Scylla and Charybdis [8/9] (The Hunger Games, Finnick/Annie)
Chapter Eight! In which Finnick needs to look at his life, look at his choices, and this fic earns its R rating.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [8/9] ( 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 Eight: Arrows in the Centaur’s Blood Finnick is called to the Capitol for the seventy-first Hunger Games, and since he’s not mentoring this year, he has plenty of time to ruin his own life.
It’s the day before Reaping, and I am doing everything I can to pretend it isn’t. It’s impossible. Annie and I have been out on the boat all last night and most of today, and Lucy turned twelve four nights ago so dinner isn’t the liveliest affair. I’ve forbidden Lucy from training but it’s not always a matter of training, not where victors are concerned. Aunt Hannah bakes enough bread that even Roarke turns down more servings, and Uncle Jonas hauls out a platter of perfectly-seasoned crabmeat, but I can’t manage more than a few bites of anything. Katie and Lucy steal from my plate, and Aunt Shannon purses her lips either at that or at the way I’m putting food to waste--or both. “Let them,” Mags says, “they’re growing girls.” I translate for my aunts, and Aunt Shannon’s cheek twitches but she’s heard too many stories from my dad and uncles to contradict Mags, even now.
Annie sits at my side, and she doesn’t eat much either, but then, she didn’t put much on her plate. She pushes a strip of bread around her plate to sop up the juice from the crabmeat, but never lifts it to her mouth, and soon enough the dregs of the bread start crumbling back onto the dish, too heavy to stay together.
I volunteer to do the washing-up. It keeps my hands busy. Annie starts to get up too, but Aunt Hannah doesn’t spare even her from cleaning her plate before she leaves the table, and sits down next to her, tries to coax her into one, two more bites. I turn the water up higher and drown them out, thrust my hands into the sink and scrub until my knuckles turn red. It’s relaxing, not to hear anything, no concrete words, no distinct conversations, just the presence of my family, festive even on a night like this.
It’s getting louder, though.
“I want to answer it!”
“No, me!”
“No, it’s my turn!”
“Hold it, all of you!”
I look out the door in time to see my cousins scuffle, shouldering each other aside in an attempt to reach the phone first. Aidan sticks his elbow in Katie’s face and snatches the phone first, then Maeve wrestles it out of his hand and Jamie screams, “No, it’s mine!” and they bat it back and forth until Lindsay snatches it out of the middle.
“Odair residence,” Lindsay says, looking far too proud of herself for sounding grown up.
I can barely hear through the receiver, “You must be Lindsay. Is Finnick at home?”
Suddenly, the soap suds on my hands are as cold as ice. I slam the taps shut and lose the sponge somewhere in the dishwater. When I try to pull it out, I slice my palm on one of the knives, and my hand shakes too much for me to wrap it or towel it dry. Pull yourself together, I think, wipe my palm on my jeans again and again until the blood stops welling.
“Give me the phone,” I say, and to the adults, “I think the kids should turn in early. Long day tomorrow.”
Mother nods first, and though she can’t rise from her chair, she manages to usher everyone out. Annie lingers, a shadow in the doorway reaching out to me, and then Mother takes her by the arm. Annie hangs her head, and wheels Mother out into the hall. Mags looks at me before she leaves, mouths hang in there, her eyes fathomless, and touches her fingers to her lips for luck.
I put the phone to my ear, and breathe.
“Good evening, Finnick.”
“What is it?” I ask, keep my voice low and glance out the picture windows. Helen and Roarke are parading the cousins down to the beach, but the adults hang back, and the shadows from the setting sun hide their faces. Go, I think. Go to the beach. Play with the kids. Don’t look at the house. Don’t worry about me.
Snow sighs, and the sound chills my ear almost as much as his scent. “Let’s not beat around the bush, Finnick. No more gardening metaphors, no more lessons. I’m sure you’ll appreciate my dealing with you in honest confidence.”
Like hell I’m going to thank him. “Fine. What have I done?”
“I don’t know. What have you done? You spend so much time out on your boat, we hardly have the opportunity to talk to each other.”
The cut on my palm must have reopened, because the phone is slick in my grasp, threatens to slide through my fingers. I hold my breath for a few moments so I won’t smell the blood, and say, “I sail. That’s all.”
“Not alone, certainly. Even I know that’s unsafe.”
He knows. The certainty of it settles into my stomach, a cold weight that won’t stop sinking. “Annie and I go out together, when we get the time.”
“As I suspected. And not much else occupies your time, certainly. You’re not in the Capitol, you don’t have the same sort of obligations in District Four, unless there’s something I’m unaware of...?”
“There’s nothing,” I whisper, and swallow, force my throat back open. I turn around, cover the telephone stand with my body so only my back’s visible through the windows. I wish I’d bought curtains for them. I wish the sky wasn’t starting to darken; the lights overhead make this room glow to anyone looking in from the outside, a spotlight trained on me. “There’s nothing,” I say again. “We don’t have school, don’t have to work, so we spend time together.”
“I’m glad you’ve maintained your interest in Annie,” he says, and he sounds so genuinely happy that I know I’d want to punch out his teeth if he were here or I was there. “Perhaps she should come to the Capitol with you. I’m sure she would love to meet some of your associates.”
I hold onto the phone out of reflex. I can’t think of any other explanation for it. I can’t think of anything else at all. I’m numb to everything but his words and the images they conjure: Annie in the Capitol again, shrinking against the tide of light and sound, hands clawing at her--
I can’t. I can’t.
“So I insist, Finnick. Please, bring Annie to the Capitol with you. There’s plenty of space on the train.”
“Annie hates trains,” I say from somewhere outside myself, a part of me far enough away to remember our first journey on that train, her head resting against the window and her hair splayed across the glass, her legs curled up to her chest.
“That’s a pity. But it’s only a short ride. And she could make it only once, if she intends to stay.”
Almost all the air rushes out of me, and I’m left with only enough to whisper, “No.”
“No, what? No, she doesn’t want to stay in the Capitol?”
“No,” I say, not much louder, and the shudders in my throat ripple across my shoulders, down my arms and spine--I search for something to hold on to, anything, but there’s only the wall to lean against, and when I do that I’m afraid it’ll cave under me and send me tumbling. “She can’t stay in the Capitol. She can’t go. Please.”
“Not at all? But that’s a shame, Finnick. I’ve already got people looking forward to seeing what you’ve done with her.”
And back in Three I only thought I was going to get her killed. How could I have been so--I press my teeth together tight, tighter still, and say please again. “Let her stay here. Please. I--”
When I look up, expecting a response, all I see is Annie in the doorway.
“You’ll what?” Snow asks, all smiles, even where I can’t see.
“I can’t take her there,” I say, and know Annie can hear every word of it no matter how softly I speak. “She can’t go.”
“But what about all those people looking forward to meeting her, Finnick? You’ll have to explain it to them.”
“I will. I promise. I’ll--” My hand knots into a fist at my side, and I speak to the floor so Annie won’t see this, won’t see how Snow’s ripped my mask off and shown me for what I am. “I’ll make it up to them.”
It’s the kind of bargain a whore knows how to make.
“I expected as much of you, Finnick. You’re always so generous, so accommodating.”
I nod. My throat is still too tight to speak, but I have to answer him. “Thank you, Mister President.”
“Well, if Finnick Odair says something like that, I have to believe him,” Snow says, far too cheerfully. “You’re welcome. I’ll see you tomorrow. May the odds be ever in your favor.”
