Impossible things, part 2
NSFW 🔥. This fic is set about 9 years after Mockingjay. Part 1 is here. My Hayffie masterpost is here. — Reconnecting with what I imagine of Haymitch and Effie’s voices has been an imperfect and enjoyable experience for me after 19 months away from writing. The channel for creation in/through me feels very rusty... What once felt like my natural breath, like being breathed by the universe, at this point requires effort. That said, crafting this fic, surreal and awkward as it may be, offered me something good, and I’m paying that something forward. I needed this, therefore this is here. — The geese antics are a bit of playfulness for the incredible @hayffiebird 🌸… an amazing human, masterful creator, and beautiful friend. — Gratitude to Taylor and Lana for offering one more song for my Hayffie soundtrack. — I could edit this fic forever, but I’ll stop in order to receive the imperfections. It’s “just fanfiction” after all. And I’m “just human.” At least those are the stories I tell myself in moments when I forget what else I know.
She twirls in silk printed with budding yellow flowers. Her cheeks flush in anticipation as she follows the old familiar script.
“For the honor of representing District 12... Ladies first...” She reaches into the ball, pulls out a slip of paper, unfolds it, and reads her own name. “…Effie Trinket!”
She offers no resistance, no stubborn insistence that there’s been a mistake.
Haymitch tries to speak, and his tongue turns to cotton. He starts to move forward, and his boots tangle in tree roots and tiny bones. A well opens, flowing upward through his body, filling, filling, filling every fiber of his being with silent screams.
“Surrender,” she tells him, “It’s not what you think.”
He shakes his head. ‘Stay alive’ is what he knows.
“Is that enough?” she asks, “Or do you want to live?”
He wonders what’s the difference.
In the wonder, his head splits open and spills the sea. All the waters that have ever been and will ever be fall at his feet and become the tides.
Effie embraces him in the magic. His tongue returns to flesh, and his flesh burns.
“What’s happening?” he asks.
“The oldest game. …Come with me,” she beckons, “Like this…”
She kicks her shoes off in the sand and runs barefoot along the water to a carousel of painted horses. The flowers she wears come to life and bloom golden. Their petals take flight and swirl around him like warm flakes of snow.
🎶 …It’s coming down, it’s coming down, it’s coming down, it’s coming down... 🎶
The carousel plays as it turns. Effie goes by, and she goes by, and she goes by, and she goes by. The wind spins her hair into cotton candy.
At every turn she asks him, “What are you waiting for?”
***
Haymitch woke with the memory of her voice ringing in his ears. He was slumped over in a chair, like the mid afternoon sun dipping below the treetops. His head throbbed, and his mouth felt like cotton. He touched his tongue to make sure it was there. He recalled the dream but little about the days before. Just a dark haze, then a bright haze, then a dark haze, and so on. That was becoming his life again. Alcohol blurred the fine details of night and day. It’s not the life he wanted, but it’s the one he had. He knew there had been bourbon, a lot of it, but he saw no empty bottles. The room was clean. Cleaner than it had been since— “Effie?”
He stood up too quickly and fell down again onto the arm of the chair. Trying to catch his balance, he reached out and caught the pole of a floor lamp, toppling it through a windowpane. He ended up on the floor, without a scratch except for the cut on the palm of his hand that he didn’t want to remember. But the memories were staring at him nonetheless — a goddamn reporter, a phone call, unbloomed flowers, and loneliness.
The chill of winter blew in through the cracked window. Snow had fallen during the night or the day before, or possibly even earlier. He lost track of time. The geese were oddly silent, and he shuddered at the possibility that they were dead from his neglect. Things were falling apart again, including the dregs of himself, and he was letting it happen. If he let Effie’s goose freeze, she wouldn’t forgive him. Not that she was going to forgive any of his shit anyway. She was better off leaving him alone.
He stood up slower this time and peered into the kitchen. That room was clean too, and there was a fresh loaf of bread on the counter. Peeta. The kid had not lost his tendency to try to keep people alive who didn’t really want to be living.
