Scylla and Charybdis [3/9] (The Hunger Games, Finnick/Annie)
Chapter Three! In which Annie's crazy, Finnick's overworked and underpaid, and Haymitch is a better listener than you might expect.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [3/9] ( or read the whole thing at AO3 )
Authors: puella_nerdii and mithrigil
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Characters: Finnick/Annie; Mags, Haymitch, Johanna, Snow, various victors and denizens of the Capitol, and original characters.
Words: About 61000 in total. This chapter, ~7500.
Rating: R (expected THG violence, sexuality, recreational drug use, forced prostitution)
Spoilers: Backstory revealed in Mockingjay.
Summary: Finnick decides that, come hell or high water, he is bringing his tribute home from the seventieth Hunger Games. That tribute is Annie Cresta. But Finnick never thought that he would have to choose between bringing her home and keeping her safe, and he wants both. How Annie Cresta crept up on Finnick Odair.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine
Chapter Three: Unlike Achilles in his Tent When Finnick’s plans for Annie fall through, he scrambles to keep her afloat, but there are dangers in the arena that not even the most well-intentioned mentor can protect his tribute from.
“Is she out of the woods, Cecelia?”
“Yes, she made it to the water.” Cecelia sighs, like she’s almost as relieved as I am, or at least almost as tired. This close to the Training Center, the reception in the car phone isn’t garbled at all. “She’s in the river now, behind the dam. I don’t think she’ll be going near the shore any time soon.”
“She’s a good swimmer,” I say, but for praise it falls awfully flat. “She can survive up there--”
My voice cracks, and I check the front seat of the car, make sure the glass pane between my driver and me is closed and soundproofed.
“Cecelia, I screwed up,” I tell her.
“You’re still learning, Finnick,” she says.
“And the longer it takes me to learn, the more kids die because I didn’t know how to keep them safe.”
“Well then that’s a lesson you can check off for this year.” I wish I knew whether she was smiling when she said it. Either way, my throat stings. “All right, she’s wounded, but I don’t think she even notices. She’ll be fine until morning. Go check on Mags.”
“I’ll get her medicine,” I say. “And I will.”
I bolt up the steps to the Training Center and don’t bother with the elevator, just sprint down the stairs until I reach the hospital ward. I shove the double-doors open and scan the room for Mags’s bed. The ward isn’t that big, she must be close by.
Tall plastic dividers frame a section in the corner, and doctors hover around it like vultures. Seeder is standing at the foot of the cubicle, just out of reach of the bed. She sees me about the same time I see her, and waves me over.
“Thank you,” I tell her, can’t keep the ragged edge out of my voice. “How is she?”
“Still out,” Seeder says. “Stabilizing, from what I can hear. She’ll pull through.”
I nod. I can’t bring myself to do much more than that.
“Julia’s called Mags’s son already.” Seeder puts an arm around my waist. “I told her it might not be the most sensitive thing to do, but Julia said he’d got a right to know, even today.”
“It makes me never want to have children,” I say. “Knowing I could watch them die...”
“A lot of us say that.” But she doesn’t press it, just keeps me close.
I don’t know how long we stand there. I don’t know what the doctors are saying, doing. By the time Mags comes to and opens her eyes around the clear plastic mask over her mouth, it hurts to breathe. She looks at Seeder first, and then at me.
I shove one of the doctors out of the way, sink to my knees, and rest my head in her lap the way I used to. She’d comb out my curls with her fingers, sing sea-chanties to me under her breath in her cracked, warbling voice. Her hands hang limp at her sides now, and the only sound coming from her is the harsh rasp of her breath.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
I can see her hand trying to lift, but it doesn’t make it to my hair.
“You don’t have to,” I tell her, draw a deep breath to steady myself. “You can rest. I’m here.”
Seeder comes up behind me and takes Mags’s hand. “And I think she’s telling you to get yourself upstairs, now that she knows.”
“I can’t leave her, Seeder.”
“You aren’t. I’m here. And if you stay here, no one will be there for Annie.”
Cold settles at the bottom of my stomach. I can’t look at Mags anymore. I drop my head, study the pattern of squares on the floor. I need something to do with my hands.
***
“Come on,” I keep whispering at the screens. “Annie, if you don’t come to the surface, I won’t know what kind of wounds you have. Annie, please.”
Beetee, next to me, is hard at work with a set of tiny screwdrivers, taking apart a little black music-chip player. He has his glasses off, but a magnifying glass mounted on one eye like a jeweler, and his free eye is squinting. Lucky him, he probably can’t see the televisions at all like that. “Have you tried looking through the replays?”
“I did. It happened too fast, and it was too dark to see.” I watched them twice last night. The Capitol is fascinated with this development. I think it would make me sick if I didn’t already feel hollow. “It’s probably just cuts, but I still want to be sure.”
“If they’re cuts and she hasn’t bled out, she’s tougher than I thought,” Beetee says.
I keep my eyes hard on the screens. Any minute now. Please, Annie, come up for air. “Same goes for yours.”
“Oh, Telluria?” Beetee doesn’t laugh, but he does sound proud and hopeful. “She’s one of the best we’ve ever had. Her father designs sims.”
Her father designs sims. That girl with the sword has probably been running hand-to-hand combat scenarios all her life.
“I screwed up,” I say again. It hurts my throat.
“Yes, you and everyone else,” Beetee says. “That’s usually how we manage to pull through in Three.”
“Well, good on you.” Annie’s face is turned up to the sky, and her hair is fanning out around her face, still tangled with leaves and the tail ends of cobwebs. Her arms spread, and she floats on her back. I can see the gashes in her clothes, her left pant leg hanging on by a thread and the angry red welts on her thighs and upper arms. Scrapes and cuts. The salt water’s done them a favor, but it’s probably not enough. There are three cuts just like those running from her forehead up into her hair. I remember that hand, reaching out of the trees.
“All right,” I breathe. “Something to clean it, and treatment for the cuts.” No bandages, she’ll just get them wet. Besides, they’re expensive. But a water filter, she’ll need that too, and I know I need to save money for food in case she can’t hunt.
I call up the parachutiers. “Hello, Finnick!” someone chirps over the phone. “Do you need to know your budget?”
“Tell me after,” I say. “Do you have Annie’s position?”
“Yes we do!”
“I’d like you to get together one case. Hydrogen peroxide and a bacit antibiotic for her skin, and a sealant. No bandages. Wait, not bandages, but some thin cloth, a tight mesh.”
“What color?”
“I don’t care, it’s for water filtration.”
“Ooh, smart! That’s actually about a quarter of the price of a real water filter. Good on you, Finnick.” They send a little picture of what they’ve assembled to the corner of the television screen nearest me. “That look about right?”
“Yes--wait. Some plastic sheeting, four feet square, and a jar. That should do it.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to splurge on one little something that’ll go straight to the cuts?”
“No. I want it to be something she knows. Something familiar. Just the basics.”
“Then it’s all on a push of the button.” One on the console by my right hand flares up. “Just so you know, your budget--”
“Later,” I say, “and thank you,” and I hang up.
She opens her eyes, so green against the murk of the dammed river. I whisper I’m sorry, and push the button.
The cameras watch the little silver parachute fall, wafting down onto the water. It lands just over her right shoulder. If the river wasn’t drifting that way, Annie might have completely missed it, but this way, she floats into it, and it startles her. Treading water, she wraps an arm around it and holds it close, burying her face in the glistening cloth. She kicks her way not to shore but to the structure of the dam, and braces her feet in a crack down the reservoir wall’s center so she can climb out. It’s a good thirty feet down to the riverbed from there. She sits on the top, and opens the parcel, then starts taking off her clothes to see to the wounds.
“Good,” I can’t help saying, even if everyone in the victors’ lounge can hear me. “She’s got it.” She’ll have to keep out of the water for a while after this, but none of the other tributes have made it up here, they’re too busy thinning each others’ ranks in the riverbed. By the time some of them brave it through the forest, she’ll have found a place to hide.
Annie splashes the peroxide over her cuts and shudders. It must sting, with all the salt that’s worked its way into her cuts.
“You send her medicine and she gets naked,” Cashmere says. “She must really want to win.”
“I hope so,” I say. I don’t move my eyes from the screen.
But Cashmere doesn’t take that as sincerely as I expected. “Ladies and Gentlemen of Panem, Love ‘em and Leave ‘em Finnick Odair finally wants a two-night stand.”
I got into this with Johanna. I don’t feel like rehashing it. “She’s my tribute.”
The cameras stay trained on Annie. She’s just about finished with the peroxide, one capful at a time, everywhere but the cuts on her face so far. For some reason the cameras zoom in on the wounds bubbling up and she grimaces but doesn’t cry out yet, not like before. That’s good.
Cashmere sighs. “And wouldn’t it be just the right scandal for the rest of your image.”
“What, responsibility?” Come to think of it, responsibility would damage my reputation beyond repair. Maybe I should try it more often.
She shrugs. “Well, it could’ve been worse if it had been the other way around. She takes off her clothes, then you send her medicine. That would’ve gotten the message right across.”
Annie screws the cap of the peroxide on with trembling fingers, and rinses her hands in the water. She doesn’t stop wringing them, twists them again and again until I worry the salt will scour her skin off. The string I gave her is still knotted around her thumb.
