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The war was over. The war was over and they’d won.
The war was over and slowly, painfully, Panem was beginning to stitch itself back together.
Haymitch left Katniss and Peeta to themselves, confident they could fight off the press vultures on their own, and took the first train into the heart of the Capitol in the bleeding grey of early morning light.
He stared out the window, at the buildings flying by, at the graffiti that all seemed to say the same thing and let his destination slide from his mind like oil off water.
If he didn’t think about it, it wasn’t really happening, right?
But he had to go. He had to. Just once.
The train screeched to a halt and Haymitch disembarked, walking the empty streets, his footsteps the only sound shattering the stillness of a city heavy and sleepy with the dawn. He walked a path he’d only walked once before, to a building he’d never actually been inside, and examined the call buttons.
He chose one at random and buzzed it. After a moment, a grumpy sleep-thick voice barked at him from the box.
“Hi,” Haymitch said, shifting to his other foot and leaning in close. “Sorry, I, uh, locked myself out of the building. Can you buzz me in?”
The voice grumbled but the door unlocked with a click and Haymitch could barely believe it had been that simple. He ducked inside, footsteps swallowed by the velvet carpet, and headed for the stairs. He didn’t bother knocking on the door at the end of the hall, tucked away unassuming in the corner.
He tried the handle – locked, of course – and resigned himself to picking the lock.
It was a complicated lock and it took Haymitch several tries and muttered curses, but finally he got it to click and the door swung soundlessly inwards.
The apartment was hushed, like everything was poised to shatter if he made even the smallest noise, like the very air itself was holding its breath, just waiting for the sword to fall.
Haymitch stepped inside and closed the door behind him, the soft click swallowed by the heavy air. He lifted his foot, then hesitated. Slowly, he bent in half, tucking his finger under the lip of his shoe and tugged the shoe off first one foot, then the other, setting them neatly off to the side.
He moved through the apartment in his socks, looking at everything but taking in nothing – the towel folded neatly on the kitchen counter, the flowers drooping as they died slowly on the side table, the bookcase stuffed full of photos and magazines and slim-spined novels with fainting women on the covers.
Haymitch’s throat itched in a way it only ever itched when he’d breathed in a heady cloud of perfume and for a split second he was torn between the ridiculous desire to breathe as deeply as he could or stop breathing altogether.
The door just passed the living room was closed and Haymitch knew instinctively it was the bedroom. He paused in the hall, his hand on the doorknob, and considered what he was about to do. The lingering traces of perfume were clouding his brain, making it hard to think and sticking in his throat, making it hard to breathe.
He turned the doorknob.
It was small, intimate. The bed was made, a bed too large for only one person, and there was a cluttered vanity off to the side with a huge mirror that reflected the entire room back. Haymitch caught a glimpse of his reflection, of his tired red eyes and his thin lips, pale and pressed tight together in a line. He hadn’t shaved in too long – he was starting to look painfully scruffy.
There was something, he noticed, stuck in the edge of the frame of the mirror, marring the perfect mimicry of the room in front of him, and Haymitch had crossed the room to see what it was before he realized he was moving.
It was a photo – two photos, actually. One he recognized instantly as a tabloid photo that had been taken months ago, on the Victory Tour. Haymitch stared at himself, looking down and away from the camera at Effie, who was in the middle of telling picture-him something astounding, judging by her face and the light frozen in her eyes. It was a candid shot – probably one of the only ones of them together in existence.
Haymitch’s hand jerked and he yanked the photo off the mirror, cradling it gently between two fingers.
The second photo took him a long second to recognize – the woman in the photo was blonde and young, frowning into the camera like it had done her a great personal offense by pointing itself in her direction. Her little nose was wrinkled in protest but there was a curved tilt to her lips.
There was a splash of freckles across her nose and Haymitch’s throat closed swiftly, leaving him wildly dizzy. He wobbled, reaching blindly for the chair and sinking down in front of the vanity, trying to catch his breath as hot prickles of guilt stippled behind his eyes, making them burn.
He hadn’t gone to the funeral. He hadn’t been able to force himself to go, to sit there stone-faced as the cameras snapped pictures of his grief and sniffling women made grandiose speeches while remaining dry-eyed enough not to smudge their impeccable makeup.
He’d sat instead, alone in his house, staring at the bottle sitting unopened on his kitchen counter. In the end, he’d thrown the bottle out his window, watching it shatter against the flagstones, the amber liquid seeping out in a pool, glistening under the streetlights.
Effie would have probably been proud of him – proud that he’d resisted the temptation to drink away her memory.
They covered the funeral on TV. After all, Effie was news. They were all news – Effie and Katniss and Haymitch and Peeta. They were gossip, speculation, morning opinion columns and talk show punch lines.
Haymitch hadn’t watched the coverage either.
Now he sat in her apartment, alone at her vanity, feeling as though the entire building was just holding its breath, waiting for her to come sailing through the door in a cloud of perfume and sparkles.
Haymitch looked down at the picture in his hand and tried to remember what she’d been telling him that had put that half-smirk on his face.
Finally, after an eternity he stood, cradling the photo like it was made of gold. After the moment he plucked the other photo off the mirror as well – why Effie had kept a photo of herself without her make-up tacked to her mirror, he couldn’t guess.
She was achingly beautiful.
Haymitch pressed both photos carefully between his hands and left the bedroom, walking back to the front hall.
He slipped his shoes back on, slowly, carefully, trying to buy himself a few more seconds in her space. Finally, hand on the doorknob, he turned and surveyed the apartment.
It was still. Absolutely still.
He sucked in a breath, words piling on the tip of his tongue, bursting to escape, to break the stillness with desperate apologies, confessions, questions, rage, confusion, pain.
There was so much he wanted to say.
But in the end he just turned around, opening the door and stepping into the hallway, breathing in a gulp of air that instantly tasted wrong without that hint of perfume lingering in the back of his throat, and closed the door behind him with a click.