THG Fic: "More Than the Sum" (Haymitch/Annie, PG-13, MJ spoilers)
Another Wicked Winter fill here, for trovia
Chars: Haymitch/Annie (yes, I bring you another rare pairing...)
Title: More Than the Sum
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Char death, mentions of murder and sexual slavery.
Spoilers: Post-MJ AU, so CF/MJ spoilers abound.
They were the two left behind. So it was at the reaping. Though at least in Annie’s case it was because Mags loved her and Finnick enough to lay down her life; for Haymitch, it was simply that the boy didn’t trust him to be remotely capable enough to save Katniss. Still, the end result was the same: the two of them in Mentor Central, volunteered for by others, watching the Games and the slaughter from above, helpless to do anything but wheedle sponsors and drop little silver parachutes.
So it was again in Thirteen. The two of them, a pregnant woman and a middle-aged drunk, deemed unfit for battle and left behind as the rest of them went off to war.
So their faces weren’t broadcast on the television with the banner The Heroic Dead. Gale. Peeta. Katniss. Johanna. Finnick. All of them killed in an instant and all the others of their squad too. Nobody survived to tell the tale, and so Haymitch and Annie never knew what had killed them, only that there were no bodies left to be recovered and buried. At least, he reflected, they hadn’t had to watch them die. Still, that television screen had its uncomfortable reminders of The Fallen and faces in the sky.
After that, watching the squabbles and bickers and plays for power as Snow was captured and then Coin in turn was taken down, he was sick of all of it. But going back to District Twelve didn’t appeal. True, perhaps it was where he would fit best: a ruined man among the ashes of a ruined district, but eventually others would come back. He already had lost any hopes of their goodwill long ago. In letting the boy and the girl die this time, in being the one left alive still when better people didn’t come home, he knew not a one of them ever wanted to see his face again.
So he wasn’t quite sure how it happened. Annie didn’t exactly ask and he certainly didn’t. But they left Thirteen together in some kind of unspoken pact that it was time to get the hell out of that place, and somehow by the time they reached the dry deserts of Five, he hadn’t left yet. Apparently Four and the ocean held too many memories for her of her own losses and he was quickly given to understand she didn’t intend to return for a good while, if ever. Five was too warm to remind him of Twelve and probably too dry to remind her of Four and it seemed that suited.
He’d been desired once, for all the misery it had cost him year after year to suffer through the Capitol’s “love”, but that had ended years ago now and he had no wish to endure being desired again. He knew full well that being loved, wanted, or even needed by someone seemed impossibly distant, as wretched a thing as he’d become. But if he could be of any use at all to someone, then that was something giving him at least some small worth.
Her pregnancy was a hard one, so “being of use” sometimes meant fetching medicine or cooking broth or tea when her stomach was too rough to handle anything else. It meant cleaning up vomit as she apologized, embarrassed- though he’d puked enough in his own life to not be bothered by it. It meant pretending not to hear her as she cried sometimes at night, when he was sitting up awake as usual. The child was all she had left of Finnick, so he knew she would fight as hard as she had to in order to see it live, the task consuming so much of her energy and her will.
In a way it became his fight also. If she lost the baby, if she died, that would be one failure too much. The duty he felt towards that warred constantly with the bottle. But swiftly, he realized that he’d be useless in truth if he was drunk all the time. The horror of imagining waking up from a drinking himself into a stupor to find her bleeding or sick or dead and if he’d been sober enough he could have maybe done something began to stay his hand. Denying himself the solace of oblivion eventually became his personal little penance for being the one left alive yet again. Gradually it became easier, though the siren call of it was still there sometimes.
He thought he was actually relieved that the baby, a little boy, had Annie’s black hair rather than Finnick’s bronze. “Dylan,” Annie said, holding on to her son and looking down at him with adoration, the hardship and exhaustion of labor suddenly forgotten. “We agreed we’d name a boy Dylan.” At least she didn’t decide to say to hell with that and name him ‘Finnick’, he thought, slipping out of the room and leaving the two of them alone. It was a tableau with no place for him.
