Chapter Text
Six months after returning to what was left of District 12, Haymitch had fallen into a predictable routine. A supply train would arrive from the Capitol on the first Wednesday of the month. Goods would be unloaded into a neighboring warehouse, then distributed among the few hundred survivors who had returned and the handful of engineers and medics who had come from the Capitol or District Thirteen to assist. There were basic provisions, but also car after car of lumber, bricks, concrete, lime. Wire and pipe. Everything the town needed to rebuild itself. The survivors took the lead, dictating what would be built and where. The engineers oversaw things, and a small group of loggers from 7 had come temporarily to assist in the construction.
The tents that had once been the only shelter outside of the victor’s village were slowly becoming less cramped as the first sets of houses went up. There was even a little medical clinic in its own tent on the old town square. The factory had broken ground near where the Hob had once stood, thought for now it was nothing more than a hole in the ground dotted with large machines covered in teeth and treads.
There was some sort of weekly meeting where residents could learn about what was going on, and maybe even vote on it, but Haymitch had never bothered to attend. He didn’t have much to offer the reconstruction project, but the train had plenty to offer him. His agreement to keep an eye on Katniss included his old winnings, his house, food, and one crate of white liquor a month. Not the fruity crap they drink in the Capitol either, designer spirits engineered to keep you tipsy for as long as possible. The hard stuff. He wanted to be blackout drunk as fast as possible.
By the time the train arrived, the last crate had inevitably run low. In the week or two before a shipment he’d have to ration enough to keep the worst of the withdrawal symptoms at bay. That meant by Wednesday he was lucid enough to meet the train around when it arrived in the late morning. The platform and the warehouse were always bustling with activity. For those few hours, District Twelve felt like a real town again, not a glorified refugee camp.
Unless he caught it being unloaded from one of the supply cars, his crate was always waiting for him in the same place. The warehouse had some sort of organization system he didn’t understand or care about. All he knew was that the small wooden crate in the back corner was for him. It was even marked with his name on a little paper tag.
An ad hoc marketplace sprung up during the unloading. Even while the pallets of constructions materials were still being hauled off the train people would start breaking into the crates and concocting things. Greasy Sae would bring her cauldron and start throwing together a soup. As soon as they’d found the first jugs of oil, a man with one leg and one eye named Kane would start frying biscuits. One of the lumberjacks had a surprising skill for griddlecakes. It was starting to remind him of the Hob, if only for the first few days after the train. By then everything would be distributed and the market would dissolve until the next train day. The sellers were still around, of course, if you knew where to find them. Ripper hadn’t survived the bombing though, and until somebody took her place, the train was all he had.
Sometimes Haymitch would buy something, less because he wanted it and more in order to spread his coins around. Katniss and Peeta were better about it. Today he bought a few sausages fresh from the grinder as Sal, the new butcher, went to work on a shipment of beef from 10. He had an allotment of goods as well. Coffee. Sugar. He’d started leaving his flour for Peeta. With that boy around now there was no shortage of bread in the victor’s village. Then he would truck everything back on a little wooden cart. He only really woke up a few weeks later, when the bottles started running low again.
This particular shipment day, Haymitch was back home and cracking the seal on his first bottle when a knock on the door interrupted him. He paused. Waited. Decided he didn’t need to deal with it and took a swig. Katniss wouldn’t bother knocking. Peeta would, but he’d be with Katniss, who’d barge in right afterward anyway. There was no barging, and therefore no Katniss, and no Peeta, and therefore nobody that he was obligated to care about. Besides, they knew to stay away when a train came in. Anyone else could go fuck themselves.
He took another long drink, feeling the liquor burn all the way down to his gut. Ready to burn the day away. The knock came again, and he ignored it. And again.
Finally the knocking became a non-stop, urgent banging that was drilling into his skull. His head pounded with a withdrawal-hangover combo that wouldn’t subside until he’d reached the bottom of the bottle. Haymitch had no choice but to stumble to the door, bottle still in hand. “What the fuck do you—” he shouted as he threw the door open. What he saw drained the rest of his words back down his throat.
Effie.
