millarific (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
millarific) wrote2013-06-23 05:12 pm
millarific) wrote2013-06-23 05:12 pm
Entry tags:
Hunger Games Fic: Sit With Me, Muchacho (G - Haymitch, Mags)
Title: Sit With Me, Muchacho
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
millari
Characters: Mags, Haymitch Abernathy
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Beta:trovia
Summary: “Do you tell them to target my tributes? Is that it? The weak, underfed ones? The easy targets from District Twelve?”
A/N: This started out as a reward ficlet fortrovia, for working on her dissertation. She also supplied the beta and title. Thanks!
A/N 2: Crossposted on AO3 here
“Oh, for the love of a fucking dead canary!”
The piece of uniquely District Twelve slang comes roaring across the silent, half-comatose room at Mentor Central at around 3 a.m. It's been a fairly quick Games, and the few mentors actually left populating headquarters by Day Six mostly don't bother to look up, although she hears a couple of snorts of subdued laughter emitting from behind consoles. No wonder: Haymitch sounds so ridiculously provincial right now.
However, she's pretty sure none of them were paying attention to the right part of the arena to see what Mags saw – her tribute, Connor, surprising Haymitch's girl tribute in the dead of night with a spear thrust to the back while she got some desperately needed sleep. The girl awoke to him ruthlessly twisting the weapon between two of her vertebrae, blood spurting everywhere, and agonizing pain. Connor's already out of there, watching from a safe distance behind a tree in the dark, a move of which Mags approves, since the girl's still clutching a substantial hunting knife in her hand, even as she writhes around in the dirt of the arena. It's immediately clear that no parachute, even if Haymitch had a sponsor to give one, is going to save her. The girl will be lucky to last ten minutes before the hovercraft is sent out.
The low seats and the high consoles keep the mentors from having an unobstructed view of each other when working, but Mags hears the unmistakable sound of the heavy mentor headset being thrown down onto the dashboard in a fury, and the violence of chair wheels screeching across the thick mahogany floor. There are heavy, angry footfalls. But it's the surprised, staccato sound of automatic guns suddenly being clicked into life that makes Mags finally pull herself up from her station to take see what's going on.
Her vision fills with 150 pounds of Haymitch Abernathy in her face, ignoring the two overwhelmed, helmeted Peacekeepers, who have their guns pointed in reluctance at the enraged mentor.
“Haymitch,” says one in a gentle but firm voice. “You know the rules – no aggressive contact between victors.” They look supremely uncomfortable though. Most Peacekeepers here have a knee-jerk admiration of the victors, especially the ones they have been watching over in Mentor Central for years. None of them wants to arrest a victor, especially one with tributes still in the arena; although for Haymitch, this will no longer be true in about eight minutes.
“Get those out of my face!” he yells at them. “I'm not about to hit someone who could be my Gran!”
The guards look grateful when Mags waves them away.
“What is it, hijo?” she engages him, using what these days amounts to her own private term of affection, since hardly anyone anymore knows the language of her ancestors. Certainly Haymitch has no idea what it means, and that's just as well. Knowing that she's calling him son would probably unsettle him.
The District Twelve victor has kept his distance from them in his first three years of service to the Capitol. He's shown up to mentor, miserably failed at picking up sponsors, watched his tributes die – usually in the first two days – and then disappeared for the next several. He never wants to talk about where he disappears to, and all the other victors seem to have silently agreed to leave him alone until he's ready to discuss it. But they all know where Snow has been sending him during his copious downtime in the last three years, and where he'll probably be going this year by tomorrow; that can't be making these losses easier.
“Every year!” he bellows, completely out of context, but Mags immediately knows what he means. “Every fucking year your tributes kill at least one of mine! How is that? Do you tell them to target my tributes? Is that it? The weak, underfed ones? The easy targets from District Twelve?”
She turns a hard stare on him, slowly pulling off her headset and hanging it on the hook at the side of her console. “Suggest that again, and I just might start,” she says in a low, offended undertone. He stares at her agog, clearly not expecting so frank an response. She flashes him a grim smile. “I don't play that sort of game. This espectáculo perverso is horrible enough without that.”
He sinks down into the console opposite her, the one reserved for Colin, the other District Four mentor, whose tribute Marisol has already been dead since yesterday morning. He looks like he hasn't slept all night.
