chapter Text

Back in the living room, sitting down on the couches, Johanna turned on the television and Haymitch suppressed a wince and a groan at Gloriana Frill, the Secretary of Communications, suddenly filling the screen. Her bronze skin, gone crepey with age, was surgically pulled tighter than ever across those bird-like bones, the bright floral tattoos around her eyes carefully redone so they weren’t distorted by it. That high girlish coo of a voice was saying, “Evacuation of the Jewelrose Quarter and the Silver Downs district to the relocation center established at the Charles Mackenzie Memorial Hall will proceed at noon today. Citizens are advised...”

My beautiful boy, he heard in his mind, that voice whispering right in his ear as she pushed him back into the suffocatingly soft mattress all those years ago after her daughter’s birthday party, and she hadn’t even noticed he’d closed his eyes, not wanting to watch her doing this to him. He’d been frantically trying to just go away deep inside his own mind, fighting a vague stupid urge to cry or to beg her to leave him alone, fighting the miserable wish he’d died in the arena rather than endure this. He was seventeen and wiry and he hadn’t grown into his full strength yet, but he was definitely stronger than one deliberately starved middle-aged woman. To simply lie there and submit and not fight her off like all his instincts wanted made him feel even more ashamed, like he’d agreed to have this to happen by choosing to not escape.

He felt a touch on his shoulder and it startled him out of the past and back into the present, and he looked over at Johanna. There was a grim tension to her jaw as she looked at him, and the faint wash of green he’d seen up close in her brown eyes seemed vanished into the darkness of the anger reflected there. He wondered how nauseated or upset he must look that she’d immediately picked up on it. “She’ll pay,” Johanna said simply. “One way or another.”

He nodded at that. Not much else to say to it. Breathing deep for a second, he said, grasping on the situation at hand to help him clear his mind, “If they’re evacuating Jewelrose and Silver Downs, the front line of the battle’s punched pretty far into the city already.” Jewelrose was the pricey shopping district near City Center, and Silver Downs was where most of the politicians and actors and professional athletes and the like made their homes. He’d had plenty of appointments put on the book out in Silver Downs over the years.

“If the rebels accidentally destroy Silver Downs in taking it over, I’m not gonna be the one to complain about it,” Johanna said with a smirk, nudging him with her shoulder.

“You ain’t kidding on that,” he said, managing to laugh. It was actually sort of a pleasant thought to imagine some of those ugly, garish mansions demolished. “That’s good news, though. Means our side’s making rapid progress.”

“They are?” He glanced over his shoulder to see Peeta and Katniss standing there, finally awake. Katniss looked pale and drawn like she’d had a rough night, but her eyes were steady and clear. So she’d dealt with Gale, as best she could for the moment.

“Yeah,” he said. “Taffeta went out for some food and to sound out the word on the streets. So hopefully when she gets back we’ll get a more complete picture of things.”

The Capitol’s chief newscaster, Joy Cloudmist with her silver-blond dyed hair and face painted ghostly white, came on next reporting that all citizens not in the evacuation zones were being urged to stay in their homes, and await contact from the relocation center regarding opening their homes temporarily to dispossessed citizens. Chiming off several areas of the Capitol still currently in the safe zone but slated as housing for refugees, Haymitch gave a grunt of annoyance as Joy said, “Sunset Hill.”

“Well, that’s not good news,” he said, glancing around at the rest of them. “That’s us.”

“We can’t stay here if they’ll be assigning some Capitol citizens to move in,” Peeta agreed.

“I don’t think even Solonius Trove’s gonna be able to keep her from that,” Haymitch agreed wryly. Not to mention the fact he was probably hiding out somewhere, like Snow’s mansion, and simply left Taffeta here, meant he’d pretty much abandoned her to care for herself as best she could during the rebel invasion. Classy guy, really.

“What about Finn?” Jo spoke up sharply, glancing towards the bedroom where Finnick was resting. “He can’t come with us.” She was right, of course. His injuries and being forced to walk for several more hours after when he probably shouldn’t have, plus the painkillers, meant he really needed to stay in bed and rest. The fact that without something to fight the infection that he’d likely be battling soon enough also wasn’t promising.

“No, he can’t,” he agreed tiredly. “For our part, best we can do is make a plan of how to keep going, and when Taff comes back we’ll figure that out.”

“If he’s holed up in his mansion and not making public appearances,” Peeta said with a glum sigh, plopping down on one of the couches, “that makes him a lot harder for us to get at him.”

“Maybe I could surrender to him,” Katniss said. “I mean, once I’m inside the mansion...”

“The good news is they apparently don’t know we’re here,” Johanna pointed out to her. “If they’d identified us from the cameras down on the Transfer, you can bet your sweet little Mockingjay ass our faces would be all over the news. You really want to hand over the advantage of surprise like that?”

“Thirteen’s probably keeping hush on our sneaking out from camp. It’s sort of embarrassing to them to admit that we’ve gone rogue,” Peeta mused. “And they’ve probably got enough raw footage of us from the last week to splice together some more propos and nobody’s the wiser that they’re not brand-new stuff.”

“You’ve seen one propo of us shooting out windows, you’ve seen them all,” Katniss muttered in distinct annoyance.

“They’re right,” Haymitch told Katniss. “Besides, if you surrender, you really think they’re gonna let you into that mansion with a handgun in your pocket to kill him? You’re the worst of us four at close-quarters combat too, so it’s not even like you could hope to grab a knife and take him out.” Long-range weapons were unquestionably her strength.

Peeta shot him a look of annoyance as Katniss’ expression turned into a scowl. “You surrendering is giving him far too much of a victory anyway, Katniss. It’s too risky.”

“Well, Jo’s right. Surprise is our one advantage so far. Besides, it’s not like she or I could be the ones to try to surrender anyway. I imagine I’m to the point where he wants to just shoot me on sight before I can manage to cause him more trouble.” He glanced over at Johanna and gave her a smirk. “You too, most likely.”

“At least you got the chance to say ‘Fuck you’ right to his face on national television,” she jokingly complained. “What the hell did I get? Hair and skin treatments, and getting high on hallucinogens, at the very exclusive Detention Center resort.”

The two of them chuckled at that and he saw how uncomfortable Katniss and Peeta looked at them joking about being tortured. “He’s going to be heavily guarded,” he said, bringing it back to reality. “And we’ll have to avoid rebel forces too because chances are if we run into them, we’re going to get dragged back to our dear overbearing Mommy Coin to answer for us misbehaving like this.”

“No secret routes into the mansion, of course,” Katniss said, though he could hear that it was more of a question.

“Doubt it.” If there even were any routes like that they’d probably be escape tunnels leading somewhere deep in the mountains and they weren’t going to find that without some fancy-ass ground surveying equipment like the Capitol used sometimes in the mines.

“So what’s the plan?” Katniss demanded impatiently.

“Shut up and let me think about it some, sweetheart.” It wasn’t like he had much to go on here, mostly knowledge of what wouldn’t work and vague notions of what they’d be confronted with once they reached Snow’s mansion. “And let’s see if we get any more intel as the day goes on.”

He thought about it while the newscast started reporting on the food shortages and rioting in the streets. Apparently a young woman with dark hair had been killed last night with hysterical citizens insisting it was Katniss Everdeen. When the photograph came up on the screen, it was a round-faced woman who was at least twenty-five, with nearly-black eyes, and whose skin was several shades darker than the olive tones of the Seam. The only thing she had in common with Katniss was dark hair caught up in a braid. “Stupid idiot probably did her hair like that as a tribute to Katniss after last year,” Johanna said with a shake of her head and a sigh.

Katniss bit her lip and Haymitch could see the weight of it settling on her, the knowledge of another death that may have been inspired by her actions. “Not your fault, sweetheart,” he said quietly, reaching over to squeeze her shoulder with his hand for a moment. “Don’t make it like that.”

Updates came through the morning. Apparently, like the three tines of Finnick’s trident, three separate rebel forces were pushing their way through the Capitol, two sweeping to either side and one going right up the middle. The west, with Silver Downs and the like, was obviously having the most success, but when the city map showed the location of the eastern force, they were closing in on City Center themselves. The central attack was obviously having the most trouble, but even they were only about six blocks away from Sunset Hill. “I’m surprised they’re evacuating people here, considering it’ll probably be overrun in the next few days,” Peeta said with some surprise.

“There’s nowhere safe in the long term to go,” Johanna said bluntly. “Not even Snow’s mansion.”

Glancing at the map, Haymitch looked at the current battle lines, calculating their progress from the last update they’d gotten back in camp, then visualizing in his mind how the next day or so might go. “I think the western wing of the attack there will be at the mansion sometime tomorrow or the next day if they keep up their current pace.” That put a definite clock on their efforts to get to Snow before Thirteen and the other rebels did.

“No pressure on us or anything,” Katniss said with a sigh. “I’ll go make some tea so we keep warm.”

Sitting there with their fingers wrapped around a warm mug of tea, the power went out for the first time that day, the television suddenly cutting out to blackness rather than the crackling static of a dead feed. It came back again around noon, cut out again for another fifteen minutes, then returned.

Beetee broke through almost instantly with a propo showing rebel forces fighting Peacekeepers, the spire of Snow’s mansion clearly visible in the distance. There was an announcement from Coin that Capitol citizens who stayed quietly in their homes and surrendered to the “Panem Liberation Army” would not be harmed. “However, any attempts at hostility or resistance,” she warned, her chilly, nearly-colorless eyes staring a hole in the camera, “are considered declaration of being a part of a Capitol citizens’ militia and therefore will be met with deadly force.”

“In other words, sit down and shut up or get shot,” Johanna said. “Well, at least she made the terms of it pretty clear for people.” Though she looked over at him and her raised eyebrow made her opinion of Coin pretty clear. Haymitch couldn’t pick up on anything in her very neutral tone and expression in that announcement, but then, Snow was a master of that too.

After Beetee handed back the reins, Joy returned with a report from the east, where Haymitch heard with a sinking feeling what had apparently prompted Coin’s message in part. The newscast was shot from a rooftop, the burning fires behind her were visible as she tearfully reported about a night of bloodshed, looting, rape, and cruelty by some of the rebel forces there after what sounded like a difficult day of fighting and the Peacekeepers had finally retreated. They’d ceded the area to the rebels, leaving it totally unprotected as it was occupied.

One Capitol woman Joy interviewed at the designated relocation center, not even noticing her makeup was smudged and the way the florid bruises on her face and her torn clothes spoke eloquently of what had happened, licked her lips nervously and her eyes darted around wildly as she said, “There were five of them, they...they...broke in, demanded we get out.” She let out a strangled noise, a keen of unbearable grief and shame. “They shot my husband when he tried to tell them to leave, and then they...on the floor...they took turns...they asked me how I liked being the one that was powerless for once...they laughed, they called me a...a...Capitol cunt.”

“Fuck,” Johanna cursed softly. “Just...fuck that.” Feeling sick, Haymitch shook his head, unable to find anything to say to it at the moment. He could see how it had probably happened. A long hard day of fighting, frustration at the haughty arrogance and privilege of the Capitol. The final spark, a Capitol man once again trying to boss them around by telling them to leave. From there, taking a chance to shame and denigrate some Capitol citizens just as the districts had been ground underfoot for years and years. That woman might be Capitol, probably had cheered the Games and the oppression of the districts her entire life, and Haymitch couldn’t call her entirely innocent, no.

But that kind of violation? Oh, he understood rape all too well. He knew what it felt like, how it turned someone from a person into a thing, a thing to be overpowered and broken down and degraded, and finding the way back to being an actual person again was no easy thing. That was something he and Johanna were still struggling with even now, those nights together in Thirteen a careful, tenuous start on that journey. He knew no matter what, even if he managed to move beyond it, there could always be things and moments that would helplessly carry him right back to the dark grip of the past. Nobody deserved rape, no matter what they’d done. They asked me how I liked being the one that was powerless for once.

“We don’t win anything if this war makes us no better than the people we’re fighting,” Peeta said, and Haymitch could see the agony in his eyes at it, the sick disillusion at seeing how vicious some of their own allies were getting in their chance to get revenge for all the suffering.

Peeta and Katniss hadn’t seen some of the things he and Johanna had on the screens in Mentor Central, the things the Capitol edited out. Johanna had her own edited moment with Dazen's boy. He’d found out that in his first mentor year, Ruby from One torturing Larkspur to death had been greatly cut down to make it seem more like righteous vengeance for her sister Sapphire’s death the year before and less like sadistic revenge. He’d been as shocked by watching that as Peeta had been today, yelling at Chantilly in his rage and horror.

The Capitol had its ways of sanitizing the arena. That editing was just one more example. The mentors had seen it unvarnished, though, the very worst instances of people becoming animals in human skin under the influences of pressure and violence. He and Johanna might not be fully surprised by it happening here in the war the way the two kids were, but that didn’t mean they weren’t horrified by it anyway. Because maybe at the end of the day he’d wanted to believe better of the rebel forces too.

That cast a glum shadow over things, and when he heard a key in the door about twenty minutes later and Taffeta returned, arms full of bags, he eagerly jumped up to grab some of the load from her, if only to have something to do. “What did you do, buy out the entire market?” he asked her in confusion.

“I got you some new clothes so you can leave the uniforms behind,” she said, as she set down some of the bags on the kitchen table and Katniss, Peeta, and Johanna also came to investigate. “I claimed it was stocking up for refugees, since apparently I’ll be housing them soon enough.”

“Any word on when that’ll happen?”

Taffeta shook her head. “Probably tomorrow, that’s the word. You should still be safe here for the night.” She shrugged.

“What do we do about Finnick if you’re having more company?” Johanna asked her bluntly.

Unloading a small loaf of bread, she handed it to Haymitch. “I could only get one,” she said glumly. “Short supply everywhere on everything, it seems.” Looking over at Johanna, she answered, “He has to stay here, clearly. But it’s chaotic enough that I think I can claim him as an injured Capitol citizen sent to stay with me. His wounds are bad but not dire enough to earn him a place on the hospital right now.” She shrugged. “His face is all wrapped up to start which helps. I got some dye for his hair to hide that, maybe I’ll have to bandage his eyes too if need be to help hide their color, but doing all that should avoid him being identified.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Haymitch said, relieved she had gotten on it already, not liking the uncertainty of leaving Finnick and Taffeta possibly risking discovery every moment with Capitol refugees breathing down their necks, but it was the only possible recourse now.

Taffeta kept looking at Johanna and said, softly but with an edge of certainty, “I’ll keep him safe, Johanna. As best as I can.” Given the handgun in her pocket when she went out, Haymitch had the feeling she would back those words.

Johanna nodded, apparently accepting that assurance. “How bad is it out there?” she asked.

“Bad,” Taffeta said, mouth set in a grim line, unpacking some obviously bruised apples. “What happened last night out in Sokato has people plenty freaked out.” Thinking that being stuck here they hadn’t heard, she sighed wearily and said, “Apparently there was a lot of...”

“There was a news report about it,” Katniss told her quietly, interrupting, but Haymitch had the feeling it was only because hearing the words all over again would make them all cringe anew. “We heard what happened.”

Right then Snow’s voice came from the living room, rising in indignant wrath, “...unforgivable and barbaric acts of these so-called ‘soldiers’ from the districts prove that the generosity of the Capitol seventy-five years ago...”

“I’m hitting ‘mute’ on that asshole before I end up wrecking your television,” Johanna informed Taffeta, storming out to the living room and silencing it. She came back.

“Peeta?” Taffeta said, looking at him, obviously having the sense to see that he was still the softest of them, the best. The one most disillusioned by hearing what had happened last night in Sokato.

Peeta simply shook his head, and Haymitch saw that Katniss’ arm crept around his waist. “Let’s hurry and take him down before this gets worse,” he said miserably. “Before it’s all about revenge rather than freedom.”

Taffeta gave him a pat on the arm as she passed. “I’ll make chicken stew for dinner,” she said. “If you two,” she nodded to himself and Johanna, “want to change Finnick’s bandages and dye his hair while you’re at it.” Handing Johanna a packet of hair dye, Johanna’s eyes glanced it over.

“Midnight Purple, huh,” she said. “Eh, I figured he’d look better blond.”

Finnick was awake and they helped him sit up, carefully letting him sip some water through a straw, his torn lips not up to the task of drinking normally. “Don’t talk,” Haymitch cautioned him. It would probably rip the sutures.

Finnick made a low grunt of frustration in his throat, and then lifted his hands, green eyes focusing on them as he signed, as he had with Mags before the Quell stole her away from him. What’s going on?

“Shit hit the fan,” Haymitch said, while Johanna carefully was unwinding Finnick’s bandages. “The war’s gonna be over soon, but Taff will take care of you here.”

I can fight, Finnick insisted vehemently, with emphatic gestures.

“Oh, bullshit. Your face got torn half off, Finnick,” he said bluntly.

How bad will I look?

“Hard to say. You’re gonna have some bad scars, I can tell you that.” No point lying to him on it. “You’ll keep both your eyes, though, I think.”

No more Capitol heartbreaker. Good. Finnick’s eyes shone intensely at that, and oddly, Haymitch could see why he might feel like that. For the same reason Johanna had resorted to aggression and nudity, and he’d become a drunk bastard, and they’d been relieved when the interest dried up because of it. Finnick’s gorgeous looks had been his advantage in the arena and his bane ever since. No, the cameras wouldn’t love Finnick Odair now.

But while Johanna was still distracted, apologizing awkwardly to Finnick as she had to carefully pull on some bandages that had stuck to the wounds, he quickly signed, But Annie will love you anyway. And your baby too.

Finnick’s eyes closed for a moment, reminded of the wife and child he had to stay alive for now. I know. She loves me for myself. Always has. The simple signs, the confident assurance in them, made Haymitch sure that Finnick was right. Annie Odair would be there for him, no matter how he looked.

“Well, we get to dye your hair as part of your ‘poor wounded Capitol citizen’ disguise,” he said with mock cheerfulness, holding up the dye packet for Finnick to see, the purple-haired person in the picture obvious. “Jo and I get to be the first to welcome you to the ranks of the dark-haired. Everybody knows we have more fun.”

A soft sigh of resignation came from Finnick at that and Johanna actually grinned at him. “Oh, shut up, Finn, and stop being childish. Haymitch and me, we had to get our heads shaved. You can put up with a dye job.”

But does it have to be purple? I’d look better blond, and that one Haymitch did translate for Johanna so she could enjoy a good, honest laugh about it.

Getting the bandages off, the wounds were starting to look a little bit red and swollen in a way Haymitch really didn’t like, a few of them oozing a clear fluid. But Taffeta didn’t have anything to kill infection here, and the one syringe of medicine the Thirteen first aid kits had, they’d already injected into him last night. It apparently had slowed things down but not dealt with the brewing infection entirely. “You might not want to look in the mirror,” he muttered as the two of them helped Finnick to the bathroom. The sight of it couldn’t do him much good.

Finnick grunted something, and Haymitch could see the moment they set foot in the bathroom his eyes lifted to see himself in the mirror. Finn stared at his ravaged face for a good thirty seconds, taking in the damage and then probably trying to imagine what he’d look like when it healed. Then he nodded, sighing and apparently accepting it.

They helped a Finnick Odair now sporting a head of bizarre dark purple hair back to the bed an hour later, and carefully covered his face with fresh bandages, the unruly mop of hair now sticking out the top.

The power went out for most of the afternoon, though Taffeta’s gas stove still worked, so at least they had tea and the smell of the chicken stew to keep them going. As the darkness was falling, the loudspeakers around the city told citizens that curfew was now dusk rather than 8 pm and all of them should return to their homes for their own safety. “Guess slipping out of here tonight ain’t the best idea,” Haymitch remarked, which had been an option he was considering, just in case Taffeta got late visitors.

“If I haven’t gotten refugees by now it’s probably safe for the night,” Taffeta told him. “One more night of rest won’t kill you anyway.”

Eating the warm, hearty chicken stew, with some of the broth reserved for Finnick, Haymitch shrugged. “I’d love to tell you I’ve got a great plan, but without knowing exactly what it’s like around the mansion, it’s gotta be a bit flexible. But we’ve all been there, and the one vulnerable point is probably the rose garden.” It had always been geared more towards congenial appearance and the public functions Snow held there than sheer security. “If we can get over the wall and hope it isn’t guarded by a dozen Peacekeepers and he hasn’t suddenly installed bright floodlights for security, there’s at least some cover there that we can use to get in close, take out whatever Peacekeepers there are. Because there’s no way in hell we’re getting in the front door.”

What he didn’t say was they’d likely have to try to sneak their way through all the rooms of the mansion, somehow taking out Peacekeepers before they could sound the alarm. It was risky as hell and they’d need a lot of luck on their side.

Settling down for the night, apparently it was on Johanna’s mind too. Letting the blankets over them slowly create a pocket of warmth, she said softly, “Not that I don’t like ‘em, sickeningly cute as they are. But you realize it might be smarter to leave the two of them behind. He can’t walk quiet and she’s only got a nice noisy handgun that she can use. Easy for them to get themselves killed, or get us killed too.”

He knew she was right. Peeta’s frequently noisy footsteps wouldn’t help on a mission requiring stealth. The relative silence of Johanna’s axes and his thrown knives would be useful in a way Katniss’ handgun wouldn’t. Plus there was the angle of leaving them behind out of the extreme danger, which was tempting.

Then he admitted to himself that danger or not, they had the right to be there for it, and if he tried to make them stay put for their own good, they inevitably wouldn’t. Katniss never did what he told her anyway, no matter how much sense it made. “Not that I disagree, mind. But you know if we leave them back here she’ll just go try to do it herself and he’ll follow right behind her,” he said wearily. “And leaving them here to get caught by Peacekeepers bringing refugees isn’t a great idea either.” If he thought he could convince them to go find the rebel forces and be safe there he’d do it, but good luck with that. He already knew trying to talk Katniss into that was a lost cause.

“No,” she finally agreed, turning over and settling her head on his shoulder. He knew he’d wake up with his arm asleep but he wasn’t about to tell her that and make her feel awkward enough to move. The pins and needles on waking up were more than worth it to have her here like this. “Guess we’ll just have to make the best of it. We’d better get Snow though, so we have something to show for our little adventure when Coin starts frostily chewing us out for us telling her to shove her precious military protocols by walking off.”

She was right, of course. “I’ll take the heat on that.”

She gave a snort of amusement. “Like you made us do anything. Snow wasn’t stupid enough to think you coerced us all into an alliance. Coin’s not stupid either. She knows you make the ideas but she knows you can’t make us do a fucking thing we don’t want, Haymitch. Nope, we all go down together for it, together.” At least it wouldn’t involve a six-person hanging. He hoped not, anyway. What did they do to deserters anyhow? Was it an execution-worthy offense? He had the suspicion it might be, and tried to not wince at realizing he might have escaped Capitol execution only to get himself in a spot to be killed by Thirteen. Himself and Johanna and Finnick and Katniss and Peeta too. Yeah, he was really talented at talking people into schemes that would likely get them killed, wasn’t he?

“Should have looked up the penalty for desertion before we went and did it,” he muttered, irritated with himself for the oversight.

He could have sworn from how her body was shaking that she was barely holding in a laugh, though the pressure of her fingers touching momentarily against his cheek was almost gentle. “Seriously, sometimes you blame yourself too much. Just go to sleep.”

Chapter Text

Haymitch was awoken in the first hints of dawn by the sounds outside the window, and glanced down to the street below to see people hurrying towards City Center, carrying backpacks and bags and clothing, some of them tugging little kids by the hand. Some of the children were crying, some of the adults were talking too loudly in their fright, and the ever-present white uniform of a Peacekeeper was issuing orders directing the flow of scared refugees. Three stories up and through the window glass, he couldn’t quite hear what exactly was being said.

When the public address system piped up, though, he heard that loud and clear. “President Snow is opening his home to house the refugees displaced by the fighting overnight. Please proceed in a calm and orderly fashion to the Presidential Mansion.”

“Get our stuff ready,” he told Johanna, hearing her getting up from the blankets behind him, “I’ll go wake Katniss and Peeta.” No point turning on the television for a last newscast update. Obviously the front had moved, the rebel forces making an aggressive push in the darkness, and they were right at Sunset Hill. If they were moving refugees into Snow’s mansion, that meant there really was nowhere safe for them to go.

Hurrying into Taffeta’s spare bedroom, he shook Peeta’s shoulder through several layers of blankets. “Get up, you two, we’re getting out of here now.” Peeta’s bleary eyes squinted up at him and Katniss peeped up from behind his shoulder too. “We’ve captured this area now, and Snow’s supposedly taking in refugees,” he explained bluntly.

Like that, Peeta sat up and reached for his artificial leg, leaning up against the nightstand, and rolled up his pants leg. Haymitch glimpsed the stump and while it still looked pink and tender, undoubtedly the rest they’d gotten here and staying off his feet had helped heal whatever damage he’d taken by beating the hell out of it in the sewers like that. “You need a new leg,” he told Peeta bluntly, seeing how tight the fitted cup of it was on his stump. No wonder it had rubbed it raw, digging in like that with the fierce pressure he put on it by that sprinting and climbing. “That’s why it’s hurting you.” He’d noticed that much as he’d ragged Peeta about it during the spring talking about who was entering the arena about that thing being his physical weak point, he’d seemed even more vulnerable with it of late.

It made sense, though. Peeta had gotten that leg, the best prosthesis the Capitol could offer, as a boy of sixteen and a half, fresh from the arena. He was nearly eighteen now. Haymitch would judge he’d put on another inch or so since then, and his already stocky frame was filling out more towards a man’s full strength. The leg had been fine on the Victory Tour and even during their training for the Quell. But it had been months since then, months in Thirteen where it would have been hard, if not impossible, for him to be able to get the leg properly replaced. The hard military training in Thirteen had probably only turned it into a bigger problem by strengthening his thigh muscle more, especially all that insane five-mile running they’d had to do, day after day.

“I know,” Peeta said wearily, “but there’s no help for it now. I’ll make do.”

Haymitch wondered with some irritation how long it had actually been a problem and Peeta hadn’t said anything about it. Bloody Peeta and his quietly suffering in silence. All right, maybe Haymitch wasn’t much one to talk, being born and bred to Seam stoicism, but he didn’t like being surprised by things like this. He knew Peeta probably meant well, didn’t want to be a bother or whatever, but he was honestly surprised Katniss hadn’t been all over his ass about it. Well, too late now to worry about it.

“Be in Finnick’s room, five minutes.” They didn’t ask for further explanation. Obviously they got the point. Being in the group of refugees that got taken into Snow’s home was their direct ticket in, no questions asked. If nothing else, the fact that people would be approaching the house and not shot on sight, and the chaos of a group of alarmed and frightened people, might well give them an opening to slip in without going through whatever security checkpoints had been established there.

Passing back through the living room, he saw Johanna hastily stuffing some of their things back in the backpacks, and she followed him into the other bedroom where Finnick’s eyes were open through the mask of bandages. Taffeta was already up and moving too, digging through the bag of clothing she’d gotten yesterday in the name of housing refugees. “Here,” she said, thrusting some clothes into his arms, turning and doing the same to Johanna.

He heard Katniss and Peeta come in behind him, but he was already hastily tugging off his uniform, undoing the buttons of the jacket. No place for modesty here when time was of the essence. Wasn’t like Johanna hadn’t seen him naked often enough of late, and Taffeta had seen him in his underwear plenty over the years when she was doing measurements and fittings for his clothes. Besides, this wasn’t even as bad as that. His undershorts and undershirt more than covered him up, including the scars from the Detention Center. Though given that Katniss hadn’t flinched at stripping down Beetee to his skin in the arena, he doubted she was going to squawk at the sight of her mentor in his underwear.

“Lime green?” he groaned to Taffeta, as he tugged on the green shirt with its garish orange trim. “I thought you said ‘Never again’ to me wearing neon colors.”

“Necessity of the moment, dear.”

“Terricia would be so proud.” Because joking like this was helping put his jangled nerves more at ease, given the tension and urgency they were all feeling right now, maybe it was helping settle the others down too. If Haymitch is making quips it’s all normal, right?

“So we’re gonna try to just get in the front door?” Katniss asked, pulling on a pair of pants whose legs below the knee flared out to a cuff that was probably about as big around as her head.

“That’s the idea, sweetheart.”

“You think,” Johanna said, “he’s not doing an identity check at the door? I mean, this is the paranoid fucker who poisoned his rivals over the years we’re talking about.”

“Not great publicity,” he pointed out to her, “to make your frightened and freezing people wait for a finger stick to confirm their identification before letting them in.” Processing an identification blood sample, like the Peacekeepers did at the reaping, was a quick enough process, only taking a few seconds. But multiply that by hundreds of people and it added up, and it spoke of a lack of trust in his own people Haymitch wasn’t sure Snow could risk at this point.

“He knows it’s the end,” Johanna answered him bluntly. “His own people know what an asshole he is. I don’t think he cares about looking good to them. He cares about saving his own neck, and just letting anyone who comes to the door get in unchallenged is a great chance for some rebel assassins to sneak in. You think he hasn’t thought of that?”

“Point taken,” he acknowledged. Snow’s sense of self-preservation was one of his most highly developed priorities. Then he had a more disturbing thought. “But it’s possible that they’re opening the mansion now because security’s no issue, and he’s already run off for safety somewhere.”

“No way to know,” Katniss said grimly. “Not until we get there.”

“He was there yesterday,” Peeta said. “We know that for sure. That announcement denouncing what happened in Sokato,” his voice hitching for a split second, “was filmed in the mansion, I’m pretty sure. That’s his office, right?”

“Yeah,” Haymitch said roughly, finishing up with the buttons of the shirt. That place, dreary and dark and oppressive with the huge granite topped desk on the raised platform and no chairs for whoever Snow called in there, was a place he never wanted to visit again. Being there when Snow told him exactly why his family had died was enough. “No helping it. We can’t stay here, can’t just go back to the rebel lines with our tails between our legs, so we might as well go there. And if Johanna’s right and they have blood checks at the door, it’ll still be enough of a mess with anxious refugees that we can likely find some way to get in there or through the garden.”

Finishing dressing in their ridiculously garish Capitol clothing, including new shoes that in his case he would bet they were going to probably hurt inside of a mile of walking, they made their goodbyes and thanks to Taffeta. The only forces she ought to run into now were the rebel soldiers and with Finnick there as her patient, that ought to help convince them she was on their side. Of course, having a gun handy just in case probably didn’t hurt her chances of survival anyway, and Taffeta, for all she was nearing seventy, was a victor nonetheless. All of them, even the most faded, they’d managed to dig out at least some of the core of steel that had carried them through the arena as children. Even Haymitch himself had found something solid again to build upon. Mags had proven her strength in spades in the arena, and strangely, from the way Finnick seemed around her, Haymitch couldn’t help but wonder if Taff echoed the mentor Finn grieved for still.

“Keep his identification tag close at hand to show ‘em when they come,” Johanna suggested, and Finnick clumsily tried to fish it out from beneath his shirt where it was hiding. Johanna was the one who moved to help him, slipping the metal chain over his head and turning to hand it to Taffeta. Then she leaned down as if she’d kiss Finnick on the cheek or the brow, and she hesitated, probably realizing that would be kissing him right on one of his wounds. Instead she took his hand in hers for a moment. “‘Bye, Finn,” she said, and managed that impish smile of hers. “Try to not get into more trouble while we’re gone.”

Finnick snickered, but then his eyes, the green blazingly bright against the surrounding stark white bandages, strayed to where Haymitch, Peeta, and Katniss were waiting to make their own farewells. It was a groggy gesture that he made, but unmistakable all the same, the fingers of the let hand touched to his lips and then held out. Silently they returned it back, as that pretty much said it all.

Leaving the bedroom, his mind was filled with a thousand and one things that could go wrong out there, and how that gesture, which most of Panem thought was simply one of love and respect, had been the final farewell to the dead in Twelve. That was why he’d used it at that meeting back before the Quell, trying to recruit the others--he fully expected he wouldn’t survive the arena. He’d seen that thing at too many funerals to easily associate it with the notion of a future.

Whatever thoughts were on Peeta and Katniss’ mind, they didn’t speak up either, and clearly Johanna noticed it. “Many thanks to our brilliant stylist for effectively disguising us as idiots,” she quipped to break the tension of the moment, hands on her hips which only emphasized the cut of her puffy-sleeved baby pink blouse. Not a good color or style on her. In another situation, one less urgent and less grim, he’d have loved to tease her like he had about the Thirteen uniform that it was ugly enough he’d be happy to see her take the thing off. But like most anything else not related to the mission, he was carefully trying to lock that away. Friendship and caring had their place, even in the thick of combat, but he couldn’t let those concerns make him be the one to falter and doubt. Not when they were looking up to him to lead the plan here.

“Should we leave our identification tags here?” Katniss asked, holding up the metal disc between her fingertips. “I mean, if we’re caught with them on by Peacekeepers...”

“Might as well keep ‘em.” In case worse came to worse and the thing had to fulfill its intended purpose of identifying a body, though he was hoping like hell that wouldn’t happen. They’d lost Gale already and Finnick badly wounded. If he lost Peeta or Katniss, or Johanna, he wouldn’t be able to simply come back from that. “If Peacekeepers are looking at us close enough to be searching us and finding those, they’ll have seen our faces,” Haymitch pointed out. As victors, their faces were pretty instantly recognizable, even if he and Peeta both had about a week’s worth of not shaving to their credit by this point.

So, bundled up again in their coats and gloves and hats and hoods and scarves, out Taffeta’s front door they went, eating some of the last of the bread in the elevator to start the morning with something in their stomachs. Once they left the apartment building, they joined the crowd making a weary trek towards Snow’s mansion as the winter snow was falling down, silent and white. “Daddy, I want to go home,” one boy in a bright blue jacket whimpered, his hand clutched in his father’s, which was bare of any gloves or mittens and thus rapidly turning pink with the cold.

“It’s not safe at home, Gerrold,” the father lectured, and even through the inane Capitol accent, there was something universal and human, all tired and wary and frightened, in his voice. “We’re going to the president’s house and we’ll be away from the fighting there.”

Carefully the stream of people walked on, Peacekeepers at intervals positioned to guide them along streets with their deadly pods temporarily deactivated to let the refugees pass in safety. Surveying those around them Haymitch saw that for every warmly dressed person there was another in a bathrobe or bare feet or a mishmash of clothing that looked like they’d grabbed blindly from a closet in the dark. These were Capitol people; even the poor here had lives with more wealth than almost anyone out in the districts save the victors and possibly the mayors. It could only have been fear and shock, rather than deprivation, that drove them from their homes in such an unprepared state for the brutal cold of the day. The dazed and terrified looks he saw on some faces spoke eloquently enough in support of that.

As they crossed Chandor Street, where one of his and Chaff’s favorite watering holes had been, suddenly the crack of rifle fire rang out and the few thoughts of Chaff he permitted himself were abruptly cut short as a refugee about twenty feet ahead, a man in evening clothes, dropped to the sidewalk. More rifle shots rang out, too many for him to accurately track their source, and suddenly Gerrold, in his blue coat, crumpled to the icy street.

“It’s coming from above,” Johanna said sharply through the terrified screams of the civilians and the bellows of the Peacekeepers ordering to return fire. “Rebels are up on the rooftops. Can’t stay in the street, we’re sitting ducks here.”

“C’mon,” he said, spying an alleyway and shoving Katniss and Peeta towards it. There was a burst of golden light to his right, towards the mansion, as apparently they had reactivated the pods with the rebels coming onto the scene, and where dozens of people had been standing, there was suddenly nothing except ash piles blowing in the winter wind. Willing his stomach to stay put, he reached for the gun in his pocket and ducked into the alley.

They weren’t alone, however, he quickly saw that. A white-uniformed Peacekeeper was slumped against the wall, her hands covering a wound in her chest. She must have been shot in the opening moments of the firefight and tucked herself away in here. “Please, help me,” she said in a rough gurgle, looking at them. He looked back at her, so damn young. Eighteen, nineteen? Barely past reaping age. Blond, like the merchie kids he’d shepherded to the arena. That green tinge in her eyes reminded him of Johanna although this was to the point of being actual hazel. Those same eyes were full of dread at the realization that she was going to die. Before any of them could think to do or say anything, she gave one last gasp and her tension-wracked body relaxed into death and that was it.

As the screams and the shots continued, they stayed in the alley and he kept looking at the body of the young Peacekeeper. Fighting for the enemy, perhaps, but she’d been barely more than a kid, and they’d seen with Lyme and Enobaria and Brutus than even diehards could see the light. This girl here was never going to get the chance to find out what she’d make of life after Snow, and he could only think wearily that it was one more life cut brutally short for no cause. She’d died on the whim of an old man hiding in his mansion who didn’t give a shit about her, died for nothing that was worth fighting for in the end.

When the noise died down, he crept back towards the alley to investigate and see if the coast was clear, a shot took a chunk out of the pastel brick right near his face, cutting his cheek open with a flying sharp-edged chip of it. He leaped back, and a voice called defiantly, “The next one won’t miss, Capitol scumbag, and we’ve got you trapped in there.” A distinctly non-Capitol voice, instead it was Thirteen’s nasal drone, and the insult meant this must be rebels too. Great, they were going to get shot by their own side here unless he did something to dissuade them.

Only one route out that he could see and he took it. “Asshole, stop firing, we’re on your side!” he decided to risk yelling it.

His Twelve twang apparently caught their ears. “Identify yourself,” came the crisp order.

“Squad 22. Abernathy. I’m in command.” At least nominally, but “I’m sort of making the plans but this is kind of a democracy where we discuss it” wouldn’t fly too well with Thirteen’s strict military ways.

“Abernathy? Haymitch Abernathy?” Well, not like there were any other Abernathys talking in a Twelve accent. Snow had neatly seen to that twenty-five years ago when he killed his ma and Ash both.

“That’s what he said, dipshit! And who the fuck are you?” Johanna demanded.

“Squad 413, Captain Emerson commanding. Come out slowly.” He glanced over his shoulder and nodded at the others, and they carefully emerged back onto the street. He didn’t look down the street just yet, but even directly in his line of sight, there were bodies and pools of blood staining the paving stones.

Emerson was perhaps thirty-five, stocky and brown-haired. “What are you doing dressed like that?” he demanded to know, pointing at their Capitol clothing with the tip of his rifle. Haymitch really hoped he had the safety on that thing. The fact he hadn’t arrested them on sight meant apparently Coin hadn’t let all the Thirteen forces know that Victory Squad had gone rogue. That was an unexpected piece of good news, and with that he prepared to bluff his way out of this.

Peeta, though, beat him to the punch. “We’re on a special mission, Captain,” he said, stepping forward, tugging his scarf loose and letting Emerson see his face. “We were supposed to try to infiltrate the president’s mansion as part of that group of refugees--”

“Which have gotten away from us now, thanks very much,” Johanna said sarcastically.

Not for the first time, Haymitch was impressed by Peeta’s ability to just bullshit on the spot like that, and to come up with the same story Haymitch himself was going to claim. He’d learned about deceit and bluffing over a period of several years, took him even longer than that to get really good at it. Johanna had a natural streak of it in her, better than him, but Peeta was gifted by birth at what in Haymitch had come only with training and the intense fear of failure and punishment. The boy was a born liar, and he said that with admiration rather than criticism.

Emerson chewed his lower lip in a way that made him look oddly boyish compared to his stern Thirteen countenance, obviously turning the matter over in his mind. It seemed natural that Victory Squad would get sent on a mission like that, knowing the Capitol and Snow as they did. Finally, having apparently weighed it, he nodded. “OK. Sorry to break into your mission. If you hurry you can catch up to them still. I’d stick to the Avenue of the Tributes if I were you. We sent some automobiles down in an hour ago to help clear out the pods, but the Peacekeepers are absolutely swarming the place still and we fell back to take the smaller streets like this one.” Haymitch wasn’t surprised. The Avenue of the Tributes marched directly up to Snow’s mansion. If the Capitol ceded that route, they might as well simply roll over and surrender. “You guys ought to pass by them without trouble, though.”

“Thanks,” he said tersely, aware of the need for haste to make it to the mansion before the rebels did. Also, he figured it was a bad idea to hang around in case Emerson had a comm and decided to report on Squad 22’s progress to someone in the brass who might inform him that said squad was to be detained, or even shot, on sight. “Let’s go.”

They hurried up the street, past the dead bodies in their pools of blood. Peacekeepers, a few rebels in their grey uniforms, but mostly civilians. The ash piles from the pod were there, and given the melted and mutilated state of some other remains, he deduced they’d activated some other pods again which had been triggered by fleeing, panicked people. “Avenue of the Tributes, before we hit a pod ourselves,” he suggested to them, jerking a thumb to the left at the next intersection, hearing rifle fire a couple streets over. He couldn’t risk pulling the holo now, not when Peacekeepers might see it and it would kill their disguise.

On the Avenue, he couldn’t help but pause for a moment, reflecting on all the times he’d been forced to be here, what a part of the Games this street was. He’d been down it twice in a chariot himself, once as a scared boy and once as the planner of a rebellion. So many years in the stands too as a mentor, watching doomed children in Twelve’s costumes roll by and seeing the boredom of the audience. Last year, he'd been seeing them scream and cheer for Katniss and Peeta, and thinking with wonder that they might have a chance. It was silent this morning, nobody in the snow-covered stands, and the white uniforms and fur-lined hats of Peacekeepers here and there were the only visible signs of life. “Refugees heading for the Presidential Mansion?” the nearest one called to them.

“Yes!” Johanna yelled back, quickly faking a Capitol accent. “Please, is it safe?”

“Hurry up and get going before the rebels try and take the Avenue again!” he called, gesturing them on with an impatient hand. They didn’t need to be asked twice, and Haymitch could well imagine that their resulting run wasn’t helping Peeta’s leg, but at least it wasn’t a killing sprint. To his credit he said nothing about it.

As they passed the Peacekeeper Haymitch heard him on his comm to the Peacekeepers up ahead reporting four refugees en route, presumably so they wouldn’t be mistaken for rebels and killed. “Good job,” he said to the others lowly, “keep it up and we’re golden.”

That lasted until they reached where the Avenue should have terminated at the gates of Snow’s mansion, with the balcony where he greeted the tributes yearly overhead. Except this time, there were hastily erected wire fences in front of the mansion, like some eerie mockery of a reaping pen, containing what looked to be several hundred kids.

“Human shields for that snake,” he heard Katniss snarl in disgust, and he wasn’t inclined to disagree with that assessment. This was Snow’s last resort, apparently, to hold off the rebels. He was barring his gates with the lives of the Capitol’s own children, gambling that they wouldn’t sacrifice so many innocent lives only to get to him.

As he watched, two Peacekeepers escorted five or six more of them to the gate of the pen and urged them on through to join the others. He looked over to see the parents anxiously looking at their kids, yelling and protesting as the Peacekeepers held them back from the gates, a bristling line of rifles and a waist-high line of concrete barriers helping keep them at bay.

It was like Reaping Day had finally come for the parents of the Capitol. The districts had long ago learned that wailing and protesting made no difference. They’d borne it in stoic silence before Haymitch was born, let alone by the time he was reaped and became a mentor. But the early years, oh yes, they must have been like this, anguish and chaos and grief and terror, parents and children all screaming and crying.

A temporary fix at best, because the moment the rebels killed the Peacekeepers and set the kids free, Snow was defenseless. But it would cost lives, and some of those bullets would find children along the way. He wasn’t a fan of Capitol children. He’d seen too many over the years and what they grew up to become, vapid and oblivious and approving of the cruelty of the Games. He’d watched them running around with toy swords and bows and playing “Hunger Games” with each other. There were action figures of the victors too that were popular gifts. When Seneca Crane was a kid and his ma Lucretia had paid a time or two for Haymitch’s company, he’d seen the little boy who would grow up to be a Head Gamemaker starting early at it, staging elaborate scenarios with action figures of himself, Chaff, Blight, Chantilly, and others.

Capitol kids eventually grew up to be Capitol assholes, but these were children, being raised to not know better, and unlike the adults, they hadn’t been a part of harming anyone yet. They were still innocent, and so seeing them there made him think, Is this really what it’s come down to?

“The rebels are here!” someone shrieked, and the gunfire began again, too close for comfort. Right then someone threw a parcel over the heads of the Peacekeepers, yelling to the kids, “Catch!” At least a half dozen more followed quickly after, flying over the fence. Through the chain links of the fence he watched the children scrabble for them, tugging at the wrapping with fingers shaking with cold and fear, probably wondering if it was food or blankets or what was being given to them to help them through this ordeal.

The explosions knocked him off his feet, and when he rolled over, pushing himself up off the icy stones with an effort, shaking his head as his ears were ringing and he was a bit dizzy, he heard the screams. Some of the Peacekeepers right near the fence were screaming too, caught in the blast, but mostly it was the small, high-pitched wails of agony from young throats, toddlers and teenagers and everything in between.

They lit up the morning, burning like they must have in Twelve when they dropped the firebombs, dozens of children immediately turned into human torches. Then he saw Katniss had vaulted the barrier and was racing for the front gate of the pen, where children, some burning and some not, were shaking the fence frantically and screaming in terror and agony to be let out of the inferno.

He didn’t stop to think about it, about what had just happened and how and who did it. He didn’t ponder how stupid and reckless a move it was by her and how they’d probably get shot by either the Peacekeepers or the rebels for it by making themselves targets, or how much fire there was and how much he now hated being around a deadly fire. It was Katniss, and she couldn’t turn down someone who needed her. She had made her choice that these trapped and dying kids were more important than breaking away to get to Snow and he couldn’t disagree. He followed, and by the sound of it, Johanna and Peeta were right there with him.

Even through their leather gloves the metal of the gate burned their fingers, like grabbing a hot skillet off the stove, until they finally got it flung open, spurred on by those terrified eyes watching from the other side. The children rushed out, screaming, some of them dropping to roll on the snowy ground to try to put the fires burning on their clothing and skin and hair out, but they didn’t seem to be dying down like flames ought.

Then they were rushing inside the pen, near the flames that up close smelled suspiciously acrid and chemical rather than the familiar scent of wood or coal fires, and there were others running in too to help with the rescue, calling out names of children that must have been herded in here. He watched Katniss reach down to grab a child by his or her non-burning arm, and Peeta must have spied the unexploded packages at the same time as Haymitch did, because he lunged forward towards Katniss, yelling, “No!”

On pure instinct, he flung up his hands and closed his eyes to help protect them. Even through his closed eyelids, the explosion was still white and bright and intense as staring into the sun. The pain followed a few moments later.

Chapter Text

Haymitch woke up to see Perulla Everdeen leaning over him. Back in the hospital again with the bright lights, it was hard to tell time given how he kept slipping in and out of consciousness but he was pretty sure was the third day after the firestorm in front of the mansion. That would make it three days too, they told him, since rebel forces had stormed the courtyard almost immediately after that and Snow had quickly surrendered and been arrested. But he’d missed that part. He’d been passed out on the paving stones by then. Though he’d missed his own little shining victory moment in the arena too, for that matter. Hadn’t seen Sapphire’s skull cleaved by the axe through his tunnel vision, hadn’t heard the cannon or the trumpets through the ringing and roaring in his ears.

