When The Canary Sings

Leverage

First Person: Haymitch Abernathy 

~~

I awoke at four in the morning to loud banging on my door. I sprung up from my seat at the kitchen table, and shoved the two liquor bottles into the cabinet beneath the sink. What day was it?

Four months had passed since Becca had seen the victors from her show that she put on, meaning four months since Snow tried and failed to kill her friend.

Becca asks about the victors from time to time, and gets excited when she wakes up in the morning and walks downstairs to see Chaff sitting at the table or Finnick and Annie asleep on the couch. My house is like a safe house. Whenever any victor needs a break from their clients and the Capitol, they hop a train and come down to 12, where there's a bed waiting. They can't stay for long though, someone is always calling. 

...

These few months had been particularly rough for Becca. A few weeks after the show she had for the victors, her grandmother, her last relative that actually cared about her, passed in her sleep. Becca whole-heartedly believes that it was natural, she was old, she passed in her sleep.

Becca found her first, ran to my house and got me. Then I got the doctor, and Becca still believed it was natural, but everyone saw through it. Everyone saw the white foam bubbling from her mouth. Everyone saw the small drops of blood leaking from her nose, and everyone saw her veins practically popping out of her skin.

However, I was the only one to see the singular white rose on the floor of her bedroom.

Not to mention once her grandmother died, her deadbeat mother showed up to her house in the middle of the night, banging on the door like a wild woman. Becca opened the door, happy to see her mother, and her mother gripped her by her hair and started screaming, trying to drag her somewhere. Luckily, Will was there to swoop in and push her mother off her.

I thought her mother was dead, so when I asked her, she revealed she flat-out lied to the entire country. In her words, she wanted to save her mother, and the district, the embarrassment. 

"District Twelve already has so much to deal with. The last thing we need is for the Capitol to be calling us all Morphling addicts." 

Ever since, Becca's been sleeping in my house. Her mother, who people believe is addicted to Morphling, is constantly seen hovering around the Hob, wrapped in a shaggy blanket with glazed over eyes. Becca constantly sees her because when you see the woman that you came from, who you are a carbon copy of, you will always lock eyes. Her mother often comes to me, begging for her daughter to come home.

Becca likes to move on quickly and pretend things never happened. She likes to bottle everything up and pretends she's fine, and I tell her that one day she'll just explode.

Being a teenager, she discards my advice.

Although, sometimes in the dead of night, I wake to her quiet sobs, and on the nights that she wakes up screaming and wailing, and when there is no blonde boy crawling through her window, I go up and hold her until she falls back to sleep.

I walked to the door and opened it, letting the crisp winter air hit my cheeks.

"Hello, Haymitch!" Effie greeted me, walking into my house, followed by Ophelia, Cinna, and a team of photographers and avoxes wheeling in a pile of clothes that could probably clothe the entire district.

"What are you doing here?" I ask, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

"Haymitch!" Effie scolds, "manners, and turn some lights on." she huffs, welcoming the other people into my house. "It's the photoshoot for her victory tour!" She gasps, offended that I forgot.