Haymitch’s stomach rumbled in response to the aroma of the bread, but past experience along with the dried vomit on his shirt suggested that his gut wouldn’t be ready yet to keep down anything solid. He fumbled with scooping out coffee grounds and putting on a pot to brew. Then he dragged himself upstairs to sober up in the shower so he could track down the geese, wherever they were, before another night fell. Winter was the one season when they really depended on his attention. Their wild cousins were flying south. But his geese were long-domesticated, and they were stuck with him.
Without taking off his clothes, he stepped into the shower. It was more immediate than doing laundry and more logical than burning the clothes with the garbage. He took a wide stance to keep from falling down as warm water spilled over him and turned the muscles of his legs to jelly. He tilted his head up to the nozzle and opened his mouth to collect water for rinsing his teeth. This approach was quicker than using a toothbrush. The shower had become his answer to nearly everything that he couldn’t get in a bottle of liquor. Hell, if he woke up with an erection, he could even jerk off in here and pretend he didn’t need anyone for anything. But today there was no need for pretending, only flaccid emptiness.
He peeled off each article of clothing until he was naked and the shower ran cold. Then he stayed a moment longer to clear away the fog left in his head after yesterday’s binge. Goosebumps spread across his body, and the planet of fear that he drank to shove down crept into his chest, threatening to explode the world. He mollified it by telling himself he’d restock his alcohol while out looking for the geese, and he’d drink again later.
He turned off the water and pulled a clean towel from the cabinet. It was one of Effie’s, pink and soft. It held the scent of her which was gone now from the set of sheets that he’d been sleeping on for the month since she left him. He just stood there, dripping on the bathroom floor and holding her towel — not wrapping it around his shoulders or warming up his body, not going to a place of indulgence in what was. If he did that, it would be too hard to keep going. He put her towel back on the shelf, and dried off with one of his own that smelled of moth balls and stale reality.
He draped his wet clothes over the shower door then dressed for winter. He needed to check on the kids too. They had asked him for help repairing storm shutters. It was a project that wouldn’t require as much sobriety as, say, climbing up on the roof to clear the rain gutters or sweeping the chimney. When had they asked him? Last week? The week before? The first storm already hit before he got around to helping them. He wondered if it could ever be possible for him to not let everyone down and if there could come a time again when his small world would feel less like hell.
***
Effie stepped off the train onto the icy platform. A gust of wind chilled her neck, so she buttoned her ankle length coat to the top and pulled up the hood. She adjusted her purse over her shoulder and pulled a large rolling suitcase filled with all of the possessions she had taken away with her last month.
The storm she’d been watching through the windows on the train had arrived in 12 before her, and it laid on the ground a thick blanket of snow. The town was still dressed up with remnants of Yuletide. Buildings had been decorated with boughs of evergreen, symbolizing life, rebirth, and renewal. Doors, windows, and fireplaces were brightened with holly, signifying hope and potency.
Oh, mistletoe… and ribbons! She touched a gloved hand to her chest, admiring the simple splendor. The plant had been collected from trees and hung over doorways for protection and fertility. These were old customs resurrected from from ancient times, long before the Dark Days — from simpler times, almost forgotten and brought to life again.
During the past couple of years, Effie had taken to joining the seasonal festival committees, and she felt displaced now seeing that this holiday had come and gone without her participation. The aging decorations tugged at her heartstrings, and she felt sentimental about how it all might have been.
She did not know how this day would unfold, but she felt freshly determined to make this work, to continue to forge a life here, despite the pangs of doubt that kept coming back no matter how certain she felt at times that they were gone for good. She set her heels in the snow and made her way along the road.
I’m afraid… I’m afraid… I’m afraid… A voice from within repeated over and over. She didn’t know which part of her was afraid to be returning home or why. How would she be received? What emotionality would she encounter? Would she be forgiven for having left? Was she making a big big big mistake? Would she fail to fully grasp whatever it was that she was wanting so desperately?
She needed his heart with her heart, his hands with her hands, his body with her body. Screw the heartache from forever; she needed him now. And she was as terrified as she was thrilled to be heading again toward that possibility.
She hadn’t gotten far when she heard a commotion coming the Hob. From a distance, she saw Greasy Sae banging a frying pan with a large steel ladle and chasing a flock of geese out of the building.
“You birds come after my food again, and I’ll be cookin’ each and every one o’ ya in a stew!”
