Haymitch was never really sure if Peeta and Katniss loved each other. Even after their games, when everyone was so sure that it was genuine. After all… Look at what they had endured together.
It isn’t that he doesn’t believe in love (although he is, admittedly, a skeptic), it’s he doesn’t believe real love… The healthy, heart-healing, patch up the raw and decaying edges of yourself, sort of love… Can be found in the Games.
He knows what it’s like to be under that blade, to know that every day might be your last.
And to have one person to share that with. Someone to care, to watch your back, to be strong for. Someone to be strong for you, when you don’t know how you could keep fighting on.
Haymitch doesn’t know if he loved Maysilee. What he does know, is that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. For a short, bittersweet time, she was the only light in his hopelessness.
Was it love? No, probably not, he acknowledges that.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t haunt him, that she doesn’t figure largely in his nightmares.
It doesn’t matter that Katniss and Peeta survived, or that they hold up a bloody good act. It’s that nothing good, nothing real, can come out of the Games.
And that includes the Victors.
The survivors aren’t really people. And they aren’t alive, not really. They just pretend to be.
Giving away the last pieces of themselves to whoever, whatever, numbs the pain. The only difference, as far as Haymitch is concerned, is number.
Katniss and Peeta gave their ragged, bleeding shards to one another; handfuls overflowing like an emotional massacre.
And dependence isn’t love.
But it might be the best that any of them can really hope for.
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