He hangs up, and the phone slides from my hand, clatters to the floor. The dial tone beeps at me disapprovingly, but it’s like I hear it through the water; the sound’s twisted, displaced. I slump against the wall and let it take my weight, give up trying to talk or stand or keep my eyes open.
Annie’s feet are quiet but not silent. They make no sound when they touch down but they peel away from the tile floor and it’s like the tap of flesh on flesh, empty fingers drumming on a thigh. “Finnick?”
I think I say, “Hey.”
“Finnick, no.” She shakes her head, or at least I think she does, I can’t bring myself to look but her hair nudges against my elbow. “Don’t go.”
“Have to,” I say. “On the train to the Capitol tomorrow, after the reaping.”
“No,” she says again. “You’re leaving now and I don’t want you to go. Don’t go. You’re not here.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t know what else to offer.
Her hand touches my hip, then draws away; before I can look, she’s sitting down next to me, leaning the side of her head right against my pocket. “Stay,” she says. It’s so soft it barely makes it up to my ear. “Stay and tell me why you left.”
“Snow called.”
She shivers, holds on to my ankle. “You won. You won, he can’t make you go back.”
“He can,” I say, and if I say it like that, like I’m describing the height of the waves or the time the sun sets or anything else that is, things that don’t change no matter who’s observing them and don’t give a damn how you feel about it, I can speak. “He can do whatever he wants.”
“And what does he want?”
“He wants me to go back,” I say. Flat. Distant. Like the parts of the shore exposed when the tide is lowest. “He wanted you to come with me.”
“Then I’ll go,” she says like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “If you go, I--”
“No,” I say, collapse and grab her by the shoulders, cut her off and break through before she gets the idea stuck in her head. Everything I tried to hold back surges again, crests high over my head, and I brace myself for when it’ll all crash down. Not long now. “No, Annie. You can’t. You can’t ever.”
Her eyes flash wide, her breath catches. “You can’t tell me no. It hurts you, you don’t want to go either, so I’ll go too. Or I’ll go instead.”
I grip her so hard my fingers ache. “Annie, listen. You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know what they do--what they’d do to--”
The wave breaks. I can’t finish.
Her lips close, and I lose myself in her eyes. They stare, at me, through me. She says my name, asks where I’ve gone.
“I can’t let you go there.” I want to close my eyes, curl up until I block out the rest of the world like she does, sink deeper and deeper until it’s all so far over my head that it doesn’t matter. I don’t. “I can’t let them make you like me,” I say. My voice breaks; something else might, too, deeper inside. I’m not brave enough to check.
She leans back, draws me down to the kitchen floor. I kneel, and then stagger against her, leaning my head on her thigh. She did this to me in the Training Center. I did this to Mags, so many times before that, and Annie tangles her hand in my hair the same way Mags used to, coaxing everything out of me.
“He--sells me,” I say. “President Snow, I mean. My body. Me, and some of the other victors.” The ones everyone wants, the ones everyone remembers.
Annie’s hand stills against my scalp. I’m surprised she’s still touching me at all.
“It started when I turned sixteen.” It doesn’t matter how hard I squeeze my eyes shut, how tightly I curl in; I see all of it, can’t block anything out. “I don’t know when I get to stop. And they’ll hurt Mother and Dad and--everyone--if I try.”
Her fingers curl into a fist in my hair, and then pull away, leaving me slipping through like sand. “You don’t want Snow to make me like you,” she breathes, and I don’t think she breathes in after.
“I don’t,” I say.
“But--” She trembles, all through her, and lifts her hands up to cover her ears, “--but you made me like you. And I am. And I can’t leave. I haven’t left. I’m still there. I’m already there.”
Her tears reach my cheeks before my own do.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I hate that phrase. I wish I could rip it out of the language. It’s never enough, and it’s all I have.
“It’s fine,” she says and it doesn’t sound fine at all, not the way she’s crying, not the way her arm scrapes against my scalp and she doubles over into her lap, head in her hands. “It’s all right. I won. I ran off and the forest tore me apart and I think I’m still there, so it’s okay. There’s water soon. It’s mine but it’s water. And then I won’t have to worry anymore and neither will you.”
I listen. I have no right to do anything else.
“It would have been horrible if I lost. Then I’d have to go around and say I’m sorry to everyone. You don’t like that either. So I’ll stay. It’s safer for you. And then next year you can try again, okay?” Her hands claw through her hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t want to lose.”
“I lost,” I say, so quietly that the dial tone almost subsumes it. “I lost you.”
She doesn’t say anything to that. Her palms smack over her ears and her shoulders quake, and if she’s still crying it’s only tears, no sobs, no gasps.
We lie on the floor until my dad comes to carry her home. He doesn’t ask, and I’m in his debt for that. I don’t know if I have any words left.
***
I wear a suit without a shirt to the Reaping, like I do every year. Mags walks up to the Justice Building with only a cane to aid her, and Old Neal to watch behind her and make sure she doesn’t fall. It’s a somber year, despite the favor we’ve received from the Capitol all through the year thanks to Annie’s victory.
Julia Page isn’t unnecessarily excited, and goes about drawing the tributes’ names with shining glasses and a smooth, natural smile. I think I hate that more than I’d hate a grin, at this stage. The girl comes first, Tricia Crabbe, and she’s only thirteen, so there’s actually a murmur when Julia calls for volunteers. One of the larger girls at the front row of seventeens raises her hand and steps up. Paula Marisco. She gets a round of applause, a gesture of the cameras sweeping up to her father and mother in the crowd. Then Julia draws a boy, Roy Scala, and he shoulders out of the eighteens with hateful determination.
I’d say we have a couple of winners, but there’s no way in hell either of them is escaping the bloodbath at the Cornucopia this year.
Besides, nobody wins.
“No,” I hear Annie whisper from a few seats away. “No, no, no...”
Her voice swells, and the cameras click and turn in unison, swarm to her side.
“Don’t go,” she rails. “And don’t come back. If you go, don’t come back!”
I can’t move. I can barely even look.
But Mags is there, and Annie’s on the right side of her for her to lance out an arm and hold Annie in her chair, and even if Annie struggles to get free Mags’s arms have tanned my uncles’ hides, she’s strong enough to keep Annie down. “You can’t!” Annie keeps shouting. The cameras love her. “They want you to, they want you to go there and come up for air and there isn’t any air, just blood. They breathe blood. Your blood.”
The color drains from my face. I press my lips together, press my hands to my knees, hold myself rigid and refuse to turn my head. The cameras are extending feelers in my direction, snaking out boom mics and wires. If I move, they’ll see me. Stop moving, I think to Annie as hard as I can. Don’t let them see you.
“It’s dry,” Annie whispers. “That’s why they need us.” Then Mags pulls Annie’s face into her lap and rakes her fingers through Annie’s hair and shushes her, says things I can’t hear or understand until Annie calms down.
How does Mags do it? How does she keep finding more to give?
The ceremony ends, and Julia insists, “May the odds be ever in your favor,” as the tributes are escorted into the Justice Building. The other victors rise and leave the stage, but Mags has Annie, and sings to her whether the cameras ignore it or not.
I can’t stop watching her, even after I follow the tributes inside. If I do, I’m terrified I’ll never find her again.
***
“How do you still do this?”
Mags looks up at me, strains off the back of the chair she’s just taken in the Justice Building. She smiles, but only half of her mouth complies. I kneel so I can hear her.
“You deserve it, and so does she,” she says. “We must take care of one another. You do it your way. I’ll stay here and do what you can’t.”
