antipathy

He was a drunk.

This knowledge chafed her to no end, it infuriated her because he was her lifeline. Her mentor. Her support. All the other students got sensible, seasoned professors who knew their stuff and were generally quite helpful. True, Professor Woof was nearly deaf and Professor Chaff was actually a drug-addled idiot, but Chaff was nearly lucid most of the time and his insane conspiracy theories were at least interesting. Katniss actually felt quite let down. This wasn't what university was supposed to be about.

She stayed after class one day, drumming her pen on the top of the table, watching Haymitch slowly erase the whiteboard. Another useless class. Thankfully Haymitch seemed content to let the class discussion ramble into the full hour and fifteen minutes allotted, so typically their biweekly class consisted of thirty or so students arguing their various views about "A Rose for Emily" or A Streetcar Named Desire while their professor slept. That, or he pretended to listen by nodding approvingly.

"He's a bit frustrating," Peeta commented. He was a boy who sat behind her in class—much shorter than she, with a round, handsome face hidden behind wide glasses. Sunshine colored hair fell into his eyes and he always seemed to smell of yeast and warm sugar. She liked him—they had argued quite fiercely about the merits of Fences main character, Troy Maxson, and she considered him one of the bright spots in the class.

"Yeah," Katniss muttered, still glaring at Haymitch's back, the wrinkled sports coat riding up to reveal and equally rumpled dress shirt beneath. "Do you think he even reads our papers? I mean, I didn't have a single annotation on mine when I handed it in."

"You got yours back?" Peeta wrinkled his nose and swung his backpack onto his shoulder. "I didn't even get mine returned. I just assumed he's not reading them and throwing them in a bin somewhere."

She bid Peeta good bye as he walked out the door and decided to wait for Haymitch to finish clearing the board before pouncing.

When he sat back down in the chair, Katniss made her move.

Those dull gray eyes surveyed her tiredly, as though already steeling himself for the tirade that would inevitably follow. Katniss, a fairly beautiful girl with a stunning lack of knowledge about this fact, had a terrible scowl on her face. Her tousled brown hair was pulled back in a tight braid and her large brown eyes narrowed at her professor; she slapped a flyer down on his desk.

He raised an eyebrow. "I only accept tips in cash, sweetie."

"It's a flyer for the Best Young Writers competition," Katniss snapped, taking what could be considered a very disrespectful tone with her professor. "I want to enter. And I want to win. But I don't know whether or not I'm any good at writing—I think I am, but I'm not going to get any better with a professor who shows up twenty minutes late every class smelling like bourbon."

He didn't even flinch or look guilty, just looked up at her with those diamond-dust eyes and crooked a jagged little smile up at her.

"That competition is like…" he paused, waving a hand around as though harvesting the right words from midair, "a gladiator arena. For writers. I've read your stuff, honey, and you'll get ripped apart."

A hot flush of shame crept up her neck and Katniss's lips parted. The hurt was raw in her eyes but her tone was rough with anger. "Oh? So you actually read the papers you assign us? That's good to know."

He raised an eyebrow. "I'm your professor."

"Yeah, that's right," Katniss fired back hotly, "You're our professor. Do your job."

"Listen, sweetie," Haymitch said, sitting forward, shaggy blonde hair falling into his eyes, "I've got tenure. If I want to show up tomorrow at eight in the morning, drop my pants, put a bugle to my asscrack and play 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' with a series of musical farts, I can do that. I can also show up to class whenever I want, if I want to show up to class at all, and I can smell like piss or beer or whatever I feel like smelling that day. This also means you can report me to the dean because I don't give a shit, darlin'."

"You need to start giving a shit," Katniss said flatly. "You're my professor. I'm paying forty thousand dollars a year for this education, and I want to come out of this school being the best damn writer I can be. I can't transfer out of this class, and you've got tenure, as you've already pointed out. So either start giving a damn or this is gonna get real old, real fast."

She smiled at him, hard and bright, forcible and mildly bratty. "I can get annoying pretty quick."

"I've noticed," Haymitch said wearily.

"So?" the girl said, raising her eyebrows, hand on her hip. "What'll it be, Professor?"

He leaned back in his tired old swivel chair and ran a hand through his hair. He looked old but Katniss knew he wasn't even forty yet. He was rumpled and wrinkled and a mess, but those gray eyes were focused and sharper than she had ever seen before. "Tell you what," Haymitch said, in the tone of a tired man conveying one last and final favor, "Give me your best writing. Your best piece. I'll look it over tonight and I'll tell you whether or not it's worth submitting."

