Rated: T | Words: 2337
Summary: Missing scenes taking place after Sunrise on the Reaping leading up to the original trilogy.
It’s only when the spirits run out and the ghosts press in that Haymitch finds solace in the Hob. At least the familiar faces that haunt this place are living and breathing. That he can almost stand. As long as those who are left are just out of his reach, they are just out of danger. He can live with that. He has to live with that.
Drinking helps.
The days bleed together when you have no direction between one Reaping Day and the next, and it isn’t until Haymitch pushes into the decrepit warehouse that he realizes it is fuller than he likes this early in the day. Sunday, he realizes irritably. The one day the mines are closed. Just his luck. He contemplates turning around and walking home, but his thirst for searing liquor wins out. It is an easy, worn path to the stall that sells the good stuff, especially when most people give him a wide berth. He isn’t sociable and he isn’t liked. That is, except for the wadded up currency shoved in his pockets.
“Burdock!” a voice calls out across the din. “Nice looking kid you got there!”
The voice that answers is too close for comfort. “She just turned a year old yesterday. Figured it was time for her first taste of the Hob.”
Haymitch doesn’t want to look, but he does. Burdock stands just a few feet away, leaning against the counter at Greasy Sae’s booth, his arm wrapped protectively around a baby that sits atop it. She is reaching with chubby hands for his bowl of steaming stew.
“Gotta let it cool first, Katniss,” he tells her gently, edging the bowl farther away from her grasp.
Katniss.
The memory of digging for katniss roots with Burdock, Lenore Dove, and Blair up at the lake when they were kids gurgles up from the depths of his mind, and Haymitch drowns it again before it hurts too much. He tears his gaze away from the dark haired child as another memory surfaces unbidden. A little Louella taking some of her first wobbly steps on the sparse patch of crabgrass in front of the McCoy home.
Haymitch doesn’t know if Burdock sees him, but he doesn't wait to find out.
She’s up on Burdock’s shoulders the next time he gets a good look at her: two braids that barely graze her narrow shoulders, a big smile on her face. But Haymitch doesn’t see Katniss perched there. He sees Louella as she’d trailed after him in the schoolyard, picking dandelions and asking him to make her a flower crown with them. He’d strung the flowers together and she’d worn it until they turned brown and wilty.
He realizes he’s staring when the girl catches him, her smile dropping a bit. But it’s curiosity in her Seam grey eyes, not disgust. She’s too little yet to know, but she’ll figure it out soon enough – that his face is synonymous with the death of two District 12 tributes each year.
Haymitch walks away, the clinking of bottles matching his steps.
Katniss has a small sack slung over her shoulder, walking hand in hand with Burdock, who has his own bulging sack. They must be fresh back from the woods. Her hair is in two, familiar plaits down her back. Louella’s ghost incarnate.
Haymitch glares down at his bowl of soup, face burning, annoyed he’s been caught. “Of course she is,” he grumbles back. “She’s got Burdock for a pa.”
“He’s got two girls now. Little Primrose.” The old woman leans forward. “Still not on speaking terms with him?”
“I’m barely on speaking terms with you.” Avoiding the question. Shouldn’t even be a question. What right does she have to ask that question?
“Well,” Greasy Sae huffs. “You’re not too pleasant company.”
“Never aimed to be,” Haymitch says behind a wry smile.
She leaves him alone with his questionable meal after that, but Burdock and Katniss have vanished from view.
Another Reaping Day.
Another two tributes led to slaughter.
Haymitch didn’t sleep, and he’s out of the house the moment sunlight invades. He’s nursed his liquor bottles dry, and he’s not willing to wait for the Capitol’s rich supply provided on the train that afternoon. Moving with a purpose, his gait is already unstable, packed, dry earth swaying under each deliberate step. Haymitch intends to be wholly incoherent by the time Effie shows her face and insists he be presentable. As if such a thing exists.
The Hob is teeming with life but subdued when he staggers in. Eyes will be watching him more closely today, but he pretends not to notice the offended glances and outright glares. He doesn’t acknowledge them and he doesn’t blame them. How dare he, after all? The sheer audacity. He should be sober for the boy and the girl that will be thrust into his temporary care. Yes, he knows that, and they know that…they all know that. But…he can’t. He can’t look at their soft, innocent faces with a clear mind or eyes. Not without shattering, not without breaking into pieces he couldn’t hope to scrape up and hold together. He isn’t above the knowledge that he is a coward. He’d never claimed to be anything else. Artificial courage is found instead at the bottom of a bottle and in the murky depths of an inebriated mind.
“Haymitch?”
He hasn’t heard his name from that voice in years. That startling fact alone stops Haymitch short, but he doesn’t turn to face the man who spoke. “Burdock,” he returns instead.
“What are you doing here?” Burdock asks.