“I don’t deserve it,” I say. The corners of my eyes sting. “I don’t--Mags, I can’t even be sorry about her being alive, even when I know--”
Mags raises her hand to shush me. “We have all been through this,” she says. “We have all been through hell. Sometimes, there is worse to come. But if we are not here together, we have won nothing. We live for nothing without each other. We survive for nothing without each other.”
It reminds me of the last verse of the marriage song. I rest my head in her lap, wish I could close my eyes, but I can’t. “I don’t want to lose them,” I whisper, and don’t need to add the rest. She knows. Even now, even with half her face slack and one of her hands gnarled uselessly at her side, she’s so strong.
“Then don’t,” she says. “But don’t lose yourself either.”
***
The prep teams and mentors and tributes rush off the train as soon as it pulls in, which leaves me and a few others to deal with the cameras scuttling around, looking for the first scoop on this year’s contestants. I tell them a story about the time when Lucy and Katie convinced Connor that he’d laid an egg, wait for them to stop laughing, fake a yawn, and barricade myself in my apartment as soon as I can. The opening ceremonies unfold on television, as bright and loud as ever, and Drusus has given up on sea ghosts to turn Paula and Roy into jellyfish, with glowing clear film over their skin. It’s not as impressive as he probably wants it to be. I mix myself a drink, then another one, and by the time Drusus shows up I’m sprawled over the arm of the couch, trying to trace the shapes I see in the cushions, but they slip away as soon as I start to outline them.
He reads me my schedule in the morning, or, well, the early afternoon, once the tributes are off training and it’s my turn in prep. It’s tight, of course. I’m working for two. I wonder if Drusus knows. He doesn’t say anything about it if he does, just packs me off to ‘dinner-and-subsequent-activities’ with Francia Mayhew and says he’ll wait up if I don’t call and tell him otherwise.
She’s new, a slip of a young woman with pale blond hair and lavender skin. Nothing like anything back home, and that’s the only time I’ll let myself think about home for the rest of the evening. If I forget about home, I can rest my fingers on her thigh during dinner, trail them higher and higher until she fists the tablecloth and looks down, flushing dark violet. Nobody around us says anything, even if they notice. Typical, really. I finish my wine and whisper to her not to let the table shake. I get her off between the cheese course and dessert. At least out loud, everyone chalks up her sudden departure from the table to her wanting to make room for more. I don’t laugh. She returns and gives me the rest of the night off, her cheeks still glowing.
Maybe I should do this more often. Stop letting them pretend they don’t want what they do, and give them what they’ve been begging for.
I make a few stops before I go back home, pick up some things I probably shouldn’t be buying for myself, not with the cameras still flitting around. I even open one of the packages on the way home, offer some to the driver because it’s polite and he’s probably never had it before. He doesn’t accept. His loss.
Dru doesn’t either. That actually surprises me. But he’s working, he’s got tributes to kill, and I don’t. I have the night off.
The tributes keep training, the clock keeps ticking, I take my coffee with more sugar than yesterday, and I keep working.
***
I stop into the victor’s lounge while the tributes are training. It’s not like I have anything better to do. It’s just about the same crowd from last year, minus Cecelia, who still hadn’t had her baby when I saw her on Annie’s Victory Tour, so that’s a pretty good reason not to be here. I let the door hit my ass on the way in. “Morning,” I say; it’s close enough to what passes for morning in the Capitol, anyway. I think. It’s still light outside, is that close enough? I tangle my fingers in my hair, thinking. Should’ve brought a rope, my hands keep clenching, searching for something to fix around.
A few of them turn around from the consoles and the televisions. I stare at the televisions. I wonder if they love me like they used to. I should touch them. I try to. I think Chaff waves hello, and Brutus shrugs, but there’s this flash of gold and Cashmere looks over her shoulder and sneers. “District Six is that way, Finnick.”
“This is better than morphling,” I say. Granted, I haven’t had morphling since they fixed me up after my Games, but morphling slows everything around you, makes the world bleed into liquid at the edges. This makes my pulse thrum but keeps the world from racing by--I’m gliding instead of melting, like all the sights and sounds around me are encased in glass and I can walk over them, doodle things on the surface with my breath and fingertips. And none of it can touch me back.
“Don’t bring it in if you don’t plan on sharing,” someone says. I think it’s Greg.
I laugh. Why shouldn’t I? It can be funny, it can be whatever I want it to be. “I can bring some over. Phone for it, anyway. We have a phone in here, right? Of course we do. Come on, it’s new, let’s try it, we’ll start a trend. Victors are trendsetters, you all know that.”
“I’m in,” Greg says, and a couple of others laugh, but then one of the patterns does touch me back, a sharp cold shock down on my hipbone, and melts into Seeder.
“A little early for that, don’t you think?” she asks.
“It’s not really morning,” I admit. My smile slants at the corner.
“Not really night either.” She guides me to sit down somewhere that smells awful. The smell tangles around me in vines. I remember the vines. They really wanted me. I think they want me now too, so I rub against them, trace them back.
“Get the fuck off my couch,” Haymitch says.
“Don’t see your name on it,” I say, and frown, press my nose into the cushions so I can make sure his name isn’t written on it.
“Invisible ink,” he says. “Musk. Booze. Things much worse. Unwritten poetry, unsung songs, and thousands of unborn children.”
Johanna mimes vomiting. I laugh. There are sparkles dribbling out of her mouth, the color Drusus sometimes uses. “Doesn’t matter,” I say, lean forward to let him in on the secret. “It can’t touch me.”
“But I can,” Haymitch snarls. I’m pretty sure that’s his boot on the seat of my pants, and then those would be his hands at the scruff of my jacket, and it gets really tight at the underarms before he throws me to the floor. The room jiggles before everything settles down again. I think Seeder’s yelling at him about that. Throwing me, I mean, it’s not his fault the room won’t stay still. It makes me think of snowglobes, all that white swirling under glass. Trapped.
“You threw me,” I say, and my laugh dies in my chest before I let it out. Am I coming down already? No. No. I don’t want to go back.
“Yeah, and I’ll throw you out if you sit on my couch again.”
“Cut him a break, Haymitch,” Chaff says. That must be him helping me up.
“He shouldn’t be here anyway.” That’s Cashmere. “He’s not mentoring this year.”
“It’s the victor’s lounge,” I point out. “Not the mentor’s lounge.” It’s a good point, if I do say so myself.
“That’s because they assume any victors in the Capitol are here for the tributes,” Johanna says.
I fold my arms behind my head, my grin wide enough to spread off my face. “Like you, Josie?”
She snarls. “Call me that again and you’ll need more than drugs to take the pain away.”
I match it. “So you’re stepping up to the plate this year, Josie?”
She punches me in the teeth. My mouth shatters. I laugh through the shards. “So this is going to become a yearly tradition, huh, Josie?” I manage, gasping before she tackles me back to the floor. More shattering, in the back of my head this time, and the fragments catch the light behind my eyes. My head is stinging, swelling. I guess she must have broken through.
“Get him out of here,” Haymitch says, I think. “Get her off him and get him out of here.” Chaff takes half of me and Gloss takes the other, but they’re going in the same direction so I don’t fall apart.
It’s dimmer in the hall. Chaff pats me on the back, asks if I need help getting home, and I tell him I’m not going. Gloss hugs me, but I think it’s just to whisper in my ear.
“Don’t do this,” Gloss says. “It only makes it worse.”
I don’t want to think about worse. I close my eyes. When I open them again, the hallway’s empty, and the lights sink lower and lower until they leave burnt-black smears on whatever’s left of the glass.
“I’m not here,” I say, and wrap my arms around myself. It worked for Annie. Sort of.