The hooligan geese were unmistakably Haymitch’s. Effie’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment. What in the world!
“Effie Trinket! I am glad to see YOU.” The mayor waved from a couple of blocks away and walked toward her. Effie wished a snow bank would open up and swallow her. Today she wanted to pass through town unnoticed, and she was not succeeding.
“Mayor,” she greeted him with a version of her old plaster smile.
“I trust that you are here to collect those geese! Haymitch has been informed in the past that district ordinances require livestock to be kept in agricultural and residential zones only. We simply cannot tolerate them around the businesses. No exceptions!”
Pulling her bag through the snow was challenging enough. She did not want to deal with the geese too, but she was uncomfortable thinking about how cold and hungry they probably were to have ventured into the Hob of all places!
Recovering geese who wandered off when fences went down or gates were left open was Haymitch’s work. Effie generally took little interest in them beyond gathering their eggs in support of Peeta’s baking or hollering at them to shut up in moments when she could not tolerate their noise.
“I will do what I can about the geese,” she told the mayor, “Regardless, they will be relocated to their coop within the hour, and they will NOT be returning to town under my watch.”
“I knew we could depend on you to remedy this nuisance. It is good to have you back.”
Effie reached into her purse and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in parchment. She purchased it from the dining car, but since she had no appetite on the train, now it would be a bribe. She made a clucking sound in the direction of the geese who were foraging at the foot of a dumpster. A large white goose with brown speckles on her neck waddled in Effie’s direction. The rest of the flock followed on her heels.
Haymitch had referred to that one as “Effie’s goose” since the day last summer when the bird injured her foot, and Effie wrapped her in a towel and spent the afternoon holding her on the porch. That day Haymitch was willing to name what he was feeling as love. That declaration was a long time coming.
Sometimes a thing gets so big inside us that we need to either come out with it or die. She knew that if love had been the only thing growing in them, then they wouldn’t be struggling. More was needing to be expressed here. She couldn’t work with what she didn’t know or couldn’t see clearly. It was like trying to juggle invisible balls.
The speckled goose looked up from Effie’s feet, glancing between her and the sandwich with rapt interest. The other geese eyed the food too. The birds started chatting and nipping at each other over which one of them had the biggest claim to it.
Effie stood up straight and held the sandwich in the air. “That is ENOUGH ruckus! NONE of you will be getting anything until you are back home where you belong. Come along now.” She set off again down the snow covered road, pulling her bag behind her with one hand and holding the sandwich toward the sky with the other. She was half-hoping the geese would follow her, and half-hoping Sae would come back out of the Hob and haul the lot of them into her soup pot! Except for the speckled one. Effie wouldn’t be letting that one go.
***
Haymitch held a steaming mug of coffee in both hands as he crossed the frozen yard. A large tree branch had gone down, blockading the door to the goose coop. Setting his mug on a fence post, he yanked at the branch until it pulled away. Then he opened the door and peered inside. Aside from soiled nesting material, the coop was empty. The birds were gone.
He unlatched the shed, and pulled out a bag of feed, hoping that the sound of grains and seeds clinking in their bowls would bring them in as usual. Then he wiped his dusty hands onto his jeans, picked up his mug from the fence, and resumed sipping coffee. Drinking anything was better than drinking nothing. Snow crunched under his boots as he turned his gaze up to the sky. “If I were locked outside during a snowstorm, where would I go?”
A flock of Canada geese passed high overhead, migrating to far off places with blue water, warm sand, and bottles of rum... Would he go with them? He’d be turning 50 soon, and he felt more alone than ever before. What was keeping him here in a town built on a graveyard of his people, in woods haunted by their ghosts, in a house filled with memories that he couldn’t stand to remember and was terrified to forget?
“Where would you go?” He whispered across the lawn to the sharpest memory, the tiniest ghost. The wind blew through leafless branches, and the wild geese flew beyond the horizon.
The graveyard was inside him. There was no escaping it.
He reached the bottom of his mug and went back into the kitchen for a refill before heading out to search for his geese in their usual hiding spots. As he poured the coffee, he heard more of them in the distance. Then their honking grew louder, much louder.
