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Summary: Chapters 25 & 26

Chapter 25

Haymitch wakes up delirious, covered with stitches and hooked up to tubes, and passes out again. He wakes for a second time in the tribute apartment with a pump in his chest, just like Lou Lou’s. He spends days alone, eating the bread and milk in the fridge, and wondering if Beetee, Wiress, and Mags are being tortured. The TV in the apartment plays clips of old Games and, one night, he hears Lucy Gray Baird singing before pulling a young man onstage with her. He realizes that Twelve’s only victor, a figure shrouded in mystery, was Covey, and that the man with her onstage is Snow. He panics that Snow will punish Lenore Dove to get to him.

Eventually, Effie, his prep team, and a group of Peacekeepers arrive to get him ready for his Victor’s Ceremony. He is cuffed and brought to a room under the stage and Effie refuses to leave him, which touches Haymitch. He spies Wiress and Mags and is upset; they look as if they have been beaten (Mags is even in a wheelchair), but they are not allowed to go to him.

Haymitch walks onstage and is stunned to be met with a thunderous applause. Caesar shows a highly curated summary of the Games that paints Haymitch as a “jackass,” and downplays the other tributes and his attempts to challenge the Capitol. The footage does not show Haymitch blowing up the generator, simply cutting away after he is declared the winner. The camera then pulls back as Haymitch is carried away, revealing that the arena looks like a giant eye. The Cornucopia marks the pupil, the wide circle of the spring-green meadow makes up the iris, and the darker green of the forest and the mountain terrain narrow to points on either side, forming the whites of the eye. Haymitch understands this is supposed to symbolize the idea that the Capitol powers are always watching. Snow places a crown on Haymitch’s head and ominously tells him to “enjoy his homecoming.”

Chapter 26

Haymitch attends the Victor’s Ceremony afterparty, in which he is displayed in a golden birdcage for Capitol citizens to admire and gawk at. Plutarch approaches Haymitch’s cage and reveals that Lenore Dove was never actually released; Haymitch is distraught. He spends the next several days being carted around the Capitol, and he perseveres through the humiliation because he does not want Snow to target his loved ones.

On the last day, his pain-killing pump is removed and he is placed on a train back to Twelve with the bodies of Maysilee, Wyatt, and Louella. On the way home, he wonders about District 12’s only other victor and starts to think about the lyrics to “The Hanging Tree” song. He and the coffins are dropped off at the station late at night. He walks toward his house and finds it on fire, with his Ma and Sid trapped inside. He and other residents from Twelve desperately try to save them, but it is too late. Haymitch has to be held back by Burdock and Blair so he does not rush in anyway and get himself killed. Asterid gives him a sleep syrup, and he passes out. 

Haymitch wakes up in Louella’s family’s house. District 12 has a funeral the next day for Haymitch’s Ma and Sid, along with Louella, Maysilee, Wyatt, and Wyatt’s father who hung himself the day before, when his son's body was delivered. A distraught Haymitch thinks that he sees Maysilee, but it is only her twin sister, Merrilee. Burdock sings the funeral song—“The Old Therebefore”—and everyone does a three-finger-salute to honor the fallen.

Haymitch escapes from the mourners after the funeral and realizes the fire was Snow’s doing, and that he killed his family to punish him. Burdock and Blair eventually take him to his new house in the Victor’s Village, but Haymitch sneaks out after they fall asleep. He heard that Lenore Dove was released and he wants the two of them to run away together. 

Finding Lenore Dove in the meadow with her geese, he watches her soak up the fresh air for a moment. He also watches her find a bag of gumdrops, which Haymitch figures she left in the meadow after Sid gave them to her after the reaping. Haymitch rushes to Lenore Dove and they embrace and declare their love for one another. Eventually, they sink into the grass and Haymitch feeds her one of the gumdrops. Lenore Dove thanks him and says she can finally eat the ones that he bought her on Reaping Day, now that he is home, because she has been sleeping with the bag under her pillow. Haymitch realizes, too late, that these gumdrops are not the ones he sent her—they’re the same shade of red as the rose Snow wore at the Victory’s Ceremony. These gumdrops have been poisoned. With no antidote at hand, Lenore Dove dies—though before she does, she makes Haymitch promise that he will stop the sun from rising on another reaping.

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