***
Julian smacks me on the back once more. I’m pretty sure it’s a signal to get off him. “Whew,” he whistles, “now that was entirely worth it.”
That doesn’t require much more of a response than a little smile, so that’s all I do. I slip away and grab my pants off the back of the chair and fling them over my shoulder.
“You’re not staying,” he teases, stretching out on the bed, gone sweaty and boneless and smug. “What I paid and nothing more, is that how you roll?”
“More or less.” I pat his cheek, and my hand comes away slick. I don’t smear it on my pants. “Makes you wish you’d bought the deluxe package, huh?”
“In this economy?” He laughs. “I’m lucky to get it as advertised. Good luck to you, Finnick.”
“And to you,” I say, and more or less mean it. He even gives me money for the cab ride home. Could have been worse, I decide, and stretch out in the backseat.
Drusus is half-asleep when I get home, still making alterations on Roy’s interview suit. He breaks away from sewing long enough to give me a once-over, hand me a drink, and put me to bed with it. No words. That’s Drusus in the zone, though, so I don’t mind. Between that and the drink, and the crash I’ve been trying to stave off, and sheer physical exertion, I have no trouble getting to sleep at all.
Besides, Annie’s there when I sleep. Annie, and the ocean, and the sand under my feet. We’re dancing, my arm around her waist and her hands on my shoulders, tugging me closer. It’s bright out, and warm, just before high tide. I slip on an oyster shell the same way I did when I was small, and it tears into me, but the ocean washes me clean and Annie’s there with it, drawing me out and down and close. Her hair trails against my chest, wet all through, and her eyes pull me under and under again. She arches back, crests on top of me with the waves--
--and feet away from my ear, a drill grinds.
I sit bolt upright in bed and spring out of it, spin around to face the source of the sound and wonder why I don’t sleep with a knife. I’m casting around for anything that might work as a weapon and come up with the glass by my bedside before I see that it’s Beetee with the drill, and he’s staring at me unperturbed, the morning light glinting off his glasses.
I set the glass down. I feel bad for thinking of it as a bludgeon.
“Afternoon,” Beetee says.
“Hi,” I say, blinking. “You’re in my apartment.”
“I’m sweeping it.” He revs the drill once more, securing a metal plate behind my end table.
“Sweeping it.”
“Yes.” He drills in another screw, then straightens up and looks around the room, the drillbit bobbing as he counts. “I have a few more to take care of. Why don’t you go get some coffee and have a shower.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. “Beetee, what the hell is going on?”
“Like I said, I’m sweeping your apartment.” His glasses have slipped down his nose, and he looks at me over the rims. “Just in case there’s anything you don’t want hanging around.”
I know he means more than he’s saying, but I’m still not over the part where he broke into my apartment and started drilling holes in my wall. So I stare some more.
“Unless you want to watch,” Beetee goes on.
Did Drusus slip something into my drink last night? I sniff the glass, can’t pick anything up but a lingering whiff of alcohol, not that that means much. “I’m good. I think.”
Maybe this is Dru’s way of telling me stop doing drugs when you don’t know who designed them.
“Suit yourself.” Beetee goes to another corner, pulls over a stepladder and starts knocking gently on the wall. “If you ever have a problem, just say my name. That’s how this works.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “I’m going to shower.”
“Good. See you when you get out.” Then the drill cranks to life and I leave.
I step into the shower, fill the stall with steam, and think of the softness of Annie’s hands.
***
Gnaeus has kept me up all night. I’ve gotten a few breaks to tend the rope burns, to drink, to take a pill, but nothing else. So when he stops paying a bizarre amount of attention to my left elbow and says the Games are starting, I almost welcome it because it means I can sleep.
I should wait until Paula and Roy die at the Cornucopia. But I can sleep after that.
Gnaeus has his bets on the girl from 2, whose name is Merry but whose disposition is anything but, and he’s cheering her on as she barrels to the Cornucopia over the twitching bodies of the two who made it there seconds before her. I study her with professional interest. She’s tall and broad-shouldered, clearly knows her way around a sword and a spear, and if the broken back of the tribute she’s standing on is any indication, is fine enough without either. If she guards her supplies well, she has a decent shot at winning.
The cameras cut to the bodies on the rocks, pan over their faces, and I recognize the one she’s standing on: Roy. I can only hope she puts him out of his misery before someone else has to. From across the circle, Paula sees him fall and screams something--it might be his name, but the cameras are soaking up and magnifying each sound and it’s hard to pick out one voice amidst all that. She rushes forward, hesitates just a second too long to elbow a small boy out of her way, and I know she’s dead.
I’m right. I tend to be about these things, I’ve noticed. Call it observation, call it practice, call it instinct. The javelin pierces her throat, and skewers the other boy for good measure. They crash to the ground, locked together. The boy from 1 threw it, I see now from the way he’s sizing up his kills, but he doesn’t retrieve his weapon. Why should he? He’s a Career, he’ll get more.
Let the commentators dissect how the traditional alliances seem to be breaking down this year. They’ll have fun with it.
“Look at them go,” Gnaeus cheers. “They’re a regular bunch of live wires.”
“My district’s out,” I say, turn away from the screen. I will Paula and Roy’s faces to leave my mind, retreat to the shadows with the faces of every other kid who’s died since I started watching these things, but they stay cemented there, their eyes wider in death than they were in life. Could I have done better for them than Brine and Beatriz? No, and I cut that thought off there. She’s home. She’s home, and this isn’t home, and I swore I wouldn’t bring her here, and I need to stop breaking my promises like this.
“Shame,” Gnaeus says, and keeps watching.
***
Drusus almost cries with joy when I ask him to get me dressed for a nightclub. He needs something to be excited about. His tributes just died. It really isn’t funny. I should stop laughing, even if it’s only inside my head. But Drusus is ecstatic to wrangle me into even tighter pants than I usually wear to work, and work tendrils of things that shine into my hair, and he and the prep team (who are a little more vocally disappointed about the poor tributes) spend hours working abstract designs onto my back and chest, black and gold and glittering.
I don’t tell them I’m meeting Johanna Mason at the club.
Augustus’s Daughter is packed to the gills when I get there. There’s barely any room to dance, even dancing the way they do here, slicked up and practically inside each other. There’s a list, and I’m on it of course, and the cameras seem surprised and thrilled to see me. I talk up Drusus’s efforts and the tragedy that was District 4’s poor showing this year and insist I’m just here to put that in the past where it belongs and have myself a good time. The cameras eat it up. Back home, they probably choke on it.
“Someone looks like a harlot,” Johanna hisses behind me.
“Someone sounds as charming as ever.” I smile tightly. The music inside the club pulses, swells, and it should be loud enough to drown her out if she insists on whispering things in my ear for the rest of the evening. Her and everyone else.
“Well the way I sound and the way you look, it’s a perfect match,” she says. Never mind the way she looks; her hair has streaks of blood red in it that seem to suck the light and smoke out of the air, and she’s wearing about as much fur as you could find on an otter pelt, covering only what she needs to. Her nails glint whenever someone comes by carrying glasses, catch the light just the same. “Dance with me.”
“Oh, Johanna.” I step in closer, cup her shoulderblades and trail my fingers down her back in time with the music. “Does this mean you do like spending time with me?”
“Let’s find out,” she says sweetly, up on her toes and teetering heels to put her mouth just under mine. “How many songs can we get through without me breaking your face?”
I laugh and press her back down before she breaks her ankle. “Let’s see, huh?”
