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Haymitch has never hated Peeta more in his life than he does right now.
He’d been right to pour out the liquor - a drunk mentor and a drunk tribute are equally useless - but it didn’t stop the way every inch of him ached for a drink tonight. Something to silence the grief bubbling up inside of him.
The absence of it is its own kind of noise. He's sober enough to hear the clock on the mantle, the distant bark of someone's dog, the creak of the house settling around him. Drunk, the world compressed down to whatever was directly in front of him. Sober, it expands outward until there's too much of it. He'd forgotten that. Twenty-four years and he'd still somehow forgotten that.
The cupboard door slams shut and he stands with a grunt as he gives in and sinks deep into the armchair besides the fire, staring out of the window. Across the street, Katniss is still awake. The light on the far right third floor is still on. Part of him wants to go find her and drag her down to his level. But she deserves this. One last night with her mother and sister before the doors to the Hall Of Justice swing closed.
(The empty space in that sentence where Burdock should be burns on its way out.)
He doesn’t know if the Everdeens would be allowed to stay in the house, with Katniss gone. The question of inheritance rarely comes up with victors. They were lonely people. He supposes it won’t matter for long anyway. Once Snow knows… He cuts that thought off. Tomorrow first. Then whatever comes after.
His own house is still practically empty, twenty four years later. He never bothered decorating beyond the piles of bottles that amassed any way they would fit and a layer of decades old dust. Victor’s Village was never home to him - that title still belonged to the scorched patch of ground on the edge of the Seam where a water pump now sat. A last reminder of how his threat was neutralised.
But now he’s a threat again. And now he has another girl with long dark braids and another boy who’d die for her to protect. Haymitch isn’t stupid. He knows whose name is being pulled tomorrow. Snow knows how to punish him already.
He'd tried to prevent it. He'd been drunk enough, and cold enough, and discouraging enough, and still somehow Katniss Everdeen had looked at him across a train car and he'd felt something shift.
He resented that, in the way you resent a wound that's healing wrong. It would have been simpler not to care.
Peeta made it difficult in ways Katniss never did. Katniss understood ugly things instinctively. She expected betrayal, punishment, loss. Peeta still moved through the world like kindness was something durable. Like it could survive contact with the Capitol. Haymitch hated him for continuing to prove, over and over again, that sometimes it could.
He was sitting alone next door right now. The knowledge ate at him. The knowledge of what he would do if Effie Trinket read out Peeta’s name tomorrow had already chewed him up and spat him back out.
It wasn't nobility. He wanted to be very clear about that, even in the privacy of his own head. It wasn't that he was a good man or a brave one - he had twenty-four years of evidence to the contrary. It was simpler than that, and in some ways worse: he was already ruined. He'd gone through the machine once, and the machine had done what it did, and whatever came out the other side hadn't been worth much to anyone. Sending him back in would be a waste of something that was mostly wasted already.
Sending them in would be a waste of everything.
He’d known all of that from the moment the announcement left Snow’s mouth. It hadn’t stopped the way his chest constricted when first Peeta and then Katniss came to him, desperate and awful, begging for him to save the other. It hadn’t stopped booze and withdrawal leaving him shaking and pathetic. It hadn’t stopped him retching at the vision of sinking a knife into Wiress’ back, or leaving Mags alone in the woods with the mutts, or Finnick convulsing on the ground after he poisoned his food.
(Finnick had called him last week. Another pleading bargain. He told him, quietly, so that Annie didn’t overhear, that if he and Finnick both went in, Haymitch had to make sure he didn’t make it out. He couldn’t let the Capitol have him as their winner again. He couldn’t survive the attention that came with being Victor twice.)
And knowing all of that didn’t stop the horrible, selfish part of him that hated all of them. Peeta, Katniss, Effie, the Victors, all of them. Hated that all they could ask of him was to go back into that place and give up everything for them. But he would. He’d do it in a heartbeat.
The clock strikes midnight. Reaping Day.
He's thought about the date twice today, between hours staring at the ceiling, and pushed it away both times. Effie probably has it scrawled in a planner somewhere in colour coded ink, between train rides and press meetings. Everyone else who would remember is dead. There's a version of himself, maybe, who marks the occasion. Forty-nine years. More than almost everyone who stood where he stood. Raise a glass - and there's the problem.
He knows, after thirty years of this, that when the sun rises tomorrow it will be like any other. The birds will sing, the dew will coat the grass, the rooster down the road will alert them all of the time. Everything will continue as it always does, without bothering to ask the District’s permission. It will pay no attention to pens of gaunt children, to overdressed camera crews, to wailing mothers. The world doesn’t mark the reaping.
But Haymitch does. And tomorrow he will do it again. March across town, stand on that stage, and listen to the names for what he knows, one way or the other, will be the final time.
Happy birthday to him.