She wore a blush pink wig, a pink skirt, and a pink jacket stuffed to absurdity at the shoulders and emblazoned with some kind of gaudy flower pattern. Her shoes were matching pink plastic and open at the toe. About the stupidest thing she could possibly wear to hike up here. The road into town was long and dusty and covered with rocks. She had big wings of golden paint flinging out from the corners of her eyes.
All in all it was a fairly understated look, for her.
Haymitch didn’t know what to do but stand there and drink her in. He hadn’t come nearly close enough to true withdrawal to be hallucinating this vividly. “You’re here.”
“Yes.”
“How did you get here?”
“On the train.”
The train did usually have a passenger car attached, but it held drably dressed officials and the odd construction worker. “I think I would have noticed you at the station.”
“I thought it might be better to let you get drunk first.” The bottle still hung limply in his hand. Effie took it from him as she pushed her way in and added, “At least a little,” before taking a swig herself. She nearly gagged. “That’s disgusting,”and shoved the bottle back at his chest.
Effie looked around and her nose curled. Broken bottles. Dirty clothes. The occasional patch of old vomit in a corner. “Glad to see nothing’s changed.”
“What’s it to you princess?”
She wandered into the sitting room at the front of the house. There was a fireplace that didn’t work and lots of debris covering an elegant couch with a curved wooden frame, clawed feet, and crushed velvet cushions in an upsettingly vibrant blue. Haymitch had always hated that couch. He remembered how hideous it was as Effie started cleaning it off. Of course she would like it though. It was the nicest thing here. All the other fine Capitol furniture the house had come with had been destroyed or burned or bartered away. The couch had probably only survived because he’d forgotten about it.
Clothes and empty bottles, greasy paper that had once wrapped meat, the lid of at least one liquor crate not yet sacrificed to the wood stove. It was barely the beginning of autumn. He hadn’t needed it yet.
“Well be my guest,” Haymitch said sarcastically. He watched her work for a few confused moments before asking, “Why are your here?”
Even when she’d made room on the couch she didn’t sit down.
“It occurred to me that I could take the train at any time now.”
“It just occurred to you out of the blue.”
“Yes.”
“So you came all this way to clean my house.” Effie shrugged. She was trying to fold a few wrinkled shirts but, unfurling them and seeing the state they were in, settled for balling them up and kicking them under the couch.
Haymitch rolled his eyes and took a pointed gulp from the bottle. Wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “You could have sent any number of people to check up on me. A few coins still go a long way out here.”
Effie used her sleeve to wipe all the trash from the end table onto the floor.
For some reason he felt the need to pick up after her and started collecting things she’d knocked aside. “You’re not even doing a good job!”
She plucked the bottle from his hands and took another sip before she set it on the table. “It was strange, not seeing you this summer.”
That’s right. The summer had felt strangely hollow without the Games. Lighter, for sure, but fragile, like a branch that couldn’t hold the climber’s weight. It had been hot. Haymitch had been busy settling in to his new old life. Getting drunk at the kitchen table. Sweating a lot. When the temperature became unbearable, getting drunk in the bathtub upstairs.
“Good, of course,” she continued. “But strange.”
Haymitch dumped the armful of crap he’d acquired into the fireplace. “I had a full schedule,” he said before he realized what she was implying. “You took a fifteen hour train ride because you missed me?”
“Is that really so hard to believe?”
“I’ve heard stranger, but not by much.”
“It occurred to me that if I didn’t make the effort, I would probably never see you again.”
Haymitch didn’t see how that could be a bad thing. What he wouldn’t give to never see himself again. “And that’s a problem?”
She shrugged, still not looking at him.
Finally Haymitch grabbed her elbow and asked again, “Why are you here, Effie?”
In reply Effie turned around, grabbed both sides of his face, and kissed him. It was a warm, passionate thing. Haymitch felt the same rush he got opening his first bottle of the shipment. Finally. Finally. I’ve been waiting for you. The thought would have concerned him if he’d been aware of it. Mostly he was aware of Effie’s tongue down his throat. The way she tasted like white liquor and something sweet and fruity. Strawberries maybe. The way he was wrapping his arms around the small of her back and didn’t want to let go.