He looked up and saw Perulla there, carefully fussing with the bandages on his hands. “Looks like old times all over again, you and me,” he rasped, holding up his hands for her with an attempt at a laugh that turned into a dry, painful cough as his throat and lungs weren’t apparently fully healed up yet.

“Hush that before you hurt yourself,” she said, all business about it. But the way she looked at him said yes, she remembered too when he’d been taken to the Banner house, his hands badly burned after trying to get into the inferno of his old house, stupidly convinced he could somehow still save them if he could just get in the front door. It had been Jace Banner that treated him at first, but the tedious days after that of checking the healing and dosing him with sleep syrup when the pain grew too great and changing the burn ointment and bandages, fell to young Perulla as her daddy’s apprentice. If she hadn’t been anxiously trying to ask him about the too-painful subject of Maysilee, he could have almost thought of her as a friend in those days, terrified and alone and hurting as he had been. “At least it won’t be weeks of healing this time,” she said, giving him a gentle squeeze on the shoulder.

No, after three days speeded by the finest available medicine, the burns were already progressing nicely, so the doctor cheerfully informed him. Wasn't that lovely. At least he didn't wake up this time with them telling him about something alarming as a new liver he hadn't even been aware of getting, so he'd count that as a plus. When he’d looked at it the last time the dressings were changed, his hands were already pink with healing, better protected from damage because luckily, the tough leather shooting gloves from Thirteen were a lot slower to burn than most fabrics. The other burns were worse, though, as the bombs went off and sent out a sticky, burning gel that only smeared and spread when he tried to smother the flames. He’d been far enough from the blast that only spatters and droplets of it had hit him, but even those had left him with some shiny, slick red patches of skin on his forearms and chest, a couple on his legs.

Well, given the scars he was carrying already courtesy of his last stay in the Capitol, it wasn’t like he’d been planning on running around shirtless anytime soon anyway. He already knew his much-abused body wasn’t much to look at by this point. What was a few more scars to add to the total?

He and Johanna were better off than Katniss and Peeta, though, who’d been a few feet closer to the blast and suffered for it. Apparently the doctors still had the two of them doped up pretty fiercely. That was necessary because otherwise the pain would probably be unbearable while they shaved off a few areas of deeply burned skin that couldn’t be saved and grafted on the new. They hadn’t let him go see them yet, isolated in a totally sterile environment as they were, but he could imagine, comparing his injuries to how much fire he’d endured against the two of them.

“Thank you,” Perulla said softly, finishing with his hands. “They told me you saved her.”

He shook his head. “Thank Johanna, she’s the one that grabbed Katniss,” he said wearily. Jo hadn’t even asked, rushing in to grab Katniss away from the worst of the flames, leaving him and his greater strength to handle getting the bigger bulk of Peeta to safety. She’d risked worse burns than she already had to save Katniss. In doing so, she’d spared him from finally having to make the harsh decision that he’d been able to sidestep last year by enthralling the Capitol with a sweet little love story and carefully guiding Seneca Crane into becoming a believer, the choice he’d escaped again this year by pushing Peeta aside and entering the arena himself for the Quell.

Which of the two of them do I save and which do I condemn to die? By this point he knew it was a choice he couldn’t stand to make.

Johanna wasn’t in the room with him, much to his regret--instead, in the other bed it was another of the rebels. He hadn’t seen her yet, drugged as he’d been most of the last few days anyway. The thought had crossed his mind of going to find her if only to reassure himself they weren’t lying to him to spare him a bad blow as long as possible, but sedatives and painkillers and tiredness usually had him drifting back to sleep rather than being able to muster the effort to get out of bed.

He blamed the morphling as it finally crossed his mind that Perulla ought to be in Thirteen rather than here changing his dressings as part of the nursing staff. “They fly you here because of Katniss?” he asked. With the fighting done and her baby girl in the hospital getting her skin repaired, Perulla would have wanted to be here.

“No, I came with the medical corps earlier,” and that made sense, they would have had field medics out with the soldiers, ready to treat their wounds. The squads that hadn’t gone rogue, anyway, and had to make do with his sewing skills and Taffeta’s kitchen table. “Prim and Annie came along too,” she said softly, “and I know Annie was being kept back at the field hospital because of her pregnancy,” and the fact that exposing her to combat conditions probably couldn’t be good for her mental state, Haymitch thought, warily trying to ignore the sudden specter of little Gerrold, the dead Capitol kid in his bright blue coat, peeking up at him from the foot of the bed with solemn eyes. Maybe combat conditions hadn’t been the best idea for him either, given that he kept seeing ghosts. Boggs had said they wanted to keep him Command; might have been the smart play.

“And I thought Prim was too--they told me that she was just going to be a surgical assistant!” Seeing the anguish on her face and hearing it in her tone, obviously something was wrong with Prim, and he tried to fight through the lingering clouds in his mind to puzzle it out. Apparently not drinking all these past months had lost him some familiarity with that skill, because he was really having to work for it here.

“Wait, what?” Now he really was staring at her in confusion, groggily forcing himself to sit up because he felt weirdly vulnerable lying there. “They let Prim out in the field?” The girl was only thirteen--no, she was fourteen by now. Granted, that was more than old enough for the arena but far too young by Thirteen’s standards to be out in a combat zone.

“Yes,” Perulla said with a heavy sigh, looking like even admitting it pained her. “She was wounded too.” That explained the anxiety he saw in her about it.

“How bad?” he asked simply, forcing the words through a throat that was suddenly tight from more than the rawness of inhaling chemical fumes and pure scorching heat. Prim had always been a truly good kid, ever since he’d started to get to know her after Katniss’ Games, living in Victors' Village as she was, and with how Perulla seemed of a mind to invite him over for dinner. She had the best of Burt’s kindness with Perulla’s compassion. Privately he thought, but knew he would never tell any of the Everdeens, that even without her being the kid of one of his childhood friends to add to it, Primrose would have been a death in the arena that would have stayed with him even more than most. He had a few like that already, starting with Larkspur.

“She took a bullet in her back. They’re hopeful that she’ll walk again,” Perulla said tiredly. “With some more surgeries in the future and fairly extensive physical therapy, or so they tell me.” Surgeries, physical therapy--words that to someone from Twelve, even a born merchie girl like Perulla, let alone one who’d been raising her kids down in the Seam, were concepts that might as well be distant as the moon. Perhaps they could fix Prim, and the Mockingjay’s sister probably would get top priority, but that was probably little comfort against what would be a long journey by the sound of it. There was no guarantee, either. He remembered that Sable, the girl from One that won the 69th Games, had gotten a sword in the spine in her final fight with the girl tribute from Two. Sable was the one that survived that battle but she never walked again, never came to the Capitol either for that matter. The Capitol liked their One victors in particular to be shining and perfect, not crippled.

“Well,” he said carefully, “I imagine Peeta might be some help to her there.” He’d had to deal with learning to walk again too, in his own way, after he got his artificial leg.

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Perulla took in a shuddering breath and her voice got thicker with tears as she admitted, “They told me the bullet barely missed some major arteries.” Which meant that Prim had nearly died of her wound, when she shouldn’t have been anywhere near the battle zone in the first place.

She was a widow who lost a husband and currently had both her daughters in the hospital badly injured, and no guarantee either of them would be able to fully recover from it. As was, Haymitch figured she was entitled to some tears here, so he put an arm around her shoulders and let her simply cry it out like she needed. She could go be strong for both her daughters after this but right now she needed a few moments of frailty, and presumably she knew he wouldn’t judge her for it. Not after how much of his own weakness had been so very public.

Soon enough she dried her eyes, all business again, finished changing his bandages, and continued on her rounds, and he knew she wouldn’t mention it again to him. Feeling clear-headed enough to not want to lay there and stare at the ceiling, he carefully sat up, trying not to wince as the motion pulled at the burns in some places. Snagging a robe from the hook beside his bed, he pulled it on over the hospital pajamas because it was chilly in here. Sliding his feet into the loose slippers on the floor, grabbing the pole with his drug drips hung on it, he decided to go see again if they would let him actually see Katniss and Peeta, even if it was through the glass of an isolation room. He’d rest easier seeing them still alive.

The worst thing was, in addition to the pain of the burns trickling down through the haze of the morphling, Johanna woke up with cramps to boot. Just what she needed right now, stuck in bed like this and already in pain: cramps, back pain, being sick to her stomach, and the general annoying mess from getting her period right now. “Monthly visitor”, she thought with a snort, was what Capitol women primly called it, like it was some kind of welcome guest. Not that hers were usually monthly. Six weeks, two months, whenever it felt like showing up, really, and the experience was always worse the longer it went before arriving again. She’d been irregular as hell ever since the Quell--blame it on starvation, stress, and then insane amounts of physical training--so this one was hitting her particularly badly.

So when she asked the nurse for some more morphling, bitching about the cramps, the woman actually listened rather than giving her a sour look like they had before in the Thirteen infirmary and telling her that she needed to reduce her morphling dose, not increase it. It probably helped she was a woman old enough to be her mother who might naturally take some pity on her. Turned on the morphling drip, sending more sweet painkilling bliss into her veins, found her some supplies too to take care of the hygiene problem. Johanna tried to not be reminded of her mom. Then she leaned down, clucking in sympathy and patting her softly on the shoulder. “I know it hurts. Never mind it,” she said soothingly. “It was the very early weeks still. But you’re young. You’ll be healthy soon enough and you can try again.”

Johanna stared at her, because she might as well have been talking in garble like old Mags had after her stroke. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The nurse looked surprised that Johanna didn’t automatically know what she was talking about. “I’m afraid the drugs that we had to use to encourage your body’s immune system for rapid healing and fighting off infection from your burns are also drugs that tend to cause spontaneous miscarriage in the first trimester.”

Spontaneous miscarriage. Right on the heels of that were several thoughts in a dizzy whirl, including Wait, I'm pregnant? and But I'm not now then rapidly rolling right into I’m going to kill that bastard. It had to have been Haymitch. She hadn’t been with anyone else in over a year now, not since the last Games before the Quell, and she’d slept with him the first time about a month ago.

How had that happened? She’d been on that contraceptive shot they gave her in Thirteen. Eight years of Capitol injections to keep her barren every summer and not a single hint of a pregnancy, not even a scare. If anything, that was the only time of the year her period was regular as clockwork. A couple months in Thirteen on their shots and suddenly she got knocked up immediately after she started having sex with Haymitch?

“You had clomiphen in you, dear,” the nurse said, now looking confused herself at Johanna’s look of obvious shock, “when we tested your blood for drugs already in your system to avoid giving you anything that might result in some bad cross-reactions. That’s a fertility stimulator, and clearly it worked since you had the hormones of the first weeks of pregnancy too. You weren’t deliberately trying for a baby?”

“No,” she ground out. No chance in hell of that. “And what’s an injection of that stuff look like, out of curiosity?”

“Cloudy blue.” They’d given her a shot of a murky blue stuff as opposed to the piss-yellow of the Capitol injections. What had they said to her? If you’re going to be having intercourse with Abernathy, you’ll find this useful. They’d never said it was contraceptive, only let her naturally assume it and believe it. But she was damn sure she’d never said anything to them that would make them think she was willing and eager to get Haymitch to knock her up.

So scratch killing Haymitch, on second thought. Apparently this wasn’t his fault. She was now going to kill some people from Thirteen. All that testing and the subsequent congratulations to her on how being tortured hadn’t wrecked her chances for having kids. The lecture about how she ought to get right on it once she recovered a bit more because she was in her peak reproductive years, and Thirteen always welcomed new children.

She laughed bitterly then, because she’d told Haymitch exactly this, hadn’t she? They didn’t give a shit about her as a person, only what use she had for them as a breeder, and it seemed like they’d tried to trick her into getting knocked up without asking her about it. Probably figured that once it was a done deal she’d go along with it happily enough. She’d heard plenty about Capitol women not wanting to wreck their figures with a pregnancy or be saddled with a screaming needy baby, and she knew out in the districts the apothecaries usually had some kind of tea or tonic that might or might not work for a woman who simply couldn’t feed another hungry mouth. She wondered suddenly if Thirteen even allowed women to terminate a pregnancy. Wouldn’t surprise her if not, if they were willing to resort to underhanded crap like this to make sure women were getting pregnant.

Come to think of it, Finnick had told her for him and Annie their baby was a happy surprise, that they hadn’t been trying yet, not with the war still on. He’d shrugged, smiled, and figured it was the rare case of the contraceptive shot failing: maybe it was just meant to be, huh? She wondered if maybe Annie had been injected with clomiphen too. Maybe Katniss also--no, not Katniss, they couldn’t risk their little Mockingjay being out of combat with a tiny bun courtesy of Peeta cooking in the oven. She’d still heard sympathetic murmurs in Thirteen for the baby Katniss had supposedly miscarried from her injuries in the arena.

A miscarriage. Well, she’d just had one for real, not some bullshit story spun for sympathy with television viewers. The word rang through her mind, and she pushed the nurse’s hand aside. “Going for a walk,” she said, needing to get away from that sympathetic look, needing to get away in general because her supposed allies had found one more way to violate her that even the Capitol didn’t manage. She’d never been like Taffeta, obliged to bear a kid she might not really want. She felt how her whole body was trembling and she wasn’t sure if she was poised on the edge of violence or tears.

She couldn’t go see Haymitch right now, not with this suddenly thrust on her, because it would be all she could think about and she couldn’t tell him, not right now. She didn't know if what they had together could easily bear the weight of being tested by something as sharp and painful as, Thirteen rigged things so while we were busy trying to relearn how to be human beings rather than whores, we actually made a kid together, you and me, but it’s gone now. Building that kind of trust between them hadn’t come easy, and it meant too damn much to her to let it break down again. It didn’t matter anyway, no need to tell him and force him into the idea of them having some kind of a shared future, based on a baby that was gone already. She needed a little time to settle herself down before she could talk to him again, that was all. Katniss and Peeta were being treated for their wounds and even if she could go see them, she doubted they’d be much good for conversation, doped up as they must be.

That left Finn, and so she headed down the hall to his room. Annie, so she had heard from the nurses gossiping around her during those times while she was awake, had screamed on first seeing his bandages come off, exposing his injured face. Then it turned out that it wasn’t that she was horrified that her husband’s beauty was gone--fucking morons, Johanna could have told them Annie might be nuts but she wasn’t shallow, Finnick wouldn’t have ever loved someone superficial. It was the sheer change in him from when she saw him last, the injuries and the deep purple hair to boot, that made her afraid he’d been replaced by a mutt. Once she got convinced that he wasn’t a mutt, apparently she was laughing around him just as usual.

“Better not be naked in there, lovebirds,” she grumbled as she knocked on the frame of the door.

Apparently Finnick still wasn’t really talking yet, given the stress of it on his still-healing lips, but he looked over, saw her, and waved her in eagerly. She shuffled her way on over, pushing the pole along the way, and said wryly, “Me, hospital pajamas, bags of liquid drugs--this is getting awfully fucking familiar.” She raised an eyebrow. “Still not a mutt, Finnick? Just checking.” Being upset still brought out the nasty bitch in her, what a surprise.

Annie chose to treat it as a joke, though, and said with a laugh, “No, though I keep hoping someone will find some hair dye for him. I really can’t get used to the purple.” She tousled Finnick’s hair fondly as she said it. Johanna looked at him frankly, knowing he wouldn’t be insulted by her staring. The pink scars criss-crossed his tan skin, healing speeded enough to be minus the hideous lines of black stitches now. But the scar tissue subtly pulled and puckered his face in spots, one eyelid drooping a bit, one corner of his mouth pulled up into something vaguely like a hint of a smirk. It wasn’t horrible mutilation, and when the pink faded to silver it wouldn’t look even this bad, but for a formerly gorgeous man, it was a big change. The hair being the thing Annie jokingly couldn’t get used to, obviously having already accepted the scars, made Johanna think that no, Annie would love her husband, ugly or handsome.

“Well, we all agreed he’d look better blond.”

Finnick signed something to Annie, that sign language that Johanna had never learned the way Haymitch had also, and Annie looked over at her and said, “How are you feeling?”

“Fantastic. All the morphling I want,” she shrugged, “and a few more scars for the collection.” Didn’t much matter, a little more damage to something already pretty well ruined down in the torture cells. Nobody Capitol would ever want her now, that was for damn sure. Though she wouldn’t bet even non-Capitol men would be in a hurry either. Bitchy and scarred was a pretty poisonous combination.

More signs from Finnick to Annie. “They tried to offer him scar reduction once the wounds are finished healing. He said no.”

“Good for you,” Johanna said fiercely. “I’m keeping mine.” They weren’t erasing it from her skin this time, pretending it had never happened. “I earned these.” She’d helped try to save those Capitol kids, then dragged Katniss out of the fire. Hadn’t even really thought about it, once those bombs went off right near them--Katniss was burning, so she was going to go haul her sorry ass to safety. This time it wasn’t the terms of a pact she’d made with Haymitch and the others either. Somewhere in the middle of things out there she’d started to think of the annoying brat as a friend, once Katniss had gotten over herself and her own growing legend a bit. Maybe even something like a little sister, even if she’d never be Heike. “So, we won, Snow’s gonna hang or get shot or whatever, all’s well that ends well.” Not time to get all sentimental and whatever here.

“You’ll have to come visit us in Four whenever you can,” Annie said, and Johanna was actually sort of moved by the generosity of it. She had to know about Johanna’s history with Finnick. Finn was almost painfully honest with people he cared about, as she well had cause to know. Apparently she’d accepted that when it came to Finnick, she’d won. Johanna could tell her that Finnick had always been hers anyway. She’d never had Finn, not really, not in the way she'd wanted. She could see that clearly enough now, from viewing how he was with Annie compared with her. It made her want to hate Annie just a little, but she managed to shrug it off.

“I hate the water, haven’t you heard?” she said dryly. She was sticking to the story Haymitch had told them. Though the ocean wasn’t her idea of a fun time, really. She could swim a bit, good enough that it had helped her in the arena during the Quell, but that was something totally different from the sea. She’d glimpsed it only during her victory tour but the way it hungrily lapped and crashed on the sand was nothing like the calm ponds in the woods back home that kids took a dip in during the summer.

“You and me both,” Annie said with the lift of an eyebrow, and something that Johanna would swear was the hint of a mischievous smile.

“Wonderful. We can sit on the beach and heckle Finn. I like this plan already.”

Finnick chuckled low in his throat and put an arm around Annie’s waist, the other motioning with signs. “The baby too,” Annie interpreted. “After all, we’ll want her to get to know Auntie Johanna.”

The sight of Finnick’s hand settling comfortably on Annie’s still-flat stomach, and knowing he wanted her to be a part of his kid’s life, was too much for her right now. “Good,” she muttered, turning hastily to leave. “That’s good. Think the sedatives are getting to me so...”

She hurried down the hall, at least as much as pushing that pole could allow. She’d never really thought about having kids, not since they turned her into a whore and killed her family and she realized she wasn’t going to have a nice, normal kind of a life. She’d had one or two flickers of the notion with Finnick, sure, before he met Annie, but she’d been eighteen and dumb then.

She wasn’t even really sure she would have felt up to being anything remotely resembling a good parent. Yeah, well, Annie’s cracked in the head and she’s still gonna manage it. But Annie was still softer, kinder. Her first instinct wasn’t to be a bitch. So given that it was a kid she hadn’t asked for, probably couldn’t have cared for like it deserved, and therefore losing it was for the best, why was she upset?

She’d lost something she hadn’t even realized existed, something she maybe wouldn’t have even wanted, but the knowledge was all too real now, and she couldn’t undo that, couldn’t go back to a place where it hadn’t happened. She’d conceived a kid and then had it taken away, and in both cases it was the drugs they put into her rather than her that had made the choice.

But silly and sentimental as it was, she couldn’t help but think for a moment that with the war done now, her kid and Finnick’s could have become friends. They could have played together on that beach in Four instead of maybe having to try to kill each other someday in the arena.

It was killing her. She couldn’t let herself go down that road, start to wonder about stupid things like if the baby she hadn’t asked for anyway would have been a boy or a girl, had her brown eyes or Haymitch’s grey ones. Yeah, didn’t matter what color eyes it would have had, with a bitch and a drunk for its parents, poor kid was probably better off not existing anyway. Biting down on a knuckle, willing herself to not be an idiot and cry, she told herself it was the stress and the hormones, that was all. OK, that and the feeling of once again being used, and she thought she was more than entitled to be upset about that. Though that ought to make her massively pissed off and ready to punch some people, not depressed. Hormones, that was it. Stupid fucking hormones.

She wandered towards the isolation unit, thinking she’d see Katniss and Peeta if nothing else. She ought to check in on them, friends as they were. Besides, they were much worse off than her and her little problems, and the slap of reality at seeing what she was pretty sure were the only two kids Haymitch was ever interested in having would help ground her again.

Of course with her luck, Haymitch was already there, though his back was turned to her, and he was talking with a twitchy-looking Volts, who must have arrived from Thirteen.

“...identification of the children’s remains by a blood sample matched up against the central Panem genetic database,” Beetee said. “So at least their names will be known.” He had a strangely intense look on his face, different from his usual distracted air.

“We might need that in Twelve come spring, for all that,” Haymitch said with a sigh. “There’s plenty of ‘em burned beyond recognition...”

Hooray, the war was over, but nobody much seemed to be in an openly celebratory mood. Too many dead along the way for that. Finnick and Annie were the closest she’d seen to happy, but then, they had a bright future ahead of them. She was about to go slip away before Haymitch noticed her, but Beetee looked up and saw her and said, “How are you, Johanna?”

Gee, thanks, Volts. Haymitch turned, and for a moment, on his face there was an undisguised relief and even something like pleasure at seeing her for the first time since the bombs, before it settled back into his usual carefully nonchalant expression. “About as well as anyone who got half-roasted can feel,” she said, willing herself to put the mask back in place, not let her own feelings show. Haymitch had taught her well, after all. “Better than Katniss and Peeta, though, I’ll bet.”

Haymitch nodded slowly at that. “Still won't let any of us see ‘em,” he said with a frustrated sigh.

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” Beetee said. “There’s a great deal of work to do on the identifications anyway. I’m glad to hear Katniss and Peeta are expected to make a good recovery, and you two and Finnick as well.”

Much as she wished he wouldn’t, Volts left, and she was alone with Haymitch. She’d been around him enough to realize he was distracted, and she was almost thankful for that because that meant he wouldn’t pick up on anything off about her as readily. But still, she felt compelled to ask, “What’s bugging you?”

“Prim Everdeen was on the front lines as a medic. Got shot. She’s got paralyzed legs.” Right, the little sister, the one all of Panem adored. That was some hard news, to say the least, and their mom had to be having a rough time of it, one kid burned and one kid crippled.

“She’s too young for that, isn’t she?” She had to be only thirteen or fourteen.

“Supposedly,” Haymitch said, with a faintly cynical smile. “But there she was anyway.”

“Maybe they ran shorthanded enough they had to send her out anyway. We saw how crazy it got out there.”

“Maybe so,” though from their tones neither of them was fully convinced of it. That was what happened when two well-trained cynics got turned loose on a thing. Then he sighed softly and gave a never mind it gesture to her, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “I’m too fucking tired today for thinking on conspiracy theories.”

She could yank his chain and scoff that the day Haymitch was too tired for that kind of thinking was the day he might as well give up, period, but she could see he really was tired, and it wasn’t just physical tiredness. It was that glum soul-weariness of having been through too much. Then his arm went around her shoulders and he moved closer to her, and much as she told herself she ought to be careful until she was more certain of herself, instinctively she found herself leaning into it. Didn’t even care they were in public, because right now she needed it, that flicker of relief and warmth that had been in his eyes when he first saw her, the tight clasp of his arm now telling her that yes, he was glad to see her all right and he’d worried about her. He didn’t even need to say it, and by how she leaned into it, slipping her own arm around him eventually, she told him the same back in return. In that firestorm, she hadn’t had any time to worry, but if she had, the notion she might never see him again might have had its place. They were both a bit more scarred up, had some more nightmares to add to the collection after the last few days, but holding on like this said it was OK, they’d be there for each other to deal with it. It scared her in a way, how much she'd come to rely on that certainty from him, but to have it meant more than she could say.

She figured it was a better thing that no words were necessary to get that point across. Because anything that came out of her mouth was likely to wreck this, whether by the need to say something biting and sarcastic, or worse, telling him what she’d learned from that nurse. She knew she ought to tell him, someday, if for no other reason than he ought to know about Thirteen’s apparent manipulation. But she was in no rush because really, she didn’t want to cause him more grief when he’d had enough of it in his life already. Right now she selfishly wanted to simply let the quiet comfort of this stand without disrupting it like that. She was too fucking tired today for conspiracy theories too.

Chapter Text

They released Finnick from the hospital first. She and Haymitch followed, sprung from the hospital a few days later, with a pretty impressive jar of ointment to keep rubbing several times daily on the still tough, tight, dry areas of the burns to encourage them to heal with as little scarring and deformation of the skin as possible. Katniss and Peeta were still isolated, though the doctors reported at least the grafts were taking and they were hoping to move them to the general ward soon. Prim Everdeen, so she heard, was conscious, and she’d be going back in for the first of her surgeries later in the week. So they were all starting to heal up, as much as they could.

They’d been given their old rooms in the Training Center, on Coin’s orders. The Seven apartment was eerily quiet without Cedrus or Blight here, and it had her thinking of the kids that had come through and went home in coffins. Apparently Thirteen’s oppressive housing rules still applied here that she’d been put in a separate room from Haymitch. She wasn’t sure how she felt about being forced to sleep in this place, whether Coin had done it as a twist of the knife to make them stay in a place that reeked of the Games and was so tied to so many nightmares, or as an invitation to freely wreck the place, piss on things or smash them or set them on fire. It didn’t much matter. She wasn’t going to sleep well here, especially not alone, so she’d see if Haymitch was willing to let her move into the penthouse with him.

The old bitch herself hadn’t been presumptuous enough to take Snow’s old rooms in the Presidential Mansion--not yet, anyway. Apparently Snow himself was still sleeping there, albeit under heavy guard, and remembering the damp cinderblock walls and hard metal slab of a bed in her cell, the idea of the old bastard sleeping in comfort and luxury even now made Johanna want to scream. But Coin had made damn sure to reserve the best guest suite in the mansion specifically for herself, and Johanna would bet once Snow was executed, she’d be redecorating the Presidential Suite to suit her own tastes in a heartbeat.

She and Coin had business, that was for sure, and so she went the few blocks to the Presidential Mansion to take care of that. Johanna found her conducting things from Snow’s imposing office, naturally, that bony ass sat down in Snow’s chair like she’d covetously claimed it as her own already, moving right in like a vulture on a carcass. She said with false sweetness, “I need an actual appointment here, Madam President, or have you got five minutes for me?”

Coin looked up with those pale icy eyes, nothing like Haymitch’s grey. “I suppose I can spare a few minutes for you, Mason,” she said, putting down her pen. “Make it quick, though. I’ve got a trial starting tomorrow and a lot of other things to handle.”

There were still no chairs in this place, she noticed, to make people stand there uncomfortably as yet another little control tactic. Apparently Coin liked Snow’s idea there. Fuck that. Stepping up on the dais, she shoved a few papers aside and perched herself on a corner of the desk. It wasn’t all that comfortable, but damned if she’d admit it. “Guess I’ll make my own seat here.”

Coin raised an eyebrow. Johanna knew better than to pull this with the likes of Snow, because she’d been slapped down hard by him for her supposed insolence, but Coin was going to get the rough edge of her tongue here. The only people she had for Coin to try and hurt, if she was so inclined, were Haymitch and maybe Finn too, and they were seasoned veterans of Snow’s brand of fuckery, so they could take care of themselves. “So, apparently I had a miscarriage a few days ago thanks to the drugs they had to use to treat my burns.”

“My condolences.” Not a flicker of anything human there. “To both you and Abernathy--he was the father, of course.” The total lack of expression made Johanna want to grab a paperweight, a letter opener, anything, and go after her. It made her want to claim it had been someone else’s kid than Haymitch’s, if for no other reason than to try to provoke Coin into some kind of reaction. Wasn’t like she hadn’t been thought of as a slut before.

“Funny thing is, I assumed I was getting a contraceptive. I damn well didn’t ask to get shot up with a fertility drug, and don’t bother denying it. They found it in my bloodwork. So, let’s have the explanation of why your doctors went behind my back to get me knocked up,” she said.

This maybe hadn’t been the best idea, coming in here to confront Coin with angry as she was right now at the whole thing, but she needed to know. She had to hear why this woman thought she had the right.

Coin sighed, almost irritated, like a parent having to explain something to a particularly slow child. “The population of Thirteen has been unsustainable for years now given the birthrate crash caused by the epidemic. Therefore, immigrants to the district in their reproductive years are very reasonably expected to do their duty and help alleviate the problem. You’re young enough still. Your initial medical screening proved you’re fertile. You gave indications to the entire country of having a stable heterosexual relationship with Abernathy. You were clearly ideal to bear children, so like with any other woman coming in with that situation, the clomiphen was used to help you conceive as quickly as possible.”

If by ideal Coin meant half crazy after being tortured, sure. But apparently only her womb needed to work properly, not her brain. Johanna also thought “having a stable heterosexual relationship” was about the least romantic phrase she’d heard about having a steady lover, and that was coming from someone who openly snickered at the hearts-and-flowers maudlin bullshit the Capitol called “romance” so breathily. She had an idle thought and couldn’t help but ask curiously, “So what happens if you’re a homosexual woman, by the way? You gonna tell ‘em to suck it up and go fuck a man, never mind that they don’t like cock?”

“Artificial insemination,” Coin said coolly, still unruffled by Johanna’s trying to provoke her with crudeness, and that was one way she differed from Snow and his sheer primness, “where possible, using the sperm of a homosexual male, so that both parties fulfill their reproductive obligation.”

“Well, you’ve got it all worked out neatly, don’t you? Except the part where you didn’t fucking let me and Haymitch decide if we wanted a kid.”

“The needs of the community have to come first, Mason. We needed children desperately, and insisting on gratifying your individual desire in the face of a dire predicament like the collapse of our entire district can’t be allowed. Particularly given that you owe your very survival to Thirteen, your reluctance to do your part is purely selfish.”

“So yeah, guess that means no abortions in Thirteen, then.” Now Coin looked at her like she’d suggested something genuinely depraved. Johanna wondered how many refugee women had been unknowingly knocked up by the clomiphen and then forced to have that baby. It was every bit as bad as here in the Capitol, where vanity outweighed the worth of a life, in the arena or out, and abortion was no more of a big deal to them than a nose job.

“It’s a criminal offense,” Coin snapped, “to attempt to terminate a pregnancy, and no doctor in Thirteen would carry the procedure out.”

Johanna leaned forward a bit. “You know what the other person who told me that I owed my life to the goodwill of his government did to me, after the arena? He took ownership of me and he whored me out.” She stared at Coin directly and said as evenly as she could through her rage, “It’s not happening again. My body isn’t gonna be your fucking property to use, Alma. So keep your hands off me, off Haymitch, and off any kids we may actually choose to have.”

There was the part of her that wanted to continue on to promise, And I’m going to take you down for doing this to me and to others, and for whatever other dirty hands I know you have to have, but she wasn’t seventeen and stupid now, mouthing off to someone poised to run the entire country. She knew better now than to poke a bear with a stick and make it attack. What she had said Coin could take as Johanna, enraged at being powerless, simply ranting and venting. If she made an actual threat, though, that would be serving notice, and right now she needed the woman to not be on her guard.

With that she didn’t say another word, simply turned and walked out and headed back to the Training Center with the deeper cool of evening falling, pulling her coat tighter around her for the journey back. Having had Coin blithely confirm everything, without even a flicker of doubt or defensiveness, only made her even more pissed off about it. Coin genuinely didn’t think she’d done anything wrong and that was the frightening part. Though with that she had to think what the hell do I do now? It wasn’t like she could only sit on the information, and given how she and Haymitch had said before that Coin made them uneasy with how she ran things, the realization she was poised already to swoop in as Snow’s successor did not sit well. She’d have to bite back the discomfort and tell Haymitch about all of it, because if the last months had shown anything, it was that they worked better together, and she couldn’t take on Coin alone.

No, she was sure Haymitch would be on her side with this. Even before the Quell, before Thirteen, he probably would have backed her. She knew full well he was suspicious of most politicians.

He wasn’t in the Twelve apartment when she knocked, though. She highly doubted he’d left to go out on the town, given that a lot of the city was still a mess and he was still recovering from his burns anyway. That left one place to try, and where else had they gone for what little privacy could be had in the Training Center away from the cameras and the audio bugs? Going to the stairwell, she climbed the last flight of stairs and saw the door to the roof was indeed slightly ajar, a cold draft coming through the crack with a rock stuck in it to keep it from locking someone outside. Looked like she knew him too well.

He’d spent most of the afternoon in the Twelve apartment, laying there and half-listening to the television, but mostly doing his level best to not think too much. Because thinking led to counting the losses, and with the frenzy of the war over there was finally time to tally them all, from the ones dead in the arena to those in Twelve all the way up to Gale blown to bits and Katniss and Peeta in the burn ward. Thinking, in the past, had led to drinking so he could stop thinking.

He was all too aware of the crystal bottles in their usual spot in the apartment, full of delightful oblivion there for the drinking, the first alcohol he’d really been around for months and months. The cognac at Taffeta’s didn’t count. He’d been much too busy there to be thinking about taking a swig then. He wasn’t busy now, left back in the fucking Training Center with nothing to do but lay around and try to not go more crazy than he already was, and only the promise to Johanna that he’d hold off until Snow was dead for a drink with her stayed his hand.

Finally the television caught his ear and he found himself sitting up and watching the footage they showed, and as he watched it, his mind started turning it over. It made him want a drink even more, the thoughts in his head, so he found himself up on the roof to get away from it for a while. There was a certain comfort in being up here, where for all the years there had been at least a little privacy.

Johanna found him up there, and he wasn’t sure how long it had been that he’d been staring out into the gathering dusk, lost in his own thoughts. Must have been a while since he was a little stiff-jointed from cold as he got up off the bench to meet her, and the moon had risen fat and full. He could actually see the stars better too, given that many of the Capitol’s lights and almost all of its garish neon weren’t lit. “The forcefield’s gone,” he said first, throwing a hunk of snow over the ledge so that she could see it didn’t get flung back at them. “Guess they have better uses for what electricity they have here in the city right now than maintaining it.”

“Or they finally don’t give a fuck if we throw ourselves off the roof,” she said with a snort, and didn’t that just tell him that her thoughts were running darkly as his right now?

He looked at her carefully a minute, weighing it, and decided to simply go for broke. They’d never really minced words with one another. “Coin’s a problem. A big one.” She didn’t have a smart comeback, obviously just listening to him.

“When Boggs pulled me out of camp after Gale,” he tried to not hesitate on the name and the pang of guilt it still caused, “got there, he told me the whole setup of our squad, us being all together like that, was Coin’s doing, and she meant it to cause problems. Also to maybe give a good chance to get us all wiped out in one fell swoop by having us together when everything was all fucked up in the middle of a combat situation, because once Katniss pulled all the districts together to make one last push against the Capitol, we sort of became unnecessary. And as victors, with the influence we have, we’re a potential threat to her taking over power.”

“By not hurrying to say she’d the logical choice to take over after Snow,” she said flatly, and he was relieved to see she was following along easily like that. She shook her head and laughed, a sound fraught with bitterness. “Moving to take out rivals--taking a page from Snow right there. You told me that years ago, didn’t you? Take one asshole in power out and unless you make sure the person stepping in isn’t just as bad, it’s not a fucking victory.”

“It’s worse than that, I think,” he said, because obviously she wasn’t in a great mood right now either and adding to it wasn’t making him happy, but he ought to be honest by this point. He needed her thoughts anyway, needed to run his suspicions by someone he trusted to not tell on him and to be honest if she thought he was only being crazy and paranoid. “It’s not only threats. It’s...I think she’s ruthless as he is. We saw what happened with that night in Sokato.”

“Oh, that little announcement where she pretty much told Capitol folks to shut up and take whatever happened to them because they’d get shot if they resisted? Yeah, I noticed she didn’t take the chance to tell her own soldiers to behave.”

“There’s that. There’s Prim Everdeen. A fourteen-year-old girl sent into a heavy combat zone, against the usual rules about age. All I can come up with is leverage,” he said simply. Johanna of all people would understand that, what an emotional toll it took to have a leader kill family members. Snow had done it to both of them to enforce his will, to prove how powerless they were against it.

“That bitch. That fucking bitch.”

“There’s the footage I was looking at today. A camera crew with one of the squads caught us trying to rescue those kids and once Thirteen’s forces identified us, it went all over the newscasts. We’re more popular with the public than ever, by the way, all four of us. Stepping away from the fight to try to save the lives of innocent children and all of that. Probably the only reason Coin hasn't been able to go after us for desertion.” He would have laughed at the irony of it if the thoughts he’d already had hadn’t been far more pressing.

“Bet that really frosts her ass, doesn’t it? But what about the footage? You see something there?”

“What did you get about the bombers when we were there on the scene?”

She stood there, arms folded over her chest, head half-bowed as she remembered it. “I’m pretty sure it was Capitol clothes, Capitol accents,” she said finally. “It all happened so fast, but it had to have been Capitol people. They got in close because the Peacekeepers figured they were there to throw the kids some blankets or food or something. If they’d have been rebels they’d have been shot on sight.”

“Exactly. And that’s what I saw on that tape too: a half-dozen Capitol citizens throwing bombs into a crowd of their own kids. That’s what they’re saying it is too, and that Snow’s such a monster, to kill them so callously.” He leaned in closer, voice instinctively going to something barely above a whisper, because after so many years, the need for discretion was beaten into him too hard to so easily shake off. “But why would he kill them like that, Jo? Snow’s a bastard, but he’s clever. He’s not psychotic. He already had those kids there as his last shield against the rebels.” Snow killed without guilt, that was a given, but Haymitch was fairly sure he always had some reason, no matter how cruel or warped, behind it. After watching that tape, he’d racked his brains trying to find the angle that explained it, and time and again he ran into a brick wall. There was no way he could make sense of it. No reason for Snow to kill off his final defense. Not unless he had finally flipped out at the very end and lost his mind, and Haymitch very much doubted it.

She looked up and her eyes were wide and dark in the moonlight, and he could see from the horror and fury in her expression that she understood. “Oh, shit,” she said. “The Thirteen squad with a camera crew was very conveniently there to get it all on tape, wasn’t it?” He nodded. “And we four, well, we definitely proved how easy it is to dress up Capitol and mimic the accent and get right up to the mansion.”

“She killed children. Burned them alive, for a propo to finish discrediting Snow.” Funny that Jo had brought up what he’d said to her years ago, when she’d been furious and desperate and mouthing off about wanting to kill Snow. The same hallmarks were there in Coin as in Snow: the manipulation, the greed for power, the ruthlessness at the cost of lives, the elimination of rivals. He’d spent the afternoon being afraid that they’d taken out one monster and the next one was already living in the Presidential Mansion. To have fought this hard, taken so many losses along the way, and possibly to no fucking point, was almost unbearable to consider.

“Outstanding. So we’ve got a new Snow, one with tits rather than a cock. She even thinks she owns peoples’ bodies too, you know.”

“Wait, what? She was whoring people out like Snow did?” That was news to him, and he had to admit it caught him aback, another piece of the horror that he hadn’t known about. He wondered how she knew and was almost afraid to ask because what could Coin have done to her?

“No, no,” Johanna said, waving a gloved hand. “She doesn’t whore them out for fucking, Haymitch. She forces breeding, in the people that can have kids. To boost Thirteen’s population whether people like it or not. They told me in the hospital that when they tested my blood for what drugs were in it so they knew what they could treat me with for the burns, they found a fertility booster. Where I was supposed to have that contraceptive injection.” After that desperate, clumsy first time when they’d been too caught up in things to think about that practical reality, he’d asked her if she’d had a shot, and she’d assured him she had it covered.

Immediately he remembered being in the hospital in Thirteen, that weird and even creepy feeling he had about how quick they were to focus on his ability to father children, never mind his emotional and physical state after being tortured like that. He remembered talking it over with Johanna, how she’d been unsettled by it too. Apparently it hadn’t just been idle paranoia on their parts. The thought of it--hell yes, it was as bad as Snow. But he was focused more on Johanna right now and how personal the thing hit, how close to home. “Jo...”

“Don’t worry about it, there isn’t any baby to cause any issues,” she said with an impatient shrug. But he knew her well enough to read some of her tells by now. Beneath her fury at being used again, of her body being seen as someone else’s property, there was something else. From the way she didn’t quite look at him, and the tension of her shoulders underneath her coat, he was forced to wonder. Maybe the word choice was deliberate on her part.

Some part of him didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know because he didn’t think he could bear it, but he did anyway. If she had to withstand it, he should share the burden. “There isn’t right at this moment,” he said, at first delicately trying to pick his words and then giving up because he couldn’t focus on that with his mind reeling at the possibility like this, “but...there was?”

She didn’t answer him. Not in words, anyway. But that told him everything. How he could suddenly feel unbearably pulled in so many different directions emotionally; he felt like it was going to tear him into pieces. The anger, the grief, the guilt, all of it.

Coin had used him to make another little Thirteen citizen for her. Trying to come back from the damage done by eighteen years of his body being used by one president, he’d been unknowingly used all the while by another one. Those nights that had meant so much to him now were tainted in a way. “I am going to fucking well destroy her,” he said between his teeth, fists clenched, and he wanted to hit something, wanted to have Coin right there in front of him so he could kill her, and he’d gladly be executed for it at this point if only he sent her screaming to hell first.

But on the heels of that was the realization that he would have been a father next summer. He’d have had a family. After so many years, he would have had something he’d told himself early on he shouldn’t have for everyone’s safety, and then eventually he knew he shouldn’t have it because of what he’d become, drunk and cynical and damaged. There was no way he ought to be trusted to raise a kid, the same way he knew he shouldn’t ask any woman to take him on as a husband. But that didn’t mean he stopped wanting it sometimes anyway, in the unbearable loneliness of some dark nights in Twelve knowing he was the only living soul in Victors' Village, that someday he’d die alone there and nobody would really give a fuck. A drunk failure finally dead, that was all he’d be. The sudden knowledge that he could have had more than that and have lost it all again in an instant touched that hunger in him and left the wound of it in its wake. He hadn’t expected a kid, knew there was no way it was an ideal time and he wasn’t the ideal man to begin, and oh yes, he was pissed off at how it had happened, but...still.

Johanna was hurting too, he could see that clearly. Guilt, being his constant companion, quickly took the forefront of things. He’d tried to comfort her, help her, and instead, he’d only helped cause her pain. The dread that had been lurking in his mind that he’d only fail her in the end, ever since he gave in to what he desperately wanted and started to let himself be stupid enough to get involved, now seemed entirely justified. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ha--”

She turned to him and snarled, “Like this is your fault. Like you kept trying to apologize for agreeing to fuck me when I was getting put on the circuit. Coin did this to us both, you stupid bastard. If you ever do me wrong, Haymitch, I will fucking well let you know it.”

“All right,” he said, taken aback by her vehemence but recognizing that upset as she was, it was better to let her get it out. She was entitled.

She let out a soft sound of irritation and said,“Might as well know now, I’m not gonna be in a mood for it later. So what’s your plan after the war? Go home to Twelve, get busy drinking yourself stupid again, and be pathetically grateful whenever Katniss and Peeta aren’t too busy having a life with each other to make enough time to invite you over for dinner or ask you to babysit the cute little kids they’re gonna have?”

Apparently her temper was making her lash out again and while he was used to it, that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt anyway. Especially the momentary thought of Peeta and Katniss with kids, given what she’d just told him. Keeping his voice level took some effort as he said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” He might as well be honest with himself and with her. Left alone with nothing but his thoughts and passing whatever years he had left, he'd inevitably be drinking again.

“Wow, sounds really great,” she said mockingly. “Everything you probably ever dreamed about.”

“Have you got anything better to suggest?” he snapped.

“I don’t know, maybe actually having a life of your own?”

She was taunting him, that was all. “Oh, that’s brilliant. Twelve’s a wonderful place for people to move to, especially right now.” It was one thing for himself and Katniss and Peeta. It was their home and of course they’d want to help rebuild it. Getting someone not from there to deal with the aftermath was a different story. “Besides, I’ve got no right to ask you--”

“Fuck that, if I said you’ve got the right, would you even ask?” She was calm now, almost too calm. “Or do I get the usual little speech of ‘You’re my friend, Johanna, but that’s all’? I’ve gotten it plenty, I can handle it one more time. If that’s the case let’s cut the bullshit. We’re grown-ups. We’ve been through worse. We can handle the truth, right?”

The irritated, panicked feeling of being cornered faded in the face of her settling down. Maybe it really was better that they simply make things clear, and he could let go of the uncertainty. But her saying, If I said you’ve got the right wanted to give him an idiotic sense of hope anyway. At least he would know for certain and that was a good thing. “I love you, yes.” He almost wanted to close his eyes as he committed himself to that, waiting for it to lead to pain in some way. He hadn’t said it to anyone since Briar and how he'd loved her with a whole, uncomplicated, naive first love, hadn’t dared to let himself feel it or believe it for anyone since. But he would be honest, even if she told him he wasn't enough, and if she did, he wouldn't blame her. If this ended up hurting at least it was a clean hurt, one that would heal eventually in a way not knowing couldn't. “But you ought to have someone better.” Simple, matter-of-fact.

She looked at him, head cocked slightly aside. Not laughing at him yet. “Better how?”

“I’ll never be all right, not really.” The nightmares, the damage, the scars on his soul--they might lessen and fade, perhaps, but the dark and the missing parts of him would always be there in some way. He’d never be entirely whole again.

“You actually think I will, idiot? I’m pretty sure most of the same stuff you went through got put on me too. You were there for most of it in my case.”

“I’m fifteen years older than you. That’s pretty likely to make you an early widow.” She’d already lost enough in her life without facing another loss before her time. He had no idea how long he might live. Nobody in his family that he could remember lived out a full lifespan. The new liver probably bought him more time, sure, but he didn’t know whether he was naturally due to die at forty-five or ninety-five. Chances were, though, he would go a good bit before her--it was grim but simple math.

“And I could get hit by a train next month,” she pointed out. “If it’s one year or forty, it’s gonna be better for that time than I’d be if I was alone again. So it’s worth it.” Put like that, not much argument he could make. If he knew he’d only have five years with her he’d still take it in a heartbeat. It would be five good years that he’d have been drunk and miserable. She moved towards him, gripped the lapels of his coat in her gloved hands. “Even when I’m being a complete bitch, you’re tough enough to be a complete asshole right back. You know me, and you’re still here for me and you give a shit. So no, there’s no ‘better’ for me. Someone who hasn't been through all of it? He doesn't know me, not really.”

Likewise, she knew him, knew from experience exactly what had shaped him. She’d seen him at his worst and darkest and lowest. Lately she’d seen his vulnerabilities up close and tried to help him through rather than taking the chance to wound him with it. If he could actually make it with anyone in life, it would be her, because she’d stood by him so far through all of this, already helped make him better than he had been alone. He couldn't bear to simply shut up and watch her walk away only because he didn't say something. “Well, come spring we definitely could use someone in Twelve who knows how to cut lumber and build houses. You’re really crazy enough to come live there?”