“Goddammit.” He pounds uselessly on the buttons in front of him with a closed fist and the twenty-four screens give off a brief, violent flicker. “Six days,” he mutters. “Six fucking days, Mags.”
The longest he's ever had tributes survive the arena. “Your girl this year even outlasted a Career,” she acknowledges in a quiet voice and sits back down. It's been a long night and her arms aren't as strong and steady as they used to be. The late night hours have taken away her muscle strength, but it's Haymitch's face that's sagging with exhaustion, his eyes hollow and with dark circles underneath. Since he's the only mentor, he has no one to relieve him at his console, and nobody would blame him for taking a few hours off in his Training Center apartment to grab a nap, but he rarely does. If he does, he sleeps on the sofa in the lounge, asking one of the Avoxes to wake him after an hour or two, or if anything happens with his tributes.
He rubs at the bridge of his nose. “I really thought they would go somewhere this year.”
“I know,” she says simply, but he just scowls at her with charged resentment
“How could you possibly know? Your tributes win every couple of years. How could you know what it's like to lose them like this, when six days of survival is a goddamned feat?”
She studies him, feeling a bit of pity, and a bit of guilt, if she's willing to admit it. Time was when she was a one-woman welcoming committee for new victors, if she did say so herself. She's been the oldest living victor for a long time now. Could remember when she had been the first ever victor from her District, the Games were that new. She had been the one who had convinced her fellow mentors early on that they shouldn't be rivals. Not something she would ever say out loud, but she was proud of how she'd convinced them to become a more or less united group: the best revenge would be to become friends, she'd told them, and it had worked.
Well, all right, it hadn't quite worked with the Ones and Twos consistently, but the camaraderie she had built among them had still given a satisfying middle finger to the Capitol more often than not, and best of all, Snow could never do anything about it, because there was nothing obvious to fight back against.
But how had she lost track of this new one? How had she let him get so lost, without even have a previous victor in his district to guide him? He's clearly part of no victor camaraderie here.
In fact, Mags doesn't know Haymitch Abernathy all that well. But she noticed right away, as soon as she saw him at sixteen on her mentoring screen, that he was a person who wouldn't deal well with being the object of her guilt, or her pity. She takes a different tack:
“You really think you're the only one, don't you, pendejo?” she chides him.
His brow wrinkles, not recognizing the word, she's sure, but definitely getting that it's an insult, possibly even a very un-Gran-like one. He bolts out of his chair, ready for a fight, but she rises up with him and stays in his personal space.
“You think you're the only one who comes into this not knowing what he's doing?” she presses. “Who says you're supposed to know what you're doing? Did anyone teach you anything? Have you ever let anyone teach you anything?”
His mouth opens, then closes with surprise. His lips press into a firm, straight line.
“Like who?” He manages to hang on to his angry bitterness enough to utter the challenge, working on it so diligently, she finds it almost comical. “Only ones who know anything about this are you all, and the less I know, the more likely your tributes stay alive. Can't say I even blame you people for not wanting to share.”
This time, it's her turn to be surprised. “What is this 'you people' nonsense?” she reproaches. “You are one of us now, whether you like it or not. And we help our own; but you have to ask for help.”
“This is not one happy family, Mags,” he retorts. “We're a group of brutal killers, assembled to produce more brutal killers. He looks over at the District 1 consoles, both still occupied, both tributes still in the Games. “What do I have in common with them over there?” he challenges. “Nothing. They stay up all night, high on caffeine and planning how their tributes can hunt mine down.” Brutus stands up and stretches, then takes a long swig of coffee, as if on cue. Haymitch gestures towards him with a sarcastic nod of his head. “Does he really look like the sharing type?”
The question inspires Mags to bend down and reach below her console, hand rustling blindly in the bag she almost never fails to keep by her feet. “If it's sharing you want, hijo ...”
She emerges triumphant with her prize between her fingers, reaching with it towards him across the small aisle that separates them: “Chicharrón?” she offers.
Haymitch looks at her like she's lost her her mind. “What the fuck, Mags?” he hisses, dumbfounded, then erupts into loud, booming, slightly helpless laughter. He sinks back down into the plush leather seat, his wiry frame sprawled all over it. The disruptive sound momentarily grabs the attention of the two District 1 mentors, who stand up with narrowed eyes, looking their way, but don't otherwise acknowledge Mags. Beetee also pops into view for a moment to see what the laughing is about, looking half-asleep, then slumps back down in his chair, and once again, she can only see the dark crown of his head. Chaff, who's walking out to the alcove where the trays of food are kept, doesn't stop at all. Mags observes how none of them acknowledge her or each other. She's surprised she's never noticed this before.