She grinds her hips on mine, her fur on my leather, and one song blurs into another. Apparently we do get along as long as we’re not talking to each other. She’s lithe and small but forceful and eggs me on, grabs me by the neck and holds me where she wants me. I don’t stay, I never stay for long. I pin her arms over her head, twine our fingers together and pulse in time to the music and she snarls, her eyes dark and glittering. Cameras flash. We drink the light down.
The music speeds up, the bass throbbing up through the floorboards and speakers, racing at breakneck BPM. Johanna and I clash, break apart to pull other partners in and writhe against them until we leave them panting and glassy-eyed, but we find each other again and lock together, her legs straddling my thigh, my hands sliding down her hips. When we’re out of breath, I take her aside, buy something out of someone’s pocket. This time, it’s enough to share, and the music around us surges high enough to drown in.
“Look at you,” she whispers, riding my hip so her mouth can reach my ear. “You’re a regular Capitol citizen now.”
“And what does that make you?” I ask, grab her by that ridiculous fur thing and haul her off but the texture tickles my hand too much and my fingers won’t close so I seize her shoulders instead. Her skin is slick, slick and melting. I should’ve asked the guy what the hell those things did. Oh well. Hindsight. Too late now. The music booms in agreement: too late. Too late.
“Same as ever.” She jabs her fingernails into my back. I think Drusus’s design is bleeding. “Fucking your kind over.”
“Really?” I laugh in her ear. It sounds wrong, low and drawn-out. “‘Cause I don’t see anyone getting fucked.”
She looks like she likes the sound of that, out of my mouth. She licks her teeth, rakes her nails down my spine to the waist of my pants. “Look in a mirror, asshole. You’ve got snow spilling out of every orifice.”
The beat skips and shudders, spins higher and faster without stopping, and I grab Johanna by her red-streaked hair and haul her into the hallway. I think I do, anyway. We hit a wall, at least, and when her back collides with it she shuts up, groans instead, deep and feral and trembling all over.
“Like I said.” She grins, lopsided and framed in red and black. “You’re fucked.”
“And you’re desperate.”
“That’s what happens, when you’ve got no one left you care about.” Her eyes shine. For a second, they aren’t hers.
I tear her off the wall and throw her past the nearest door I see. Glass shatters on the way, purgatives splatter on our ankles. Someone green shrieks and runs by but I barely see it, shoving Johanna onto the sink’s ledge and the mirror behind it. I don’t look in. I just look at her. “You leave her out of this,” I snarl, more breath than voice.
“You brought her in,” she snaps back, chest heaving against mine. The shoulder of her top has fallen down. Her skirt’s up around her hips. She’s hot there and hateful everywhere else, tearing into my back and shoulders. Blood tangles with the designs Drusus painted on, and I feel the shapes change, slick and twisting on my skin. “And you’re pathetic. You can’t have her, so you drive her nuts and have her fuck herself over for you--”
I slam her into the mirror, widen the cracks in it, and if I didn’t have to keep my hands under her thighs I’d wrap them around her throat instead, choke off that horrible smug smile and make her swallow every last hateful whisper. “Shut up,” I hiss, my teeth grazing her neck. “Shut up, you little slut.”
She moans, high and thin, almost squeaking. “Good,” she pants. “You know the difference between a slut and a whore.”
The mirror fractures. Her legs wrap around my hips, her underwear is soaked and heavy, all too easy to shove aside. She bites my shoulder, flays my back, and either it doesn’t hurt as much as it should or I just don’t care, since I don’t stop her no matter what she calls me. Whore. Traitor. Killer. I save Murderer for her, I know there’s a difference there too. Her nails drill into my scalp and past it to my skull so the words have someplace to go. I get myself undone, hold her legs apart. I feel like she’s stripping everything away there too, boiling away my skin. She laughs like I’m fucking it out of her, asks if I wish I could do this to all the people who do it to me. I ask her how she knows I don’t.
“Because you keep doing it,” she says, reeling, her heels ramming my back, making me push in harder. “You do whatever the hell they want. I bet you’d let them ruin you if they wanted you to stop, just so you could make someone happy.”
It’s too late to stop. I ignore the gashes in my chest and back, push past them, push her and sink my teeth into her shoulder and claw at her thighs until her voice breaks, until what she’s calling me gets jumbled and tangled and splintered and it doesn’t mean anything.
I come down from the sex but not the high. Johanna slumps against the mirror, dangles a hand into the sink, and looks extremely pleased with herself for someone who’s probably going to limp out of here tonight.
“You,” I say, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, “are just like them.”
She coughs, then laughs, and untangles her limbs from around my back. My blood and makeup are all over her arms, her fingertips, under her nails. “I thought that would make it easier for you.”
I do my pants back up and shoulder the door open, slam it behind me--
--and recoil at the wall of cameras clicking in my face.
---
--
.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [8/9] ( 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 Eight: Arrows in the Centaur’s Blood Finnick is called to the Capitol for the seventy-first Hunger Games, and since he’s not mentoring this year, he has plenty of time to ruin his own life.
It’s the day before Reaping, and I am doing everything I can to pretend it isn’t. It’s impossible. Annie and I have been out on the boat all last night and most of today, and Lucy turned twelve four nights ago so dinner isn’t the liveliest affair. I’ve forbidden Lucy from training but it’s not always a matter of training, not where victors are concerned. Aunt Hannah bakes enough bread that even Roarke turns down more servings, and Uncle Jonas hauls out a platter of perfectly-seasoned crabmeat, but I can’t manage more than a few bites of anything. Katie and Lucy steal from my plate, and Aunt Shannon purses her lips either at that or at the way I’m putting food to waste--or both. “Let them,” Mags says, “they’re growing girls.” I translate for my aunts, and Aunt Shannon’s cheek twitches but she’s heard too many stories from my dad and uncles to contradict Mags, even now.
Annie sits at my side, and she doesn’t eat much either, but then, she didn’t put much on her plate. She pushes a strip of bread around her plate to sop up the juice from the crabmeat, but never lifts it to her mouth, and soon enough the dregs of the bread start crumbling back onto the dish, too heavy to stay together.
I volunteer to do the washing-up. It keeps my hands busy. Annie starts to get up too, but Aunt Hannah doesn’t spare even her from cleaning her plate before she leaves the table, and sits down next to her, tries to coax her into one, two more bites. I turn the water up higher and drown them out, thrust my hands into the sink and scrub until my knuckles turn red. It’s relaxing, not to hear anything, no concrete words, no distinct conversations, just the presence of my family, festive even on a night like this.
It’s getting louder, though.
“I want to answer it!”
“No, me!”
“No, it’s my turn!”
“Hold it, all of you!”
I look out the door in time to see my cousins scuffle, shouldering each other aside in an attempt to reach the phone first. Aidan sticks his elbow in Katie’s face and snatches the phone first, then Maeve wrestles it out of his hand and Jamie screams, “No, it’s mine!” and they bat it back and forth until Lindsay snatches it out of the middle.
“Odair residence,” Lindsay says, looking far too proud of herself for sounding grown up.
I can barely hear through the receiver, “You must be Lindsay. Is Finnick at home?”
Suddenly, the soap suds on my hands are as cold as ice. I slam the taps shut and lose the sponge somewhere in the dishwater. When I try to pull it out, I slice my palm on one of the knives, and my hand shakes too much for me to wrap it or towel it dry. Pull yourself together, I think, wipe my palm on my jeans again and again until the blood stops welling.
“Give me the phone,” I say, and to the adults, “I think the kids should turn in early. Long day tomorrow.”
