(no subject)
Title: heroes who you ought to be
Author: andthen_shesaid
Characters/Pairing: Haymitch, Maysilee, Mrs. Undersee
Summary: The candy shop is dreadfully empty.
The shop is dreadfully empty, rows and rows of peppermint jars and licorice twists and jelly beans, and she’s standing in the middle of it all.
She thinks that she is alone now and her sister is dead and so are 48 other contestants and the little boy who smiled so bright is dead and Iris is gone and she’s here and Haymitch is somewhere and they’re both breathing, so that’s something.
(But her head aches and her hearts been ripped to shreds and there’s no one to sell candy to, anymore.)
/
It’s the first November 2nd that she can remember just right and Haymitch’s brother had been barely two, but still old enough to decidedly point to the pink-and-yellow striped candies on the shelf.
“It’s his birthday. And he likes the stripes.” Haymitch had said, with the kind of grin that - you know, could maybe make a girl fall in love, and she had tied them up extra tight in a wax paper bag.
Haymitch had counted coins, and she’d tried to give him a discount, because, really, it was the kid’s birthday, but something quick like anger-guilt-pride flashes in his eyes, and instead she takes the coins from him and smoothes down the green fabric of her dress.
The little boy smiles bright at her, with a coal smudge on his chin and his left cheek bulging awkwardly, like he’s tried to stuff all three of the candies in his mouth at once.
/
It’s a sunny day - it’s the reaping day, it’s the worst day of her life.
When her sister was reaped, she didn’t cry.
Her sister didn’t either - that little thirteen year old girl with the dark seam hair who she’d never spoken to, not once in her entire life and the skinny fifteen year old with greasy black hair who had bones that seemed to jump out of his skin, she doesn’t know him either but his eyes are blue instead of grey, they all cry - but Haymitch and her sister stood tall and strong.
Haymitch looked straight at the cameras with determination and anger and a lot of other things that she can’t name.
He’s not looking at her.
There’s a girl three rows in front of her, in the eighteens, with curly dark hair and skin and cheekbones that look like a painting that hangs in Julian Undersee’s house. She’s crying.
There’s the little boy who came in to her store for the past ten years, always getting candies with stripes and always smiling and saying please and thank you even while Haymitch did nothing but carefully count out coins, he was standing with the twelve’s and his eyes were glistening wet and his face all twisted up like he was trying his damned hardest to hold it all in. He’s crying.
No one is looking at her. Because everyone who doesn’t matter is looking at the stage, watching the four doomed children on the stage and her mother has her father’s chest, and her father is shaking like he’s about to explode. She’s sort of aware that Iris is holding her arm so hard it hurts and that the boy she’d caught her kissing behind the schoolyard that one Wednesday forever ago was staring at Iris with such intensity in his eyes that it hurt. She knew the baker’s son was staring at Iris too, and that was because Iris had hair like sunflowers and eyes like cornflowers and a tiny nose and a bright smile and she knew that they were staring at Maysilee because she was up on the stage in a pale pink dress that made her skin glow and she was beautiful because she was dying.
Mira stands, small and tiny and scared with Iris crying next to her and all her tears get stuck inside her body and it’s like they’re trying to get out but instead they just bottle themselves up inside her and she feels like she might explode if this goes on any longer.
/
It’s November 2nd again, and this time the boy is four and she knows his name is Lee and that he hates peppermints, but still likes stripes.
He’s strutting along in front of Haymitch, not even holding his hand.
Mira thinks about how Maysilee had offered to take her shift today - they’re both only 10, but they still have shifts. She’s been working since she was 7, because Daddy wouldn’t have it any other way.
Haymitch is silent and still next to him - he’s got strong hands that are caked with calluses and coal dust, but she doesn’t think he’s even 18 yet.
Haymitch doesn’t like her, not since that one time she tried to give him a discount, or maybe just on principle, because she doesn’t know what hunger feels like and she sneezes if too much coal gets in her nose. If she was Maysilee - and sometimes she forgets she isn’t - she might keep trying to give him the discount, just out of stubbornness and spite and misguided kindness, or if she were Iris she might secretly lower the price just before he comes in, or something clever like that. But she’s Mira and she (thinks) she understands things like pride so instead she carefully counts his coins and drops them into the register.
Lee picks two purple-and-blue striped this year and one striped two different shades of green and she smiles as he carefully unwraps one and licks it, then puts the two other in his pocket for later.
I’m gonna make them last this year, he says and Haymitch had smiled at him fondly and it was like she wasn’t even there, but she still felt like grinning for no reason at all.
/
It’s the day before the reaping and she’s standing in front of her closet - Maysilee is already dressed in this pale pink thing that looks kind of like sunrise.
She selects a pale yellow dress with white stripes and laughs at herself.
