Hunger Games: The Second Quarter Quell - The Story of Haymitch Abernathy

Chapter 4: The Opening Ceremony

The costumes were nearly as bad as Haymitch had imagined.

To be fair, the idea was always terrible, but he had been holding on to that little sliver of hope that maybe the stylists actually knew what they were doing. 

He felt a little silly in his baggy overall-type outfit as Mathilde pulled it up over his body, but reminded himself that this was redeemable. He hoped. Because nothing would be worse than flunking the reaping, flunking the opening ceremony, and flunking the rest. 

He had better prepare himself for at least a week of games without any sponsors. He'd probably wait until a few people died out, and the viewers lost their favourite, and found someone else. But he'd have to be careful until then.

'Perfect,' said Mathilde impressively, staring down his awful costume. 

Quince Everly looked equally as perplexed as Haymitch, his even being a couple sizes too small for him, and whined about how silly it looked on him. 

'Oh, Quince, would you please be quiet?' Mathilde demanded.

Almost as soon as the pair were dressed, they were whisked down to the bottom floor of the Remake Centre, where an army's worth of horses and chariots, arranged in District formation, with two side by side, lay waiting. 

Doubled tributes equaled double chariots, and double chariots meant a lot of chariots. And usually, they'd would enter one by one, both tributes on. But this time, two chariots were released at once. 

Haymitch's thoughts flitted to the massive amount of tributes, his eyes scanning all forty-seven of them. And from the forty-seven, there were at least forty-four – forty-five, if he counted Quince – with a better chance than him, and he was going to have to outlive every single one of them. 

His odds were so low, he wanted to escape, to run away, right then and there. Until Quince, in an attempt to be funny, which failed, as per usual, stumbled into Haymitch, sending him crashing headfirst into the wall beside him, which made it slightly difficult to walk in a straight line, let alone leave. 

Haymitch fumed in frustration, watching as Mathilde trotted over, shocked. At first, he deemed nothing to be wrong, until he straightened up, and heard an odd, loose, rattling noise from his helmet. 

Carefully, he pulled it off, despaired to realise that now a singular crack ran straight through the middle. Haymitch's heart began to race as the opening music introduced the ceremony, blaring through what sounds like a million invisible speakers, and the first pair of chariots left the stable for its ride through the stadium.

'What do I do?' Haymitch groaned, but Mathilde had already yanked the headlamp-sporting helmet from his hands. Oh, god. The only costume worse than a baggy miner's jumpsuit with no sleeves was a baggy miner's jumpsuit with no sleeves and no helmet to go with it. 

At this rate, he was going to look more like a farmer than a miner. Which would've been great, should he have been District 11.

The second set of chariots left the stable, and Mathilde trotted out of sight, inducing a pang of stress in Haymitch's chest. He felt ridiculous in his getup, but had no time to be opinionated right now.

The District 3 chariots were gone, 4's soon to depart.

As Mathilde finally came waddling back, she brandished both a comb and a frustrated expression.

'I couldn't find any gel,' she huffed impatiently, attacking Haymitch's dark waves with the comb until they cooperated. As she finished, she pulled back, admiring her work.