“So maybe I love you too.”

He couldn’t help but smile at hearing that, feeling the warmth and the promise in it, how it suddenly changed everything in his perception. Sliding his arms around her, he pulled her in closer. “Just remember who said it first, huh?”

“I’m never hearing the end of that, am I?”

“Oh, hell no. I’m going to treasure any instance of getting one over you.” Given that they’d pretty much definitively said this was it, that the doubt wasn’t in the rightness of each other but in themselves, he didn’t see a point in waiting. Out in the districts they’d never made a massive game out of courtship like the Capitol did, waiting to test over and over if someone was really their "true love" before taking the plunge, waiting for some supposed perfect moment to propose, all overblown idealized romance. Life was short enough, they both knew that better than most, and with the confidence she seemed to have in him, he wanted something that made it real and certain for them. “Marry me?”

“Yes. But only if it’s not some big public thing for people to gawk at. Fuck ‘em.” He couldn’t help but laugh at that, though it wasn’t much of a heartfelt laugh, more like armor against everything that still seemed overwhelming and unbearable. “You smell like strawberries. Do you not know how to work those showers or what?” she murmured into his ear.

“I gave up trying to learn years ago.” All those fucking selection screens--he’d learned which one was for rose-scented soap so he could avoid it and that was it. He’d tended to randomly punch buttons and then laugh about it with Chaff and the others if he ended up smelling really ridiculous. Though after a certain point in his mentoring career he always ended up smelling sharply of alcohol pretty shortly after his showers, so nobody really noticed.

“Fine, I’ll show you. It’s not like we’re all that busy. Got Snow to see executed, another president to take down, a wedding to plan behind Plutarch’s back...”

“We could use a good dinner before all that plotting. I’m starving.”

“Are you asking me to go have dinner with you after you already proposed to me?”

“Apparently. But hey, you did agree to marry me. So I owe you a pork chop, don’t I?” She did laugh at that, holding him even tighter as she did so, and there was a tremor in it that told him that she too was joking and laughing rather than giving in and crying. The edge between the two tonight seemed pretty fragile. There was too much pain around things, all the ordeals they’d been through recently and had to deal with still, the prospect of now having to take down Coin too, and most of all, the baby that they hadn’t expected but they’d never get to know. He was pretty sure after this they couldn’t even talk about their thoughts on having kids, not for a while.

But now there could at least be some of the sweet taken alongside all the bitter. Open joy was something that was too far out of reach, but faith that his future could be better was there. Taffeta was right. Today wasn’t pretty by any means, but being able to solidly believe in the reality of something brighter up ahead rather than just wishing for it, made all the difference. With faith, the possibility of hope actually didn’t seem pointless. Whatever happened, they would deal with it together. He wouldn’t be left alone to face the darkness.

He really was hungry, and he needed to put some more of that damn burn ointment on, and the winter night was breezy and bitterly cold to boot and they’d be shivering from it soon. But standing there holding her, he didn’t ever want to let go.

Chapter Text

Haymitch woke up the next morning with Johanna asleep next to him, and over breakfast, found he kept looking over at her and wondering if he’d dreamed it all. It seemed like a delusion anyway, something caused by the tracker jacker venom. If he could be seeing ghosts still, he could imagine something as nuts as Johanna actually agreeing to marry him in a moment of reckless indulgence of pure fantasy.

But if it was a delusion, and it came with the news that Coin was an imminent threat to address, and that they’d lost a child besides, that was really a new level of punishing himself. Still, trying to believe that it had happened, and that it could actually last, was an idea he could approach only warily. She’d come to her senses soon enough, right? Maybe she even did love him, but that didn’t mean it was a good idea.

Such a kick in the ass to be already waiting for it to turn bad for him, but he hadn’t had anything in his life for so long that hadn’t been destroyed or stolen away. Trying to believe in something good that could last was an act of pure faith that was a struggle right now.

Sipping her coffee, she eyed him over the rim of the mug, brown eyes narrowing. “No, Haymitch, I’m not having second thoughts,” she said with a half-shrug. “You and me, we’re better off already than we were alone, and probably we’re gonna keep being better off together than if we call it quits. So stop looking at me like you’re waiting for the axe to fall.”

As romantic declarations went that wasn’t going to rank high in the hearts and flowers department. He was grateful for that. Bone-deep practicality about the situation was something he could much more easily accept than sheer sentimentality. “Or are you backing out yourself?” she asked, quieter, and only the subtle changes in her that he was learning to read, the hint of tension in her body and her tone, told him that she was at least a little bit afraid he would.

He shook his head, answering her honesty with his own. “No. I’m just trying to not start dwelling on all the ways it could go wrong.” All the ways he could fail and fuck it up, all the ways he could do it right and fate would still screw him and he’d lose her. But she’d been right last night, demanding to know what he planned to do after the war. He could fail her and he could lose her. But if he simply let her go, he’d go back to Twelve and pretty much just wait for his life to be over, while away his twilight years and regret some things not done. Somehow he had the thought that she’d be lonely in Seven too, as isolated as he’d been for all those years, and that was a bitter realization. “One day at a time, eh?” he offered carefully, and she nodded. Apparently they both still needed time to get used to the idea, but that was OK.

At least there was something to focus on this morning, aside from the problem of Coin. With Snow, his cabinet, and the top Gamemakers ready to stand in the prisoners’ dock as the senior officials of the Capitol, the newscasts were already calling it “the trial of the century”. Considering there had been nothing to match it since the so-called “trial” and mass execution of some thirty-odd rebel ringleaders in the Capitol seventy-six years earlier for treason, Haymitch could well imagine this was making history in its own way.

They ran a special on those ringleaders from what was now being called the First Panem Rebellion, rather than the Capitol name of the Dark Days, while he and Johanna were finishing eating. It was pretty standard fare, breathlessly outlining the cruelty of the Capitol now in melodramatic tones set to whip up the people given the opportunity now to punish Capitol leaders in turn. He couldn’t help a wry laugh when they mentioned one of the ringleaders from Twelve, and a picture of a middle-aged man, blond with a full beard and mustache and a kindly face, came on screen. Pavel Donner. Maysilee’s kin, of course. That mockingjay pin, the subtle hints of things below the surface he’d gotten from Maysilee and then later from Madge. It made plenty of sense there.

Though the next name from Twelve did make him sit up and take notice. Ravenna Dearborn. Silvery grey eyes, curly coal-black Seam hair framing the bones of her face, where he saw familiar echoes to the face he saw in the mirror. He knew from his ma’s stories that Grandpa Tad had been orphaned as a kid and then grew up in the community home, which pretty much doomed him to a life as being among the poorest of the poor in the Seam. That fate was hard to escape for a family, had continued down the generations to his daughter Magnolia, and then to Haymitch himself.

He didn’t know much about the Abernathy side of things. Maybe they had all been about as useless as Blair himself, a mean-tempered wife-beating drunk. Though Blair had grown up orphaned himself, according to his ma, so that probably hadn’t helped things for him. But he’d grown up listening to from his ma telling him about the Dearborns, her own kin, at least what bits she knew.

He wondered suddenly if Snow had known that he, and Maysilee for that matter, had that dangerous heritage in them. Had he looked a clever, defiant sixteen-year-old boy fresh from the arena and found the ties to a woman executed fifty years before, feared the potential of stories whispered, secret family histories kept alive, to inspire Haymitch towards deliberately making a fool of the Capitol and the Games? Snow needn’t have worried about all that. Haymitch had always assumed his great-grandparents died of disease or the mines or starvation or pure wearing out, like so many did in Twelve. Maybe Great-Grandpa Haymitch, whom he’d been named for, had fallen to that fate, or perhaps he’d died in the rebellion itself like so many did. Nobody mentioned otherwise to him growing up, but then, it was dangerous to talk about the Dark Days out in the districts, at least openly. No sense whipping up anger and resentment over it when there was no hope for anything to change. Acknowledging openly that there had been a notorious rebel in the family could have been stupid and extremely risky. The Donners sure as hell hadn’t done it either, no matter what they might have told Maysilee in private.

“Looks like rebellion’s in the blood with me,” he told Johanna, nodding towards the television. “That’s my ma’s grandma there. Ravenna.”

Johanna looked, and he heard her soft chuckle. “So great, you come by being a troublemaking pain in the ass honestly,” she said, nudging him with her shoulder. “But yeah, I see the resemblance.”

Staring at the face of Ravenna, he couldn’t help but smile a little. He knew how she’d died, jeered and tormented at a Capitol traitor’s hanging. He’d come within hours of that fate himself, been ready to accept it. But he knew what she’d lived for too, what she’d fought for so desperately. There was a certain sense of satisfaction, of justice, in knowing that he’d managed to carry off the task that Ravenna had died trying to accomplish. Looks like you finally get your day here too.

Getting dressed then, Jo fishing up some of her clothes from down in the Seven apartment while he raided his own closet here, he stared at himself in the mirror, not used to clothing this nice after the last months in Thirteen and the like. His suit still hung a little bit loose but beneath a winter coat it didn’t much matter. They headed to the Hall of Justice where the trial was due to be held. They’d already been informed they’d be required to testify. He was of mixed feelings about that. Finally being able to air all of the crimes, the dirty deeds, brought a sense of satisfaction, even vindication. But he couldn’t quite escape the feeling of shame. Growing up Seam, airing dirty laundry for everyone to see wasn’t considered smart or admirable by any means.

It was the media circus he had expected, camera crews there already, trying to get an interview or the like, yelling questions about the war, about Snow, about the prostitution circuit, and about Katniss and Peeta. Of course, one even called out, “So, Johanna, did you and Haymitch follow up on your arena romance?”

“Let’s get in there before I end up punching someone,” Johanna muttered to him through clenched teeth. At least with the early December cold, pretty much everyone was in a rush to get inside the building. That, and to judge from the crowd, to find seating.

As witnesses, they apparently didn’t have that issue, with seats already reserved in the conference hall where the trial was taking place. Meeting up with Finnick and Annie in the lobby, he noticed that Finnick’s wounds were already starting to look a little better. That, and his hair was back to its normal color. Well, pretty close to it.

Finnick noticed them looking at his hair and grinned, and though the lines of it creased his face differently now, Haymitch still saw the same old Finnick in the expression. “The color is called ‘Odair Bronze’, you know.” Of course it was, being taken from the distinctive shade of the original like that. Haymitch remembered that for several years after Finnick’s Games, plenty of fake bronze hair and fake tans had been very popular among the Capitol people.

“Think it’s a little bit too orange,” Johanna told him with a smirk. “Sure you don’t want to go with the shaved look? Haymitch and me, we both recommend it.” She ruffled her fingers through her short hair.

“It’s better than the purple,” Annie said with a shrug and a smile, “and once we get back to Four and he gets some sun on it, that’ll help fade the orange anyway.” She sounded wistful for home, and Haymitch couldn’t blame her. At least Four was somewhere to go to as home. He couldn’t get the images of the bodies rotting in the summer sun from Twelve out of his head. They’d be snowed over by now, just waiting for the spring thaw to produce the horror all over again.

“Sorry for the purple,” Haymitch told him, needing the distraction of that from his dark thoughts. Since Finnick hadn’t needed the hair dye job after all, hadn’t had Peacekeepers come anywhere near Taffeta’s apartment.

“No apologies,” Finnick said, waving a hand. “I’ve had to endure worse looks.”

“Like a tiny little bit of golden fishing net barely covering nothing?” Johanna said archly.

“Well, it’s certainly not nothing,” Finnick said with a mock aghast look. Just then a smartly-uniformed Thirteen soldier came to escort them to their seats. Which, given the crush of people in the hall, turned out to be a good thing.

Surveying the table for the War Crimes Council, he saw Coin wasn’t there. Smart play by her there. To be the director in the judgment of her predecessor would have tainted her ascent to the presidency, made it look as grabby and greedy as it actually was. Instead, he didn’t recognize the woman taking the central chair. Probably in her mid-thirties, near-black hair that reminded him of Ash’s, and an air of command. “Any of you know her?” he asked, seeing she wasn’t wearing a grey Thirteen uniform like several others on the Council.

“That’s Brocade Paylor,” Annie supplied, leaning over and talking quietly. “She was the commander of rebel forces in Eight.” Yeah, everything that went down in Eight, that hospital bombing he’d seen in Beetee’s clips during the battle for the control of the feed the night he forced Snow’s hand on television, was while he was still busy with his stay in the Detention Center. He nodded his thanks to Annie, and then turned his head to survey the prisoners.

They were dressed neatly, in their own clothes rather than prison uniforms, and none of them looked to be in pain from torture. Apparently they’d been treated kinder than Capitol prisoners had been, and he was living proof of that. His eyes surveyed them. The politicians were there. Solonius Trove, Taffeta’s ultimate purchaser. Gloriana Frill, his own first buyer. Thalius Eland, the first man to fuck him and the first person to make sex an exercise in pain. His gaze swept through them all, the ones who looked pissed and the ones who looked arrogant and the ones who looked terrified. He couldn’t help the satisfaction of seeing them brought low, made to answer for years of privilege and cruelty and abuse.

Finally at the end of the row, Snow’s eyes met his as if he’d been looking directly at him, waiting. Haymitch simply smiled at him, a confident smirk of victory, because three months ago Haymitch had been the one facing the rope, and what could the man do to him now? Now he was the one facing death, the one whose fate was solely in the hands of others.

Finally, Paylor called things to order and Truesdale Lodestone, the lawyer defending Snow and his cronies said immediately and irritably, flapping a hand towards Haymitch and the others, “I object to these witnesses being present in the courtroom listening to the others. It’s prejudicial to their own testimony.”

“They’re his victims, so they have a right to be here to support each other and to face the people who did them harm,” the prosecutor snapped; Ardelia Kincaid, a sharp-faced woman in well-tailored Thirteen grey.

Paylor, for a wonder, didn’t lose her cool in the face of what was obviously going to be a massive damn headache in terms of proceedings. “They have a right to be here,” she agreed. “But keep in mind if I hear anything about any testimony being rehearsed or agreed upon beforehand, or if I start to hear things that sound suspicious from any witness, it’s gonna get challenged and possibly thrown out.” Haymitch admitted to be a bit impressed. She was actually going to try to play fair here.

“There’s plenty of documentation out there to help back their words, they hardly need to lie,” Kincaid remarked dryly.

“Ob--” Now Paylor made an impatient gesture of move on.

The Council was charged with considering the specific indictments of crimes against the people of Panem. First, enacting the slaughter of children by planning or enabling the Hunger Games. Second, enacting the attempted genocide of District Twelve by firebombing it without chance to surrender or evacuate. Third, the enslavement of the victors of the Hunger Games by forcing them to participate as mentors in the Games and as performers for the Capitol. Fourth, the use of rape, sexual slavery, and obligating childbearing among victors of the Games. Fifth, the use of torture by Peacekeepers out in the districts and in the Detention Center. Sixth, using the Hunger Games and the threat of starvation or obliteration as a method of controlling dissent. Seven, systematically murdering any perceived potential threats, or their families--that one had to be directed specifically at Snow.

The first witness was called, and he paid careful attention to the proceedings, wanting to hear the stories of others, and already trying to think how this might work when it came time for Cinna and Effie. Maybe by then they’d have their pound of flesh with bigger targets like these, and they’d be less eager for blood. If they convicted the actual Gamemakers, would they need to be so harsh on a stylist and an escort?

“He should be in here with us,” one of the junior Gamemakers suddenly yelled furiously while Plutarch himself was testifying, her face flushed red with rage. “You planned almost the entire arena this year, you bastard!”

“Did a bang-up job of it too,” Johanna said in an angry undertone.

Plutarch’s immunity was quickly brought up, though the point had been made that his hands weren’t entirely clean of the matter. He may have been a rebel, but he’d played his cover as Head Gamemaker to the hilt and people had died for it. Haymitch could see where Plutarch had had to play his role, same as the rest of them had for years, but it didn’t mean he had to like it, remembering those that paid the cost.

He was called to the stand late in the morning, the first of the victors to testify. Annie was the one who said quietly to him as he stood up to take the stand, “They’re the ones who need to fear the truth, Haymitch. Not you. Just keep that in mind.” Apparently his role as the brains behind this thing accorded him pride of place, or maybe it was how much Snow had taken from him. Giving his name and age, he agreed that yes, he was a native of District Twelve, as well as the victor of the 50th Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell, at the age of sixteen.

“Can you describe what happened after your return to your district?” Kincaid asked.

You mean the nightmares or what? But he knew what she was asking, and somehow, even knowing Snow was toothless now in terms of harming him, the secrecy of twenty-five years in fear of whatever consequences the old man would choose made the words stick in his throat. Or perhaps it was also the notion of finally being able to talk about them openly after so long. He found himself glancing out towards Johanna, instead of towards Snow, because she must know how he was feeling right then, facing this same ordeal herself. She was looking steadily back at him. Taking in a deep breath, he said, “Eleven days after I got back, my old house burned down with my mother, my younger brother, and my girlfriend all still inside. None of them made it out alive. On my Victory Tour several months later, President Snow told me that their deaths were intended as a lesson to me after I made the Capitol look stupid with my use of the forcefield in the arena, and I’d better keep quiet about it or there would be further consequences.”

“Prosecution would like to enter Exhibit 12, the untampered Games footage of--”

“Objection, Commander Paylor, that conversation is hearsay, purely between my client and Mister Abernathy--”

“He was there and he’s allowed to testify to the conversation, and Mister Snow,” a faint murmur went through the crowd at Paylor addressing him like that, “is welcome to counter with his own version of events when he takes the stand, so move it along, Mister Lodestone.” The footage was introduced and played. He didn’t bother watching it. He’d seen it enough already.

“Can you give me their names, Mister Abernathy?” Kincaid prompted him. As if anticipating another explosion from Snow’s lawyer she explained, “It’s needed for the record, if Coriolanus Snow is going to be charged with ordering these specific deaths.”

“Magnolia Abernathy, Ashford Abernathy, and Briar Wainwright.” To finally have that on record, their names and that Snow had been the one to cause their deaths, was something at least.

“Thank you. May it please the Council to accept Prosecution Exhibit 13, a sworn affidavit from former Peacekeeper Deirdre Law, reporting a conversation with Phineas Fog, at the time the Head Peacekeeper of District Twelve, wherein Fog relayed the order from President Snow to, and I quote, ‘make an example of what happens to traitors since we can’t kill the boy himself’ of the aforementioned three people. Fog apparently expressed particular misgivings about the need for executing Ashford Abernathy on account of his youth, but Ms. Law reports that the orders were later carried out by Fog and two others and that contrary to usual procedure, it was never entered into the official duty log.”

It was all so clinical, so very dry. But in a way he was glad they didn’t ask him to describe that day in detail. He wasn’t sure he could handle it. Soon enough they got into far worse territory, when the topic of his being put on the circuit came up. “Are you one of those victors whom Mister Snow forced into a role of sexual slavery, Mister Abernathy?”

He didn’t risk another glance at Johanna. He knew she was watching, though below the edge of the witness box, he was tightly clasping his hands together to try to keep them from shaking. To talk about it like this, to answer so dryly about something like this, and in front of those who’d been the ones who did it to him, was no easy thing. Neither was knowing this was being broadcast live all over Panem. But Finnick had been the first to open up, to say that the shame belonged to the people that bought them. He’d been gutsy enough to start this thing rolling. Haymitch wouldn’t be the one to stop it. “Yes. From the time I was seventeen at the 51st Games through the 69th when I was thirty-five and the demand finally stopped.” Going through it, telling how Snow had threatened the Donners and the Wainwrights and Twelve in general, he tried to keep calm as he could about it, though it wasn’t easy by any means. Ironically, it was the very whoring they were discussing that meant he’d had a hell of a lot of practice at keeping a poker face and not letting fear or revulsion show.

“Can you identify any of the defendants as those that raped you?”

“Objection, ‘rape’ implies the use of force, and the defendant testified he consented--”

“Oh, bullshit,” he snapped, unable to help it now, impatient with the rules of the court, and beyond pissed off that this fat blue-haired shit was implying he’d done all of it willingly. “You think just because I wasn’t always tied or held down--and sometimes I was--there was no force involved? I was threatened into it. That was our payment as his whores, he told me, the continued safety of those we didn’t want to see harmed. Not a one of us wanted to get flogged, or fucked bloody, or screw men if we liked women or women if we liked men, or act out some idiotic fantasy, but we damn well did it anyway because we knew we were keeping people alive by it.”

“Use of threats or force and a lack of freely given consent defines the crime of rape under the Code of Conduct,” Kincaid jumped in quickly. “Shall I pull up the specific citation for the Council and Mister Lodestone, or are we all agreed on that point?”

“Uh...” Lodestone said, looking pissed off.

With that he turned to the defendant’s bench and looked it over again, focusing on the question and trying hard to recover some equilibrium after that outburst. “It’d be easier to pick out the ones that I didn’t have to have sex with,” he said dryly, and a nervous laugh ran through the courtroom at that.

“Keep it to the question you were asked, Mister Abernathy,” Paylor chided him, and he accepted the admonishment with a nod. Too many years of being encouraged to grandstand and make snarky remarks were hard to overcome here.

He identified them by name, looking at all of them in turn, daring them to cross him now, trying to not remember what they’d been like in bed, but being forced to admit to some of the details when Kincaid asked him about it. Gloriana Frill actually looked hurt, as if he’d rejected and insulted her unfairly, and he wanted to start shouting at her for that. Snow, when he glanced that way again, simply had that usual impassive expression, biding his time and taking it all in.

“In support of Mister Abernathy’s testimony, I’ll offer two more exhibits. His medical file as maintained by Doctor Lucius Sixleigh detailing treatment of wounds and injuries received during the period in question, and his appointment book kept by Ms. Yelena Farthingale at the Office of Victor Affairs at the same time detailing the names and dates of instances where Capitol citizens engaged in his sexual exploitation.” He really hoped some people, hearing the name Victor Affairs, appreciated the stark irony of it. He also wondered what they intended to do with the names in that book that weren’t among the defendants sitting right there, because there were plenty of them.

It surprised him a little that Snow had left such a record of things, but when he thought about it further, it wasn’t that shocking. The man was so methodical, so precisely controlling of details. He couldn’t have climbed as high as he had and kept such absolute power for so long by leaving anything to chance or misunderstanding or the discretion of his underlings. He’d kept records of everything, being so blind as believe he would never be taken down and that therefore the thorough paper trail couldn’t be used to fuck him in the end.

“What was it like, Mister Abernathy?”

“What?” He stared at her.

What was it like? It was having Snow want to know if you were still a virgin so he could get more money for you. It was having him tell you what was going to happen and almost wishing he would be an ordinary monster and actually enjoy the idea of you getting raped rather than just being cold about it. It was an exam every summer to make sure you were still fit to fuck and shots to keep you safely sterile. Drugs at times too for us men to keep us hard for hours, sometimes for days, until being touched actually hurt enough that you wanted to scream, and I know the women got plenty sore too at that kind of party. It was showers and crying at first to cope. It was alcohol later for me and some others, drugs for other people, mindless sex or giving in to insanity for some. You come to wish they’d held you down every damn time, that they’d beat you senseless first and then fucked you till you bled. To submit without fighting when you knew you could get away, to get to a point where you’re actually performing on their whims, how do you think it was like? It was letting them take your soul bit by bit until there’s nothing left of you but their pet and you want to die but you can’t kill yourself because then others will suffer because of it.

Kincaid filled the silence. “That is, would you say that the ordeal of enduring eighteen years forced into prostitution has caused you significant physical and mental harm?”

He wanted to laugh at those words, so shorn of anything real and human. Instead he smiled bleakly. “Yes. I would say that’s true.”

“May I remind the Council that ‘deliberate infliction of significant mental or physical harm’ also meets the definition of torture as established by...”

Considering he had the dubious honor of being involved in some way with suffering from the terms of most every indictment they had, from the circuit to the Games to bombing Twelve to torture, Kincaid had plenty to ask him, and the hours dragged on as he carefully answered the questions. Lodestone got more sullenly silent as the day went on, probably sensing his case was screwed, at least when it came to Haymitch.

Haymitch recognized he was getting tired himself from recounting details of long-withheld horrors, trying to keep it clean and clinical when he really wanted the defense of his sarcasm or his anger, but whenever he tried to use it, Paylor was right there to swat him for it just like anyone else, telling him to keep in line. He finally understood the game here: he had to be angry at what was done to him because appearing too calm would make it look like it hadn’t mattered, but not so angry he started running his mouth like he really wanted to do.

He could see the dramatics to this, the sense of pageantry, but it was much subtler than the Games, and the stage of a legal trial and its expectations were unfamiliar. If he was going to take some role in Cinna and Effie’s defense, he’d have to learn a whole new set of rules here. Just reading the law books wasn’t enough, he’d have to learn how to act properly when it came to a legal case and how to pick his moments, like he’d had to learn how to act for the cameras around the Games, or he’d be getting smacked down hard and fast to the point they wouldn’t bother taking him seriously. The thought of it was sort of a defeating prospect.

He was also willing with all his might that the ghosts that raged in his head wouldn’t appear at the invitation of discussing what had killed them and how they’d suffered, and thereby make him freak out on countrywide television, not to mention look bad in front of the Council. There might be documentation to back his words up, sure, but a publicly half-crazy witness wasn’t going to look too impressive anyway.

After Kincaid finished, Lodestone started his own questions and fixated on him being a liar. “So what you’re saying, Mister Abernathy, is that you routinely engaged in falsehoods and lies?”

“I did what I had to do,” he said flatly. “What was demanded of me to please sponsors for the Games in order to keep a tribute alive, or patrons in order to satisfy them.”

“Lying to keep tributes alive? You seem to have had little success there--” Yeah, and all of Panem knew that, didn’t they? He saw the deliberate prod to try to get him to lose his temper, and he was about ready to do it anyway because he’d found out with Gale, he was sick and tired of being beaten down with that.

“Objection!” Kincaid snapped, popping to her feet.

“Quit provoking him, Mister Lodestone,” Paylor said, “and get back to your question.”

“The only two tributes you successfully mentored as victors were Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, is that correct?”

“Correct.” Pretty obvious fact there, but he couldn’t help biting off the word in irritation anyway.

“What lies did you engage in regarding them?”

“Ob--”

“The people of Panem deserve to know about the character of the witness and whether he’s reliable to be truthful in his--”

“The evidence says he has been--”

“He’s a confessed liar!”

“I lied about being Katniss’ father,” he said, interrupting the two of them bellowing at each other and Paylor looking like she’d like to smack both their skulls together. “Her parents really are Burdock and Perulla Everdeen. That was a deliberate last-minute attempt to throw things over the top and get the Capitol to be upset enough to call off the Games so we didn’t have to go all kill each other come morning. Didn’t help, obviously.”

He’d kept his word there to Katniss, straightened the matter out and admitted he’d lied and that he wasn’t her father. It was a risk, openly exposing himself as a liar and that he’d deliberately tried to play on public sympathy, but it had to be done. Granted, she wasn’t here to see it, but maybe the television was playing in the hospital and she was conscious to see it, or she’d hear about it. Either way, she would know he’d kept his promise and given her back what was rightfully hers. Whatever it cost him was fair.

“You’re now testifying, under oath, that Katniss Everdeen isn’t your daughter?”

“No.” He looked at Lodestone and smiled bleakly. “I testified already about those contraceptive injections Victor Affairs used on me and I didn’t ever have a lover in District Twelve.” Even if he had been willing to allow himself that comfort, he knew nobody there wanted him, first because of thinking he was a willing Capitol slut and then later when he actually was a drunk embarrassment. “So I don’t have any children at all, in case that was your next question.” That was an answer that was more painful for him after last night and what Johanna had told him. He wanted to look over at her again at that moment but he was afraid they’d start picking up on that and somehow use it.

“And in the matter of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark and their romance, was that also a lie?” He imagined Finnick and Johanna and the rest were watching anxiously now, because they knew full well he’d spun a line of pure bullshit for the sponsors, courtesy of Peeta giving him the spark. But if he exposed the whole romance as a cynical ploy for survival, he wondered if Panem would ever forgive him, or forgive Katniss and Peeta for that matter. No, it was their story and he’d prefer to leave it up to them to set the story straight if they wanted. He’d shoved them into the romance act to begin and he was going to leave the choice up to them now.

“They’re genuinely in love with each other,” he said. He was confident that was true now, but it was a shaky evasion there. All it would take was some careful questions on the specifics and he was screwed.

Nervously he waited for Lodestone to ask if they had been in love during the 74th Games, if the toasting and the supposed pregnancy were real, but apparently, he was satisfied with drawing a little blood already with Haymitch admitting to lying about being Katniss’ father. He took that and obliviously left the real killing blow behind him, and Haymitch breathed a sigh of relief.

The hours wore on and finally Lodestone let him go. Glancing at the clock, Paylor dismissed them for the day, and by the time they got their coats on and everything, the winter dark was fast falling. Kincaid told him he’d done a good job and he nodded idly, not really caring.

He wasn’t sure how he felt. Numb, mostly. There was the satisfaction of knowing the bastards would pay, that he’d faced them and kicked the rock away and made them slither out into the unforgiving light in all their ugliness. There was the knowledge that they were doing it in a far more civilized manner than Snow had, simply ordering executions without any kind of trial. They were doing it right, setting a precedent for how Panem ought to be now, and the record of those crimes would always be there, undeniable and enduring. He knew all that and he knew it was a good thing.

But there was a part of him that wished they’d just dragged the lot of them out into the snow, shot them, and had it over with. It might have been easier than trying to go through with this ordeal of struggling to put the unspeakable into words, all the rage and pain and grief and guilt and horror of it, let alone use words carefully devoid of any feeling. He’d said what had been done to him, true, but not really what it had actually done to him in the end.

He wished he felt more vindicated, and perhaps that would come when it was over and the verdicts came, but for now it felt like once again, he didn’t much matter in the grand scheme of things as an actual person. He mattered as a lot of testimony, that was all, words and exhibits describing the sparse facts of Capitol crimes. One more little cog expected to fulfill a role in a greater design, a man who’d fall in line and do what was expected, regardless of his own feelings on the matter.

It wasn’t the Games by any means, no, but he only mattered in that Council hall as a victim, not as a man. Not that he’d wanted that damn Thirteen head doctor with the whole annoying But how did it make you feel? routine, but to have it scrubbed of any feeling at all felt weird in its own way. Even when he’d tried to not feel things, he had, because that was only human, right?

The weight of that kept him quiet through dinner and the rest of the evening. “You OK?” Johanna finally asked him as they were settling down for the night, and it must be a measure of how off-kilter he must be that she was actually asking him so bluntly as that.

“Be ready, it ain’t easy to keep your temper.” He knew Johanna was even more prone than him to blunt, mouthy outbursts and it would be hard for her to keep from snapping at them. “And you’ll probably feel like it didn’t help you all that much to tell it.”

“I saw.” She’d been there for him, he’d never forget that.

He bunched up the pillow a bit. “It’s justice, not revenge, that’s all.” Revenge was the other side of the coin, pure emotion. “And it’s gotta be done in the name of justice if we’re not looking to make the same mistakes again.” Peeta had been right with his observations about Sokato. Stooping to pure revenge would be putting them on the same footing as the Capitol. Coin was poised to make herself a new Snow, after all, by pulling the same tricks. How they were going to deal with her, he didn’t know yet.

“Doesn’t much help you cope with it.”

You do, though, he thought as she tucked herself into his embrace, and he thought that having her having faith and trust and even some love for him, more than justice, would be what helped him through. “We’ll get through it,” he told her. “Then we’ll leave the Capitol and never have to come on back.”

“Start planning the wedding,” she said with a chuckle half-muffled into his shoulder. “Too bad we’re not doing it up all Capitol style, ‘cause I’d have dibs on Finn. He’d make such a pretty bridesmaid. I’m thinking that nice ruffly pink dress the idiots voted to use in Katniss and Peeta’s wedding.”

He couldn’t help but laugh, thankful that once again she could find a way to shove him out of his glumness and make him forget at least for a short while. Sometimes it really was the little things against the weight of it all.

Chapter Text

Peeta had lost track of time, which was easy enough to do given the circumstances. First it was all pain, nothing but sensation of countless nerve endings raw and screaming, and then there were the moments of lucidity that were enough for him to seize on the terror that Katniss wasn’t there. Slowly coming up from the suffocating darkness, on one of those times a nurse had told him Katniss was alive, she was there, she just had to be in a different room while they treated her own burns in isolation. Considering his healing skin and the new grafts couldn’t even handle the pressure of a sheet at that point, that he rested on an unusual mattress that gently cradled and supported his injured body, he knew he wouldn’t be able to bear Katniss touching him. He couldn’t be around her, though, without wanting to hold her tight and not let go of her again for fear that he’d find out them both surviving hadn’t been real.

After the first few days, he was conscious more than not, and they only drugged him up for further debridement and treatment of his burns. Sometimes they turned on the television and he saw how Snow’s trial was going. Haymitch testified, and he wondered if Katniss saw that he’d kept up his end of things and admitted he wasn’t her father like he’d claimed. He looked like hell himself, Peeta thought.

Finnick testified. Johanna. Annie. Witness after witness, telling similar tales of the cruelty of Coriolanus Snow and the Capitol during a decades-long reign of terror over the districts. The cameras were there for every minutes of it, every word, dwelling breathlessly on the picture being painted in the Hall of Justice. Coin was there too, already making speeches left and right about the promise of a Panem beyond Snow. Not much detail there on what exactly that meant, Peeta noticed.

December passed by, day by day much the same, a slow progression. They moved him from the burn ward to a private room to continue to let his skin heal, and the nurses and doctors came and smeared ointment on his skin and bathed him gently and had him carefully flex his limbs to check the fit of the new skin and the healing of the old. He moved from a tube snaked down into his stomach to eating soup to eating real food. Katniss’ mother actually visited him out on her rounds, which was a surprise but one he was grateful for--he was even more grateful they let him wear a loose hospital gown now and she wasn’t seeing him naked. Not that he was especially modest, but his potential mother-in-law seeing every bit of him would be a bit too weird to imagine. He was shocked to hear about Prim’s injury, seeing the strain of two kids in the hospital on Perulla Everdeen.

Haymitch and the others came to visit now that it was finally allowed, and his first question to his mentor was, “Katniss?” Of course he’d have been to visit her first, and he trusted Haymitch would be honest about her.

“You’re not gonna win a Capitol beauty contest, either of you,” he said.

“Like any of us are,” Johanna chimed in dryly, and Peeta couldn’t help but laugh because yeah, she was right about that.

“But she’s doing OK. Asking about you. I’ll swing back by, tell her I saw you and you’re healing about the same as she is. Anything you want me to tell her?”

“Tell her I’m thinking of her. The rest, that’ll keep until I can tell her myself,” he told Haymitch, feeling his heavy eyelids starting to droop, and the nurse shooed the others out to let him get his rest.

Finally he and Katniss got to share a room together for the last days of their stay, though neither of them got to do much more than sleep and tiredly wave at each other and talk. About making a garden, about repainting some rooms at home, about little things in general. They didn’t talk about the big things in the future, like Snow’s demise or the sheer huge task of rebuilding Twelve. They definitely didn’t talk about the sight and sound and smell of burning children at the gates of Snow’s mansion, or Gale's death, or Peeta killing that Peacekeeper. Those were nightmares that would never leave him, not really.

He spent an hour once describing the cake he wanted to make for her eighteenth birthday, the exact recipe for the chocolate cake and the meringue buttercream frosting he’d make and how he’d decorate it, and she listened, answering when he asked about what she’d like. “Green frosting of course, your favorite color is green...”

He saw her wrinkle her nose a bit and she mused at him, “I’m not sure green frosting’s gonna be all that tasty, Peeta. You told me if you use too much dye it can start tasting weird.”

Where it came from, he couldn’t say exactly. Maybe it was remembering their conversation back last year at the camouflage station while he was painting his skin and they talked about frosting, but he blurted out, “Bet it would be tasty no matter what if I licked it off of your skin,” and he had a sudden vivid visual of that, and he realized with a little embarrassment that despite being exhausted and in pain and the thought of all her skin against his right now made him wince, his cock definitely still worked. At least the hospital gown and blanket covered that problem.

She smothered her laughter into her pillow, and when she looked up at him again there was a hint of a smile, the first he'd seen on her since the bombs, as she said, “We might have to try that. You do make really good frosting.”

“When we’re more healed,” he promised her. That was going to be a while yet. Thinking of her seeing the crazy patchwork of his skin now, the angry red scarred parts they’d saved, the smooth fair parts that hadn’t been touched by the burning gel, and the softly pink tissue-fragile grafts, he tried to not be self-conscious. Her own skin had to be that damaged, and this was Katniss. She wasn’t some silly shallow girl who’d turn away from him because he was scarred now. At least the flames had pretty much spared his face--he just had some singed eyebrows and a small burn on one side of his neck from where one spatter had hit. “I wish I could hold you,” he murmured over to her.

“I know,” she said, and she stretched out a hand towards him which was only lightly scarred, able to bear the pressure of his touch. Though it took almost the entire length of his reach, his own fingers brushed hers and then held. He didn’t let go until her arm was trembling with the exertion of holding it out straight for so long and she reluctantly said, “My arm’s gonna fall off, Peeta.”

The whoops of celebration woke them both up one morning late in the month, the day before they were due to be released. “Guilty on all the indictments for Snow,” the nurse told them when she came with their pain medication and drugs to fight infection, looking well satisfied. “All of his cabinet and all of the Gamemakers were convicted on at least one count. They’re all going to be executed, starting with Snow on New Year’s Day.” She looked over at Katniss. “Good thing you’re healing well, you’ve got an execution to handle,” she said almost cheerfully.

“Yeah, guess so,” Katniss said shortly, and Peeta could see the storm of anger gathering in her dark grey eyes.

The first reporter sneaked in to get their reactions scarcely half an hour later and security promptly threw him out, and Peeta was grateful they confiscated his camera with the pictures of himself and Katniss lying there in their hospital gowns. Less than an hour after that, Peeta had wheedled and cajoled and glibly used a silver tongue, citing the security issues of the reporters that would keep coming in, to get them released a half day early with the promise they’d be back daily as scheduled for check-ups. Never mind that it was almost sundown already and it was sort of a desperate move. At least at the Training Center they could refuse to answer the door and maybe have a little peace and quiet.

The car dropped them off and the grey-uniformed security in the lobby handed over the keys for Twelve. Hitting the familiar button for the penthouse, Peeta rested his head against the cool metal of the elevator. “Let’s just try to get some sleep,” he suggested. Even if it would have to be in separate rooms for now since they couldn’t share a bed just yet.

He really didn’t expect to walk in on Haymitch and Johanna on the living room couch. All right, maybe that wasn’t quite the right term. They were asleep and their clothes were definitely on. But from the way that his arm was tightly around her waist and how she was curled up against his side, both of them relaxed and apparently comfortable with each other like this, it couldn’t be anything but deliberate, and that was intimate enough that it was almost stranger than walking in on them having sex would have been. Though the latter would have burned his eyes a lot more. “Uh...”

He swore his voice wasn’t that loud, but Haymitch woke with a startle anyway, eyes snapping open, and he saw the two of them. “They didn’t call me to tell me you were getting out of the hospital early,” he said, voice sounding aggrieved. “I’d have come to help pick you up, you know. Try picking up the damn phone next time, huh?”

“So, um, you and Johanna?” Katniss said, sounding as confused as Peeta felt.

“If you think that’s bad you’re lucky you weren’t here two hours ago, Kittycat,” Johanna said with a smirk, stretching and sitting up. “Clothes strewn everywhere.”

“Jo,” Haymitch muttered, sitting up himself, though Peeta could see from the faint shake of his shoulders he was trying to not laugh.

“Which pretty much means you’ve just been napping this whole time,” Katniss said dryly.

“Hey, don’t give me the disapproving look here, Mommy. I seem to remember hearing about Haymitch walking on you two all half-naked back in Thirteen, and besides, we’re getting married.” There was a definite hint of satisfaction in her voice at that.

“Wait, what?”

“Congratulations,” Peeta told her with a smile, definitely surprised but actually pleased for the two of them. “Let me know when you need a cake.”

“Thanks, Hotbuns.” Johanna smirked. “I’ve pretty much moved in here so that means you two may want to take up living in the Seven apartment starting tomorrow morning.” Her eyebrows waggled mischievously.

Katniss followed him into his room and said lowly when the door was closed, “Seriously? Married? I mean, they said that stuff in the arena was fake and all!”

“You and I weren’t real in the arena either, but we are now,” he pointed out, and by now he could admit it and think about it without the twinge of pain that he’d had initially. “Finnick said they’ve been friends a good while, and after what they went through in the Detention Center together...” He shrugged. He could see how that could have drawn them together easily enough, and given living as roommates in Thirteen that would have given them the chance to grow some kind of relationship. He was a little surprised they’d kept it quiet this long and even he hadn’t picked up on it. “He needs somebody, Katniss, after how alone he’s been and everything he’s been through. I think she does too. Even if neither of them would actually admit it.”

“Oh, my. Can you imagine what it’ll be like having Haymitch and Johanna as our neighbors?” Katniss said, putting a hand over her eyes.

Hopefully having some kind of happiness in his life meant Haymitch would drink less. Seeing him sober this long, Peeta didn’t want to lose him again like that. “It’ll never be dull,” he replied. “They might actually try to kill each other on a regular basis.” Before long the two of them were giggling and chortling and smothering it behind their hands.

In the morning Katniss and Peeta moved down to the Seven apartment. That was better, Johanna figured, for everyone concerned. Not that she and Haymitch were having loud, enthusiastic sex that would embarrass the kids. Actually they hadn’t been having sex at all, at first because of their healing burns and maybe now it was hesitation because of the miscarriage. But the privacy of having the place to themselves was nice, and frankly, she figured Peeta and Katniss could use that too without Haymitch anxiously hovering over them as he was.

With Snow condemned to die, things started moving quickly from there. Coin seemed to be everywhere on the television, promoting herself and making it clear that she was stepping in to fill the power void, speaking like it was already a done deal. Every time she saw the woman’s face, Johanna wanted to throw an axe at it.

The execution was set for New Year’s Day. The night before that they were having that Victory Ball, and under Coin’s directive it more and more it was sounding uncomfortably less like a celebration of the war’s end and a brighter Panem to come, and more like one of the old Capitol parties before the Games or on a victory tour, reveling in the bloodshed, reveling in the punishments to come for Snow and his cronies in the days following that.

A shame that she already wasn’t looking forward to the thing with Coin blathering another speech and wrecking the occasion, because she would readily admit, this was probably the first dress she had that she sort of actually wanted to wear in public.

In Cinna’s old studio, Effie Trinket was chirping and flitting around her, doing a final fitting of it. “We did the design to be rather simple--I didn’t see you as fuss and ruffles sort of a girl--and, well, I knew you might need some more skin covered.”

Which was pretty much a polite way of saying “Let’s not show off what a mess the torturers made of your skin,” but Johanna actually sort of appreciated that. Put it simply, she was never going to be wearing anything like that gorgeous strapless number with diamonds that she’d so envied on Katniss. She wasn’t going to be wearing anything strapless or with a plunging back, period. At least Trinket readily understood that, having been in the Detention Center herself, and had taken it into consideration. Oddly sensitive for someone who’d come across as a total Capitol idiot, Johanna had to admit.

It was blue, which made her like it more to begin--maybe she could reuse it for the wedding, no sense not using something this nice and in the right color. The bodice was sort of fitted, showing off her figure, her shoulders and her breasts and her waist and hips. The fine dark blue silk of it was richly embroidered with leaves and vines in silver thread, the paler blue underskirt left plain.

She looked like a woman in this thing rather than a whore or a bitch or a girl. “Looks really nice,” she said, trying to not sound too keen on it and invite the other woman to start squealing more about clothes. “I’ll try not to wreck it,” she deadpanned.

Effie fussed with the unfinished neckline, carefully folding the flaps of silk back, mumbling to herself and adjusting it a hair here or there, finally pinning carefully and explained, “I had Cinna leave this alone so that we could adjust it at the fitting based on your scars, though it looks like you’re lucky there, we can definitely lower it to something suitable to a young woman rather than making you look like some dowdy matron...”

“Thanks,” she said wryly. Though when she looked again in the mirror, yeah, the lower neckline definitely helped.

Effie stood beside her, regarding Johanna’s image in the mirror, and frowned. “Well, it’s the sort of occasion people will be wearing gloves anyway,” she murmured half to herself.

“What?” Then she looked and saw while the sleeves covered her halfway to the elbow, that didn’t do much for the scars and burns that were still prominent on her forearms and hands. “Oh. Yeah.” Well, if they were supposed to be wearing gloves anyway, fine. It made a nice, ready excuse.

“Now, where are those gloves? I have Katniss’ fitting later today at the Training Center, Haymitch said she was in no shape to come here yet, and of course Cinna’s doing the fittings on all the gentlemen,” Effie chattered, digging through drawers and the like, tossing things over her shoulder as she did so. “Ah, here they are!”

“What, you actually didn’t take a chance for a free look at some good-looking men in their underwear?” Johanna teased her lightly. “Shit, like Cinna’s gonna appreciate that sight properly.” She’d joke like that, try to let bygones by bygones and try to forget how Effie might have ogled some of the male victors like most Capitol women--hell, like some district women too must have--because she’d paid plenty for it in the end. She assumed if Effie had been enough of a bitch to buy a victor Haymitch would have been the first to throw her to the wolves rather than being determined to try to bail her out. She was the only escort left, just like Cinna was the only stylist alive. The rest had all been executed shortly after the Quell, and Johanna couldn’t say she missed Gemma or Donella all that much. It would be so easy to clean house entirely on that by getting Effie executed, but apparently Haymitch’s odd sense of fair play wouldn’t let that happen. That said something pretty loud and clear about Effie.

Effie’s laugh was strange, high and brittle and nervous, almost frightened. “My, no, I don’t imagine the men want a Capitol woman like me around them after...well...” She handed Johanna the gloves, elbow-length and made of white silk. “Why don’t you try those on now and see how it looks?”

Something about that laugh and the sudden additional skittishness gave Johanna pause. She watched Effie, silly Effie with her head of purely natural, short light brown hair and without a trace of her stupid face paint, and she finally put a finger on it. That frantic air, the undercurrent of fear at Johanna mentioning her being alone around half-dressed men--it could be out of the awkwardness of a Capitol woman thinking about being around some of the male victors who’d been whored out, sure. But she didn’t think that was it, and as she stood there and watched Effie bustle and fidget and everything, her suspicion deepened, because she knew a thing or two from experience herself, didn’t she? “Shit,” she cursed. “Those fucking pervert bastards.”

“You shouldn’t use...”

“I’ll call ‘em ‘fucking pervert bastards’ if I want,” she snapped, “or what, is ‘rapist pigs’ any more acceptable to you?”

Effie’s head shot up and her blue-grey eyes were full of misery and panic for a second before they went frosty and her tone was pure Capitol as she said, “Don’t be silly, Johanna, you’re throwing wild accusations here and it’s quite rude to do so.”