“There’s no message, Cashmere. I didn’t sleep with her.” There, I’ve addressed her main concern. Hopefully that’ll shut her up.
She falls silent, and I lean forward, my chin propped on my hands. Annie finally pries her hands out of the water and remembers the antibiotic. She squeezes some out onto her fingers, presses them into the gash on her left thigh. The cameras barely pick up the sound, but she definitely mouths my name.
Everyone in Panem sees that.
I’d say I screwed up again, but Cashmere would take that the wrong way. “Oh, please,” she says, and it looks like she’s taking it there anyway. “The last time a tribute moaned my name like that, Gloss hacked her hand off while it was still up her--”
“Well, you two always have been close,” I say flatly.
Gloss’s hand curls on my shoulder. His nails are filed into squares. That means they’re too close. “Say that again?” he asks.
I flash my teeth. “I said, you two have always been close.”
He shoves my face into the television screen. Stars explode behind my eyes, and my nose smarts--I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s swelling enough that I need to open my mouth to breathe. Good thing, too, because the next thing he does is pull back my chair and throw me to the floor with it. Doesn’t knock the wind out of me, but it’s close. I know I’m lying flat, but the rest of my body doesn’t, since the floor seems to shudder and tip under me.
“Never expected to hear that from you,” Gloss snarls, towering over me.
I struggle to my elbows so I can get a vague sideways look at the screen. “Then tell your sister to knock it off,” I say. “She leaves my reputation alone, I don’t say anything about yours.”
Cashmere and Gloss look at each other. If the line between their eyes was a wire I could walk across it. Without a word, he backs off, even offers me an arm, if not an apology. I’ll take the arm, my vision is still turning black at the corners.
I stand there long enough to make sure Annie’s finished applying the medicine. She does, and the cameras cut away. The girl from District 3, Telluria, is chasing down Spindle and the boy from District 9. That’ll keep the Capitol occupied for a few hours. “I need air,” I say, and manage not to slam the door behind me this time.
Haymitch is already on the roof, sprawled over the bench, his bottle dangling from his fist. “Tell me you haven’t started a new one already,” I say.
“I did. Chaff was just up here.” The butt of the bottle nestles in the dirt. “More if you want it.”
I push his feet off the bench and sit down, let my shoulders slump forward, let my head loll in my hands. The light of the Capitol pulses overhead somewhere, but it’s nice not to look at it for a while. “I think I do.”
It takes some effort, but he hoists the bottle up and slams it into my thigh, leaving a mudstain that Drusus is going to lecture me about later. I snatch it and drink. If I swallow fast enough I don’t have to taste it, but it still scalds my throat going down. Once I’ve stopped spluttering, I say, “I don’t know how you drink this stuff.”
“Years of training,” he says. “Daily regimen. The kind of stuff that makes Peacekeepers cry and write home to mommy.”
“Ha,” I say, and take another swallow, open my throat. I can’t emphasize enough how awful this tastes; it’s like the liquor’s rotting in my mouth.
Haymitch laughs too. “You think I’m kidding. I’m not. Couldn’t even keep it down at first.”
“You learn, I guess.” I set the bottle down, or mean to, but I can’t let go of the neck, and when I realize that my fingers draw even tighter. “You were right.”
He exhales, sharply. “What was that?”
“You were right,” I repeat.
“Just wanted to make sure you said it. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
My throat’s too scalded by the white liquor for me to make much of an effort at talking, so I nod. If he gloats, though, I swear I’ll punch him again.
He doesn’t gloat. He props his elbows on his knees and hangs his head. “Guess that’s your lesson for the year. Johanna learns they’re gonna die, you learn that you can’t save ‘em.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I drink again. The third time must be the charm, because I don’t mind the burn as much. How quickly does this kick in?
“Gets easier,” he says, and I can’t tell if that’s about the drink or the reason we’re drinking. “You learn to pick them, or pick between them, or pickaxe them in the head before they even go in just to save yourself the trouble. Year in, year out. Least you’ll get a break. You can have time to go home, meet the kids before you reap them. Have them, if you want. You probably won’t. At least you’ll have an excuse, I wonder if Snow’s killed off all your chances of that. Kids.”
I see Varin’s head land at Annie’s feet, see the roots of those trees crawl forward to soak in the blood, see Mags struggle to form words with the side of her mouth that still works. It’s too soon to take another drink. At this rate, I’ll polish off the bottle before Haymitch has any, though I doubt he cares, it’s not like he spends his money on anything else. I drink anyway, and it makes slumping into the bench easier, makes the lights overhead hurt less to stare at.
“And after a while,” Haymitch goes on, “you wise up and stop wanting them to win. What’s winning? Life? My life? Your life? I don’t envy you your life. I send twice as many kids to die as you’re ever gonna and I don’t envy Finnick Odair his life.”
“And if I give up on them,” I say, set the bottle beside me for now, “then what do I do?”
“You sleep a little more at night.” He takes the bottle back, takes a swig that puts mine to shame. “Or maybe you don’t. But you know the kids aren’t alive, and if they aren’t alive, at least they aren’t you.”
I shake my head. It does absolutely nothing to clear it. The lights smear as they hit the force field, I notice, blur just enough around the edges to make it look like I’m seeing the city through plastic. “When Finnick Odair thinks something, you have to believe him, or else you feel like you’re letting him down. She said that.” I can remember it all. The words are branded into the back of my mind. “And I said--”
I can’t say it.
“And I let her down.”
Haymitch takes a breath so deep that it could drown him, and shoves the bottle back into my lap. I accept and drink until my throat can’t take it anymore.
“Whoa, whoa there, kid. Save some for the fishes.” He tries to wrest it back, and it splashes my face and my chest, but there’s still about a quarter left in the bottle. The alcohol stings the corners of my eyes, and the parts of my nose still raw from where it hit the screen, but I don’t try to wipe it off. “You did all you thought you could.”
“It worked for me,” I say. That came out wrong. “Not--she wasn’t being me, I didn’t tell her to, but catching the audience off-guard, sticking with the Careers, that works. Not just for me, I mean. It’s worked before.”
“And why’d you think it would work for her?”
I shut my eyes, rub my forehead like I’m trying to squeeze that thought out. “I don’t know. I thought--I thought I could make them see her.”
“See her and what? Love her?”
“Believe in her. Think she had a shot.”
Haymitch laughs, as bitter as I’ve ever heard. “That’s not how you win. That’s not how anyone but you wins.”
“Where you come from,” I shoot back, make a grab for the bottle. He lets me take it.
“And what’d you see? What did you want them,” he sweeps his arm out at the Capitol, the cameras, the haloed lights, “to see in her?”
“Still waters,” I say. “Running deep.”
This time, Haymitch’s laughter isn’t bitter. It’s barking and awful and rings in my ears, drowns out the cars and the music in the streets. I think he’d knock the bench over if it wasn’t bolted to the roof. I’m also pretty sure he uproots a plant, but it’s hard to tell, the light’s swimming up here. Or I’m swimming in it.
“That. That is Capitol bullshit,” he says, just before he falls off the bench. “--ow.”
I don’t bother to help him up. “It’s not. It’s what I saw. Maybe not in those words, but I saw it.”
“You sound like a stylist. You’ve been here too long, kid. It’s gotten under your skin. Must’ve shoved it up your veins with the tracker.” The laughter still sharpens his voice but the words are slurring closer and closer together. “Then again. Maybe you do know what they want. After all, you are it.”
I can’t draw my knees up to my chest, so I slouch forward to rest my elbows against them, my hands gripping my hair. That’s sharp, sharp enough to be clear. My name is Finnick Odair, I think. I am nineteen years old. I am the victor of the sixty-fifth Hunger Games. “I am the highest-paid whore in Panem.”
--I said that. I didn’t mean to. It just slipped.
Haymitch hauls himself back up to the bench. He doesn’t say anything, but he breathes, short and sharp, the way that means go on. So I do.
"I guess that's an accomplishment,” I say, and my smile would be awful if my mouth wasn’t so slack. “Would be if I saw any of the money, anyway. How much did I add to the state budget last year? Must've at least supplied some of the president's personal allowances. Maybe I funded his garden. He should give me a plaque. Here lies Finnick Odair." I pause. "Here grows Finnick Odair."
“I hate those roses.” Haymitch says. “Hate them, and hate him.”
“You and me and all the rest of us.” Are there cameras up here? Or bugs? I squint, but it’s hard to make them out in the dark and half the things I catch out of the corner of my eye might not be what I think they are, anyway. Even if they are watching, even if the feed’s piped directly to Snow’s office, so what? He knows everything else, he must know that. “I hate them all,” I say. It sounds flat, but why shouldn’t it? It’s true. “And I’m one of them.”
He grabs me by the shoulder, just like Gloss, but instead of shoving me off he pulls me down into the crook of his arm, holds me there, tapping his fingers on my head. I can’t tell if it’s affectionate or just because I’d fall over otherwise.
“I’m theirs,” I say. The words don’t feel like mine, quite; my lips must be moving, but I can’t feel them. “Not mine. I look for mine, what’s mine, I mean, and--” I pound my chest, wait to see if the sound echoes. “I can’t find it.” And then I cough, shudder enough to throw Haymitch’s arm off for a minute. He puts it back quick, though, keeps my face turned away and his hand on my head.
