Fic: Planting Seeds in Vanquished Soil (7/11)
Title: Planting Seeds in Vanquished Soil
Author: millari
Characters: Haymitch Abernathy, Mags, Beetee, Chaff, President Snow, Haymitch's Dad, Haymitch's Girl, OCs
Pairing: Beetee/Haymitch
Rating: R
Beta: the incomparable trovia
Warnings: Implied references to forced prostitution, canonical character deaths
Summary: On his victory tour, Haymitch soon finds out that the real Games have only just begun, and survival means learning to spin out a web of lies, compromises and self-destruction. The Games' oldest living victor and arguably its most intelligent one show him that even in the tainted life of a Victor, there are still ways to prevail.
A/N: This is a finished multi-chaptered work that I will post about once per week.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
CHAPTER 7
They say little as they make the ten-minute walk to the beach along winding sand-dusted roads surrounded on either side by medium-sized scrub. (District Four reminds Haymitch of his own district in this one way: Nothing here completely escapes the thin coat of sand, the way everything in District Twelve has a layer of coal dust.)
For a brief, annoying moment, Haymitch had thought the Capitol journalists were going to follow them, but then at the last minute, they were distracted by the late appearance of an older Four victor, Vitae, who has become something of a recluse and is never seen in
the Capitol. As she makes her appearance and the journalist pack darts after her, Mags gives Haymitch a knowing wink, and gestures for them to leave. He suddenly realizes that Mags must have sent for her.
Of course, Carlos and his little friends more than make up for Mags and Haymitch's silence, with their oblivious whoops, running ahead and picking up rocks from the side of the road and seeing how far they can throw them forward. Mags seems unconcerned at their growing distance, perhaps because it's a sunny day. The wind is whipping around, but it's still a lot warmer than it would be in Twelve, which he's grateful for. There is also a distinct smell in the air that Haymitch doesn't recognize. It's not quite a dank odor, but sort of like a combination of the brine he remembers smelling in the grocer's shop back home.
When they finally reach the crest of a hill made of sand, dirt and rocks, the ocean quite suddenly comes into full view, and Haymitch's first glimpse of it is nearly dizzying. It's so wide, the houses along the shoreline on either side look like multicolored dots. And as far as he can see forward, there is nothing but bright, blue water, the nearest portion cresting relentlessly and pounding at the shore. The water just never ends; he stands there staring at it, stunned.
He knows from school that the oceans mark the boundaries of Panem, but his teachers had never talked more about the details than that, and you learned fast that it paid to train yourself out of wondering such things. But eyeing this endless expanse of water, those childhood questions about other not-Panem places come back to him anew.
Mags lets him stand there just staring for a while. “It looks like it goes on forever, but it does end somewhere.” She sounds pleased with his gaping response to the view.
“What's on the other side?”
“Not sure anymore,” she replies. “Back before the Dark Days, my parents used to tell me that there had been islands out there if you went far enough, islands where the language of our ancestors came from. But nobody knew anymore if those islands were still there. They were probably submerged, though, back when the waters rose.”
Haymitch thinks about this. “But there still must be something out there eventually, if you go far enough, right?”
With a hand on his shoulder that feels warm and soothing to him, she chuckles. “Always wanting to know where things go, aren't you, muchacho?” She then nods at his question. “Yes, it makes sense, doesn't it? But they didn't teach us that in school, so I couldn't tell you.”
“Not in my school either,” he commiserates. “I remember one time in a geography lesson on the districts in third grade, this friend of mine Kori Holborn raised his hand and asked the teacher what else there was in the world beyond Panem. A couple of other kids started making guesses out loud, and her face turned so angry. She just glared at Kori and told the kids to be quiet. Then she moved on to something else.”
“Well, I guess the teachers in Panem haven't changed much in fifty years,” she grumbles. She gives his shoulder a squeeze that feels a bit like a shrug, as if to say, What can be done about it?
“What does that word mean?” he asks after a long, silent moment.
Her eyebrow flicks up in surprise. “What word?”
“Muchacho.”
That makes her smile. “Oh, nothing special. It just means 'boy'.”
“I'm not a boy anymore,” he intones.
She sighs. “Maybe not.But you deserve to be.” The hand falls from his shoulder. “Come, let's go down to the beach. There’s nothing like seeing the ocean up close.”
She propels herself down the sandy slopes with confidence, but for Haymitch, it's a halting, lurching, almost limping journey to the flatter land by the shore, and even when he gets down there, the land is still not exactly even. The lack of solidity under his feet is disconcerting. It's not entirely unlike slogging through very wet mud, but still, he has to struggle to keep up with Mags, and Carlos and his friends are already pinpricks along the shoreline. He thinks how if they'd had beaches in the arena, how he probably wouldn't be alive today.
“Has anyone ever tried getting into a boat and just sailing out there, until they found something?” he asks when he catches up with her. The idea of it is starting to fascinate him.
“If they have, they've never come back to tell us. They'd probably die first of starvation and thirst long before they found anything,” she shrugs beside him as they walk close to the loudly crashing waves.