By the time her eyes fall back on Haymitch, he's quieted, and withdrawn back into his typical frown. But the gloomy spell cast over him seems to have lifted somewhat, and he takes the fried concoction from her fingers for the peace offering that it is.
“Wow, this is terrible,” he tells her in between dutiful bites. “What is it made of?”
“Pig skin,” she answers, sitting back down and watching him.
His face screws up in an instinctual expression of distaste and he now chokes down what's in his mouth, but puts the rest of it down onto the console. “Ugh, really?”
“I would think in a district as poor as yours, people would be happy to eat something with so much pig fat attached,” she chides. “Many calories.”
“In a district as poor as mine, nobody has pigs,” he retorts flatly. “Well, except the baker. He can afford it.” He pauses in disbelief. “Wait, they have pigs in District Four?”
“Equus sends me the skin,” she gestures vaguely towards the District 10 console, where Equus, who is long gone since his tribute died in the bloodbath five days ago, and Gloria is already on Victors Affairs “appointments,” her tribute having died two days in, trying to collect water. “The Capitol has no use for the skin, so he sends some to me every year before the Games. Her eyes alight with the conspiratorial air of a secret. “Every year before I come to the Capitol, I order my daughter-in-law to make them for me.”
“You do?” he asks, not trying to hide the expression in his voice that says what he's really thinking - why would you want to eat these? Mags nods.
“I used to think she was incompetent at it, but after eight years of eating these malditos, I'm beginning to think she's doing it on purpose,” she grins. “Nobody could get something wrong that many years in a row, eh?”
Haymitch thinks about this, then shrugs, looking distinctly unhappy all of a sudden, and it hits her that she's chosen her words poorly. “Ay, hijo...” she sighs and watches his gloom return – chased away only for a few moments by the novelty of Linda's terrible cooking.
“All right,” she declares. “Here's what you are going to do for old Mags. First, you will go to the drinks table and get me a cerveza.”
“A what?” he asks, not really looking at her, but when he gets no verbal response, he is forced to look up and see Mags making a tippling gesture with her finger cupped in a circle, as if around the neck of a bottle. “Oh, a beer?” he confirms with subdued amusement starting to emerge once more from beneath the fog in his eyes. He gets up. “You know, I don't think any of us understand those district words of yours,” he grunts. “Why do you even use them?”
“Cállate, muchacho,” she retorts with absolutely no repentance. He gets the reproach to be quiet well enough, despite the language barrier. “I use them for the same reason Linda has to make the chicharrónes. Because sometimes you just need to have a little poder.”
She'd be more worried about uttering a statement like that if she didn't know from experience that Snow's spies who go over the surveillance tapes don't ever bother anymore with going to find the correct arcane book to translate her.
When Haymitch looks at her with a blank expression, clearly confused, she raises her right arm to the side of her head, crooking it at the elbow and contracting her bicep. “Poder,” she repeats in silent explanation. He gazes at her like he thinks she's a little demented, but charmingly so. Not surprising. She's cultivated this image ever since she founded the Games training school in District Four nineteen years ago – of the lonely, aging, possibly a little crazy woman, seeking out a trifle with which to occupy her time. A little undignified image to see reflected back at yourself in the news coverage every year, but it was worth it to get what she wanted and not look too much like she was fighting back.
In her day, only the favored districts, One and Two ever won at all, because it was all about punishment, and One and Two were allowed to win because in the Dark Days, they had been closest to the Capitol – both geographically and politically. Back in her Games, the Tenth, she was the first victor who hadn't come from Districts One or Two, a victory that wasn't supposed to happen in a Games that was supposed to be about beating down districts with questionable loyalty.
When she won anyway, she made sure to wear a soft pink dress to her crowning, her blonde hair gathered around her face in soft, wavy wisps, her voice girlish and demure, to assure them she wasn't a threat, no matter how much she wanted to tell them all to go fuck themselves.
Of course, all that about the Games has changed, but she never forgot about the power of image to keep oneself safe.
She is still pondering this when Haymitch hops up and walks over to retrieve her beer from the table.