This day, this entire day is so sickeningly stupid. It’s the Reaping and it’s a holiday and later, she thinks that she and Maysilee and Iris will sit on the steps of the Justice Building and eat candy that Mira took from the shop and watch the footage on the television. The square will be empty because everyone else will be mourning, but Mira hasn’t known anyone who had been reaped since she was six and the girl who used to watch her when her parents had worked had her name called. And her father hadn’t let her watch the Cornucopia part of that games - he’d sent her into the kitchen to help the Seam woman who cleaned their house make a pie. She’d been crying, that woman, and later Mira had learned that her son had been reaped the year before. The girl dies in the bloodbath, and so did the woman’s son.
After that - after all the recaps and the introductions of the stylists and the shot of Rina Voegele - who won the games last year and wears dresses that show off her skin, implanted with glitter and looking more like someone from the Capitol than anything else (but Mira can still see her with that knife, twisting and turning and not even crying) - she and Maysilee will go home and hold their breath when they pass the graveyard for all the dead tributes and make pie. Maybe strawberry, this year.
Mira liked strawberries.
/
It’s November 2nd and the boy is nine. Haymitch is sixteen and Mira had heard he’d been caught with some girl in the woods behind the school, tangled up in legs and old clothing.
Maysilee had pretended not to care, crinkling her nose and running a brush through her hair. Mira had rolled her eyes, then, because - well. Maybe that’s a twin thing. Maybe it’s like those twins that went into the games together - once, a really long time ago, and they still played it on the recaps because they could. The girl died in the bloodbath and the boy died seconds later but no one could tell why.
Maysilee thought things like poison darts or conspiracies. Mira thought things that didn’t matter.
Lee chooses the pink-and-red striped ones that taste like strawberries and the white-and-blue stripes that taste like toothpaste and the green-and-white ones that taste like sugar.
Haymitch pays for them in carefully counted coins and she doesn’t try to give him a discount. He gives her a wry smile in return.
/
It’s the day her sister dies, and she’s sitting alone in the room with the television. It’s on, but the volume is low because her father is sleeping.
There’s a shot of one boy - the one from two, maybe - making a campfire. It’s stupid, really, because that will attract the squirrels. Maybe he knows what he’s doing. Maybe he wants to die.
Haymitch and her sister are curled up together, under an overhang and it’s almost sweet, if they both weren’t doomed. But her sister’s cheekbones seem shaper, her hips more rounded - Mira had run a hand over hers when she’d first seen her on the interview, glowing in a beaded dress, and felt like a separate entity - and Haymitch had always been attractive in that rakish, angry sort of way, so it turns the scene, acid rain surrounding them and artificial colors glowing, into something beautiful.
Mira claims a headache - there has been this buzzing in her head since the reaping, but it won’t go away - and goes to bed.
She wakes up to her mother screaming.
/
November 2nd and her sister is dead.
“Get whatever you want.” Haymitch tells Lee. “Guess we’ve got enough for anything now.” His mouth is set all wrong - like he’s trying to smile but really, he’s just baring his teeth and crying.
“I only want three.” Lee says, quiet, twisting his fingers around the fabric of his shirt, not meeting her eyes. She counts them out, pink-and-red and blue-and-green and yellow-and-white, avoiding both of their eyes.
“Sorry.” Lee says, after she’s twisted the plastic and counted the coins. Haymitch has given her extra. She gives them back.
Mira doesn’t know what she’s apologizing for, but her head aches and sister’s body is in a graveyard and Haymitch is alive, breath like liquor and eyes like coal, so she ignores them all, takes her break early.
She goes into the break room, leans against the cardboard boxes and the shelves and cries.
/
It’s a cold day in November - not the second, but a week after, so it wouldn’t have been special except it was.
They were playing recaps on the screen again; Maysilee is beautiful and brilliant, even in death, and they kept playing it over and over.
She cried the second time she saw it and the third and then the fourth and fifth but by the next day it had all gone numb. Except her head - her head always hurt.
Haymitch’s mother - who she had never met, but she could picture an old woman with laugh lines and wrinkles and Haymitch’s nose - and Lee and that curly haired girl, who he was probably going to marry, because Maysilee was dead and he’d loved her first, all die in a fire.
An accident, her mother says. What a tragedy, her father says.
She sees Haymitch on the street, swaying back and forth, a bottle clutched in sweaty fingers. And she wants to - feel empathy, to help him, to rush out into cold air and tell him that it would be okay, that it was all okay. It’s what her sister would have done.
But her sister’s dead and she’s Mira, angrier and worse than a lovely dead girl, so she presses her forehead to the cool glass of her window and doesn’t think of anything.
(A week after he will show up at their door with a box of shiny needles from the Capitol, death in his eyes and a not-quite-apology on his lips, but she will refuse them. They’ll still be on the doorstep a few days later and eventually she will take them and fall asleep and not wake up until Julian Undersee brings her a bouquet of yellow carnations. She will not cry.)
/