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Her victors.
Not only did they have a common home in Twelve, but Effie quickly realized that, much like wealth, poverty had a way of binding its captives together. Effie would make a comment, or reference a brand the three didn’t know, but she was simply outnumbered. They never outright said anything (well, Haymitch did, that was to be expected) but the looks exchanged across tables and between corners of the room weren’t unnoticed. She was the odd one out.
But those were her victors, the three of them, and Effie was nothing if not doggedly determined to not only protect them all, but nurture them in whatever ways she could. Whatever ways her body, mind, and spirit could provide for them.
Money and pain, Effie had realized, were what truly separated people. That’s what the Games were about after all. Sometimes one could work for the other, or be used to earn the other, but at the end of each day, the pain you went through and the money you had were what drew the dividing lines in the sand. And Effie had far more money and far less pain than her victors.
And she’d learned to accept that! Really, she had. Because Effie was nothing if not very skilled at accepting her life. She compromised with the best of them — she would save her sister and work in the Games, but dammit, she’d make the best of being there. She’d let Haymitch have his bottle and his denials and his grief, but dammit, she wouldn’t let him completely waste away, she’d keep some semblance of a friendship up. And when the kids came along, dammit, she’d keep them too.
Maybe that was the problem. She’d gotten one too many concessions in her favor. She’d been too happy. No one in Panem was allowed to be too happy.
Not that she’d trade the rebellion for the world, of course. Even her world.
Well, her victors were her true world.
Peeta, her son, the sweetest, most caring man in the world with a heart of gold and skin as strong as steel. She’d never known a better, more honest example of what a good man could be. With every reason to hate her, and yet he’d never treated her with anything but kindness and sincerity.
And her dear, sweet Katniss. She never could have said so to the girl, of course, but she’d felt a kinship with her, with the sacrificial tendency and all. But Katniss had given up so much more, had loved and lost more than Effie could ever dream. Her brave, wonderful girl, with that poorly hidden mirth and pout that reminded her oh-so much of Haymitch. Like father, like daughter, she would have told them in a different life.
Haymitch Abernathy, the unequivocal love of her life, the other half of her soul, her best friend for decades, the strongest man she’d ever known. She’d have died for him over and over again, but she also would have, and did, something far harder: she lived for him. Over and over and over again, Effie lived for that man, living for the both of them when he couldn’t do it himself. Effie lived every day with him, for him, keeping him alive in the long haul, bringing him water and cleaning him up and making him crack a smile, giving him just the right amount of optimism and hope that the spark in his eyes wouldn’t fade out. Effie would have died for him, but she lived every day under the surveillance and the crushing weight of oppression with a smile for him.
Effie would give up her whole world, her life, for the rebellion, to put a stop to the tyranny and the death and the destruction. She’d give it all up, a small sacrifice on her part to ensure no child had to be escorted to a televised death.
But she wouldn’t have given up her world. Her victors. If the universe had asked her to give up those three people for a fair and just world, Effie knew she’d ought to be ashamed of her answer.
So it was a kindness, then, that she ended up in prison. After all, she’d told the universe what she could stand to lose and what she couldn’t — made her compromise clear and fair. She’d give up everything, even herself, but not her victors.
And so the rebellion came, and it swept Effie up alongside it, but she landed on the wrong side of the country, miles away from her world.
So it was fair. The beatings, the lashing, the starving, the interrogations lasting forty-eight hours and the brainwashing attempts, it was fair.
Funny, she’d mused, her throbbing head against the cool concrete of her cell. All it took was a war for Panem to finally be fair.
And then they won.
And Effie, by a funny turn of fate, lived. A substantial amount of paperwork had been dedicated to securing her life and release, and, when it had been presented to her, a stack as thick as a classical novel she didn’t own anymore, all she’d managed was a shaky laugh and, “Goodness, all those trees just to save me?”
She’d taken the bloated folder to her apartment, still intact, emptied of its valuables, but livable, and cried. Cried longer than she ever had in prison.
She cried once, woke up the next day, took aspirin for her headache, and promised herself she wouldn’t do it again. (She would)
After all — it’d been more than fair.
Her victors, miraculously also alive, were still worse for wear. Peeta, out of his mind. Katniss, burned and grief stricken. Haymitch, a shell of exhaustion.
And they were all home just a day after Effie’s release.
At first, she called them, because Effie Trinket had never learned the meaning of shame. It prevented too many opportunities, after all, so she didn’t so much as flush when she called Haymitch and promptly made him choke on his whiskey.
“Now that that’s out of the way,” she said politely. “How are the children?”
“Geez, Eff.”
A visit wasn’t discussed, really. She talked to the children, sometimes about light things — the bakery, sweaters, the phases of the moon — and sometimes the panic attacks, the crying, the drinking, the nightmares and the scars. And it was nice. She got to have them in her life, at least in some way, by the grace of the telephone, her favorite invention as of late.
Effie had rebuilt a modest life, tiptoeing the edges of hatred on either side as long as she remained in the middle of the aisle.
And that was fair. She’d done so much wrong, so, escaping with torture and trauma and a lower-middle class life ahead of her and her victors on the other end of a phone line, really, was an equitable compromise.
So it was unfair of her, really, one Tuesday (Wednesday?) night, on the phone with just Haymitch, to bring up, slurred softly between puffs of exhaustion but not alcohol, “You know, I might have as many scars as you do now.”
He sucked in a breath. “Huh?”
Effie nodded to the phone. “I have plenty now. Mainly on my back, stomach, legs…arms…” she trailed off. “I might have as many as you do.”
He was quiet for a long time, but in the space between two and three in the morning, minutes felt like seconds. “That matter?” He asked quietly.
“I think so.”
“Why?”
She frowned. She’d never had to explain this to another person.