“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know,” Haymitch growls. When he moves to keep walking, a hand catches hold of his right arm. Haymitch reacts instinctively, swinging out wildly with his left, fist tight, but misses his target by a longshot. It’s only Burdock holding him in a vice-like grip that keeps Haymitch from falling.
Burdock doesn’t wait for Haymitch’s vision to steady before he’s dragging him off the main aisle. “We need to talk.”
“Nothing to talk about,” Haymitch argues, and he hates that his voice slurs.
Burdock shoves him into a chair at an empty booth. The old thing shifts and protests under Haymitch’s weight but ultimately holds. Haymitch tries to stand up, but Burdock pins him, a hand on each shoulder, rough, calloused fingers digging painfully deep. “This has to stop, Haymitch!” Burdock says.
Haymitch won’t look at his face, won’t meet his eye. Haymitch wants to be angry, furious, enraged. Instead shame permeates the scalding emotions boiling in his throat. “I can’t.”
“You can,” Burdock insists. “You are their only hope, Haymitch.”
“It shouldn’t be me…”
“But it is you!”
Haymitch feels his face twist, feels the tears burn. He grinds his teeth, the sour taste of old liquor on his tongue. “I was supposed to die, Burdock!” The explosive confession makes Burdock step back, but Haymitch doesn’t have the energy anymore to move, so he buries his face in shaky hands, hoping that the man in front of him will just walk away.
But it’s too much to hope for. Haymitch hears Burdock crouch down in front of him, boots scuffing the cracked cement floor stained with coal dust. “But you didn’t, Haymitch,” Burdock says, so softly that Haymitch almost doesn’t hear him over his own ragged breathing.
“And they did,” Haymitch whispers back.
Burdock knows who they are. Some of them.
Louella. Wyatt. Maysilee. Sid. Ma. Lenore Dove.
Burdock doesn’t know about the others.
Haymitch’s allies. His rivals.
They’re all dead. And he’s alive.
Why?
“I know,” Burdock says.
But he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the ghosts and the faces and the bloodstains. Haymitch wouldn’t wish that on him. It’s why he pushed everyone he had left away, why he can’t be weak now. But he is weak, and Burdock is right here. Haymitch drops his hands. He doesn’t care if his face is wet. “I’ll lose them. Our kids don’t stand a chance against the Careers.”
“You did.”
Haymitch scoffs. “Barely.”
“That’s still enough.” Burdock reaches out, grabs Haymitch’s hand. “At least give them something to hope for.”
“Hope is cruel,” Haymitch says, and he means it.
Burdock shakes his head and sighs. “Hope is everything.”
Haymitch is too tired to argue, so he doesn’t. Their minds are made up. No words will change that.
Eavesdropped conversations in the Hob is how he hears the news. Mining accident. An explosion, they say. Only six months ago, he had spoken to his friend for the last time, and now Burdock is dead.
Haymitch doesn’t go to the funeral, but he stands at a distance, unnoticed. It just doesn’t feel right to go and stand among friends and loved ones when he was neither in the end. He sees the girl, Katniss, hand in hand with a smaller girl. Primrose. Asterid stands behind them, the kind face he knew is void of expression. He recognizes it, because it is the same emptiness that stares back at him when he catches his reflection in the mirror.
He thinks of when he lost his own pa in the mines, how the world had tilted off kilter and never quite went upright again. A new normal had settled. It would settle for them too, in time. Just so long as their lives don’t upturn completely. Haymich has seen Katniss in the Hob, how she watched her father barter and sell. Smart as a whip, that one. She’d be okay. They’d all be okay.
A fist of emotion aches in his throat as he walks away, silent as a ghost.
The girl outgrows Louella.
Haymitch sees her in the Hob, enveloped in Burdock’s hunting jacket. Two braids have become one, cutting ties with his little sweetheart’s ghost. But Louella still haunts Katniss’ shadow, what might have been if another slip of paper had been chosen from the glass ball of girls’ names.
He sometimes sees her in town with her sister, looking in the bakery shop window at the cakes. He could afford one now, but he never has or will. He’d have no one to share it with, afterall, and wasn’t that the whole point? Sid would have loved a bakery bought cake, while Ma would’ve protested even with a smile on her face. Lenore Dove would admire the clever decorating, the unlikely canvas capturing her meadow’s wildflowers with sickly sweet frosting.
Time moves between brief glimpses of the girl with everything she represents, and Reaping Days, dark and numbed by habits that have lost their strength.
Another Reaping Day, another set of lambs given to his miserable care.
But it’s not just another name. It’s one of the few names he has dared to learn. Dared to hope that the odds would be in their innocent favor.
“Primrose Everdeen.”
Burdock’s ghost whispers, You are their only hope, Haymitch.
But that isn’t quite true, because another voice speaks up then. Broken, breathless, but clear. “I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!” And the shattered mirrored visage of his sweetheart steps up to the noose instead.