“Raping a prisoner in the Detention Center is pretty fucking rude too.” The way Effie flinched every time the word “rape” came up only confirmed it all the more. Maybe she’d even been in deep denial, trying to convince herself that it hadn’t happened, that some man hadn’t been inside her, shaming her, turning her into a hole to fuck rather than a person, thrusting and grunting and sweating. Johanna had tried to do that a few times herself, until the next one convinced her all over again that yeah, it was real. Everybody coped in their own way.

“It didn’t...I wasn’t...they would never...”

“They do. Believe me, they do and they used to do it to me,” she said, and with that something in Effie’s face crumpled and she gave a deep, choking sob, like her heart had been yanked out of her.

Johanna wasn’t quite sure how it happened but suddenly she ended up with Effie Trinket sniveling and sobbing on her shoulder, crying her heart out and saying how she hated them and how betrayed she had been by her own people and how she wanted to die and how filthy she felt. “I know,” she said, rubbing Effie’s shoulder lightly and simply letting her have it out. “I know.” She knew all too well, and some part of her hurt for Effie, who hadn’t imagined something like that could happen to her. There had been a time in her life Johanna had been the one overwhelmed by it too.

After that Effie finally lifted her head and sniffled. She was definitely not a pretty crier, Johanna noted, but seeing her like that made her feel all the more real and human anyway rather than some painted Capitol doll. “Oh, now I’ll have to clean this too before you can wear it,” she said with a fretful sigh, plucking at the silk on Johanna’s shoulder that was now gone all damp with Effie’s tears and snot.

“It’s just fabric, Effie, for fuck’s sake. Relax.” Even if it was probably the nicest thing she’d ever worn.

Effie gave her a watery smile and said, “All right, but let’s get that dress off of you so I can start getting it out before it possibly sets in a stain.” Undoing the zipper, Johanna peeled it off carefully, knowing Effie saw all her various scars as she stood there in her underwear.

“You can trust both Haymitch and Finnick, you know,” she told her. Considering they’d testified to their own experiences for the entire country to know, she didn’t feel like she was selling out a big secret. “They’ve been there too. They’ll be...” She searched for the right word, something that didn’t sound cloying on her tongue. “It helped to have people that understood,” she said finally. Perhaps that was why she gravitated to Cinna. The fact that he was a man and yet Effie trusted him already made Johanna suspect he’d been through his own ordeal in his cell.

She left the studio not quite friends with Effie but at least feeling like there was some decent potential to do more than get frustrated and annoyed with her and want to bark at her to shut up. Back at the apartment, she saw Haymitch lying on the couch reading, book propped up on his chest. “So, how’s the dress?” he asked, raising his eyebrows and giving her a bit of a smile. “Better than Donella’s shit, I’ll bet.”

“The dress is fine.” The dress was actually gorgeous but that wasn’t the issue at hand here and something in his face sobered as he saw that she wasn’t about to banter with him. He sat up, put the book on the table, patted the space on the couch beside him. She sat and didn’t waste time on prelude. They didn’t do that with each other. She kept her voice down as she said, smooth and almost flirty, "How 'bout you and I go get some air and I tell you all about it? I might need to go get some nice underwear later to go under it." She didn't, Effie even took care of that bit.

That meant the rooftop, and as he understood that, something in his face changed, expression going tight and his eyes narrowing. “Promising. How 'bout then I tell you everything I'm gonna do to you after I get that dress off of you?" he returned in equal measure. They’d already established thanks to Volts investigating it that the audio surveillance system was still active, though there was no way to tell if Coin was actually using it. Johanna was readily inclined to believe she'd spy on the potential threat of the victors, so she didn't want to risk being overheard right now.

Haymitch found his shoes, and they pulled on their coats and hats and gloves against the bitter December air. They climbed to the roof, and the rock was already there in the door, showing that someone else had the same idea. “Crap, let's hope it ain't interrupting something here,” Haymitch muttered, though he poked his head out. “Ah, we're fine. It’s Tilly and Niello, just talking.”

Stepping out onto the roof, they nodded to the two One victors. Over the last couple of weeks, slowly the Center had gotten more residents as the victors arrived for the trial and the execution. Every floor had at least one victor now, though with new arrivals there was usually the glum story of the ones from that district killed after the Quell or killed in the rebellion, either by the Capitol or in some cases relayed by Brutus and Enobaria, now recalled back from the fighting in Two as their sole surviving victors, killed by the rebels. All told, only seventeen victors were left in Panem now, out of fifty-nine a year ago. Depressing math, really. Twelve had the most survivors with Haymitch, Peeta, and Katniss. Johanna was the only living victor from Seven now. It didn’t surprise her that much that they’d killed Cedrus shortly after the Quell, considering Seven was pretty obviously involved in the conspiracy, but she knew she’d miss both him and Blight in her way.

Both Niello and Chantilly Dumas were from before her time, replaced as mentors for One by Cashmere and Gloss, so she didn’t know them like Haymitch did. Niello, a big, blond man aging gracefully even as he was now into his fifties, nodded to both of them and gave a wave. Chantilly was brown-haired and in her early forties. She’d won the year before Haymitch and Johanna knew from the gossip she had been to Haymitch for a good ten years what Finnick had been for her, a close friend and lover to cope with being on the circuit.

But she’d married Niello, seemed pretty happy with him, apparently had two little kids with him that were safe with their grandparents in One, so Johanna assumed that she had nothing to worry about from the other woman. If Haymitch wasn’t going to begrudge her lasting friendship with Finnick and get crazy and jealous about it, she’d simply return him the favor when it came to Chantilly. She knew Chantilly had been there when Haymitch had needed her so no reason to be a bitch about it.

Standing there, they shot the breeze for a little while, being polite and all, and in Haymitch’s case, chatting with old friends. Johanna even got drawn into it since all four of them were from northern districts and they happily slung some joking crap towards the poor tender southerners like Beetee and Finnick and Annie and Rice from Eleven, the boy who won the year after her, and how they must be loathing the snow right now. Finally the One victors headed off and they had the roof to themselves. “We really needed to talk about your Victory Ball dress?” he prompted her, knowing that wasn’t the issue at hand at all. "So...Cinna? Effie?" Already he was trying to figure it out from what little she had said. No surprise there. "You hear something I haven't about them being arrested?"

“I'm pretty sure the guards raped Effie while she was in the Detention Center. Probably Cinna too, I’m thinking, given that you know how equal-opportunity they are when it comes to fucking, and that she wasn’t afraid of being around him like she apparently is of other men.”

“Fuck,” he said on a low sigh, which was pure Haymitch eloquence. “I didn’t see it.” His tone made it clear he thought he should have.

“You can’t do everything,” she reminded him sharply. He’d had plenty to deal with already, not the least of which was trying to scrape himself back together.

“They didn’t do it to either of us, so I didn’t think that...” He smiled a bit wryly, his expression suddenly as bleak as the war-scarred winter world that they were standing in. “But then again, there wouldn’t have been much fun in raping someone who’s so used to it already. Chances are Snow probably told them not to waste their time, and to focus on something that would actually get a reaction from us.”

True enough, she thought. Raping either of them would have been fairly pointless. Both of them were enured enough already to being forced by being on the circuit. In having to shove down their own instincts and overlay that blank canvas with an expected act, they’d pretty much passed beyond the point of giving any genuine reaction. They wouldn’t scream and beg and fight like the torturers would want. They’d really get no response at all, and that made it hardly worth the effort. Not when there were tortures that would be far more effective at causing pain and getting something real out of them, like the knives and the wires and the venom and listening to screams in the next cell. “Not to mention you know they’d have been even happier to punish two of their own who turned traitor as rough as they possibly could.”

“The doctors admitted we got the worst scars, and I didn’t hear them mention the venom in the others,” he said cautiously, fingers steepled against his lips as he thought it over. Sheer physical pain and mindfucking them with the drugs probably would be the most effective, Johanna would admit. “Cinna and Effie, well, now we know what they did to them.”

“So what the hell did they do to Brutus and Enobaria?” How did they go about torturing two crazy bastards who were so used to brutality and physical pain since childhood that it had to be one of the less effective methods they could use?

He looked over at her. “My guess? Kicked the crap out of them too, sure, but I’ll bet they let them know they were disgusting traitors and left them alone to stew in it. Brutus in particular, he was well set up for that since he believed he was a disgrace already. Nothing half so effective as making you torture yourself by making you believe you deserve whatever pain you get, is there?”

“No.” They both knew that full well. How many years had they both spent thinking they deserved to suffer for having gotten their families killed? “She’ll be coming here to do Katniss’ fitting if you want to try to talk to her, or whatever.”

“Yeah, maybe,” thought the doubt in his tone told her that he was well aware that consoling people wasn’t really his strong suit. “Don’t think shoving a bottle of liquor at her is gonna help it much.” Then he made a sound of pure frustration. “Katniss shouldn’t even be going to the damn thing, having cameras shoved in her face and all. Peeta either."

“Yeah, well, she’s supposed to be there tomorrow night and then day after that, execute Snow.” Considering she wouldn’t put great odds on Katniss even being able to hold that bow straight right now, she thought the idea was pretty ridiculous. “Don’t suppose we could tell Coin she can do her own killing?”

“Oh, my, no,” he said, voice suddenly full of anger and loathing, “she’s gotta get someone else to do it so her own hands stay clean. It doesn’t look good to the nation to kill your predecessor. It’s OK for her to direct the whole thing, though, turn it into a total circus.” He gave her a long, careful look. “I heard today they’re selling tickets. We have guaranteed ringside seats, of course," pure biting sarcasm there, "but...fucking tickets, Jo.”

She remembered what he’d told her when they’d been locked up in those cells, about how a Capitol execution for treason went. The girl when he was nineteen who’d dragged him to one, so proud that her family had enough clout to get two tickets to witness it firsthand. She could well understand the loathing in his voice at that idea. “It’s all happening again,” she said tiredly. “So much for it being about justice.” It was turning right on back to vengeance in Coin’s hands.

“Snow first, then we have to go careful on Coin,” he cautioned her. “If we make one wrong move while she’s presumably watching us like a hawk right now while she’s securing her position, we’re fucked.”

“So we just let her parade and proclaim herself the fucking savior of Panem and make your girl do her killing for her. Never mind she’s in no shape for it physically or mentally right now.”

“I know,” he said with a soft grunt of irritation. “She does this now, it’ll stay with her in a different way. It ain’t gonna be exactly like the arena, and both she and all of Panem will know it.” It was one thing to kill in the arena, taking out someone in pure self-defense. That fucked a person up plenty already, as they both well knew. Being an executioner for someone you actually wanted dead was something different entirely, even in killing as big a bastard as Snow. For the rest of her life Katniss would always be known as the girl who wanted her revenge enough to execute a president for it, on live television. That was a pretty heavy weight to bear.

“It probably ought to be someone who’s got no personal stakes in it to take that shot,” she acknowledged. Some anonymous Thirteen lackey or whatever. “Or do Snow like they will the rest of ‘em if nothing else, hanging or a firing squad with rifles.” None of this melodramatic “execution by lone archer” shit. The best thing Panem got towards actual fairness was Coin letting Paylor run that trial and doing it with a pretty even hand, but now that it was over, Coin was making her stamp on things obvious with the execution.

“Honestly, that would be best. And hell, failing that I’d volunteer to take that shot at him myself, I can deal with it better than her. But you know Coin will insist the damn Mockingjay has to do it for proper closure or whatever shit she’s claiming is her reason.” Control. It all came down to control in the end, didn’t it?

“Dance, puppet, dance,” she muttered angrily. After everything, all the sacrifices and the suffering, Coin got to step in from her lofty perch safely away from all of it and neatly control the whole business. She’d lost nothing, endured none of the pain, and they were living in her show now. That was bad enough objectively, but given what Coin had done to the two of them with that clomiphen, that made it unbearable.

He was quiet for a long time and she knew enough to just let him think it over. When he had something to say, some idea to bounce off her, he’d let it fly. “There’s one way around it I can see that gets Katniss out of being used by it and fucks Coin out of securing her place by being hostess of her own little revenge spectacle.”

“Yeah?” Though she thought she already knew, understood where his reasoning must be going.

His eyes met hers, level and betraying only a glimmer of what he must be feeling right then, knowing the risk that this could mean for them both, how it could likely set off a chain of events where they had to be ready to react. “We kill Snow."

Chapter Text

“I’ve got a blue dress, you know,” was what Johanna said to him when they were watching a newscast from Ten where the people were celebrating in the district square. That, at least, felt good, felt right, like the rebellion he’d started had accomplished something worthwhile. They’d needed to see happy people joyous in their freedom, laughing children dancing and throwing snowballs at each other. They’d never need to fear another reaping.

After all, they’d just watched another newscast earlier reporting a dozen wealthy Capitol citizens discovered bound and shot through the head out in Silver Downs with a note claiming they’d been sentenced and executed by a “People’s Court”. Admittedly the put a bit of a damper on things. Granted, two of them had bought him over the years. One had bought Johanna. So he couldn’t say he mourned their loss but how it had happened set him on edge. It made him wince to remember he and Johanna had snarked that they wouldn’t mind if that whole neighborhood was destroyed during the invasion. It wasn’t what they had meant at all, it wasn’t what they had fought for so hard.

“Oh?” he said, looking over at her, leaning back against the cushions of the couch and putting an arm over the back. “You looking to do a fashion show here? I won’t object.”

She made a small sound of irritation, swatting him lightly on the leg. “We wear blue at weddings in Seven.” Well, his own clothes for the night were silver and black, which was pretty standard for him. Went with his coloring, after all. Seeing she had his attention, she continued on. “And I’m thinking, there’s paperwork that’s gotta be done and it’s not like you have any damn government left in Twelve to do it.”

“You've got a point with that.” So what, did she want to get married in Seven? He had no problem with that. It was just the forms anyway, not the stuff that actually mattered.

“We’ve got a few hours now,” she pointed out to him. “The Hall of Justice is open still. The toast, the trees, the stuff that actually counts, we can do that later in Twelve. I’ll even let Kittycat and Hotbuns be there for it.”

“You’re so generous,” he told her dryly. “What’s the rush, though?” He couldn’t help but be curious. He would have figured she’d want to wait until after Twelve got the Justice Building re-opened and all, do everything all at once. The forms were simply the pure legal crap, after all.

She leaned in close, kissed him lightly on the jaw, and said softly but bluntly in his ear, “We could get really fucked by taking on Coin if something goes wrong." That was true. One bad misstep and they could end up arrested for treason again, one less obvious mistake and they’d be nervously left waiting for the axe to fall, never quite free of it. “And hey, I’d like to at least know for sure I’d be the boss of you.”

He understood what she was actually saying. If this was the chance they had before they possibly plunged right back into potential danger, into the murky waters of trying to topple another president, best to take it. Be able to say that they’d lived while they could, had a little while together after so many years denied everything that mattered. Now that she’d brought it up, seeing the faint hint of fear in her that he felt too, he couldn’t help but agree. “All right. Let’s do it.”

Getting dressed, doing up a tie and a vest and all so familiar by now as to not require much focus, he thought how strange it was. He’d gone into the arena the first time terrified, thinking of the people back home he desperately wanted to see again, the future he was scared would never come to pass. Ever since then, after everything was taken away and he existed in a constant hell of Snow’s making, he hadn’t much cared about the idea of dying. Sometimes he actually wished for it to happen, but mostly he was simply indifferent to it. Nobody else cared, why the hell should he?

He’d gone into the arena this time putting his survival in terms of what use it would be to keeping Katniss and Peeta alive long enough to get them out and safely away. He’d made Peeta promise to leave him behind if it came to it. He’d been fully prepared to die, expected it, even embraced the idea of dying in a way that was at least worth something. It was better than dying a pathetic useless drunk.

He knew he would still be willing to die now, if it came down to it, if that was the price to be paid to take Coin on down. But the difference was this time he felt the old familiar dark shadow lurking there, long absent, and he knew that he was afraid to die.

Because he realized that for the first time since he was sixteen, he really wanted to live.

It was quiet and simple compared to all the usual hoopla surrounding a Capitol wedding, which he’d seen turned out in full force when they were planning the one for Katniss and Peeta. Ten minutes at a jeweler picking out two plain gold bands and saying that was all they wanted, thank you very much, no, they weren’t interested in the diamonds or the pearls from Four. Then it was fifteen minutes at the Hall of Justice with an official and two clerks as witnesses roped into it. Five minutes of which was spent arguing about the irregularity of two citizens from two different districts attempting to get married because of course, it never happened, cross-district emigration being prohibited. “It’s a new Panem and I’m moving to Twelve whether you like it or not, so shut the fuck up and sign the papers,” Johanna finally told him crossly. Her wry look over at him said, Give us one more thing to get arrested for, why not?

The official said, “I suppose you’ll be living in the house in Victors' Village in Twelve,” scribbling that on the forms.

Then it was agreeing that yes, they wanted to get married, that neither of them was already in an existing marriage, that they were agreeing to this while being of sound minds. He looked over at her and smirked at that one. Sound minds? Not quite, maybe not a hundred percent ever. But he didn’t doubt the rightness of it anyway. They’d be there for each other.

He kissed her, a pretty chaste kiss on the lips, and it was done, the official handed them their stamped forms and directed them to the photographer for a portrait, and they headed out towards Snow’s mansion. Married--he wasn’t sure he felt like it. A good part of it was the absence of the toasting, and definitely it was the unexpectedness of it after so long being convinced he’d never have anything like it. It would take a while to sink in, that was all, that it was real. Right now it still felt a little bit like a dream. But a good one, at least, for once.

The Victory Ball itself wasn’t too bad, for all that being back in the ballroom of Snow’s mansion brought back more than its share of memories for him, particularly of last winter’s Victory Tour. At least, it being winter now, it couldn’t be held out in the rose gardens which were the traditional site of the Victor’s Social each year for the mentors to try and cajole sponsors.

Coin, apparently eschewing the party as an example of Capitol decadence or the like, came in her stark Thirteen greys, made a speech about a new start for Panem in the new year and how the “wrongdoing” of the Capitol wouldn’t go unanswered, and then apparently left the party. “Guess she’s not feeling too festive,” Johanna said in his ear as they were out on the dance floor.

“She’s too busy grabbing power and whipping up the mood for punishing people,” he said, remembering those executions earlier that day. But for now he played his part rather than think about Coin. He danced with Johanna and Annie and Effie and Enobaria and other women too who came his way asking for a dance with the man who’d once been the laughingstock of Panem. He drank the punch rather than the booze that was freely offered, because he remembered what he’d promised Johanna and anyway, he wanted his head clear tonight. He smiled and laughed like he hadn’t a care in the world, like this night truly did mark a triumph and a hopeful turning point in things. Victory Ball. The word was no better used in this case than it was for Victory Tour. He wondered if out there in the night more people were dying in pain and terror while they drank and celebrated here at the mansion and ignored it. No, not too much had changed yet.

He had one dance with Katniss, in her black and white dress obviously meant to echo her role as the Mockingjay, and he saw the dark circles under her eyes and how carefully she moved with her tender skin and how distant her gaze seemed. “It’ll be all right, sweetheart,” he said, leading her back over towards where she and Peeta were sitting, taking a rest from the dance floor. No, they shouldn’t be here tonight. But then they shouldn’t have been involved in all this right from Reaping Day on, period.

“Will it really, Haymitch?” she murmured to him, shaking her head tiredly.

“We don’t tell lies now, remember? All three of us agreed on that.” He settled for squeezing her fingers lightly in his, one area he knew could bear the contact, and let her go sit back by Peeta, watching as the boy put an arm carefully around her shoulders. “Why don’t you two go back to the hospital?” he suggested softly. “Go be with Prim and Katniss’ ma tonight. If a token appearance is good enough for Coin, it’s good enough for you two.”

Being with family was where they really wanted to be anyway right now, he was sure, rather than here being paraded around and harassed for the expected publicity. Besides, it got them clear of what he and Johanna were planning. Shoving them away to safety was the best he could do for them right now.

They left shortly after and he watched them go, relieved. A little while after that he and Johanna slipped out, towards the greenhouse where he’d heard that Snow was passing the last evening of his life. Figured the old bastard would want to be among his roses at the last.

Two soldiers in the ragged, mismatched clothing of rebels not from Thirteen guarded the entrance. With Johanna and himself all dressed up for the ball right down to gloved hands, they made a stark contrast. The only thing in common was how weary they all looked. “You two are OK to go in,” the woman said, obviously recognizing the two of them. “Been a busy night for visitors for him already. Turned away plenty of gawkers, but I figure you two have the right to see him. The Mockingjay and Peeta were by not too long ago.”

He tried to not wince at that news. They must have stopped by on their way out the door, and he wished they hadn’t, but it couldn’t be undone now. Nodding with a curt, “Thanks,” they stepped into the greenhouse. The side panels were frosted glass, presumably for privacy, and he was sure they were also bulletproof and shatterproof for security reasons. But when he glanced up through the clear glass of the roof, he could see the stars.

Johanna slid her arm through his and they walked along the pathway, and he was trying to not breathe too deeply and inhale the heady thick perfume of the roses, white and blush pink and yellow and blue and lavender, tenderly cared for by a monster while he enabled the killing of children and sold people into degradation. It made him want to burn this garden to the ground once Snow was dead. Or maybe burn it with Snow in it. She must have sensed the tension in him because her arm went a little tighter in his.

They found him walking the path. More like shambling, really, given that he was shackled and hobbled and draped with chains, covered with tracking devices and what looked like the same kind of electric shock cuff that Snow had slapped on him during their tour of the devastation in Twelve to make him behave. He stared at the two of them with interest, well-dressed and strong and in fairly good health now. Haymitch realized the last Snow had seen them, they were the ones imprisoned, half-crazy and in pain and simply waiting to be killed in an execution. Things had turned completely opposite now. “I expected I might see you. Have you come to taunt me, then? Flaunt how after all these years, you’ve finally won?”

He stared Snow directly in the eyes. “Let’s not bullshit. There’s no such thing as winning for us. Not after everything you took from me, and from Johanna. And from everyone else. You can’t give it back, so we just finally stop losing, that’s all.”

A tight-lipped smile answered him. “I should have figured you of all people would be astute enough to see it. You needn’t bother with your romantic charade here, by the way. You did a much better job of convincingly maintaining it during your imprisonment than Miss Everdeen and Mister Mellark did for the public, rather than selling each other out as I’d hoped you might have done, but there’s no purpose to it now. Though I’m surprised you’d resort to attempting the same trick twice when you knew I was aware of it the first time, Mister Abernathy. Very unoriginal.”

Johanna stepped forward, tugging off the white glove on her left hand. She held it up, showing off the gold band on her finger for Snow to see, and showing off the scars on her arm to boot. “Sorry, you wanna rethink that assessment there, old man?” Snow eyed her wedding ring, looking a little taken aback. “Well, I’m not going to fuck him in front of you to prove it. Don’t even think of trying to insist on it.” Haymitch really hoped she wasn’t going to step into things with Snow enough to start playing his little games.

“I stand corrected. I was aware you two had a close friendship, but...”

“Well,” Johanna said with a raised eyebrow, pulling her glove back on, “we’re the two you screwed over hardest to keep us pinned down, so why not be friendly with each other?”

The flash of irritation on Snow’s face rapidly faded and he said calmly, “My congratulations to you both, then. Such a pity I didn’t know about the wedding. I’d have been happy to provide you with my best roses for your bridal bouquet.” He’d left a rose by the burned-out house. Sent roses for the funeral too. He must have done the same for Johanna, and Haymitch knew he was laughing at them with that statement.

“And I’d have been happy to shove them right up your ass,” Johanna told him sweetly, jaw set tight. “Thorns and all.” Her expression said Couldn’t be worse than what some of them did to me.

“It appears I was wrong in the matter of the romance of the Mockingjay and Mister Mellark also. She just came by to see me, you know.”

“I know,” Haymitch said, not wanting to give him a chance to go on try to jerk his chain with that. “So, we could sit here all night reminiscing fondly and trying to mess with each other for old times’ sake, but let’s get past that, shall we? We’re here because we have a couple of questions for you.”

“And you expect me to humbly answer you because now I’m the one imprisoned and condemned. No, you both gave me nothing while you were imprisoned.”

“Nothing? I played along with your script on television for the whole country to see.”

“And by that, as agreed upon, you bought the potential of Miss Everdeen and Mister Mellark’s continued existence. Everything comes with a price, Mister Abernathy. You should have learned that by now. I have answers you want, so what do you have to trade for it that’s of use to me at this point? Nothing, I imagine.”

That lofty arrogance was there even now, and it helplessly fed Haymitch’s temper. He laughed, a tight angry laugh. “You think I wouldn’t beg? You had me forced down on my knees ever since I was a kid, and had me busy sucking cock and licking cunt while I was down there. So I ain’t hobbled by anything so inconvenient as pride. But you make me beg, we know that it’s not you shaming me. Not this time. It’s the last pathetic move of a sorry old man knocked off his throne and about to die, grabbing desperately at what shreds of power he can have, and we’ll know it’s only because I unsettle you that much. So, tell me, Coriolanus. Do I have to beg?”

Now Snow looked at him with something almost like a careful respect. “And here my answer to that was gonna be ‘I’ll trade you not beating the fuck out of you for those answers’,” Johanna told him, crossing her arms over her chest.

“You should rely more on the subtlety I know you’re capable of using, Miss Mason.” Snow smiled slightly at her. “Madam Abernathy. Pardon me.”

“Here’s what you get in trade if this goes right. You get to know you helped take down Alma Coin. That satisfy you?”

“Oh, greatly. I do admire Alma’s deviousness, though, in letting the districts and the Capitol tear each other to pieces while she and Thirteen neatly stepped into the void left behind completely unscathed. I would recommend you try to depose her now while my succession is less than uncertain. She should provide a challenge for you both. I’m rather sorry I won’t live long enough to see the outcome.”

“Yeah, very nice. So I assume you’ll confirm for me that you didn’t bomb those kids in front of your mansion?” He stated it like fact, because there was no point playing games here.

“You reasoned your way through that already? Well done. I’m not above killing children, as we all know, but when I kill someone it has a purpose. There was no point at all to my slaughtering the safeguard I had put in place. Very convenient too that a camera crew happened to catch the bombers in the act.”

“What happened during the Dark Days with Thirteen?” Johanna said. “We never got a good explanation out of them.”

“They pointed nuclear missiles at us, we pointed nuclear missiles at them,” Snow shrugged with a heavy clink and rattle of his chains. “It was a stalemate. And so we--or rather, President Mackenzie and Bullington, the mayor of Thirteen at the time--signed a mutual non-aggression pact where Thirteen agreed to go into hiding and pretend to be destroyed by the Capitol in return for total Capitol non-interference in their future affairs.” He glanced over at the two of them. “You chose a dangerous ally to court. Particularly given that Thirteen actually began the rebellion during the Dark Days and then abandoned its allies at the end.”

He got that, all right. He’d wondered how Thirteen had managed to exist like that, figured it was probably the Capitol actually did think they’d destroyed Thirteen and Thirteen hid underground, taking advantage. Finding out it had been a cold, deliberate pact stunned him a bit, he’d admit. Thirteen had started the fire and then when things started turning bad, they ran and saved their own skins and left behind the rest of Panem to pay the price, watched the ringleaders--including Ravenna--hang for it. They’d watched the districts suffer. They’d watched for seventy-four years as the children of the other districts bled and suffered and died horribly in the Games. And they didn’t lift a fucking finger to try and stop any of it. Seeing the look on Haymitch’s face, Snow said, “It’s all in the records, dear boy, which I’m sure must now be in the custody of the so-called War Crimes Council after they raided my office. Assuming Alma hasn’t destroyed them already to cover it up, of course.” He smiled slightly. “Perhaps she’ll have learned from my mistake.”

“I used Thirteen to keep Katniss alive and to take you down because they were the only ally I could get strong enough to get things rolling. That’s all.” If he’d known who he was getting into bed with at the beginning of things, known what Thirteen was really like, would he have still done it? Probably. He didn’t exactly have any other option besides watching Katniss die, watching any hopes for a revolution die. Desperate times, desperate measures, and all that. “Like you said, I shouldn’t trust them. I ain’t stupid enough for that.”

“And so now, having successfully used her for your purposes, you’re turning your knife on Alma Coin.”

He made it sound like Haymitch was like him, and that prodded his temper again. “Before she can turn hers on me,” he pointed out, “and before she gets her claws in good and deep on Panem.”

Snow laughed at that, a sound that was full of something almost like delight, though it quickly ended with him coughing wetly into a handkerchief that was already red-stained. Once he recovered enough breath, he said, “Oh, my. You had some cleverness even as a boy, I’ll grant you, but finally, Mister Abernathy, you’ve got the ruthlessness it takes to be a player rather than a pawn. You’d actually make quite the politician now.”

“C’mon, don’t insult him like that,” Johanna said with a snort. “He’s actually a good man, that’s pretty incompatible with being a fucking politician.” He couldn’t help but feel a surge of affection and gratitude for her for that, simple words as they were, they said plenty about her opinion of him.

“You genuinely do care for each other, don’t you?” Snow said with interest. “Fascinating.”

“Oh, Haymitch and me? Been in love for years. We just weren’t going to hand that little bit of information over to you so you could screw us with it like you did Finnick and Annie.”

“We agreed years ago that we don’t lie to one another,” Snow chided her with amusement. “Given your obvious infatuation with Mister Odair and your more recent reputation for numerous one-night trysts, I doubt that’s the case.”

He could see Snow at work here, picking and prodding and trying to find a weakness to upset her, to throw her off-guard and exploit that opening. Exactly what he hadn’t wanted to happen, but then, he had a bit more experience with Snow’s games over the years than her. “Jo...”

“No? Well, he was my first, that’s no lie.” Johanna smirked at Snow. “Sorry, Cory. You sold Gaius Luna the sloppy seconds there.”

“How very unfortunate for Gaius.” Snow’s voice and expression were cool, and Johanna looked irritated at the lack of reaction.

“He doesn’t give a shit,” he told her, shaking his head, remembering his own discussion with Snow back in Twelve. “He got the money out of Luna all the same because Luna believed you were a virgin. We kept it quiet, so it didn't make him lose out because of it.” If she’d gone out and flaunted what the two of them had done, publicly defied Snow, that would have been a different story.

“He's correct. So, what are your plans now?” Snow asked, giving another cough into his handkerchief, wiping at the blood on his lips afterwards. “Go home to Twelve, or perhaps Seven, and try to replace the families you’ve lost?”

“You mean the families you stole from us? You can bet we’re not planning on naming our firstborn ‘Coriolanus’,” Johanna snapped at him irritably.

“Oh, are additional congratulations in order? You two certainly wasted no time.” Somehow, even without knowing the story, the man had hit upon a chink in the armor--a big one.

He could almost sense Johanna’s fury and hurt, practically coming off of her in waves, felt the pressure of his own rage building. “Shut the hell up,” he said, his own voice sounding harsh in his ears. “None of your damn business if we have kids. You’re never getting anywhere near them.”

“As your children, they would have made truly magnificent tributes,” Snow mused. “Though whether they would represent Seven or Twelve would be something of a dilemma, I admit.”

“Would it matter what fucking district they got reaped from? I knew better than to have kids. Legacy tributes are popular enough, but my kids? Johanna’s kids? You’d never have let them survive the Games.”

Those cold blue eyes met his, completely unapologetic. “No. I wouldn’t.”

He wanted to ask whether they would have been reaped right at twelve, or if Snow would give it a few years to let the hope and the dread both continue to grow. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want that hanging over his head if they ever did decide to have a kid, looking at a son or daughter and knowing, This is the age I would have watched them die on my mentor console.

Trying to recover, struggling to get back on even keel, he said to Johanna, “This has been fun and all, but I think we got what we came for.” As usual with Snow too, a hell of an emotional beatdown in the process. He should have expected that.

“Think so,” she said, recovering too, though he could see the traces of her struggling with her calm even as he was. “Let’s bid this piece of shit goodbye properly and get out of here.” He was about to reach in his pocket, do what they had come here for, when Snow spoke up again.

“Did you listen to the contents of the affidavit of Peacekeeper Law that was read during your testimony, Mister Abernathy?”

“Oh, the one where she said she got told you had directly ordered Fog to kill my family and Briar to teach me a lesson? Yeah, I heard.” At least there was a record of it, proof of what Snow had done to him. Fog was probably dead by now, already been near sixty when he finally retired from Twelve after twenty years as its Head, and that was back when Haymitch was only eighteen. Likely meant he couldn’t testify to it himself, so at least Peacekeeper Law had stepped in to do it.

Snow carefully sat down on the stone bench near him, chains rattling, and smoothed down his jacket, immaculately dressed as always. “Did you notice that she recalled that Head Peacekeeper Fog expressed particular misgivings about killing your younger brother?”

“Hey, it’s nice to know he at least momentarily balked at the idea of killing his own son. Were they already dead when the house burned, by the way?”

“Yes, they were dead. Shot beforehand. Also true in your family’s case, of course, before the forest cats came,” he said to Johanna. No loose ends, no chance for screw-ups, just like they’d thought. “So you were aware Ashford was his son.” What was the purpose of this? He wasn’t sure he wanted to go with it, the feeling he was being set up for something, but helplessly, he was drawn in anyway.

“My pa died two years before my ma had a second kid, one with dark brown hair rather than black, and the way Fog was around her and around me and Ash? Really, not that fucking hard to figure out, even when I was only about eight years old. You’ve never pegged me for an idiot.”

“One might also speculate as to the reason Fog acted that way around you,” and what the hell did he mean by that, “but that’s not the purpose of this discussion. Fog called me immediately, begging for clemency on Ashford’s behalf. Claiming the boy was too young to be made an example, not even of reaping age yet, and finally he admitted to me that he was attempting to save his son.”

So Fog really had given a shit about Ash. For a Peacekeeper, even a Head, to be pleading with Coriolanus Snow for mercy on a condemned person’s behalf, that took more than its share of balls. “Lot of good it did him.” Ash had died in the end anyway. Probably just meant Fog had made someone else pull the trigger.

Haymitch tried to ignore the movement he saw behind Snow’s shoulder, didn’t want to see Ash’s ghost, skinny limbs and dark brown hair, standing there in the roses. Didn’t want to see the bullet hole he was now going to be imagining through his little brother’s head. “Didn’t it?” Snow said with a sly smile. “Or perhaps it did.”

He stared at Snow. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“After discussing it with Fog, I realized how short-sighted it would be to kill them all. There could always come a day when even the distant weight of your own district's safety wouldn’t hold you in check--we’ve actually seen that day come and go already, haven’t we? It’s always prudent to hold something back in case of that sort of eventuality. One final trump card, something even you didn’t know about.”

His brother. His little brother who’d been buried and had his headstone in the graveyard and who’d never gotten to grow up and kiss a girl and have kids, all because of Haymitch. Dead at eleven, but here was Snow implying otherwise with that smug look on his face, taunting him with the agony of hope. He didn’t even realize he had Snow’s jacket in his hands until he was right in Snow’s face, breathing in the decaying blood and roses smell that just stoked his fury and his fear all the more, and snarling, “Tell me what you did with Ash or I’ll fucking kill you right now.”

“Haymitch!” He heard Johanna’s voice, felt the pressure of her hand gripping his shoulder, and it cut through some of the layers of helpless rage. “It’s not gonna do any good for you to threaten him like that. He’s dying tomorrow morning anyway.” Nodding tightly, seeing the sense in it, he let go of Snow and stepped back, feeling the tension of his anger still in his body, trembling with the sheer desire to attack, to pound the answer out of him. The desire for pure, bloodthirsty revenge for what he'd endured, and that realization more than anything started to settle him down.

“She’s correct. Threats or pain won’t affect me when my life is already forfeit. So, I ask you again,” Snow smiled again with his teeth horribly streaked red with blood, “what do you have to trade?”

For this, he’d beg. He’d do about anything, no matter what it entailed, how degrading or humiliating or shameful because this was his brother, maybe still alive. That was everything after so long, and he was suddenly afraid that Snow was going to dangle the possibility and then refuse to tell him anything simply to fuck him over one last time.

It was Johanna that stepped in while he was still reeling, stepped in front of him too so Snow was looking at her, her voice calm enough though he heard the undercurrent of anger in it. “You know we’re going after Coin. That’s a gain for you already. As for the rest? Short notice, but we’ll do our best to see if we can’t get you out of your execution.”

“Wait, what?” he protested, hearing what sounded like her making a deal with the devil. No chance Snow ought to get out of it, slither away from getting what was coming to him. It would kill him to let it go but if that was the price, he would have to live with never knowing about Ash. That wasn’t his sacrifice to make, it was all of Panem’s. She looked back over her shoulder at him and her brown eyes said Trust me. Suddenly he thought he realized what she was doing, what her choice of words had meant, and he nodded slightly to her.

“That’s not much.”

“It’s the best you’ll get,” he said, enjoying flinging Snow’s own words back at him. “Besides, the final decision won’t be in our hands, will it? All we can do is try.” With that, Johanna probably knew he followed her reasoning here.

“We’ve agreed to be honest, very well. Fog claimed parentage of Ashford, and asked for mercy for him. I finally agreed to it, on the condition he be removed from Twelve and sent to Two.”

“Why Two?” So Ash was alive. Had been alive, at least. He couldn’t let himself feel everything about that right now, because it would overwhelm him. He couldn’t have a fucking breakdown in front of Coriolanus Snow.

“Orphans there are raised to become Peacekeepers. Really, an elegant solution. It seems fitting that one Abernathy should be made to serve Panem so loyally in recompense for the defiance of the other. Although of course Abernathy is no longer his name. The orphans apparently all were renamed to help them cut the ties to their pasts.”

“Then what is his name now?” he demanded.

“I really don’t know.” Snow held up a hand, neatly gloved in black leather. “No, Mister Abernathy, that’s not a lie. I didn’t concern myself with those details. My only interest was hearing the reports on his continuing loyalty and service from the Peacekeeper Headquarters, and to know I could access him readily if he should be needed to provide you with one final reminder.” One final reminder. What would he have done, confronted with Ash, a grown man, and a Peacekeeper? White uniformed, the symbol of the Capitol’s hated authority. True, some of them had been good men, like Darius. A lot of them had been bastards like Thread or Cray, ready to oppress or exploit the people out in the districts. To know his baby brother had been turned into that, forced to that life because of Haymitch’s actions, was an utter mockery. How hard must it have been to endure that life, constantly punished by it? As hard as being whored out on the circuit, in its own way.

“And did you warn him never to contact me, I assume?”

The lizard eyes flicked up to meet his again. “He didn’t need a reminder of that. Nor did his loyalty need encouragement. You’re clearly both familiar with some of the rather potent effects of tracker jacker venom on the mind.” Oh yes, he was, and at the corner of his vision he knew the child Ash would be there, turning into a vision of what he might look like as a grown man, in that hated white uniform. So instead he focused on Snow’s face so he didn’t see it. “It can also be used to alter memories, make a mind more...hm...malleable in terms of perceiving the world and reality.”

“So you mindfucked an eleven-year-old boy into obedience,” Johanna said into the lingering silence that followed. “Proud moment for you.”

“The term is popularly known as ‘hijacking’, Madam Abernathy. Though we prefer to think of it as...a sort of re-education. I very much doubt he remembers you, Mister Abernathy.”

Did that mean that wherever he was, Ash remembered nothing about those years together? Years Haymitch kicked the shit out of kids who teased Ash for being a Peacekeeper brat. Years he’d tried to teach him the things he learned himself out in the woods. Years of sleeping in the same bed where Ash usually stole all the covers. Years of the way Ash looked up to him with awe, and Haymitch rolled his eyes and rumpled his hair and called him “runt”. Was he really even Ash any longer? To have that hope given and then snatched away again just as quickly left him feeling like he’d been suckerpunched.

“You sorry sack of shit,” Johanna said lowly. He wanted to take her hand, reassure himself that something in his life was still real, hadn’t been stolen away from him. But he wouldn’t do it in front of Snow. He wouldn’t give the old man the satisfaction of knowing he needed that to get through this.

“Yes, well, it worked. And I never had to produce young Ashford as needed leverage, which is quite remarkable. But with that method having proved so effective already, when the time came that you also proved yourself troublesome, Madam Abernathy, I authorized the same in the case of your sister Henrika.”

“Heike?” The sound of it was full of something close to despair, and it tore at him too to hear it. Johanna’s little sister, treated to the same, and if it was bad enough to think about Ash, the knowledge that this put Johanna in pain too was overwhelming. Snow chose well in the Detention Center, making them listen to each other’s screams as a torture. Only the years of maintaining a facade to hide the agony inside was keeping him going right now, and it must be the same for her.

“What else do you know about either of them?” Johanna demanded of him.

“Nothing. They both successfully graduated Peacekeeper training and have served with distinction since.” What did that even mean, what would they have done in the line of duty to earn that? If they were brainwashed into thinking like someone like Brutus or Enobaria once had, that Capitol loyalty came first, who knew what they could have done? “You’d have to consult the Peacekeeper records for more information. As that’s all I have for you, perhaps this concludes our business this evening?”

Johanna straightened up, he could almost see the stiff line of her spine through her dress, and looked at Snow directly. “You know, in Seven, every year we’d have a few weeks of going to a forest that got replanted, where the saplings were still starting to grow. We’d have to root out the weeds and the vines and everything so the trees would be healthy.” Her voice went low and she said, “You’re a weed, old man, sapping this country for your own benefit. You have been for decades. And now we’ve finally rooted you out. So fuck you.”

Haymitch reached in his pocket and pulled out a fresh handkerchief, handing it to Snow. “Here you go. Hope you find it useful.” Feeling the weight of something in it, Snow’s eyebrows rose slightly as he unfolded it, trying to keep his hands steady. Several bright green pellets lay in the white linen in his hand. At his questioning look towards them, Haymitch smiled wolfishly at him and said, “You really think that after so many years of sacrificing our own interests to keep other people safe that we’d suddenly let you get away at the end? We never said we’d get you out of your execution alive.”

“We thought about a nightlock pellet,” Johanna told him. “But that there, it’s even better. You baby these roses so damn much that you ought to recognize weed killer when you see it.”

Snow’s laugh was a horrible clacking, wheezing sound that Haymitch thought he would hear in his mind until the day he died. “Bravo. I couldn’t have done it better myself. Providing me, a known poisoner, with a poison that I could have obtained here, secreted away in the soil of my own garden. Your tracks are neatly covered, and Panem avoids the grotesque spectacle of my execution with the Mockingjay acting as Alma’s pawn. Finally beginning to think on a bigger playing field, are we?”

“Your choice, take it or not as you like,” Haymitch told him. “I really don’t give a shit. As I said, whether you die, that’s not up to us.” Of course he cared, he didn’t want it to come down to the execution tomorrow morning, putting the burden of it on Katniss and playing into Coin's hands, but he wasn’t going to let it show and give Snow the satisfaction. “It’ll be quick.” Rapid incapacitation of the lungs and heart, and considering how compromised Snow’s breathing was already, that would probably help even more.

“Now that the game’s over, I’ll admit it’s actually been something of a pleasure to match wits over the years.”

“Can’t say the same.” He wanted to just get the hell out of there while he and Johanna were both still capable of holding it together. But he had one more thought then, and quickly tugged off his gloves, showing off his hands. Snow would see his brand-new wedding ring too, yes, but also the pink scars of the healing burns there. Have you lived all this time believing someday the chance would come for you to prove yourself the phoenix that would rise from the ashes? There are your ashes, Mister Abernathy. Perhaps we’ll see if you can burn. “Looks like I can burn, huh? But you'll burn tomorrow, and you ain’t rising up again." He'd already heard that they planned to cremate Snow's body and scatter the ashes to the winter winds so there would never be any kind of tomb or memorial to him. "Goodbye, Coriolanus.” With that they left, and he took her hand as they went. Whatever else Snow might have said as parting words, Haymitch didn’t hear and really didn’t care.

Chapter Text

They’d arrived back at the Twelve apartment, having abandoned the Victory Ball. Not like either of them felt like going back and faking interest after what Snow had said out there in the greenhouse. It had been bad enough seeing Haymitch obviously staggered by the news about his brother, and she’d seen that he couldn’t quite get a grip, stepped in to try to protect him from it as best she could. She knew what his brother had meant to him, with as hard as it was for him to talk about Ash. To find out he was not only alive, but that he’d been forced into Capitol service was rough enough, but to then hear he’d been mindfucked into forgetting. To be honest it was the most exquisite kind of cruelty she could imagine, even for Snow. Giving a glimmer of hope and then brutally ripping it away mere moments later, it was making Haymitch lose Ash all over again.

She should have figured that if Snow did a thing once and it worked he’d have done it again, but when he said he’d done it to Heike too, it was like the bottom dropped out from her world. Her sister. Kind little clumsy chatterbox Heike, just barely turned fourteen when she had supposedly died. Heike, who’d desperately wanted those hair ribbons. Heike, who’d never met someone she didn’t want to try to make her friend, compared to Johanna’s tomboy prickliness. Had she been forced to watch them shoot Bern and Mom and Dad before the Peacekeepers left them for the forest cats to come and devour?

They had burned Haymitch’s family. Hers was torn to pieces by the cats. Looking at it in the cold light of things, she could only think that was to cover the evidence, so nobody would see there was one body missing or perhaps substituted with another one.

She thought about Heike, alone and terrified in Two, being injected with the tracker jacker venom to turn her mind into the Capitol’s tool. She’d be twenty-three now, a grown woman. A Peacekeeper. With the rebellion she might even be dead, there had been plenty of Peacekeepers killed, and Johanna had almost been satisfied to hear that back in Thirteen. That was before one of them might have been Heike. Or Ash.

Neither of them had said a word to each other on the way back, because to open the gates of it was too much to bear right now. What would they even say? They couldn’t go back and kill Snow again for it, though she wished they could. This new burden on top of facing the threat of Coin was too damn much, and she felt like if either of them said something, she’d just start to come apart.

Standing there in the living room, taking off her winter gear and those long silk gloves, she eyed the television. She could turn it on, true, try to distract herself that way. But the news would be all about the Victory Ball, and Snow’s execution in the morning, and the midnight countdown to the New Year, things she didn’t want to think about right now.

Haymitch came back and her heart sank a little when she saw he was clutching a bottle by the neck. She couldn’t fault him exactly, she kind of really wanted a drink right now, kind of wanted to get roaring drunk actually, but she couldn’t help the notion of feeling a little dejected and pretty pissed off at the sight of him immediately turning back towards his favorite method of self-destruction. It wasn’t like she’d gone and immediately pinned some stranger up against the wall at Snow’s mansion and fucked him to help herself cope. Her new husband, and he aimed to spend their wedding night cuddled up with a bottle.

“One thing I’ll say,” he said, that rough and sarcastic edge sharp in his voice, “they do keep a fantastic liquor cabinet here. Always some new stuff in it every year. Not that I was exactly choosy, you know.” She knew full well. However he may have been when he was younger, by the time she met him he was rapidly becoming the sort of drunk where quantity most definitely trumped quality. “There’s a nice little business in One in selling well-aged booze from the districts to the Capitol. The raw stuff, that’s too provincial for them. But give it ten, fifteen years to mellow out in a barrel and even good ol’ white lightning becomes something impressive.”

“No kidding, Haymitch,” she snapped at him, not in the mood for a lesson about liquor. “Where the fuck do you think One gets the barrels for ageing wine and whiskey and all of it?” There were coopers in Seven who took white oak, turned it into staves and then barrels for export to One just for that purpose.