Without Finnick there, she’d been talking to the shrink from Thirteen more about how to deal with her issues after the arena, the sudden flashbacks. He’d hear her whispering to herself sometimes, fingers focusing on some simple task like tying a knot or washing the dishes, “I am Annelle Odair. I’m twenty-four years old. I loved Finnick Odair. I was married to him until he died. We have a son now. His name is Dylan. He’s three months old.” So on and so on, the touchstones of a meaningful life filled with love-wife, mother, daughter, sister.
I am Haymitch Abernathy, he’d think with grim humor when he heard it. I’m forty-two years old. I’m pretty much nothing. Thus ended the recital in his case. After all, “son” and “brother” hadn’t applied for so many years now, and “husband” and “father” never had and never would. His friends had all died in the arena or in the war, or been lost to him years and years ago when he shut himself away from the rest of the district.
Probably a good thing he didn’t sleep at night anyway, because it meant he could go tend to the kid-tend to Dylan-so Annie wouldn’t have to wake up. Sometimes, holding him and feeling the living warmth of another human being, seeing the boy looking up at him with innocent sea-green eyes rather than the nightmarish hunger of the glowing eyes of the mutts that he knew were out there in the darkness, he slept soundly.
Dylan grew older, starting to crawl and get into things. He watched it, feeling himself smile in spite of himself even as he thought, I ought to go. Not like either of ‘em need me around now. Annie was more than recovered from the pregnancy, lively and lovely. If she really needed someone to lift heavy things or to reach taller shelves, he knew there were plenty of young bucks around the town would be more than happy to help out the pretty widow Odair, and some of them wouldn’t even be angling to get in her bed as part of the bargain. He ought to leave before he fucked things up for them somehow. There never had been a person in his life that he hadn’t failed and eventually it meant they ended up dead.
If she’d told him to go he’d have left in a moment. He never quite got up the nerve to do the right thing and leave. Probably it was the prospect of trying to figure out where the hell he’d go, being a man who belonged nowhere and who was unfortunately all too recognizable still to everyone in Panem. Maybe he ought to just find some quiet shack out in the borderlands, bring a rucksack full of liquor, and just drink himself deep into the black one last time and hope this time he didn’t wake. He had that plan all worked out but every morning he’d be sitting down to that kitchen table just the same.
Though even his sheer inaction came to a halt one day when Dylan was coming up on a year old. His baby babbling was gradually turning to words, and he’d mastered “Mama” already. Hearing the two of them sitting there on the living room carpet, Dylan mimicking Annie’s sounds and Annie laughing with pleasure at it, he was halfway lost in his own mind when the sound of “Dada” slammed hard through whatever idiotic musing he’d been lost in.
Frozen for only a minute, staring at Dylan like he was a ticking bomb rather than a little boy, it seemed like in a flash he was upstairs, fumbling with his things, drawers pulled out, plans all shot to hell now. He didn’t even stop to see Annie’s reaction. All that was left was the sheer animal impulse of, Leave now, just get out, you stayed way too long already and it’s done its damage. He’d had no right to even the barest part of Finnick’s place. Annie knew better, of course, but he should have figured the boy wouldn’t.
Annie obviously had put Dylan back in his crib since she didn’t have him in her arms when he looked up to see her standing there with her arms folded, watching him while he was cursing and just trying to pack. “I know, Annie, all right? I’ll go, dammit, just give me a few minutes,” he said fiercely, just trying to skip the whole awkward pain of the conversation.
“Why?” One simple little word, but she knew and she had to be pissed off.
“Because we both know I’m not that boy’s father,” he said curtly, shoving another shirt into his bag. And both we know why Finnick isn’t here. Just another kid I didn’t manage to save from the Capitol in the end.
“Maybe you didn’t father him, but you’re the only father he’s had,” she said, and that did stop him in his tracks. He looked up, seeing her watching him with steady green eyes, afraid that to even mention him after neither of them talked about him at all might have set her off on an episode. But she was made of sterner stuff than that. “And he loves you. He needs you. So leave if that’s what you really want, if you don’t want to keep that responsibility for another man’s son. But if you walk out, don’t bother changing your mind and coming back.”
