Work Text:
Don't even know her
That girl from last October
Right now, I'd like to show her
Who we've turned into
How flowers look in June
When we're on to something new
Today is the day.
Today is the day that Effie comes back to District Twelve.
Today is the day that Effie begins to call District Twelve home.
Haymitch has repeated this fact to himself often enough over the past week that the words have begun to lose their meaning, dissolving into little more than a sequence of sounds meant to occupy the restless corners of his mind—particularly whenever he finds himself staring too long at the spare bedroom or rearranging the flowers on the kitchen table for the third time in an hour. The verdict had come down months ago, but there had still been paperwork and appeals and logistical delays, the sort of bureaucratic machinery that continued grinding forward long after wars had ended and governments had fallen.
They had been completely blindsided by the guilty verdict that came for Effie despite all of the advocating that he and Plutarch did on her behalf. He thought that Paylor might be more merciful towards those who were only cogs in Snow’s heinous machine. But he should’ve known better when he noticed the rest of their ilk had been receiving guilty verdicts. The country had emerged from the war bloodied and grieving, and yet still blood thirsty and demanding sacrifices. Katniss had even commented that they likely would’ve found Cinna guilty if he were still alive. And Haymitch wonders quite often if she might’ve been right.
After a lot of debate and bureaucratic nonsense, exile had been determined to be the appropriate punishment for Effie Trinket's participation in the Hunger Games. She would be permitted to return to the Capitol for no more than one week at a time and always under supervision, but District Twelve would become the place where she served the remainder of her sentence.
As punishments went, Haymitch supposed there were worse things.
There had been a time in his life when he might even have agreed with it.
After all, Effie had stood on those stages. She had drawn names from glass bowls while children clutched their friends' hands in the crowd below. She had smiled for cameras and spoken in perfectly polished phrases designed to make ritual slaughter appear civilized, and if someone had asked the sixteen-year-old version of Haymitch Abernathy whether people like her deserved consequences, he probably would have answered before they'd finished the question.
The difficulty, as it so often proved to be, was that people rarely remained the abstract versions of themselves.
The Effie he knew remembered how Katniss preferred her tea and had once smuggled him pain medication after a particularly brutal Victory Tour without mentioning it again. She wrote thank-you notes with alarming regularity, remembered birthdays no one expected her to recall, and cried over children she had been taught to regard as honorary symbols long before she’d learned to think of them as children at all. Knowing these things had not required him to forget what she had participated in, just as mourning the tributes had not prevented him from recognizing the complicated humanity of the woman who had eventually stood beside their wooden caskets and wept as though she had lost something irreplaceable herself.
That, perhaps, was the cruelest part of it.
It would have been easier if she had been a monster.
Instead, she was Effie.
He hopes she still is.
The train whistle sounds just before noon, carrying across the rebuilt district, causing him to tighten his grip around the porch railing before he remembers there is no reason to pretend the sound has taken him by surprise. He has been waiting for it all morning after all.
When Haymitch gets to the station, he finds her there on the platform in navy blue chinos and a gray t-shirt.
For a moment, Haymitch almost does not understand what he is seeing, because the Effie who stands on the platform is familiar in outline yet unrecognizable in motion. Her short hair is pinned simply at the nape of her neck, her face is nearly bare, and the woman who once dominated any room she was in, now pauses on the edge of the platform with her suitcase clutched in both hands, scanning the small gathering with a palpable anxiousness similar to that of a caged animal.
The sight does something unpleasant beneath his ribs.
Effie sees him then and relief crosses her face so quickly and so nakedly that Haymitch feels almost ashamed to have witnessed it, as though he’s accidentally looked through a window into a room where she thought herself alone. She gathers herself within seconds, of course, because Effie has always known how to hide pain in poise, but the damage is already done. He has seen the fear and uncertainty, and can never unsee it.
She walks to him, face fixed in a perfect airy expression, and he takes a few steps to meet her.
When they finally do reach an appropriate distance from each other, Effie greets him curtly, “Hello, Haymitch.”
