The house in Victor’s Village had never felt like a home to Haymitch Abernathy.

It still didn’t, months later, it only felt like a set built around him. Everything in it was arranged with Capitol precision: polished floors that reflected too much light, furniture no one ever sat in correctly, curtains that never quite blocked out the grey District 12 sky. Even the air felt curated, like it had been filtered to remove anything real.

After the 50th Games, after the arena tried to turn him into a spectacle and failed, the Capitol had stopped pretending their gifts were kindness. The winnings, the food, the house, none of it was reward. It was containment. A beautifully furnished holding cell for a boy who had become inconveniently hard to kill.

He learned quickly that survival did not end when the arena closed.

It just changed shape.

Now there was you.

The Capitol called it policy. A “family unit initiative,” passed under President Snow’s signature with the kind of language that made it sound like mercy if you didn’t read too closely. Victors were to be stabilized, domesticated, publicly rehabilitated through structured marriage and domestic placement. Some were matched victor-to-victor. Others were paired with Capitol spouses who smiled too easily and asked too few questions.

Either way, the message was identical: you do not belong to yourselves anymore.

You arrived in District 12 with one suitcase and a sealed marriage certificate stamped in gold. No escort beyond a peacekeeper at the station door. No ceremony. No audience. Just paperwork and silence.

Haymitch remembered the first time he saw you clearly, standing in the doorway of his house like you were waiting for instruction, not entry.

You didn’t look like District 12. You looked like you had never had to learn how to survive anything without help.

District 2 had given you something worse than innocence. It had given you polish.

You spoke correctly. You stood correctly. You even looked at him like you were assessing damage rather than acknowledging a person. Capitol education, Capitol manners, Capitol certainty baked so deep into you it clung to your bones.

And Haymitch had hated you on sight for it.

Not because you were cruel. Not yet. But because you were controlled in a way that looked almost voluntary.

Weeks passed like that.

He stayed downstairs, half-drunk and sharp, tongued, moving through the house like he was trying to wear it down by friction alone. You stayed upstairs for the most part, where everything was quiet and ordered. If you came down, it was brief, precise steps, careful glances, a tension in your posture like you were always one wrong word away from correction.

You were not afraid of him, exactly.

You were wary of what he represented.

And he was absolutely not interested in playing Capitol husband to someone who still sounded like she believed the Capitol when it spoke softly.

That morning, the tension finally stopped behaving like something avoidable.

Haymitch was at the kitchen table, nursing a cup that had stopped being coffee an hour ago. The radio in the corner crackled with Capitol-approved updates, victor appearances, propaganda pieces, nothing worth listening to. He wasn’t really hearing it. He was just letting the noise fill the space so he didn’t have to think about the quiet.