Haymitch is realizing that she probably suggested getting near them because in the off-chance that the Capitol actually had found a way to bug this beach (although there is a distinct lack of hiding places for microphones here), they'd be pretty useless recordings, like Lucilla's bathtub tap trick.
“Why do you ask?”
He shrugs back. “Oh, just wondering.” When she makes no sound of acknowledgment, he awkwardly adds, “I mean, if you had nothing left to lose, you might try to find something better than...” He doesn't know how to finish that sentence at first. “You know, better than all this crap.”
She stops short at that, prompting him to stop with her as she stares him down. “What that is is suicide,” she says in a clipped tone, with hints of strong emotion hiding beneath. “And District Twelve has had enough of that for now.”
Haymitch realizes that she talking about Twelve's victor, the one who would have mentored Haymitch and Maysilee if he hadn't hung himself the night before Reaping Day. Lucilla had informed them of this detail on the train, although Haymitch had already seen Swagger's body on a stretcher back from beyond the fence, covered with a sheet.
Talk of the man brings forth a flash of renewed anger.
“Not talking about suicide,” he grunts. “I would never do that, leave people in the lurch like that coward did.”
“I suppose you have a right to feel anger towards Swagger,” she replies in a slow and measured tone as she starts them walking again. “But I have good memories of him. He was a good friend to many of us - watched out for those who ended up in the Capitol's crosshairs. He took care of them in the aftermath too, helped them get back on their feet. And he was a dedicated mentor.”
Deep inside him, Haymitch knows that there's something important buried in the details of what Mags is saying, but he isn't able to focus on that right now. Right now, he's too angry at the thought of Swagger March.
“Yeah, well, if he was such a dedicated mentor how come he never brought home a single tribute in ten years and then offed himself?” he challenges. “Why did he leave us twisting in the wind? Do you know he'd give us this speech every year about how hard he'd tried to save our tributes and how next year would be different? It was already a pretty stale speech by the time I started hearing it.”
“Maybe you should bring home a victor before you start judging others,” she snaps, and then there is no sound except the rushing waves and the faint cries of boys roughhousing in the distance. He realizes he's crossed a line with her, but that's not what makes him come to such an abrupt halt.
Fuck, he thinks. I'm a mentor next year..
He might have spent a lot of time in the last few months not thinking about that fact all. Swallowing hard, he stares out at the seemingly endless ocean.
He doesn't know what to tell his boy and girl in a few months, he thinks, staring back out at the endless ocean, thinking about Carlos and his friends in the distance, how they don't look starved like most of the children in his district. He thinks about how much food was in Mags' house.
“We're not supposed to win, are we?” he realizes. “Twelve, I mean? I wasn't ever supposed to win. Swagger's tributes weren't supposed to win either. Twelve’s tributes are just supposed to die, aren't they?” He pauses. “That's why all the victors hate me.”
“Hate you?” she manages to say like it's the most ridiculous thing she's ever heard. “How could any of them hate you? They don't even know you.”
He says nothing, taken aback. He’d been expecting reluctant confirmation.
“Do you really think you're that important, or that they're that petty?” she prods, sounding annoyed.
“But I killed their tributes,” he protests, like she doesn't know already what he's talking about. “I was just supposed to die, like we do every year. But I didn't. I broke the rules and I used the arena to kill their tributes. That's why they won't talk to me.” He kicks at some sand. “I'm surprised you're talking to me.”
“Muchacho, haven't you figured it out by now?” she retorts, shaking her head at him. “They've been ordered not to talk to you. In very harsh terms.”
He pauses in surprise. “They have? Why?” He thinks a moment, then: “by Snow?”
“Of course, Snow. He likes to keep us all apart, isolated, fighting each other,” she says, the disdain dripping from her tone. When Haymitch just continues to stare at her in shock, unsure of what to say, she sighs and offers, “Want to go cool off our toes? We can walk along the water.”
Haymitch doesn't really want to, but every excuse he comes up with in his head isn't going to work. So Mags waits in silence while Haymitch unlaces the fancy leather dress shoes provided to him by his stylists and stuffs the silk socks into them. In a couple of fluid movements, Mags detaches herself from her sandals and then they are soon approaching the foam-filled tide. Haymitch keeps his gaze on the sand being tossed around by his toes as they walk, until Mags interrupts the silence.
“We know he killed your family, and your girlfriend. We victors know.” The first waves reach them, flooding their feet and trapping them in the soggy sand. Haymitch stands there stock-still, shocked into meeting her gaze. He takes a reflexive look around him, searching for places someone could install a bug, but there isn't really much, unless they've gotten really elaborate and installed something under the beach.
“He can't put his listening toys here,” Mags reassures him, reading his body language. “This is one of the few safe places to talk in the district.”
He exhales with utter relief. “Snow threatened me,” he mutters. “Told me people in my district would die if I told anyone about what happened to my family and Alsey.”
“Of course he did,” she snorts. “He does that with all of us. It's not so easy to keep you hopping if you can compare notes with the rest of us, is it?” She wiggles her toes in the surf with a pleased expression that belies her serious tone. “Together we're stronger,” she concludes. “He knows that; so he tries to keep us apart as long as possible with threats and with lies about each other.”