Ah, Annie, he thought, feeling his heart twist painfully. She didn’t understand. If he left, he wouldn’t ever be coming back. Chances were he’d be dead in a month. Setting the bag down, he moved past her and went to Dylan’s nursery. Seeing him sitting there in the crib, Dylan looked at him and gave a guileless smile that reminded him painfully of Finnick’s already and reached his arms out, obviously wanting to be picked up.
Helpless to do otherwise, he leaned down and picked him up, holding him close, smelling the scent of soap and powder and feeling how the boy clung to him. He’d noticed it before, of course, but he’d never connected it to being thought of as anything but someone there helping tend to him, never imagined Dylan identifying him as a father. He loves you. He needs you, Annie had challenged him.
To simply be loved and needed by someone, for the first time in decades, meant the bonds of that held thick and fast and he knew he couldn’t leave, not now. So he clung to Dylan just the same as the boy held fast to him, even as something in him pleaded, Don’t let me fuck it up, don’t let me fail this one.
So he stayed, and after a while, seeing Annie didn’t wince when Dylan kept calling him “Dada”, he began to relax into it somewhat. Someday he could explain to him, set the record straight and give Finnick back his rightful place again, become “Uncle Haymitch” or whatever. But for now, Dylan was so young, and maybe she was right. He needed sheer security, not complications.
That peace lasted until Dylan was about two and a half. He couldn’t say what it was that prompted it. No romantic sunset over the distant sandstone bluffs, no holiday, no adorable thing Dylan did. They were simply washing dishes, his hand bumped hers as she handed him a plate to dry, and she suddenly leaned over and kissed him. The plate went crashing to the floor as he startled at the contact.
He hadn’t been kissed at all in something like ten years, and it had been even longer than that since he’d been kissed by someone who hadn’t been forced on him. So the sheer physicality of it, like the rare wonder of a burst of rain in the desert, was surprising enough to cause that reaction.
But mostly it was because this was Annie. She was young, pretty. She’d been loved by one of the most beautiful men in Panem, a good and gentle man to boot. What use she could have for a cynical disgraceful old bastard like him he didn’t know. It was hardly his looks. Even back when he was twenty-five he’d been decent-looking, but he’d been no Finnick. It was one thing to let him stay for Dylan’s sake, but this was something else entirely, frightening in its implications. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said roughly. It came out more accusatory than he intended, in his head it had been more confused at wondering what she could want with him.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, color suddenly burning in her cheeks as she brushed a lock of hair back with a quick, nervous gesture.
“I’m not Finnick,” he said equally softly, neither of them looking at each other. Whatever she could want from him, what use he could be to her, would never be anything but a dark shadow of what a wonderful thing she must have had with him. He wouldn’t ever be half as good as the man she’d lost.
“I know.” She took in a deep breath that hitched somewhere in the middle. “You’re you.” Apparently it was an occasion for awkward statements of the obvious. “But of all people you know what it’s like to be this lonely.” He did. He’d lived with it almost all his life. Framed that way, he could imagine three years of lonely widowhood had left their mark, and he knew that solitude induced its own kind of madness. She'd fought hard enough already to keep her demons at bay.
She didn’t say the word love, which made him thankful. She didn’t want him to take Finnick’s place there. But a simple need for comfort, for companionship; he could perhaps offer her that until she was ready to find someone to love. “Yeah,” he told her, turning her face back towards him with a careful hand and leaning down to kiss her.
Somehow he knew she would come to his room that night after Dylan was asleep, and he both anticipated and dreaded it. Lying there awake, alternating between glancing at the door and out the window at the moonlit night since he could never draw the curtains and endure pitch black, he kept thinking about how he ought to just send her back to her room. Then he kept thinking about how it might feel, being touched again by kind hands. Then he fretted about how fucked up sex was in his head, how the last thing he wanted given what she was giving up tonight by coming to him, was to treat her with that meaningless emptiness.