“Hey there, princess. Long time, no see,” he answers with a crooked smile.
Effie, queen of composure and effervescence, drops her bags and collapses into his arms. She hugs him tightly and Haymitch feels himself melt at the familiarity of her touch.
They’re quiet for several moments, just soaking up the realization that they’ve finally reunited after all this time.
“You came,” she eventually says against his chest, and there is something in her voice that makes him want to find every person who allowed her to doubt that he would and introduce them to the business end of his temper.
“Well,” he drawls, releasing her and taking the suitcase from her hand before she can protest, “somebody had to make sure you didn’t insult the district before making it off the platform.”
A laugh escapes her, very small and very fragile, but it is unmistakably hers, and because Haymitch has apparently become the sort of fool who can be undone by a laugh, he has to look away for a moment.
“You did not have to trouble yourself,” she says. “I’m sure there were other arrangements that could have been made.”
“Meh, I asked Plutarch if I could come get you,” Haymitch answers nonchalantly as if he didn’t practically beg at Plutarch’s feet to let Effie stay with him.
Something nagged at him horribly when she’d been found guilty and banished to District Twelve. He just knew they’d put her in the Seam—even though the New Panem government would tell you there’s no such thing anymore. Yet, there still seemed to be an invisible line drawn in the dirt where it used to be.
Either way, he knew it was bad business putting Effie in a place she was unwelcome and often openly hated. So, he used what little pull he had left being connected to the Mockingjay to bring Effie home to him.
“Oh?” is all Effie says.
“Yeah, figured it’d be like old times— ‘cept I’m sober and you’re not in all your Capitol garb.” He flashes her a playful smile.
Effie’s own lips quirk up into a small smile.
“And you know,” he stops and looks her up and down. “I think I like you better without all that makeup.”
Her smile grows a little wider. “Well, I like you better sober.”
Haymitch gives her a silent touché and then presses onward.
“I wasn’t certain anyone would come,” she says after a moment, so quietly he thinks at first he’s imagined it.
Haymitch stops walking.
Effie realizes her mistake immediately and draws herself upright, her expression changing to a faint, panicked elegance. “Sorry. That was needlessly dramatic of me. I only meant that I understand the circumstances are complicated.”
“Effie.”
She turns toward him because he knows she cannot help herself when he says her name that way.
“You ain’t ever getting rid of me now,” he tells her assuredly.
Her eyes shine, and for one terrible second he thinks she might cry right there on the platform. Instead, she swallows it down and gives him a smile so brittle it could cut both of them to pieces.
“I suppose there are worse punishments,” she jokes half-heartedly.
Haymitch gives a low rumbling chuckle. “C’mon, Princess, let’s get you home.”
…
Haymitch asks Katniss and Peeta to give Effie a little time to adjust before coming to see her. And he’s glad, too, because after Effie showers and settles, she comes downstairs in a dreadfully miserable mood. He’s surprised by this because she’d remarked on how nice the house looked and seemed incredibly touched by the handpicked flowers he’d gotten her. A sudden panic rises in him that the reality of her punishment has taken root and she’s unhappy about it.
She moves through the kitchen, opening cabinets and closing them again despite having no apparent destination in mind.
When Haymitch offers her tea, she informs him that she isn't thirsty.
When he suggests dinner, she says she isn't hungry.
When he points out that human beings generally require both food and water to continue functioning, she stares at him long enough that he briefly wonders whether Plutarch's paperwork had included a clause permitting homicide.
Effie refuses to sit still, and finally Haymitch can’t take it anymore.
“Alright, you wanna tell me what’s wrong?” he says with as much patience as he can muster.
“Nothing is wrong,” she answers quickly.
"Uh-huh."
"I'm merely tired," she sighs.
"You've been tired since the train station."
"I had an exceedingly long and exhausting day."
"Effie," he says, a warning creeping in his tone.
"You hate the room?" he asks.
"What?"
"The flowers?" he presses on.
"No."
"The house?"