“Then how did you even find out about my family?” he insists, finally remembering to unstuck his feet from their sand trap.
She shrugs. “He must have moved fast after your Games. Snow told one of us what he'd done to you, while you were still recovering in the hospital from your injuries. Thee little revelations of his are always meant as an object lesson, to keep one of the Victors in line.” The barest hint of a smile appears on her lips. “Of course, that Victor immediately told the rest of us.
“We share information whenever we can. We help each other fight him.”
“So he does threaten all of you like this,” he puts the implications together, thinking about Carlos far ahead. “What you did for me on the stage tonight, aren't you worried about that? What about your family?”
“My family will be fine. There are ways around Snow,” she finishes, “little ways that you'll learn when you start with us. When you throw a bunch of victors into a room together every year like that, you can't completely control them. They're going to find ways to start talking to each other, to fight back.”
“I can't fight Snow,” Haymitch said sullenly. “He's got me pinned. If I do anything he doesn't like, he'll start taking it out on my district.”
She puts a hand on his shoulder again. He's not sure whether it's supposed to be comforting or just for emphasis. “What I did tonight for you was based on knowledge from forty years of victors learning how to fight Snow and survive. We know what we can and can't get away with. You can learn too. You need to learn.”
“I need to learn to keep my head down,” he grumbles, pulling himself out of her grip. “And keep my district safe.”
He's free of her of grip, but not from her gaze, which pins him in place just as surely as the electromagnetic field that glued him to the hovercraft ladder at the end of his Games, even as he felt himself passing out on the rungs.
“You think you're done with the arena forever when you win,” she continues, “but the arena you're about to walk into now is much bigger, much crueler. Bigger stakes too.”
Haymitch doesn't want a bigger, crueler arena. He just wants to rest.
“Mags, if you only knew … ” He trails off for a moment, arms crossed over his chest, overwhelmed by the prospect of what she's hinting at. “I've had it with damned arenas!” he exclaims. “You think you know all about me, but you don't! My whole life has been an arena!”
He can see from her expression that she's patiently waiting him out. It's the same serene expression he's seen her put on for the cameras at all the Hunger Games he's ever remembered seeing back home. It's so familiar that in this context, he finds it jarring, and he feels himself emotionally scrabbling for purchase.
“I'm a victor!” he shouts at her. “I won the Hunger Games! What the hell does that even mean if I still have to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life?”
After a long moment of silence, she sighs, but it's not like earlier. This time there isn't pity there. When she speaks again, her voice has turned matter-of-fact, maybe even a little cold.
“It means you're Snow's tool,” she says, “to keep people thinking about which shirt you're wearing, and who you're dating this year, and what chances your tributes have of slaughtering twenty-three other children to death for the Capitol's entertainment, instead of the fact that their government is monitoring all their conversations, looking for even a hint of treason, and making its citizens disappear into a labyrinth of jails, torture and secret executions if they even breathe the wrong way.”
“They're doing that to people in the Capitol?” he asks, eyebrows raised.But then he remembers Lucilla and how well she knew to turn on the water faucets and whisper in his ear and to keep her words ambiguous.
She ignores him, voice growing in intensity. “It means that from now on, you will always be telling lies about yourself to please the Capitol's cameras, and you will have no choice about it, if you want your people to live. Your company will be sold to the highest bidders in order to fund the government treasury. You will have to do things you hate and even fear to protect the people that matter to you from him. The life of a victor is an arena of lies and compromises, boy.”
The tide has submerged his feet again, keeping him rooted in place. “Is that why Swagger killed himself?” he breathes. “To escape?”
She shakes her head resolutely. “Swagger killed himself because he couldn't face another set of parents whose children had died. And because he had never been a happy man to begin with, long before the Hunger Games took him. A good man, a very good man, but not a happy one. A bit like you, actually.
“It's possible to survive this life, boy; I'm proof of that, and so are all those other victors in Mentor Central, many of whom could be your friends, your allies, if you let them. It is possible to fight him,” she insists. “In little ways now, but I think in bigger ones someday.”
The surprising possibility she leaves dangling there is too surprising to resist. “Bigger ways? What do you mean?”
“I mean as big as it gets.”
Haymitch’s eyes narrow. “You mean, like a revolution?”
There is just a hint of a grin on her face. “Oh, now you're suddenly interested ...”
Haymitch rolls his eyes. “In getting rid of Snow?” he snarls. “Of all this? Of course I'm interested.”
“Well, think about what the Hunger Games does every year,” she waxes philosophically. “Out of twenty-four children, most of whom hate the Capitol already, it weeds out the strongest, the cleverest, the most ruthless killer of all, and it puts that child in a position to grow up getting to know the Capitol intimately, mingling with its most powerful citizens, becoming beloved celebrity figures. Meanwhile, they come back each year and mentor more killers like them who hate the Capitol. Now imagine if all those victors were united? What could they get up to?”