“Now you go to bed,” she orders when he returns. He watches while she throws her head back, enjoying the cold liquid against her dry throat. Her tribute is exhausted from killing, he won't be doing much until morning. She can afford a small indulgence. “Come back after you've gotten a good night's sleep, right after breakfast, before they start sending you on any appointments. Sit down next to me,” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, “and bring a notebook.” Her eyes again fill with mischief, this time a little more calculated, to put him at ease. “Old Mags will tell you her secrets.”
His eyes widen, the only aspect of his surprise he's unable to hide. “Thanks,” is all he says, like it's the most meaningless word he's ever uttered, and his face still has the always-present scowl; but she hears a hint of closely guarded gratitude in his voice.
“You're welcome,” she says, then waves a hand in dismissal. “Now go get some sleep before you fall down. I'll see you in the morning.”
He nods and turns away without another word, slowly walking out of Mentor Central. His body isn't as tight in the shoulders as it always is. A good start.
She and Seeder and Woof, Anthea, Kii, Beam, Silk, Genia, Jewel, and all the rest of the old guard, they are still a tight group. She's used to thinking of them as her second family. But there are many more now that are not really included in that list. She does a mental accounting of the room's consoles: Chaff, Beetee, Lyme, Angora, Spear, Blight, Brutus, Gloria, Lux ... She names them off one by one in her head. So many young ones. She's been losing track of the new ones as they arrive each year. When did that start happening?
She's taken the victor bonds too much for granted while focusing more on saving her tributes, building up Four's reputation and marketing the district into a Career hotbed that will generate sponsors and bring home victors. And while she's been busy making Games School an institution in Four, the younger generation has kept coming. And they've stuck to the company of their console screens, or their district partners, if they are lucky enough to have them. They're not connecting well with each other outside this room either, she's sure. Abernathy is just the extreme version of what's been going wrong in Mentor Central for the last eight or nine years now.
They wouldn't respond well to her forcing things, to her pushing them together. But Chaff would be a good friend for Haymitch, she thinks – a little older, always ready with a joke, a bad one, the payaso – but his heart is a kind one, and Haymitch clearly needs someone to cast some light over all those dark thoughts.
She thinks of Haymitch's “Gran” comment and realizes, the Capitol's citizens aren't the only ones that have been fooled by her eccentric old lady image. These newer victors have too, and so they'll indulge her sticking her nose in their business long enough until they start to feel the connection between each other on their own. And Chaff is already friendly with Beetee, so that's another connection to build upon. It's not much of a beginning, but it's enough. She's tended a garden of blooming friendships in this rocky soil before, and she can do it again if she starts looking for the right opportunities.
She takes another long, contented sip of her cerveza and watches her screen thoughtfully as, in the arena, Connor settles down for the night with his hard-won sleeping bag, stolen from Haymitch's tribute, who at this is already lying on a slab in a hovercraft.
It's not obvious, but as the camera zooms in on him, she can see how Connor's hands shake a little as he spreads out the bag. For all that the boy's been trained for this at Games School, Mags can see that the mounting body count is rattling him.
“The killing isn't so easy, is it, hijo?” she whispers to him as if he can hear her. If he lives, she thinks, adding yet another District Four victor to Mentor Central, he will need this little family she has created, the one she must keep creating, in order to keep his head together, to protect him from the real killers – not the tributes in the arena nor even the victors here with blood on their hands, but the diablos who strut proudly down these city streets like horses decorated for a parade - exotic flowers and colorful ribbons, blinders narrowing their vision, until they give no thought to how they trample over souls.
Author:
millari Characters: Mags, Haymitch Abernathy
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Beta:
troviaSummary: “Do you tell them to target my tributes? Is that it? The weak, underfed ones? The easy targets from District Twelve?”
A/N: This started out as a reward ficlet for
trovia, for working on her dissertation. She also supplied the beta and title. Thanks!A/N 2: Crossposted on AO3 here
“Oh, for the love of a fucking dead canary!”
The piece of uniquely District Twelve slang comes roaring across the silent, half-comatose room at Mentor Central at around 3 a.m. It's been a fairly quick Games, and the few mentors actually left populating headquarters by Day Six mostly don't bother to look up, although she hears a couple of snorts of subdued laughter emitting from behind consoles. No wonder: Haymitch sounds so ridiculously provincial right now.