Just please don’t let her say ‘Finnick’, he thought desperately, punching his pillow and trying to get it comfortable. Said either in pleasure or in tears, it would hurt too damn much. He’d taken too much of being with women, and men, who wanted him to be someone he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure he could take it again. At least it had been so long that he wasn’t worried about likewise mistaking her for Briar, who he’d never had the chance to make love with anyway. Annie’s eyes were green and her skin darker-black hair was about all the two had in common.
Hearing the creak of a floorboard he looked up and she was there. At least she hadn’t come blatantly dressed for a seduction, no silk or lace. Just the oversize t-shirt she usually wore, hanging down almost to her knees. She stood there for a minute looking at him, arms awkwardly hugging her chest. “I imagine it’s been a while for you. Since you were with someone you wanted to be with.” Somehow she had the knack of speaking up and leaving the door open for him to just say something in return without making it awkward, or making him feel like the reply was demanded. He didn’t know exactly how she did that sort of quiet invitation, but it was a gift she had nonetheless.
“A good bit longer than you,” he admitted wryly. “It’s…well, for me…” He blew out a slow breath, tried again. “If at some point I ain’t exactly here…it’s from the old days. It’s not any reflection on you.”
She nodded. “I can imagine.” If she’d run into that with Finnick their first times together, she was going to be gracious enough to not say that outright. “If it happens, it happens.” Matter-of-fact in her acceptance of his flaws, he could say that at least. Having her issues be so public had probably forced that in some sense.
She reached down and grabbed the hem of the t-shirt, pulling it up over her head. She might be young, but no denying from her body and the roundness of her breasts and hips that had settled there after Dylan that she was a woman, lithe and lovely, not a girl. She’d lived in ways he hadn’t, had married and had a child. But she’d loved and lost too. They had that in common at least.
Feeling the dip of the bed as she slipped in next to him, he waited until she reached for him first. Slow and careful, he did his best to keep his mind in that bed with her rather than to retreat back into the mindlessness that had become his refuge back in his whoring days. “Stay with me,” she coaxed him once when she must have sensed his mind wandering. She touched him softly on the cheek, her fingers then stroking through his hair, nothing sexual and everything tender about it. She must have done this with Finnick, and that was a flash of sudden revelation. Back when each summer he returned to her a little more broken by playing the whore again and covered with the shame of it. Somehow the thought of it didn’t throw a damper on things; in a way, it was a comfort to realize she could maybe actually handle him in all his utter fucked-up glory.
Shivering at it, the words and the touch pushing at parts of him he’d locked away years ago to stop the bleeding, he kissed her again, as much desperation as desire. At least he knew plenty about pleasure, and for what she was giving him, it was easy to give her that as generously as he could, wanting her to have it, feeling her respond to him first with shyness and then with greater confidence. Needing this to be her choice as he did, that meant it was her that finally urged him to finish it, her that took his cock in a surprisingly steady hand and guided him inside her, her that drew him in closer with her arms and legs wrapped around him.
Fuck, the things she said to him, and when he looked down at her she was looking back at him, seeing him, speaking actually to him. Soft words about him being safe, being a good man, being wanted. Hearing her cry out, just a sound rather than his name or any other, and feeling her shudder as she came, he felt a sense of awe at it like he hadn’t in years. By the time he finished, panting and softly nuzzling her neck, he felt like he was about to start bawling like a damn kid. Idiotic that he was the one on the verge of tears since she was the one who’d lost another piece of her husband tonight by taking another man to bed, but it was true nonetheless. True also that Annie didn’t love him, and if she was smart she never would, but he’d never felt his flaws had ever been so known and accepted anyway.
She curled up and went to sleep, and what dreams she might have dreamt of Finnick, he wouldn’t ask. He lay there, holding a woman in his arms and watching the moon over the desert, hearing only blissful silence that meant Dylan was also sleeping peacefully.
He couldn’t help feeling like a new world had been opened to him, and it was so utterly simple, something he’d always known but couldn’t have accepted until tonight. They had been the two left behind, him and Annie, and now they were three with Dylan. But bound together as they were as a family, they were much more, much stronger, than they ever would be apart. He knew that whatever came of this between them, he could never truly want to leave.