“When you put it like that, you make the Hunger Games sound like the dumbest idea the Capitol ever thought up,” Haymitch observes, caught halfway between amazement and skepticism.
There is an undertone of mischief to her grin. “I'd like it to be. The key, of course, is that we're all united. And we aren't exactly yet,” she admits. “Districts One and Two, course. They still believe in the Capitol mierda. So no talk of rebellion with them, all right, boy?”
Haymitch nods. “Got it.”
She grabs his hand in confirmation. “But anyway, next stop for you is District Three. Snow thinks they are all his whipped dogs there too, because they invent all the Capitol's toys, and the electronics for all the weapons. But Three's victors know who the real enemy is in Panem. There are allies you can count on. Of course, they won't be able to talk to you right now, but when you get to Mentor Central next Hunger Games, you should look up Beetee and go out for a drink. He's just a little older than you, and I think you two would get along.”
“The guy who won with the electrical wire, right?”
Mags nods. “Do you remember his Games?”
“Not really well. But my girl was rooting for him from day one that year. She likes him because he's smart.”
The words are out of his mouth before he realizes: He’d actually forgotten for a little while that Alsey's not alive anymore. Shit. A wave of loss and guilt hits him so hard he can't think straight. How could I have forgotten that?
“That he is,” agrees Mags stiffly. She must have noticed the slip too. “Nobody still really understands how he won his Games. But he's also got a great sense of humor. I think he'd make a good friend for you.”
The idea of having a friend seems to him a bit ridiculous and childish at this point. Haymitch hasn't had a friend besides Alsey in such a long time, he can't remember having had one at all. His last friend was probably at age six or seven, and he remembers the kid's face, but not his name anymore. Having friends became awkward once his dad started being drunk all the time, and then no one wanted to be friends with him anymore anyway.
He'd felt a suprising impulse to try and make friends with Chaff, but that had worked out terribly. He wonders idly what District Three's victor might hate him for.
“You don't believe me,” she observes, and turns to call Carlos and his friends back to start the journey home. “That's all right. You'll see for yourself.”
Carlos then appears, beaming with pride, a pile of shells in his hand and a fish hanging over his back, dangling from a makeshift fishing hook made of bone and some woven-together vegetation that Haymitch has been seeing all over the beach.
“Abuelita, look!” he cries. “Look what I got!”
“Niño, you know better than that,” she chides him as soon as she sees the fish. “Now your mother is going to have to salt a perfectly good fish just so it won't go to waste when we have so much cooked food at home. And that fish could have stayed in the water longer to make more babies. You need to think about these things more, Carlito. No wasting food in any form.”
The boy's features slump a little, and he mumbles out a disappointed, embarrassed apology to her in front of his friends. Then his expression surges back into excitement with the power of a new and sudden idea. “I could bring the fish to Señor Leon,” he suggests. “I bet he would like to have a fish for dinner tonight.”
Mags considers this slowly, Haymitch suspects a bit more slowly than necessary, to keep Carlos guessing. Then she smiles. “That is an excellent solution,” she pronounces. “And very thoughtful too. Señor Leon gets tired easily these days. You shall go to his house as soon as we get back to town. I think he will be very glad to see you with his dinner.”
When they return to the house, most of the guests and all of the journalists have left, and Lucilla is talking the Mayor's ear off with suggestions about how she could improve Four's banquet next year with a more detailed array of eating utensils to address each type of food they had served.
“After all, the media is always here filming this event, and you don't want your district to come across as backward,” she's telling the woman just as Haymitch intervenes.
“Lucilla, don't you think we should be getting to bed?” he interrupts pointedly. “Early morning train ride and all, right?”
She looks surprised, while Mags looks amused. The Mayor just looks grateful. “I suppose so,” Lucilla concedes, reluctantly rising from her chair and saying her good nights. Haymitch takes her arm, an unusually aggressive move for him with her, and leads her out of the banquet to their rooms upstairs on the second floor.
“What has gotten into you?” she says with a touch of pleased wonder in her voice. “You’re not usually this assertive. You usually just let me and the prep team lead you around everywhere like you couldn’t care less. Did something happen between you and Mags?”
Aware of the bugs everywhere, Haymitch fights to keep the tiny panic from rising within him. “Nothing happened,” he tries to say as smoothly as possible. The last thing either he or Mags needs is for Lucilla’s oblivious remark to get a thought going in Snow’s head.
She wrinkles her nose. “Well, don’t let her bully you.”
He rolls his eyes a little. “You keep telling me that, everywhere we go.”
“Not everywhere. Besides, Mags is a whole different class of intimidating. I wouldn’t have wanted to face her in the arena.” She gives a Capitol-style shudder of mock horror that she usually reserves for backward manners or ugly landscapes or unfortunate hairstyle choices. It usually makes Haymitch want to hit something. But tonight there has been talk of alliances and friends, and Lucilla's annoying behavior mostly rolls over him as he pulls her up the stairs, her incessant chattering a moving cloud of Capitol air traveling with them.
“You really should have had more of the lobster, Haymitch,” she admonishes as they make their way out to the car that's been sitting waiting for them all night. “It was totally to die for.”