Katniss despises him.
He never expected anything else, but her transparent disgust is a sharp sting nonetheless. It’s in the boy, Peeta’s, eyes too, but more guarded and restrained. It’s not like the fire in the girl’s eyes. Somehow, they convince him to stay sober, to mentor them the way they see fit. But it isn’t just their voices that argue through his drunken fog. It’s Burdock’s voice in his head, the feeling of a father’s hand around his, pleading with him to step up to the role no one in their right mind would ask for. It’s his growing audience of ghosts that trail him wherever he goes.
The barrier he’s built and fortified begins to crack, and he spackles it behind harsh words. He can help them for as long as he can, but he can’t let them in. He doesn’t think he could survive losing them both if he lets them past the stronghold.
He can hear her crying through the door, and his heart gives just a little. More if he’s willing to admit it, which he’s not. But the girl doesn’t respond well to him and Effie knocking and asking to be let in.
“Give her some time,” Haymitch says finally, turning away.
Effie makes a disapproving sound at his back. “We do not have the luxury of time,” she mutters.
Haymitch ignores her, moving to the living room. He tries not to imagine what could have happened in the private sessions to finally push Katniss over the edge. She’s been determined to remain stoic and unmoved, but it was only a matter of time. Strange that it was when she only had herself to depend on that she finally broke. He thought that was all she wanted. Maybe he was wrong. Not like he hasn’t been wrong before.
When dinner is announced, and Effie tries again, Katniss does emerge. Her face is still a little swollen from crying, eyes red rimmed and tear stained. No one mentions it, beginning the meal with meaningless small talk. But Haymitch can’t erase the image from his mind no matter how hard he tries. Another set of tear stained eyes, so many years ago, watching him intently as he told her that she was in every way better than anybody in the Capitol. And he’d meant every word. Still does.
You and me to the end. Right, Hay?
You and me to the end.
When Haymitch finally forces the conversation back to the private sessions, Seam grey eyes are watching him as he listens to Peeta tell about his time in front of the Gamemakers. Intently. Afraid. You are their only hope, Haymitch.
“And you, sweetheart?” The nickname slips oh so naturally from his lips, a name he’d only ever reserved for Louella.
Summary: “Beetee knows the climax of his punishment has arrived in a flurry of tiny, razor sharp teeth and claws.” | Missing scene from Sunrise on the Reaping
Warnings: Major Character Death / Graphic Descriptions of Violence / Hopelessness
Pain.
The pain of being reaped, of survival, of victory. The pain of living with it, of mentoring, of watching your tributes die…over and over again.
Beetee knows pain. Deeply. Intimately. It is his constant, gruesome companion.
This is not pain.
This is being alive and dead in the same agonizing, horrific, shuddered breath. But death would be too kind. This is punishment, grave and deep and public. The other mentors are watching him, unspoken knowledge in their silent pity.
He doesn’t want their pity.
He wants his son.
The focus of the games had shifted so suddenly, so jarringly, that Beetee had not at first registered what he was seeing as the mutts began to swarm their victim. Then he hears his son’s cry of panic, his child’s agonized shrieks as he tries to fend off the vicious, mindless attackers, and Beetee knows the climax of his punishment has arrived in a flurry of tiny, razor sharp teeth and claws. And the hidden cameras, with their soulless eyes controlled by soulless beasts, capture every excruciating detail.
He had thought he’d imagined the worst possible death.
He had thought wrong.
“Haymitch!” Ampert had wailed, “Haymitch, help! Help me!”
Help him. Beetee pleaded, willing the older boy to keep his promise. Don’t let him suffer. Please, Haymitch. Please.
Haymitch does come, but far too late.
When the mutts are finally called away, Haymitch stumbles forward to stand over the skeleton of a small child, freshly stripped of his life.
When the District 12 boy looks up, his eyes briefly meet with a camera. Not on purpose, Beetee knows, the cameras are too well hidden and masked for that. But for just a moment, their eyes meet, and Beetee sees his own rage and horror and sorrow reflected back at him in pools of grey.
When Haymitch releases a guttural scream, the footage breaks away, moving to another tribute, another horror, another story.
Beetee moves.
He stands slowly. He isn’t sure his legs will let him. When they do, he walks to the door, holding his fragile composure together. Only his breathing betrays him, trembling and wet. The Peacekeepers don’t stop him. He has seen what he was meant to see.
The hall is less public, but still monitored heavily. So he continues to walk, his steps becoming more and more unsteady, dragging. He doesn’t want to move. He wants to die. He wants to join his son in death so that maybe they’ll be together again. He can tell him, again, how sorry he is. How this is all his fault. How his arrogance did this.
He thinks he can make it to the bathroom, but he only makes it to a bench. He does not sit so much as collapse. He doesn’t brace his arms on his knees so much as curl into himself, tight as he can, hiding his face from the cameras that are watching. Always watching.