“That’s ‘cause there isn’t anything.” He sighs. I can feel him sigh, feel myself sinking. “They take what’s ours. That’s how it works.”
Mags flashes in my mind, sunken and small in her hospital bed, staring at nothing at all. She said she’d look after Annie if I couldn’t. I should have promised that for Varin. And now I’m all Mags has, and all Annie has. “I don’t want to lose her, Haymitch.”
“Thought you said she wasn’t yours.” He knocks my head to the side. It’s on his chest now. He smells awful. I don’t mind enough to move. “Thought you said you couldn’t find anything that was yours.”
“She’s not mine.” I’d shake my head, but it’s too thick for that to work. Even my tongue’s swelling in my mouth, making it hard to talk around. “I just don’t want to lose her.”
He doesn’t say anything to that, and neither do I, not for a good long while. Claudius Templesmith’s voice blares out of every speaker in range, and the screens light up just the same as the sky over the Arena. I think Spindle and the boy from 9 are dead, the only two faces tonight, but they’re twisting into grey nightmares, reshaping themselves where the stars should be.
“I can’t stay,” I say, try to lift my head, but it sinks back into Haymitch’s chest. “I have somewhere to be. A date.”
Haymitch snickers. “A date.”
“A date,” I say again, and if there’s nothing in my voice at all that’s probably for the best.
He hoists me up, walks me away from the bench. There’s a rail, so I grip it, but then the city streets are swirling behind my eyes and I can’t stop staring. “Wait, wait,” Haymitch says, “if you’re gonna hurl, don’t pitch it over the side of the building. It’ll just come back and hit you in the face.”
“Not yet,” I say, blink down at the city. “I’ll take a purgative. Take painkillers. Won’t feel anything.”
“You’ll feel it in the morning.” He pulls me back, tries to steady me again. I remember I drank most of the bottle. I wonder where the bottle is. He can’t have finished it. “Take care of yourself, if you’re gonna take care of that girl.”
“That’s why I should go,” I say. Make myself presentable. Drusus--well, Drusus will kill me, but after that he’ll fix me up. It’s the Capitol, they have drugs to take this away, they can take anything away if you let them. “I should--”
I’m still holding on to the rail.
Haymitch pries me off it, one finger at a time. “Come on.” He gives me a shove towards the elevator. I stumble towards it and he hauls me up by the collar of my jacket, half-drags me to the door, even pushes the button for me. “Thank you,” I say, and turn around so I can actually do that, close my eyes and lean in--
He holds up a hand right in front of my mouth, and looks at me like I’ve gone mad. “With breath like that?” he says. “Thanks is fine.”
I nod. Did I screw that up, too?
The elevator arrives, and I back in. He stands there watching me until the doors close.
***
I don’t remember much of last night. Probably for the best.
What I know is that I have been watching the screens since I got here at eleven and they haven’t shown Annie once.
That means she’s not dead. It also means I have no idea where she is. And apparently the spat the Careers are having is worth an entire hour and a half of airtime, even if no one’s threatened to kill anyone else yet.
I still don’t know where she is when Haymitch stumbles in at one in the afternoon. “Get off my couch,” he says.
“Get here earlier,” I say, rub the sore spot above my eyebrow where a headache’s building.
“I don’t think you understand me.” Looks like he’s found a new bottle since last night. Half of one, at any rate. It should make up for what I drank on the roof. “This couch and I go way back. Longer than you’ve been alive. This couch has seen war. It has seen slaughter. It has seen parts of me that even the great Finnick Odair has not touched. I have burned scents into this couch that your stylist and your dinky little prep team couldn’t scrub out of you with a cheese-grater. You don’t want to sit on my couch.”
“I’m rescuing it from a life of depravity.” Onscreen, the girl from 1--I think her name is Tourmaline--unsheathes her knife and brandishes it at Feldspar, the boy from 2. The other two Careers fall back, and the camera zooms in on what the Capitol hopes is an impending duel. They’re not going to show Annie until this is over.
Haymitch holds the bottle over my head, tilting it. “Then I’m rescuing it from you.”
I can’t swat the bottle out of his hands fast enough to avoid getting white liquor poured on my hair. “I’m turning you in to Drusus,” I say, stand up and wring it out as best I can over the couch cushions.
Haymitch plunks himself right down, grinning widely. He plants his boot right on the liquor stain, smears around whatever’s on his heel. “And what’ll he do to me? Turn me into a mermaid?”
“He’ll turn you into a sea lion. Then he won’t have to shave your whiskers.”
“Go right ahead and tell him.” Haymitch stretches out, and looks me in the eye. “It’s fine.”
He changes his tone, then. It’s fine. I haven’t apologized for last night. He means I don’t have to.
He leans over the arm of the couch and asks, “Any update on the crazy one?”
Johanna lifts her head from one of the couches long enough to say, “No, the ones with the rock names are still trying to kill each other. I wish they’d hurry up. I have money on Beetee’s.”
Beetee turns away from the screen at the sound of his name. By the look of it, he’s been here all night. “What?”
“I have money riding on your girl, Volts.”
I mouth Volts? to Haymitch, who shrugs.
“Oh.” Beetee pushes his glasses up his nose and smiles. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Wait--Beetee’s been here all night. I ask, “Have they shown Annie at all?”
Johanna rolls her eyes, but Beetee says, “Yes. She’s camped out in a cave near the reservoir. The entrance is camouflaged, so I don’t think the cameras can see her.”
She has some privacy, at least, especially with the rest of the remaining tributes sticking to the basin. I run my fingers through my hair, squeeze out more of the alcohol. “Did she have anything with her? Food, water, other supplies?”
“She had the medicine you sent her, dug a solar still behind the cave, and she turned the parachute into a waterskin. Made a closure out of reeds.”
“Thanks,” I say. She can hold out longer without food than she can without water, and if she has enough presence of mind to transform the parachute like that, she might be able to fish. I can’t believe I forgot to send her a waterskin. The expense is worth it.
“Finnick,” Seeder says from the door to the lounge. “Mags is up, and she’s asking for you.”
I’m needed more there than here right now.
***
One side of Mags’s mouth perks up when she sees me. The other droops at the corner and doesn’t move.
“Hey,” I say, give her left hand a squeeze. Her fingers twitch around mine, trying to grasp them, but can’t quite close. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in bed this late in the day.”
I think she says, “Never liked it.”
“Me neither,” I admit. “I tried sleeping in after I didn’t have to work, but it felt wrong.” I hold her hand between mine, rub her fingers to get the blood flowing in them.
Her head tilts forward, but it takes effort for her to raise it. “Day’s day. The sun’s the sun.”
I nod. The monitors at the foot of her bed beep and whirr, flash bright numbers I can’t figure out and send liquids trickling down the tubes attached to her veins.
“Take Varin’s sponsors,” she says.
I blink, don’t even realize I’m shaking my head until I say, “Mags, I can’t.”
“As many as you can,” she says, looking me hard in one eye. “Some of them are more for Four than they were for him.”
She may be bedridden, but her glare’s still strong enough to bore a hole through me. I see why my father and uncles hid from her so often when they were younger--and when they were older, come to think of it.
“Are you sure?” I ask her again.
Her speech may be garbled, but her meaning isn’t. “We bring one of them home.”
I press her hand to my cheek, and her fingers twitch again, stroking it. She looks me in the eyes, and hers are still as dark and unrelenting as a storm. “I’ll take them,” I say, and can barely add, “Thank you.”
She leans back into the pillows, and closes her eyes. The monitors at the foot of her bed keep whirring and chirping, and her breathing settles into the ease of sleep. Chaff and Seeder’s eyes are on me now, and Seeder is smiling.
“I thought she might do that,” she says. “It’s not unheard of, you know.”
I nod. “I know. I just didn’t expect.” Considering.
Chaff laughs. “That’s Mags for you, though.”
“It is,” I agree. “I really should have known, come to think of it. Did she ever tell you about her Games?”
“Saw the reel, but I never asked her, no.”
“She was a volunteer,” I say, and brush a wisp of hair away from her eyelids. “They called another girl that year at first, a twelve-year-old. Fiona MacCormick. My grandmother.”
Chaff whistles and shakes his head. “They know each other well?”
“The MacCormicks practically raised Mags after her parents drowned in a storm.” I smile, remember how Mags used to sit my cousins and me in front of a fire and tell us stories about Grandmother: how her knees were always skinned, how she had a habit of wandering too far down the shore, how she wore out her shoes faster than anyone Mags knew. “She started a tradition after that, though. In Four, when someone’s too young or weak to make it in the Arena, a volunteer replaces them.”
Seeder shuts her eyes solemnly. “Which is why some of you show up trained.”
“More and more of us over the years. Fiona gave Mags her token, but Mags never told us what it was.” I peer at her and wonder if she’d tell me now, now that I’ve braved the Arena, but I haven’t asked her since before my Games. “She never stopped reminding my father and his brothers about what she’d done, though. I saved Fiona MacCormick’s life, she used to say, and you little bastards killed her.”
Chaff and Seeder aren’t the only ones to laugh at that. A couple of passing doctors apparently overheard.