Go to Chapter 8
Author: millari
Characters: Haymitch Abernathy, Mags, Beetee, Chaff, President Snow, Haymitch's Dad, Haymitch's Girl, OCs
Pairing: Beetee/Haymitch
Rating: R
Beta: the incomparable trovia
Warnings: Implied references to forced prostitution, canonical character deaths
Summary: On his victory tour, Haymitch soon finds out that the real Games have only just begun, and survival means learning to spin out a web of lies, compromises and self-destruction. The Games' oldest living victor and arguably its most intelligent one show him that even in the tainted life of a Victor, there are still ways to prevail.
A/N: This is a finished multi-chaptered work that I will post about once per week.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
CHAPTER 7
They say little as they make the ten-minute walk to the beach along winding sand-dusted roads surrounded on either side by medium-sized scrub. (District Four reminds Haymitch of his own district in this one way: Nothing here completely escapes the thin coat of sand, the way everything in District Twelve has a layer of coal dust.)
For a brief, annoying moment, Haymitch had thought the Capitol journalists were going to follow them, but then at the last minute, they were distracted by the late appearance of an older Four victor, Vitae, who has become something of a recluse and is never seen in
the Capitol. As she makes her appearance and the journalist pack darts after her, Mags gives Haymitch a knowing wink, and gestures for them to leave. He suddenly realizes that Mags must have sent for her.
Of course, Carlos and his little friends more than make up for Mags and Haymitch's silence, with their oblivious whoops, running ahead and picking up rocks from the side of the road and seeing how far they can throw them forward. Mags seems unconcerned at their growing distance, perhaps because it's a sunny day. The wind is whipping around, but it's still a lot warmer than it would be in Twelve, which he's grateful for. There is also a distinct smell in the air that Haymitch doesn't recognize. It's not quite a dank odor, but sort of like a combination of the brine he remembers smelling in the grocer's shop back home.
When they finally reach the crest of a hill made of sand, dirt and rocks, the ocean quite suddenly comes into full view, and Haymitch's first glimpse of it is nearly dizzying. It's so wide, the houses along the shoreline on either side look like multicolored dots. And as far as he can see forward, there is nothing but bright, blue water, the nearest portion cresting relentlessly and pounding at the shore. The water just never ends; he stands there staring at it, stunned.
He knows from school that the oceans mark the boundaries of Panem, but his teachers had never talked more about the details than that, and you learned fast that it paid to train yourself out of wondering such things. But eyeing this endless expanse of water, those childhood questions about other not-Panem places come back to him anew.
Mags lets him stand there just staring for a while. “It looks like it goes on forever, but it does end somewhere.” She sounds pleased with his gaping response to the view.
“What's on the other side?”
“Not sure anymore,” she replies. “Back before the Dark Days, my parents used to tell me that there had been islands out there if you went far enough, islands where the language of our ancestors came from. But nobody knew anymore if those islands were still there. They were probably submerged, though, back when the waters rose.”
Haymitch thinks about this. “But there still must be something out there eventually, if you go far enough, right?”
With a hand on his shoulder that feels warm and soothing to him, she chuckles. “Always wanting to know where things go, aren't you, muchacho?” She then nods at his question. “Yes, it makes sense, doesn't it? But they didn't teach us that in school, so I couldn't tell you.”
“Not in my school either,” he commiserates. “I remember one time in a geography lesson on the districts in third grade, this friend of mine Kori Holborn raised his hand and asked the teacher what else there was in the world beyond Panem. A couple of other kids started making guesses out loud, and her face turned so angry. She just glared at Kori and told the kids to be quiet. Then she moved on to something else.”
“Well, I guess the teachers in Panem haven't changed much in fifty years,” she grumbles. She gives his shoulder a squeeze that feels a bit like a shrug, as if to say, What can be done about it?
“What does that word mean?” he asks after a long, silent moment.
Her eyebrow flicks up in surprise. “What word?”
“Muchacho.”
That makes her smile. “Oh, nothing special. It just means 'boy'.”
“I'm not a boy anymore,” he intones.
She sighs. “Maybe not.But you deserve to be.” The hand falls from his shoulder. “Come, let's go down to the beach. There’s nothing like seeing the ocean up close.”
She propels herself down the sandy slopes with confidence, but for Haymitch, it's a halting, lurching, almost limping journey to the flatter land by the shore, and even when he gets down there, the land is still not exactly even. The lack of solidity under his feet is disconcerting. It's not entirely unlike slogging through very wet mud, but still, he has to struggle to keep up with Mags, and Carlos and his friends are already pinpricks along the shoreline. He thinks how if they'd had beaches in the arena, how he probably wouldn't be alive today.
“Has anyone ever tried getting into a boat and just sailing out there, until they found something?” he asks when he catches up with her. The idea of it is starting to fascinate him.
“If they have, they've never come back to tell us. They'd probably die first of starvation and thirst long before they found anything,” she shrugs beside him as they walk close to the loudly crashing waves.