However, she's pretty sure none of them were paying attention to the right part of the arena to see what Mags saw – her tribute, Connor, surprising Haymitch's girl tribute in the dead of night with a spear thrust to the back while she got some desperately needed sleep. The girl awoke to him ruthlessly twisting the weapon between two of her vertebrae, blood spurting everywhere, and agonizing pain. Connor's already out of there, watching from a safe distance behind a tree in the dark, a move of which Mags approves, since the girl's still clutching a substantial hunting knife in her hand, even as she writhes around in the dirt of the arena. It's immediately clear that no parachute, even if Haymitch had a sponsor to give one, is going to save her. The girl will be lucky to last ten minutes before the hovercraft is sent out.
The low seats and the high consoles keep the mentors from having an unobstructed view of each other when working, but Mags hears the unmistakable sound of the heavy mentor headset being thrown down onto the dashboard in a fury, and the violence of chair wheels screeching across the thick mahogany floor. There are heavy, angry footfalls. But it's the surprised, staccato sound of automatic guns suddenly being clicked into life that makes Mags finally pull herself up from her station to take see what's going on.
Her vision fills with 150 pounds of Haymitch Abernathy in her face, ignoring the two overwhelmed, helmeted Peacekeepers, who have their guns pointed in reluctance at the enraged mentor.
“Haymitch,” says one in a gentle but firm voice. “You know the rules – no aggressive contact between victors.” They look supremely uncomfortable though. Most Peacekeepers here have a knee-jerk admiration of the victors, especially the ones they have been watching over in Mentor Central for years. None of them wants to arrest a victor, especially one with tributes still in the arena; although for Haymitch, this will no longer be true in about eight minutes.
“Get those out of my face!” he yells at them. “I'm not about to hit someone who could be my Gran!”
The guards look grateful when Mags waves them away.
“What is it, hijo?” she engages him, using what these days amounts to her own private term of affection, since hardly anyone anymore knows the language of her ancestors. Certainly Haymitch has no idea what it means, and that's just as well. Knowing that she's calling him son would probably unsettle him.
The District Twelve victor has kept his distance from them in his first three years of service to the Capitol. He's shown up to mentor, miserably failed at picking up sponsors, watched his tributes die – usually in the first two days – and then disappeared for the next several. He never wants to talk about where he disappears to, and all the other victors seem to have silently agreed to leave him alone until he's ready to discuss it. But they all know where Snow has been sending him during his copious downtime in the last three years, and where he'll probably be going this year by tomorrow; that can't be making these losses easier.
“Every year!” he bellows, completely out of context, but Mags immediately knows what he means. “Every fucking year your tributes kill at least one of mine! How is that? Do you tell them to target my tributes? Is that it? The weak, underfed ones? The easy targets from District Twelve?”
She turns a hard stare on him, slowly pulling off her headset and hanging it on the hook at the side of her console. “Suggest that again, and I just might start,” she says in a low, offended undertone. He stares at her agog, clearly not expecting so frank an response. She flashes him a grim smile. “I don't play that sort of game. This espectáculo perverso is horrible enough without that.”
He sinks down into the console opposite her, the one reserved for Colin, the other District Four mentor, whose tribute Marisol has already been dead since yesterday morning. He looks like he hasn't slept all night.
“Goddammit.” He pounds uselessly on the buttons in front of him with a closed fist and the twenty-four screens give off a brief, violent flicker. “Six days,” he mutters. “Six fucking days, Mags.”
The longest he's ever had tributes survive the arena. “Your girl this year even outlasted a Career,” she acknowledges in a quiet voice and sits back down. It's been a long night and her arms aren't as strong and steady as they used to be. The late night hours have taken away her muscle strength, but it's Haymitch's face that's sagging with exhaustion, his eyes hollow and with dark circles underneath. Since he's the only mentor, he has no one to relieve him at his console, and nobody would blame him for taking a few hours off in his Training Center apartment to grab a nap, but he rarely does. If he does, he sleeps on the sofa in the lounge, asking one of the Avoxes to wake him after an hour or two, or if anything happens with his tributes.
He rubs at the bridge of his nose. “I really thought they would go somewhere this year.”
“I know,” she says simply, but he just scowls at her with charged resentment
“How could you possibly know? Your tributes win every couple of years. How could you know what it's like to lose them like this, when six days of survival is a goddamned feat?”
