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He’ll live. If it makes his girl happy.
After twenty-five years of unadulterated agony, the sun rises on Haymitch Abernathy’s birthday, and there's no Reaping. No Drusilla or Effie to pick a name out of a bowl to send children to their brutalization. No daughter of a Callow or son of a McCoy that he has to mentor to death.
But there’s no Lenore Dove either. His rare and radiant girl lives on in his memory, and he sees her in every goose and mockingjay, but he can’t touch her. The last time he held his girl, she was getting cold. There was once a time when he could only truly feel her presence when he fed her those gumdrops every time he closed his eyes.
As Snow’s death grows farther in the past, Lenore Dove comes closer. He can feel her, the gentleness she constantly carries in her tone, really, for the first time since he stumbled down that alleyway and saw the secret Maysilee held for his girl.
He sees Maysilee, too, now. Not just because of Merrilee anymore. The sight of fine jewelry no longer begs him to pick up the nearest drink—sometimes, it’ll even draw the ghost of a smile from him, as if he needs any more ghosts. It’s almost frightening, after years of holding all of that anger and sadness.
He sees everyone on this unseasonably cool July day. He sees Sid’s stars in a painting displayed down at the now-rebuilt Hob, Wyatt in a betting slip. His mind is a mosaic of everyone he’s lost—meaning the slightest suggestion of his sweetheart of old or her body double could send him back to the Quarter Quell.
Of course, he sees Lenore Dove. Less figuratively, he guesses, as he walks deep into the meadow.
It's one of those rare days where Lenore Dove’s grave doesn’t see liquor. She doesn’t like it, says he’s killing himself with a bottle. Maybe if he killed himself with a bottle instead of a weapon, he’d have plausible deniability.
For the first time in his life, he wills the thought out of his head. He has to stay here now. He has to enjoy what none of his loved ones could—a life without Coriolanus Snow killing them slowly, a life free from the eyesore known as the Capitol. But every time he thinks this way, he circles back to the fact that this life is also without the Newcomers. Without the most stuck-up girl in town, without the oddsmaker, without his family.
He needs to stop thinking. The word loneliness is an insult to the state he finds himself in when he thinks like this, which is why he turned to sleep syrup in the first place. But he doesn’t want to turn to that today, so he leans on her headstone and closes his eyes.
“Haymitch?”
His hands reach for an invisible knife under an invisible pillow before he even opens his eyes. He sees Louella McCoy and Burdock Everdeen’s hunting jacket.
He blinks before he actually finds Katniss, holding a turkey with the strangest look on her face.
“Oh. Hey, sweetheart,” he says, raspy because it’s probably the first time he spoke today. “Sit.”
Katniss is, for all intents and purposes, getting better. She screams less in her sleep, or his hearing is getting worse. It’s becoming rare to find her curled up in a ball on her porch at four in the morning, tears staining the wood. It’s crawling towards a year since she lost her little sister. Prim’s passing was what made him tell her about Sid, and how his eyes would light up just like the stars as he’d tell Haymitch about them, even if he can barely recall the information now.
Lenore Dove is a hard topic to breach, even as Peeta and Katniss grow close once again. The farthest he’s gotten was telling a story of her geese, briefly mentioning ‘his girl, who’s gone now’.
Katniss is weary. He can’t blame her—the forest she’s known since she was a kid suddenly has a graveyard—seeing these graves here for the first time was disturbing for him, too, all those years ago. She hesitantly sits down next to Maude Ivory’s grave, careful not to disturb the restful as she sets the turkey on the leaf-covered ground.
“What… is this?”
“My girl. And her family. She was…”
Katniss tilts her head, sensing how uncomfortable he is. She can do that better than anyone alive. During the victory tour, some clueless citizen of the Capitol had said something along the lines of ‘keep her away from the wine, don’t want her to become her mentor!’ and it’s stuck with him ever since. They’re hauntingly similar, Katniss being a reflection of what Haymitch once had and Haymitch being a reminder of what Katniss could have turned into.
She doesn’t even have to tell him that he doesn’t have to talk about it. He waves a hand dismissively and continues.
“She was Burdie... Burdock’s cousin. I guess that makes you her cousin, a few times removed, huh?”
He regrets it the moment it comes out. When that bomb went off in the Capitol with Prim, Katniss’s entire life might as well have been in the center of that explosion. He shouldn’t lay this on her, how deep her heritage goes in Twelve. Katniss was born with Victor in her blood, thanks to Lucy Gray, and maybe she didn’t need to know that right now.