Mother nods first, and though she can’t rise from her chair, she manages to usher everyone out. Annie lingers, a shadow in the doorway reaching out to me, and then Mother takes her by the arm. Annie hangs her head, and wheels Mother out into the hall. Mags looks at me before she leaves, mouths hang in there, her eyes fathomless, and touches her fingers to her lips for luck.
I put the phone to my ear, and breathe.
“Good evening, Finnick.”
“What is it?” I ask, keep my voice low and glance out the picture windows. Helen and Roarke are parading the cousins down to the beach, but the adults hang back, and the shadows from the setting sun hide their faces. Go, I think. Go to the beach. Play with the kids. Don’t look at the house. Don’t worry about me.
Snow sighs, and the sound chills my ear almost as much as his scent. “Let’s not beat around the bush, Finnick. No more gardening metaphors, no more lessons. I’m sure you’ll appreciate my dealing with you in honest confidence.”
Like hell I’m going to thank him. “Fine. What have I done?”
“I don’t know. What have you done? You spend so much time out on your boat, we hardly have the opportunity to talk to each other.”
The cut on my palm must have reopened, because the phone is slick in my grasp, threatens to slide through my fingers. I hold my breath for a few moments so I won’t smell the blood, and say, “I sail. That’s all.”
“Not alone, certainly. Even I know that’s unsafe.”
He knows. The certainty of it settles into my stomach, a cold weight that won’t stop sinking. “Annie and I go out together, when we get the time.”
“As I suspected. And not much else occupies your time, certainly. You’re not in the Capitol, you don’t have the same sort of obligations in District Four, unless there’s something I’m unaware of...?”
“There’s nothing,” I whisper, and swallow, force my throat back open. I turn around, cover the telephone stand with my body so only my back’s visible through the windows. I wish I’d bought curtains for them. I wish the sky wasn’t starting to darken; the lights overhead make this room glow to anyone looking in from the outside, a spotlight trained on me. “There’s nothing,” I say again. “We don’t have school, don’t have to work, so we spend time together.”
“I’m glad you’ve maintained your interest in Annie,” he says, and he sounds so genuinely happy that I know I’d want to punch out his teeth if he were here or I was there. “Perhaps she should come to the Capitol with you. I’m sure she would love to meet some of your associates.”
I hold onto the phone out of reflex. I can’t think of any other explanation for it. I can’t think of anything else at all. I’m numb to everything but his words and the images they conjure: Annie in the Capitol again, shrinking against the tide of light and sound, hands clawing at her--
I can’t. I can’t.
“So I insist, Finnick. Please, bring Annie to the Capitol with you. There’s plenty of space on the train.”
“Annie hates trains,” I say from somewhere outside myself, a part of me far enough away to remember our first journey on that train, her head resting against the window and her hair splayed across the glass, her legs curled up to her chest.
“That’s a pity. But it’s only a short ride. And she could make it only once, if she intends to stay.”
Almost all the air rushes out of me, and I’m left with only enough to whisper, “No.”
“No, what? No, she doesn’t want to stay in the Capitol?”
“No,” I say, not much louder, and the shudders in my throat ripple across my shoulders, down my arms and spine--I search for something to hold on to, anything, but there’s only the wall to lean against, and when I do that I’m afraid it’ll cave under me and send me tumbling. “She can’t stay in the Capitol. She can’t go. Please.”
“Not at all? But that’s a shame, Finnick. I’ve already got people looking forward to seeing what you’ve done with her.”
And back in Three I only thought I was going to get her killed. How could I have been so--I press my teeth together tight, tighter still, and say please again. “Let her stay here. Please. I--”
When I look up, expecting a response, all I see is Annie in the doorway.
“You’ll what?” Snow asks, all smiles, even where I can’t see.
“I can’t take her there,” I say, and know Annie can hear every word of it no matter how softly I speak. “She can’t go.”
“But what about all those people looking forward to meeting her, Finnick? You’ll have to explain it to them.”
“I will. I promise. I’ll--” My hand knots into a fist at my side, and I speak to the floor so Annie won’t see this, won’t see how Snow’s ripped my mask off and shown me for what I am. “I’ll make it up to them.”
It’s the kind of bargain a whore knows how to make.
“I expected as much of you, Finnick. You’re always so generous, so accommodating.”
I nod. My throat is still too tight to speak, but I have to answer him. “Thank you, Mister President.”
“Well, if Finnick Odair says something like that, I have to believe him,” Snow says, far too cheerfully. “You’re welcome. I’ll see you tomorrow. May the odds be ever in your favor.”
He hangs up, and the phone slides from my hand, clatters to the floor. The dial tone beeps at me disapprovingly, but it’s like I hear it through the water; the sound’s twisted, displaced. I slump against the wall and let it take my weight, give up trying to talk or stand or keep my eyes open.
Annie’s feet are quiet but not silent. They make no sound when they touch down but they peel away from the tile floor and it’s like the tap of flesh on flesh, empty fingers drumming on a thigh. “Finnick?”
I think I say, “Hey.”
“Finnick, no.” She shakes her head, or at least I think she does, I can’t bring myself to look but her hair nudges against my elbow. “Don’t go.”
“Have to,” I say. “On the train to the Capitol tomorrow, after the reaping.”
“No,” she says again. “You’re leaving now and I don’t want you to go. Don’t go. You’re not here.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t know what else to offer.
Her hand touches my hip, then draws away; before I can look, she’s sitting down next to me, leaning the side of her head right against my pocket. “Stay,” she says. It’s so soft it barely makes it up to my ear. “Stay and tell me why you left.”
“Snow called.”
She shivers, holds on to my ankle. “You won. You won, he can’t make you go back.”
“He can,” I say, and if I say it like that, like I’m describing the height of the waves or the time the sun sets or anything else that is, things that don’t change no matter who’s observing them and don’t give a damn how you feel about it, I can speak. “He can do whatever he wants.”
“And what does he want?”
“He wants me to go back,” I say. Flat. Distant. Like the parts of the shore exposed when the tide is lowest. “He wanted you to come with me.”
“Then I’ll go,” she says like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “If you go, I--”
“No,” I say, collapse and grab her by the shoulders, cut her off and break through before she gets the idea stuck in her head. Everything I tried to hold back surges again, crests high over my head, and I brace myself for when it’ll all crash down. Not long now. “No, Annie. You can’t. You can’t ever.”
Her eyes flash wide, her breath catches. “You can’t tell me no. It hurts you, you don’t want to go either, so I’ll go too. Or I’ll go instead.”
I grip her so hard my fingers ache. “Annie, listen. You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know what they do--what they’d do to--”
The wave breaks. I can’t finish.
Her lips close, and I lose myself in her eyes. They stare, at me, through me. She says my name, asks where I’ve gone.
“I can’t let you go there.” I want to close my eyes, curl up until I block out the rest of the world like she does, sink deeper and deeper until it’s all so far over my head that it doesn’t matter. I don’t. “I can’t let them make you like me,” I say. My voice breaks; something else might, too, deeper inside. I’m not brave enough to check.
She leans back, draws me down to the kitchen floor. I kneel, and then stagger against her, leaning my head on her thigh. She did this to me in the Training Center. I did this to Mags, so many times before that, and Annie tangles her hand in my hair the same way Mags used to, coaxing everything out of me.
“He--sells me,” I say. “President Snow, I mean. My body. Me, and some of the other victors.” The ones everyone wants, the ones everyone remembers.
Annie’s hand stills against my scalp. I’m surprised she’s still touching me at all.