She studies him, feeling a bit of pity, and a bit of guilt, if she's willing to admit it. Time was when she was a one-woman welcoming committee for new victors, if she did say so herself. She's been the oldest living victor for a long time now. Could remember when she had been the first ever victor from her District, the Games were that new. She had been the one who had convinced her fellow mentors early on that they shouldn't be rivals. Not something she would ever say out loud, but she was proud of how she'd convinced them to become a more or less united group: the best revenge would be to become friends, she'd told them, and it had worked.
Well, all right, it hadn't quite worked with the Ones and Twos consistently, but the camaraderie she had built among them had still given a satisfying middle finger to the Capitol more often than not, and best of all, Snow could never do anything about it, because there was nothing obvious to fight back against.
But how had she lost track of this new one? How had she let him get so lost, without even have a previous victor in his district to guide him? He's clearly part of no victor camaraderie here.
In fact, Mags doesn't know Haymitch Abernathy all that well. But she noticed right away, as soon as she saw him at sixteen on her mentoring screen, that he was a person who wouldn't deal well with being the object of her guilt, or her pity. She takes a different tack:
“You really think you're the only one, don't you, pendejo?” she chides him.
His brow wrinkles, not recognizing the word, she's sure, but definitely getting that it's an insult, possibly even a very un-Gran-like one. He bolts out of his chair, ready for a fight, but she rises up with him and stays in his personal space.
“You think you're the only one who comes into this not knowing what he's doing?” she presses. “Who says you're supposed to know what you're doing? Did anyone teach you anything? Have you ever let anyone teach you anything?”
His mouth opens, then closes with surprise. His lips press into a firm, straight line.
“Like who?” He manages to hang on to his angry bitterness enough to utter the challenge, working on it so diligently, she finds it almost comical. “Only ones who know anything about this are you all, and the less I know, the more likely your tributes stay alive. Can't say I even blame you people for not wanting to share.”
This time, it's her turn to be surprised. “What is this 'you people' nonsense?” she reproaches. “You are one of us now, whether you like it or not. And we help our own; but you have to ask for help.”
“This is not one happy family, Mags,” he retorts. “We're a group of brutal killers, assembled to produce more brutal killers. He looks over at the District 1 consoles, both still occupied, both tributes still in the Games. “What do I have in common with them over there?” he challenges. “Nothing. They stay up all night, high on caffeine and planning how their tributes can hunt mine down.” Brutus stands up and stretches, then takes a long swig of coffee, as if on cue. Haymitch gestures towards him with a sarcastic nod of his head. “Does he really look like the sharing type?”
The question inspires Mags to bend down and reach below her console, hand rustling blindly in the bag she almost never fails to keep by her feet. “If it's sharing you want, hijo ...”
She emerges triumphant with her prize between her fingers, reaching with it towards him across the small aisle that separates them: “Chicharrón?” she offers.
Haymitch looks at her like she's lost her her mind. “What the fuck, Mags?” he hisses, dumbfounded, then erupts into loud, booming, slightly helpless laughter. He sinks back down into the plush leather seat, his wiry frame sprawled all over it. The disruptive sound momentarily grabs the attention of the two District 1 mentors, who stand up with narrowed eyes, looking their way, but don't otherwise acknowledge Mags. Beetee also pops into view for a moment to see what the laughing is about, looking half-asleep, then slumps back down in his chair, and once again, she can only see the dark crown of his head. Chaff, who's walking out to the alcove where the trays of food are kept, doesn't stop at all. Mags observes how none of them acknowledge her or each other. She's surprised she's never noticed this before.
By the time her eyes fall back on Haymitch, he's quieted, and withdrawn back into his typical frown. But the gloomy spell cast over him seems to have lifted somewhat, and he takes the fried concoction from her fingers for the peace offering that it is.
“Wow, this is terrible,” he tells her in between dutiful bites. “What is it made of?”
“Pig skin,” she answers, sitting back down and watching him.
His face screws up in an instinctual expression of distaste and he now chokes down what's in his mouth, but puts the rest of it down onto the console. “Ugh, really?”
“I would think in a district as poor as yours, people would be happy to eat something with so much pig fat attached,” she chides. “Many calories.”
“In a district as poor as mine, nobody has pigs,” he retorts flatly. “Well, except the baker. He can afford it.” He pauses in disbelief. “Wait, they have pigs in District Four?”