Through the front window he saw her, parading his geese up the road like a scene out of a bizarre fairytale. She rattled off a string of swear words punctuated by “Manners!!” and “Stop fighting!” and “This behavior is precisely why your kind is referred to as ‘fowl’!”
Adrenaline surged through his body. He felt the rush in his arms and legs, in each finger and every toe. What is she doing here? Was she showing up to collect more of her belongings, or…? A wheel of her suitcase caught on a chunk of ice, and the bag toppled over. It looked heavy, not empty. …Or she’s coming home.
Effie added to her litany of curses as she inadvertently dropped the sandwich she had been carrying. The geese swarmed at her feet and devoured the thing.
“I am DONE with this project! Now, shoo!” She waved them off toward the yard. The birds were already heading that way, interested perhaps in their wide open coop and the possibility of more sustenance.
Haymitch’s heart beat into his throat as he watched her right the suitcase and free the wheel from the ice. The hood of her coat fell back, and the wind caught her hair, setting it loose from its clip and blowing out her curls into something wild. Her lips, her cheeks, and the tip of her nose were all pink from the cold, and he thought about making promises that he couldn’t keep, just to have her. To have her right there in the snow on that fur coat.
What the hell is she trying to do to me? Anger was coming up to protect the wounded one within who had barely started to accept that he was living a life without her again.
Effie tucked her hair behind her ears and added wind to the list of all the nature she was cursing: geese, cold, snow, ice, wind, and the curious fear that nagged louder as she moved toward the house. This homecoming was not happening in any of the possible ways that she had envisioned. She was not looking how she intended to look or feeling the way she had imagined she would feel. Standing on the porch, she agonized a long time over whether she should knock on the door, or just open it with her key and step inside, or run back to the train station and avoid facing the fear entirely. The decision was ultimately made for her when the door opened.
“So are you coming in or what?” His voice was rough and shaky. He hoped she’d assume the shakiness was from drinking. And his bloodshot eyes could be explained by the liquor too, come to think of it. He preferred for her to know him now as the drunk he’d always been rather than as the man who’d spent the night before last crying himself to sleep, like an abandoned kid, and then spent last night drinking and trying to forget. The last thing he wanted from her was pity.
She took in the details of his appearance. His boots and coat, thick grey sweater and blue jeans, and woolen cap weren’t what she had been expecting. He seemed sturdy and solid. He’d let his beard grow in fully. He smelled of coffee and the woods and peppermint soap.
He’s going out. …Is he meeting someone? It was late in the day on a Saturday. …Is he dating someone?! She hadn’t considered that possibility. The thought of him being intimate with someone else made her sick. She pressed a palm to her empty churning stomach.
The pain on her face tempered his anger. “Effie, what’s going on?” His concern for her was too marked not to notice.
“Are you going out?” She asked, taking off her sunglasses so she could look him in the eyes.
Hers were swollen. Dark circles underneath were barely concealed by makeup. It looked like she was showing up here because she had lost some sort of battle with herself. “I was going outside to search for the geese, but I see you’ve already done that.”
The geese… “So you’re not seeing anyone?”
“Seeing anyone? What the hell kind of question is that? Is THAT why you’re here — to find out if I’m seeing someone?”
“Of course not.” But now she needed to know. “…Are you?”
He stormed off to the kitchen, leaving her standing in the doorway.
Typical. She wheeled her bag inside and closed the door behind her. For the second time that day, Effie felt out of place in dearly familiar surroundings. She took three deep breaths, hung her purse and coat on the rack in the entryway and set her boots on the doormat. She opened the curtains on the south facing window to let in the late afternoon sunshine. She unfolded a handkerchief from her pocket and dusted off the mahogany coffee table. “Hello, you,” she whispered to it like an old friend.
Haymitch gazed out the kitchen window looking over the yard. He pretended to watch the geese to avoid seeing her, but he was keenly aware of her presence. He heard her footsteps cross the kitchen. The hinges creaked as she opened a cabinet. She poured herself a cup of coffee as if she had never left, as if it was a regular day of them sharing their lives. Except they weren’t.
Effie noticed the bread on the counter. The dear boy. “How are the children?” she asked. It was a safer place to begin.