“Ah,” he murmured, a faint wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Then it looks like you have some claim on this too. Good choice, then.” He tossed her the bottle--unopened, still sealed, she noticed. She caught it and read the label. Commemorative bourbon whiskey, originally from Twelve, aged for twenty-five years in the barrel before they had bottled it. “Meant to be a nice little memento for the Quell this year,” he said with a harsh chuckle when she looked up at him. “Chaff told me they had bottles of rye whiskey during the Second Quell they’d barreled up the year of the First.” For Harvest Anderson, from Nine, she realized. Now for this year, they’d cracked open the bourbon barrel, stuck one bottle of it in the Twelve liquor cabinet for Haymitch so he could relive the glory of his win or whatever.

If he wanted to dwell on his past and get drunk by himself, fine. Bastard. “So what, you want me to leave you alone to get cozy with the mistress here?” she said, holding up the bottle and handing it back to him, fighting the urge to smash it instead. Why she had to bristle and snap, why she just couldn’t say something so simple as, I’m involved in this too, I need you here with me tonight rather than you holing up and drinking yourself fucking blind and stupid and miserable, she didn’t know. But the words I need you stuck in her throat all the same and what came out instead was pure bitchiness as usual.

He looked a little startled. Then something shifted, his expression softening. “Hanna...” Ever since she’d told him about what those who knew her had used to called her, he’d only used it that once, that final night in Thirteen. If he’d called her that in public she’d have been pissed off, because him telling her that had been something private, said like that when she thought they were both dead come morning. It startled her somewhat to hear it now, that little bit of sheer familiarity, and she tried to not read too much into it, not wanting to be let down by him.

“I’m not gonna damn well beg,” she told him fiercely. She shouldn’t have to do that, continually fight to matter to him more than other things.

He looked at her with something in his face that she couldn’t read, not yet. “No, I think we’ve both had to go down on our knees enough already.” Wasn’t that the truth, whether he meant in terms of sex or submission, or most likely both. She thought about him only an hour or so ago, raging at Snow, You think I wouldn’t beg? You had me forced down on my knees ever since I was a kid. No, he wouldn’t make her beg. “I figured we’d both have ourselves a drink. I did say we would,” he explained, and she could practically feel how careful he was being, testing to see if the rift was there ready to drag them into a fight. She didn’t want to fight him, not tonight.

“He’s not dead yet,” she reminded him. Though he could be, if he’d taken those pellets right after the two of them left. “Not until tomorrow.”

“No, but fuck it, I’m calling it close enough,” he said with a shrug, peeling the seal on the bottle and opening the top. “No ice, too bad. Let me go find a couple of glasses...”

She laughed at him, making him pause and glance over at her. “Stop being a prig. We’ve fucked each other, Haymitch, think I can drink from the same bottle as you.” We’re married, we would have had a kid. “Or are you just trying to make sure I get half of it before you can chug it all?”

He laughed in return at that, bitter and low and dark, lifted the bottle and took a drink, a single sip, and held the bottle out to her. That at least told her he wasn’t going to start guzzling the entire thing having taken the first taste of it. She watched him lick the droplets of it off his lips, and he said, “It ain’t champagne, but...here’s to us. Took everything they threw at us and we’re still here.” Still here, he'd said, those comforting words, and that he chose that to say first soothed her a little more, told her that he remembered through the pain and bewilderment that there was now an us.

She took the bottle. “Suits better than champagne would.” Champagne was too genteel, too soft. She raised it, and took a drink herself, all smoke and sweetness and smooth burn, Twelve liquor and Seven oak and twenty-five years of simple endurance. She took another drink and said, “To Coriolanus Snow. May he finally rot in hell.” She gave him the bottle and watched him take his drink for that one.

“To our new president Alma Coin. May she get everything she’s earned.” He didn’t dare say more than that, probably conscious even as Johanna was of the potential that the bitch herself was listening in. If she was, to hell with her.

“To a new Panem and not screwing it up like the old one.”

He hesitated a good while before offering up the next one, half-raising the bottle a couple of times as if ready to say something, and then letting it die unsaid. “To absent friends,” he said finally.

She drank to that, and figured they’d better quit because if they started naming each loss and taking a drink to them, they’d be through the Quell bourbon in no time and probably through the entirety of the liquor cabinet to boot before they were done. There was no shortage of names. She looked over at him and met his eyes with hers, giving the only thing she could see suitable to end this. “To Heike. And Ash. Wherever they are tonight.” Whoever they are.

He took one last drink for that and she was gratified to see he put the cap back on, setting the bottle down on the table. Then he was kissing her, or she was kissing him, didn’t really matter who made the move. It was good, almost too good, exactly what she needed right now. All intense heat and lingering taste of liquor, the immediacy of him there wanting her enough to put down the bottle, and she gratefully gave herself up to it.

She could almost have killed him when like after Finnick’s wedding he suddenly backed off, and there was a flicker of worry in his eyes like he was afraid to hurt her. Like after what Coin did things had been damaged badly and she wouldn’t be OK. She’d only hurt if he tried to treat her like she was too fragile to bear this and let that distance between them open up again after they’d fought to get this far. “It’s fine,” she snapped. “I’m fine.”

“I didn’t get a damn injection yet,” he said with frustration. Considering he’d gotten out of the habit in recent years and she hadn’t even told him until after they’d left the hospital, she hardly blamed him on that. Probably figured she’d been too caught up in what happened to get one either.

“I did.” It was one of the first things she’d done after the nurse had told her. She saw the relief in his expression at that. Heading towards the bedroom, leading him away from the bottle still on the table, she said over her shoulder, “Coming?”

“Oh, after you,” he answered dryly, his voice right behind her as she turned on the lamp beside the bed. She laughed, turning to kiss him again, finding the spark there ready and waiting, shoving the coat from his shoulders and down his arms as he helped her take it off. Usually back in Thirteen they’d just stripped before getting down to business, finding it still a little too much to be undressing each other. But right now she didn’t want to step back and let him do it. That he’d allow her said something, and she pushed it while she could, blindly tackling the buttons of his vest and then glancing down and undoing his tie. Nothing leisurely about it, urgent and eager as the kissing, and even as she was handling his shirt buttons she felt his hands on her back, finding the zipper of her dress, tugging it down.

Shrugging it from her shoulders, taking her hands from him long enough to slide her arms through the sleeves and help shimmy it down her hips, the dress pooled on the floor around her ankles under its own weight as she stepped out of it. “Hurry up,” she said, kissing him again. Obliging, he had the clasp of her bra undone a few seconds later with ease. Probably had a lot of practice over the years at it, expected to have the skills to play the role of the experienced rakehell, but he wasn’t acting a part, not with her.

No time for the niceties, and she was relieved to see him as impatient as her as they got rid of the rest of the clothes, felt the urgency in his hands running over her body, shoulders and back and breasts and hips and between her thighs. She saw his new burn scars at a glance but dismissed them quickly as just another part of him. They’d been this desperate before, that first time in Thirteen, but that had been laced through and through with the anxiety it wouldn’t work, the feeling that they had to rush because if they paused even for a moment the reality and fear might intrude. This felt clean of that awkwardness, pure heat and desire and if she couldn’t say I need you tonight to him in words, she said it now with her body, how she pulled him over her, how she stroked his cock and guided him inside her, how she gasped against his mouth and arched her back as he filled her tightly.

This was what she’d needed tonight, not tender touches and soft kisses and sweet romance. She was no shy girl needing a gentle awakening. She was a woman who’d been dragged through hell over the years, beaten down and broken and scarred, and she’d been left reeling yet again even after the war ended. Hurt and pissed off and grieving and scared, all of it, she needed someone who could withstand the full force of her darker side and her jagged edges, someone who could share that and not be wounded or frightened by it.

Much as this was terrifying in some ways, she wanted to let go of all of it, bottled up as it had been, and let him do the same. She wanted to claim him as her own, not Snow’s and not Coin’s and not Gloriana Frill’s or Thalius Eland’s or even belonging to a bottle of whiskey. She wanted to lose herself in him in turn and know he’d keep a piece of her safe by it, bound to him.

With the rake of her nails on his shoulders and the way she moved beneath him, she gave him no quarter. He returned the favor, and it was fast and hard with the thump of the headboard against the wall, him looking down at her with those grey eyes gone all dark with desire, looking at her in a way that was fierce and hungry. He’d looked at her before during sex, as she had him, but there was always the intrusion there of anxiety, of uncertainty, because they were watching each other for signs that they needed to back off and take it easy. This time he watched her like he simply couldn’t get enough of her, like he couldn’t bear to look away.

They both might ache a bit tomorrow, going at it a bit rough like this, but this wouldn’t be them hurting each other. It wasn’t about deliberately causing pain, the way it had been with some patrons. This was not being able to back off, of giving in to a sheer overwhelming need for each other tonight to shut out everything but this comfort. Need that had driven them beyond the point of what lingering fear or self-consciousness they might have still had. This was what she’d wanted from him, knowing how badly he’d been damaged that he had forged his control so tight he’d retreated from feeling anything. Seeing him in this state of abandon, lost in the moment and knowing it was all for her, made her respond even more to him in turn, writhing harder and demanding, “More.”

He got his hands beneath her hips, lifting them, urging them up higher. Still looking at her, breathing hard, he said lowly, thickly, “Wrap your legs around me.”

With anyone else, even the other times before with him, she would have scoffed and said Asshole, I don’t take orders in bed, I give them, or Yeah, and what will you do for me? This time she heard it in his voice and saw it in his eyes that he wanted her closer yet, needed it. So she gave him what he asked for, got her legs locked tight around his waist, crossed behind his back, pulling him in closer.

Her reward for that was a pretty enthusiastic groan of pleasure from him. He was still so damn quiet in bed usually, held back in that well-trained silence he was trying to shake off, so hearing something that unrestrained wasn’t expected by any means. It felt good, felt powerful to be the cause of that in him; and not powerful in the condescending way it had with others, wanting to laugh at how helpless they became in the depths of lust while she stayed apart from it. Hearing that and knowing what she was doing to him, she felt the coiling tension within her go even tighter at the sound. With that and how that move changed the angle a bit in just the right way, took him inside her even deeper too, it was nearly too much. She almost came right there. As was, she gasped out a helpless, “Fuck.”

It showed how caught up he was in this that he didn’t take being handed a wide open opportunity for Yeah, that’s the idea here, darlin’, or some other wisecrack like that. He just leaned down to kiss her hard. Hands on his shoulders, she tugged him down to her. He obliged, lowering and bracing up on his elbows. The way his weight pressed her back into the mattress, the feel of his body skin-to-skin all along hers, the brush of the hard muscle and soft hair of his chest against her breasts; all of it was a dizzying, heightened level of sensation, and she didn't feel trapped by it like she'd worried she might. She wrapped her arms around him, fingers stroking over skin and scars both, running a hand through his black hair now grown back enough to start to show the curl of it. She kissed him back, seizing his bottom lip in her teeth for a moment. They found a good rhythm again, and maybe they’d figured it out, because as she gave herself over to the pleasure of it and he followed soon after, finally he felt close enough now to push away the nagging doubt and fear. She'd spent enough time already convinced that every kiss, every touch, every laugh, every wisecrack and verbal jab, every softer moment in the still of the night, would be the last one they would have, afraid to embrace it fully because of how that pending loss would tear her apart. Now she could start to try and let herself believe day by day that this was real, he was hers and she was his, and it could last and not be stolen away or screwed up.

Lying there next to him after, covers tucked up against the chilly air on their flushed and sweaty skin, she had her head next to his on the pillow. So this is what it’s like. She’d known already from the past that it was harder to think of most anything right after a good fuck. But this felt stronger than that, more than the haze right after pleasure.

Their siblings, Snow, Coin, the miscarriage, the war, the Games, the Detention Center, the future of Panem, the problems were still there and they’d come back, needing to be addressed. For now, though, it had all retreated to a safe distance leaving only this interlude of peace and quiet, no pain or sorrow. Just the two of them, belonging to each other. His eyes were on her again, though now they were deep and thoughtful, the calm after the storm. Reaching out a hand, he stroked her cheek, her hair. “We’ll find ‘em. Whatever it takes,” he said simply, and she heard the promise in those words, forged tough as the ones he’d made her at the Hall of Justice.

She didn’t say to him that they might be dead already, among the many casualties of the war. Or imprisoned or due to be executed for something they’d done during their time as Peacekeepers. Or even if they were alive and well they might not remember any of their life back when they were kids, before the venom, and they might not want to try. He wasn’t an idiot, he had to know all of that already. But even if it came to the worst like that, at least they would know for sure. They could start to try to move on, and that would be better than the torment of always having to wonder.

“We will,” she answered him, accepting it was true. “And we’ll show the bastards, because we’re gonna live.” She figured he knew what she meant, not that they’d live in terms of survival, though she damn well was counting on the fact that despite Coin’s best plans they would do that. But they’d simply survived for too many years already. She meant that they would find a way to really live.

“Good plan. We’ll get on the details of that. Later.” He leaned over, hand cupping the back of her head, kissing her. She could sense it wasn’t as a direct prelude to another round, because it was leisurely and even gentle. But even without the sense of overwhelming urgency, she could feel him there, withholding nothing from her. So she answered him in turn without having to think about it.

They told each other about Heike, about Ash. Spoken in whispers, something in its way as intimate than what they’d just done. Words hesitant at first from drawing on memories long buried away as too painful, slowly coming more easily. Maple syrup and snow candy. Blue hair ribbons. Setting snares. Handing over worn hand-me-down shoes too big that had to be stuffed with rags in the toes. Giving up the larger slice of bread. Kicking the crap out of other kids in the name of protection. Helping teach letters and numbers. The proud first catch of a rabbit. The little stories of years growing up as older siblings, moments of laughter and irritation and exasperation and love.

Somewhere deep in the night she heard the distant sounds of noise out on the streets. It must be midnight, turning over into the new year. They were having a muted celebration in a battered and terrified city, she was sure. She rolled over and tucked back into the curve of his body, feeling the warmth of him, feeling the steady beat of his heart against her back, and gradually she faded off to sleep with his breath stirring softly against her cheek.

In retrospect, seeing Snow maybe hadn’t been the smartest move. But Katniss had wanted to, and so Peeta had gone with her, knowing maybe she needed this kind of closure. She hadn’t been abused in the same way people like Finnick and Haymitch and Johanna and the others he’d watched testify had, but Snow had terrified and tortured her in his own way to gain control over her. In her good behavior being the price of so many peoples’ lives, she had suffered more than her share.

But it hadn’t gone exactly as expected. From his experience of Snow, Peeta should have expected that it could never be something as simple as face value--the man always played a deeper game. A person had to be sharp to keep up with him, and neither he nor Katniss were at their best. Snow probably found it laughably easy to yank them around.

It was what he said that had lingered when Katniss yelled at him about his soldiers shooting Prim. “I can’t speak for certain as to whether it was my Peacekeepers that injured your sister, Miss Everdeen,” Snow had said, resting his chin in his hand and giving them a terrible smile, “but I think you haven’t allowed for the very good possibility they didn’t. Being shot in the back typically speaks to the bullet coming from one’s own side, doesn’t it? Accidentally, of course. Or perhaps not. Such a strange thing for such a young girl to be on the front lines to begin, and such a miracle she didn’t die, unless she was meant to provide an example of what could be done to those you love?” He laughed then. “Clever Alma, to injure the child in a way that any hope of recovery will be prolonged and dependent upon continuing access to the best care. Care that could easily be denied her should you prove recalcitrant, Mockingjay.”

From there when Katniss turned next to the bombing of the children, he coolly outlined how he had no cause to be responsible for that, and with the cold reason of it laid bare, Peeta couldn’t find reason to argue. All in all it led back to one dreadful possibility: Coin was the very thing they had just deposed. They hadn’t liked her at all, true, and seeing how ruthless she had been in the takeover of the Capitol had been disturbing, but it was one thing to dislike someone and another to be ready to think them that deliberately cold-blooded.

They spent hours at the hospital after that, watching Prim sleeping peacefully in her bed, talking quietly about what Snow had told them. “At least we know one monster dies tomorrow,” Katniss said finally, huddling up tight in the too-large sweater from their apartment that she was wearing against the chill over her black and white evening dress.

The execution, where Katniss would kill an unarmed man on national television. Peeta had to admit that the more he thought about it, the more he saw the spectacle surrounding it, the more he disliked it. He didn’t think she’d feel as gratified by it as she’d thought, back when she demanded getting to kill Snow as one of her terms of being the Mockingjay. “Katniss, maybe you should get someone else to take that shot. Say that you’re still healing, that you’re not well enough.” It was even mostly true. They both still tired easily, trying to work strength back into their atrophied muscles, and they both were still on low levels of morphling on a daily basis.

“I can’t back down now or Coin’s got me where she wants me,” she said, shaking her head with that intensely stubborn look, that expression that wouldn’t allow for the appearance of weakness. She sighed, running a hand through her hair. After the fire singed it so badly, it had been cut short to her shoulders and skillfully styled to conceal the thin spots, but as her fingers mussed it, he could see them again. She said finally, “We should talk to Haymitch in the morning.” Her eyes said it clearly enough: I can’t do this again, Haymitch will have a plan, he’ll know what to do.

Haymitch probably would be helpful here, that was true. But the more Peeta thought on that notion, the more he realized it: Haymitch always had a plan. “If we’re figuring this out now,” he said slowly, “you don’t think he’s there worked through it himself? Him and probably Johanna too?” It would be harder to Haymitch to hide something from his fiancee, and Johanna was pretty astute herself, for all she hid it behind her blunt, in-your-face openness.

From there it was remembering how he’d sent them home from the Victory Ball, how he’d carefully asked them about things over the last few weeks, how he’d dryly remarked that he wouldn’t trust Coin or her promises too much. “I’ll bet you he’s been shutting us out,” Peeta concluded.

“Then we’re definitely going to have a talk with him in the morning,” Katniss said, eyes flashing with anger, and probably the most life he’d seen from her in weeks. “We went through this already after the Quell. He agreed. No more of him keeping secrets and going behind our backs. Especially when it’s our necks on the line.”

In the morning they took the elevator up from the seventh floor, familiar in every way except the decor color, to knock on the door of the Twelve apartment. It was a long minute before Johanna answered the door, pushing a hand through her tousled hair as she looked both of them over. “At it early,” she observed dryly.

“We were thinking about going for a walk and we wanted to see if you and Haymitch wanted to come along.” The way Katniss said it, it was more like an order than an invitation, and he could see the flash of humor in Johanna’s eyes at the recognition.

She pushed open the door and said, “Yeah, sure, fresh air sounds good. Wait here in the living room. It’s gonna be a few minutes.” As they stepped inside, Peeta saw that she was wearing what looked like Haymitch’s white shirt from last night, to judge from how it covered her down to her knees, hastily misbuttoned. She must have thrown it on in a hurry, he realized, rather than taking the time to find something of her own. She waved an idle hand towards the couch to gesture them there, padding back towards the bedroom Haymitch had used both last summer and this year.

Katniss mumbled, “I’m really not sure I needed to see that.” Though Peeta understood, it was more the mental image of what she must have been up to last night that was alarming her.

“At least she wasn’t naked again,” he pointed out with some humor. She made an exaggerated face of horror and swatted his arm.

Katniss leaned forward and picked up a bottle of liquor on the coffee table, cap in place. It was still mostly full. “All right, he was drinking last night, but not much at all, and at least he put it back down,” she said with a faint sigh of something like relief. She read the label and he judged from her expression that something wasn’t right. Reaching over and taking the bottle, he quickly found out what it was. Carefully he put the bottle back down again.

He found the remote control and turned on the television, figuring it would be better than the awkward silence of thinking about their mentor and his fiancee and their sex life. Peeta was happy for him, really. Politely happy, from a distance, without details.

Of course, a newscast was on, clearly in the middle of a broadcast. First up was a report about the rationing shortages expected in the shops today. It was one thing if they couldn’t get oranges or shrimp, but he instinctively winced to see it included something so essential and normal as bread. They showed the people of the Capitol already in the ration queues, and some had been out there since the middle of the night in the freezing cold, only for the hope of a loaf of bread. He thought about Katniss at eleven, desperate and out in the rain, face and body all defeated too-thin angles as she starved and looked over at him with a hopeless expression. He remembered the rich food at the ball last night and felt sick to see nothing much had changed, and wished he had enough bread to give to them all.

Katniss’ fingers crept over and held his, though she let out a gasp of surprise at the next story. “It seems the blossoming of love in the arena has become a District Twelve tradition...” Apparently Haymitch and Johanna had gotten married yesterday at the Hall of Justice. They showed several pictures of the two of them. One of them was obviously from the arena this year from Haymitch’s short hair and their district-colored shirts, Haymitch’s black and Johanna’s green, the two of them with their arms around each other. That had been after the jabberjays, Peeta remembered. Another picture of them in the clothes he recognized from last night, looking like they were in the middle of a dance. One from during Snow’s trial, Haymitch’s hand on her shoulder as their heads were bowed together in quiet conversation. The general opinion seemed to be, if not the overwhelming idealistic enthusiasm for himself and Katniss, at least a sincere, “Good for them, they’ve earned it.”

“Oh, that’s truly precious,” Johanna said, now leaning down on the back of the couch. One quick look at her left hand and Peeta saw the ring there proving it was true. She smirked at the two of them, giving Peeta’s cheek a quick, light pinch. “So, gonna welcome your new evil stepmentor to the family, Kittycat? Hotbuns?”

“Congratulations,” Katniss said, still sounding baffled.

Right about then there was a holler from Haymitch of an obviously pissed off, “Damn it, Jo!” Johanna chortled gleefully at that.

“Uh, congratulations from me too. What did you do to him?” Peeta asked, unable to help it. It couldn’t be turning the shower on cold, like Farl had loved to do to him in the house in Victors' Village just to be a pain. That probably would have earned actual yells of alarm, to judge from how badly Haymitch had reacted to Katniss throwing that water on him back in Thirteen.

“Last time he lets me just program the shower ahead for him while he’s shaving,” she said with a proud smirk. “Hey, I’ve got to keep him on his toes.”

“We would have figured you’d have waited a while to get married,” Katniss told her. “Or, um, is there some reason...”

“No, Katniss, I’m not knocked up, we’ll leave that story to you and Peeta,” and the fact that she used their actual names was unusual enough, but there was an odd sense of anger in her tone at the suggestion it might be a hasty wedding due to a pregnancy. “You don’t have a mayor in Twelve and might not for a while. That’s it. We figured we’d do the damn paperwork now because nobody cares about that and do the important stuff later. Have some cake and all of that with the people we actually give a shit about.”

“OK, OK,” Katniss said, waving her hands in surrender. “Sorry.”

Haymitch came out a few minutes later, and he grumbled at Johanna, “I swear you’re gonna pay for that,” before nodding to Peeta and Katniss. “What the hell is this?”

“I went for jonquil,” Johanna said with a grin. “Aw, honey, you smell so nice.” As Haymitch passed by, looking totally sober, sticking his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, Peeta caught the distinct whiff of a floral soap. “Kids gave us their congratulations, by the way.”

Haymitch nodded at that, looking over at the two of them, and he looked about ready to say something when Joy Cloudmist came back with a breaking story. President Snow apparently had been found dead in his greenhouse early that morning, having committed suicide by poison during the night.

“What?” Katniss said with a gasp.

“Looks like he did us all a favor there and just got it over with,” Johanna said matter-of-factly, sprawling out on the couch beside Haymitch.

“You don’t have to shoot him after all, sweetheart,” Haymitch added, looking thoughtful. “Panem gets to move on without a big ugly spectacle either. I’d call that a plus.”

Peeta couldn’t honestly disagree, though the suddenness of it was startling, and he couldn’t help but fear a little bit that those that were demanding a pound of flesh weren’t going to be happy with this turn of events. “So that’s it, then. We can go home.” He almost demanded it of Haymitch, wanting to see his reaction and what it might say about his thoughts on whether it really was over. He could have tried watching Johanna but he was more familiar with Haymitch and his possible tells.

Haymitch gave him nothing, no sign at all, but then, he was a master at concealing his thoughts and feelings. Having listened to the trial, Peeta knew he’d forged that ability in a lot of pain and suffering. Peeta himself had learned to lie very young, to pretend that everything was fine at home and that his bruises came from clumsiness, and to make his teachers and everyone else believe it. It had been the only way to survive, because even if they somehow did something and took his mother away, which was unlikely, Liam Mellark probably couldn’t raise three boys on his own. Or they might take them away from him too, there was always that fear. They’d have ended up in the community home, and she was their mother, at least they knew her rages and her problems and could usually handle them. So he lied and he got good at it, so good that nobody ever saw beyond his quiet, so eager-to-please demeanor.

“Let’s go take that walk, huh?” Haymitch said finally, apparently having equally sized Peeta up.

Dressed up warmly, there were reporters almost the moment they exited the lobby of the Training Center, wanting to get statements on Snow’s death, on Prim’s status, on Haymitch and Johanna’s marriage, on his recovery and Katniss’ too, on whether they had plans to renew their vows and file the paperwork, on when they planned to try for another baby, on whether Haymitch and Johanna planned to start a family of their own, on rebuilding Twelve, on their thoughts on Coin. It was all a cacophony of words that made his head spin.

“It’s a new year for Panem, and a new beginning, where we can all hopefully start to move beyond the pain that’s shaped our past,” Haymitch said, giving them a quick sound clip. “That’s all for now, and we’d appreciate some consideration while we talk about our own future plans.”

“Sorry, folks, we newlyweds need our privacy,” Johanna told them with a sly grin. “Don’t be stupid and make me smash your cameras, eh?” A few chuckles broke out at that and Peeta was pretty sure some of them were nervous ones. It worked, though, and they were left alone to continue on.

“Mags taught me way back when you’ve got to give ‘em a little or they’ll hound you until you do,” Haymitch said dryly. “Though that’s a fine balance. I’m sure Katniss and Peeta agree, the more you give, the more they seem to want.”

“No kidding,” Katniss said, glancing over at Peeta. “They still want more.”

“They won’t get it,” Peeta assured her. They were going to live their lives for themselves now, not for the Capitol or the cameras.

“I give you credit, darlin’,” Haymitch told Johanna with obvious amusement, “that’s about the most effective job of chasing them off a good half-dozen hot stories that I’ve ever seen.”

“A reputation as an angry bitch is so useful sometimes.”

They went to Victory Park, only a few blocks away, free of the cameras that they feared were still active in the Training Center. Though even that short distance was enough to see a long line of people waiting at a grocery, and though it was early in the morning yet, the sign said that they were sold out of milk, potatoes, and oatmeal already. Peeta sighed, shaking his head at it. “So this is what we fought for. To turn the same back on them as they did to us.” Again, he watched to see for a sign of something.

Katniss was far less patient. “You lied to us again, Haymitch,” she said bluntly. “I’m betting on it.”

“Oh?” Haymitch said with interest, cocking his head aside. “And on what subject would that be, sweetheart? I know the Capitol bastards' defense lawyer proved well and good I’m a known liar, but I’m really not your father, promise.”

“Coin,” Katniss spit the name furiously, kicking at a clod of snow as she said it.

“Ah, that,” Johanna said, and that simple acknowledgment told Peeta plenty.

“She bombed those kids in front of Snow’s mansion. She got Prim injured up on the front lines, probably deliberately planned to have her paralyzed like that.”

“Hadn’t thought about that one,” Haymitch mused, “but that’s a good point. She got shot in the back, didn’t she? Probably friendly fire. Really easy to make it deliberate.”

Hearing him say that, reminded of what Snow had said, Peeta said angrily, “And Prim’s recovery rests on her getting care that’ll probably be tied to Katniss’ continued compliance, we get it. She’s right. You kept this from us, Haymitch.” Because it was more than obvious he’d worked his way through it already. “You had no right to keep us out of it.”

“No right?” Johanna snapped angrily. “Says the girl who threw herself at a reaping stage to save her sister. Says the boy who suddenly pulled out a love declaration on his crush on national television to save her life. You two did plenty to keep others out of it, so don’t get so fucking judgmental. You’re two, you’re so damn lucky, and you don’t even appreciate it. When he was seventeen, when I was seventeen, we didn’t have anyone left who would try to protect us. We had to take all of it, year after year.” She raised an eyebrow. “And whatever little Twelve pact you three made, I didn’t agree to jack shit on keeping you in the loop, so don’t start blaming me.”

“You two were still in drugged-up comas when she and I figured it all out,” Haymitch said finally, arms crossed over his chest. “You’re still not fully well, let’s be honest. You’re in no shape to take on another Snow.” He looked over at them, grey eyes fiercely unapologetic. “And you’ve given enough already, damn you both, so why can’t you ever be smart enough to shut up and sit down when I try to give you a chance?”

“Same reason you can’t ever leave it alone, Haymitch,” Johanna said with a snort. “They care.”

“Like you don’t,” Katniss retorted at her. “You’re planning to take Coin down right alongside him. I doubt it’s only ‘cause he somehow dragged you into it. You’re not that stupid or weak.”

“That’s a hell of a compliment. Getting better with those little kitten claws, are we?”

Peeta thought back to Mentor Central, about stretching out in that chair for a quick nap, about sleeping on the couch in the lounge. The other mentors had been there for him as much as they could, and it had still been hard. He’d been so alone, so helpless. Haymitch had been even more alone and helpless than that, enduring twenty-three years as a mentor purely solo with no help and no allies for the arena, watching tributes die and stitching up their bodies, going home to Twelve where he’d pushed away all his friends and any hopes of a life in the name of protecting other people. Solitude and distance must have become like instinct to him in response to that, and that he’d let Johanna in that close as his ally against Coin as well as his wife said plenty about his opinion of her. “You think she’s strong enough to be there along with you, and I’m gonna guess you’ve come to rely on her pretty deeply also that you’re not trying to shove her out of harm’s way too,” he said, looking over at Haymitch. The startled look on Haymitch’s face told him he’d hit the mark. “You don’t have to go it alone this time, though. You shouldn’t. Not when other people want to help.”

“We’re not stepping aside here,” Katniss added. “You know we won’t.”

“Oh, I’m sure if I tell you to get lost you’ll just go behind my back like you always do. So let’s be realistic about the situation. You’re not gonna just be able to barge in and shoot her dead. You see that there?” Haymitch pointed a gloved finger towards an imposing black marble obelisk in the center of the park, rising tall against the grey winter sky. “Victory Park. The names of the victors are engraved on that. All seventy-five of us, from Trajan Shulikuk from Two, all the way to you two. Saluting our supposed courage and sacrifice in the name of Panem’s enduring peace.“

“Well, courage and sacrifice to bring peace, we got that right,” Johanna said with a bitter laugh. “Just not how those pricks intended.”

“There’s seventeen of us left now. That means forty-two of us died in the last six months due to a rebellion that I made happen. I don’t know exactly how we’re gonna nail Coin yet because she’s tricky. She’s clever as Snow, greedy and arrogant about power like him too.”

“Arrogance is a big problem, though. You told us that once,” Peeta reminded him, remembering what he’d told them about the Careers.

“Yeah, but she hasn’t had years in power to get complacent like he did. She’ll be wary until her position is snug and secure. And you two get involved this time, if it all goes bad, I can’t guarantee you’ll make it home alive.” Peeta knew what he was getting at but couldn’t quite bring himself to say openly: that he really wanted the two of them to live, to be safe.

“That could happen even if we play nice and stay out of it,” Katniss told him. “We’re going to stay at risk so long as Coin’s around and we need to know what’s going on with it so we don’t make a mistake.” She looked at Haymitch, the ferocity in her Seam eyes matching his. “And she’s my sister. I owe it to Prim.”

He looked at them a long time, and finally nodded. “OK, you’ve got a point. And I can't plan things near as well if I'm always having to make sure and pay attention for you two stumbling around like idiots behind my back.” Real Haymitch affection there, Peeta thought with a smile.

“You know some of the others will be pissed off at being excluded,” Johanna told him. “They’re right. Might as well take advantage of all the allies we can get here. This isn’t going to be an easy one.” That was true also. The more people they had to help on this, the more chance there was to make it a success. Having worked with a lot of the surviving victors in Mentor Central, Peeta could honestly say he felt like he would trust them. Haymitch must know their character even better than that. He looked over at Katniss and saw the subtle signs of relief in her. They wouldn’t have to try to fight Haymitch or go and do it alone either. That was a comfort.

“Then Jo, you and I ought to go send out some invitations to have us another little rebellion meeting. This afternoon, have it in Seven’s apartment? We’ll have ‘em come to you,” he said, nodding to Katniss and Peeta. “Until then, you two go back to bed and get some actual sleep. I mean it.” That was one order from Haymitch he thought he and Katniss might not even disagree with.

Chapter Text

Dropping Katniss and Peeta back off to drag themselves to bed and get some much-needed sleep, they went around, knocking on the doors of the various floors of the Training Center and talking to the other victors once the meeting was set for four in the afternoon.

Some, like Finnick, really didn’t need much convincing. Meeting in the Seven suite at four today, that was all that was needed. Finnick nodded in acknowledgment, looking the two of them up and down as they stood at the door. His face had healed enough now that his expression was readily recognizable as a smug, happy smirk. “I really hate to say to you two that I told you so, but...”

“Shut up,” Johanna grumbled, cuffing him lightly on the shoulder. “Yeah, fine. You told us so. We admit it.” Finnick’s chuckle followed them back to the elevator.

Others were a little harder to win over. Rice Lee, the only living Eleven victor, was something of an unknown for Haymitch. He’d won the 67th Games. The spiked maces year, which a lot of people kind of wanted to forget anyway, brutal and disgusting as most of the deaths had been. But more than that he was bound to have been less on Haymitch’s radar. That had been a bad year in general, with the prolonged hopes for Maya to make it all the way dashed to pieces at the end with her dying slowly from the poisoned feast, placing fourth. On top of that, it was the year Finnick and Johanna entered the circuit and he was dealing with the heavy load of helping them through that, trying to step in and take the burden of it where he could.

Mostly he was unfamiliar because while Johanna managed to scrape herself together after she snapped and go play possum in stalking and killing the final tributes of her year, and the Capitol spun it as her having had that strategy all along, Rice hadn’t been put on that same path. Not much careful storytelling to be done with a Games that ended with a crack-up so obvious as a shattered boy screaming and sobbing, begging the corpse of Gloss’ boy for his forgiveness. After he didn’t shape up by his Victory Tour, still walking around with that thousand-yard-stare, Chaff told him that Rice had been politely “invited” to stay home from the Games from then on and let Chaff continue mentoring. It happened sometimes with victors the Capitol didn’t want to be reminded of on a yearly basis. Rice hadn’t been back to the Capitol since then until the Quell forced him to become one of Chaff and Seeder’s mentors, along with yanking old Cotton out of peaceful retirement for the same.

Rice looked pretty sane, a handsome young man of twenty-six with dark copper skin and carefully guarded near-black eyes, as he answered the door to Haymitch while Johanna was talking to Taffeta down on the eighth floor. But then, eight years with the Capitol totally hands-off to let it settle down had probably helped him more than its share. “A meeting?” he asked, his voice deep and resonant. “What’s that for?”

“Meeting, get-together, whatever. Not many of us victors left, Rice. We’d like to have you there.”

Rice looked at him with polite suspicion. “Chaff said you always have some kind of plan up your sleeve. Not sure I want any part of that.” Then he smiled slowly, almost reluctantly. “But he did say, him and Seeder both, that you’re good people anyway. And you’re right, ain’t many of us left. All right. I’ll be there, but don’t be just expecting me to get involved in whatever you’re maybe cookin’ up.”

Down on the third floor, Beetee answered the door, pushing up his glasses and giving them a nod of greeting. Told about the meeting, he said, “Oh yes, and Peeta had mentioned something about a possible television malfunction in the apartment, spotty reception and the like. I told him I’d take a look. That would be a ready opportunity if you don’t mind my tinkering.” Meaning I’ll take care of the surveillance when we’re up there.

“Have at it, Volts.” Thinking of what they’d been talking about at the hospital, about identifying the dead kids from the bombing and how that ought to get put to use in Twelve come spring, Haymitch realized here was perhaps a shortcut compared to having to talk to Brutus and Enobaria about things. “If Jo and I give you a blood sample, can you run it through the identification database and see who pops out as related to us?”

“Of course,” Beetee said, looking puzzled, “although there’s a long backlog right now given identifying all the war dead.”

“Hundreds?” Johanna asked, and the look on her face said she immediately regretted asking.

“Thousands,” he said, with a weary expression, and Haymitch tried to not wince. Thousands of people dead in this war, out of a low population to begin. “And given that all your relatives are dead...” He hesitated, coffee-brown eyes obviously confused but too polite to ask outright.

“Snow kidnapped his brother and my sister and used tracker jacker venom on their brains to change them into happy little Peacekeeper trainees,” Johanna said bluntly, cutting right to the heart of the matter. “Name change and everything.” Beetee absorbed that news with barely a flicker of surprise, and immediately looked pensive.

“Oh, yes, then that would be a ready way to find their new identities. Although,” Beetee grimaced, “the task is a bit more difficult now. We’ve found with some of the dead Peacekeepers from the bombing that they’ve been...well, they remain unidentified as some genetic information was removed from the database.”

“What?” Everyone in Panem was supposed to be in that thing. Just one more way Snow kept tight control of things.

“Brutus speculated that the records have been tampered with to allow former Peacekeepers--and some Capitol citizens also--to slip through the net, as it were. Given the fact that they’re now seeing some of their own on trial for their lives, and the unrest we’re seeing with vigilantes taking justice into their own hands, perhaps it’s understandable that any Peacekeeper, no matter their guilt or innocence, might have some cause to fear identification and potential retribution.”

“Great,” he said with a sigh. It made total sense, true. Without that profile in the database, all it would take was slipping away to somewhere new, claiming a fake history, and starting over with a new name to cut ties with the past. But that didn’t mean Haymitch had to like it.

“You still willing to run our blood through it anyway?” Johanna asked. She shrugged when Haymitch glanced over at her. “Worst news we can get is that there’s nothing left there, Haymitch.”

“Certainly. I’ll bring the sample kit to the meeting. I would suggest you talk to Brutus and Enobaria about what records may be available in Two, though. It’ll might be faster and perhaps more productive.”

“Yeah, we will. Thanks.” It was a setback, he’d admit, though maybe he shouldn’t have expected it to be just that easy.

Going down one more floor, Johanna told Enobaria bluntly the moment she answered the door, “Hey, Fangs, by the way, don’t think to give me any shit about Haymitch. We all know you’ve been fucking Brutus for years.”

“Not ‘Fangs’, moron, I ditched ‘em first appointment I could get,” Enobaria told her wryly, smiling broadly and showing off a set of perfectly normal teeth. “And me and Brutus, yeah, so what about it?”

Johanna leaned in closer, voice going quieter, and Haymitch barely heard her words. “Coin decided we newcomers would make great baby incubators for Thirteen. Pumped us full of fertility drugs to make it happen rather than a contraceptive. They found them in my blood when they were treating my burns. So you might want to make sure you’re not knocked up with a little baby Allamand.”

“It’s not an issue,” Enobaria said carefully, “but thanks for the heads up.” The way her eyes narrowed told Haymitch that underneath the cool Two reserve, she was definitely pissed off.

“Brutus here?” Haymitch asked, nodding into the apartment, decorated in cool blues and greys.

“Yeah. Come on in.” She left the door open and called for Brutus.

The man himself showed up, nodding to Haymitch, joking, “What, you down here to see if there’s some lousy romantic film on?”

“He just got married, Brute,” Enobaria said with a snort of amusement, “he’s probably got better things to do with his afternoon than sit here and make fun of ‘Splendor in the Field’ with you.”

“Gee, thanks, I’d appreciate that, Fangless,” Johanna told her with a smirk.

Brutus snickered. “‘Splendor in the Field’, yeah, that was the one in Nine...”

“A very well-fed and cheery District Nine, as I remember,” Haymitch recalled. “And yes, it’s the one with him making his marriage proposal by burning the words into a cornfield so she can see it from a hovercraft.” Insanely elaborate marriage proposal, thoughtlessly wasting so much food--pure Capitol flair there.

“So what was the one set in Ten?” Brutus asked, looking baffled.

“That was ‘Splendor in the Pasture’.” He remembered it had involved ridiculous stunts with horses. “And I think we gave up after ‘Splendor in the Mine’ because after that,” and how the woman had saved her beloved by calling his name and singing to him from the entrance of the mine and improbably having it carry a good couple of miles underground to guide him out of the pitch dark, “none of the others were gonna be nearly as hilarious for me.” There had been a whole set of those films, supposedly depicting life and love in the six “quaint” outlying low-technology districts.

“But then you have, what, ‘Splendor in the Orchard’ and ‘Splendor in the Mill’ too,” Johanna said with mock wide-eyed innocence. “Those are classics. I fucking loved ‘Splendor in the Forest’, you know. Him carrying her out of the woods after fighting off a dozen bears with only an axe.”

“So I’ll buy the whole collection of tapes for you as a late New Year’s gift,” he told her dryly. “Anyway, we’re holding a little get-together this afternoon, us remaining victors and all. Watch some bad television together and maybe have a drink or two to the ones that ain’t with us any longer before we all head home. Talk some things over about the future,” and he gave them a meaningful glance at that.

Brutus’ expression was tightly controlled, but he gave a slight nod. “Yeah, sounds good.” He smirked then. “Looks like it’s bad film day after all, Baria.”

“There’s one other thing,” Johanna said, breaking in impatiently. “You’re from Two, so what do you know about the orphanage there?”

“What, the Peacehome?” Enobaria answered her. “It’s over by Chaydell Falls. Kids there were trained to be Peacekeepers so they’d have a guaranteed job when they grew up.”

“Is it usual that kids born in another district would end up there?” Because even if they’d been renamed or the like and claimed as Two natives, Ash’s Twelve twang and Heike’s round Seven vowels would have been distinct, probably their looks too.

Brutus shrugged. “I don’t know much about it myself, Haymitch, but my brother Quintus was a Peacekeeper. Got his twenty-year pin.” He said it with casual pride, and Haymitch tried to not want to instinctively ask if Quintus Allamand had been a bastard as a Peacekeeper or not. It was different for people from Two, that was clear, and he couldn’t afford to antagonize Brutus right now by picking a fight like that. “I don’t know details on how it all worked, though. Just like Quin couldn’t tell you anything about being a tribute candidate.” Not surprising, given Brutus had been pretty much taken away from his family at age six and lived a life dedicated to the Games ever since.

“But if you look at the Peacekeeper Corps, you’d see more than a few that don’t look quite like Capitol or Two natives, that’s for sure,” Enobaria pointed out. “Green eyes like Four, red hair like Five, that sort of thing.” Haymitch had to admit he hadn’t really looked too much at most of them in terms of their lives beyond the uniform and the fact they obviously weren’t from Twelve. He’d been on the same casual live-and-let-live terms with most of them as anyone else in the Hob, but they didn’t ask his personal business and he didn’t ask theirs.

“Why are you asking anyway?” Brutus asked, sounding interested.

“Apparently Snow hid my brother Ash away in the Peacehome rather than killing him like he told me he did,” he said, not in the mood to dance around the subject. “Did it to Johanna’s sister Heike too, for that matter. They graduated and they’ve served as Peacekeepers and that’s all he knew.”

“Shit.” Didn’t that just say it all? “Well, it means they’re alive rather than dead like you always thought,” Enobaria offered matter-of-factly.

He could see from Johanna’s expression that she really wanted to say, Yeah, and they’re Peacekeepers, but she held her tongue. “Would the Peacehome have good records?” she asked instead.

“Oh, sure. They’d have to keep a file on them and their progress through the years like they did for us tribute trainees.” Brutus shook his head, cautioning them, “You’re not getting in there immediately, though, I’ll guarantee you that. Non-military access to Two is pretty dicey these days with the insurgent threats that keep popping up. They’re not gonna just let you two wander in for personal reasons.”

“They pulled us out of it to come here for whatever reason President Coin has for requiring us,” Enobaria said with a wry expression, making it obvious she didn’t see much use being here when she could be kicking some asses back in Two.

“I can try to talk to Quin about it, sure. Or if you talk to an actual Peacekeeper, they’ll be able to give you better than we can.” Nodding to acknowledge that, they excused themselves and after a brief chat with Niello on the first floor to confirm he and Chantilly would be there too, headed back upstairs.

Johanna picked up the remote, and hesitated, tossing it on the couch cushions. “Enough bad news already for one day, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Not to mention right now he didn’t want to see Coin’s face or hear her voice. “But at least Snow’s dead.” The reign of terror was finally over, not that it meant that its scars and repercussions disappeared. Those would linger for a long time yet. He knew for certain that some of them would never leave him until the day he died.

“I imagine some people aren’t gonna be too happy about him robbing them of the pleasure of watching him die.” Her eyes were carefully wary at that. He understood. There could be some kind of retribution for it, public outrage of people taking out further frustrations.

“They’ll have to get over it,” he answered. “It is what it is. They can’t revive him and kill him again.” They hadn’t killed Snow, not really. They just enabled the opportunity for him to take his own life. In the end Snow had made that choice, and it eased his mind to have not deliberately taken yet another life. He had the feeling to some people--Coin in particular--they wouldn’t make much distinction, though. But if she had suspected them, chances were she’d have had them arrested already.

“Thousands of dead,” she said bleakly, her expression saying that she hoped to hell Ash and Heike weren’t among them. “I suppose we ought to be checking on the arrested Peacekeepers coming up for trial also,” she added with some reluctance. “See if...”

See if their siblings had been some of the worst among Peacekeepers, so notorious they’d been dragged into a courtroom as war criminals to answer for atrocities. The idea of it was too painful. Ash was thirty-seven now, long since become a grown man. He’d have been a Peacekeeper almost nineteen years. His hands couldn’t be entirely clean, could they?

This was the deep hell Snow had left them as a parting gift. The uncertainty of once again not knowing, the possibility that they could hope for the best and then lose their siblings all over again by finding out there were among the many war dead out there. He gave Haymitch the fear too that it truly could come to the very worst possible and he would have to watch his brother be condemned to die, unable to do anything but admit he deserved it for the man that Snow and venom and Peacekeeper conditioning had possibly made him become. He would rather Ash had died innocent at eleven, the boy from the memories he’d told to Johanna last night, than live to become that. But realizing that, even having the thought of a situation where he’d see cause to wish Ash had been murdered instead, made him sick nonetheless.

The silence hung there, heavy with things that neither of them really wanted to say at the minute and give way to wallowing in the whole miserable shitheap of it. He thought about that bottle of bourbon, still mostly full. He didn’t really want to go to it but the call of it was there anyway, promising forgetfulness, relief from pain, like it had for so many years. “Fuck it,” she said finally. “We’ve got a while here and I really don’t want to spend it moping.” With that she reached down and seized the hem of her sweatshirt, tugging it up and over her head in a brisk motion. Good plan, he thought.

Last night had really been something different, he would readily admit. The way it happened, there had been no room for fear or doubt or anything but the two of them. Maybe they’d needed that push of sheer desperation to take that kind of step, like they’d needed it in Thirteen to even reach out to each other to begin. After that, she was utterly his and he was hers in a way that couldn’t be taken back. True enough, that fact comforted him deeply. It also sort of scared the shit out of him because it was such unknown territory to suddenly exist now as one half of something, have part of him belong to someone that much.