“They were terrified of her,” I say. “We all were. She used to threaten to take a switch to them. I think she would’ve switched my uncle Jonas after he got my aunt Ruth pregnant--well, she wasn’t Aunt Ruth yet--but my mother stopped her.”
Chaff slaps his thigh and hoots with laughter, holding the stump of his left arm against his head. “She would’ve. I’d lay money on that.”
“You’d win.” Mags’s eyes stay shut, but I swear there’s a smile playing at the corner of her mouth, the one she can still use.
Seeder takes my hand, and pats my knuckles. “Come on. She’s good as told you to start making your calls. You’ve got a tribute to bring home.”
***
“Thank you for not withdrawing your sponsorship,” I say, shift the phone to my other ear and tuck it under my shoulder. I keep one eye on the Games. I always do, these days, and luckily it’s easy enough to do that in the Capitol. The cameras are tracking Telluria along the outskirts of the woods. The cameras like Telluria. She’s a mess, covered in grime and gore, but her weapons are always shining. The Career pack has fallen apart, and now both District 2 tributes are dead, and Sid and Tourmaline from District 1 have split up and are stalking through the riverbed. Brutus has been glaring daggers at Cashmere and Gloss all day. Cashmere runs the flat of her knife along the edge of the table and stares back at Brutus coolly. I step away from both of them and keep talking to the sponsor. “Of course, of course, I completely understand, you’ve already been more than generous and, well, things have changed since your first payment.” I laugh a little, as lightly as I can while I’m still watching the Games unfold. “But we still have a shot at bringing home a victor from District Four.”
“I’m always glad to help,” he says. “Though honestly, I wish you’d approached me sooner.”
I swallow, grip the phone hard enough that I hear it creak. “It’s been a busy Games,” I say, and for some reason I’m remembering Annie on the bed, curled on her side, talking about how to lace everything she said with double meanings.
“Yes, things are coming to a head now. And I understand it must be hard for you to go on without Mags. Do give her my best. But please, make some time for me after, if you’re going to be taking over for her in the future.”
“Of course,” I say, shoot another glance at the screen. “We know how to appreciate our sponsors in District Four.”
I hate how easy it is to say the right thing to these people.
“Wonderful,” he says, “then let my pledge stand. I look forward to discussing this in person.”
I drop my voice. “I’m sure that can be arranged.”
Johanna kicks the seat of my pants.
I manage not to drop the phone. “Until then,” I say, hang up, and glare at her. “What was that for?”
She’s sprawled on one of the couches, legs over the side, arms behind her head. “For being obvious.”
“Obvious closes deals faster.” I toss the phone on the couch, resume staring at the screen. Telluria’s crouched behind one of the rock clusters at the foot of the dam, cleaning one of the gashes the trees left on her arm. How close is she to Annie’s cave?
Johanna stretches, arches her back off the cushions. “Yeah, well it makes me sick. Conduct your personal business elsewhere.”
“I’m securing sponsors,” I tell her, bend over the back of the couch and snatch the phone up and drop it into her lap. “You should try it sometime. It helps your tributes.”
“Not when they die at the Cornucopia.”
“Well,” I say, “you have to be competent enough to get them past that point.”
She sneers at me and takes hold of the phone. She clubbed one of the tributes to death last year with a rabbit skull, I remember. “They have to be worth it first. I mean, who knows? I could waste all that effort getting sponsors for a kid who goes down there and turns out to be a basket case.”
I yank the phone out of her hand. She overbalances and stumbles over the arm of the couch, glares up at me. “There are worse things to be.”
“Yeah,” she agrees, pulling herself back up. “Like the kind of person who won’t just put her out of her misery.”
“She’s not a horse with a broken leg.”
“No, she’s a girl with a broken mind, and if I were down there she’d be a girl with a broken neck.”
I throw the phone to the ground and punch her, smack in the middle of her hateful mouth.
For a second it’s quiet enough in the lounge that I can hear Telluria cleaning her wounds.
Then Johanna spits blood, shrieks, and tackles me to the ground.
She’s smaller than I am, but strong, and her elbow catches me in the stomach and knocks the wind out of me, so I’m already staggering back when she hooks her leg behind my knee and sends me sprawling. Two can play that game; I grab her knee and give her leg a solid yank, and she falls to the ground beside me. She claws my face--oh, Drusus will kill her for that--and I don’t think I’m bleeding but my cheek stings. I’ll make her do more than sting, I decide, and slam my knee into her hip.
“Quick, before someone stops them!” Haymitch slurs, just as Johanna grabs onto the legs of a chair and tries to bring it down on me. “I’m laying a hundred on Finnick. Any takers?”
I roll to the side, in time to avoid the blow. The leg chips on the floor, and splinters of it fly into the couch. Gloss takes Haymitch up on the bet, “You’re on, a hundred on Johanna,” but maybe I can crush that too if I get to my feet before she does. I grab Johanna by her hair, and she snarls and shudders, and I realize she wanted this all along. Well, then. I twist my fingers and use my strength to flip her over, pin her thighs with my knees and wrap my other hand around her throat.
Someone’s trying to pry me off her. Brutus, I think, grabbing me by the hair and saying, “If I don’t get to do it out here, you don’t get to do it out here,” and he probably didn’t mean to give Johanna time to claw at my face again but once she does that, Cashmere holds her back too. Everyone’s shouting. I don’t know what everyone’s shouting. And everything seems to be shaking, rumbling, pounding into my ears.
I clutch the side of my face, cover the marks Johanna left. “You,” I say, and my voice almost shakes too much to get the words out, “are just like them.”
Her chest heaves, and she struggles in Cashmere’s grip, kicking her feet off the floor. She probably means to say something, I can see the words forming in the blood at the corners of her mouth.
“You should be watching,” Beetee says, so quiet I have to listen.
I whip my head around.
All of the television screens are filled with dark rushing water.
I tear myself away from Brutus and dash towards the screen, struggle to make out anything in the middle of it all. “What happened?”
“Earthquake. The dam broke. Listen.”
I’m not the only one shoving towards the monitors, searching through the chaos. The flood has taken down the concrete and wood of the dam, swollen through the riverbed, swallowed up the roots of the trees. I can see the branches struggling, grasping for the sky like they’re hungry, they’re drowning too. Gloss is hollering, “Tourmaline! Tourmaline,” and pounds his fist against the screen just as she lets go of the ravine’s edge and the current carries her away.
Annie. Annie’s cave was right by the water, and at this height it must have washed in. I shove Gloss aside, he’s seen what he has to. The cameras cut wildly, latching on to anything they can, a glimpse of an arm here, a weapon turned to driftwood, a girl trapped by the straps of her backpack as debris hammers into her and beats her bloody. I can barely hear the cannons firing over the rush of the waves. How much water was there in that river?
“They didn’t plan this,” Cashmere is growling, “they can’t have planned this. It’s too late in the game. It was still exciting. They don’t do this unless it’s not exciting. They can’t.”
“They fucked up,” Johanna says, and even her voice shakes. “They really fucked up.”
The camera cuts to the top of the ravine, behind the ruins of the dam, but I see nothing. I can’t even tell where Annie’s cave was. I search the screen, submerge myself in the images until I can almost feel the water surging around me, swallowing me.
Gregory, the mentor from District 5, pushes back his chair and turns away from the screen. Another cannon fires. His tribute. “What the hell happened?”
“The structural integrity of the dam was compromised by the first earthquake, and then the second one two nights ago displaced the--”
“Shut up, Beetee!” Gloss turns on him, shoves him out of his chair. “I bet your girl’s been running sims for this too, huh?”
“No, that isn’t what her family works on.”
“Well, good for her! Maybe then she’ll actually have to fight her way through.”
“How does it feel having to worry about a Career, Gloss?”
The flood roars again through the screen, and it’s all too much noise. “Shut up, both of you,” I snap.
“Could be worse,” Haymitch spits. “Could be a volcano.”
“You too.” I listen for cannonfire under--or over--the flood, but I can’t pick anything out. Four left. Annie’s one of them. But where is she? The camera shuttles between Telluria, Sid, and the boy from District 6--there are cameras all over the Arena, why are none of them on Annie? Why don’t the Gamemakers want me to see her?
Telluria’s lost her sword. She’s holding on to the exposed roots of a tree, flat against the edge of the ravine. Dirt crumbles into mud and slathers her arms but she holds on, keeps her head aloft. I can see the diagonal line of her body as the current drives it forward, like it’s trying to tear her in half at the waist. The camera zooms in, pans down her back to the water.
It isn’t the tide that drags her down.
A hand shoots out of the water, claws at her ankle. Telluria starts, frees one hand to try to beat her attacker off, but the waves surge around her and she scrambles, her fingernails scrabbling on the bark. It’s not enough. The waves rise higher, and Annie surfaces with them, drags Telluria’s head under and holds it there. It’s hard to see Telluria thrash with the way the water churns around them both. I grip the edges of the screen, try to find her even if I can see her right there.
Sea ghost, I told Drusus. Annie’s hands are white as foam, and the hair tangled around them almost looks like seaweed. Everything about Annie is strangling Telluria, holding her down. The camera catches her face, the white of her teeth and eyes, the black hollows under them, the pale hunger in her skin, and even Drusus’s best makeup couldn’t bring this out.