She persisted in referring to them as ‘the children,’ no matter how many years passed. Haymitch had been so absorbed recently in his own drama that he genuinely had no idea how they were. “They’re fixing storm shutters.” It was the best answer he could give.
“I’ve missed them. …I told them I’d be arriving today.”
Well, that explained the boy cleaning this house while Haymitch was passed out this morning. He knew the kids wanted Effie here.
“Thoughtful,” he said with a hint of sarcasm. If she had told him that she was coming, he would have thrown what she said to that reporter in her face and hollered at her to stay in the goddamn Capitol or wherever this relationship wouldn’t hurt her. But his truth was that he wanted her here. Every cell in his body wanted her here, and he didn’t know how to reconcile what he wanted with what she needed. So for the time being he kept looking out the window and said nothing more about it.
“Sae nearly cooked your geese today.”
Haymitch finally looked at her. She was wearing a red dress with long sleeves and pearl buttons up the front. When she moved, the hem brushed the seams that ran up the backs of her stockings. She looked prettier than all the ribbons folks put up in town for Yuletide. He cleared his throat.
She continued. “Apparently, they were brazenly eating out of her soup pot.”
He suppressed a grin. “Resourceful. They can be a pain in the ass. Thanks for bringing them home.”
“They were a handful indeed. I did not see another option. You know how the mayor loves to talk about zoning violations. And I was expecting Sae to come back out at any moment with a—”
“I’m not seeing anyone,” he interrupted her to say it.
“Neither am I.”
“I didn’t ask if you were.”
“Nevertheless, I want you to know. …I do not want to be with anyone else.”
What the hell? He was as frustrated about her showing up like this, all beautiful and shit, as he was about her leaving. She ran so hot and cold that she was either burning him or freezing his ass off. “You said you needed to stay away from me, and now you’re making yourself at home here as if it’s any old Wednesday.” He glanced at her cup of coffee.
“Today is Saturday, Haymitch, and this time apart has offered me some clarity.” She was still unclear about how much clarity she actually had but she said it anyway.
“What do you want, Effie?”
She took another deep breath. “I want us to name the baby.”
“The baby?” His gaze dropped to her stomach. He hadn’t seen her in a month. That was the way it happened when she was pregnant the first time and she came here to tell him. He recalled the discomfort on her face just a moment ago at the doorway and her hand on her belly. Effie…
Oh, the way he looked at her... She recognized his misunderstanding. “I’m not…” she didn’t say the word. Her tone held a tinge of sorrow. “I’m referring to the one I lost. I have been thinking about her often, and the therapist suggested I might want to give her a name.”
His stomach rolled in a mixture of relief, disappointment, and acrid emptiness. He didn’t know what to do with those feelings. He swallowed the urge to throw up.
She glanced out the window to the snow below the maple tree, naked now in winter. Tiny buds lined the branches, waiting for enough warmth to open and leaf out green.
Sadness bubbled up in Haymitch at the thought of naming a baby long-dead. Names were things written on slips of paper and thrown into reaping balls, not a way out of grief. But what harm could come from naming somebody who never got to live?
“I don’t know much about naming babies.” He didn’t want to be having this conversation, especially not with his head feeling like it was splitting open. But Effie never mentioned the miscarriage anymore. She just looked at that tree and sat in its shade during the summer. He figured it was on her mind sometimes, but she didn’t talk about it, despite her tendency to drone on and on about most subjects.
“In my lineage, girls traditionally receive a feminine version of their father’s second name.”
Talking about this felt like sand moving under his skin, but something in him kept going. “No baby needs any more of my name than is necessary. Her getting my genes was burden enough.”
Effie sighed, “She was perfect. I would not have wanted her to have anyone else’s genes but yours and mine.”
He said nothing more about giving her his name, and Effie didn’t push it. She offered something else instead. “‘Carissimi Unum’ means ‘Our dear one.’”
“No Capitol names.” The translation touched him though. “This is hard enough without bringing that place into this.”
“We conceived her in the Capitol. It was my home then.”
“Well, she was born here. Her home is here.”
He spoke about the baby in the present tense, even though she had been just a glimmer and then gone.