Chars: Haymitch/Annie (yes, I bring you another rare pairing...)
Title: More Than the Sum
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Char death, mentions of murder and sexual slavery.
Spoilers: Post-MJ AU, so CF/MJ spoilers abound.
They were the two left behind. So it was at the reaping. Though at least in Annie’s case it was because Mags loved her and Finnick enough to lay down her life; for Haymitch, it was simply that the boy didn’t trust him to be remotely capable enough to save Katniss. Still, the end result was the same: the two of them in Mentor Central, volunteered for by others, watching the Games and the slaughter from above, helpless to do anything but wheedle sponsors and drop little silver parachutes.
So it was again in Thirteen. The two of them, a pregnant woman and a middle-aged drunk, deemed unfit for battle and left behind as the rest of them went off to war.
So their faces weren’t broadcast on the television with the banner The Heroic Dead. Gale. Peeta. Katniss. Johanna. Finnick. All of them killed in an instant and all the others of their squad too. Nobody survived to tell the tale, and so Haymitch and Annie never knew what had killed them, only that there were no bodies left to be recovered and buried. At least, he reflected, they hadn’t had to watch them die. Still, that television screen had its uncomfortable reminders of The Fallen and faces in the sky.
After that, watching the squabbles and bickers and plays for power as Snow was captured and then Coin in turn was taken down, he was sick of all of it. But going back to District Twelve didn’t appeal. True, perhaps it was where he would fit best: a ruined man among the ashes of a ruined district, but eventually others would come back. He already had lost any hopes of their goodwill long ago. In letting the boy and the girl die this time, in being the one left alive still when better people didn’t come home, he knew not a one of them ever wanted to see his face again.
So he wasn’t quite sure how it happened. Annie didn’t exactly ask and he certainly didn’t. But they left Thirteen together in some kind of unspoken pact that it was time to get the hell out of that place, and somehow by the time they reached the dry deserts of Five, he hadn’t left yet. Apparently Four and the ocean held too many memories for her of her own losses and he was quickly given to understand she didn’t intend to return for a good while, if ever. Five was too warm to remind him of Twelve and probably too dry to remind her of Four and it seemed that suited.
He’d been desired once, for all the misery it had cost him year after year to suffer through the Capitol’s “love”, but that had ended years ago now and he had no wish to endure being desired again. He knew full well that being loved, wanted, or even needed by someone seemed impossibly distant, as wretched a thing as he’d become. But if he could be of any use at all to someone, then that was something giving him at least some small worth.
Her pregnancy was a hard one, so “being of use” sometimes meant fetching medicine or cooking broth or tea when her stomach was too rough to handle anything else. It meant cleaning up vomit as she apologized, embarrassed- though he’d puked enough in his own life to not be bothered by it. It meant pretending not to hear her as she cried sometimes at night, when he was sitting up awake as usual. The child was all she had left of Finnick, so he knew she would fight as hard as she had to in order to see it live, the task consuming so much of her energy and her will.
In a way it became his fight also. If she lost the baby, if she died, that would be one failure too much. The duty he felt towards that warred constantly with the bottle. But swiftly, he realized that he’d be useless in truth if he was drunk all the time. The horror of imagining waking up from a drinking himself into a stupor to find her bleeding or sick or dead and if he’d been sober enough he could have maybe done something began to stay his hand. Denying himself the solace of oblivion eventually became his personal little penance for being the one left alive yet again. Gradually it became easier, though the siren call of it was still there sometimes.
He thought he was actually relieved that the baby, a little boy, had Annie’s black hair rather than Finnick’s bronze. “Dylan,” Annie said, holding on to her son and looking down at him with adoration, the hardship and exhaustion of labor suddenly forgotten. “We agreed we’d name a boy Dylan.” At least she didn’t decide to say to hell with that and name him ‘Finnick’, he thought, slipping out of the room and leaving the two of them alone. It was a tableau with no place for him.