A cannon fires, and Beetee shuts his eyes, adjusts his glasses, and says nothing.
---
--
.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [3/9] ( or read the whole thing at AO3 )
Authors: puella_nerdii and mithrigil
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Characters: Finnick/Annie; Mags, Haymitch, Johanna, Snow, various victors and denizens of the Capitol, and original characters.
Words: About 61000 in total. This chapter, ~7500.
Rating: R (expected THG violence, sexuality, recreational drug use, forced prostitution)
Spoilers: Backstory revealed in Mockingjay.
Summary: Finnick decides that, come hell or high water, he is bringing his tribute home from the seventieth Hunger Games. That tribute is Annie Cresta. But Finnick never thought that he would have to choose between bringing her home and keeping her safe, and he wants both. How Annie Cresta crept up on Finnick Odair.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine
Chapter Three: Unlike Achilles in his Tent When Finnick’s plans for Annie fall through, he scrambles to keep her afloat, but there are dangers in the arena that not even the most well-intentioned mentor can protect his tribute from.
“Is she out of the woods, Cecelia?”
“Yes, she made it to the water.” Cecelia sighs, like she’s almost as relieved as I am, or at least almost as tired. This close to the Training Center, the reception in the car phone isn’t garbled at all. “She’s in the river now, behind the dam. I don’t think she’ll be going near the shore any time soon.”
“She’s a good swimmer,” I say, but for praise it falls awfully flat. “She can survive up there--”
My voice cracks, and I check the front seat of the car, make sure the glass pane between my driver and me is closed and soundproofed.
“Cecelia, I screwed up,” I tell her.
“You’re still learning, Finnick,” she says.
“And the longer it takes me to learn, the more kids die because I didn’t know how to keep them safe.”
“Well then that’s a lesson you can check off for this year.” I wish I knew whether she was smiling when she said it. Either way, my throat stings. “All right, she’s wounded, but I don’t think she even notices. She’ll be fine until morning. Go check on Mags.”
“I’ll get her medicine,” I say. “And I will.”
I bolt up the steps to the Training Center and don’t bother with the elevator, just sprint down the stairs until I reach the hospital ward. I shove the double-doors open and scan the room for Mags’s bed. The ward isn’t that big, she must be close by.
Tall plastic dividers frame a section in the corner, and doctors hover around it like vultures. Seeder is standing at the foot of the cubicle, just out of reach of the bed. She sees me about the same time I see her, and waves me over.
“Thank you,” I tell her, can’t keep the ragged edge out of my voice. “How is she?”
“Still out,” Seeder says. “Stabilizing, from what I can hear. She’ll pull through.”
I nod. I can’t bring myself to do much more than that.
“Julia’s called Mags’s son already.” Seeder puts an arm around my waist. “I told her it might not be the most sensitive thing to do, but Julia said he’d got a right to know, even today.”
“It makes me never want to have children,” I say. “Knowing I could watch them die...”
“A lot of us say that.” But she doesn’t press it, just keeps me close.
I don’t know how long we stand there. I don’t know what the doctors are saying, doing. By the time Mags comes to and opens her eyes around the clear plastic mask over her mouth, it hurts to breathe. She looks at Seeder first, and then at me.
I shove one of the doctors out of the way, sink to my knees, and rest my head in her lap the way I used to. She’d comb out my curls with her fingers, sing sea-chanties to me under her breath in her cracked, warbling voice. Her hands hang limp at her sides now, and the only sound coming from her is the harsh rasp of her breath.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
I can see her hand trying to lift, but it doesn’t make it to my hair.
“You don’t have to,” I tell her, draw a deep breath to steady myself. “You can rest. I’m here.”
Seeder comes up behind me and takes Mags’s hand. “And I think she’s telling you to get yourself upstairs, now that she knows.”
“I can’t leave her, Seeder.”
“You aren’t. I’m here. And if you stay here, no one will be there for Annie.”
Cold settles at the bottom of my stomach. I can’t look at Mags anymore. I drop my head, study the pattern of squares on the floor. I need something to do with my hands.
***
“Come on,” I keep whispering at the screens. “Annie, if you don’t come to the surface, I won’t know what kind of wounds you have. Annie, please.”
Beetee, next to me, is hard at work with a set of tiny screwdrivers, taking apart a little black music-chip player. He has his glasses off, but a magnifying glass mounted on one eye like a jeweler, and his free eye is squinting. Lucky him, he probably can’t see the televisions at all like that. “Have you tried looking through the replays?”
“I did. It happened too fast, and it was too dark to see.” I watched them twice last night. The Capitol is fascinated with this development. I think it would make me sick if I didn’t already feel hollow. “It’s probably just cuts, but I still want to be sure.”
“If they’re cuts and she hasn’t bled out, she’s tougher than I thought,” Beetee says.
I keep my eyes hard on the screens. Any minute now. Please, Annie, come up for air. “Same goes for yours.”
“Oh, Telluria?” Beetee doesn’t laugh, but he does sound proud and hopeful. “She’s one of the best we’ve ever had. Her father designs sims.”
Her father designs sims. That girl with the sword has probably been running hand-to-hand combat scenarios all her life.
“I screwed up,” I say again. It hurts my throat.
“Yes, you and everyone else,” Beetee says. “That’s usually how we manage to pull through in Three.”
“Well, good on you.” Annie’s face is turned up to the sky, and her hair is fanning out around her face, still tangled with leaves and the tail ends of cobwebs. Her arms spread, and she floats on her back. I can see the gashes in her clothes, her left pant leg hanging on by a thread and the angry red welts on her thighs and upper arms. Scrapes and cuts. The salt water’s done them a favor, but it’s probably not enough. There are three cuts just like those running from her forehead up into her hair. I remember that hand, reaching out of the trees.
“All right,” I breathe. “Something to clean it, and treatment for the cuts.” No bandages, she’ll just get them wet. Besides, they’re expensive. But a water filter, she’ll need that too, and I know I need to save money for food in case she can’t hunt.
I call up the parachutiers. “Hello, Finnick!” someone chirps over the phone. “Do you need to know your budget?”
“Tell me after,” I say. “Do you have Annie’s position?”
“Yes we do!”
“I’d like you to get together one case. Hydrogen peroxide and a bacit antibiotic for her skin, and a sealant. No bandages. Wait, not bandages, but some thin cloth, a tight mesh.”
“What color?”
“I don’t care, it’s for water filtration.”
“Ooh, smart! That’s actually about a quarter of the price of a real water filter. Good on you, Finnick.” They send a little picture of what they’ve assembled to the corner of the television screen nearest me. “That look about right?”
“Yes--wait. Some plastic sheeting, four feet square, and a jar. That should do it.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to splurge on one little something that’ll go straight to the cuts?”
“No. I want it to be something she knows. Something familiar. Just the basics.”
“Then it’s all on a push of the button.” One on the console by my right hand flares up. “Just so you know, your budget--”
“Later,” I say, “and thank you,” and I hang up.
She opens her eyes, so green against the murk of the dammed river. I whisper I’m sorry, and push the button.
The cameras watch the little silver parachute fall, wafting down onto the water. It lands just over her right shoulder. If the river wasn’t drifting that way, Annie might have completely missed it, but this way, she floats into it, and it startles her. Treading water, she wraps an arm around it and holds it close, burying her face in the glistening cloth. She kicks her way not to shore but to the structure of the dam, and braces her feet in a crack down the reservoir wall’s center so she can climb out. It’s a good thirty feet down to the riverbed from there. She sits on the top, and opens the parcel, then starts taking off her clothes to see to the wounds.
“Good,” I can’t help saying, even if everyone in the victors’ lounge can hear me. “She’s got it.” She’ll have to keep out of the water for a while after this, but none of the other tributes have made it up here, they’re too busy thinning each others’ ranks in the riverbed. By the time some of them brave it through the forest, she’ll have found a place to hide.
Annie splashes the peroxide over her cuts and shudders. It must sting, with all the salt that’s worked its way into her cuts.
“You send her medicine and she gets naked,” Cashmere says. “She must really want to win.”
“I hope so,” I say. I don’t move my eyes from the screen.
But Cashmere doesn’t take that as sincerely as I expected. “Ladies and Gentlemen of Panem, Love ‘em and Leave ‘em Finnick Odair finally wants a two-night stand.”
I got into this with Johanna. I don’t feel like rehashing it. “She’s my tribute.”
The cameras stay trained on Annie. She’s just about finished with the peroxide, one capful at a time, everywhere but the cuts on her face so far. For some reason the cameras zoom in on the wounds bubbling up and she grimaces but doesn’t cry out yet, not like before. That’s good.
Cashmere sighs. “And wouldn’t it be just the right scandal for the rest of your image.”
“What, responsibility?” Come to think of it, responsibility would damage my reputation beyond repair. Maybe I should try it more often.
She shrugs. “Well, it could’ve been worse if it had been the other way around. She takes off her clothes, then you send her medicine. That would’ve gotten the message right across.”
Annie screws the cap of the peroxide on with trembling fingers, and rinses her hands in the water. She doesn’t stop wringing them, twists them again and again until I worry the salt will scour her skin off. The string I gave her is still knotted around her thumb.