“There are less elaborate names that convey a similar meaning. ‘Cara Amare’ means ‘Dear love.’ It has old origins, but it’s more modest.”
“‘Cara…’” he nodded, “She’s been under that tree since the day she...” What he was thinking had him feeling so vulnerable that he almost couldn’t say it. But it felt too big not to say it. “…When I think about her, she’s ‘Maple’.”
Tears welled up in Effie’s eyes and threatened to spill onto her cheeks. “You think about her?”
He didn’t want to see those tears. Not now. He was already doing all he could to avoid scooping her up and crushing her to him and trying to give her the things he didn’t know how to give her and was afraid to give her.
“A person doesn’t forget a thing like that.”
“I would not have imagined that you’ve been holding a name for her in your mind. …‘Cara Maple’ fits her; doesn’t it?”
He didn’t know how anything could fit a dead baby, yet somehow it did.
She reached for his hand. She was asking him to meet her part way. He wanted to touch her and everything else, but he was haunted by what she’d said to that reporter, ‘It was hurting more to be in than out.’
“Effie, I don’t want to be hurting you.”
Then don’t. She slid a finger into his palm, and drew a circle around the cut from her hairpin. “I don’t want to hurt you either.”
Then stop leaving me. He curled his fingers around the one she offered.
“After escorting all of those children to their deaths, it was my karma to lose her.”
He clasped her shoulders. “Karma is made up nonsense. It’s bullshit! You couldn’t have controlled any of that. All of those kids would have died regardless. …Even Cara.”
She softened to hear him call the baby by name. She slipped her arms around his waist and melted into the cracks of him, like butter on toasted bread. “This is the third winter since I lost her, and I’ve been losing myself all along. I thought I’d know myself again in my old routines and places. But in the Capitol there is nothing to hold onto. Nothing in that life seems to matter to me anymore.”
In the embrace, Haymitch felt her thinness. This month away had made her fragile, like an empty champagne flute. She sighed against his chest, and the vibration moved though his body, coaxing it back to life. It had been weeks since they held each other. Without her, there had been no release and so little feeling — just the old demons bashing around his skull and kicking relentlessly.
“What kind of baby would I give you? Another dead one? It’s no good, Effie. It’s impossible.” His feelings didn’t match his thoughts. He recalled the roiling flash of disappointment when she said she was not pregnant.
He enfolded her in his arms, fitting her against him. The fragrance of crushed leaves wafted in through the crack in the window, and the thought of a baby born full term and alive felt possible. Terrifying, yet possible.
He shut out the emotions and leaned into the feeling of her. The room was spinning lightly for him, like the carrousel in his dream. She centered everything somehow and kept his feet on the floor. Her hair smelled like orange popsicles with vanilla ice cream. He breathed her in and softened. His guard was coming down. His body was responding to her in the ways it always did.
“What if it could be impossibly good?” she murmured in that dangerous consciousness of hope.
For a split second he believed her. With his guard down, he let in her thread of hope, until age-old fear commanded, ‘Don’t. Don’t you dare hope.’
“You’re dreaming, honey. You’re imagining the same way you do about those curtains. Those flowers are never gonna open. You said it yourself, you’re lost in something that isn’t real.”
She moved her hands over his back, feeling his solidity. “This is real. Your body. My body. They decided the first time. What if we just let them decide again?”
His hand stilled its caress. “You said you were done with having sex to try to ‘fix’ us. I drink, and you feel alone. …A baby is not going to ‘fix’ that.”
She pulled back far enough to see the pain behind his eyes. She didn’t know how to reconcile what she wanted with what he needed. She could only guess about what he needed, about what would stop him from retreating into himself. “I don’t expect a baby to fix anything. I just long for her. …And I want you. I want our family.”
“Effie—”
“I need us to be talking about this, but I’m not trying to push you into another baby that you do not want.”
“Hey, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want her until after she was gone. I’m not saying I don’t want her now. I’m not saying I don’t picture how it would be to have a kid with you. I just don’t see how I’m ever gonna not be mixed up about it.”
“What if we just love each other and see what happens?”
“The way I love you isn’t enough for you.”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t need to. You left.”
“I would never THINK that. You KNOW what you are to me. When you’re with me like this, I feel like I’m swimming in the core of the sun.”