Relief washed over her but she didn't let it show on her face. "Great," Katniss said, and turned to gather her things. She strode out of the room, long legs carrying her far away from her drunk, washed-up, lush of a professor.

Even if he did have nice eyes.

Her best piece was an essay titled The Way Things Work, and it was a twelve page paper concisely examining the pros and cons of consumerism, commercialism, and capitalism in American culture. She was ridiculously proud of it, and it had actually gotten published in her small hometown paper. She was a big deal back in her tiny little town—Katniss Everdeen, the girl going off to school to be a writer. There was a lot riding on her.

Part of her knew that Haymitch might not even look at it, and there was a big chance he wouldn't give it more than a cursory glance. Still, she emailed it to him and slept uneasily about it, worrying that he would think she was too biased or too ham-handed or that her sources weren't properly academic.

That self-doubt was what made her a good writer. That's what she thought, anyway—she had been a voracious reader and then a highly competitive writer who was also cripplingly insecure about her craft; it was a dangerous, volatile combination but it worked well for the most part.

Two days later, in class, Haymitch shuffled in at his usual time. His rumpled blonde hair looked shaggier than ever and there were circles under his eyes—he opened his scuffed leather bag and took out a bunch of stapled-together pages.

Katniss felt her heart leap into her throat.

As though it were absolutely nothing, Haymitch tossed her paper back on her desk, face-down, and clapped his hands together. "All right," he called out, bored and tired and still dreadfully hungover from the night before, "Antigone. Discuss."

While her class bustled and murmured about the play, Katniss just stared at her paper.

It was covered in red pen. It looked as though Haymitch had used up three or four pens on the tearing apart of her paper, her thesis, her diction, her sources, her title, everything. Whole paragraphs had slashes through them. Question marks littered the page. There were sloppy, half-scrawled notes in the margins, things that read like What do u mean by this and this is your thesis, right? ELABORATE

Selfishly, childishly, she hoped he was just being mean. She had embarrassed him, even though it had been privately, she had still taken an uppity tone with her professor and this was his way of getting back at her. He would probably mark this against her in her grade. Hot tears filled her eyes and the very real idea of getting back at him somehow—a bad review on Rate The Professors? But he had so many already—was sounding like a very good plan.

The class time seemed to speed by faster than usual, as Katniss couldn't stop leafing through the pages and seeing all the red. The red: it was like he had killed a small, inky animal and scattered its blood all over the page. When he dismissed the class she was half-packed already, determined to get out of there was fast as possible.

"Everdeen!"

She froze, and ground her teeth together. No. He could not want to humiliate her further, did he? Oh god, Haymitch was a cruel man.

Her classmates filed out on either side of her, and she decided she didn't want to face him—she'd just stop showing up to class, she'd take the Incomplete or the N grade or whatever. "Hey!" she heard him call, and her shoulders tensed as she flew towards the door, hustling fast, trying to get past her classmates.

His hand closed around her upper arm. "I was talking to you, sweetheart," he said flatly.

"Thanks," she hissed, and she was horrified to find that her eyes were filling with tears. "Thanks so much, yeah, message received. I got it now. Fuck off, right? Okay, fine, whatever."

He looked…hurt? Was that possible?

"Christ, what do you want from me?" he snapped, running a hand through his hair. He did look hurt, like a kicked dog. "I thought you wanted me to give a shit. I did."

He studied her face and then the hurt evaporated as he examined her eyes. "You…have you never been criticized?"

"You hated it," Katniss growled, her voice burred with heat, "that's fine, that's okay, I didn't—"

"No," Haymitch interrupted sharply, "no, it was a great paper."

But, her mind protested feebly, but the red pen…

The professor looked more serious than she had ever seen him, and not in the haggard, hungover sort of way—in a genuine graveness and solemnity. "If you enter the competition, you've got a real shot."

It was like pulling back the curtains and letting the sunshine flood the room—she could feel the warmth spread all over her, down the full length of her body, the tips of her fingers and the spaces in between her ribs filling up with light. She said nothing but her face was now open, the harsh lines of her face vanished and her scowl gone. In that moment she was utterly, deliriously, amazingly beautiful, like the great and terrible gods that the Greeks worshipped. Her gold flecked eyes were very wide and they looked at him with rapt attention.

"It'll take a shitload of work," he said, wanting to ease her down, wanting her to close up again, because Jesus she's beautiful how didn't I notice this before, but instead it only made her shine harder. How did someone shine without a smile? It was like being outside in the rain with no storm clouds.