Without Finnick there, she’d been talking to the shrink from Thirteen more about how to deal with her issues after the arena, the sudden flashbacks. He’d hear her whispering to herself sometimes, fingers focusing on some simple task like tying a knot or washing the dishes, “I am Annelle Odair. I’m twenty-four years old. I loved Finnick Odair. I was married to him until he died. We have a son now. His name is Dylan. He’s three months old.” So on and so on, the touchstones of a meaningful life filled with love-wife, mother, daughter, sister.
I am Haymitch Abernathy, he’d think with grim humor when he heard it. I’m forty-two years old. I’m pretty much nothing. Thus ended the recital in his case. After all, “son” and “brother” hadn’t applied for so many years now, and “husband” and “father” never had and never would. His friends had all died in the arena or in the war, or been lost to him years and years ago when he shut himself away from the rest of the district.
Probably a good thing he didn’t sleep at night anyway, because it meant he could go tend to the kid-tend to Dylan-so Annie wouldn’t have to wake up. Sometimes, holding him and feeling the living warmth of another human being, seeing the boy looking up at him with innocent sea-green eyes rather than the nightmarish hunger of the glowing eyes of the mutts that he knew were out there in the darkness, he slept soundly.
Dylan grew older, starting to crawl and get into things. He watched it, feeling himself smile in spite of himself even as he thought, I ought to go. Not like either of ‘em need me around now. Annie was more than recovered from the pregnancy, lively and lovely. If she really needed someone to lift heavy things or to reach taller shelves, he knew there were plenty of young bucks around the town would be more than happy to help out the pretty widow Odair, and some of them wouldn’t even be angling to get in her bed as part of the bargain. He ought to leave before he fucked things up for them somehow. There never had been a person in his life that he hadn’t failed and eventually it meant they ended up dead.
If she’d told him to go he’d have left in a moment. He never quite got up the nerve to do the right thing and leave. Probably it was the prospect of trying to figure out where the hell he’d go, being a man who belonged nowhere and who was unfortunately all too recognizable still to everyone in Panem. Maybe he ought to just find some quiet shack out in the borderlands, bring a rucksack full of liquor, and just drink himself deep into the black one last time and hope this time he didn’t wake. He had that plan all worked out but every morning he’d be sitting down to that kitchen table just the same.
Though even his sheer inaction came to a halt one day when Dylan was coming up on a year old. His baby babbling was gradually turning to words, and he’d mastered “Mama” already. Hearing the two of them sitting there on the living room carpet, Dylan mimicking Annie’s sounds and Annie laughing with pleasure at it, he was halfway lost in his own mind when the sound of “Dada” slammed hard through whatever idiotic musing he’d been lost in.
Frozen for only a minute, staring at Dylan like he was a ticking bomb rather than a little boy, it seemed like in a flash he was upstairs, fumbling with his things, drawers pulled out, plans all shot to hell now. He didn’t even stop to see Annie’s reaction. All that was left was the sheer animal impulse of, Leave now, just get out, you stayed way too long already and it’s done its damage. He’d had no right to even the barest part of Finnick’s place. Annie knew better, of course, but he should have figured the boy wouldn’t.
Annie obviously had put Dylan back in his crib since she didn’t have him in her arms when he looked up to see her standing there with her arms folded, watching him while he was cursing and just trying to pack. “I know, Annie, all right? I’ll go, dammit, just give me a few minutes,” he said fiercely, just trying to skip the whole awkward pain of the conversation.
“Why?” One simple little word, but she knew and she had to be pissed off.
“Because we both know I’m not that boy’s father,” he said curtly, shoving another shirt into his bag. And both we know why Finnick isn’t here. Just another kid I didn’t manage to save from the Capitol in the end.
“Maybe you didn’t father him, but you’re the only father he’s had,” she said, and that did stop him in his tracks. He looked up, seeing her watching him with steady green eyes, afraid that to even mention him after neither of them talked about him at all might have set her off on an episode. But she was made of sterner stuff than that. “And he loves you. He needs you. So leave if that’s what you really want, if you don’t want to keep that responsibility for another man’s son. But if you walk out, don’t bother changing your mind and coming back.”