She was the sun for him too. But basking in a sunbeam is a hell of a lot different than swimming in plasma.
“Sounds painful.”
“It is NOT painful when we’re like this. The feeling of this is more than enough for me. It’s nearly everything for me.”
“Nearly? What more do you want?! I can’t be like THIS all the time. I am who I am.”
“I WANT who you are.”
“You don’t want me drinking.”
Effie hesitated in order to tread carefully around this subject, “You know how I have always felt about you, regardless.”
“What you’re feeling is not the same as what you’re thinking. You don’t want me drinking anymore.”
“Do not put that on me! You do not get to decide what I’m thinking or what I want. Perhaps YOU are the one who does not want you drinking anymore.”
“You’re being evasive.”
“Haymitch, I want you HERE! When you’re intoxicated, you’re someplace inside you where I cannot be, where I do not exist. I want what’s inside you that I only glimpse or never get to see.”
“There you go again, wanting impossible things. Even if I knew how to give you all of that shit, if you had it then you wouldn’t want it.”
“There YOU go again, deciding what I want and do not want. Those are NOT your decisions to make. I want all of you, and I want you to want all of me too!”
“You think I don’t?”
“Half the time you don’t even see me.”
“Maybe you aren’t seeing yourself, sweetheart. And if you were, then maybe you wouldn’t be asking me to do it for you.”
She huffed, “What am I not seeing?”
“I can’t know that. I can’t even know all the shit in me that you want me to give you!”
She had no retort to offer. In the silence, he heard her teeth chattering. She was shivering.
How long had she been shivering? He knew he wasn’t seeing her in all the ways he should, even in moments like this when he was basically sober. “You’re cold. The window’s busted. Some things have been falling apart around here.”
“I don’t know why I’m shaking. This conversation… I don’t want to give up on us. Haymitch, I refuse to give up on us! I will NOT allow this to be the end. There is so much here between us. Do you feel it?”
She touched his chest, and he couldn’t hide the things his heart was doing. If there were places in him where she didn’t exist, it was because he was keeping her out for her protection or because something in him was keeping his awareness out for the same reason.
He could have stepped away from her touch. Maybe he should have, but he shifted toward her. “It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself.”
“I do NOT need to convince myself of what I already know! I left you because I was despairing. I was wrong to despair. …I’m sorry.”
He felt responsible for that despair, and here she was apologizing for it. He sighed, not knowing how to change things between them so that she wouldn’t keep feeling it. “You’re not wrong. You’re just feeling what you feel…”
When he looked closely, he could see more layers of the Effie he’d known falling away. It scared the hell out of him. He didn’t know how to stop it. He cradled her face in his hands and caressed her. “…These cheeks are so hollow, honey.”
She released a breath she’d been holding. “Your eyes are too. Have you been sleeping?”
“Probably about as much as you’ve been eating. Do you want dinner? Peeta’s been dropping off a loaf of something most days.”
She shook her head no. She slid her hands up his chest and noticed new flecks of grey in his beard. She wanted all the details she missed, all the stories his body could tell her. “I want what’s happening now.”
His thumbs brushed the corners of her mouth. “You said if you came back our clothes would be off, and we wouldn’t be fixing anything at all. You said it like that’s the problem.”
His calluses were rough against her chapped lips. She felt the flying in her body, the certainty that she could make this work. The therapist said the high was a red flag. It unfurled in her awareness, wrapped around her like silk, and drew her in.
“There is nothing to fix tonight,” she told him, “I’m offering anything that you want from me, and I’m allowing everything that you want to give.”
Tonight. “Then what happens tomorrow? What happens the next time you’re hurting?”
She shook her head. “What is the point in not hurting if there is no joy either? I felt no joy without you.” After awhile, I was not even sure why I was living.
He echoed her feelings in his own confession. “Since you left, it’s been hard to keep staying alive.”
It’s what she wanted to hear — the pain he rarely spoke of and his need for her. Tears filled her throat. “Can I come home?”