"Certainly not."
"You regretting agreeing to stay here?"
Her head snaps toward him. "Haymitch!"
"Just narrowing it down,” he says innocently.
Effie softens at this and takes a seat at the table with him.
"No," she says gently. "You've been extraordinarily kind."
That frightens him more than anything else she's said all evening.
Because if she wasn't upset with him… then who?
He lets the silence stretch as Effie folds the dish towel twice, then unfolds it, and folds it again.
The answer hits him like a slap to the face.
Haymitch tilts his head patronizingly as he looks at Effie.
"You know," Haymitch says casually, "Katniss wanted to come by tonight."
The towel stills in her hands.
"They both did."
Effie doesn’t look at him, and instead looks intently at the towel.
"Oh."
"Told 'em to give you a little breathing room," he tells her gently.
"How thoughtful," she mutters bitterly.
"They'll come by soon."
Effie goes back to folding the towel. “They're busy."
"Effie," he warns with her name yet again.
"They have responsibilities and entirely understandable reservations about maintaining relationships with former Capitol officials."
"Effie." His tone is more clipped this time
"I imagine it would be rather awkward."
He raises his voice a few decibels. "Effie!"
The towel hits the table loudly.
"I know they don't owe me anything!" The words burst out of her so suddenly that Haymitch nearly jumps.
Effie freezes in her spot.
The kitchen falls silent as her eyes widen with immediate horror.
"I..." She pressed trembling fingers against her mouth. "I didn't mean..."
Then she’s up and moving before Haymitch can stop her. By the time he makes it to the bottom of the stairs, he hears her door slam.
…
Haymitch doesn’t see Effie for the rest of the night. He waits for at least another hour, listening to the familiar creak of the stairs long after the kitchen has gone quiet. He lingers over dishes that don't particularly need washing and nurses a cup of coffee that grows cold between his hands. Twice, he thinks he hears movement overhead and glances toward the ceiling with the absurd hope that she'll reappear to apologize for running out and explain herself.
But she never comes back downstairs.
The next morning, he tries again. Around ten, he carries a tray upstairs to her door, grumbling about giving her damn delivery service.
He knocks.
No answer.
"Effie?"
Silence.
He shifts awkwardly in the hallway, balancing tea and toast with all the grace of a man uniquely unsuited to nurturing.
"Listen," he says, staring at the closed door, "if you're trying to starve yourself to death, Greasy Sae's gonna kill me. I'd rather avoid that."
Nothing.
Then, finally, "I'm not hungry."
Her voice sounds thin through the wood.
"You've never said that in all twenty some odd years I’ve known you."
"I assure you, Haymitch, I remain entirely capable of assessing my own appetite."
"Funny. I've known you a long time and have yet to see evidence of that."
A pause. Then, softer, "Please, Haymitch."
The plea drains the fight out of him.
"Okay."
He leaves the tray outside the door anyway.
An hour later, the toast remains untouched.
But, the tea is gone.
…
The first week settles around them like a dark cloud. Haymitch keeps waiting for some recognizable version of Effie to emerge from beneath the sour mood. He waits for complaints about coal dust tracked into the hall, for lectures on architecture, for passionate speeches about the barbarism of drinking coffee from a chipped mug. But the woman in his house moves through her days with such careful quietude that he begins to miss even the forms of her that used to annoy him.
It occurs to him gradually, in the same way winter settles over Twelve without anyone noticing, that Effie is disappearing in front of him. Not in any dramatic fashion that might have prompted intervention, but through a hundred tiny acts of self-erasure so polite they are almost impossible to object to. She apologizes for taking up space in rooms where she once moved furniture without asking, thanks him for meals with the formal gravity of someone receiving charity rather than sharing a kitchen, and asks permission before borrowing objects she has used before.
The first time she apologizes for sitting in his chair, Haymitch stares at her long enough that she mistakes his silence for anger and begins to rise.
“I can move,” she says quickly. “I’m terribly sorry. I simply wasn’t thinking.”
