Chapter Text
Winter had always been Haymitch’s favorite season. He loved the snow. He loved the blanket of white that ended up covering everything in sight. He loved the firelight and the crunchy sound of frost under his boots.
It turned out he also loved snuggling with a hot blonde under a pile of blankets while the blizzard raged outside…
“It is absolutely too cold in this place.” Effie muttered from under all the blankets she had been able to unearth in his house.
He curled tighter around her and nuzzled her nape. Truth be told, he was almost too hot. It was positively toasty in the bed and if it had been left to him, he would have ducked two or three blankets but, in this like in almost everything else since she had showed up, he humored her.
He wanted to keep her.
Sometimes, on his bad days, he was scared he wanted to keep her more than she wanted to stay.
His bad days hadn’t magically gone away but there were admittedly less of them now. Perhaps because she had so many bad days of her own he didn’t have time to feel sorry for himself when she needed him to keep her from drowning into the bad memories.
She had spent so long ignoring her trauma, pretending it couldn’t affect her, hiding from it instead of confronting it that it had taken a turn for the worse in her first few weeks in Twelve. She had refused to leave the house at first, had suffered from so many panic attacks and flashbacks Haymitch had been at a loss…
It had taken weeks for her to finally settle down a little, to stop clinging to him in fright at night, to stop hyperventilating every time she was startled by a loud noise, to stop thinking Peacekeepers would break down the door and take her away… On that front, he supposed the government taking her apartment hadn’t helped – and he had had words with Plutarch about that, many words, none of them pleasant – but she was finally accepting his promises that he would kill anyone who tried to hurt her again, regardless of if they had a warrant or not.
She was getting better. She lost herself in her own headspace less and less. She was more engaged with reality. She went outside to the town – sometimes even by herself. She had made a couple of friends – unsurprisingly, the woman who owned the clothes shop now regularly came over for tea. She smothered the children with her mothering, often prompting Katniss to send him exasperated looks over the dinner table.
He wouldn’t have said she was back to normal because he knew for a fact there was no normal to find after the kind of ordeal she had been through but she had found a balance and that was the best one could hope for.
“How can you be cold? I’m fucking sweating.” he complained.
He wasn’t just sweating, he was soaked under the armpits and at the small of his back. There were too many blankets piled on the bed, her body was warm and not only was a fire lit downstairs but he had pushed up the old heater as far as it could go without the boiler blowing up so she would be comfortable. Nobody could have said the house was cold.
“Take off your shirt then.” she hummed.
A part of him felt a thrill at the thought of finally lying with her without clothes on – even if it was only the top part – but he didn’t rush to follow her suggestion.
“I’ve just got boxers, not pants.” he warned, even though she could probably feel his bare thighs against the back of hers.
He had been very careful not to push her on any intimate front. He slept in sweatpants and shirts even though he usually preferred to sleep naked – she was aware of that and she had never commented before so he had decided putting clothes on was the right thing to do – and he was always diligent in keeping from her any hint of arousal. He angled his hips away when he woke up hard in the morning and the few hesitant kisses they had shared since she had come to Twelve had been mostly chaste and innocent.
“Well…” She wriggled away from him and he regretfully let her. She turned around, slowed by the heavy layers of blankets, and peered at him in the relative darkness of the bedroom. “Perhaps you should take them off too.”
His heart started hammering, his body understanding what she was getting at a second before his brain caught up. He didn’t move though, simply studied her face, noticing the flash of uncertainty that passed over her features when he didn’t move at once…
She averted her eyes and cleared her throat. “Unless you do not wish to, of course.”
He reached out, brushed his fingertips along the length of her jaw tentatively… He was never sure when she would flinch at his contact. She had been getting better but in the beginning…
“You want me naked, sweetheart?” he asked.
It was the only tactful euphemism he could come up with. Because he was pretty certain if he got naked, stuff would happen.
She stared at him for a long time and then licked her lips. His grey eyes darted to her mouth.
“Do you still want me? Like that, I mean.” she whispered. “You have not… You have not seemed very interested and…”
“You’re kidding me, yeah?” he scoffed, meeting her gaze again. The pained look on her face told him she wasn’t. “I was just… I was giving you some space.”