“Lenore Dove is, uh… Covey. They performed everywhere in Panem before the games. You should’ve seen them, there’s… there's really nothing like it, I swear. They’re all gone now, but one. That man’s the only person with all of their memories. He, uh,” he pauses, his hand reaching to take a swig of a drink that isn’t there. His scoff comes out as more of a sigh. “Don’t like me much. I can’t really blame him.”
Katniss nods, sensing that she shouldn’t ask. “He told me about them. The Covey… they’re all gone now?”
He nods, thinking. “Except you, Katniss.”
She doesn’t have much of a reaction, only silently reading the names of the Covey resting here. After a few moments of silence, Katniss speaks.
“Happy birthday, Haymitch.”
He’s brought back to Sid, knocking on his door the morning of the fiftieth, but only for a moment. Hearing the exact words that his little brother had said that day felt like a weird joke. But he manages a look that isn’t utter disgust. Maybe he even smiles. Whatever the reaction, it encourages her to continue.
“Peeta’s baking you a cake. I wasn’t supposed to tell you, and I know you don’t want one, but I didn’t want to tell him no.”
There was once a time when he refused to let them in. And here they are, baking him a cake and celebrating his birthday. This is the first time he’s celebrated his birthday since he had his family, and the first time the event has ever called for a cake. Back when he was a boy, it was too dark a day to end with expensive frosting and sugar.
But now, it’s just a regular day—the thought of that doesn’t seem real.
“How’s he doing now?” he finally answers.
“He’s fine,” she says, emotionlessly, before he gives her a look. That’s her default answer to everything, and they both know it. She had just forgotten she was talking to Haymitch.
“Sorry. I think… he’s good. Not good, but good like us. He’s better. He remembers most things. There are some memories that I think are lost forever, though. He’ll remember the color of my coat from a random day in the Victors Village, but he can barely remember the pearl he gave me in the seventy-fifth.”
Peeta endured a different kind of psychological warfare than him and Katniss—hijacking. It was all so eerily similar to Lou Lou, back in thirteen he found himself staring at Peeta for an extended time, trying to make sure it was actually Peeta and not another body double, not another bad memory. But now he bakes and paints and loves Katniss, so he knows that’s their Peeta.
Oh, how Peeta loves that girl. Everything those two resemble him and his girl so severely it starts to become funny. How could he be so unlucky to be where he is now? Katniss is the star, she’s exactly what Plutarch wanted Haymitch to be—and Haymitch was just a prototype, a failed experiment that led to a domino effect of tragedy.
“Did I say something wrong?” Katniss interrupts his thoughts, bringing him back to earth.
He laughs, shaking his head. “Nah, I’m just…”
God, what is he? A brother, a son, a love, a victor, a drunk. He’s been so much, lived so many lives, yet the life he truly wanted to live has been gone for far too long.
“Scrambled.”
Katniss nods, pulling her knees up to rest her chin on them. She looks down at the turkey that’s soon to be dinner, and sighs. It sounds just as tortured as Haymitch’s.
“It never gets better, does it?”
Haymitch wishes she didn’t know how he feels.
“Not really. I’m sorry, kid. It does… get easier. Especially now.”
Katniss absorbs that for a few moments, before getting up.
“I thought so. I’m gonna give this turkey to Peeta. Tell Lenore Dove I said it was nice to meet her.”
She says this so casually, so softly, and steps out of the graveyard. As if saying something so understanding to Haymitch is a normality. It destroys him, but only a little. He has to learn to live with himself in this world, after all. For Lenore Dove.
After they eat the turkey for dinner, a beaming Peeta presents Haymitch with a slice of chocolate cake. Too many emotions pull at his chest for an old man to handle, so he just nods admiringly and dives in. He’s halfway through a story about the shenanigans he and Katniss’ father would get into as teenagers, and he turns out to be a coherent storyteller when he’s not drunk. If Katniss hanging onto every word means anything.
This is the best life has been for Haymitch since his Ma gave him a list of chores every Sunday. He’s eating cake on the couch with people he loves, and neither of them are at risk of being killed because of that.
Haymitch’s life is good, whatever good means with so many ghosts. Nothing is back to normal and nothing will be—he’ll see those gumdrops until he moves on from this life, and he’ll absolutely never use a fireplace—but it’s better. He’s not seventeen, drunk out of his mind, and sobbing on the floor of his empty house while absence is screaming at him.
Here, he has ghosts, but they’re not angry. They’re just a part of him, embroidered into his soul. His happiest memories are of people long gone, so the ghosts of those times are stitched into the fabric of his being.
Maybe that's okay. He’s learned to live with these aching memories, and he knows that when he leaves the old therebefore, his beautiful girl waits for him.
She’ll be real, in the sweet old hereafter.