Haymitch is realizing that she probably suggested getting near them because in the off-chance that the Capitol actually had found a way to bug this beach (although there is a distinct lack of hiding places for microphones here), they'd be pretty useless recordings, like Lucilla's bathtub tap trick.
“Why do you ask?”
He shrugs back. “Oh, just wondering.” When she makes no sound of acknowledgment, he awkwardly adds, “I mean, if you had nothing left to lose, you might try to find something better than...” He doesn't know how to finish that sentence at first. “You know, better than all this crap.”
She stops short at that, prompting him to stop with her as she stares him down. “What that is is suicide,” she says in a clipped tone, with hints of strong emotion hiding beneath. “And District Twelve has had enough of that for now.”
Haymitch realizes that she talking about Twelve's victor, the one who would have mentored Haymitch and Maysilee if he hadn't hung himself the night before Reaping Day. Lucilla had informed them of this detail on the train, although Haymitch had already seen Swagger's body on a stretcher back from beyond the fence, covered with a sheet.
Talk of the man brings forth a flash of renewed anger.
“Not talking about suicide,” he grunts. “I would never do that, leave people in the lurch like that coward did.”
“I suppose you have a right to feel anger towards Swagger,” she replies in a slow and measured tone as she starts them walking again. “But I have good memories of him. He was a good friend to many of us - watched out for those who ended up in the Capitol's crosshairs. He took care of them in the aftermath too, helped them get back on their feet. And he was a dedicated mentor.”
Deep inside him, Haymitch knows that there's something important buried in the details of what Mags is saying, but he isn't able to focus on that right now. Right now, he's too angry at the thought of Swagger March.
“Yeah, well, if he was such a dedicated mentor how come he never brought home a single tribute in ten years and then offed himself?” he challenges. “Why did he leave us twisting in the wind? Do you know he'd give us this speech every year about how hard he'd tried to save our tributes and how next year would be different? It was already a pretty stale speech by the time I started hearing it.”
“Maybe you should bring home a victor before you start judging others,” she snaps, and then there is no sound except the rushing waves and the faint cries of boys roughhousing in the distance. He realizes he's crossed a line with her, but that's not what makes him come to such an abrupt halt.
Fuck, he thinks. I'm a mentor next year..
He might have spent a lot of time in the last few months not thinking about that fact all. Swallowing hard, he stares out at the seemingly endless ocean.
He doesn't know what to tell his boy and girl in a few months, he thinks, staring back out at the endless ocean, thinking about Carlos and his friends in the distance, how they don't look starved like most of the children in his district. He thinks about how much food was in Mags' house.
“We're not supposed to win, are we?” he realizes. “Twelve, I mean? I wasn't ever supposed to win. Swagger's tributes weren't supposed to win either. Twelve’s tributes are just supposed to die, aren't they?” He pauses. “That's why all the victors hate me.”
“Hate you?” she manages to say like it's the most ridiculous thing she's ever heard. “How could any of them hate you? They don't even know you.”
He says nothing, taken aback. He’d been expecting reluctant confirmation.
“Do you really think you're that important, or that they're that petty?” she prods, sounding annoyed.
“But I killed their tributes,” he protests, like she doesn't know already what he's talking about. “I was just supposed to die, like we do every year. But I didn't. I broke the rules and I used the arena to kill their tributes. That's why they won't talk to me.” He kicks at some sand. “I'm surprised you're talking to me.”
“Muchacho, haven't you figured it out by now?” she retorts, shaking her head at him. “They've been ordered not to talk to you. In very harsh terms.”
He pauses in surprise. “They have? Why?” He thinks a moment, then: “by Snow?”
“Of course, Snow. He likes to keep us all apart, isolated, fighting each other,” she says, the disdain dripping from her tone. When Haymitch just continues to stare at her in shock, unsure of what to say, she sighs and offers, “Want to go cool off our toes? We can walk along the water.”
Haymitch doesn't really want to, but every excuse he comes up with in his head isn't going to work. So Mags waits in silence while Haymitch unlaces the fancy leather dress shoes provided to him by his stylists and stuffs the silk socks into them. In a couple of fluid movements, Mags detaches herself from her sandals and then they are soon approaching the foam-filled tide. Haymitch keeps his gaze on the sand being tossed around by his toes as they walk, until Mags interrupts the silence.
“We know he killed your family, and your girlfriend. We victors know.” The first waves reach them, flooding their feet and trapping them in the soggy sand. Haymitch stands there stock-still, shocked into meeting her gaze. He takes a reflexive look around him, searching for places someone could install a bug, but there isn't really much, unless they've gotten really elaborate and installed something under the beach.
“He can't put his listening toys here,” Mags reassures him, reading his body language. “This is one of the few safe places to talk in the district.”
He exhales with utter relief. “Snow threatened me,” he mutters. “Told me people in my district would die if I told anyone about what happened to my family and Alsey.”
“Of course he did,” she snorts. “He does that with all of us. It's not so easy to keep you hopping if you can compare notes with the rest of us, is it?” She wiggles her toes in the surf with a pleased expression that belies her serious tone. “Together we're stronger,” she concludes. “He knows that; so he tries to keep us apart as long as possible with threats and with lies about each other.”