Ah, Annie, he thought, feeling his heart twist painfully. She didn’t understand. If he left, he wouldn’t ever be coming back. Chances were he’d be dead in a month. Setting the bag down, he moved past her and went to Dylan’s nursery. Seeing him sitting there in the crib, Dylan looked at him and gave a guileless smile that reminded him painfully of Finnick’s already and reached his arms out, obviously wanting to be picked up.
Helpless to do otherwise, he leaned down and picked him up, holding him close, smelling the scent of soap and powder and feeling how the boy clung to him. He’d noticed it before, of course, but he’d never connected it to being thought of as anything but someone there helping tend to him, never imagined Dylan identifying him as a father. He loves you. He needs you, Annie had challenged him.
To simply be loved and needed by someone, for the first time in decades, meant the bonds of that held thick and fast and he knew he couldn’t leave, not now. So he clung to Dylan just the same as the boy held fast to him, even as something in him pleaded, Don’t let me fuck it up, don’t let me fail this one.
So he stayed, and after a while, seeing Annie didn’t wince when Dylan kept calling him “Dada”, he began to relax into it somewhat. Someday he could explain to him, set the record straight and give Finnick back his rightful place again, become “Uncle Haymitch” or whatever. But for now, Dylan was so young, and maybe she was right. He needed sheer security, not complications.
That peace lasted until Dylan was about two and a half. He couldn’t say what it was that prompted it. No romantic sunset over the distant sandstone bluffs, no holiday, no adorable thing Dylan did. They were simply washing dishes, his hand bumped hers as she handed him a plate to dry, and she suddenly leaned over and kissed him. The plate went crashing to the floor as he startled at the contact.
He hadn’t been kissed at all in something like ten years, and it had been even longer than that since he’d been kissed by someone who hadn’t been forced on him. So the sheer physicality of it, like the rare wonder of a burst of rain in the desert, was surprising enough to cause that reaction.
But mostly it was because this was Annie. She was young, pretty. She’d been loved by one of the most beautiful men in Panem, a good and gentle man to boot. What use she could have for a cynical disgraceful old bastard like him he didn’t know. It was hardly his looks. Even back when he was twenty-five he’d been decent-looking, but he’d been no Finnick. It was one thing to let him stay for Dylan’s sake, but this was something else entirely, frightening in its implications. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said roughly. It came out more accusatory than he intended, in his head it had been more confused at wondering what she could want with him.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, color suddenly burning in her cheeks as she brushed a lock of hair back with a quick, nervous gesture.
“I’m not Finnick,” he said equally softly, neither of them looking at each other. Whatever she could want from him, what use he could be to her, would never be anything but a dark shadow of what a wonderful thing she must have had with him. He wouldn’t ever be half as good as the man she’d lost.
“I know.” She took in a deep breath that hitched somewhere in the middle. “You’re you.” Apparently it was an occasion for awkward statements of the obvious. “But of all people you know what it’s like to be this lonely.” He did. He’d lived with it almost all his life. Framed that way, he could imagine three years of lonely widowhood had left their mark, and he knew that solitude induced its own kind of madness. She'd fought hard enough already to keep her demons at bay.
She didn’t say the word love, which made him thankful. She didn’t want him to take Finnick’s place there. But a simple need for comfort, for companionship; he could perhaps offer her that until she was ready to find someone to love. “Yeah,” he told her, turning her face back towards him with a careful hand and leaning down to kiss her.
Somehow he knew she would come to his room that night after Dylan was asleep, and he both anticipated and dreaded it. Lying there awake, alternating between glancing at the door and out the window at the moonlit night since he could never draw the curtains and endure pitch black, he kept thinking about how he ought to just send her back to her room. Then he kept thinking about how it might feel, being touched again by kind hands. Then he fretted about how fucked up sex was in his head, how the last thing he wanted given what she was giving up tonight by coming to him, was to treat her with that meaningless emptiness.