“There’s no message, Cashmere. I didn’t sleep with her.” There, I’ve addressed her main concern. Hopefully that’ll shut her up.
She falls silent, and I lean forward, my chin propped on my hands. Annie finally pries her hands out of the water and remembers the antibiotic. She squeezes some out onto her fingers, presses them into the gash on her left thigh. The cameras barely pick up the sound, but she definitely mouths my name.
Everyone in Panem sees that.
I’d say I screwed up again, but Cashmere would take that the wrong way. “Oh, please,” she says, and it looks like she’s taking it there anyway. “The last time a tribute moaned my name like that, Gloss hacked her hand off while it was still up her--”
“Well, you two always have been close,” I say flatly.
Gloss’s hand curls on my shoulder. His nails are filed into squares. That means they’re too close. “Say that again?” he asks.
I flash my teeth. “I said, you two have always been close.”
He shoves my face into the television screen. Stars explode behind my eyes, and my nose smarts--I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s swelling enough that I need to open my mouth to breathe. Good thing, too, because the next thing he does is pull back my chair and throw me to the floor with it. Doesn’t knock the wind out of me, but it’s close. I know I’m lying flat, but the rest of my body doesn’t, since the floor seems to shudder and tip under me.
“Never expected to hear that from you,” Gloss snarls, towering over me.
I struggle to my elbows so I can get a vague sideways look at the screen. “Then tell your sister to knock it off,” I say. “She leaves my reputation alone, I don’t say anything about yours.”
Cashmere and Gloss look at each other. If the line between their eyes was a wire I could walk across it. Without a word, he backs off, even offers me an arm, if not an apology. I’ll take the arm, my vision is still turning black at the corners.
I stand there long enough to make sure Annie’s finished applying the medicine. She does, and the cameras cut away. The girl from District 3, Telluria, is chasing down Spindle and the boy from District 9. That’ll keep the Capitol occupied for a few hours. “I need air,” I say, and manage not to slam the door behind me this time.
Haymitch is already on the roof, sprawled over the bench, his bottle dangling from his fist. “Tell me you haven’t started a new one already,” I say.
“I did. Chaff was just up here.” The butt of the bottle nestles in the dirt. “More if you want it.”
I push his feet off the bench and sit down, let my shoulders slump forward, let my head loll in my hands. The light of the Capitol pulses overhead somewhere, but it’s nice not to look at it for a while. “I think I do.”
It takes some effort, but he hoists the bottle up and slams it into my thigh, leaving a mudstain that Drusus is going to lecture me about later. I snatch it and drink. If I swallow fast enough I don’t have to taste it, but it still scalds my throat going down. Once I’ve stopped spluttering, I say, “I don’t know how you drink this stuff.”
“Years of training,” he says. “Daily regimen. The kind of stuff that makes Peacekeepers cry and write home to mommy.”
“Ha,” I say, and take another swallow, open my throat. I can’t emphasize enough how awful this tastes; it’s like the liquor’s rotting in my mouth.
Haymitch laughs too. “You think I’m kidding. I’m not. Couldn’t even keep it down at first.”
“You learn, I guess.” I set the bottle down, or mean to, but I can’t let go of the neck, and when I realize that my fingers draw even tighter. “You were right.”
He exhales, sharply. “What was that?”
“You were right,” I repeat.
“Just wanted to make sure you said it. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
My throat’s too scalded by the white liquor for me to make much of an effort at talking, so I nod. If he gloats, though, I swear I’ll punch him again.
He doesn’t gloat. He props his elbows on his knees and hangs his head. “Guess that’s your lesson for the year. Johanna learns they’re gonna die, you learn that you can’t save ‘em.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I drink again. The third time must be the charm, because I don’t mind the burn as much. How quickly does this kick in?
“Gets easier,” he says, and I can’t tell if that’s about the drink or the reason we’re drinking. “You learn to pick them, or pick between them, or pickaxe them in the head before they even go in just to save yourself the trouble. Year in, year out. Least you’ll get a break. You can have time to go home, meet the kids before you reap them. Have them, if you want. You probably won’t. At least you’ll have an excuse, I wonder if Snow’s killed off all your chances of that. Kids.”
I see Varin’s head land at Annie’s feet, see the roots of those trees crawl forward to soak in the blood, see Mags struggle to form words with the side of her mouth that still works. It’s too soon to take another drink. At this rate, I’ll polish off the bottle before Haymitch has any, though I doubt he cares, it’s not like he spends his money on anything else. I drink anyway, and it makes slumping into the bench easier, makes the lights overhead hurt less to stare at.
“And after a while,” Haymitch goes on, “you wise up and stop wanting them to win. What’s winning? Life? My life? Your life? I don’t envy you your life. I send twice as many kids to die as you’re ever gonna and I don’t envy Finnick Odair his life.”
“And if I give up on them,” I say, set the bottle beside me for now, “then what do I do?”
“You sleep a little more at night.” He takes the bottle back, takes a swig that puts mine to shame. “Or maybe you don’t. But you know the kids aren’t alive, and if they aren’t alive, at least they aren’t you.”
I shake my head. It does absolutely nothing to clear it. The lights smear as they hit the force field, I notice, blur just enough around the edges to make it look like I’m seeing the city through plastic. “When Finnick Odair thinks something, you have to believe him, or else you feel like you’re letting him down. She said that.” I can remember it all. The words are branded into the back of my mind. “And I said--”
I can’t say it.
“And I let her down.”
Haymitch takes a breath so deep that it could drown him, and shoves the bottle back into my lap. I accept and drink until my throat can’t take it anymore.
“Whoa, whoa there, kid. Save some for the fishes.” He tries to wrest it back, and it splashes my face and my chest, but there’s still about a quarter left in the bottle. The alcohol stings the corners of my eyes, and the parts of my nose still raw from where it hit the screen, but I don’t try to wipe it off. “You did all you thought you could.”
“It worked for me,” I say. That came out wrong. “Not--she wasn’t being me, I didn’t tell her to, but catching the audience off-guard, sticking with the Careers, that works. Not just for me, I mean. It’s worked before.”
“And why’d you think it would work for her?”
I shut my eyes, rub my forehead like I’m trying to squeeze that thought out. “I don’t know. I thought--I thought I could make them see her.”
“See her and what? Love her?”
“Believe in her. Think she had a shot.”
Haymitch laughs, as bitter as I’ve ever heard. “That’s not how you win. That’s not how anyone but you wins.”
“Where you come from,” I shoot back, make a grab for the bottle. He lets me take it.
“And what’d you see? What did you want them,” he sweeps his arm out at the Capitol, the cameras, the haloed lights, “to see in her?”
“Still waters,” I say. “Running deep.”
This time, Haymitch’s laughter isn’t bitter. It’s barking and awful and rings in my ears, drowns out the cars and the music in the streets. I think he’d knock the bench over if it wasn’t bolted to the roof. I’m also pretty sure he uproots a plant, but it’s hard to tell, the light’s swimming up here. Or I’m swimming in it.
“That. That is Capitol bullshit,” he says, just before he falls off the bench. “--ow.”
I don’t bother to help him up. “It’s not. It’s what I saw. Maybe not in those words, but I saw it.”
“You sound like a stylist. You’ve been here too long, kid. It’s gotten under your skin. Must’ve shoved it up your veins with the tracker.” The laughter still sharpens his voice but the words are slurring closer and closer together. “Then again. Maybe you do know what they want. After all, you are it.”
I can’t draw my knees up to my chest, so I slouch forward to rest my elbows against them, my hands gripping my hair. That’s sharp, sharp enough to be clear. My name is Finnick Odair, I think. I am nineteen years old. I am the victor of the sixty-fifth Hunger Games. “I am the highest-paid whore in Panem.”
--I said that. I didn’t mean to. It just slipped.
Haymitch hauls himself back up to the bench. He doesn’t say anything, but he breathes, short and sharp, the way that means go on. So I do.
"I guess that's an accomplishment,” I say, and my smile would be awful if my mouth wasn’t so slack. “Would be if I saw any of the money, anyway. How much did I add to the state budget last year? Must've at least supplied some of the president's personal allowances. Maybe I funded his garden. He should give me a plaque. Here lies Finnick Odair." I pause. "Here grows Finnick Odair."
“I hate those roses.” Haymitch says. “Hate them, and hate him.”
“You and me and all the rest of us.” Are there cameras up here? Or bugs? I squint, but it’s hard to make them out in the dark and half the things I catch out of the corner of my eye might not be what I think they are, anyway. Even if they are watching, even if the feed’s piped directly to Snow’s office, so what? He knows everything else, he must know that. “I hate them all,” I say. It sounds flat, but why shouldn’t it? It’s true. “And I’m one of them.”
He grabs me by the shoulder, just like Gloss, but instead of shoving me off he pulls me down into the crook of his arm, holds me there, tapping his fingers on my head. I can’t tell if it’s affectionate or just because I’d fall over otherwise.
“I’m theirs,” I say. The words don’t feel like mine, quite; my lips must be moving, but I can’t feel them. “Not mine. I look for mine, what’s mine, I mean, and--” I pound my chest, wait to see if the sound echoes. “I can’t find it.” And then I cough, shudder enough to throw Haymitch’s arm off for a minute. He puts it back quick, though, keeps my face turned away and his hand on my head.
