ghosts that we knew: A mockingjay fanfiction

38

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Chapter 38

Haymitch
••flashback

It's a tricky little thing, sobriety is. Awakening your senses to a state so heightened that you couldn't even turn it off if you wanted to, sobriety forces you to pay attention to the things that the alcohol blurs for you.

Like, for example, the sight of a body caught in between states of life and death, or the smell of formaldehyde and filth catapulting up your nostrils, or the feeling of someone's blood on your hands.

I don't breathe until she starts to. After what feels like hours of watching doctors try to pump some life back into her, I don't let myself live again until Effie Trinket sputters to life with coughs and spasms.

Her eyes are wild, bloodshot, and dismayed. She's as limp as a rag doll. If it weren't for the nametag sewn onto her dusty Capitol clothes, I would have never guessed it was even her lying there.

They tell me that her body went into septic shock a while ago. The drastic change of scene beat her immune system to a pulp, and due to all of the bacteria from the treatment in the Capitol that got into her bloodstream, it's a miracle that she's still alive.

All I hear is that she's still alive.

The doctors hook her up to a bunch of fancy machines until she's beeping from just about everywhere, and they finally shed her of her tattered dress. I wince when I realize that what has just been tossed in the trash is exactly what she had been wearing in the final hour before I left her to rot in the Capitol.

They tell me I can take as much time as I need to be alone with my friend. I don't argue when they call her that.

In the white District Thirteen hospital gown that clashes with her pale, translucent skin and limp blonde knots of hair loosely splayed across her mound of pillows, she looks even more like a ghost than she did before.

The evidence of her torture is etched in her body. Everything, from the whip lashes that crisscross her forearms, to the sores on her back that cause her to writhe and claw behind her subconsciously, to the purple and yellow discoloration around where her nose has been broken, screams at me, tells me that I am responsible for creating the ghost of Effie Trinket.

She's going to make it. The doctors told you that she was going to make it, I tell myself, as if it makes any of this sight more bearable.

And I don't know what else to do, or say, or think without being completely disgusted with myself...so I simply take a seat beside her. I clasp my palms together to keep them from shaking in my lap.

When she opens her eyes, looking even farther away than the Capitol itself, the weight of my guilt comes crashing down upon me.

Immediately upon spying me at her bedside, she opens her dry, cracked lips to speak. No sound comes out.

"Hey," I tell her dumbly. Correcting my greeting etiquette, I edit myself to say instead, "I mean, um...Hello, Princess."

The nickname is old and worn, and in a melancholy sort of way, it brings me back to a happier time in which I would tease her with the name 'Princess' on the train while en route to the Hunger Games.

The name seems to have no effect on her. She doesn't look very much like a Princess right now, anyway. She looks more like a prisoner. And I feel like the grand freakin' court jester for making such a shitty joke.

Trinket blinks listlessly. She gazes around at her cramped emergency room, eyes growing wider with confusion in each second that passes. Once more she tries to speak, and I watch as she consciously decides against it. She flinches, shrinks back against the bed, and twists her mouth into a foul grimace, as if saying anything will trigger some sort of alarm or reopen her wounds.