"Okay," she said immediately. "Okay. I'll revise it and send it back to you."

Despite that expression, despite the look on her face, she was still a hardass.

But it was that look on her face. Like he'd just told her that she was the solution to every mathematical equation ever created and that her very existence could stop the world on its axis.

"Yeah," he heard himself agreeing. "Yeah, send it back after you revise it. We'll talk about it tomorrow."

An endless game of ping-pong began.

Her inbox filled up with correspondence and drafts of the paper. It soon began to shunt out her other schoolwork and more than once, Haymitch pointed out the timestamp on her email and told her to go to bed. But it was an almost feverish obsession as she wrote and edited, re-cited her sources and found new ones. Twelve pages became fourteen and a half, and that became sixteen, and before she had even really gotten a full night's sleep, sixteen became twenty. It was a shaggy beast of a paper now, miniscule compared to a thesis but far too large to edit in one fell swoop.

She stayed after every class and peppered him with questions. Her determination and ambition was startling and a little awe-inspiring; she was a tyrannic force and it was annoying, sometimes. She knew that he would probably prefer going immediately home and drowning himself in bourbon, but she stayed after class every time, sometimes an hour after class.

Finals loomed overhead like ragged black mountains, and since she'd been ignoring her schoolwork they posed a significant problem. Communication slowed to a trickle and then ceased as she buried herself in geometry, art, and physics for three weeks.

On her final day of English class, she waited after he dismissed them. He had come to expect this now. It took a moment because Peeta wanted to exchange numbers, which she did happily, because he was a sweet boy who smelled nice and she liked studying with him. But in that moment all she wanted him to do was go away, because she wanted to talk to Haymitch.

"So," she began, after Peeta had left, "I just wanted to say…thanks for all your help this semester. It really…it really meant a lot."

He shrugged, shoved his hands in his denim pockets. "My pleasure," he said, and it was.

She twisted the strap of her bag tightly. "I know that the semester is over, and everything, but would you mind if I kept emailing you? The competition submission deadline isn't until August, and I just thought—"

"Yeah, by all means," Haymitch said, and was it a little too quickly? The words felt slow, syrupy, slurry in his mouth. That open, vulnerable look was back on her face and it always made him feel a little foolish, a little reckless, and maybe a little bit in love. He supposed that he was feeling the same way anyone would feel if a girl like Katniss gave them that blistering, raw look of complete and utter emotional acceptance.

Intense.

That was the word. Her gaze was intense.

"Do you…" she began, and then faltered. Then she seemed to scrap up her courage. "Do you want to go grab a bite or a drink somewhere?"

Inviting a drunk for a drink, she thought to herself wryly, now there's a laugh.

He sucked on the inside of his cheek for a moment and then looked at her from beneath a sheaf of blonde hair. "Thaaat…depends," he said slowly. "Are you taking my creative writing class in the fall?"

She blinked. "Um. I don't know. Should I?"

"Well," he scratched the back of his neck, "speaking as your professor, I think you should take it, because I know you're a damn good writer. But speaking as a friend—" here he looked at her and there was a caginess, a wariness in his eyes, as though she would object to being called his friend, "—I can't, ethically, go out and have a drink with you if I'm still your professor."

Those gold-flecked eyes blinked once. "Then I won't take it."

He eyed her.

She slid her bag off her shoulder and let it drop on the chair, before marching around the side of the desk. Haymitch looked at her, momentarily confused, before she closed that professional-personal distance and grabbed his shirt collar. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him hard on the mouth, fingers curling in his collar, mouth soft and half-open. He stood there dumbly for a moment, arms at his sides, just standing there and thinking This beautiful woman is kissing me, before realizing the error of his ways, in the fact that he wasn't kissing her back.

His blunt fingers, much better suited for typing, curled through her thick brown hair and slid to cup her jaw. She tasted like something sweet, perhaps strawberries or peaches or something soft and fruity. Her hand dropped lower and he felt her fingers on the hollow of his throat, and she slanted her mouth to deepen the kiss. One thumb brushed his collarbone and he actually shivered, like a virgin girl.

After a moment she broke away, and that blazing look was all over her face again. "Does anyone else teach creative writing?" she asked.

"Finnick," he breathed, eyes flicking between her gaze and her lips.

"I'll take him. You're a fucking lousy professor."

And then she pulled him close to kiss him again.

Bit of fluff, I haven't written Aberdeen in a while. Something a bit lighter for this couple? I like this AU, I might explore it a little more. –Nylex