But while he in no way regretted it, and was relieved to see that even that rough edge to it hadn't held bad reminders for either of them, he would be honest with himself and pray it was never quite spurred on by something that dark again. That while he knew there would definitely be some pain in his life yet, maybe he would never again have to feel so totally laid open and wounded like that, spun so out of control because he was half-crazy at the moment. Having to feel like utter ragged hell in order to let go enough to be that close to her didn't really appeal. Keeping that ability for closeness and abandon but having it be simple passion and not an overwhelming wildness due to sorrow; well, they’d have to see if they could manage it.

This was promising, though. He could feel some of the faint hesitations between them, the little walls that still consciously had to be let down. To get past that would take more time yet. But the worst of that old sense of anxiety seemed to be missing. He didn’t need to constantly make sure he wasn’t retreating inside or watch to see if she was OK.

“Gotta tell you, I always enjoy the view,” he said. She laughed at that and leaned back, sitting up proud and tall, letting him get a good look at her. The way the winter sunlight shone on her flushed light golden skin was something to behold. The old scars were there still, the new burns too, blotchy and slowly fading to pink. He saw them, the marks of her courage and survival on her, more beautiful to him than any Capitol artifice. Her eyes too, looking at him with the knowledge of her own strength and desire, looking at what she knew she was doing to him, obviously enjoying it too to judge from the faint smirk on her lips.

He smiled right back and returned the favor with his hands on her, all over her, teasing her with the assertion that while she was on top, he wasn’t without his own power here. She leaned down over him again before the end, and he was grateful for the deeper intimacy of that, as she touched her forehead to his and murmured something soft he didn’t quite catch. It didn’t matter, he knew what she’d meant by it.

It was a long time before either of them stirred afterwards, and the easy peace of it, his arms wrapped around her, was definitely like the night before. No pretense needed any longer of accidentally falling asleep simply to enjoy these moments. It had all been so sudden, going from nothing and no hope of it to having something so valuable to lose, of having bound his life to hers. He couldn’t say that the haste of it had been the brightest idea, but he’d been afraid of really living for too long, and they both knew life could be pretty damn short. If they sometimes screwed it up from rushing things, he was confident they could get through that. They’d endured the Games and a war and all manner of unspeakable things, so they were survivors. They could probably find some way to manage to not kill each other in a marriage. It would be better to endure the rough patches and have these good moments together than spend the next ten years cautiously circling the matter, never quite willing to take that big step on pure faith. “Better than moping?” he murmured into her hair, kissing the top of her head lightly.

“Yeah.” Finally she pushed off of him with a faint grumble of effort, getting up and saying, “I’ll go get the shower running, we’d better get cleaned up before we head downstairs.”

“No frickin’ jonquil this time, I mean it,” he called after her, hearing her cackling with glee at having successfully pranked him that morning as she ruffled her hands through her hair. Life with her was probably going to be many things, but he was pretty sure it was never going to be boring.

She programmed it for orange scent this time, which he deemed acceptable. As they got dressed again he mentioned, “I figure I’ll go get an injection myself tomorrow. It’s better if both of us are on ‘em.” That way even if one failed or was faulty, they wouldn’t find themselves in the position of suddenly expecting a kid. He couldn’t go through that again, not right now. He just couldn’t. He couldn’t even fully touch the issue with her because it was still far too raw, but she ought to know that he was taking precautions too.

“Fine,” she said curtly, and he felt the chill in the word and how her retreat there stung him. Apparently she wasn’t ready to talk about that either.

“I’m only making sure it’s not an issue,” he protested, unable to help an edge of temper creeping into his tone. He didn’t want to see either of them hurt again like they'd been, that was all.

“That’s fine,” she said again, and he realized he really hated that word when it meant she wasn’t fine at all, “so go get the fucking shot so we’re definitely safe and let’s just let it go, all right?”

“All right,” he said with a slow sigh, his own irritation fading as he realized that it probably wasn’t anger at him, it was being unable to deal with it and lashing out. When she touched him on the shoulder passing by to grab her shoes, as if in apology, he knew it for sure. Neither of them were ready to face it yet. The fact that the ruthless bitch who’d done it to them in the first place was still at large probably didn’t help.

Heading down to the Seven apartment, he found Katniss and Peeta awake and looking a little brighter than they had this morning. Several of the others were already there, and Chantilly came over and said to him with a cheerful smile, “Good choice there, Haymitch. She’s one of the few people that I can actually see making you have to put in effort to keep up with her.” He knew from her, that was pretty much a ringing endorsement, and her expression told him that yes, she actually was happy for him.

Johanna grinned evilly. “See, now, I think I like you. Even if you did fuck him first.”

“Oh, let’s have that be bygones,” Chantilly said with an answering smirk. “It was before your Games, dear, and if we all hated each other for screwing other victors none of us would talk to each other at all.”

“Guess it means you have good taste, at least.” Apparently this was the two of them clearing the air and making sure of no hard feelings. Well, at least she knew he didn’t hold it against Finnick that she'd had a steady understanding with him.

Niello came up then and slung a companionable arm around Haymitch’s shoulders. “Ah, the moment your wife starts comparing notes on you with the other victors. Welcome to the wonders of being married.”

The rest arrived in turn, Ten’s Wy Ingersoll last of all. The television was turned on, and the newscast right now was reporting on Coin’s reaction to Snow’s suicide. “Obviously this is a disappointment to the people of Panem that they won’t see justice done. I intend to see that the same doesn’t happen in the case of other war criminals.”

Beetee, tinkering away, turned and gave Haymitch a thumbs-up, indicating the surveillance was knocked out. “Half an hour or so,” he said. Peeta shut off the television.

“All right, let’s get to it.”

“Is this another crazy sober scheme of yours?” Dazen said wryly, giving him a cheeky smile.

“Sort of. Look, I know most of you don’t know Coin, but we seriously don’t want her leading Panem. We just paid hard to get rid of one sociopathic power-hungry tyrant, I ain’t in a hurry to see another one put in place.”

“Bold statement. Care to enlighten us here, Haymitch?” Clover said, waving a hand in a go on gesture.

“He’s right,” Katniss said, having drawn her knees up to her chest on the couch and looking around at all of them. “While I was in Thirteen she was always doing her best to keep me under control. Making that announcement about the terms I set for cooperating, saying I’d agreed to follow it to the letter or else there would be consequences.”

“She’s afraid of the Mockingjay,” Johanna said. “Afraid of all of us, actually, because we all know that we’ve got some power in Panem.”

“All right, so we make her nervous. But what’s your proof that she’s a power-crazy tyrant?” Wy said, folding his arms over his chest.

“We made Snow nervous too,” Finnick reminded Wy dryly, “and look how sharply he kept us in line.”

“When her own former right-hand man pulled me aside during the siege of the Capitol to pretty much tell me to take our squad and clear out before she could find some way to wipe us out, that’s really not a good sign,” he pointed out.

“She’s pursuing revenge now,” Peeta added. “Not reigning in her own soldiers, letting the vigilantes run wild, not bothering to keep the food supply running, talking about executions left and right and pretty much giving the impression they all had it coming, no matter that it's revenge and not justice that's happening out there in the streets.”

“The other victors living here in the Capitol were killed,” Taffeta said softly. “The other ones who were sold off to a protector. Because the rebels under Coin’s general authority were inclined to shoot first, even on unarmed citizens, rather than ask questions. I only survived because I was keeping Finnick safe in my apartment, and I had his military identification from Thirteen, but first they had me down on my knees with a gun to my head calling me a traitor.”

Haymitch hadn’t known that, Taffeta hadn’t mentioned it. But he had noticed none of the other Capitol victors had made it through the war. It made a terrible kind of sense that the rebels had simply killed them as supposedly being on the side of the Capitol. The thought of them having a nearly seventy-year-old woman in that position, ready to coldly execute her, sparked his temper more than a little. “Taff,” he said apologetically. She shook her head, dismissing it, obviously not wanting him to dwell on it or on the friends she’d lost.

“Oh, by the way, she wants our kids,” Johanna said, eyes flashing with fierce anger, “wants us having them quick as possible, and she’s gonna do what she has to do to get them.”

“She was talking about repopulation earlier today,” Dazen said, looking startled. “How with the war deaths it was urgent that people consider starting families. Wants to lower the minimum marriage age to sixteen, urging people to consider having large families...”

“With a whole year’s harvest destroyed in the fighting and a lot of people facing starvation this winter, let’s all go have babies before there's food for them to eat,” Clover said with a harsh laugh. “Oh, that’s really brilliant.”

“Sixteen?” Wy said doubtfully. “I mean, if we’re gonna start to pull all the low-tech districts out of the shit that they’re in, you’d think we’d want to prioritize something like education, not starting families young?” He nodded towards Katniss and Peeta. “No offense there,” obviously remembering their supposed pregnancy before the Quell.

“None taken,” Peeta said.

“She injected women immigrating to Thirteen with fertility drugs to get them knocked up as quickly as possible,” Johanna said. Haymitch could feel the startled eyes on her. “No, I’m not kidding you. They found those drugs in me here in the hospital. She didn’t bother to deny it when I bitched her out. Said it was necessary and me complaining about it was being selfish and putting my own desires ahead of the needs of the population.”

Annie let out a startled gasp at that, looking at Finnick and saying helplessly, “But we thought it was because the injection failed?” She shook her head, mumbling lowly to herself, and he could see Finnick instinctively turning to her, urging her to stay with him and not break with reality given the news.

Chantilly, sitting over with Niello, was looking pretty furious herself. He knew full well why she’d take that as a personal affront, given what was expected of One victors when it came to having kids. Along with the victors bought out by a Capitol citizen, the One victors had been particularly vulnerable to Snow insisting on their having children.

The 69th Games were pretty much shit for him, start to finish. Before the Games began he’d pissed off one of the last patrons he had left by drunkenly mouthing off. Consequently, after Anse died at the Cornucopia, Finch had suddenly run into some Gamemaker-released wolf mutts that tore her apart. He got the message.

Johanna had been up in his apartment two nights ago, breasts almost spilling out of that leather corset top they had put her in, trying to seduce him because Finnick had fallen for some girl back home and she was cut to the bone by it. She’d gotten drunk and ranted about it and then passed out on the couch, the angry hardness faded from her face in sleep to show that she was far too young to be dealing with what she was.

He hadn’t seen Chantilly much since she retired and married Niello, since the older One victors tended to be politely hinted at to live quietly and try to stay off-camera during the Games. It didn’t fit with their image of fresh, sexy youth to see a fifty-year-old One victor. But given that he had no purpose in the Games right now and she’d called and asked to see him he’d readily accepted. She was an old friend, a good friend, and it got him away from Mentor Central for a little while.

What he didn’t expect was the swell of her stomach that was obvious even through his whiskey haze. “Congratulations?” he’d offered, baffled.

“Niello and I finally got that phone call,” she’d said, sitting down on the bench in Victory Park, brushing a hand through her brown hair to smooth it down in the summer heat. She didn’t dare look as upset as she felt, years of One training in force as she smiled for the inevitable cameras taking pictures of two victors chatting in the park. Never mind he was beyond tipsy and she was miserable. “We kind of expected it. It’s been six years since Jasper had a kid.”

His wits were running whiskey-slow as he blurted, “Wait, Jasper has a kid?” They both knew Jasper didn’t incline towards women. Not that it stopped Snow from selling him off to plenty of women before Gloss replaced him as the male mentor and Jasper retired to One. Apparently Jasper was pretty hands-off when it came to his offspring, or at least, he didn’t bother to mention that little matter to Haymitch. “No kidding?”

“Silk didn’t like men either but that didn’t stop her from having two daughters,” Chantilly retorted sharply. He remembered them both well: Sapphire, who’d tried to kill him in the arena and died from her own axe, and Ruby, who’d tortured Larkspur to death the next year. “Just like it doesn’t stop Victor Affairs from selling you to men as well as women. There’s expectations.”

“Point taken,” he mumbled. “Look, Til, I’m really pretty damn drunk here so you’ve gotta bear with how slow I am. So, it’s been six years,” he motioned for her to go on.

“If Jasper can suck it up enough to sleep with a woman and father a kid, Niel and I really have no excuses to offer,” she said bleakly. “And they reminded me, I’m thirty-seven. I’m getting towards the end of my childbearing years, and Niel’s pushing fifty himself. One’s got to offer legacy tributes every now and again to keep the Capitol happy, and Niello and I are the only other One victors still young enough to have kids.”

He didn’t have to say that the kid was doomed. They’d talked about how being a legacy tribute was a death sentence years ago, about how he was never going to marry and how she knew One being as it was, eventually she’d be expected to marry and to have some kids. Looked like that day had come, and he had nothing to offer her that wasn’t empty words. “Fuck.”

“I got the test results yesterday. It’s twins too,” she said with a watery laugh. “A boy and a girl. So either they’re doomed as legacies or just maybe if it suits the Capitol’s whims better, I’m carrying the next Cashmere and Gloss.” Knowing what they did to Cash and Gloss on the circuit, he couldn’t help but feel the horror of it. “I’m not sure which is worse.” Neither did he, for that matter. “It’s not that I hated the idea of kids. If things were different...but it’s knowing what’s going to happen to them and I can’t stop it.”

She’d wanted them in the end, that was for sure, come to love them fiercely. He’d watched as she’d pretty much ripped Lodestone a new one when he suggested that her kids amounted to a deliberate publicity stunt on her part, rather than something Snow had forced on her. Their names are Sardonyx and Citrine Dumas. Donny and Trina. He hates peas. She loves dogs. They’re both six, and now I can rest easy knowing they’re never going to have to be in the Hunger Games and die in the arena or survive it and be sold as whores. They’re my kids, you sorry son of a bitch. Paylor sort of gave her a swat for going after him, but the point was still taken anyway and broadcast across the nation.

“Annie,” Niello said, looking over at her with a look of sympathy, having been in this position himself, “it doesn’t matter.” Annie’s green eyes went to him, slowly calming. “It’s your kid. You apparently were happy about it before. Doesn’t change a thing about the baby. All it changes is what you think about Coin.”

“He’s right,” Finnick said, giving Niello a grateful look.

“She put my sister on the front lines and got her shot,” Katniss told them. “Prim’s only fourteen. They don’t let people from Thirteen out into battle unless they’re eighteen, but she was there anyway. And she got shot in the back. Shot by our own side. She’s paralyzed now, you probably saw the newscast. It’s going to require me staying on Coin’s good side so she keeps having access to what she needs to get better. You think that wasn’t deliberate?”

“She killed children too for no reason,” Peeta said softly. “Those kids Snow had in front of his mansion.”

“That was Snow,” Lizzie, Six’s sole survivor, piped up, shaking her head. “We all saw the newscast, Capitol bombers and all.”

“Was it?” Peeta said. “They were there as his protection. He had no reason to get rid of them like that. That would be like him every year just shooting twenty-four kids rather than holding the Games. He was cruel but he wasn’t insane.”

“Just because the bombers dressed and sounded Capitol doesn’t mean they were,” Katniss insisted. “The four of us got right up to the gates ourselves using that same method.”

Beetee fidgeted a bit and said, “They’re correct. The napalm in those bombs was something Thirteen did have access to. Gale Hawthorne and I contributed to developing it after seeing how the Capitol used it to destroy Twelve, so that we would have it available as a weapon if need be.”

“Bad move, Beetee,” Haymitch said, looking at him, trying to not want to start yelling and demand to know what the fuck he had been thinking. Beetee hadn’t seen Twelve, hadn’t smelled the stench and seen the burned, twisted corpses. The awkward, guilty look Beetee had on his face, the way he’d thrown himself into identifying the war dead, told Haymitch enough. He couldn’t make Beetee feel worse by beating him over the head with it, because the man clearly already blamed himself for what his work had been used to do.

“I know that,” he acknowledged. “At the time it seemed like the smart move, to be prepared and ready to match the Capitol’s weapons with our own so as to not leave ourselves defenseless. I looked at it as a purely intellectual exercise, not seeing the whole picture. I admit it, and I do regret it. I never intended it would be used like that.”

“I believe you, Beetee,” Katniss said, and like that, Beetee relaxed ever so slightly. The rest of them seemed to as well, the Mockingjay and that subtle ability of hers to reach out and pull people together at work.

“The chemical signature of Capitol napalm and ours is of course identical, so it can’t be determined from the bombed area, but,” Beetee’s eyes lifted, looked around the room, “I assure you, the rebels had it available to use. And what Peeta and Katniss are saying does make more sense than President Snow bombing those children.”

“There was a camera crew from Thirteen right there to capture that little magic moment too,” Johanna pointed out. “Don’t you think that’s a little too convenient?”

Looking around, he saw their expressions, ranging from shock to anger to skepticism. “I started this whole thing back last summer. So me, I’ve definitely got to finish it. Some of you I asked for your help once already. I hate to do it, but I’m asking again. Those of you who weren’t here last time, I’m asking you now. We’ll stand stronger against her if we stay together.” He paused, let that sink in for a minute, and then went on.

“But I know we’ve all lost friends already in this war. Too many of them." He could imagine them now, Seeder and Chaff, Max and Poppy, Blight, the ones lost along the way, and the thought of them hurt still, a wound that wasn't healed by any means. "May be as you just want to go home and pick up what pieces are left. No shame in that.”

“We honor our dead better by finishing the fight, not running home to hide away,” Brutus argued.

“Speak for yourself, man,” Rice said with a shake of his head. “Ain’t like most of us asked to get involved anyway. Plenty of us never wanted any damn glory in the arena. Living quiet’s what I’ve done since then, it’s kind of what I’d like to keep on doing, you know?”

“But it happened,” Annie said. “The arena happened, to every one of us, and it can’t be taken back. And it’s made us targets for Coin.”

“You can go home, Rice, but you’ll probably be watching your back. It won’t be living quiet like you want.” He held up a hand, anticipating the protest. “Not like I’ll stop you going. But all of us here, we look after each other. We’d rather you stick with us.”

“So what exactly,” Lizzie said carefully, “are you proposing to do about her?”

“That’s the tough part,” he said glumly. “Aside from the whole fertility drug thing since the hospital staff knows about it now, and knowing Thirteen had the napalm--though the Capitol did too--a lot of it’s us working through the puzzle. We know how it fits together but she can slide her way out of it since there ain’t much concrete proof. We bring it up right now, we’ve played our hand too soon.”

“So we live in fear. Fantastic,” Dazen said. “Thanks for that, Haymitch.”

“You’d rather he leave you out in the cold to have her take you by surprise?” Johanna retorted. Haymitch tried to not think about Peeta chewing him out for trying to go it alone and do just that--leave everyone on the outside and caught unaware by it. He’d been convinced he’d spare them harm by it, but he would admit now he probably would have simply left them even more vulnerable by not making them realize about the target painted on them. He’d seen with Snow that innocents and those left ignorant got caught up in the game of power just the same. Besides, he hadn't made it through the arena alone either time, had he?

“She’ll have to make a move somehow,” Peeta pointed out. “To suppress or discredit us in some way. We can’t keep existing as a threat to her.”

“She’ll make a mistake,” Finnick said. “Eventually. Maybe even soon, giving how she’s got to hurry up and secure as much power as she can early on while it’s easy to grasp. And we’ll be ready for it. Look how much it hurt Snow when I shot that propo airing all his dirty laundry. He couldn’t hide from it.”

“We’ll be ready for it,” Haymitch agreed with him. “When it happens, are you in to stand together on it?” Around the room they went, some of the assents ready and fierce, some a little slower and deliberate. But all of them agreed in the end. Nobody wanted to see another Snow or be left alone to face Coin’s possible methods of getting a victor underneath her thumb. It was a care here where they’d stand together or die alone, and nobody was in a mood to die needlessly after so many wasted lives.

He was about to send them on their way when Katniss spoke up. “I didn’t know about the rebellion before the arena, but I do now. So for what you did during the Quell, for me and for Panem, and what you did during the rebellion too, thank you. And for what you’re doing now to make sure we don’t end up in the same place again. It’s hard and we’ve all suffered, and I can’t ever repay any of it, but I’m not going to forget you, or the ones who died already for it. I promise you that. If you ever visit Twelve, any of you will always be welcome at my house.”

It was always going to remain a damn wonder to Haymitch that for a prickly, proud girl who still had her moments of possessing all the warmth and charm of a dead slug, she could somehow just pull out these genuine moments where nobody could help but be swayed by her and be her friend. But he was thankful for them anyway, because if they somehow found their way to a better future for their country, it would be because of that.

Chapter Text

Haymitch answered the knock on the door shortly after breakfast to see Beetee standing there, and said, “Up and at it early, Volts.” In truth, Beetee looked like he hadn’t been sleeping much lately, dark smudges of fatigue under his eyes behind his thick glasses. The napalm and Thirteen’s callousness in using the weapons he’d so blithely built was apparently still eating at him. But while he could talk to him about it and be a friend, that wouldn’t solve the problem itself. He knew plenty himself about the deep roots of guilt. That was an absolution Haymitch couldn’t offer--it was a thing Beetee was going to have to work through himself.

“Yes, well,” Beetee said. “I was here to adjust your television, if you'll recall?”

“Damn power keeps going out,” Johanna complained, having come up behind Haymitch, “and when it comes back, the reception’s usually for shit for a good hour.” Obviously it was something Beetee didn’t want Coin to know. Well, that was pretty much everything, but they’d learned to pick and choose their opportunities of freedom from surveillance when the power was on, just like they had with Snow.

At least he knew from past experience there was no video in the bedrooms. There would have been a hell of a lot of amateur pay-to-view videos of two victors in bed out there if that was the case. Audio only, so Coin was getting an earful, and Haymitch hoped the old bitch winced at it. He refused to be embarrassed; he was more pissed off.

Beetee knocked out the audio and took the seat Johanna gestured him towards. “I had some time last night so I took the liberty of running your samples through the database then.”

Knowing that was a personal favor to have bumped them to the head of the list, considering the thousands of other samples to be run to hopefully put a name to the dead, Haymitch said, “Thanks.”

“Well, the names of the dead can wait one more day, perhaps, but to have a chance to fix something among those still living...well, at least I certainly hope that's the case.” Beetee shrugged awkwardly. “It did help that I could narrow the parameters to blood relations with a great degree of genetic similarity rather than the usual, which is spitting out any name possible sharing a familial lineage in hopes of finding a living relation to notify, however distant.”

He could sense Johanna shifting a little impatiently next to him and much as he didn’t want to get peevish with Beetee when he’d done them a kindness like that, he did wish the man would cut the technical babble, given he and Johanna hadn't learned much about that kind of stuff in school. The Capitol didn't see fit for coal miners and lumberjacks to need to know all that much about electronics or genetics. “I wish I had better news,” he said apologetically. “The database gave me some deceased relatives for both of you, including your mother and father, Johanna, as well as your brother Bernhard. Your mother, too, Haymitch.” Had he imagined it or was there a slight hesitation there before he’d added that last one? “But no records of Ashford Abernathy or Henrika Mason.” Haymitch wasn’t surprised exactly, but he would admit he was perhaps a bit disappointed. He shouldn’t have expected the answer to come so easily, though.

“Shit. Well, you tried,” Johanna said with a glum sigh. “Thanks anyway, Volts. Looks like Haymitch and me are going on a little trip to Two as soon as they’ll let us in. I’ll pick up a damn rifle again and sign up for their stupid militia if that gets me in sooner, I promise you that.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it for an instant,” Beetee said, all sincerity. “However, this does lend clear support to what Snow told you. There’s no record at all of Ashford or Henrika. They were erased. Snow could hardly have kept their records in there and had that information come up along with that of an differently-named orphan turned Peacekeeper any time they had a blood test for identity confirmation.”

Beetee was right about that. “It would have made the deception pretty damn obvious, yes. So, well, that’s a little progress at least. Means we ain’t going to Two chasing only a fairy tale.” That meant it hadn’t been something Snow told them just as one last manipulation. He hadn’t thought it was, but the greater certainty was something.

“Yes, of course. There is one more thing,” he said, and now there was a clear hesitation as he looked at Haymitch. “Would you prefer this remain private between--”

“Whatever it is,” he said, “you can say it in front of her.” Not good, whatever news it might be. That was pretty much a given. He tried to not let his mind go to what it might be. Dead uncle he never knew he had?

“All right then. One more name did come up as linked to you, a Peacekeeper who died earlier this year. Phineas Fog?” Fog, the old Head when Haymitch was a kid. Ash’s father, so sure, the name would be there as connected to the Abernathys, right? Then the actual wording hit him, the way Beetee said it like delivering bad news: linked to you. Linked to him, not to Ash, because Ash’s profile was gone, and he'd mentioned Haymitch's mother still being in there, but he hadn't mentioned his father, had he?

“Oh, hell. That bastard was my father?” he blurted before he could help it. Fog, who’d had olive skin. But he’d seen other Capitol people with that skin too, and Fog would have been alien to the Seam anyway. Not because of brown hair and golden brown eyes, some Peacekeeper brats had unusual hair and eyes, but because of that hated white uniform he wore. Peacekeeper brat. He’d kicked the shit out of other boys who called Ash that. None of them ever had said it about him, at least not where he could hear, but he had Seam-black hair and his ma had a husband at the time he was born, so they’d had no cause.

They’d married hastily, though. He’d known that. They’d filled out their forms and had their toasting six, maybe seven months before he came along, and he’d never thought more about that beyond the unsettling notion that it must have been for his sake that she married an angry man whose pay regularly went mostly to buying more white liquor. But growing up hardscrabble Seam, and with a dead ma and a pa struggling to do his job with blacklung, perhaps she’d had to sell herself to warm Phineas Fog’s bed years before Blair Abernathy had died.

Beetee nodded cautiously. “The genetic similarity between you two indicates a father-son link, yes. I’m sorry.” Offering his condolences for it, Haymitch thought, suppressing the urge to laugh. Either that or go hit something or break something, maybe all of it.

He felt Johanna’s hand on his arm after Beetee left, and shook his head, wanting to turn to her but feeling too stunned to do it, too disgusted. “Never mind it,” he told her, desperately trying to seize hold of something rational. “Just...it ain’t a thing that matters.”

“Really?” she said, her disbelief obvious in her voice.

“You think it ever mattered to me that he was Ash’s father? He was my brother, damn it, so why should it be different when it’s me?” Ash was his full blood brother now, he realized, not his half-brother, for all that Haymitch hadn’t reckoned that as something significant when they were kids. “And hell, it’s only me trading a wife-beating drunk for a whoremonger as my father.” It wasn’t like Johanna herself, or Katniss, losing a father they’d loved fiercely. Not even like Peeta, losing a deeply flawed man too weak to protect his kids but one still one who’d done the best he could. “Either way it means it was a man who treated my ma like shit and didn’t have the first damn thing to do in raising me.” He looked at her, saying fiercely, “Doesn’t matter at all. I’m my mother’s son.” He could feel the truth in that, because she was the only parent who had ever done anything for him at all, the only one who’d been there for him.

But still, the axis of his reality had shifted slightly, and something had changed. It cut deeper than before. Over the years he’d laughed bleakly about how his own bad blood proved out, how he became more like the son of his supposed father than the man he’d wanted to become when he was young and full of hopes. Still, now he could choose what he would be. He couldn’t scrub Fog’s blood from his veins, same as he couldn’t have done it with Blair Abernathy, but he would have to do his damnedest to not truly become his father.

Well, he thought a little dismally, Fog maybe gave him one small worthwhile thing in fathering him. He’d been wondering here and there of late how long he and Johanna might have, what his blood would tell in terms of his natural lifespan. Fog had probably been eighty or so when he died, and he’d fathered two healthy sons in his forties, at that. It seemed like a bad joke that after getting a pretty late start on having a life of his own, if he managed to have kids and live to a good age that might be due to Phineas fucking Fog.

“You wanted to go see Cinna and Effie anyway when we go to the Detention Center,” she pointed out to him, brown eyes watching him with concern but a blessed lack of pity, “and if anyone knows anything about that, it’s gonna be Cinna.”

After Snow’s death, in response to the public outcry demanding blood, Coin had pulled a wide sweep for the second round of arrests. He was sure plenty of people in the Detention Center would be rightly found guilty, but others like Cinna and Effie and other with tenuous accusations of guilt at best had been thrown in there to boot. Coin’s justification in a newscast had been that they all had to be captured and detained now before they could slip away, and that they deserved to be brought to justice. At last count several hundred people were in prison right now.

But Johanna was right. Cinnabar Locke, of all people, knew what it was to have to deal with being fathered by a man who’d abused his mother, a man who he had rejected. He’d lived with that reality his whole life. “You might be right,” he admitted with a sigh. “Besides, we might as well check the pictures of the Peacekeepers they’ve got locked up while we’re there.”

“Yeah, OK, I’ll do it while you’re talking to the two of them,” she said, and she reached out and took hold of his hand in hers for a moment. “If I see anyone who looks sort of like you, I’ll let you know. Brown hair, you told me, right?” He couldn’t even imagine what Ash would look like now, grown up from a boy of eleven.

“Yeah, but darker than yours. Almost black, but not quite.” The difference had been most readily apparent in sunlight, when Ash’s hair showed reddish-brown highlights. “Straighter than mine.” He had no pictures of Ash to show her, not here in the Capitol. The only ones he had were back in the house in Twelve, and he wasn’t ready yet to see if he could call up the interview of his family from his Games when he’d reached the final eight, or images from his homecoming. Ash had hugged him so damn tight, he remembered, and initially he’d wanted to panic because it was too fast, too close, but then he’d relaxed, felt as safe as he could after the arena.

Going back to the Detention Center was a nightmare in and of itself. He’d never walked through these doors. After the arena he’d woken up from the anesthetic in the cell once they’d done surgery on him, and then Thirteen’s rescue party knocked him out on saving him. But stepping inside the glum grey stone of it, knowing what horrors this place had witnessed not only with him but countless others, made him want to step right back outside into the cold winter morning.

After they signed in, it was obvious that their position as victors, and apparent heroes for having tried to save those kids, was what got them access right now. “Not just everyone can waltz in here and talk to the prisoners,” the check-in guard said with a raised eyebrow. “Or access their pictures in your case,” he told Johanna, the two of them having lied through their teeth claiming she was looking to see if some Peacekeepers involved in a particular incident in Seven were being held here so she could add that to the list of criminal charges. They scanned the prisoner roster then. Dozens of Peacekeepers there, he noticed, but nothing so easy as an Ash or a Heike. He spied one particular name among them and pointed to it. “Not who we were looking for,” he told her, conscious of the guard listening in. “But I might get something useful out of him.” She nodded, not questioning it.

Both of them hesitated to split up after that. He could feel it. After those weeks here with only each others’ voices to keep a little bit of sanity, paying for it by listening to each other scream, going it alone and letting her go was a tough sell. He was trying to shake the irrational fear that if he let her walk down one of those corridors out of his sight he might not see her again. But he would have to deal with it, and so he forced himself to not give way to it. He wouldn’t touch her either in reassurance, not in this place. “See you soon,” he said gruffly.

“Don’t keep me waiting,” she returned flippantly, but he could see she was covering her own fear by it as she headed off towards the guards’ control room to access the photos of the prisoners.

He signed the forms to request visitation with his three prisoners of choice. They sat him down with Cinna first, and the sight of him dressed again in those drab prison greys hurt, though at least he had a jacket on over them to keep warm. “You warned Effie and I that this was coming,” Cinna told him calmly, sitting there like a man at ease despite his shackled wrists. “And I know you won’t give up on us.” What a thing this was, Cinna the man with his life on the line again and yet facing being thrust back into living hell he was good enough to be trying to settle Haymitch’s anxiety. He was a truly good man, despite his inheritance from Solonius Trove.

“Are the conditions OK?” he asked hesitantly, wanting desperately that he wasn’t being tortured or raped or shot up with venom, that it wasn’t the same thing all over again.

Cinna’s voice went even softer. “Oh, the food’s fine and pretty regular. We get to take walks in the courtyard every afternoon. It’s been all right for us, but then, Effie and I typically do our best to not provoke things anyway, and there are others who readily draw more anger.” He said it with a trace of pity for them. “But I couldn’t tell you what goes on.” Which meant at least there wasn’t tormented screaming from down the hall from methodical torture like they’d all listened to before. That was an improvement at least. “How are Katniss and Peeta?” he asked with interest.

“Still recovering, but they’ll do. Obviously they’re hoping to see you get the hell out of here soon.” When they’d heard about the arrests Katniss sounded about ready to storm the Detention Center herself, It’s not fair, Cinna never did anything but help me! He could hardly blame her. It was pretty much the same argument he’d had with Coin back in Thirteen, but of course the woman proved as good as her word. He’d sort of vaguely hoped she’d forget, find bigger fish to fry, which had been stupid of him. It seemed like she wouldn’t quit her vengeance until she hunted down everyone loosely tied to a Capitol crime, innocent and guilty alike.

“Well, I’d talked to my mother and Effie about us going back to Eight when this is over,” Cinna said with a faint smile. “At least it’d be a district where my skills would be sort of useful, right?” He could hardly blame him for wanting to put distance between himself and the Capitol. Taffeta too, finally given the chance to go home after so long, and live her last years in peace among her own people. Imagining Effie making a life out in the districts wasn’t as hard a sell as it would have been last winter for him, given that the Capitol had abused and betrayed her so badly.

He couldn’t do it. Cinna had his own crushing burdens right now and finding the words was difficult anyway, so spilling his guts about wondering how to deal with a total bastard of a father wasn’t going to happen. “Well, we’d come visit. You know that.” They talked a bit more about small things, ignoring the trial to come. There wasn’t much they could say about it anyway.

“Thank you,” Cinna said when Haymitch got up to leave. “For coming.” His gold-flecked green eyes spoke of his gratitude for not being left alone, of having someone remember him in here.

Remembering Cinna’s quiet support in Twelve after Haymitch took that walk through the smouldering ruins at Snow’s behest, and then in prep before he’d been forced on the stage with Snow, he simply nodded, and offered him his hand, which Cinna took. “My pleasure.” Didn’t need to say more than that. He’d first met Cinna as a boy, yes, but he’d grown to be a man who’d become his friend over the last year and a half.

They led Cinna away and brought Effie next. He admitted he was still getting used to her without the paint and powder and the wigs, but to be honest, he thought she was more of a looker in her silvery blue dress at the Victory Ball and just a bit of pink lip paint than she had been in all that fancy crap. “You’re looking well,” she said, and her voice didn’t have that annoyingly, almost hysterically chipper edge to it that had pissed him off over the years. “It seems marriage agrees with you? I wouldn’t have imagined you and Johanna making a match together, I’ll admit.”

“Aw, thanks, Eff, I know I used to be irresistible but I’ll admit it’s a shock that anyone could pick a drunk asshole like I turned into,” he said dryly, the snarky tone like instinct after so long with her making it clear how annoyed she was by him. How uncivilized and embarrassing he was to her.

She bit her lip, hearing the sharpness in his words, the accusation he hadn’t meant of And I became that way because of the Capitol but which came out anyway, hanging there between them. “I only meant...never mind what I meant. I’m happy for you, really,” she said in an almost desperate voice, and her eyes pleaded with him to not be angry. He felt like an ass immediately. He’d gotten too used to Johanna and her deft ability to give it right back to him, or even Katniss’ ability to scowl and mutter dark and grouchy replies. It was like kicking a little fluffy puppy, and one that had been kicked too many times already.

“I do owe you an apology, Haymitch. I know that. When I was assigned to Twelve I was ashamed to be associated with such a drab, poor place. I was embarrassed by the tributes every year and with how I’d never move up to a more respectable district because of it.” She breathed in deep, and went on. “I made jokes with my friends about bedding you because you supposedly had that reputation already and anyway, like anyone else I couldn’t imagine someone from the districts wouldn’t be grateful to have the attention of their betters from the Capitol.” That was the essence of it, wasn’t it? They’d been so arrogant, so convinced that they were above it all, that any good thing the districts had was purely because of Capitol benevolence and that district people ought to be profusely thankful for it. “That never happened, simply because, well, you weren’t precisely my type.” She admitted that without hesitation, not trying to hide behind moral scruples. He liked her better for it. “Though I wonder what you would have done if I’d let you know I was interested.”

“I’d have taken you to bed--however many times it took until you got tired of me--and done what it took to keep you happy, because I couldn’t much refuse,” he told her, meeting her eyes with his and seeing that she didn’t flinch from the harsh honesty of it.

“Then obviously I’m grateful now I didn’t try. And I do regret all those years I never bothered to notice what was right in front of me, with District Twelve or the Games or with you. I think I didn’t want to see, because there’s no going back from it.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say It’s OK, don’t sweat it. But he stopped. It wasn’t OK, not really. For years she’d been a willing and oblivious part of the system that had celebrated the murder of children and kept people in fear and starvation and forced victors to become whores. A small piece, one with admittedly minor sins that were more of blindness than active exploitation, but she had been Capitol with all the oppression and terror and ugliness it represented. He couldn’t excuse it away with a few words. Doing that would trivialize all the suffering.

It would also trivialize her finding the nerve to become aware enough to realize what was really going on and say This is wrong to him on that train, and pay the price she had in the Detention Center for it; trivialize the guts it took for her to be confessing her guilt to him now, and be asking his forgiveness by making an apology. So instead he told her softly, “I forgive you.” He wasn’t sure he could immediately forget everything as if it hadn’t been, and any time she did something thoughtlessly Capitol it would likely annoy him, but he would never fail to give credit that Effie had remade herself, and at high cost. She had made herself into a woman whose strength and courage he could respect. Seeing how she was looking at him, with profound relief like he’d lifted a weight from her shoulders, he grumbled, “And really, just don’t be blurting all that out again in court, all right? Make my job a lot harder.”

She smiled then, a slight little smile as if he amused her rather than exasperated her. “Oh, Haymitch. Really. At least I’ll know I’ve got someone looking out for me who wants to see me stay alive.” This purely honest Effie was disconcerting him, giving him things he couldn’t answer readily with simply being himself with his dry wit and sarcasm, and the vulnerability in her it made the notion of failure hurt all the more.

“I don’t have a great record with that.” She had to know that. She’d watched a lot of the tributes die just the same as him.

“You did the impossible last year and saved two tributes. You did yourself one better this year and started a successful revolution too, at that. If anyone can manage to help earn my freedom, I imagine you can.” Her smile turned almost shy. “Cinna asked me to go to Eight with him, you know.” Neither of them stated the obvious, that there was no guarantee she’d live that long. She also didn’t say what exactly was between her and Cinna, but he thought he sensed where it was, and where it might go. He’d leaned on Johanna once too as the person who understood him and what he had endured like no other would. “I think I could do quite well in the textiles district, don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. Burn all your ugly tacky wigs before you go, though.”

“Yes, well, sobriety looks quite good on you, so I suggest you stick to it,” and damn, he had no good answer to that one either, half-honest and half-nagging as it was, bits of both the old and the new Effie. Besides, it was true enough.

When the guard came to escort her back to her cell, he told her, “Stay strong, all right?” She nodded to him and left, back straight and head held high.

His third visitor wasn’t going to be a friendly chat. They led him in, and Haymitch noticed that since they’d last seen each other, like him, the man had lost some weight. Though he doubted in this case it was from months of hard training at the ruthless behest of Peeta Mellark. Being starved while they tortured him here certainly hadn’t helped that matter either. Haymitch definitely could have used the benefit of those few extra pounds at that point.

“You were expecting your ma, Cray?” he said mildly, seeing the expression of surprise on Gallus Cray’s red face at seeing him sitting there. He also noticed the bruises on his face. Apparently yes, the guards were taking out some frustrations. “Take a seat.” He gestured to the chair opposite.

Cray sat down, eyeing him with interest. “That would really be a feat. I never knew her.” Haymitch passed on the obvious insults he could make about that--more important things to talk about right now.

They’d long been Ripper’s best customers, the two of them. The disgusting drunks: him, the supposed Capitol slut, and Cray, who preyed on the local women. “You became Head in what, the year of the 60th Games?” That was the same year Effie replaced Honoria Delight and started as Twelve's escort, so he was confident of the answer.

“Yeah,” Cray confirmed. “That was after Dulcet died.” None of them had missed Marcellus Dulcet when he died eight years into his tenure as Head, since he had loved the whip and the gallows. Loved them so much that when Haymitch was nineteen even he found himself taking stripes, after he punched a Peacekeeper he saw busily groping a little Seam girl too young to even have breasts. He’d been drunk off his ass enough to give way to his fury, but that was getting more and more common for him at that point. Granted, anyone else in Twelve would have been hanged outright for attacking a Peacekeeper, but he knew they’d been shocked to see a victor being whipped. He’d just laughed and told Dulcet to not hold back. He’d gotten flogged as a kid in Twelve and by patrons in the Capitol, and in being punished rather than let off the hook as a victor he felt like he almost belonged again to Twelve. Until the next Games, when they saw him looking cozy with Capitol folk again as a supposed lover, he had actually felt like he’d earned a little respect back from the people. He'd particularly regretted losing those flogging scars in Remake.

“So that means you’ve been a Peacekeeper for, oh, twenty years in the rank and file and then almost fifteen as Head in Twelve. Plenty of experience there with how things run. Let’s talk about the Peacehome in Two, eh?”

“What about it?” Cray shrugged diffidently. “Sure, I grew up there.”

“Oh, really now?”

“My parents were Peacekeepers. In Six, I think. Any kids a female Peacekeeper has automatically are given up to the Peacehome. Twenty years, no raising a family. That’s the deal, but doesn’t mean we’re expected to be celibate and well, accidents happen.”

“I think we both know you didn’t exactly adhere to celibacy, did you?”

Cray snorted in irritation, his manacles clinking as he put his hands on the table. “Signing up for years of celibacy as Head? Hell no. That’s unreasonable, and they full well know it. When you’re an ordinary Peacekeeper you’re encouraged to stick to your comrades for sex, but a Head shouldn't screw a subordinate. Unprofessional. It interferes with the chain of command. You have to find other options.”

“So instead you fucked starving local women half your age or less. Classy, Cray. Real classy.”

“I paid them fairly for their services. And as if you don’t like ‘em while they’re still young and fresh too as opposed to old worn-out hags,” Cray retorted at him. “I forget exactly what Games she won, so just how much younger is your new little wife Johanna than you again? Fifteen years? Twenty?”

He punched Cray right in the jaw before he could even think about it, unable to help the fierce surge of fury at the insinuation. Damn him, if she was forty like him he’d have loved her just the same, because it wasn’t about her age or her looks, it was about how she understood him and could withstand the worst in him and believe the best in him. It touched too on that small kernel of lingering guilt about being her first, him so jaded and her so naive, of how passionless it had been. Given the perspective of things between them now, that made the contrast all the clearer. It had been better than the alternative, true, and he knew she forgave him--actually, she’d never blamed him, she’d told him that vehemently enough. The trouble was that he was still trying to find a way to finally forgive himself for it and let go. “You really picked the wrong person to be mouthy with about forcing girls into your bed, Cray,” he snarled at him

He saw the fear there in Cray’s dark eyes, realizing suddenly he’d overstepped and mouthed off to a dangerous man who was no longer the downtrodden, harmless drunk victor of Twelve who didn’t give a shit. He had fear of Haymitch’s rage and what had been done to him by the Capitol and what Cray had done to Seam girls and what it meant Haymitch could do to Cray now in vengeance. It was nakedly obvious that if Haymitch felt angry enough and confident enough of a lack of consequences to punch him, Cray was scared and teetering on the edge. For a moment he realized he could use that. It wouldn’t take much, just the mere suggestion of what could be done to him.

All he would have to do would be to lean over and stroke the backs of his fingers over that unshaven cheek and give a knowing look as he said huskily, Do you want me to tell you exactly what I’m going to do to you? You can’t stop me, you know. He’d used that as part of a script for with his patrons for years, though he’d ended it with Because I’m going to have you begging for more. He’d have to skip that part. Then finish it off with the words they’d used on him in this very Detention Center, But you can spare yourself the pain if you cooperate. Tell me what I want to know. That was early on, back when they actually bothered asking him questions.

It would be so easy to do it, use a few well-chosen words as his weapon, and he knew down in his bones it would break Cray and send him hurtling into mindless terror. It didn't even matter there was no way he would carry out the threat. The man would tell him anything to save himself from the mere implication. There might be something almost satisfying in the man finally feeling what Haymitch himself had felt, what those girls had felt, the powerless, the helplessness.

No. Oh, fuck no, not like this, not ever. He thought of that Capitol woman with her torn clothes and her thousand-yard-stare, They asked me how I liked being the one that was powerless for once. Recalling Snow proudly laughing and proclaiming, Finally, Mister Abernathy, you’ve got the ruthlessness it takes to be a player rather than a pawn. Remembering Johanna telling him what she’d figured out about what had happened to Cinna and Effie right here in the Detention Center.

All he had to do was give in to the worst in himself right now, use threats of vengeance and violence to force a man to do his bidding, and he would take a big step down that path to the Capitol’s crimes owning his soul forever. How he’d go home after that and talk to Katniss and Peeta, still believing in better things for the world and that there was some good in people, he didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine how he could stand to curl up tonight with Johanna, put his hands on her, having wallowed in that kind of filth.

What sins he had to this point were mostly ones that the Capitol had helped push on him, having little or no choice but to do as he did. Coin had recognized that and gave him legal amnesty, even if it wasn’t moral absolution by any means. This would have been his solely his own choice to embrace the darkness, to become a worse man rather than the better one he desperately wanted to be.

Apparently his hesitation while being right up in Cray’s face was intimidating enough, and Cray protested wildly, “I never forced any of them! They came to me, came to my door looking for the money. I paid ‘em fairly for it, I don’t even know why they arrested me. I never hurt them, I never took one that was too young.”

He calmed down enough to realize that was true. It had been too tangled up in his mind with what had been done to him, and his mother going to Fog who’d apparently fathered him, but the girls had gone to Cray, gone to other Peacekeepers too. Gone to their doors and knocked, desperate, starving, seeking to sell the only thing they had left. There had been the terrible weight of inevitability and helplessness, he remembered his ma crying softly sometimes when she thought he was asleep and couldn't hear, but no threats, no force. No question Cray had used their lack of power to feed his own appetites, but perhaps it wasn’t defined as an actual legal crime. “Sure, Cray. Fine. You’re all heart. I didn’t come here for that, though. The Peacehome. There any out-of-district orphans there?”

Eager to please now, Cray nodded, sending the too-long strands of his sparse silver hair flying with the gesture. “Yes, of course. Like I said, there are, ah...” He paused awkwardly. “There’s accidents sometimes. And if a local woman doesn’t want the kid, or if she dies, the father can claim it and send it to the Peacehome. Or sometimes if the numbers in the Peacehome were low, some orphans might get recruited from the local orphanage and sent to Two.” He said with a spark of defiance, “Because the district orphanages are shitty places and at least they had a better place to live and an actual job when they grew up rather than being stuck as the lowest of the low.”