Just please don’t let her say ‘Finnick’, he thought desperately, punching his pillow and trying to get it comfortable. Said either in pleasure or in tears, it would hurt too damn much. He’d taken too much of being with women, and men, who wanted him to be someone he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure he could take it again. At least it had been so long that he wasn’t worried about likewise mistaking her for Briar, who he’d never had the chance to make love with anyway. Annie’s eyes were green and her skin darker-black hair was about all the two had in common.
Hearing the creak of a floorboard he looked up and she was there. At least she hadn’t come blatantly dressed for a seduction, no silk or lace. Just the oversize t-shirt she usually wore, hanging down almost to her knees. She stood there for a minute looking at him, arms awkwardly hugging her chest. “I imagine it’s been a while for you. Since you were with someone you wanted to be with.” Somehow she had the knack of speaking up and leaving the door open for him to just say something in return without making it awkward, or making him feel like the reply was demanded. He didn’t know exactly how she did that sort of quiet invitation, but it was a gift she had nonetheless.
“A good bit longer than you,” he admitted wryly. “It’s…well, for me…” He blew out a slow breath, tried again. “If at some point I ain’t exactly here…it’s from the old days. It’s not any reflection on you.”
She nodded. “I can imagine.” If she’d run into that with Finnick their first times together, she was going to be gracious enough to not say that outright. “If it happens, it happens.” Matter-of-fact in her acceptance of his flaws, he could say that at least. Having her issues be so public had probably forced that in some sense.
She reached down and grabbed the hem of the t-shirt, pulling it up over her head. She might be young, but no denying from her body and the roundness of her breasts and hips that had settled there after Dylan that she was a woman, lithe and lovely, not a girl. She’d lived in ways he hadn’t, had married and had a child. But she’d loved and lost too. They had that in common at least.
Feeling the dip of the bed as she slipped in next to him, he waited until she reached for him first. Slow and careful, he did his best to keep his mind in that bed with her rather than to retreat back into the mindlessness that had become his refuge back in his whoring days. “Stay with me,” she coaxed him once when she must have sensed his mind wandering. She touched him softly on the cheek, her fingers then stroking through his hair, nothing sexual and everything tender about it. She must have done this with Finnick, and that was a flash of sudden revelation. Back when each summer he returned to her a little more broken by playing the whore again and covered with the shame of it. Somehow the thought of it didn’t throw a damper on things; in a way, it was a comfort to realize she could maybe actually handle him in all his utter fucked-up glory.
Shivering at it, the words and the touch pushing at parts of him he’d locked away years ago to stop the bleeding, he kissed her again, as much desperation as desire. At least he knew plenty about pleasure, and for what she was giving him, it was easy to give her that as generously as he could, wanting her to have it, feeling her respond to him first with shyness and then with greater confidence. Needing this to be her choice as he did, that meant it was her that finally urged him to finish it, her that took his cock in a surprisingly steady hand and guided him inside her, her that drew him in closer with her arms and legs wrapped around him.
Fuck, the things she said to him, and when he looked down at her she was looking back at him, seeing him, speaking actually to him. Soft words about him being safe, being a good man, being wanted. Hearing her cry out, just a sound rather than his name or any other, and feeling her shudder as she came, he felt a sense of awe at it like he hadn’t in years. By the time he finished, panting and softly nuzzling her neck, he felt like he was about to start bawling like a damn kid. Idiotic that he was the one on the verge of tears since she was the one who’d lost another piece of her husband tonight by taking another man to bed, but it was true nonetheless. True also that Annie didn’t love him, and if she was smart she never would, but he’d never felt his flaws had ever been so known and accepted anyway.
She curled up and went to sleep, and what dreams she might have dreamt of Finnick, he wouldn’t ask. He lay there, holding a woman in his arms and watching the moon over the desert, hearing only blissful silence that meant Dylan was also sleeping peacefully.
He couldn’t help feeling like a new world had been opened to him, and it was so utterly simple, something he’d always known but couldn’t have accepted until tonight. They had been the two left behind, him and Annie, and now they were three with Dylan. But bound together as they were as a family, they were much more, much stronger, than they ever would be apart. He knew that whatever came of this between them, he could never truly want to leave.