“You’ve sat in that chair plenty of times before,” he responds gruffly.
Effie looks down at the faded upholstery as though it might answer for her, and she lowers herself back into it carefully, like a person relearning an old ritual after losing faith in the god it was meant to honor.
That night, after she goes upstairs, Haymitch remains in the kitchen with the lights off and the unopened bottle still sitting on the counter, and he begins to understand with a sinking feeling in his belly that Effie Trinket might not be okay.
…
Haymitch has seen people disappear before. Tributes did it in the days before the arena, especially the ones who had already decided they would not come home. Men in Twelve did it after cave-ins, returning to their houses with coal dust in their lungs and an inexorable feeling of loss. He has done it himself, bottle by bottle, year by year, until there were whole stretches of his life that existed only as a rumor other people had to tell him about afterward.
But Effie’s vanishing over the next couple of weeks unsettles him in a way he does not know how to manage, partly because it is so subtle and partly because some furious, helpless part of him keeps insisting that a woman who once argued with him for forty minutes about the implications of mismatched napkins should not be allowed to fade into obscurity.
So, he starts looking for ways to pull her back.
At first he does it badly, because Haymitch has never been gifted at tenderness when tenderness requires planning. He takes her to the market and pretends not to notice when people stare. He brings home tea he has no idea how to brew and scowls through her gentle corrections because the sound of her correcting anything feels like proof of life. He ruins dinner on purpose once because he thinks irritation might be easier for her to access than happiness, and when she stands over the smoking pan and murmurs that accidents happen, sounding so forgiving it nearly drives him mad, and he has to go outside and split wood until his hands ache.
Some days she tries for him.
That is the worst part.
She tries because she can see him trying, and Effie has always been susceptible to other people’s expectations. She sits with him on the porch. She goes to the market with him. She learns how to live with and feed the geese. She lets him show her where the strawberries are coming in.
Once, when they’re in the garden she accidentally snaps the stem of a tomato plant, she goes very still.
Haymitch watches her face go pale.
“It’s a plant,” he says, because he knows and doesn’t know at the same time.
“I know,” she replies, which is how he realizes she is about to cry.
He reaches for the broken stem and tosses it aside with more casualness than he feels. “Happens all the time.”
“I should have been more careful.”
“Effie, sweetheart, I’ve killed more plants than you’ve owned shoes.”
That earns him the faintest exhale, not quite a laugh but adjacent enough that he counts it.
He counts everything in those ensuing weeks.
He counts the mornings she comes downstairs before noon. He counts the number of bites she takes at dinner without needing to be reminded. He counts every time she forgets to ask permission, every time she complains about the weather, every time she says his name with annoyance instead of apology. It would embarrass him, if there were anyone inside his skull but him to witness it, how quickly he becomes a collector of her smallest returns to herself.
The worst part of loving someone, Haymitch thinks, is that it does not ask permission.
If it had, he would have said no.
He would have refused outright, probably with profanity, and saved himself the inconvenience of discovering that the woman who had first arrived in District Twelve with an overwhelmingly loud outfit and a vocabulary built almost entirely out of exclamation points would someday become the person whose footsteps he could identify anywhere in the house. He would have laughed in the face of anyone foolish enough to suggest that one day he would find himself standing in a kitchen at midnight trying to remember whether she took honey in this particular tea because the thought of getting it wrong felt unreasonably catastrophic.
It’s this night, while he’s debating adding honey to her tea, that she finally joins him.
He hears her before he sees her, so he calls behind his back. “You know I still carry my knife on me, right?”
“Is that supposed to scare me?” she says flatly.
“Shouldn’t it?”
“Have you forgotten how good I’ve gotten at disarming you?”
He turns to face her now. “Oh, you think so, huh?”
“I know so,” she says indignantly.
“Let’s see it, Trinket.”
Effie sighs, then charges at him. She surprises him with how stealthy she is even in their older age. He had taught her a little bit of combat fighting and how to disarm him many, many years ago when they were both still young and much more agile. It makes him momentarily grateful that he wasn’t chosen for the third Quarter Quell.