Haymitch knew that from the experience of his own family, but he somehow doubted any of them would have preferred to be Peacekeepers even if it meant continuing to be some of the worst off in the Seam. He wanted to ask just how aggressive that “recruiting” had been because he doubted any district kid aside from a Two native was thrilled at the idea of becoming a Peacekeeper. He let it slide, because he didn’t want to get into that argument with Cray right now and lose his temper again. As was he was still trying to tamp it back down to a safe level. “So it’s common enough.” He wondered if Cray himself had perhaps fathered some children that even now were in the Peacehome. It was depressingly likely.

“Any Peacekeeper out there surnamed ‘Law’ that you meet has a parent from the districts, and there’s enough of ‘em in the service,” Cray assured him dryly. “They all get renamed at the Peacehome anyway. New first name, and then ‘Law’ as their last name.”

Now that at least was useful information. Deirdre Law, who’d sworn that affidavit. Darius Law, Darius with his red hair and long nose like he’d seen on more than a few Five tributes over the years. As if reading his mind, Cray said, “That boy Darius that was always hanging around the Hob? I saw you two talking now and again at Ripper’s. He was a Law. Probably died in the bombing, though.”

“No,” Haymitch said harshly, “the Capitol took him prisoner after he tried to stop a flogging your replacement was putting on. Cut out his tongue. Then when they were torturing me in a cell in this place they cut him to pieces in front of me before they killed him.” He was watching Cray as he said it, daring him to say Darius had deserved it. Cray winced and was glumly silent.

“I never flogged anyone,” he said then desperately, “or hanged anyone except a few I really couldn’t let off the hook early on. I overlooked all the poaching and the like that went on, let the Hob go on uninterrupted. I mean, once we all established our boundaries, overall I was pretty damn good to Twelve.” The hopeful look he gave Haymitch made him want to smack the man again, utterly disgusted by him and his self-absorption, but he suppressed the urge.

Compared to the terror brought on by Romulus Thread last year he was inclined to have to agree, but damned if he’d say so. Cray wasn’t going to get a defender in Haymitch, let alone someone who’d excuse his sins. They’d all known in Twelve he was about the least evil option of a Head, especially compared to coming off of enduring the rough years of Dulcet.

Even Fog, lax as he had been throughout Haymitch’s childhood, had given out some stripes for poaching, some to Haymitch himself. He cracked down more in his final year or so. He wouldn’t forget the day Fog had hanged Lorna Hawthorne for poaching, a fifteen-year-old girl that died hard. Haymitch had defied Fog to cut her down and bring her back home to the Seam, himself and Burt carrying her body. At the time he’d been terrified Fog’s renewed vigor on enforcement was simply one more facet of Snow showing how much control he had over Haymitch’s obedience, but he wondered suddenly if Fog had been pressed to be harder by Snow, perhaps as payment for Ash’s life.

No, Cray was no Dulcet or Thread, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t all loathed him anyway for how he blithely used and discarded women like that. “Congratulations, you were only a disgusting old man rather than a total bastard like Thread was. So you’re only morally an asshole rather than legally one too. Granted, you may escape the noose that way, so maybe it’s worth something. Were older kids coming in to the Peacehome unusual too?”

“No. So long as they were under eighteen, any age could end up there, and they did. Special schooling there until they’re eighteen to prepare for Peacekeeper training, and then they go to one of the training camps.” Cray fidgeted a bit, finally admitting, “Kids coming there before they were ten was a little more usual, granted, easier for them that way. It was always harder for the older ones to adjust.” Yeah, apparently their method of smoothing the transition was to pump them full of tracker jacker venom and screw up their brains until they were obedient. “What’s your interest in all of it anyway? You knock up some Seam woman and the kid got sent there?”

“Unlike you, I can be damn certain I don’t have any kids with Seam women, or any kids at all,” he said between his teeth, figuring he’d better quit this conversation before Cray managed to accidentally push more of his buttons. “And I’m just curious, that’s all. Means there’s nobody to me to go see for Darius as next-of-kin. He mentioned he was from the Peacehome once but didn’t explain what it all meant.” The lie popped into his head and came easily to his tongue.

Cray relaxed, thinking it all made sense now. “Ah. Probably not. His mother’s either dead or didn’t want him, and his father, well, a Peacekeeper sending a child there has to sign a release giving up all parental rights, agreeing they’ll never see them again.” That pretty much confirmed that yes, Cray had apparently sent at least one child of his to Two. So had Fog, and he knew in talking to Cray he’d gotten more insight into how Fog’s own mind must have worked, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. Never mind that apparently Fog had used the same woman for years rather than having a constant string of them like Cray. The mentality was likely much the same.

The same woman? Had Fog really stuck to sleeping only with Magnolia Dearborn Abernathy that whole time and then still managed to shoot her down like an animal when given the order, or had he had any other favorites? It seemed likely his ma had been the only one, as he’d never heard about Fog having anyone else, and that kind of information generally got around the Seam pretty easy. Beetee also hadn’t told him that he had found any half-siblings for Haymitch on Fog’s side. Though granted, if they had been sent to Two also, their profiles could be missing now as part of the purge of current Peacekeeper data. The thought of that made his head ache more than it did already.

Getting to his feet and heading for the door, he pounded on it to let the guard know he was done ahead of time. He wouldn’t thank Cray for the information and give him that courtesy, man-to-man. Turning back and waiting for the guard to arrive, he told the older man, “I hope to hell if you ever touched one girl under sixteen, or hurt a woman, or forced one, or took a child from her when she wanted to keep it, that they damn well nail you for it.”

He met up with Johanna in the lobby, seeing her there already waiting. She wasted no time, and shook her head. “Nobody that readily matches either of them. Not unless they dyed their hair, and Peacekeepers raised in Two probably wouldn’t.” Probably not, given that kind of vanity was more a Capitol or One thing than a hallmark of someone from Two. “I didn’t see anyone looking familiar, either way.”

That was actually good news, really. It meant Ash and Heike weren't notorious enough to have been arrested. “Got a little more information from Cray about how that whole system works.” He shook his head and said in an undertone, “I also really feel like I need a shower.” The need to go scrub himself clean, feeling tainted by being back in this place and talking to Cray and how it had tugged on the very worst impulses within himself, was sharp.

“You and me both,” she said, face looking a bit grim herself. “Flipping through all those files and seeing what some of them got arrested for...yeah. So let’s get the fuck out of here, get that shower going.” With some effort she gave him a sly smile, nudged him in the ribs as they walked unopposed out of the front door of the Detention Center into freedom and fresh air. “You get to pick the soap this time.”

Chapter Text

Six days had passed since Snow was found dead when Coin sent some lackeys to inform them that she’d requested, or more likely required, their presence at a meeting that morning. They held it down in the old training room, and as they walked in, Coin was waiting for them up on the dais that held the long table where the Gamemakers had once watched them and judged their capabilities.

Haymitch could see why she’d picked this room of all of them in terms of practicality, being as that was about the only table big enough in the building to hold all seventeen victors, but he’d be less than honest if he didn’t say it set his teeth on edge. He wouldn’t say he didn’t think she’d also chosen this particular venue to unsettle them and get on their nerves, considering none of them had especially happy memories of a room that had once held the potential for their life or death on the whims of the Gamemakers. A score of four versus seven or even ten made all the difference in the world. Someone like Johanna with her score of two was the rare exception to that.

The dais was well-lit, and while the buffet tables didn’t have the sumptuous excess that had been there when they all had been tributes, the fruit and cheese and pastries and the like were still probably more than a lot of people out there would be getting this morning.

The exhibition floor was darkened, but as his eyes adjusted again he could look out onto it and see the weapons racks and the dummies and the equipment still out there, same as it had been six months before when he was earning his priority target training score of twelve. Same as it had been twenty-five years ago, at that. “What is this all about?” Finnick murmured to Haymitch as they took their seats.

“Not a clue,” he returned in an undertone, Johanna taking the seat on his other side, “but I doubt it’s to tell us good news.”

“Close the door behind you, please, Mellark,” Coin directed to Peeta, who was the last of them to enter the room. As they all settled down in their chairs, she took her place standing at the head of the table and wasted no time launching right into it as some of them were yawning and still rubbing the sleep from their eyes. “My reason for calling this meeting is to settle a debate. Snow escaped a well-deserved execution and to say that there’s some justifiable fury at that is something of an understatement. The people of Panem feel robbed of their justice.”

“There’s dozens of other bigwigs still awaiting their execution,” Dazen pointed out, tiredly leaning his head in his hand. He hadn’t slept well by the look of him, his coffee-and-cream skin gone paler enough that his freckles stood out more starkly. He also hadn’t combed his red hair and it was a mess.

“But they’re not Snow,” Coin replied crisply. “The sense in the districts is that their suffering over the last seventy-five years has been so profound that fairly large measures are called for in redress.”

“We know that,” Rice told her, “we’ve been living out in the districts.” As an Eleven victor he’d seen his friends and neighbors suffering some of the hardest oppression.

Coin looked mildly peeved at having her speech interrupted. “In fact, there’s even a suggestion that complete annihilation of every Capitol citizen would be a justifiable measure.”

“Wait, what?” Katniss said in shock, vigorously shaking her head and sending her now-short hair flying with the motion. “We’re going to just, what, gather up thousands and thousands of people in a field somewhere and drop a bomb on them or something?” More than a little shocked himself, Haymitch exchanged a glance with Peeta, knowing Coin had certainly used bombs for her own aims before.

“Obviously that solution is impractical in the interest of maintaining a long-term stable population, so it can’t be put into force.”

Johanna gave a sharp, incredulous laugh. “Can’t go through with anything that threatens us all spawning at an acceptable rate,” she said, and Haymitch put a hand on her knee under the table, not as a come-on but more as both reassurance and warning, not wanting her to overplay her hand too early, as understandable as her anger was. Feeling Johanna drawn tight with tension, he was glad the axes were on the rack out there rather than right at hand. The fact that Coin cited population concerns rather than the sheer inhumanity of wiping out an entire population didn’t escape his notice. His own temper was fired up too, at Coin once again reducing people to their ability to breed. Besides, hadn’t the Council just convicted Snow on the attempted genocide of Twelve as an unthinkable and unpardonable crime, and here the notion of it was on the table regarding the Capitol itself?

“Mason--pardon, Abernathy--do you intend to let me continue or do you have something more helpful to say than interruptions?”

“No, Teacher, I’ll be a good girl,” Johanna snapped, folding her arms over her chest and sitting back in her chair. “So what else is on the table?”

“As we have no consensus among myself and my colleagues and there’s unlikely to be one, the agreement between us is this--that as you could be considered to represent the interests of your respective districts as well as Panem itself, we should we let you, the victors, decide the proposal we put before you today.” That right there set Haymitch on alert, that tingle of alarmed awareness going down his spine. Coin wouldn’t just hand that kind of power over to her potential rivals without good cause.

“No Thirteen representative needed for this?” Enobaria ventured, dark eyes watching Coin cautiously. “In the interest of everyone having a voice in it?”

Coin shrugged. “As our suffering in Thirteen clearly doesn’t equal that of the other twelve districts, I agreed that the people of Thirteen will simply abide by whatever decision is made by you.” That unnerved him even more, her openly admitting that Thirteen came through it unscathed. What was her angle? Already he was trying to figure it out, and trying to not wonder if he was being overly paranoid. He doubted it. “A majority of nine votes approves this plan. Nobody may abstain. The idea we have right now is that rather than executing every Capitol citizen, we hold one final, symbolic Hunger Games involving the children of those most directly in power.”

The overall reaction to that was a vehement, “What the hell?” Haymitch pretty much shared it. Even in his most diabolical nightmares he wouldn’t have readily come up with that. The very thought of it was so unimaginable, and yet there was Coin, putting it out in front of them with total calm and demanding they debate it.

“Are you kidding us?” Finnick demanded, his green eyes fiercely alight in his scarred face.

“Not at all, Odair. This is a legitimate proposal. Also, if you approve the plan, your individual votes will be kept secret for your own safety, but it will be known that the Games were held with your majority approval.”

“Whose idea was this anyway?” Haymitch asked her carefully. “Plutarch’s?” He hoped not, he knew Plutarch sort of had his own agenda in things, but if he’d turned his cloak that solidly and Haymitch couldn’t trust him, that was a loss.

“No, it was mine,” Coin said coolly. “On reflection it seemed to balance the need for vengeance with the least loss of life. You may proceed to cast your votes.”

“There is no need for vengeance,” Peeta burst out, his face turning red with the force of his anguish and his fury. “Not now, not ever, not like this! Never again!”

“I take that as a vote of ‘no’, Mellark.” Coin eyed Katniss. “Mockingjay?”

Katniss looked startled, uncertain, and Haymitch could feel the intense pressure of Coin there expecting her answer making her decide in a snap judgment. She’d caught them well and off guard, and he didn’t like it. If he could just get Coin the hell out of here so they could all regroup from the shock of it and start to think how they were going to handle this, that would be a big help. “I think...”

“If you’re not actually involved in the process of deciding, ma’am,” Haymitch told her, though it galled him to use the honorific he figured it was best to appear deferential and polite right now than look like a serious challenge, “you don’t much need to be here right now.”

“I’m here to certify the vote, Abernathy,” her pale eyes turned intensely on him.

“And if y’all couldn’t decide on a course of action over, what, several weeks, you want us all to decide in thirty seconds? We’re gonna need to debate this. I imagine you’ve got more important concerns for rebuilding Panem than wasting time watching us bicker about it for hours.” There was probably no good counter for her to make to that without making it obvious she was only there to keep an eye on them and perhaps influence the proceedings.

“Do any of you really feel you need more time to decide?” she addressed the others.

“Yes,” Brutus spoke up first, folding his hands and putting them on the table, “I do. Two’s relationship with the Capitol is...pretty complicated, as we’re all aware, and I’d prefer to weigh all sides of the issue well before I cast a vote on it.” Haymitch couldn’t quite risk giving him a grateful glance for taking the risk of supporting him, not with Coin eyeing all of them carefully, but he wouldn’t forget it. Several others chimed in, Katniss among them, and he could see the small lines of temper around Coin’s lips as it happened.

‘“Very well. We’ll reconvene here tomorrow morning at 0900 for me to take the official vote count.” With that Coin gathered up her things and headed for the door.

Once the door closed, Haymitch looked around at them and said, “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you about her. Convinced yet that she’s totally ruthless and that she’s also out to get us?”

“What do you mean?” Enobaria said.

“She’s put it on us, Fangless,” Johanna told her. “Never mind it was her idea, she wants us to take the public responsibility for it. If these Games went forward, the blame for it goes to us forever, not to her. Great way to discredit us.”

“Discredit? Some people out there might consider us heroes for doing to them what they’ve been doing to us all along,” Rice said.

“You can’t seriously be considering it,” Finnick said angrily. “Rice, for fuck’s sake, you were there in the arena, do you really want to condemn any child to that?”

“If it was Snow’s cabinet members and the Gamemakers stuck in a Games,” Lizzie said hesitantly, her brown eyes troubled, “maybe that would be one thing. They’re the ones responsible. But doing it to kids...”

“No, not even if it was the politicians!” Peeta insisted. “Let them be executed, sure, but not in that kind of sick spectacle. The only right way is that we ought to let go of our anger and dispense justice.”

“And the need of the people for some kind of closure doesn’t mean anything?” Brutus asked him. “You’re young, Peeta, never known much of anything outside of Twelve. You haven’t seen all the realities out there that need to be considered. Telling them ‘Too bad, your anger doesn’t matter, you have to forgive them and just deal with it’ isn’t going to go over well. By what right do you, or any of us, get to dictate to an entire nation how the ‘only right way’ to feel about this is?”

“Our whole district got destroyed, Brutus,” Katniss snapped. “Peeta lost his whole family. I think that’s enough of a loss to count.”

“Do we really want to turn this into a pissing match of who lost exactly how much?” Rice spoke up. “We all lost plenty. Us and everyone in the districts too. That’s the point.”

“How is there any closure to the losses in holding another Games?” Peeta insisted. “You don’t think seventy-five years ago they were holding this same debate and that’s how we ended up with the Games to begin? If we don’t stop it right now, in seventy-five years when the Capitol is angry and oppressed they’re going to want to rebel and get their revenge on us for this. It’ll never end.”

“Full irony points to Coin,” Chantilly said with a wry smile. “Putting us in this particular room to debate it. Making us into her own little personal Gamemakers.” Haymitch couldn’t help but admit she was right. Sitting in the Gamemakers’ seats, the symbolism of it was pretty significant, once it had been pointed out.

“She’ll probably make us help direct the Games because we signed off on them,” Johanna said, looking disgusted. “We really will be Gamemakers. Sink deeper into this shit too because of it.” He couldn’t imagine making an arena, designing a hell made to kill children.

“Look, I’m a mother,” Chantilly said. “My own kids would have been in the arena when they got old enough. So no, I can’t condone making anyone else’s children pay for the sins of others.”

“I’m with her,” Niello said simply. “We One tributes trained since we were kids in hopes of being able to survive the arena if we got picked. Enough lives got sacrificed to the Games already, even the ones who didn’t go to the arena. I’m not signing over more of them.”

“I’m with Chantilly too,” Annie said. “I’m having a child in five months.” Her hand slipped down to the small swell of her belly under her sweater. “I want a better Panem for this child and all children to grow up in. I won’t become a woman that tells her own child that I treasure them while I deliberately condemned other kids to die.”

“And obviously I’m voting ‘no’ also, so that’s five of us already that won’t let this happen,” Finnick said.

“Six,” Beetee informed him. “Enough have died. I’ve got some likely responsibility for the deaths of Capitol children already from the napalm bombs. I won’t deliberately take on more.”

“There’s gotta be some kind of better way,” Wy said, “but damn if I can think of something that punishes them enough without going so crazy as to bring back the arena.”

“Seven against,” Johanna spoke up. “Most of you didn’t see those parents there screaming when Snow took their kids and penned them up, and then when they burned to death. They’re Capitol, yeah, but they’re not ignorant now. They know what it’s like to be terrified for their lives and watch their kids suffering. Those kids were still innocent and they died bad deaths thank to Coin. I’m not handing any more kids over to her to kill. Execute the Capitol leaders and let’s fucking well move on.”

“Eight,” he spoke up himself. “We finally have a choice of becoming something besides a bunch of people who got fucked up by the arena when we were kids and got to relive the Games every year since. We’ve got blood on our hands already, true. I’m a killer, yeah, same as the rest of you.” Even Peeta finally wasn’t exempt, he’d shed blood too down there on the Exchange. Maybe that contributed now to his vehemence against more slaughter. “But I ain’t making the choice to turn into a murderer.” He had killed before because it was the only way to survive. This would be causing the death of people simply to watch it happen. It was a big, irreversible step he wasn’t willing to take, giving over to the worst in him. He’d refused to threaten Cray. He wasn’t going to kill Capitol kids, not when only weeks ago he was trying to save them. There were more than enough ghosts in his head of dead kids without inviting more to move on in. “I won’t kill kids for what their families did.” Ravenna had hanged for the rebellion and fifty years later, he went into the arena as part of the continuing price paid for it. No more.

“Nine,” Katniss said quietly, looking over at Peeta. “No country that wants to resolves its fights with the lives of its kids is worth supporting. So that’s the majority of us.”

“I’d rather we got an actual agreement.” Tearing the victors apart would be a rift that would linger, and given there were so few of them left, Haymitch was inclined to avoid it. “Look, do any of you really think that this is the best way, the only way? You want this be your biggest legacy when they write the history books? She said she’d keep our names off the votes for our own security. That means there are people out there that don’t want this and would be furious to have it happen, no matter what she’s claiming she’s supposedly hearing from the districts. We know our own people back home. How much would the majority of them out there actually want this enough to make it happen and enjoy watching it?”

“Tempting as it could be for them to have a good taste of their own medicine,” Enobaria said, “I’d really rather focus on making sure Two doesn’t end up completely destroyed.”

“I can’t support a Capitol Games,” Taffeta said bluntly, “because yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but there are some good people here who should be given a chance to atone. They’ve typically been oblivious, I agree, but being raised to not realize the truth is very different from deliberate cruelty. I vote no, but we can’t just tell Coin that and let it go, because I’m afraid she’ll revert back to that plan of killing everyone with Capitol citizenship. If justice prevails and Cinna survives his trial I’m not willing to lose him to indiscriminate revenge.”

“So we have to deal with her before she really gets going on duplicating Snow’s tactics,“ Katniss said fiercely. “And I want her gone before she can try to hurt Prim even more. Are we going to have to kill her to get rid of her?”

“Seriously, can we all just stop talking about killing people?” Peeta said desperately.

Haymitch sighed in exasperation, shaking his head. “Sweetheart, this is why nobody lets you make the plans. You just go kill her now, she wins, because you’re the assassin rather than the liberator.” If Katniss killed her, if any of them simply killed her, before Panem knew what kind of woman was poised to take the reins of the nation, it would be a disaster. Coin would go down in the public eye as a victim rather than an eliminated threat. Katniss would probably be put on trial for it, possibly executed. He wasn’t about to let that happen.

“So now we expose her,” Finnick said. “We take the chance that the people of Panem really won’t support another Hunger Games and tell them her other crimes too. Look what happened when I dragged Snow out into the light with that propo.”

“She’s not as bad a monster yet as Snow,” Niello said, green eyes cautious as he spoke up. “It’s still taking a risk calling her out now.” His face said, I have young kids, I survived one revolution already, what happens to them if I get killed now taking part in a coup?

“Yet,” Johanna said, stressing the word. “She’ll get there and I don’t want to give her that chance. It’s gonna be harder to kick her scrawny ass out of the Presidential Mansion once we all get all cozy with the idea of her as our president.”

“Do we really want to sit back and wait until she does something so extreme that nobody can overlook it,” Beetee said quietly, “knowing that we knew her character and could have perhaps prevented it? Can we live with that?”

“I’ve got family too that I gotta look out for here,” Rice said, shaking his head. “If she’s gone after Katniss’ little sister already, I don’t want her anywhere near mine if I do something in the future she doesn’t much like.”

“You know we’re probably putting targets on our backs doing this,” Dazen said with a sigh. “But maybe that’s better than it was with Snow, looking over our shoulders the rest of our lives.” He wouldn’t say it was all rousing enthusiastic support, but it seemed like they all agreed on one thing at least: Coin needed to go.

“We need Plutarch then, if we’re gonna be filming a propo,” Katniss said. “Do you think we can trust him?” Her grey eyes, Seam eyes, met his own, reflecting her own doubts about Plutarch, the convenient film crew that caught the bombing and everything.

“I think we have to,” he said, admitting it. None of them knew precisely how to work a camera crew--that was a pure Capitol skill. They needed Plutarch to pull this off, and trust that he would support their side more than Coin’s. He smiled reluctantly. “Though he didn’t seem too thrilled with Coin back in Thirteen, caught the two of them arguing more than once. If nothing else he’ll probably be excited by the idea of a great propo.”

Annie got to her feet. “Well, I can go find him.” She shrugged, made an apologetic face. “I needed a bathroom break anyway?”

“I know how that goes when you’re pregnant,” Chantilly said with amusement, lightening the mood. “Taffeta does too, I’m sure.” Taffeta laughed quietly and agreed. He took Johanna’s hand in his for a second out of the sight of the rest of them, and her fingers clung tightly to his. No, it wasn’t OK, it hurt in an odd way, maybe because the whole matter was still a muddle of emotions anyway. But the thing was too personal so it was easier to simply mutely endure these moments than to tell the others what had happened.

“If anyone asks, you’re getting him to consult with us about what his plan for these Games would likely involve so that can figure into the debate,” Haymitch told her. That would be a reasonable cause for Plutarch to be joining them, to alleviate Coin getting suspicious if she was watching them.

They nervously waited then, not saying much about it. Nobody seemed to want to try to debate it further and possibly wreck the moment. They finally dug into the food. He had some coffee and picked at a muffin. Blueberry, his favorite, and it tasted like sawdust which pretty much proved he had no real appetite.

Plutarch came in finally with Annie close behind him, looking far more awake than any of them had on entering the room. Though coffee, and the adrenaline rush of a debate like this, seemed to have charged all of them up pretty neatly. “Annie said there was something you wanted to discuss about a propo?”

“Tell me you didn’t know Coin was proposing a Hunger Games using Capitol kids,” Katniss demanded bluntly.

Plutarch’s blue eyes went wide and his face went pale. If he was faking his shock, he was one of the best actors Haymitch had ever seen, and over the years he’d seen some pretty damn good ones. “Never,” he said vehemently. “This sort of thing is what we fought against, isn’t it?”

“We want to call her out,” Haymitch told him. “Shoot a propo, like you did with Katniss and Finnick.” Step by step they took him through Coin’s transgressions, and Plutarch’s expression got more and more bleak with each one.

“She had said she wanted a camera crew on that squad since they were likely to be some of the first to reach the mansion, but...oh my.”

“That’s a bit mild. I was thinking more along the lines of ‘that unspeakable bitch’ myself,” Johanna told him.

He shook his head, looking heartsick. “Things have happened in this war already. Stupid, vicious, cruel things that we’re going to have to try to look beyond. But this...it can’t stand. Not if we want it to stick, not if we want this to be the time that we finally get it right.” Sipping at a cup of water, his hands mostly steady, he told them, “The problem I can see with this propo is that it’s powerful stuff, yes, but it has no resolution.”

“What?” Taffeta asked him, looking confused. “We confront Coin with the things she’s done and her plans for Panem so she can’t hide from them. It seems fairly straightforward?”

“And then what?” Plutarch said with an impatient wave of his hand. “The people get to sit back and watch you fight Coin and simply wait for the outcome. A lot of the propos I shot during the war were meant merely to inspire with dramatic images. This one, though, it’s dropping a bomb.” Looking around at them, realizing his audience and his choice of words, he winced and said, “OK, forget I said that, please. Rather, this is a powerful propo. Nothing less than a call to arms, so what you need is a plan of action. That propo with Finnick and Katniss gave a clear directive for people to seize upon: rise up, openly claim your freedom from a man like Snow. In short? Fight to be free from tyranny.”

“So what, we inspire people to storm the mansion?” Enobaria said with interest. Ah, Two, always looking for the good fight.

“Oh, no. If we seize control by force, what’s to make us any more legitimate a leader than Coin, claiming succession like she is? What’s to stop someone else in a month deciding they don’t like things and staging another coup? No, what we need is to give the power back to the people. Let them fairly cast their own votes, elect their own representatives, choose our country’s destiny. It’s worked before.”

“In books,” Haymitch pointed out dryly. They’d all learned in school too that old North America’s vaunted democracies had collapsed pretty readily beneath the terror of nuclear war and famine and disaster. “It failed, too, when things were desperate.”

“So what then?” Peeta said irritably. “We appoint another leader and tell the people they’d better like it? You were right, Brutus.”

“I was?” Brutus said, looking surprised.

“None of us should get arrogant enough to think we get to dictate to an entire nation what’s right and expect them to take it. Plutarch has the right idea. The people should have their say in government.”

“Very fine and well,” Haymitch said, appreciating Peeta’s idealism even as he sighed at the impracticality of it right now, “but that’s going to take a while to set up a nice functional democracy. Elections, representatives--right now we’re facing how to get rid of a huge threat and how to get Panem through the next year or so without too many people dying. We need sheer stability before we can think about improving things. What can we do right now that’s practical?”

“Take one small step first,” Johanna said with a shrug. “Elect an actual leader that people support. Coin can hardly object to that idea without looking like as power-greedy as she actually is. The rest, that’s hopefully gonna follow from there.”

“And what if they happen to actually elect Coin?” Katniss said.

“Then we’ve made idiots of ourselves on national television and we’d better watch our backs, Kittycat.” That was an understatement. Coin was probably too clever to risk “accidents” for them immediately with how suspicious they might look. But Haymitch was cynical enough to think that over the years they might happen, or some other more subtle form of revenge. They had with Snow’s rivals, and Coin could probably afford to be patient in dealing with rivals already rendered powerless. “But I think it’s a risk we’re gonna have to take, putting some faith in people like that, and hoping it pans out.”

“Never thought I’d actually hear you say a thing like ‘putting faith in people’, Jo,” Finnick teased her lightly. “Can’t be Haymitch’s influence.”

“Ah, shut up, Finn,” she grumbled, throwing a balled-up napkin at him as Finnick laughed.

After the plan was laboriously made, everyone playing devil’s advocate and coming up with any counter they could imagine Coin could make to make it fail, they were ready. Plutarch managed to get his camera crew in there. All of them took part in the propo in the end. Haymitch led it off, looking into the camera as Plutarch gestured that they were filming. “I’m currently at the Hunger Games Training Center in the Capitol, in the tribute training room where only a couple of hours ago, President Alma Coin asked me and the other remaining survivors of the Hunger Games to take on the very role of the Gamemakers that used to sit at this table and watch Panem’s children desperately trying to impress them. The Gamemakers that twice now have watched me and gave my odds for survival before sending me to the arena to die. The Gamemakers that currently are awaiting their executions. She said that the decision of whether to punish the Capitol by holding one final Hunger Games involving Capitol children would be left to us.” He paused for a second, committed himself to it, hell or high water. “We won’t vote to let that happen. We condemn that idea and any other idea that involves deliberately taking the lives of innocents as the price for someone else’s sins. Furthermore, we condemn Alma Coin for proposing an idea based on something recently defined by her own War Crimes Council as a crime against the people, as well as for other crimes against the people.”

Unfortunately saying outright, “She’s crazy and ruthless and if you let her stay in power you’re absolutely insane,” wasn’t quite an option. But he thought they did a pretty good job of it nonethless, running through the list of how Coin couldn’t be trusted to have the best interest of people in mind. The clomiphen, the napalm, Thirteen’s abandonment in the Dark Days, the conduct of some of the rebel soldiers during the Capitol takeover, the vigilantes running wild even now.

They left the last two slots to Peeta and Katniss. Gentle but silver-tongued Peeta who had the ideals and the words to back them, to appeal to the best in people without seeming naive or accusatory. “We ask you, the people of Panem, to make a choice to believe in the brightest and best within ourselves and our nation rather than the darkest and most fearful. Join us, please, in making the country we should have, one governed by law and justice rather than fear and secrecy. The free country that we fought for so hard. The free country I want my own children to grow up in.” Glancing at Katniss ready to take her place in front of the camera, Haymitch thought he saw her flinch at that last bit. He tried to not read too much into it. Not his business.

Katniss brought it home. It had been no contest among them that the Mockingjay herself should make the final call to bring the districts together. “At noon tomorrow, we ask that all the adults of this nation report to their respective Justice Buildings. This includes the Capitol. They’re a part of this nation too, though now they’ll be equal, no better than the rest of us. District Twelve, we’ll be seeing you at Thirteen,” and there was genuine eagerness in her voice at the thought of seeing old friends. “Each district’s victors and their officials will be waiting for you to cast your own vote for the new President of Panem. We’ve all been kept silent too long. Now is the time for us all to let our voices be heard.”

“Cut,” Plutarch said, eyes alight and grinning widely at them as he straightened from watching the camera view. “Wow. No real editing on this. Nothing fancy for effects. It speaks for itself.” Coming from Plutarch, that was pretty significant.

“Just get it on the air,” Haymitch told him. Before, at the very worst, Coin found out and destroyed the tape or something like that.

“I’ll assist in that,” Beetee said. “Particularly in case Coin tries to prevent it from a repeat airing as I imagine the more we play it the better, with the rolling electricity shortages throughout the districts. Though in doing so she’d be proving us right, so perhaps she’ll just accept it.”

As the rest filed out, Peeta and Katniss stayed behind a minute. “Johanna’s already covering Seven, obviously,” Katniss said, “but someone’s got to handle Twelve, Thirteen, and the Capitol. So who’s it to be of us three?”

“I don’t think we ought to leave Haymitch to oversee the Capitol voting,” Peeta said, shaking his head. “You and I don’t have people here we’re already inclined to dislike the way he does, Katniss.”

“You mean people whose teeth he wants to kick in?” Johanna inquired with an arch of an eyebrow.

He shrugged. “If you kids want to take Twelve and Thirteen so you can go there together, I’ll manage.” Not to mention avoiding Thirteen meant he staved off a possible reckoning with Hazelle just that bit longer. He had to admit he still wasn’t looking forward to trying to tell yet another mother how her kid had died. Maybe it was honesty about himself, maybe it was cowardly self-preservation too, but he didn’t know if he was quite ready to face her yet. “They’ve already sentenced most of ‘em in my case, so I won’t be seeing them at the voting box. Besides, there’s a thing to be said for me staying around here. Keeping an eye on Coin.”

“All right,” Peeta said. “Katniss, if you’ve got Twelve?”

“It won’t take long,” she said with a dry understatement that hid the loss they all still felt at it. “Once they’re done I’ll come help you with the ones from Thirteen.” She gave him an apologetic smile. “You’re probably gonna be better at handling them protesting at you about us calling their president a monster anyway.”

Beetee gave them a heads up, and the propo first aired in the Capitol at 3 pm. Fifteen minutes later, Haymitch headed over to the Presidential Mansion to have a chat with Coin. “I assume you saw our little public announcement?” he said, having been brusquely escorted into her office by two grey-uniformed Thirteen soldiers who didn’t look too happy to see him.

“I should have figured you’d be the one to have led this farce. What is the meaning of this whole thing, Abernathy?” she asked him coldly. He wished she’d get angry. It would make her seem more human, but those eyes stayed cold and sharp and her hair was flawless, not a strand out of place.

“It’s us victors refusing to be your little scapegoats to give legitimacy to your plans. It’s us telling the people exactly what kind of person is poised to take over and lead them. So tomorrow Panem votes for a leader they pick, not someone who’s claiming this office only by conquest. Thought it seemed pretty straightforward in the propo?”

“Oh, yes, your little election.” She scoffed at that. “You do realize that I can readily challenge the legitimacy of its results since it’s being overseen by the very people that denounced me today?”

“Don’t be fussing yourself about that, Alma,” he told her, standing at the window rather than in front of the desk like she probably wanted. “We victors are there at the vote only to look nice and support the process. We didn’t spend our morning in that training gym throwing spears or taking naps. We thought ahead. Plutarch’s arranging for marked and locked ballot boxes as we speak, ones that ain’t getting unlocked until they’re back here at the Hall of Justice. To be opened in the presence of others, and every single damn vote in there to be certified and marked by two witnesses before it joins the official tally. Non-victor witnesses, in case you were curious.”

“So it’ll be Capitol citizens as witnesses, who also have a vested interest in deposing me.” All right, they hadn’t thought of that angle and he made a quick mental note to tell the others tonight to try and recruit people from each of the districts to come help with the ballots. It made the sheer logistics a bit more of a pain in the ass but if it cut off an avenue for Coin to undermine things, it was worth it.

“Nah, we’ll use some people from the districts for it too.” He shrugged, trying to present the image of being at ease, trying to not let old instincts hold sway and confuse her with Snow and worry that after having challenged her openly someone would suffer for it. This was a different situation and if she did it, people would be watching. “You’re welcome to be there for the tallying as a witness, of course. Make sure it goes smoothly and fairly.”

“I could deny you the means to stage this spectacle of yours. You’ll need numerous hovercraft and the like to get out to the districts, and the use of those are under my command.”

“You could, but you won’t, will you?” He smiled at her, letting himself be confident they’d forced her hand. “Because if you do, people will think you’re afraid of a fair election. Hell, maybe you can even suppress it by claiming now isn’t the time since we’re in the middle of a crisis. But six months from now, two years, whenever, they’re gonna be calling for an election again. Eventually, you’d have to face it.” He looked her right in the eyes and said, “Panem won’t be having any more tyrants holding absolute power for life. The idea of the people holding the power is out there and it can’t be taken back.”

That frosty mask cracked and she looked at him with an expression of active dislike. He actually sort of enjoyed the honesty of it. “And if the districts do happen to elect me, Abernathy? What underhanded scheme have you got then?”

“Oh, I imagine you’ll carry the majority of Thirteen handily, but there’s plenty of other people out there. If they elect you they’re unfortunately sort of nuts, but if that happens, at least they know what they’re getting and they actually chose it rather than having it forced on them. Like it or not, if you win it fairly tomorrow, we’ll all agree to live by that decision.” He grinned at her. “At least until the next election comes anyway. You wouldn’t be able to put it off forever. So, what’s your response to this going to be, out of curiosity?”

“I’ll make a statement tonight that your accusations against me are ridiculous attempts to undermine my authority, but that I’ll abide by the will of the people tomorrow in the election.” Now there were some clear signs of temper, and she sounded about ready to spit nails.

“Good.” He headed for the door, calling over his shoulder, “We’ll see you with the election results, Alma. Don’t get too comfortable in that chair.”

Chapter Text

The day itself had been busy for Johanna, waking up before dawn to meet the hovercraft in order to be out to the winter town in Seven in time for noon. Setting up shop at the Justice Building, there had been a pretty constant flow of people all through the day to where she was waiting with Mayor Luoma.

She and Luoma had been muttering about the possible difficulty of convincing people of the need for the finger stick to confirm their identity, being as it would bring back memories in all of the adults of six years of Reaping Days where it had been done to them. But Plutarch had been insistent on it during yesterday’s meeting--one adult citizen got one confirmed vote, and ergo one less thing for Coin to use as a weapon to complain about the legitimacy of this. Apparently Volts had been up half the night writing the programming so that when the name came up on a portable computer she or Luoma or his wife could hit a couple of keys and confirm they’d voted. She’d seen how it worked this morning when Haymitch and Katniss’ mom threw their votes into the Twelve box before it left, since the two of them wouldn’t be leaving the Capitol today, Haymitch to oversee the Capitol vote and Perulla Everdeen to care for Prim.

It probably helped ease some fears that she and Luoma and Mrs. Luoma went first and showed the waiting crowd that nope, no big deal, just a harmless little blood test, a quick scribble on a piece of paper, fold and shove it into the locked and sealed ballot box, and it was done. Besides, Seven never tolerated cowardice well, didn’t have the reputation of showing fear. No wonder the Gamemakers had been surprised by her the first time, a girl from Seven who’d totally lost it. No wonder the rest of Seven hadn’t known what to do with her, first with her utter public breakdown that they might or might not think had been real, and then with her getting a grip and playing weak and terrified in her deliberate hunt of the other tributes. Seven didn’t show fear but she’d unsettled them all, no question. Deceptive cunning wasn’t something they knew well, laconic and honest as they generally all were as a district. She’d become something in the arena that they didn’t quite understand and didn’t know how to deal with easily.

She wouldn’t say that had entirely gone away, but for the first time in a while there were genuine smiles and inquiries as some of them came up to see her. Hearing a matter-of-fact, “Yeah, it’s good to see you alive and well still, gutsy thing as you did,” from a citizen of Seven was pretty much like squeals of joy from another district. They didn’t ask about the arena or the torture, which was a relief, and a few actually congratulated her on getting married. “Well, he’s a smart one,” was the usual consensus on Haymitch, which was a careful commentary on both his intelligence and that possibly suspicious cunning. But they usually ended with some theme on, “And pretty brave too, openly taking on powerful people like that,” so essentially, Haymitch got the general seal of Seven approval. Not to mention that of course the Mockingjay whom everybody loved obviously cared for him.

Throughout the day she heard some about the damage to the district, and it was frustrating to know she wouldn’t have time to stick around and check it out. Nothing quite like Twelve’s total destruction, obviously, but there had been some bombs and fires and the like. Some sections of the winter town had been hard hit right after the Quell, though as most people had been away at summer lumbering the deaths had been kept lower, and nobody knew for sure how badly hit things were out in the wilds of the summer camps where it was hard to get a collective picture in the lingering confusion with everyone scattered to the winds before they’d all come together to fight for their district. A lot of people had died, that was clear, and food was scarce right now with the storage facilities in the winter town being destroyed over the summer. Johanna knew guiltily that the hammer had probably fallen harder because she, their victor, had been so openly part of the rebel alliance. But there was the quiet conviction of, “But we’ll bury our dead and we’ll rebuild.” No excuses, no complaints, no bullshit, that was the Seven way. Seemed like, to judge from Katniss and Haymitch, Twelve shared something of the same stoicism.

They voted, they took the time and chatted with her, and they headed back to make the best that they could of their lives right now. She ate dinner with the Luomas, snuggled down into her coat, and walked the mile to the glade that housed Victors' Village, the thick shade of the trees a comfort. Seven of the houses had always been empty. Two had been vacant since before she was born. She looked over at Blight’s house, at Cedrus’, and found it hard to believe she’d never see them again. She could imagine them there even now, Blight far more at ease away from the Capitol and anything smacking of whoring, busy brewing up spruce beer that would knock a grown man on his ass and carving toys for kids, Cedrus sitting on his porch smoking his pipe and practicing his birdcalls. She shut her eyes as she turned away and headed for her own house, and hoped their venom ghosts wouldn’t appear, Blight down on the ground with his dead, wide-staring hazel eyes and Cedrus with blood and brains in his shaggy, thick grey hair from a gunshot through the back of his skull.

But of course the house was no comfort either. Six months since she’d been back, since Reaping Day in July, and even though the lights were working--for the moment--and she got a cheery fire going in the fireplace, she felt the solitude of it weighing on her. She’d spent winters here all by herself before, and after the last months of never quite being alone, the silence of being back here was almost oppressive.

She ended up in her room, busying herself packing some of her things. She’d need clothes to move to Twelve, after all, no sense buying everything new in the Capitol where it was all terrible anyway when she had perfectly good stuff here. When those were packed she moved on. She didn’t go into Bern and Heike’s rooms, not ready to clean them out just yet. Bern was still dead and Heike, well, that was a wound that she couldn’t quite touch.

Thinking of things from around the house she’d want to bring with her, a small pile slowly accumulated in the parlor. The New Year’s tree ornaments for sure and maybe next year they could have a tree together, she and Haymitch. She’d probably have to do the carving for the ornament but that was OK. She smiled wryly and thought she and Haymitch would probably have to make a fox ornament, for cleverness.

Going into her parents’ room, she ran a hand over the cherry wood dresser her parents had made together, touching the carvings of oak and maple leaves, the motif that was passed down through her family’s furniture. Every piece had its individual additions and flourishes from the couple that made it, but they’d all have some oak leaves for strength and maple leaves for sweetness, even in hard times. The bed, also cherry wood, had been her grandparents’, Oma Kirsten whose hair she’d inherited. The eldest child usually inherited any available family heirloom furniture when they married, unless there was enough they decided to share with the younger siblings. Bern obviously couldn’t put in a claim now, and she’d never thought she’d get married either and that Heike was dead, so the stuff just sat in that room with the door shut. She’d take the dresser and the bed, she decided, looking at the satin-smooth lines of the wood, and if they found Heike and if she decided she wanted anything to do with Johanna and if she ever married and wanted either piece as a memento of their parents, Johanna would happily hand it over. That was a hell of a lot of if.

The power went out and she knew trying to pack by candlelight would be futile, and she had no idea where the lanterns were buried as she hadn’t needed them in years. Obviously it meant no television as a way to keep her mind off things either. She ended up sitting downstairs watching the flickering fire with a green-and-white quilt around her shoulders, having given up on reading as a distraction but not able to sleep just yet. The power had gone out. The house was too quiet. For the last six months she’d never been entirely alone. For the last few months, she hadn’t really slept alone either. Even when Haymitch wasn't right there, she'd known he was right nearby if she wanted to talk to him. She’d married him a week ago now, and after things had moved forward for them that night and since, being without him tonight was even harder. He was over a thousand miles away now, and the hovercraft taking her back to the Capitol wouldn’t take off until early in the morning.

So even knowing it was impossible, she found herself wanting him there so she could reassure herself things were different from before, that tomorrow morning she wouldn’t wake up in this house facing yet another day of loneliness in an endless stretch of them until the day she died. She glanced down, seeing the proof that things had changed in the gold ring there on her hand, but it wasn’t enough right now with all the echoes of the past around her. She couldn’t have him here tonight, but even hearing him might be enough. That voice had kept a little piece of her sane down in her cell, though she’d gone weeks without seeing his face. It would be enough to get her through the night.

Throwing another log on, chewing on her thumbnail, wanting to scream if only to have some sound in the place, she found herself reaching for the telephone. It was an hour earlier in the Capitol, though it was still pretty late for all that. She knew the number for the Twelve apartments from having called him in summers past to go out on the town for a drinks-and-bitching session or the like.

He answered on the third ring, grouchily saying, “Let’s cut this short. No, I ain’t giving any interviews and I have no idea what the results are because I’m not counting the ballots and they’re not counting them anyway until all the districts are in.” He didn’t sound like he’d been sleeping, and he didn’t sound drunk either.

“Hey,” she said stupidly, because she’d called on impulse anyway, not actually planning anything to say, and she just now realized that.

“Is that just a ‘Hey’ you’re giving me there?” he said, obviously recognizing her voice, the irritation suddenly gone, “or ‘Hay’ as in ‘Hey, Hay, how was your day?”

She couldn’t help laughing at least a little at the cadence of the words. “Fine, be like that. Hey, Hay, how was your day?” she mocked him gently.

“Sounds better when you say it.” He was quiet for a second. She imagined him there, sitting on the bed, talking to her. Shoes off, of course, and probably had been the entire evening already; the man couldn’t keep a pair of shoes on more than about thirty seconds after walking indoors. “Day full of Capitol people,” he said. “Hungry. Cold. Tired. Scared pretty shitless at first not quite sure it wasn’t all some big trick, till I think they finally figured after the first dozen or so I wasn’t gonna pull out a knife and start the killing. After that, it went pretty smooth. They kept trying to thank me for standing up to Coin after how they fucked up my life.” The awkwardness in his voice told her he didn’t much know how to deal with that. “How’s Seven?” he said a little hastily, obviously wanting to change the topic.

“Same old. Voting went off pretty easily. Seems like they’ve started to get over me being a crazy axe killer. You’ve got their general approval as my dear sweet hubby. If only you could chop down trees, though.”

“How’s Seven for you?” He repeated himself, adding the last two words with a careful emphasis, but she thought now she understood what he’d actually meant. Sure, he’d wanted to hear that the voting went well, but he’d asked, How are you doing with it, how is it being back home, are you there and now thinking you never want to leave?

She thought about what to say, all sorts of things she couldn’t ever express to him openly. It’s like I’m back in the past again. It’s one night but it’s a tough one and I wish you were here. “Quiet.”

“Too quiet?” he guessed, obviously getting that was why she’d called.

“Yeah.”

“Too quiet here,” he admitted softly. Everyone else was out in their districts getting the votes. She had a flash of realization herself: if tonight was like falling back into an old rut for her, it was for him too. Every summer there had been nights like this for him, left totally alone up in that suite after his tributes died in the arena.

Not much either of them said to that. They understood and that was enough. “Well, throw an extra blanket on tonight and keep warm, huh?” she said finally.

“Be keeping a lot warmer if you were here,” he said, recovering enough to give his voice a suggestive tone, both of them having no trouble remembering the nights together just past.

“Oh, you’d be naked in front of this fire if you were here,” she reassured him, finding her mood lifting as they got back on a lighter topic.

“Ah, so my dear wife has a thing for that? Don’t tell me you’ve got yourself a bearskin rug there too for this little tryst we’d be having.”