“It started when I turned sixteen.” It doesn’t matter how hard I squeeze my eyes shut, how tightly I curl in; I see all of it, can’t block anything out. “I don’t know when I get to stop. And they’ll hurt Mother and Dad and--everyone--if I try.”
Her fingers curl into a fist in my hair, and then pull away, leaving me slipping through like sand. “You don’t want Snow to make me like you,” she breathes, and I don’t think she breathes in after.
“I don’t,” I say.
“But--” She trembles, all through her, and lifts her hands up to cover her ears, “--but you made me like you. And I am. And I can’t leave. I haven’t left. I’m still there. I’m already there.”
Her tears reach my cheeks before my own do.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I hate that phrase. I wish I could rip it out of the language. It’s never enough, and it’s all I have.
“It’s fine,” she says and it doesn’t sound fine at all, not the way she’s crying, not the way her arm scrapes against my scalp and she doubles over into her lap, head in her hands. “It’s all right. I won. I ran off and the forest tore me apart and I think I’m still there, so it’s okay. There’s water soon. It’s mine but it’s water. And then I won’t have to worry anymore and neither will you.”
I listen. I have no right to do anything else.
“It would have been horrible if I lost. Then I’d have to go around and say I’m sorry to everyone. You don’t like that either. So I’ll stay. It’s safer for you. And then next year you can try again, okay?” Her hands claw through her hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t want to lose.”
“I lost,” I say, so quietly that the dial tone almost subsumes it. “I lost you.”
She doesn’t say anything to that. Her palms smack over her ears and her shoulders quake, and if she’s still crying it’s only tears, no sobs, no gasps.
We lie on the floor until my dad comes to carry her home. He doesn’t ask, and I’m in his debt for that. I don’t know if I have any words left.
***
I wear a suit without a shirt to the Reaping, like I do every year. Mags walks up to the Justice Building with only a cane to aid her, and Old Neal to watch behind her and make sure she doesn’t fall. It’s a somber year, despite the favor we’ve received from the Capitol all through the year thanks to Annie’s victory.
Julia Page isn’t unnecessarily excited, and goes about drawing the tributes’ names with shining glasses and a smooth, natural smile. I think I hate that more than I’d hate a grin, at this stage. The girl comes first, Tricia Crabbe, and she’s only thirteen, so there’s actually a murmur when Julia calls for volunteers. One of the larger girls at the front row of seventeens raises her hand and steps up. Paula Marisco. She gets a round of applause, a gesture of the cameras sweeping up to her father and mother in the crowd. Then Julia draws a boy, Roy Scala, and he shoulders out of the eighteens with hateful determination.
I’d say we have a couple of winners, but there’s no way in hell either of them is escaping the bloodbath at the Cornucopia this year.
Besides, nobody wins.
“No,” I hear Annie whisper from a few seats away. “No, no, no...”
Her voice swells, and the cameras click and turn in unison, swarm to her side.
“Don’t go,” she rails. “And don’t come back. If you go, don’t come back!”
I can’t move. I can barely even look.
But Mags is there, and Annie’s on the right side of her for her to lance out an arm and hold Annie in her chair, and even if Annie struggles to get free Mags’s arms have tanned my uncles’ hides, she’s strong enough to keep Annie down. “You can’t!” Annie keeps shouting. The cameras love her. “They want you to, they want you to go there and come up for air and there isn’t any air, just blood. They breathe blood. Your blood.”
The color drains from my face. I press my lips together, press my hands to my knees, hold myself rigid and refuse to turn my head. The cameras are extending feelers in my direction, snaking out boom mics and wires. If I move, they’ll see me. Stop moving, I think to Annie as hard as I can. Don’t let them see you.
“It’s dry,” Annie whispers. “That’s why they need us.” Then Mags pulls Annie’s face into her lap and rakes her fingers through Annie’s hair and shushes her, says things I can’t hear or understand until Annie calms down.
How does Mags do it? How does she keep finding more to give?
The ceremony ends, and Julia insists, “May the odds be ever in your favor,” as the tributes are escorted into the Justice Building. The other victors rise and leave the stage, but Mags has Annie, and sings to her whether the cameras ignore it or not.
I can’t stop watching her, even after I follow the tributes inside. If I do, I’m terrified I’ll never find her again.
***
“How do you still do this?”
Mags looks up at me, strains off the back of the chair she’s just taken in the Justice Building. She smiles, but only half of her mouth complies. I kneel so I can hear her.
“You deserve it, and so does she,” she says. “We must take care of one another. You do it your way. I’ll stay here and do what you can’t.”
“I don’t deserve it,” I say. The corners of my eyes sting. “I don’t--Mags, I can’t even be sorry about her being alive, even when I know--”
Mags raises her hand to shush me. “We have all been through this,” she says. “We have all been through hell. Sometimes, there is worse to come. But if we are not here together, we have won nothing. We live for nothing without each other. We survive for nothing without each other.”
It reminds me of the last verse of the marriage song. I rest my head in her lap, wish I could close my eyes, but I can’t. “I don’t want to lose them,” I whisper, and don’t need to add the rest. She knows. Even now, even with half her face slack and one of her hands gnarled uselessly at her side, she’s so strong.
“Then don’t,” she says. “But don’t lose yourself either.”
***
The prep teams and mentors and tributes rush off the train as soon as it pulls in, which leaves me and a few others to deal with the cameras scuttling around, looking for the first scoop on this year’s contestants. I tell them a story about the time when Lucy and Katie convinced Connor that he’d laid an egg, wait for them to stop laughing, fake a yawn, and barricade myself in my apartment as soon as I can. The opening ceremonies unfold on television, as bright and loud as ever, and Drusus has given up on sea ghosts to turn Paula and Roy into jellyfish, with glowing clear film over their skin. It’s not as impressive as he probably wants it to be. I mix myself a drink, then another one, and by the time Drusus shows up I’m sprawled over the arm of the couch, trying to trace the shapes I see in the cushions, but they slip away as soon as I start to outline them.
He reads me my schedule in the morning, or, well, the early afternoon, once the tributes are off training and it’s my turn in prep. It’s tight, of course. I’m working for two. I wonder if Drusus knows. He doesn’t say anything about it if he does, just packs me off to ‘dinner-and-subsequent-activities’ with Francia Mayhew and says he’ll wait up if I don’t call and tell him otherwise.
She’s new, a slip of a young woman with pale blond hair and lavender skin. Nothing like anything back home, and that’s the only time I’ll let myself think about home for the rest of the evening. If I forget about home, I can rest my fingers on her thigh during dinner, trail them higher and higher until she fists the tablecloth and looks down, flushing dark violet. Nobody around us says anything, even if they notice. Typical, really. I finish my wine and whisper to her not to let the table shake. I get her off between the cheese course and dessert. At least out loud, everyone chalks up her sudden departure from the table to her wanting to make room for more. I don’t laugh. She returns and gives me the rest of the night off, her cheeks still glowing.
Maybe I should do this more often. Stop letting them pretend they don’t want what they do, and give them what they’ve been begging for.
I make a few stops before I go back home, pick up some things I probably shouldn’t be buying for myself, not with the cameras still flitting around. I even open one of the packages on the way home, offer some to the driver because it’s polite and he’s probably never had it before. He doesn’t accept. His loss.
Dru doesn’t either. That actually surprises me. But he’s working, he’s got tributes to kill, and I don’t. I have the night off.
The tributes keep training, the clock keeps ticking, I take my coffee with more sugar than yesterday, and I keep working.