“Then how did you even find out about my family?” he insists, finally remembering to unstuck his feet from their sand trap.
She shrugs. “He must have moved fast after your Games. Snow told one of us what he'd done to you, while you were still recovering in the hospital from your injuries. Thee little revelations of his are always meant as an object lesson, to keep one of the Victors in line.” The barest hint of a smile appears on her lips. “Of course, that Victor immediately told the rest of us.
“We share information whenever we can. We help each other fight him.”
“So he does threaten all of you like this,” he puts the implications together, thinking about Carlos far ahead. “What you did for me on the stage tonight, aren't you worried about that? What about your family?”
“My family will be fine. There are ways around Snow,” she finishes, “little ways that you'll learn when you start with us. When you throw a bunch of victors into a room together every year like that, you can't completely control them. They're going to find ways to start talking to each other, to fight back.”
“I can't fight Snow,” Haymitch said sullenly. “He's got me pinned. If I do anything he doesn't like, he'll start taking it out on my district.”
She puts a hand on his shoulder again. He's not sure whether it's supposed to be comforting or just for emphasis. “What I did tonight for you was based on knowledge from forty years of victors learning how to fight Snow and survive. We know what we can and can't get away with. You can learn too. You need to learn.”
“I need to learn to keep my head down,” he grumbles, pulling himself out of her grip. “And keep my district safe.”
He's free of her of grip, but not from her gaze, which pins him in place just as surely as the electromagnetic field that glued him to the hovercraft ladder at the end of his Games, even as he felt himself passing out on the rungs.
“You think you're done with the arena forever when you win,” she continues, “but the arena you're about to walk into now is much bigger, much crueler. Bigger stakes too.”
Haymitch doesn't want a bigger, crueler arena. He just wants to rest.
“Mags, if you only knew … ” He trails off for a moment, arms crossed over his chest, overwhelmed by the prospect of what she's hinting at. “I've had it with damned arenas!” he exclaims. “You think you know all about me, but you don't! My whole life has been an arena!”
He can see from her expression that she's patiently waiting him out. It's the same serene expression he's seen her put on for the cameras at all the Hunger Games he's ever remembered seeing back home. It's so familiar that in this context, he finds it jarring, and he feels himself emotionally scrabbling for purchase.
“I'm a victor!” he shouts at her. “I won the Hunger Games! What the hell does that even mean if I still have to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life?”
After a long moment of silence, she sighs, but it's not like earlier. This time there isn't pity there. When she speaks again, her voice has turned matter-of-fact, maybe even a little cold.
“It means you're Snow's tool,” she says, “to keep people thinking about which shirt you're wearing, and who you're dating this year, and what chances your tributes have of slaughtering twenty-three other children to death for the Capitol's entertainment, instead of the fact that their government is monitoring all their conversations, looking for even a hint of treason, and making its citizens disappear into a labyrinth of jails, torture and secret executions if they even breathe the wrong way.”
“They're doing that to people in the Capitol?” he asks, eyebrows raised.But then he remembers Lucilla and how well she knew to turn on the water faucets and whisper in his ear and to keep her words ambiguous.
She ignores him, voice growing in intensity. “It means that from now on, you will always be telling lies about yourself to please the Capitol's cameras, and you will have no choice about it, if you want your people to live. Your company will be sold to the highest bidders in order to fund the government treasury. You will have to do things you hate and even fear to protect the people that matter to you from him. The life of a victor is an arena of lies and compromises, boy.”
The tide has submerged his feet again, keeping him rooted in place. “Is that why Swagger killed himself?” he breathes. “To escape?”
She shakes her head resolutely. “Swagger killed himself because he couldn't face another set of parents whose children had died. And because he had never been a happy man to begin with, long before the Hunger Games took him. A good man, a very good man, but not a happy one. A bit like you, actually.
“It's possible to survive this life, boy; I'm proof of that, and so are all those other victors in Mentor Central, many of whom could be your friends, your allies, if you let them. It is possible to fight him,” she insists. “In little ways now, but I think in bigger ones someday.”
The surprising possibility she leaves dangling there is too surprising to resist. “Bigger ways? What do you mean?”
“I mean as big as it gets.”
Haymitch’s eyes narrow. “You mean, like a revolution?”
There is just a hint of a grin on her face. “Oh, now you're suddenly interested ...”
Haymitch rolls his eyes. “In getting rid of Snow?” he snarls. “Of all this? Of course I'm interested.”
“Well, think about what the Hunger Games does every year,” she waxes philosophically. “Out of twenty-four children, most of whom hate the Capitol already, it weeds out the strongest, the cleverest, the most ruthless killer of all, and it puts that child in a position to grow up getting to know the Capitol intimately, mingling with its most powerful citizens, becoming beloved celebrity figures. Meanwhile, they come back each year and mentor more killers like them who hate the Capitol. Now imagine if all those victors were united? What could they get up to?”
“When you put it like that, you make the Hunger Games sound like the dumbest idea the Capitol ever thought up,” Haymitch observes, caught halfway between amazement and skepticism.