“This is your place too. It’s no good without y—“
Their kiss was slow and full of memories. He felt her tears on his face, and he tasted them. He welcomed them now that he was no longer resisting. He needed this, not just for now. He needed this forever, even though nothing lasted and no one stayed. Needing people was a dangerous game, and he was playing it. He’d been playing it with her all along. He didn’t trust her with his heart. He didn’t trust himself. And yet, he was playing.
“I don’t want us to fuck this up.”
“I’ve worked too hard for this to let us.”
The red flag tightened as desire.
Their winter layers were coming off, as expected, as it happened hundreds of times before. Just enough to feel each other’s skin.
“Where?” he asked.
“You said that our first time. So long ago. Do you remember?”
“Yeah. You were indecisive then too.”
“Haymitch!” She slapped his chest, and he caught her wrist.
The room spun slowly for him, like a harvest time waltz. Around and around and around. “Tell me where, sweetheart, or it’s gonna be the floor.”
“In our bed for heaven’s sake!”
“It’s always the hard way with you,” he chuckled.
She lifted his arm over her shoulder, and they eased into the familiar… The third step of the staircase creaked on the way up, and the seventh was marred by a gouge where Haymitch had dropped his knife… The headboard jostled against the wall as they slipped between worn out sheets… They leaned into one another’s touch and felt a fleeting comfort in the ache of longing... Her legs were cool as she wrapped around him... “Let’s warm you up, sweetheart.”
He moved inside her. Soft moans emerged from her throat in concert with the motion. She met him with all that she was, even the parts of her that were lost to her awareness.
“Like this,” she murmured, “Fuck me like this.”
She lit him up. In that moment of incandescence, he’d do anything she wanted for as long as he could last, though she was feeling too good and he was too hungover to last long.
She was a bird in his arms, singing. A mourning dove on a lamppost, witnessing the loneliness of the world. I see you, the feathery creature croons, I’m here. — She was a goddess, holding his life in her hands. She could crush him.
This physical aspect of loving was simple. Nothing in his life felt more uncomplicated than being inside her, sensing her arousal build as it was happening in him. It crossed his mind to slow the pace in order to draw this out, but his body would have none of that.
And neither would hers. He was in deep with her — she knew he was — yet she didn’t quite have him, even after all these years, even in their most naked moments. The reaching was fire. Heat stung her cheeks as if he had slapped her. “Oh, god…” She wanted the sting.
He watched the flush of pleasure play over her face, and he said what he’d been wanting to since he saw her coming up the road with the geese, since he saw her in his dream with bare feet in the stirrups of a painted horse asking him what he was waiting for. Fear held his tongue, but he muttered through it.
“I love you — so hard.”
Her breath caught in her throat. With those grey eyes on hers, she was certain. About everything. She cried out as waves of delight moved through her, like the tide coming in and snow falling on the beach. Resplendence.
The sensations drew him to the edge. He felt it coming for him too, all powerful and alive and shit.
Holy fuck. He wanted it like this.
After all this time, he would have thought that pulling out of her would be as simple as being inside her. He’d perfected the art of it. Hell, he’d done it half-drunk dozens of times.
This time he was alert to everything, and leaving her body wasn’t instinctual at all. One more second. Just one more. Just… MORE. Hope seeped into the cracks, and, for a crushing instant, he wanted it all.
“Eff— I’m coming—” He said it as if she should run.
“YES.” Her heart pounded as if she were running. She held his hips lightly as his body claimed what his mind couldn’t wrap itself around.
In that instant, he stayed inside her as he found release.
🎶 …Coming down… coming down… coming down… coming down… 🎶 Like glistening petals and surrender.
She traced the length of his spine through beads of sweat. Her lips brushed his neck as she whispered protestations of love and something about him needing a haircut.
“Hmm…” was all he could muster.
The month had been so long without her. He clung to her as her voice faded from his awareness. He slipped into the unconscious world of sleep without thinking about what just happened between them, without thinking about his empty flask, without thinking about anything except the feeling of her hands in his hair.
Under the familiar weight of him, she experienced a flash of uncertainty. A vision of ten tiny fingernails shaped like perfect crescent moons, reaching for her — alone. After a year of wanting exactly this moment, the uncertainty showing up in it was as unexpected as it was predictable.
A question rooted in their tangled limbs and took hold in her awareness.
What have I done?
She couldn’t shake it loose.