She smiled fiercely, even if he couldn’t see it. “No. Forest cat. Killed it myself.” She’d convinced Lina, one of the senior Peacekeepers, to let her come along on the forest cat hunt the spring before the 68th Games. Knowing how her family supposedly died, Lina hadn’t argued too hard, particularly when Johanna sweetly lied and claimed that she just wanted to help the district be safer during summer logging, and of course she’d return the rifle once the hunt was done. She even had done just that. But not before she’d killed a cat herself and got it turned into a rug. She looked at it, the ivory and green stripes, and even now, she felt some satisfaction at having bested the thing. Maybe they hadn’t actually killed her family but they’d taken down more than their share of people in Seven.

He laughed in return. “Nice choice. You wanna bring it back with you and we’ll get on that notion back in Twelve?” She had a flash of imagining it, and decided that yeah, the rug was definitely coming with her.

“I’ve already packed some other things to bring over to your house, so why not? Clothes and stuff, mostly. Can’t walk around naked.”

“Didn’t stop you before,” he said, and she could imagine his smirk. “I certainly won’t complain if you do. Besides, it’s your house too now,” he pointed out. She tried to not smile like an idiot at that.

“Packed up a couple pieces of furniture too, and I’ll try to talk ‘em into getting it sent ahead to Twelve while we finish up stuff in the Capitol. My family made it.” She tried to keep her voice casual, not show how much that meant, how much it made her think of them right now.

“Good. Might as well get rid of some of the Capitol-provided shit I’ve had in there forever.” She imagined with him it had been pretty much like with her--they let victors pick whether they wanted dark or light colored furniture and maybe a few token specific pieces, and a couple of paint colors, to make the house supposedly “theirs”, but it was all rapidly issued by the Capitol and they were expected to like it. Particularly for a girl from Seven, used to the painstaking care in family heirlooms, the plain, mass-produced Capitol furniture and the shade of green on her bedroom wall that she hated, made it feel like it wasn’t hers. Except for the wall colors, most of her house had been exactly the same as Cedrus and Blight’s houses.

“Well, I’ve got a dresser and a bed to provide.”

“Important stuff. Especially that second one.” Maybe they could make a kitchen table or something, for their own joint project. That was probably a simple enough project, even for a coal miner’s son. Besides, the idea appealed the more she thought about it. A table, that was about sitting down together as friends and family. They could have Katniss and Peeta over, or anyone like Finnick who came to visit, and sit down at that table made with care and purpose rather than whatever Capitol crap he had right now, and that was a satisfying thought. It was something bigger than just the two of them and they needed that too.

“I’m sure we’ll give it a good testing out. See if you can keep up with me.”

“Done pretty good so far.” He had, she’d definitely admit that. Better too as time went by and they’d relaxed more in bed, figured out how to be themselves again. She’d never faulted his technique, except maybe that first time, but discovering everything beyond that was something new.

“Not bad,” she taunted him, deliberately understating. It wasn’t just about the sex--she couldn’t lie to herself and pretend that. Even if that was the easiest thing to talk about, and in these kind of glib terms.

“We’ll see if you’re saying that tomorrow night.”

“Promises, promises.”

He chuckled lowly, a sound that promised all kinds of wicked things that she could suddenly imagine far too vividly. She’d better quit before it got her too spun up. She’d spent enough years here with the only pleasure she had being whatever she did for herself, and that bed was going to seem cold and empty enough tonight without indulging in yet another nod to that solitary past. She could wait until tomorrow.

There was silence for a little while as the banter seemed to have run itself out, and unless he was offering to tell in her naughty detail what he was planning to do to her tomorrow, and she didn’t know that he would since they were always much better in general at showing than telling, they seemed to have reached the end of things here.

“Johanna?”

“Still here,” she said without thinking, like instinct to answer the sound of her name said as a question like that, and hearing his voice but not seeing him, with the words they’d used through that air vent.

She heard him take in a deep breath at that, and hoped she hadn’t fucked things up by bringing up that particular memory. Then he said, “I’m glad you called,” though with his accent and how it it was said soft and rushed it came out more like a mumbled boyish, mgla’ycawl, and it took her a moment to realize what he’d said.

Honesty like that from him always pretty much disarmed her because she could cheerfully hit back with sarcasm when they were both snarking and she knew he could take it, but not when he was vulnerable like that. Though by this point it more surprised her than irritated her. She couldn’t quite say, I miss you to him, but she managed instead a low, “It’s...it’s good to hear your voice.” He’d know that coming from her that particular wording was no casually meant thing. “‘Night. See you tomorrow.”

“‘Night.” She hung up the phone, made sure the fire was dying down, and headed upstairs to her bedroom. She felt the past around her, but felt reassured the woman that had slept here before was gone. The highs and the lows both of the last six months had changed her too much. Johanna knew she was still changing, and not knowing exactly who she was becoming was unsettling sometimes, but it was better than who she had been. So she could leave Seven behind her tomorrow and head towards her future, if not without some grief, without too many regrets. The bed was too empty still but she didn’t feel quite as achingly lonely.

Haymitch had turned his box over to Plutarch already soon as the voting ended the night before, and the newscast at noon reported that all fourteen boxes had been delivered and the ballot tallying had begun at the Hall of Justice. Joy Cloudmist’s thankfully unpainted face reflected her excitement at seeing something unprecedented like this in the history of Panem. That would probably carry people through the day because waiting for hours and hours of tallying ballots by hand and for results to be reported, he would admit, didn’t make or the most thrilling news. Still a hell of a lot better than the Games, far as he was concerned.

He heard the door open at seventeen minutes after noon, from a glance at the clock, and Johanna wasted no time after that kissing him and pushing him towards the bedroom. He wasn’t about to protest that, caught up in the moment too. Neither of them might ever be back to totally normal, but he could clearly see how far they'd come from the people they’d been months ago. She might have done this with him even then but it would have been meaningless; she wouldn’t have been laughing happily and looking at him like this. Hell, back then he wouldn’t have even let her get him in the bedroom to begin because he wouldn’t have wanted to bother. Afterwards, both of them rumpled and sweaty and still half-dressed, he grinned at her, unable to help it, and ran his fingers through her hair. “So, welcome back. Not lousy Thirteen-style this time?” he teased her, now able to poke some fun about the last time they’d had sex with most of the clothes still on. Not what he had thought about last night, but never mind the plan, because hell yes, they’d both needed this. Last night without her, stuck here with all the reminders of too many nights in this silent apartment after the tributes died, had been rough. He hadn’t lied; he was glad she’d called. Thought about calling her himself, actually, except he didn’t want to possibly wake her up.

“No. Good Thirteen-style, if that exists.”

“It does now. We’ve damn well invented it.”

She laughed and traced the thin scar over his cheekbone, the one Enobaria’s knife had left, with a fingertip, then kissed it. “Looks like you missed me.”

He was certain she knew that already, so he smirked and said, “Hey, now, you’re the one that marched right in here to have your way with me.” He nudged her with his hip, telling her it was time to get up.

She obliged, heading for the bathroom already and pulling off the rest of her clothes as she went, calling back to him, “I’d say we ought to keep this act going, you and me, but they’ll all be here soon, huh?” Yeah, they’d agreed to watch the results with all the other victors, and tempting as the idea of a lazy afternoon in bed with Johanna was, he knew once they all left for their various districts it might be a long time before he saw some of them again. Besides, this election was their baby, something all of them together had helped create yesterday, and they ought to share the moment. This was something really historic.

“We’ll make up for it back in Twelve,” he told her as he followed. Finally, there would be time with each other with no distractions and no other real demands, no national crises or wars or dictators needing to take a fall. At that point, Katniss and Peeta better not come knock unless one or the other of them was dying.

The other victors arrived soon enough, and he managed to pull Peeta aside and ask him, “How was Thirteen?”

Peeta’s lips went tight for a second. “Tough sell, Haymitch. Some are pretty pissed off we denounced Coin when they think she earned the presidency. Some were really pretty supportive, though.” He shook his head, voice going even quieter. “There were some women there who told Katniss to give Johanna their thanks for her telling the country the truth about the whole issue with the clomiphen.”

Not the whole truth, he thought. But at least the parts that weren’t private and personal. He saw Katniss over talking to Johanna, saw the flash of surprise on Johanna’s face, and figured Katniss had pretty much just told her the same thing. “Good, thanks. Get yourself a seat. Gonna be a long day here and we’ll have to keep each other entertained, huh?”

He caught Katniss then and asked bluntly, “You happen to talk to Hazelle while you were there?”

“She doesn’t blame us,” Katniss said, equally straightforward, though he could see the glimmer of sadness in her eyes at the thought of her childhood friend. “Said specifically that if you blame yourself on this too she’ll be pissed off. She said Gale was nearly twenty and a man who made his own decisions, and he died doing what he thought was right. And it’s better than if he’d died down the mines. Doesn’t mean she doesn’t need time still and I think she’s staying in Thirteen for right now as part of that. But,” she hesitated and then added, “I think she’d like to hear from you someday. You’re one of the few pieces of the past that she’s got left. She said to tell you congratulations too. Boggs says ‘hi’ too, by the way.”

He nodded, relieved to hear that in the end he hadn’t chased away Hazelle too. Because at the end of the day, Haze was all he had left too of when he was a boy growing up in the Seam, the last link to those memories and the people they’d lost since then. The congratulations too meant a good deal coming from her, losing Briar as she had.

The newscast showed a few live shots of the counters at work at the Hall of Justice, dozens of them, each ballot box overseen by a representative of each district who also signed off on each vote before it was reported. Jumping back to coverage of the day before, Haymitch watched the footage of people standing around the Justice Buildings of the various districts, waiting to cast their vote. For hours, sometimes, and in the northern districts that meant standing there in the cold and the snow. But they’d stood there and waited anyway, and that pretty much said it all--they were tired of settling their scores with blood, and wanted to believe in something finer for the future.

They caught him at the Capitol ballot box while a young woman was voting, explaining the process of it to her, and they interviewed her after. “If, well, if someone like Haymitch who has every reason to be angry can still believe in us here in the Capitol and try to save our children on several occasions, maybe that means there’s hope?” she said, too-thin cheeks and all, but mustering a small smile nonetheless.

“Fuck,” he said dryly, a little embarrassed, “shouldn’t be going for me if they wanted a symbol for uniting the districts...” Katniss was pretty much the go-to girl for that image.

“No,” Finnick said thoughtfully, “Katniss will always have the power for that, no question. But as a symbol of calling for reconciliation, if you of all people could still stand up and be the first one to take the risk by condemning the idea of revenge and call for playing fair even after all you’ve lost, that’s a pretty powerful statement. You don’t think that’s why Plutarch readily agreed you ought to lead off that propo?”

To be honest he’d focused more on the end message from Katniss and Peeta, and he was a little more comfortable with being the underachieving failure to Panem than the idea of someone believing in him. Too much potential to fail. Maybe he’d accepted the notion of letting those close to him put their faith in him as a man, but he didn’t want to be any kind of damn symbol to a larger audience. They’d tried to make him one when he won the Quell, the small clever boy from Twelve who unexpectedly defied the odds, like his survival somehow meant that Twelve suddenly would become a regular contender.

Look how miserable it had made Katniss to be the Mockingjay, symbol to an entire nation. No, he didn’t want that. He’d rather be himself, even if it meant he’d have to keep figuring out some of the finer brushstrokes of exactly who he was now and who he wanted to be.

Twelve’s results would likely report in first, of course. With so few people left, and a fair number of those had to be children, not like counting the votes ought to take that long. He looked over at Katniss and Peeta and thought wryly that the law had screwed them a bit, since as they weren’t nineteen yet they weren’t legally adults and considered able to vote in this election. Able to go to war and fight for the right for other people to vote, though.

“They’re taking a while on Twelve,” Brutus said with a grunt of irritation.

“They’re probably delaying it some because it’ll be depressing to see how few votes there are and then it’ll be hours until they’ve got another district to report,” Peeta replied. Even the smallest populations in the other districts like Five and Eight had been over ten thousand before the war began. He knew the Capitol would be last, with its huge population, and he was glad Plutarch had put some help on that yesterday because otherwise it would have been impossible to get all of them through in one day. He'd already asked the others if they'd seen anyone looking like Ash or Heike with the surname "Law" come through the voting. They hadn't, but he wasn't surprised. They'd all agreed to keep their eyes open, but without an actual full name to give them, it was a tough request to begin given the frenzy and sheer scale of the voting operations, and he doubted most ex-Peacekeepers had voted anyway, because either being erased from the identity database and having their blood not match anyone's profile or popping up as a former Peacekeeper could invite more trouble than it was worth for them.

Joy finally came back on and interviewed Plutarch, beaming as he emerged from the counting room to come report the results. “And what results do you have for us, Plutarch? The citizens are eagerly awaiting!”

“The results from District Twelve are in, of course, and we expect those from District Eight and Six very shortly.” He touched a hand to his ear, obviously listening to his earpiece. “Ah, and the final votes are being tallied as we speak from District Five!”

“Gamemakers,” Rice said with a snort of amusement from where he sat in a chair, watching with interest. “He knows how to make the drama, right?”

“Yep.”

“From District Twelve,” Plutarch held up the paper in his hand, “a total of 483 votes. Uh...Sae Hines has 12 votes--”

“Vote Greasy Sae for president!” Katniss whooped with glee. “Squirrel stew for all!”

“We know where the power’s at in Twelve,” Haymitch said with a snicker. “That woman’s a damn force to be reckoned with, and she knows how to make short supplies stretch.”

“Alma Coin has received 30 votes.” A few mutters of annoyance answered that.

“She did take us in,” Peeta pointed out, “and for some, that’s cause enough.”

“Peeta Mellark has received 38 votes.”

“Well, I’m honored, but I ain’t even old enough to vote, so I don’t think I could be president,” Peeta said with a sheepish grin when the chortling and laughter died down.

“Katniss Everdeen has received 87 votes.”

“Same problem, plus Peeta would be better at it than me anyway,” Katniss said with a sigh. “I seriously don’t want to try and boss around a country.”

“You’ll settle for bossing Peeta around in bed, Madam President, we get it. Or maybe you want to let him take charge there 'cause you're too busy running a whole damn country,” Johanna said with a smirk, hands behind her head, laughing as Katniss hurled a throw pillow at her.

“Brocade Paylor has received 126 votes.” Well, one of those had been his own. He’d thought about the only person he could think of that he knew for sure had been openly fair and consistent towards pretty much everyone she’d encountered. She headed up Eight’s rebellion and then ran that trial so obviously she had the skills to keep things organized. Seemed like a logical choice.

“And Haymitch Abernathy has received 190 votes.” He felt them turning to stare at him and he knew he had to be sitting there with an expression of shock. No chance. He was their disgrace, their annual embarrassment for a quarter century because not only did he fail miserably, he failed and made a public ass of himself besides, first with Capitol “lovers” and then later with alcohol. They couldn’t be willing to put that kind of trust in him, but apparently they had. He heard the message loud and clear that they had sent him--they knew the whole truth now, things that were his fault and things that weren’t, and he’d more than earned back their respect.

“You gonna take charge in bed when it comes to him since you’ll be the president’s wife?” Katniss said to Johanna with a smirk. Johanna threw the pillow right back at her.

“Bunch of wasted votes anyway,” he grumbled, stupidly moved and more than a little embarrassed to feel like finally he belonged to them again, “not like this entire fucking country is insane enough to elect me.” He really hoped not, because if others like that Capitol woman they interviewed were looking at him as some kind of ideal now, the Capitol carried a hell of a lot of votes. He hadn’t imagined it as a possibility. Well, if they tried to elect him he’d damn well decline. He was good at screwing up other peoples’ plans and making them look like idiots. That didn’t mean he’d be brilliant at binding up a bleeding and broken nation and rebuilding it.

So he was pretty much hoping that if that happened, Coin wasn’t the runner-up. When Plutarch announced Eight’s votes that almost all went to Paylor, he breathed more of a sigh of relief, and it eased even more when Six and Five, despite having no allegiance to her, also saw in Paylor what he had seen: strong, organized, fair.

The newscasters had rigged up the tech to display things, and if the graphics and the way they talked about the vote count and all reminded him a little bit of the Games commentary and statistics, he tried to suppress it. The talk about “odds” of winning the election probably didn’t much help.

Evening had fallen by the time the thirteen districts were in, Paylor was holding a pretty handy lead with support in almost every district, and they were tallying the Capitol votes still. A glimpse in the counting room showed that almost everyone in there had turned to help with that task to get it done before the wee hours of the night. People from Seven and Nine and Four worked right alongside Thirteen and the Capitol to finish the job, and Plutarch of course made sure to point that out to everyone as an auspicious sign. “Good news is,” he said, looking around the room, “we’re safe. Panem is safe. Coin knows she ain’t gonna carry the Capitol.” They’d interviewed her earlier in the day and her comment had been a frosty, Until the votes are finalized I intend to carry out my duties as president.

There was a knock at the door. Niello, closest to it, answered. “It’s for you, Haymitch,” he said with an evil grin.

“Tell them I’m unavailable. Or dead. Or insane,” he said with a groan. “Or at least tell me one of you ordered food or it’s one of those idiots in a ridiculous costume here to deliver a song and some flowers.”

“Did I order one of those?” Johanna said with a snicker.

“Did someone order food?” Brutus chimed in hopefully at the same moment.

Glaring at all of them obviously amused with the situation, he went and figured he’d go by Mags’ old philosophy. Namely, give ‘em a little and get ‘em to leave you alone. Asked by the camera crew and Virgil Ibis about his having received his share of the votes, he said, “Obviously I’m honored by the trust people would put in me, especially those from back home from Twelve, that they’d actually think I’m the best for the job.” They’re fucking nuts, but they mean well.

“Your opinion on Brocade Paylor?” Ibis said, dark eyes gleaming with excitement.

“If she’s elected, and I do hope she is, I think we’ve all seen from how she ran the war effort in Eight and how she ran the War Crimes Council trials, we’ll have a very capable person as our president.” He grinned, impulsively saying, “She had the guts to just tell me to sit down and behave and actually manage to have me respect her enough to get me to do it, so hell, she’s got that honor over both Coriolanus Snow and Alma Coin.” There. If Paylor saw that, she’d hopefully figure out he wasn’t serious about wanting to be president.

“If the Capitol vote...”

“Haymitch, hurry up and get your ass in here!” Johanna yelled.

“Ah, sounds like Plutarch might be back with the Capitol votes. Either that or I did something so Johanna’s pretty pissed at me. Either way, I’d better attend to it right quick.” More chuckles from the camera crew. ”If you’ll excuse me,” he said, heading back inside.

No Capitol votes yet, and he murmured, “Thanks,” to Johanna for deliberately rescuing him.

“You owe me,” she said smugly as he settled back down on the couch.

They broadcast the footage of him shortly after that. Ibis must have raced back to the news center with it. As expected, his comment on Snow and Coin got its share of joking applause from the others. “Paylor could do a lot worse as an endorsement,” Finnick quipped, his arm around Annie.

Finally around ten, Plutarch appeared with the Capitol tally and the finalized vote count. The Capitol apparently believed in him as a good option, all right, but they’d seen Paylor act fair towards them too so she got more than her share. He breathed a sigh of relief as Paylor handily won the vote, 58 percent of the total across Panem, and she’d been the frontrunner in most of the districts too. That was pretty solid support for her rather than coming in to be the leader of a divided country.

“Looks like we did a good thing here,” Rice said with some satisfaction. “‘Night, all, my bed’s calling.” Voting in Eleven had run pretty late the night before.

Once Rice left, that pretty much started the flow as the rest of them all headed to their beds, most of them looking a little amazed or even dazed by the thing they’d helped accomplish today. Something they’d never have believed in happening in their lifetimes, back when they’d been kids standing on a platform in an arena hearing that sixty-second countdown, when other districts were mere opponents to be killed for survival. A united country, a leader they’d put there by their own decision, finally having a stake in their own nation and its future.

“Well, so much for my political ambitions,” Johanna joked, leaning back against the arm of the couch. “And I was so looking forward to making all the vain Capitol bitches jealous every chance I got. President’s wife has to get a nice wardrobe, right?”

“Oh, probably. Sorry. Look, it's flattering as hell, but it's a terrible idea. Give me something to fight against, OK, but tell me to run something? I ain’t exactly proven on that."

"At least they didn't seriously try to elect Katniss?" But she'd gotten her share of votes across the districts too, enough to come in fourth or fifth, something like that. Which pretty much proved that next election, they'd better have candidates for it ahead of time so people didn't do a thing like stick him on the ballot when he didn't even want the job, or Katniss as a sentimental choice rather than a practical one.

"Very true. Besides, there's the problem we’d have had to redecorate that entire mansion before we could ever stand to live there and I couldn’t much justify that cost.” Not with the whole country such a wreck right now.

“So practical. Not like I needed a couple dozen fancy dresses anyway.” He still resolved to ask Cinna to make a few more for her because to hell with it, she deserved some nice things. “And being around Capitol accents for too long gives me a headache. Years of it would have me reaching for an axe. But hey, second place,” she shrugged, “not too bad.”

No, not too bad at all. Definitely not bad when compared to what a wreck of a man he’d been last winter, drinking his way through the Victory Tour first and trying in panic and fear to keep Katniss and Peeta making all the correct steps to avoid disaster. After that, drinking his way through Thread’s terrorizing the district, sitting at his kitchen table bleakly but seriously considering the potential of drinking rubbing alcohol rather than try to face the awful reality of sobriety. “Trust me,” he said, slipping an arm around her waist and shaking his head with a relieved laugh, “this is the one time in my life I’m damn glad to not win.”

Chapter Text

The knock came at the door while they were packing up the last of their things, ready to catch the hovercraft out the next morning. Haymitch went to go answer, and to his surprise, the petite figure of Brocade Paylor was standing there. Accompanied by what looked like a couple of soldiers for her own personal security, no doubt, and he couldn’t help commenting dryly, “I think Johanna and I put all the weapons away, ma’am.”

Paylor gave an irritated sound, lips pressed tightly together. “Plutarch and his ilk insist I need security until things settle down more. I think it sends a bad message, like I don’t trust people here.”

“Well,” he said, “there’s always the chance someone pissed off about either Snow or Coin could come at you, and it only takes one person with a lucky opportunity, so...” He shrugged. “Hazards of the job?” he offered.

“Is that a ‘Better you than me’, Haymitch?” she said, eyes showing some definite amusement. Then she corrected herself carefully, “Mister Abernathy.” He hadn’t even thought about her using his first name; he was so used to it. Hell, all of Panem did, like they did with all the other victors. The familiarity from people he didn’t even know was just something he’d come to expect over the years.

So he could see the respect she was trying to offer now, and he appreciated it, but shrugged and said, “Haymitch is fine.”

“If you’ll call me Brocade.”

“Yeah, well, Brocade, you want to come sit down or what?” Johanna piped up. That took care of things pretty neatly, and Paylor--Brocade, all right--sat down on the couch, settling in against the cushions. “Congratulations, by the way,” Johanna offered, sprawling out in one of the chairs. “So is this a social call...?” Trust her to get right to things, even with a president. Haymitch had the sense she was enjoying being casual here, considering how powerless they’d both been under Snow and Coin.

“It’s pretty much my attempt to convince you to stick around, Haymitch,” she said, shrugging and getting right down to business. “You came in second in the election.”

“I was well behind you,” he pointed out matter-of-factly. She’d thrashed him handily by something like twenty-five percent of the total votes cast. That didn’t bother him, although the fact that he’d beat out Coin by a good twenty percent himself, well, he definitely considered that a satisfying accomplishment. He gave her a grin. “Politicians may generally be liars, ma’am, or at best unable to keep their word all the time, but I’m pretty sure the people ain’t too fond of it being an open fact. You saw how Lodestone got me to admit during the trial I’ve had a problem in the past with telling some lies.”

“Yes, I saw that. I also saw that people still believe in you anyway since you had support in a lot of the districts. You were smart enough to help be one of the leaders of this rebellion, and I’ve got to get the best minds together that I can to help rebuild this country. I think you could do a lot more good for Panem by sticking with it as part of the new government than by going back to Twelve.”

“And what about getting to do what’s best for him for once?” Johanna said, leaning forward, staring at Brocade with her brows creased as her voice was almost deadly calm. “He’s given enough already. He’s more than earned the right to live a nice quiet life doing absolutely fucking nothing but sitting on the porch, or raising geese, or whatever.”

“Raising geese?” he said in confusion, but the two women ignored him because they were eyeing each other with interest, as if taking each others’ measure and seeing how far each of them were willing to push this. He could see from the stubborn set of Johanna’s jaw that she wasn’t backing down, and he felt that sense of affectionate exasperation at seeing her jump in front of the thing in some kind of effort to protect him.

Brocade was the one who spoke up first. “Of course he has, you’re right. I’ll wish you both the best, and...”

“I can’t live here in the Capitol,” he said, and both of their eyes turned to him. “Not right now. Maybe not ever. That goes for Johanna too, I’m sure.” The memories were much too sharp, the pain still too fresh, and his ability for goodwill towards Capitol people probably increased the bigger the distance he could keep from them, at least for now.

“I understand. Can’t say I blame you for it either. Cam and I don’t have the direct experiences with the Capitol that you two do.” He wondered how Cambric Paylor was handling being married to the new president. A former mechanic in Eight, on television he’d looked like a gentle, quiet type, much like he could imagine Peeta being in about twenty years.

Taking in a deep breath, he looked over at Johanna, willing her to understand that he appreciated it, but this was one place where he didn’t need her to guard him. “But it’s not much use hiding away from everything either when I can actually do some kind of good.” That had been most of his life to this point, hiding away in the house in Victors' Village, trying to hide in the oblivion of alcohol, unable to do anything. Now that he could, ducking away from that would be a kind of cowardice. He had no idea what use she imagined he could be in things, but she was here and asking, and he didn’t feel like he ought to turn her down totally and tell her that after a rebellion he helped lead, the cleanup was entirely her problem. “So, yes, I am going back to Twelve and we’re gonna start to rebuild it. If there’s something you can do with me that doesn’t require me actually living here, call me and we’ll talk.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” she said. “But thank you for that. And if there’s anything I can do for either of you...”

He was about to dismiss that, but Johanna spoke up. “There’s one thing. We’re going to need access to get around the country and all, especially into Two, and probably some access to hovercraft.” Thinking ahead there, and he appreciated her being quick enough to have realized it.

Now Brocade was the one sitting there with an expression of confusion, one dark brow arched as if waiting for an explanation. “It’s something Snow told us before he died,” he said, sitting back with a sigh to explain the whole matter.

When they’d finished, she nodded in acknowledgment. “The problem I can see,” she said, hands clasped on one knee of her dark wool trousers, “is that after the war, a lot of other people out there are missing family and they need answers too. And there are a lot of tasks for the country at large that will need all the hovercraft we have available until things get going again in District Six. I’m not saying I don’t want to help you out, but if I start doing purely personal favors on this scale, I’m pretty much screwing over the people that just elected me.”

A hard answer, but fair, and while he obviously didn’t like it, he couldn’t fault her for it. This was part of why they had elected her, what she’d showed them when she ran the Council--she wouldn’t cheat or bullshit or play favorites. “Then can you at least get us some names of people to contact if we can’t go looking ourselves?” Johanna demanded.

Brocade looked thoughtful. “Hear me out here, OK? We’ve got thirteen districts and the Capitol and they’re all in rough shape. I’ll be doing the best I can to get us all through the winter, allocating emergency supplies and the like. But I know from Eight already, a lot of things are destroyed out there. Power’s out, people are homeless, supplies are low, medical treatment is shaky, things like that.”

“Well, I can tell you that come spring thaw, we’re gonna need work crews to deal with all the bodies in Twelve,” he said with a weary shake of his head, the memory of it still sharp and terrible in his mind. “And to take a genetic sample so maybe they can at least be identified. Then we can maybe get on building houses and getting the power back.”

“Twelve obviously has the biggest task. But I need someone who can go around all the districts, take the time to spend a few weeks there seeing where things are at, and be able to compare them all to each other to prioritize recovery efforts. I can’t do that dropping by overnight and having a nice chat with the mayor, and I can’t leave the Capitol for weeks on end. I need someone to go assess what the losses are, what every district needs to rebuild, and whether it’s in the next year, in the next five years, in the next ten years. I can’t grant you access and transportation to find your siblings as a personal mission. But as representatives of the Panem government? If you happen to ask some questions and do some research while you’re there doing a job on behalf of the people, that’s more than fair.” He understood readily enough that if he or Johanna extended that goodwill too far, they’d hear about it and most likely have to answer for it too.

“You want us for the job, huh?”

She shrugged. “As victors, you’ve got friends out there already as contacts. You both have something of a reputation for being straightforward--yes, Lodestone aside, Haymitch--and I think after seeing your involvement in getting Panem this far, they’ll believe you’ll deal fairly with them and try to help them through rebuilding. So yes, I think you’re both a good fit for the job, if you’ll take it.”

“Yeah, that's fine, but I want some time alone with my husband first if you don’t mind,” Johanna said with a knowing smirk towards Brocade that he tried to not roll his eyes at. Though he would admit she was right. At least a few weeks of peace and quiet together would be really nice.

“Most of the districts need to wait until spring anyway for improved access and the snow melting before you could get a good picture of the conditions and before I could get any kind of work crew in there, so that’s fair. Start your reporting with the assessment in Twelve in the spring when you can, and we’ll go from there.”

It was a damn good offer, freedom to go around and make their search and have the weight of official backing to ask their questions to boot. Not to mention, all right, he was sort of curious how things were in the other districts, being able to do what he could to help. He looked over at Johanna, trying to see what she thought about it. She looked back at him, brown eyes level and steady, and nodded slightly. She was ready to take it on too. “Send us to Two first so we can get at those Peacehome records,” because going around the other districts without even a name to go off of to help find Heike and Ash would be about the worst way to do it, ”and you’ve got yourself a deal. I imagine it's in rough shape anyway after all the fighting, so it's a good place to start.”

Brocade offered a hand to shake on it, and they did. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you in the spring, then.” She gave them a grin. “By then I’ll even have an actual title for you both. Press conference announcing it, the whole thing. It’ll be as official as it can get.”

“There’s one more thing you could maybe do,” he said, having a sudden flash of inspiration. “If you’ll hear me out. Cinnabar Locke and Euphemia Trinket. They’re locked up in the Detention Center thanks to Coin.”

“One of Twelve’s stylists and the escort, right? They were due to be executed along with you two, as I remember it.”

“Yeah. Cinna was in the rebellion from the start and Effie joined in before the Quell. They paid plenty already by getting tortured pretty hard. I’d rather not see them put through the ordeal of a trial they don’t really deserve.” Or executed, though at least with Brocade running it, perhaps the chances of that were lessened.

“All right.” She looked like she had a pretty ready answer already for this. “It’s not going to look good if I just release someone supposedly connected to the Games. There’s still anger out there and it could make them targets. So I’l make you another deal. Rather than go through the whole hardship of them enduring a trial and the notoriety of it, I’ll accept them making some kind of written statement stating they regret their admittedly very minor role in the Games. If it comes to it, they’ll have to do a propo for it. And they’ll be released with the understanding that they’re never to return to the Capitol and will dedicate the rest of their lives to helping improve conditions in one of the districts that suffered from the Games as their own personal restitution.”

It sounded too neat, pretty much coming out exactly like he would have wanted. Cinna and Effie got to go to Eight and live out their lives like they’d hoped they might. Wait--District Eight, and suddenly he remembered where Brocade herself had come from. He looked over at Brocade and saw the hint of a smile on her face, and knew she’d had it worked out already before he’d even asked. “Taffeta already talked to you?” he guessed.

“This morning. I hope that solution is acceptable?”

“Hell yes.”

“Good, because they already both agreed to it. They’ll be released tomorrow morning. I imagine you’ll see them in Eight when you’re there.” He was already looking forward to that, he realized.

“Well, if that’s the business done,” Johanna said, her tone a good bit more amiable now than when Brocade had arrived.

“One more issue. Peeta won’t be nineteen for at least another year.” His birthday was sometime in February, as Haymitch recalled it, because the boy had brought around cake for it last year. It hadn’t been a happy occasion, dealing with Thread as they all were, and he’d been glum because he was far too sober, and Katniss was miserable because she was a reluctant fiancee facing a life with a boy she hadn’t yet come to love. “And with all of his family killed in the firebombing of District Twelve, as a minor, he needs a legal guardian. Not that I intend to send him to a community home, considering Twelve doesn’t even have one at this point.”

“I was seventeen without any family and didn’t have a guardian. Look, Haymitch was on his own from the time he was sixteen,” Johanna pointed out. “It’s sort of been understood victors don’t quite follow the usual rules there.” As a victor, turning nineteen and being officially past reaping age and thus fully recognized as an adult in the eyes of the law didn’t much matter.

“I’m sure he can take care of himself, sure, just like Katniss’ mother probably won’t be going back with her right away either. But I’d like to have someone on record to be legally able to sign consent for him in case he needs medical treatment, or wants to officially get married, buy property, or something like that before he turns nineteen,” Brocade said. “That's the law, at least until we figure out the new laws defining the age of majority, anyway, and that may take a while.”

“I’ll do it,” he said. He didn’t even really have to think about it. He’d been responsible for both of them to some degree or another ever since their reaping. This was only making official what they’d known but not quite said: they had become family somewhere during it all.

“Hell, sign me up too,” Johanna said with a shrug, and though she treated it casually, he knew what it meant that she had offered. “We’re in it together, right?” But then she snickered. “I could threaten to refuse to give consent to let him marry Kittycat if she doesn’t behave, you know.”

“I’m sure you love that notion.”

“Shit, I’d rather be his guardian than Katniss’. He’ll probably make me cookies. She'll just scowl at me.”

Brocade just shook her head and laughed. “All right, I’ll get the paperwork drawn up and sent over to you today.”

He shook her hand as she left. “Good luck, ma’am. If you need advice or an opinion on something, go ahead and call me up.” As Peeta had said, there was no harm in using the allies that were out there already and willing to lend a hand.

“Just don’t be doing it constantly and for hours on end,” Johanna called lazily, giving a wave goodbye. “I’m the one sleeping with him here, so I ain’t willing to be demoted to the second most important woman in his life.” Laughing to himself, he shook his head as he closed the door as Brocade left. He could see where Johanna was coming from, firmly trying to set some of the boundaries now and serving notice to both Brocade and him of some expectations of his priorities. After having been without anything for so long, he could see her wanting to know for certain that her place in his life was secure, that she wouldn’t be left out in the cold by him somehow.

He had the same sense sometimes himself about her, the worry that she’d become too set in her ways all those years alone and that even as he needed her, she might not be willing or able to make room for him. The fear was lessened the night of the Victory Ball by seeing that they could put aside their defenses and not suffer for it. But it was easier to do that for one night, fierce and fine, than manage it every day, over the years. But the fact she’d made room for Peeta and Katniss as part of his life, accepted that it was sort of a package deal, told him that they both were making progress there. So while he couldn’t actually tell her that while he might screw up sometimes that she would be first and best for him, always, he tried to get the point across by telling her, “And I won’t forget that fact, believe me.” He kissed her lightly, said softly in her ear, “After all, you make it pretty damn impossible for it to be forgettable.”

“Damn straight I do. Wanna test it out again just to be sure your memory isn’t getting faulty?” she said with a laugh, nuzzling his neck.

The guardianship papers were signed once Brocade had them sent over. That evening all the victors gathered at one of the old haunts they’d usually had a meal at as a group each year before the Games, greeting each other as old friends, drawing the newest member into the fold. Looking around at them, he couldn’t help a faint melancholy sense. Part of it was remembering all the ones who weren’t here now. Chaff. Mags. Seeder. Woof. Lyme. There were so many others too who he’d now never see again. Part of it too was realizing this was the last time they’d probably all ever gather together at this place like they were now. Next summer there was no reason for them all to return to the Capitol and its bad memories.

All of them seemed to feel it to some extent and while there was the usual laughter and old stories, the thread of bittersweet nostalgia was there too. The Games were done and none of them was sorry for that, but he wondered if they’d ever come together like this again. None of them seemed to want to be the first to speak up about it. He ate his dinner, nursed one glass of red wine, and tried to not feel like even though the world was much improved, he was losing something here tonight.

It was Finnick who chimed a knife lightly off his glass as the meal was ending and caught their attention. The flame in the lanterns in the dining room to help conserve power reflected brightly off his green eyes. “There will never be any more Hunger Games victors,” he said softly. “That’s a blessing. But all seventy-five of us, we’ll always be bound together. So for those of you that are here, and especially those who aren’t, I think we should remember. Before we go our separate ways and those memories are gone.”

Peeta reached in his pocket and pulled out a recorder. “I’ll record it,” he told Finnick. “That way the memories won’t just be gone.” He smiled a little sheepishly. “Better use for it than recording my dreams for Doctor Aurelius to analyze.”

“I usually spent my time coming up with dreams about purple elephants and all sorts of weird shit and letting him figure out what it supposedly meant,” Johanna said with a smirk.

Brutus was the one who spoke up first, a little hesitantly to begin, leaning back in his chair and toying with his wineglass. “Trajan Shulikuk was the first victor. From Two, of course. He was sixteen. I don’t know what family he had at the time, and he always suffered from his arena wounds because they weren’t so quick to treat them. He died…I think it was the year of the 23rd Games.”

“His parents were quarry workers. He barely won, though the fact that the only district to not rebel won the Hunger Games seemed like at least a little bit of justice to Two at the time. So after we lost the next year, we started the program for training our tributes to bring more of them home,” Enobaria chimed in. Nobody else seemed to have anything to add for a victor who won so very long ago, and the ones like Mags and Woof who might have known him were dead. Maybe there might have been something on the old tapes, though.

Dazen spoke up next. “Harold Redcrow won the next year from Five. Hal, they called him. He was seventeen, and he lost three toes off his right foot in the arena. I think he was supposed to have been a good artist.”

Chantilly went next. “Chalcedony Alvarez was next, from One. Chela. Eighteen at the time. Chela finally died five years ago, with a whole pack of grandkids and great-grandkids there. She was pretty enough that some of the Capitol citizens said it was a shame she had to die, so One started to pick up on that notion.” Chantilly brought up a few quick stories about Chela, things about training and her life.

“She told me when I was thirteen and really awkward about my height that I slouched and it was a disgusting habit unless I wanted to be a coal miner. Sorry, Haymitch,” Niello said with a wry grin, and there was a ripple of laughter around the table at that.

“Speaking of coal miners, Nualla Clearly was next up, from Twelve. She was eighteen and an orphan. Mags told me last summer that those Games were where they refused to fight and instead got their names drawn in turn and executed for their troubles. She was the last one left alive. She went out past the boundary fence a few years after her win and never came back. So I never met her, and she was the only win we had until me. Maybe it was just she couldn’t take it any longer.”

The names kept coming, the next one put forth as soon as the previous one died down for lack of anything further to say, so the silence never became too heavy. Cassius Kane from Two, Willow Zamora from Nine. Johanna chimed in with Oak Lyfong, called “Ollie”, hesitantly offering the few bits and pieces she had from Cedrus and Blight about Seven’s first victor. At the 8th Games, in contrast to the earliest victors who’d been dead for years, most everyone had some remembrance or story to give about Mags, and likewise, about Woof for the 9th Games.

The evening wore on, and the entries became longer as the names became more familiar to more people sitting there. There was laughter, and there were a few eyes shining a little too bright in the lantern light, and if some napkins were reached for and used to dab at those eyes, it was quietly ignored. When it came to those that had been in the Quell, there was hesitation to discuss their deaths, but they forged on, being brutally honest about it anyway. No blame was offered for it, just the same as it hadn’t been the first time around for the kills they’d made in the arena. Mags told him he’d done only what he had to do when it came to Esca.

Admitting that he’d killed Rye after listening to Clover talk about his life was tough, but he did it anyway, and he saw from Clover’s expression she forgave him. Sandra Marchand, who’d been called “Sandy”, was the last. Wy supplied most of the information about his district mate who’d won the 73rd Games, though Johanna spoke up last and said, “At the interviews for the Quell she was all giddy about how good you looked, Finnick. You too, Haymitch,” she gave him a smirk and he chuckled in response. “I told her she’d better take that one last chance to get laid since the Games started in the morning. Then at the Cornucopia while I was covering Beetee while he got that stupid wire of his and Blight was getting Wiress, she tried to kill me. But I killed her instead.”

With that, it was finished, and Peeta reached out and turned the recorder off. “Thank you,” he told them quietly. They all finished their drinks and headed back to the Training Center. Nobody seemed in a hurry to actually say goodbye and possibly invite the feeling of finality to it. “See you later,” seemed to be more of the prevailing sentiment. That, and there was plenty of “We should get together again,” and agreeing that they should. It was a comfort to see that despite it having been the pain of the Games that brought them all together in the first place, they didn’t want to leave it all behind them.

“We’ll see ‘em all again anyway when we’re making the rounds of the districts,” Johanna pointed out as they got ready for bed.

That was true, and he admitted he looked forward to a good excuse to see each of them again. “Yeah, but it’s not the same as having us all together. We’ll have to do that.” Where and when, he didn’t know, but he was certain that it ought to happen.

The hovercraft left in the morning, dropping other victors along the way. Plutarch accompanied Beetee to Three in his new role as Secretary of Communications, and Haymitch smiled and nodded and tuned out his big plans for new entertainment programming to help lift everyone’s spirits in this dark and glum winter, not pointing out to Plutarch that it sounded like the power was out in some cases. Definitely without any power in Twelve, none of the four of them heading there would have a working television to watch it on. Well, if he missed a singing competition, that wouldn’t depress him too much. The Capitol “dance with a victor” competition he’d been obliged to be in when he was twenty-five wasn’t nearly as bad as being on the circuit, but being forced to perform like that for entertainment, it was more than enough to make him lose a taste for any kind of televised competition, even a non-deadly one.

So he left it to Peeta to politely make conversation with Plutarch and instead started trying to make plans for how he and Johanna would go about that job for Brocade. Definitely something of a daunting task, but at the same time, he was sort of excited about the prospect of it. Looking for Heike and Ash, yes, and he prayed like hell they’d have some success there. But there was also the benefit of getting to see all of Panem in a way that wasn’t a forced march through the districts to see the Justice Building and have a dinner party. He’d heard about the other districts from their victors, yes, but it wasn’t the same. He’d get to actually see the real district and its people this time. That was a privilege nobody had been able to have since before the Dark Days, not even the victors.

Twelve was due to be the last stop on the journey. Finally as twilight was falling the hovercraft dropped them off and they were back on the green of Victors' Village in Twelve. It had been right about six months now since he’d been back, nearly that long too for both Katniss and Peeta. It was still and silent and the houses were dark, and the pond was frozen over. As opposed to the dusting of ashes he’d walked through with Snow, a good two feet of clean, pure white snow covered everything. In some ways he was thankful for that, because to have landed among the carnage and have it be so obvious would have been too tough to bear. For now they could put it aside, ignore what lay down the hill from the Village, and try to recover from everything that had happened.

The solid, weatherproof crates that had accompanied them there with essential supplies to get them established again lay there on the green and he looked at them with a groan, imagining the sheer task of unpacking them. They probably had enough food in their backpacks for morning. “Let’s tackle all that in the morning, eh?”

“Sounds good,” Katniss said, stretching, and complaining, “Those hovercraft seats always leave me feeling stiff after an hour or so.”

“Imagine how I feel, youngster that you are,” he said dryly. “All right, morning it is.” With a wave to the kids, he pointed Johanna towards his house. “It ain’t much,” he murmured half to himself, “but it’s home.” Trudging through the snow, he saw the crates on the porch that must have been the furniture and the like that she had sent from Seven. “We could unpack that tonight if you want?” he asked, because even tired as he was, he could recognize that something that important to her that she’d had it sent all the way from home deserved some consideration.

“Well, we could set up the bed at least,” she teased him lightly. He was about to answer that seemed like a good idea, starting this first night home together with something that was theirs and new to them both rather than the old Capitol-issue bed he’d slept in alone for so many years, when an off-kilter, tuneless bellow caught his ear.

Turning, he saw Katniss and Peeta had actually followed them there, standing at the foot of the porch steps, and that racket was apparently Peeta’s attempt at singing.

Katniss chimed in too, her own voice warm and lovely and he could so easily imagine the echo of Burt singing in the woods so many years ago. He quickly realized what they were singing and couldn’t help but think with a surge of affection, Damn, they’re some good kids.

Peeta concluded with the final words, “…a light to show the path home,” a good second behind Katniss, off-time as well as off-key. Usually there were more than two singers so even someone totally lousy got drowned out. But the absolute mismatch between the two of them in singing ability meant that it was probably the worst attempt at the wedding song Haymitch had ever heard in all his years. But it was Katniss and Peeta and it was for him and Johanna, so it was wonderful and fuck, it must just be the cold evening air that made his breath seize up a little bit.

Nobody had ever lived in this house aside from him. Ash and his ma had never had any chance to sleep here. For his entire adult life he’d never let himself dare to believe a day could come where he’d have a wife to bring home to light that first fire together, that he might pass a night where he wouldn’t have to sleep alone in an empty bed and be afraid of what bleak or horrifying dreams might come. Couldn’t have imagined he would have two kids now that constantly filled him with mingled annoyance and pride, kids he could watch finish growing up into an admirable man and woman ready to make their own lives. The house stood there and it was dark and quiet, but he knew for him it could never again seem lonely and silent.

“I’m gonna advise that you stick to baking and painting, Peeta,” he said, his laugh a little shakier than he’d like.

“At least we know I can bake well,” Peeta said, handing over something wrapped in a fancy dishtowel he’d bet was from the Capitol. Turning back the folds of the cloth, he saw it was a loaf of the traditional Twelve sweet-bread, studded with fruit and nuts and a swirl of cinnamon. “They let me down into the Training Center kitchens to make it,” he explained.

“Oh, damn,” he said helplessly, realizing Peeta must have gotten up at a ridiculous hour to make that bread, tuck it into his backpack, and then carefully carry it all the way across the country, just for this one occasion. He hadn’t brought up a toasting to Johanna yet, figuring they’d get around to it at some point, but here the kids had gone ahead and quietly set the whole thing up for them, taking on the role of his family. Telling him by doing so that the four of them were a family now for well and good. No fancy gift could have meant more at that moment to him than a song and a loaf of sweet-bread did.

Seeing him lost for words, Johanna stepped in to save him, like she had before back at that meeting before the Quell when he couldn’t bear to say goodbye without losing his composure. This wasn’t a farewell, but it left him speechless all the same. “Thanks, Hotbuns,” Johanna said, reaching out and touching Peeta on the shoulder. “For the bread, but not the singing, though. Kittycat, you get thanks for the song.” When he thought about it, she was wearing a blue sweater today for Seven, so that was fitting.

“Well,” he said to the three of them, finally recovering enough to find the words, trying hard to not grin like an idiot and probably failing and not entirely caring, “it’s cold as hell out here, so let’s get inside and get that fire lit.”

Chapter Text

Just a quick note: for those looking for the "clean" copy of HID/AFAF, I'm still working on it slowly--it's a pretty huge project for copyediting and I'm juggling this between several other things. So for those reading either or both of the stories, please be merciful on any small inconsistencies and typos. Hopefully they're few and far between--and I'd say any edits to be made don't affect the story in any major way, so feel free to read it as-is. It's more just satisfying my Type A need to have things done right. :)

I'll update again once it's done and ready to be downloaded in a finalized form. Thanks again to all of you who've stuck with me for HID and AFAF!