“Equus sends me the skin,” she gestures vaguely towards the District 10 console, where Equus, who is long gone since his tribute died in the bloodbath five days ago, and Gloria is already on Victors Affairs “appointments,” her tribute having died two days in, trying to collect water. “The Capitol has no use for the skin, so he sends some to me every year before the Games. Her eyes alight with the conspiratorial air of a secret. “Every year before I come to the Capitol, I order my daughter-in-law to make them for me.”
“You do?” he asks, not trying to hide the expression in his voice that says what he's really thinking - why would you want to eat these? Mags nods.
“I used to think she was incompetent at it, but after eight years of eating these malditos, I'm beginning to think she's doing it on purpose,” she grins. “Nobody could get something wrong that many years in a row, eh?”
Haymitch thinks about this, then shrugs, looking distinctly unhappy all of a sudden, and it hits her that she's chosen her words poorly. “Ay, hijo...” she sighs and watches his gloom return – chased away only for a few moments by the novelty of Linda's terrible cooking.
“All right,” she declares. “Here's what you are going to do for old Mags. First, you will go to the drinks table and get me a cerveza.”
“A what?” he asks, not really looking at her, but when he gets no verbal response, he is forced to look up and see Mags making a tippling gesture with her finger cupped in a circle, as if around the neck of a bottle. “Oh, a beer?” he confirms with subdued amusement starting to emerge once more from beneath the fog in his eyes. He gets up. “You know, I don't think any of us understand those district words of yours,” he grunts. “Why do you even use them?”
“Cállate, muchacho,” she retorts with absolutely no repentance. He gets the reproach to be quiet well enough, despite the language barrier. “I use them for the same reason Linda has to make the chicharrónes. Because sometimes you just need to have a little poder.”
She'd be more worried about uttering a statement like that if she didn't know from experience that Snow's spies who go over the surveillance tapes don't ever bother anymore with going to find the correct arcane book to translate her.
When Haymitch looks at her with a blank expression, clearly confused, she raises her right arm to the side of her head, crooking it at the elbow and contracting her bicep. “Poder,” she repeats in silent explanation. He gazes at her like he thinks she's a little demented, but charmingly so. Not surprising. She's cultivated this image ever since she founded the Games training school in District Four nineteen years ago – of the lonely, aging, possibly a little crazy woman, seeking out a trifle with which to occupy her time. A little undignified image to see reflected back at yourself in the news coverage every year, but it was worth it to get what she wanted and not look too much like she was fighting back.
In her day, only the favored districts, One and Two ever won at all, because it was all about punishment, and One and Two were allowed to win because in the Dark Days, they had been closest to the Capitol – both geographically and politically. Back in her Games, the Tenth, she was the first victor who hadn't come from Districts One or Two, a victory that wasn't supposed to happen in a Games that was supposed to be about beating down districts with questionable loyalty.
When she won anyway, she made sure to wear a soft pink dress to her crowning, her blonde hair gathered around her face in soft, wavy wisps, her voice girlish and demure, to assure them she wasn't a threat, no matter how much she wanted to tell them all to go fuck themselves.
Of course, all that about the Games has changed, but she never forgot about the power of image to keep oneself safe.
She is still pondering this when Haymitch hops up and walks over to retrieve her beer from the table.
“Now you go to bed,” she orders when he returns. He watches while she throws her head back, enjoying the cold liquid against her dry throat. Her tribute is exhausted from killing, he won't be doing much until morning. She can afford a small indulgence. “Come back after you've gotten a good night's sleep, right after breakfast, before they start sending you on any appointments. Sit down next to me,” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, “and bring a notebook.” Her eyes again fill with mischief, this time a little more calculated, to put him at ease. “Old Mags will tell you her secrets.”
His eyes widen, the only aspect of his surprise he's unable to hide. “Thanks,” is all he says, like it's the most meaningless word he's ever uttered, and his face still has the always-present scowl; but she hears a hint of closely guarded gratitude in his voice.
“You're welcome,” she says, then waves a hand in dismissal. “Now go get some sleep before you fall down. I'll see you in the morning.”
He nods and turns away without another word, slowly walking out of Mentor Central. His body isn't as tight in the shoulders as it always is. A good start.
She and Seeder and Woof, Anthea, Kii, Beam, Silk, Genia, Jewel, and all the rest of the old guard, they are still a tight group. She's used to thinking of them as her second family. But there are many more now that are not really included in that list. She does a mental accounting of the room's consoles: Chaff, Beetee, Lyme, Angora, Spear, Blight, Brutus, Gloria, Lux ... She names them off one by one in her head. So many young ones. She's been losing track of the new ones as they arrive each year. When did that start happening?