“That’s ‘cause there isn’t anything.” He sighs. I can feel him sigh, feel myself sinking. “They take what’s ours. That’s how it works.”
Mags flashes in my mind, sunken and small in her hospital bed, staring at nothing at all. She said she’d look after Annie if I couldn’t. I should have promised that for Varin. And now I’m all Mags has, and all Annie has. “I don’t want to lose her, Haymitch.”
“Thought you said she wasn’t yours.” He knocks my head to the side. It’s on his chest now. He smells awful. I don’t mind enough to move. “Thought you said you couldn’t find anything that was yours.”
“She’s not mine.” I’d shake my head, but it’s too thick for that to work. Even my tongue’s swelling in my mouth, making it hard to talk around. “I just don’t want to lose her.”
He doesn’t say anything to that, and neither do I, not for a good long while. Claudius Templesmith’s voice blares out of every speaker in range, and the screens light up just the same as the sky over the Arena. I think Spindle and the boy from 9 are dead, the only two faces tonight, but they’re twisting into grey nightmares, reshaping themselves where the stars should be.
“I can’t stay,” I say, try to lift my head, but it sinks back into Haymitch’s chest. “I have somewhere to be. A date.”
Haymitch snickers. “A date.”
“A date,” I say again, and if there’s nothing in my voice at all that’s probably for the best.
He hoists me up, walks me away from the bench. There’s a rail, so I grip it, but then the city streets are swirling behind my eyes and I can’t stop staring. “Wait, wait,” Haymitch says, “if you’re gonna hurl, don’t pitch it over the side of the building. It’ll just come back and hit you in the face.”
“Not yet,” I say, blink down at the city. “I’ll take a purgative. Take painkillers. Won’t feel anything.”
“You’ll feel it in the morning.” He pulls me back, tries to steady me again. I remember I drank most of the bottle. I wonder where the bottle is. He can’t have finished it. “Take care of yourself, if you’re gonna take care of that girl.”
“That’s why I should go,” I say. Make myself presentable. Drusus--well, Drusus will kill me, but after that he’ll fix me up. It’s the Capitol, they have drugs to take this away, they can take anything away if you let them. “I should--”
I’m still holding on to the rail.
Haymitch pries me off it, one finger at a time. “Come on.” He gives me a shove towards the elevator. I stumble towards it and he hauls me up by the collar of my jacket, half-drags me to the door, even pushes the button for me. “Thank you,” I say, and turn around so I can actually do that, close my eyes and lean in--
He holds up a hand right in front of my mouth, and looks at me like I’ve gone mad. “With breath like that?” he says. “Thanks is fine.”
I nod. Did I screw that up, too?
The elevator arrives, and I back in. He stands there watching me until the doors close.
***
I don’t remember much of last night. Probably for the best.
What I know is that I have been watching the screens since I got here at eleven and they haven’t shown Annie once.
That means she’s not dead. It also means I have no idea where she is. And apparently the spat the Careers are having is worth an entire hour and a half of airtime, even if no one’s threatened to kill anyone else yet.
I still don’t know where she is when Haymitch stumbles in at one in the afternoon. “Get off my couch,” he says.
“Get here earlier,” I say, rub the sore spot above my eyebrow where a headache’s building.
“I don’t think you understand me.” Looks like he’s found a new bottle since last night. Half of one, at any rate. It should make up for what I drank on the roof. “This couch and I go way back. Longer than you’ve been alive. This couch has seen war. It has seen slaughter. It has seen parts of me that even the great Finnick Odair has not touched. I have burned scents into this couch that your stylist and your dinky little prep team couldn’t scrub out of you with a cheese-grater. You don’t want to sit on my couch.”
“I’m rescuing it from a life of depravity.” Onscreen, the girl from 1--I think her name is Tourmaline--unsheathes her knife and brandishes it at Feldspar, the boy from 2. The other two Careers fall back, and the camera zooms in on what the Capitol hopes is an impending duel. They’re not going to show Annie until this is over.
Haymitch holds the bottle over my head, tilting it. “Then I’m rescuing it from you.”
I can’t swat the bottle out of his hands fast enough to avoid getting white liquor poured on my hair. “I’m turning you in to Drusus,” I say, stand up and wring it out as best I can over the couch cushions.
Haymitch plunks himself right down, grinning widely. He plants his boot right on the liquor stain, smears around whatever’s on his heel. “And what’ll he do to me? Turn me into a mermaid?”
“He’ll turn you into a sea lion. Then he won’t have to shave your whiskers.”
“Go right ahead and tell him.” Haymitch stretches out, and looks me in the eye. “It’s fine.”
He changes his tone, then. It’s fine. I haven’t apologized for last night. He means I don’t have to.
He leans over the arm of the couch and asks, “Any update on the crazy one?”
Johanna lifts her head from one of the couches long enough to say, “No, the ones with the rock names are still trying to kill each other. I wish they’d hurry up. I have money on Beetee’s.”
Beetee turns away from the screen at the sound of his name. By the look of it, he’s been here all night. “What?”
“I have money riding on your girl, Volts.”
I mouth Volts? to Haymitch, who shrugs.
“Oh.” Beetee pushes his glasses up his nose and smiles. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Wait--Beetee’s been here all night. I ask, “Have they shown Annie at all?”
Johanna rolls her eyes, but Beetee says, “Yes. She’s camped out in a cave near the reservoir. The entrance is camouflaged, so I don’t think the cameras can see her.”
She has some privacy, at least, especially with the rest of the remaining tributes sticking to the basin. I run my fingers through my hair, squeeze out more of the alcohol. “Did she have anything with her? Food, water, other supplies?”
“She had the medicine you sent her, dug a solar still behind the cave, and she turned the parachute into a waterskin. Made a closure out of reeds.”
“Thanks,” I say. She can hold out longer without food than she can without water, and if she has enough presence of mind to transform the parachute like that, she might be able to fish. I can’t believe I forgot to send her a waterskin. The expense is worth it.
“Finnick,” Seeder says from the door to the lounge. “Mags is up, and she’s asking for you.”
I’m needed more there than here right now.
***
One side of Mags’s mouth perks up when she sees me. The other droops at the corner and doesn’t move.
“Hey,” I say, give her left hand a squeeze. Her fingers twitch around mine, trying to grasp them, but can’t quite close. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in bed this late in the day.”
I think she says, “Never liked it.”
“Me neither,” I admit. “I tried sleeping in after I didn’t have to work, but it felt wrong.” I hold her hand between mine, rub her fingers to get the blood flowing in them.
Her head tilts forward, but it takes effort for her to raise it. “Day’s day. The sun’s the sun.”
I nod. The monitors at the foot of her bed beep and whirr, flash bright numbers I can’t figure out and send liquids trickling down the tubes attached to her veins.
“Take Varin’s sponsors,” she says.
I blink, don’t even realize I’m shaking my head until I say, “Mags, I can’t.”
“As many as you can,” she says, looking me hard in one eye. “Some of them are more for Four than they were for him.”
She may be bedridden, but her glare’s still strong enough to bore a hole through me. I see why my father and uncles hid from her so often when they were younger--and when they were older, come to think of it.
“Are you sure?” I ask her again.
Her speech may be garbled, but her meaning isn’t. “We bring one of them home.”
I press her hand to my cheek, and her fingers twitch again, stroking it. She looks me in the eyes, and hers are still as dark and unrelenting as a storm. “I’ll take them,” I say, and can barely add, “Thank you.”
She leans back into the pillows, and closes her eyes. The monitors at the foot of her bed keep whirring and chirping, and her breathing settles into the ease of sleep. Chaff and Seeder’s eyes are on me now, and Seeder is smiling.
“I thought she might do that,” she says. “It’s not unheard of, you know.”
I nod. “I know. I just didn’t expect.” Considering.
Chaff laughs. “That’s Mags for you, though.”
“It is,” I agree. “I really should have known, come to think of it. Did she ever tell you about her Games?”
“Saw the reel, but I never asked her, no.”
“She was a volunteer,” I say, and brush a wisp of hair away from her eyelids. “They called another girl that year at first, a twelve-year-old. Fiona MacCormick. My grandmother.”
Chaff whistles and shakes his head. “They know each other well?”
“The MacCormicks practically raised Mags after her parents drowned in a storm.” I smile, remember how Mags used to sit my cousins and me in front of a fire and tell us stories about Grandmother: how her knees were always skinned, how she had a habit of wandering too far down the shore, how she wore out her shoes faster than anyone Mags knew. “She started a tradition after that, though. In Four, when someone’s too young or weak to make it in the Arena, a volunteer replaces them.”
Seeder shuts her eyes solemnly. “Which is why some of you show up trained.”
“More and more of us over the years. Fiona gave Mags her token, but Mags never told us what it was.” I peer at her and wonder if she’d tell me now, now that I’ve braved the Arena, but I haven’t asked her since before my Games. “She never stopped reminding my father and his brothers about what she’d done, though. I saved Fiona MacCormick’s life, she used to say, and you little bastards killed her.”
Chaff and Seeder aren’t the only ones to laugh at that. A couple of passing doctors apparently overheard.
“They were terrified of her,” I say. “We all were. She used to threaten to take a switch to them. I think she would’ve switched my uncle Jonas after he got my aunt Ruth pregnant--well, she wasn’t Aunt Ruth yet--but my mother stopped her.”
