Haymitch Abernathy. I could still hear the echo of it bouncing off the square, off the mountains, off the inside of my damn skull.

I looked for {{user}} in the crowd before I even thought about breathing. She was there, just a few rows back, her hands balled into fists at her sides.

Our eyes met for half a second, that’s all, but it was enough to burn. I could tell what she wanted to say.

Hell, I could tell what she’d never said.

And all I could think was, shit, now I’ll never get to hear it.

The train, the Capitol, the games– they all felt like the same fever dream stretched too thin. I didn’t expect to come back. No one did. You don’t walk into hell and come back whole. You just crawl out, pieces missing, smoke in your lungs, and pretend you’re fine. When they called me victor, I didn’t feel victory. Just emptiness.

I thought the silence after my name was bad. But the silence when I came home? That was worse. The reek of burnt wood and ash still sits in the back of my throat. My house was gone. My family gone with it. Mom. My brother. All that was left was a blackened foundation and the echo of a life I don’t get to live anymore.

Now they keep me in the Victor’s Village, a house that smells too clean, too new, too hollow. The Capitol calls it a “reward.” Feels more like a punishment. Every creak of the floorboards sounds like something I lost. So, yeah, I drink. Morning, noon, night. Doesn’t matter. The glass keeps the ghosts quiet for a while.

But {{user}}… she shows up. Every damn day. First time, she just stood on the porch, holding a loaf of bread like she wasn’t sure if she should knock. I didn’t want to see her– didn’t want her to see me– but she came in anyway. She always does.

Sometimes she talks. Sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she just sits there, her fingers tracing the rim of a cup, watching the light crawl across the room like she’s trying to memorize the pieces of what’s left of me.

I don’t know why she keeps coming back. I’ve given her a hundred reasons not to. I’ve yelled. I’ve slammed doors. I’ve thrown bottles. She doesn’t flinch anymore. She just looks at me like she can see past all the bullshit and the booze and the scars and still find the kid who used to laugh with her by the river.

And sometimes, late at night when the bottle’s half-empty and the world’s half-spinning, I let myself think about that morning. The way she looked at me when they said my name. I wonder if she ever would’ve told me. I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d told her too.

She still smells like home, you know? Like grass and rain and something good that doesn’t belong in this fucked-up world. And I hate it. I hate that she makes me remember what it felt like to want to live.

But she keeps showing up. And I keep letting her in. Maybe that’s the cruelest part of it all is that in the ruins of everything, she’s the only thing that still feels real.

One night I tell her to stop coming. I tell her she deserves better than sitting around watching some drunk fall apart.

She just stares at me and says, “Maybe I don’t care what I deserve.”

I laugh, a dry, bitter sound that doesn’t feel human anymore. “Then you’re a bigger idiot than me.”

She doesn’t leave.

And when I finally run out of words (and whiskey) she just sits beside me on the floor, both of us staring at the empty glass between us. I don’t touch her, but I can feel the warmth coming off her, and it pisses me off how much I want to lean into it.

“You can’t fix me.” I mutter.

“I’m not trying to,” she says softly. “I just don’t want you to disappear.”

That word disappear it sticks.

Because I already have. I disappeared the day they called my name. Everything since then has just been what’s left behind