They begin a dance, encircling one another like hunter and prey. It’s probably not the best idea to be doing this in his kitchen, but Haymitch couldn’t care less because this is the first time Effie’s seemed alive since she arrived in District Twelve.
Effie lunges at him a few times and he dodges successfully. But when she stomps on his foot and nails him in the solar plexus, he knows he’s lost. He drops the knife and Effie swipes it up off the ground.
“See,” she says proudly, and out of breath, “I told you I’ve still got the magic touch.”
“That you do, Princess,” he smiles.
Effie shuffles over to the table and sits next to her now cold tea. Haymitch joins her. For awhile, she just plays with the knife in her hands, twirling it around pensively, but Haymitch can see the words nearly bleeding out of her.
“Do you think they hated me?” she finally asks.
He does not need to ask who she means.
“I don’t know.”
Her nod is small and unsurprised. “I think I would have.”
Haymitch closes his hand around his mug, desperate to hold something so he doesn’t reach for her hand.
She draws one unsteady breath.
“I remember them,” she says, and the calmness in her voice is worse than any sobbing would have been. “Every single one of them. When I was held captive in the Capitol, I used to recite their names to myself. It felt almost like they were ghosts coming back to haunt me.”
To that, Haymitch could relate.
“But I remember more than that, too. I remember who became carsick on the trains and which children refused dessert because they were too frightened to eat. I remember a little girl who was only twelve and who was terrified of thunderstorms—Tansy Boone. There was the boy who cried because he had never slept in a bed by himself before—Owen Pike.”
The tears slip down her face silently.
“I knew their favorite colors, Haymitch. I knew who missed their mothers. I knew which ones asked whether death would hurt and which ones were brave enough to pretend they did not care.”
Haymitch’s chest feels too small for whatever is happening inside it. His heart hurts for her, for all those children they’d failed. He’d learned to live with it a long time ago, but it almost seems like Effie was just waking up to her reality.
“And then I escorted them into arenas anyway,” she laments bitterly.
She laughs, once, with such quiet horror that he almost reaches for her then.
“I believed that if I made them feel special, if I ensured they looked beautiful and were treated with dignity, if I remembered their names and stood beside them with perfect posture and did not allow the cameras to catch them looking frightened, then perhaps I was making something so unspeakable slightly less cruel.”
Her face twists. “What an extraordinary thing to have believed.”
Haymitch thinks about all the lies people tell themselves when the truth is too horrible to face. He thinks about mentors who prepare children for slaughter because refusing would only leave those children alone with strangers. He thinks about drinking until the world blurred.
“I should have known,” Effie whispers.
Haymitch surprises even himself by saying, “Probably.”
She looks at him then, startled, as though she expected comfort and received a blow from the blade she was holding instead.
Haymitch hates himself for the wound, but he knows deep down that being honest is the right move.
“You should have known, and I should’ve done more, and half the people alive should be choking on what they let happen, but sittin’ here trying to make your guilt bigger than everyone else’s ain’t the same thing as repentance.”
Her mouth trembles at his brusqueness.
“I don’t know how to carry it.”
He looks at the woman across from him, at the pale slope of her shoulders beneath the robe, at the careful hands that once drew names from bowls. He looks at a woman who remembers favorite colors from decades ago and mourns children no one expected her to love, and the terrible, inconvenient truth rises in him with such force that for a moment he can hardly speak.
Perhaps loving someone is not deciding they are innocent. Perhaps it is witnessing the worst thing they regret and choosing to remain anyway.
He is not brave enough to say that, not with the night pressing close and Effie looking as though one more unguarded kindness might break her beyond repair, so instead he reaches across the table and covers her non-knife-wielding hand with his.
“You carry it,” he says quietly, “but you don’t carry it by yourself anymore.”
Effie closes her eyes.
Her fingers turn beneath his and hold on.