She watched him for a moment longer and then sat up. She shivered once she was free from her nest of blankets but she didn’t flinch once when she grabbed her nightgown and slipped it over her head. Haymitch was hard in a matter of seconds. He let himself look his full at her breasts, her stomach, the body he had worshipped more times than he could count…
“I had enough space.” she said. She grabbed his hand and lifted it up to her breast. “I need you now.”
The nervousness would have been easy to miss for someone who didn’t know her as well as he did.
“Are you sure?”
It was the first time he had ever asked her and it irritated her.
“Of course, I am sure.” she huffed. “But if you do not…”
Her sentence ended in a small shriek that turned into laughter when he tugged her to him, coaxed her into straddling him…
Yes…
Winter was Haymitch’s favorite season. All the more so when he had a hot blond in his bed.
°O°O°O°O°
Winter had never been Effie’s cup of tea and, on the rare few times she had been forced to come to Twelve for the Tour, she remembered wondering how anyone could survive something that harsh. Winter in the Capitol was mild at best. Fake snow, fake ice, fake everything.
Twelve was the real deal.
She had never even known snow storms were a real thing before she had moved to Twelve.
It had been three days so far since they had been cut off from the world and the storm showed no sign of abating.
“Do you think the children are alright?” she asked as she carefully carried two mugs full of hot chocolate in the living-room.
She smiled when she caught sight of Haymitch crouching next to the fireplace with his still fluffy hair. She had insisted on blowing it dry after their shower so he wouldn’t catch a cold and it looked far more puffy than usual – although that might have been the shampoo she had rubbed on his head while he was busy kissing every inch of her stomach. He glanced at her, a smirk on his lip, and added a log to the fire.
He shrugged. “They’re used to it. They’ll be fine.”
His eyes did their own inspection, the smirk deepening at the long legs poking from under one of his long-sleeved shirts. Or maybe it was the mustard woolen socks she had borrowed from his drawer and pulled up to her knees.
Just at the way he shifted she knew he wanted her again.
They had spent the last two days doing little more than getting physically reacquainted with each other.
He replaced the grate and sat down on the couch, accepting the mug of chocolate and slowly blowing on it to chase the steam. She sat down next to him and plopped her feet on his lap, smiling when he immediately wrapped his free hand around her ankle only to slowly ran it over her shin.
She grabbed her notepad and her pen, half-intending to doodle some new dresses – a hobby she had given up at some point and had recently taken up again with the half-cooked project of settling down as a seamstress – but ended up leaving them untouched on her lap. Watching Haymitch was far more appealing.
Apparently, watching her was far more appealing than his book too.
She smiled and he chuckled, a little embarrassed.
“We’re acting like kids who just had their first fuck, you realize.” he mocked.
“Language.” she chided, her grin widening. “It does feel new though, doesn’t it?”
Which was weird because they had been sleeping together for more than a decade by that point.
His face softened. “First fuck of the rest of our lives.”
She couldn’t stop herself from laughing and she was shocked at how genuinely happy it sounded. “How romantic.”
“You know me…” he teased. “I’m always all about the romance.”
“For sure.” she humored him, taking her feet off his lap so she could straddle his thighs. He safely relocated his mug to the floor before wrapping his arms around her waist. “Will you take me ice skating when that storm finally stops? Katniss said there is a lake not too far where you can skate…”
“Been ages since I did that…” he commented and then shrugged. “Sure, yeah. If the ice’s thick enough.”
He leaned in and kissed her and she let him deepen it until he lied her down on the couch and nestled between her legs.
There would be no Victory Tour to follow on TV that winter but there would be ice skating and snowballs fights and a lot hot chocolate shared with the children around a fireplace.
There would no Reaping in spring but there would be long strolls around the green meadow and picnics and the adoption of a stray tabby cat Haymitch pretended to hate but secretly loved because it put a smile on Effie’s face.
There would be no Games that summer but there would be swimming in the lake and long evenings on the porch and a trip to Four that would start a traditional yearly visit.
There would no excitement about the Tour that fall but there would be a new white swing seat on the porch and crispy apple pies and an unplanned toasting on a late night.
Seasons would waltz and there would be no more Games but there would be love and happiness and nothing would be quite perfect because neither Haymitch nor Effie were but that would be alright because perfection was overrated anyway.