When they finally parted Effie slapped him light on the cheek and whispered, “Because I wanted to see you.”
That was all the incentive he needed. Haymitch found the buttons of her blazer as he pressed her against the wall, knocking something off of the fireplace mantel and not caring what it was. She started the zipper of her skirt for him before stripping him of the stained and wrinkled shirt that he’d never bothered to button in the first place.
He was glad she’d worn something halfway normal. He could never find all the zippers and buttons and hooks and laces it took to keep those stupid Capitol outfits on. Even skirts, he’d learned over the years, could zip up the back, the front, or either side. This one had a long zipper down the side, but once it was free the fabric fell away easily, leaving her only in her underwear and a silky pink undershirt covered in frills.
His own undershirt had once been white, but now it was stained with beer and mustard and sweat and he’d be lucky if that was all. She peeled it off of him and found his mouth again while her hands worked on the buckle. He felt for the lacy edges of her panties.
And then there was the wig.
He hated those fucking wigs. Not only did they look ridiculous, they always got in the way. Early on he’d torn one off the way he would the rest of her clothes and got a very different kind of scream than he’d been hoping for. That’s how he’d learned each one was secured with about a hundred little metal pins and some sort of sticky spray that would stay on anything it touched for hours. From then on he’d wait for her to take the wig off and set it on its horrible stand that looked like a person drowned in plaster.
Today the wig came off easily. Effie tossed it onto a lamp whose bulb had burned out three years ago and never been replaced. The little net that covered her real hair came away with a single swipe of her hand. He ran his fingers through her short, reddish-blonde hair and found no pins at all. Maybe it was because she wasn’t planning to be live on national television this time. Maybe it was because she was planning on something else. Haymitch wouldn’t find out because as he was opening his mouth to say as much she rid him of his pants and underwear and grabbed for him. The sound that made its way out of his throat wasn’t a quip or anything else coherent.
Instead he dove into her neck, nibbling little bites up to her ear and only stopping for the seconds it took to pull the silk shirt over her head. They both reached for the hooks of her bra at the same time and probably made it twice as hard as it had to be, but they got it off and threw it aside and Effie pushed him back towards the couch.
Now he understood why she’d been fussing over the it. “You little fox,” he said as she pushed him down onto the velvet. “You planned this.”
“I was optimistic,” she said breathlessly as she ran her tongue from his navel to the hollow of his neck. With that Effie reached down and guided him inside her.
Their annual ritual on the tribute train involved certain precautions, because fraternizing between district and Capitol was punishable on both sides. They met late at night, in the dark, in the shower of Effie’s compartment to cover the sound. They assumed every car in the train was bugged. It also involved the fact that Haymitch had inevitably drunk his way through the reaping, and dinner, and the strategy talk that followed. By that point he was a warm body and he let Effie do what she wanted.
Now he did the same, but it felt entirely different. He could see her, for one thing. Not just the glint of wet skin and teary eyes flickering by in the moonlight. She wasn’t bothering to swallow her moans. He didn’t feel the desperation to be someone else, somewhere else for a few damp minutes until the weight of what they were doing crashed down on them again.
Haymitch grabbed hold of her hips, pulling her closer, and Effie raked her nails down his chest. He wanted to live in this moment for a long as he could. He wanted to drink her up, wade into her as if she was a lake and he was burning. Unfortunately his body had other plans. He came so much quicker than he wanted to, but he couldn’t hold back. Effie bit down a laugh and worked on herself until she joined him.
“We’ll work on it,” she said as she settled down beside him. All that tidying had unearthed a quilt on the back of the couch. As they cooled off Haymitch pulled it down to protect them—mostly Effie’s skinny little ass—from the autumn chill. She curled up against him and the weight of her sent a feeling rushing through him. Desire, yes, but also something softer. He couldn’t place it. The minutes passed and he sniffed in the sent of her hair. Effie, for once in her life, didn’t say anything. Then something happened that was almost as improbable as Effie showing up at his door. He fell asleep.