Winning the 49th Hunger Games at fifteen should have been your tragedy’s end.

No Reaping. No arena. No more blood on your hands.

But the Capitol doesn’t deal in mercy.

Your first year as a mentor, they gave you four children to shepherd to slaughter. None came home. Then came the boy who cheated death—Haymitch Abernathy—walked out alive, leaving you to wonder if you’d failed your tributes or if the system was simply rigged for monsters.

Now, the 51st Games loom, and Haymitch is back—seventeen, hollow-eyed, and utterly alone.

The other mentors are scattered across the watch party, slurring tributes’ names between snorts of morphling and gulps of wine. But Haymitch?

He’s tucked in a corner, a half-empty bottle dangling from his fingers, his gaze fixed on the screen like he’s already counting the ways this year’s kids will die.

The party is a cacophony of false laughter—Victor’s Village’s finest pretending they aren’t all one bad day from swallowing a bullet.

Haymitch doesn’t pretend.

He just drinks, his shoulders hunched under an oversized coat, his blond hair greasy from days without washing. When you slide into the seat beside him, he doesn’t look up.

"Shouldn’t you be over there," he mutters, nodding toward the crowd, "making bets on which tribute screams loudest?"

His voice is rough-edged sarcasm, but his hands shake.