Work Text:
Johnny Sinclair had so much left to live for.
He wanted to live so badly.
Even though he’d let himself sink in the water, even though he’d given up.
They were Liars, and they had the brightest future ahead of them.
He wanted so badly to live.
Johnny was sixteen when he died in flames, choking on smoke and writhing in the agony of the fire that engulfed him and his home.
Haymitch Abernathy had nothing to live for.
He wanted to die; wanted nothing more than to be free of the cruelties of the world and see Lenore Dove again.
But he had to hold on, had to fulfill his promise to her. His nights were filled with nightmares, watching his brother and his mom die in flames and running from it only to feed Lenore Dove a blood red gumdrop.
He couldn’t hide in the woods without seeing everyone he’d lost; Ampert, devoured by squirrels, Wellie, her head on the ground and eyes open and unseeing, Maysilee, choking out her last breaths through the blood in her lungs, and Louella, crushed even before the arena. He never saw Wyatt in his dreams; only heard his screams. Haymitch could never find him to help him, or to apologize for anything he’d said to him.
He wondered every day why he couldn’t have been the one to die in that house instead. Why he had to lose his innocent younger brother and his mother to the fire instead of being the one to burn.
Johnny Sinclair had so much to live for, and Haymitch Abernathy wished more than anything to be dead.
Was there any universe in which he could find peace, or was he doomed to suffer in every world, locked in an unending cycle of death and misery?
Perhaps he would never know.
Perhaps it would be better, in the next life. Perhaps, in the next world.