There is an undertone of mischief to her grin. “I'd like it to be. The key, of course, is that we're all united. And we aren't exactly yet,” she admits. “Districts One and Two, course. They still believe in the Capitol mierda. So no talk of rebellion with them, all right, boy?”
Haymitch nods. “Got it.”
She grabs his hand in confirmation. “But anyway, next stop for you is District Three. Snow thinks they are all his whipped dogs there too, because they invent all the Capitol's toys, and the electronics for all the weapons. But Three's victors know who the real enemy is in Panem. There are allies you can count on. Of course, they won't be able to talk to you right now, but when you get to Mentor Central next Hunger Games, you should look up Beetee and go out for a drink. He's just a little older than you, and I think you two would get along.”
“The guy who won with the electrical wire, right?”
Mags nods. “Do you remember his Games?”
“Not really well. But my girl was rooting for him from day one that year. She likes him because he's smart.”
The words are out of his mouth before he realizes: He’d actually forgotten for a little while that Alsey's not alive anymore. Shit. A wave of loss and guilt hits him so hard he can't think straight. How could I have forgotten that?
“That he is,” agrees Mags stiffly. She must have noticed the slip too. “Nobody still really understands how he won his Games. But he's also got a great sense of humor. I think he'd make a good friend for you.”
The idea of having a friend seems to him a bit ridiculous and childish at this point. Haymitch hasn't had a friend besides Alsey in such a long time, he can't remember having had one at all. His last friend was probably at age six or seven, and he remembers the kid's face, but not his name anymore. Having friends became awkward once his dad started being drunk all the time, and then no one wanted to be friends with him anymore anyway.
He'd felt a suprising impulse to try and make friends with Chaff, but that had worked out terribly. He wonders idly what District Three's victor might hate him for.
“You don't believe me,” she observes, and turns to call Carlos and his friends back to start the journey home. “That's all right. You'll see for yourself.”
Carlos then appears, beaming with pride, a pile of shells in his hand and a fish hanging over his back, dangling from a makeshift fishing hook made of bone and some woven-together vegetation that Haymitch has been seeing all over the beach.
“Abuelita, look!” he cries. “Look what I got!”
“Niño, you know better than that,” she chides him as soon as she sees the fish. “Now your mother is going to have to salt a perfectly good fish just so it won't go to waste when we have so much cooked food at home. And that fish could have stayed in the water longer to make more babies. You need to think about these things more, Carlito. No wasting food in any form.”
The boy's features slump a little, and he mumbles out a disappointed, embarrassed apology to her in front of his friends. Then his expression surges back into excitement with the power of a new and sudden idea. “I could bring the fish to Señor Leon,” he suggests. “I bet he would like to have a fish for dinner tonight.”
Mags considers this slowly, Haymitch suspects a bit more slowly than necessary, to keep Carlos guessing. Then she smiles. “That is an excellent solution,” she pronounces. “And very thoughtful too. Señor Leon gets tired easily these days. You shall go to his house as soon as we get back to town. I think he will be very glad to see you with his dinner.”
When they return to the house, most of the guests and all of the journalists have left, and Lucilla is talking the Mayor's ear off with suggestions about how she could improve Four's banquet next year with a more detailed array of eating utensils to address each type of food they had served.
“After all, the media is always here filming this event, and you don't want your district to come across as backward,” she's telling the woman just as Haymitch intervenes.
“Lucilla, don't you think we should be getting to bed?” he interrupts pointedly. “Early morning train ride and all, right?”
She looks surprised, while Mags looks amused. The Mayor just looks grateful. “I suppose so,” Lucilla concedes, reluctantly rising from her chair and saying her good nights. Haymitch takes her arm, an unusually aggressive move for him with her, and leads her out of the banquet to their rooms upstairs on the second floor.
“What has gotten into you?” she says with a touch of pleased wonder in her voice. “You’re not usually this assertive. You usually just let me and the prep team lead you around everywhere like you couldn’t care less. Did something happen between you and Mags?”
Aware of the bugs everywhere, Haymitch fights to keep the tiny panic from rising within him. “Nothing happened,” he tries to say as smoothly as possible. The last thing either he or Mags needs is for Lucilla’s oblivious remark to get a thought going in Snow’s head.
She wrinkles her nose. “Well, don’t let her bully you.”
He rolls his eyes a little. “You keep telling me that, everywhere we go.”
“Not everywhere. Besides, Mags is a whole different class of intimidating. I wouldn’t have wanted to face her in the arena.” She gives a Capitol-style shudder of mock horror that she usually reserves for backward manners or ugly landscapes or unfortunate hairstyle choices. It usually makes Haymitch want to hit something. But tonight there has been talk of alliances and friends, and Lucilla's annoying behavior mostly rolls over him as he pulls her up the stairs, her incessant chattering a moving cloud of Capitol air traveling with them.
“You really should have had more of the lobster, Haymitch,” she admonishes as they make their way out to the car that's been sitting waiting for them all night. “It was totally to die for.”
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