“Well, you all have scars. Now I have some too.” A soft, weepy, true smile spread across her lips. “We match, Haymitch. I match all of you now.”
Either an exasperated exhale or a soft, unbelieving laugh — she couldn’t tell which — fell from his lips. “You’re crazy, you know that, Eff?”
“Of course, dear.” She missed him she missed him she missed him like a beating drum going off at twice the rate of her heart.
“That what you’ve been waiting for?” He whispered. She barely caught it.
“What?”
“To…look like us?”
Effie contemplated the string she’d pulled from her couch. “Not exactly, but...oh, Haymitch, I never really belonged with you three, you know that. I still don’t, but…” Honesty pulled at her tongue and she was too tired to fight it. “…I believe I’m closer, now.”
Silence slept soundly between them, unassuming. It was companiable between them after all these years.
Effie had opened her mouth to wish him a goodnight, to apologize, tell him to have the children call her, tell him she loved him with a burning ever-present fire in the core of her soul, things like that, when he beat her to the punch.
“Come down here, Eff.” Her breath caught somewhere between her teeth. “You don’t…you don’t gotta wait ‘till you’ve got enough scars or some shit like that. We like you ‘cause you’re you.” And, because Haymitch would always be Haymitch, he added, “Every annoying, irritating bit of ya.”
Effie took a dry breath in, and that same air exhaled out in a wet sob. “Haymitch?”
“Yeah?”
On the tip of her tongue were the words, the three words, but she bit down on them at the last moment. “I’ll be there in three days. I’ll stay in your room.”
He laughed, laughed warmer and more than she’d heard in years. “Course you will.”
Effie hung up without saying goodbye — she had only managed to pull out her suitcase when she realized her error, called him back, woke him up, said goodbye, and hung up again. She could just picture the annoyed twist of his mouth, and it sent a delicious thrill up her spine to imagine badgering him in person.
So Effie arrived two days later, with nearly everything she owned in three sparkly pink suitcases that attracted everyone’s attention, waving wildly on the platform for her victors who, except for Peeta, looked like they’d just rolled out of bed upon finding out she was early.
Which, if Haymitch’s obvious bed head was to be believed (and she knew his bed head on sight) that was exactly what happened.
Katniss was the first to spot her, and any lingering anxiety lifted off her shoulders when the girl broke into a small but genuine smile and called, “Effie! Over here!”
She hugged her beloved girl first, of course. Katniss had only taken two steps to meet her but hugged her back with the same fierceness, and Effie started sobbing as soon as she felt her grafted, scarred skin under her hands.
“Oh, my girl…my sweet girl.”
“Missed you, Effie,” Katniss whispered.
Peeta sported a boyish, beaming smile on his grown-up face. He was well and truly a man now — like hugging a tree, it was! But he was solid and real and alive under her hands, and he folded up into her just like he had when he was a teenager.
“Don’t cry, Effie,” he whispered. She ran a hand through his blond hair and smiled through tears at him.
“I can’t help it, dear.”
And the kids, bless their hearts, made themselves scarce to collect her admittedly very heavy luggage.
Haymitch just smirked at her, the infuriating man, arms crossed and looking her up and down. “Took you long enough.”
“Excuse you, I was waiting to be invited.”
“What’re you, a vampire? Gonna bite me?”
“You’d certainly deserve it.”
His eyes turned dark, eyebrows raised, and the look gave way to a burning fire in the pit of her stomach and she wondered if the kids would mind terribly if she dragged Haymitch to the nearest flat surface for about twenty minutes.
Clearly her poker face had suffered in the war, because he laughed as he hauled her up into his arms like she weighed absolutely nothing, holding her tight against his chest. “Missed me?”
Effie beamed at that stupid face. “Terribly.”
“Me too.”
If she smiled any harder, she was going to pass out.
And then he kissed her, calloused, scratchy hands on her soft face, tongue in her mouth before she could blink, then a hand in her hair like the possessive animal he was. Effie gave as good as she got, her arms wound around his neck, one leg kicked up like a damn movie, grinning into the messy kiss.
(She graciously pretended not to hear the kids gagging, because she was magnanimous like that.)
Finally, they broke a hairsbreadth for air, lips still tingling and brushing and Haymitch murmured softly, “You ain’t going back, by the way.” And if Effie wasn’t going crazy (which wasn’t a guarantee nowadays, but who cared when she got kissed like that?) Haymitch was flushing as he kissed her again and muttered, “You belong with us, princess. Always have.”
So Effie Trinket got to go home to a warm, utterly messy house she’d spend the next two months cleaning and organizing. She went home to two kids who loved her. To a man she loved and who loved her. To a family of people who couldn’t go twenty-four hours without a panic attack. To a family who had dinner together every night. To a bed where Haymitch held her every night. To a world where she and Peeta discussed art over tea. To a world where Katniss humored her and tried to teach her to hunt, to no avail, but to Haymitch’s eternal amusement. To a world where Haymitch brought home pretty rocks he’d find and clean just for her to set on the windowsill.
Effie spent the rest of her life surrounded by her victors and their love.
And maybe it wasn't fair that she got the happiest ending she could have conceived of, after all she’d done. Pain could get a person money, but it couldn’t earn happiness, safety, security. So maybe this, her life with her victors, was unfair, even with the torture she’d endured.
But condemning herself was unfair too — not the same, but a little like Haymitch trying to drown his guilt in a bottle and plug up his feelings as punishment for his past, his losses.
None of it was fair. The surviving, the dying, it was all too tangled up to find a ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ end now, after a bloody war won with lies and truths married together.
The three of them were her world. The only world that mattered and the only one she wanted. And if they wanted her, if they chose her, then maybe that was all that mattered. The three of them, her victors, wanted her in their world. One of them.
Who was she to fight that?