Chaff slaps his thigh and hoots with laughter, holding the stump of his left arm against his head. “She would’ve. I’d lay money on that.”
“You’d win.” Mags’s eyes stay shut, but I swear there’s a smile playing at the corner of her mouth, the one she can still use.
Seeder takes my hand, and pats my knuckles. “Come on. She’s good as told you to start making your calls. You’ve got a tribute to bring home.”
***
“Thank you for not withdrawing your sponsorship,” I say, shift the phone to my other ear and tuck it under my shoulder. I keep one eye on the Games. I always do, these days, and luckily it’s easy enough to do that in the Capitol. The cameras are tracking Telluria along the outskirts of the woods. The cameras like Telluria. She’s a mess, covered in grime and gore, but her weapons are always shining. The Career pack has fallen apart, and now both District 2 tributes are dead, and Sid and Tourmaline from District 1 have split up and are stalking through the riverbed. Brutus has been glaring daggers at Cashmere and Gloss all day. Cashmere runs the flat of her knife along the edge of the table and stares back at Brutus coolly. I step away from both of them and keep talking to the sponsor. “Of course, of course, I completely understand, you’ve already been more than generous and, well, things have changed since your first payment.” I laugh a little, as lightly as I can while I’m still watching the Games unfold. “But we still have a shot at bringing home a victor from District Four.”
“I’m always glad to help,” he says. “Though honestly, I wish you’d approached me sooner.”
I swallow, grip the phone hard enough that I hear it creak. “It’s been a busy Games,” I say, and for some reason I’m remembering Annie on the bed, curled on her side, talking about how to lace everything she said with double meanings.
“Yes, things are coming to a head now. And I understand it must be hard for you to go on without Mags. Do give her my best. But please, make some time for me after, if you’re going to be taking over for her in the future.”
“Of course,” I say, shoot another glance at the screen. “We know how to appreciate our sponsors in District Four.”
I hate how easy it is to say the right thing to these people.
“Wonderful,” he says, “then let my pledge stand. I look forward to discussing this in person.”
I drop my voice. “I’m sure that can be arranged.”
Johanna kicks the seat of my pants.
I manage not to drop the phone. “Until then,” I say, hang up, and glare at her. “What was that for?”
She’s sprawled on one of the couches, legs over the side, arms behind her head. “For being obvious.”
“Obvious closes deals faster.” I toss the phone on the couch, resume staring at the screen. Telluria’s crouched behind one of the rock clusters at the foot of the dam, cleaning one of the gashes the trees left on her arm. How close is she to Annie’s cave?
Johanna stretches, arches her back off the cushions. “Yeah, well it makes me sick. Conduct your personal business elsewhere.”
“I’m securing sponsors,” I tell her, bend over the back of the couch and snatch the phone up and drop it into her lap. “You should try it sometime. It helps your tributes.”
“Not when they die at the Cornucopia.”
“Well,” I say, “you have to be competent enough to get them past that point.”
She sneers at me and takes hold of the phone. She clubbed one of the tributes to death last year with a rabbit skull, I remember. “They have to be worth it first. I mean, who knows? I could waste all that effort getting sponsors for a kid who goes down there and turns out to be a basket case.”
I yank the phone out of her hand. She overbalances and stumbles over the arm of the couch, glares up at me. “There are worse things to be.”
“Yeah,” she agrees, pulling herself back up. “Like the kind of person who won’t just put her out of her misery.”
“She’s not a horse with a broken leg.”
“No, she’s a girl with a broken mind, and if I were down there she’d be a girl with a broken neck.”
I throw the phone to the ground and punch her, smack in the middle of her hateful mouth.
For a second it’s quiet enough in the lounge that I can hear Telluria cleaning her wounds.
Then Johanna spits blood, shrieks, and tackles me to the ground.
She’s smaller than I am, but strong, and her elbow catches me in the stomach and knocks the wind out of me, so I’m already staggering back when she hooks her leg behind my knee and sends me sprawling. Two can play that game; I grab her knee and give her leg a solid yank, and she falls to the ground beside me. She claws my face--oh, Drusus will kill her for that--and I don’t think I’m bleeding but my cheek stings. I’ll make her do more than sting, I decide, and slam my knee into her hip.
“Quick, before someone stops them!” Haymitch slurs, just as Johanna grabs onto the legs of a chair and tries to bring it down on me. “I’m laying a hundred on Finnick. Any takers?”
I roll to the side, in time to avoid the blow. The leg chips on the floor, and splinters of it fly into the couch. Gloss takes Haymitch up on the bet, “You’re on, a hundred on Johanna,” but maybe I can crush that too if I get to my feet before she does. I grab Johanna by her hair, and she snarls and shudders, and I realize she wanted this all along. Well, then. I twist my fingers and use my strength to flip her over, pin her thighs with my knees and wrap my other hand around her throat.
Someone’s trying to pry me off her. Brutus, I think, grabbing me by the hair and saying, “If I don’t get to do it out here, you don’t get to do it out here,” and he probably didn’t mean to give Johanna time to claw at my face again but once she does that, Cashmere holds her back too. Everyone’s shouting. I don’t know what everyone’s shouting. And everything seems to be shaking, rumbling, pounding into my ears.
I clutch the side of my face, cover the marks Johanna left. “You,” I say, and my voice almost shakes too much to get the words out, “are just like them.”
Her chest heaves, and she struggles in Cashmere’s grip, kicking her feet off the floor. She probably means to say something, I can see the words forming in the blood at the corners of her mouth.
“You should be watching,” Beetee says, so quiet I have to listen.
I whip my head around.
All of the television screens are filled with dark rushing water.
I tear myself away from Brutus and dash towards the screen, struggle to make out anything in the middle of it all. “What happened?”
“Earthquake. The dam broke. Listen.”
I’m not the only one shoving towards the monitors, searching through the chaos. The flood has taken down the concrete and wood of the dam, swollen through the riverbed, swallowed up the roots of the trees. I can see the branches struggling, grasping for the sky like they’re hungry, they’re drowning too. Gloss is hollering, “Tourmaline! Tourmaline,” and pounds his fist against the screen just as she lets go of the ravine’s edge and the current carries her away.
Annie. Annie’s cave was right by the water, and at this height it must have washed in. I shove Gloss aside, he’s seen what he has to. The cameras cut wildly, latching on to anything they can, a glimpse of an arm here, a weapon turned to driftwood, a girl trapped by the straps of her backpack as debris hammers into her and beats her bloody. I can barely hear the cannons firing over the rush of the waves. How much water was there in that river?
“They didn’t plan this,” Cashmere is growling, “they can’t have planned this. It’s too late in the game. It was still exciting. They don’t do this unless it’s not exciting. They can’t.”
“They fucked up,” Johanna says, and even her voice shakes. “They really fucked up.”
The camera cuts to the top of the ravine, behind the ruins of the dam, but I see nothing. I can’t even tell where Annie’s cave was. I search the screen, submerge myself in the images until I can almost feel the water surging around me, swallowing me.
Gregory, the mentor from District 5, pushes back his chair and turns away from the screen. Another cannon fires. His tribute. “What the hell happened?”
“The structural integrity of the dam was compromised by the first earthquake, and then the second one two nights ago displaced the--”
“Shut up, Beetee!” Gloss turns on him, shoves him out of his chair. “I bet your girl’s been running sims for this too, huh?”
“No, that isn’t what her family works on.”
“Well, good for her! Maybe then she’ll actually have to fight her way through.”
“How does it feel having to worry about a Career, Gloss?”
The flood roars again through the screen, and it’s all too much noise. “Shut up, both of you,” I snap.
“Could be worse,” Haymitch spits. “Could be a volcano.”
“You too.” I listen for cannonfire under--or over--the flood, but I can’t pick anything out. Four left. Annie’s one of them. But where is she? The camera shuttles between Telluria, Sid, and the boy from District 6--there are cameras all over the Arena, why are none of them on Annie? Why don’t the Gamemakers want me to see her?
Telluria’s lost her sword. She’s holding on to the exposed roots of a tree, flat against the edge of the ravine. Dirt crumbles into mud and slathers her arms but she holds on, keeps her head aloft. I can see the diagonal line of her body as the current drives it forward, like it’s trying to tear her in half at the waist. The camera zooms in, pans down her back to the water.
It isn’t the tide that drags her down.
A hand shoots out of the water, claws at her ankle. Telluria starts, frees one hand to try to beat her attacker off, but the waves surge around her and she scrambles, her fingernails scrabbling on the bark. It’s not enough. The waves rise higher, and Annie surfaces with them, drags Telluria’s head under and holds it there. It’s hard to see Telluria thrash with the way the water churns around them both. I grip the edges of the screen, try to find her even if I can see her right there.
Sea ghost, I told Drusus. Annie’s hands are white as foam, and the hair tangled around them almost looks like seaweed. Everything about Annie is strangling Telluria, holding her down. The camera catches her face, the white of her teeth and eyes, the black hollows under them, the pale hunger in her skin, and even Drusus’s best makeup couldn’t bring this out.
A cannon fires, and Beetee shuts his eyes, adjusts his glasses, and says nothing.
---
--
.