Someone sits next to him. A hand touches his shoulder lightly, shifts, then settles more heavily. “I am so sorry,” Wiress whispers.
She has only known Ampert for a year, ever since she moved into Victor's Village. But as Ampert’s army of unlikely allies had proven, the boy could endear himself to anyone in only a matter of minutes. His open heart and mind knew no stranger. He was too kind for this world.
He’s dreadful, of course, but Haymitch is my family now.
— Katniss, Catching Fire
Little did Burdock know that his brave, smart, fiercely protective daughter would not only save Haymitch from himself, but adopt him as the uncle she never had.
🫶 Yes!! 🥹 I love the books so much...I've been rereading the series since Sunrise came out (I have a bookclub on Fable that I mod...so its been fun, and I'm trying to annotate on my kindle versions to transfer over to my physical copies)
SAME I love how many easter eggs there are in this series... It's so beautiful how they all connect, and when you step back it's like a huge tapestry of all the little threads.
**How I feel as I find connections between the books....😂
They're so subtle too, a lot of times!! It can just be an offhanded comment by a character that meant nothing the first read-through and then it hits you like a train when you finally get it 😱
I knowwww. And the funniest part is I think half of them were accidental on Suzzane's part. She planned one half and the others she just found along the way 😂
Yeah I noticed (and made a post that somehow blew up) that in movie one Woody looks down while the chariots pass... I was like "yeah she took that and ran with it"
🫶 Yes!! 🥹 I love the books so much...I've been rereading the series since Sunrise came out (I have a bookclub on Fable that I mod...so its been fun, and I'm trying to annotate on my kindle versions to transfer over to my physical copies)
SAME I love how many easter eggs there are in this series... It's so beautiful how they all connect, and when you step back it's like a huge tapestry of all the little threads.
**How I feel as I find connections between the books....😂
They're so subtle too, a lot of times!! It can just be an offhanded comment by a character that meant nothing the first read-through and then it hits you like a train when you finally get it 😱
I knowwww. And the funniest part is I think half of them were accidental on Suzzane's part. She planned one half and the others she just found along the way 😂
🫶 Yes!! 🥹 I love the books so much...I've been rereading the series since Sunrise came out (I have a bookclub on Fable that I mod...so its been fun, and I'm trying to annotate on my kindle versions to transfer over to my physical copies)
SAME I love how many easter eggs there are in this series... It's so beautiful how they all connect, and when you step back it's like a huge tapestry of all the little threads.
**How I feel as I find connections between the books....😂
They're so subtle too, a lot of times!! It can just be an offhanded comment by a character that meant nothing the first read-through and then it hits you like a train when you finally get it 😱
🫶 Yes!! 🥹 I love the books so much...I've been rereading the series since Sunrise came out (I have a bookclub on Fable that I mod...so its been fun, and I'm trying to annotate on my kindle versions to transfer over to my physical copies)
Orange. A color associated with fire. Orange- the color of the scarf Coriolanus gave to Lucy Gray. Orange- Peeta's favorite color. Orange- the color of Lenore Dove's paint. Orange. The color of rebellion.
Haymitch often referred to himself as a rascal during his games, but the actual rascal was by and large, Peeta “because she came here with me/if it weren’t for the baby” Mellark. And I think Haymitch really appreciated that and loved that about Peeta.
The Reluctant Victor, inspired by The Reluctant Bride by Auguste Toulmouche - I just thought that this painting was SO perfect for Katniss and I had to draw it!
A lot of people have asked me to talk about Prim holding the crown, so here's a general deep dive into the characters I picked and their placements!
Starting with Prim. She was reaped, which led to Katniss volunteering to save her. It's, of course, very unlikely that Prim would have won the Games like Katniss did. Prim innocently playing with the crown that could have never been hers is also a reference to how excited she was when Katniss' wedding was happening, how she looked at it with children's eyes, impatient for her to try on the dresses. But she's also not as naive or helpless as Katniss believes, which is why her expression is grave and not cheerful.
Asterid is kissing Katniss' forehead in a very motherly gesture. Katniss is unmoved, though she still takes her hand. This is a reference to Katniss' resentment towards her mother when she stopped caring for them after Burdock's death, but also to Katniss' attempts at forgiving her in Catching Fire.
Effie is sitting at Katniss' feet, holding her hand. This represents the sincere -yet sometimes misguided- dedication that Effie has to Katniss. It also felt like an interesting placement, as Victors are often idolized by Capitol citizens.
Katniss, of course, is at the center. She's the reluctant victor, in her fire dress (with a lot of orange in it to reference Peeta, shhh). I hesitated to give her the wedding dress Snow forces her to wear instead, but felt that her fire dress was more recognizable and striking, and better represented how she is seen by the world: the girl on fire.
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