…
The next morning when Effie wakes up, Haymitch instructs her to get dressed in some comfortable clothes because he wants to show her something. He treks with her through town taking her to the very outskirts that hold so many memories.
The meadow beyond the fence line grows tall and green with wildflowers brightening the slopes in unruly patches. The idea had come to him last night, pieced together from an old memory and their discussion last night. He does not know how to save Effie from herself, and he has no language adequate for redemption, but he knows there is a meadow where, if the weather holds and the grasses are left undisturbed long enough, there is a surprise and a lesson waiting for her.
He does not tell her where they are going.
Effie follows him anyway, because for all her nervous politeness these days, she still trusts him in ways that make him want to be a better man and resent the expectation in equal measure.
“I suppose you have dragged me out here for a reason,” she says as they cross into the taller grass, her voice carrying the dry suspicion he has been nursing back to health for weeks.
“Maybe.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“Wasn’t meant to be.”
“If this is another attempt to teach me fishing by disguising it as a restorative walk, I must warn you that I am emotionally prepared to object.”
“It ain’t fishing.”
“You have lied before.”
“Only creatively.”
The sound she makes is nearly a laugh, and Haymitch stores it greedily in the back of his mind.
They stop near the center of the meadow, where the grass brushes Effie’s skirt and the flowers move in slow waves beneath the wind. For a moment nothing happens. Effie glances around with patient skepticism, and Haymitch begins to worry, with a sudden and humiliating intensity, that he has misjudged the day, the season, the timing, the whole fragile contraption of hope he has constructed out of insects and sunlight.
But then, it happens.
The grass trembles.
One butterfly rises first, small and white, barely more than a flicker at Effie’s side.
Another follows, a bright blue against the sea of green.
Then the meadow seems to loosen its hold on all hidden things at once, and wings lift from the grass in impossible numbers until the air around them becomes alive with color. They rise and scatter and circle. Hundreds of them catch the sunlight as they drift through wildflowers and around Effie’s startled body, delicate and unhurried and so absurdly beautiful that Haymitch, who has built most of his adult life out of refusing to be impressed by anything, feels his throat tighten.
“Wow,” Effie breathes. Her eyes glitter in the morning sun, and Haymitch feels himself fall in love with her again and again.
“Y’know a woman I care a lot about told me a long time ago that butterflies were her favorite.”
Effie pauses and looks at him with a soft smile. “Oh?”
“Yeah, she said people like ‘em because they’re pretty and all that, but she liked ‘em for a different reason.”
“And what’s that?”
His mouth curves despite himself. "Said the interesting part was actually that they changed."
A butterfly lands briefly against the front of Effie's dress.
She doesn't move.
"They don't stop bein’ caterpillars because they were bad at it," Haymitch says after a moment, his voice rough around the edges. "They don't emerge from the chrysalis pretending the first version of themselves never existed. The whole miracle of the thing is that they carry every part of what they were into what they become."
Effie's eyes begin to fill with tears. "Haymitch..."
"You can't undo what happened," he says, finally looking at her. "You can't go back and become the woman you wish you'd been. None of us can."
His voice catches for just a second before he forces himself onward.
"But I don't think the point is to spend the rest of your life punishing the person you used to be."
A tear slips down Effie's cheek.
"I think maybe the point is to let her grow into somebody better."
Before he can say anything else, Effie is once again barrelling into him. But this time, instead of enveloping him in a hug, she is pressing a chaste but meaningful kiss to his lips.
Haymitch doesn’t really have enough time to kiss her back, but he’s overwhelmed with the feeling that he wants an opportunity to do that in the near future. He figures that’ll come later—she needs time and he’s okay with that. She’s worth the wait.
For a long moment, she says nothing and simply rests her head on Haymitch’s chest as butterflies continue to rise around them, drifting through the meadow on the breeze.
When the butterflies begin to spread out, Effie whispers a soft, “Haymitch?”
“Hmm?”
“I think I’m going to be okay.”
Haymitch smiles and presses a soft kiss in her hair. “Yeah, princess, me too.”