She's taken the victor bonds too much for granted while focusing more on saving her tributes, building up Four's reputation and marketing the district into a Career hotbed that will generate sponsors and bring home victors. And while she's been busy making Games School an institution in Four, the younger generation has kept coming. And they've stuck to the company of their console screens, or their district partners, if they are lucky enough to have them. They're not connecting well with each other outside this room either, she's sure. Abernathy is just the extreme version of what's been going wrong in Mentor Central for the last eight or nine years now.
They wouldn't respond well to her forcing things, to her pushing them together. But Chaff would be a good friend for Haymitch, she thinks – a little older, always ready with a joke, a bad one, the payaso – but his heart is a kind one, and Haymitch clearly needs someone to cast some light over all those dark thoughts.
She thinks of Haymitch's “Gran” comment and realizes, the Capitol's citizens aren't the only ones that have been fooled by her eccentric old lady image. These newer victors have too, and so they'll indulge her sticking her nose in their business long enough until they start to feel the connection between each other on their own. And Chaff is already friendly with Beetee, so that's another connection to build upon. It's not much of a beginning, but it's enough. She's tended a garden of blooming friendships in this rocky soil before, and she can do it again if she starts looking for the right opportunities.
She takes another long, contented sip of her cerveza and watches her screen thoughtfully as, in the arena, Connor settles down for the night with his hard-won sleeping bag, stolen from Haymitch's tribute, who at this is already lying on a slab in a hovercraft.
It's not obvious, but as the camera zooms in on him, she can see how Connor's hands shake a little as he spreads out the bag. For all that the boy's been trained for this at Games School, Mags can see that the mounting body count is rattling him.
“The killing isn't so easy, is it, hijo?” she whispers to him as if he can hear her. If he lives, she thinks, adding yet another District Four victor to Mentor Central, he will need this little family she has created, the one she must keep creating, in order to keep his head together, to protect him from the real killers – not the tributes in the arena nor even the victors here with blood on their hands, but the diablos who strut proudly down these city streets like horses decorated for a parade - exotic flowers and colorful ribbons, blinders narrowing their vision, until they give no thought to how they trample over souls.
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What's great here is that it's so easy to see how Mags achieved all the things she has achieved, because you show very clearly that her mind is always at work, all the things she picks up on. I'm sort of amused to see Mags playing matchmaker for Chaff and Haymitch. You know my head canon of all their shenanigans alongside Beetee and Caramel.
It's also very easy to see how isolated Haymitch is and why, and how that's partly because of his distant, suspicious attitude. Not much of a surprise that a boy his age should have that attitude after all that has happened to him, but still often, fic is bad at showing the distance between characters, the lines that aren't crossed. Fic often acts like everybody can talk to everybody else about anything. But his need to keep his distance is such an important part of Haymitch as a character, and there's a wide gap between him and the other districts. Kat points that out in canon, this gap between Twelve and everybody else (except possibly Eleven), it's somewhat surprising that this is dynamic almost never portrayed between mentors in fic.
Anyway, this was excellent. I had a lot of fun reading it again and as always, it makes me very greedy for more of your Haymitch. Also, Mags. ;)
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Mags was a lot of fun to write, and a welcome chance to dip into my heritage in a very superficial way. I feel like a lot of my conception of her actually came out of your stories and our many discussions of her. I love your idea of how she created a Games training school in District Four, and I just kind of transplanted that idea of her as an organizer, a galvanizer onto this thing we know about the Mentors being friends. I love the idea that it was her masterplan to get the victors working together and thinking of themselves as stronger united.
And I'm glad you could see how I tried to show the different causes of Haymitch's isolation, and how this wasn't just a case of poor Haymitch, the world is so mean to him, but it's a combination of people being caught up in their own stuff they're trying to deal with, and Haymitch being the closed-off person that he is, even at this age. I like my angsty, dumped-upon characters, and Haymitch certainly fits that bill for me; but I also like getting to see the character flaws (even when they're understandable flaws) that contribute to that character's situation.
And yeah, it absolutely makes sense to me that without someone to unite them, that the victors would so easily fall into a benevolent form of "every man for himself" disinterest in each other. After all, Haymitch has a point: from a limited point of view, it makes sense not to help each other. I like the idea that the person who united them was Mags.
Thanks again, love. *hugs*
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