***
I stop into the victor’s lounge while the tributes are training. It’s not like I have anything better to do. It’s just about the same crowd from last year, minus Cecelia, who still hadn’t had her baby when I saw her on Annie’s Victory Tour, so that’s a pretty good reason not to be here. I let the door hit my ass on the way in. “Morning,” I say; it’s close enough to what passes for morning in the Capitol, anyway. I think. It’s still light outside, is that close enough? I tangle my fingers in my hair, thinking. Should’ve brought a rope, my hands keep clenching, searching for something to fix around.
A few of them turn around from the consoles and the televisions. I stare at the televisions. I wonder if they love me like they used to. I should touch them. I try to. I think Chaff waves hello, and Brutus shrugs, but there’s this flash of gold and Cashmere looks over her shoulder and sneers. “District Six is that way, Finnick.”
“This is better than morphling,” I say. Granted, I haven’t had morphling since they fixed me up after my Games, but morphling slows everything around you, makes the world bleed into liquid at the edges. This makes my pulse thrum but keeps the world from racing by--I’m gliding instead of melting, like all the sights and sounds around me are encased in glass and I can walk over them, doodle things on the surface with my breath and fingertips. And none of it can touch me back.
“Don’t bring it in if you don’t plan on sharing,” someone says. I think it’s Greg.
I laugh. Why shouldn’t I? It can be funny, it can be whatever I want it to be. “I can bring some over. Phone for it, anyway. We have a phone in here, right? Of course we do. Come on, it’s new, let’s try it, we’ll start a trend. Victors are trendsetters, you all know that.”
“I’m in,” Greg says, and a couple of others laugh, but then one of the patterns does touch me back, a sharp cold shock down on my hipbone, and melts into Seeder.
“A little early for that, don’t you think?” she asks.
“It’s not really morning,” I admit. My smile slants at the corner.
“Not really night either.” She guides me to sit down somewhere that smells awful. The smell tangles around me in vines. I remember the vines. They really wanted me. I think they want me now too, so I rub against them, trace them back.
“Get the fuck off my couch,” Haymitch says.
“Don’t see your name on it,” I say, and frown, press my nose into the cushions so I can make sure his name isn’t written on it.
“Invisible ink,” he says. “Musk. Booze. Things much worse. Unwritten poetry, unsung songs, and thousands of unborn children.”
Johanna mimes vomiting. I laugh. There are sparkles dribbling out of her mouth, the color Drusus sometimes uses. “Doesn’t matter,” I say, lean forward to let him in on the secret. “It can’t touch me.”
“But I can,” Haymitch snarls. I’m pretty sure that’s his boot on the seat of my pants, and then those would be his hands at the scruff of my jacket, and it gets really tight at the underarms before he throws me to the floor. The room jiggles before everything settles down again. I think Seeder’s yelling at him about that. Throwing me, I mean, it’s not his fault the room won’t stay still. It makes me think of snowglobes, all that white swirling under glass. Trapped.
“You threw me,” I say, and my laugh dies in my chest before I let it out. Am I coming down already? No. No. I don’t want to go back.
“Yeah, and I’ll throw you out if you sit on my couch again.”
“Cut him a break, Haymitch,” Chaff says. That must be him helping me up.
“He shouldn’t be here anyway.” That’s Cashmere. “He’s not mentoring this year.”
“It’s the victor’s lounge,” I point out. “Not the mentor’s lounge.” It’s a good point, if I do say so myself.
“That’s because they assume any victors in the Capitol are here for the tributes,” Johanna says.
I fold my arms behind my head, my grin wide enough to spread off my face. “Like you, Josie?”
She snarls. “Call me that again and you’ll need more than drugs to take the pain away.”
I match it. “So you’re stepping up to the plate this year, Josie?”
She punches me in the teeth. My mouth shatters. I laugh through the shards. “So this is going to become a yearly tradition, huh, Josie?” I manage, gasping before she tackles me back to the floor. More shattering, in the back of my head this time, and the fragments catch the light behind my eyes. My head is stinging, swelling. I guess she must have broken through.
“Get him out of here,” Haymitch says, I think. “Get her off him and get him out of here.” Chaff takes half of me and Gloss takes the other, but they’re going in the same direction so I don’t fall apart.
It’s dimmer in the hall. Chaff pats me on the back, asks if I need help getting home, and I tell him I’m not going. Gloss hugs me, but I think it’s just to whisper in my ear.
“Don’t do this,” Gloss says. “It only makes it worse.”
I don’t want to think about worse. I close my eyes. When I open them again, the hallway’s empty, and the lights sink lower and lower until they leave burnt-black smears on whatever’s left of the glass.
“I’m not here,” I say, and wrap my arms around myself. It worked for Annie. Sort of.
***
Julian smacks me on the back once more. I’m pretty sure it’s a signal to get off him. “Whew,” he whistles, “now that was entirely worth it.”
That doesn’t require much more of a response than a little smile, so that’s all I do. I slip away and grab my pants off the back of the chair and fling them over my shoulder.
“You’re not staying,” he teases, stretching out on the bed, gone sweaty and boneless and smug. “What I paid and nothing more, is that how you roll?”
“More or less.” I pat his cheek, and my hand comes away slick. I don’t smear it on my pants. “Makes you wish you’d bought the deluxe package, huh?”
“In this economy?” He laughs. “I’m lucky to get it as advertised. Good luck to you, Finnick.”
“And to you,” I say, and more or less mean it. He even gives me money for the cab ride home. Could have been worse, I decide, and stretch out in the backseat.
Drusus is half-asleep when I get home, still making alterations on Roy’s interview suit. He breaks away from sewing long enough to give me a once-over, hand me a drink, and put me to bed with it. No words. That’s Drusus in the zone, though, so I don’t mind. Between that and the drink, and the crash I’ve been trying to stave off, and sheer physical exertion, I have no trouble getting to sleep at all.
Besides, Annie’s there when I sleep. Annie, and the ocean, and the sand under my feet. We’re dancing, my arm around her waist and her hands on my shoulders, tugging me closer. It’s bright out, and warm, just before high tide. I slip on an oyster shell the same way I did when I was small, and it tears into me, but the ocean washes me clean and Annie’s there with it, drawing me out and down and close. Her hair trails against my chest, wet all through, and her eyes pull me under and under again. She arches back, crests on top of me with the waves--
--and feet away from my ear, a drill grinds.
I sit bolt upright in bed and spring out of it, spin around to face the source of the sound and wonder why I don’t sleep with a knife. I’m casting around for anything that might work as a weapon and come up with the glass by my bedside before I see that it’s Beetee with the drill, and he’s staring at me unperturbed, the morning light glinting off his glasses.
I set the glass down. I feel bad for thinking of it as a bludgeon.
“Afternoon,” Beetee says.
“Hi,” I say, blinking. “You’re in my apartment.”
“I’m sweeping it.” He revs the drill once more, securing a metal plate behind my end table.
“Sweeping it.”
“Yes.” He drills in another screw, then straightens up and looks around the room, the drillbit bobbing as he counts. “I have a few more to take care of. Why don’t you go get some coffee and have a shower.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. “Beetee, what the hell is going on?”
“Like I said, I’m sweeping your apartment.” His glasses have slipped down his nose, and he looks at me over the rims. “Just in case there’s anything you don’t want hanging around.”
I know he means more than he’s saying, but I’m still not over the part where he broke into my apartment and started drilling holes in my wall. So I stare some more.
“Unless you want to watch,” Beetee goes on.
Did Drusus slip something into my drink last night? I sniff the glass, can’t pick anything up but a lingering whiff of alcohol, not that that means much. “I’m good. I think.”
Maybe this is Dru’s way of telling me stop doing drugs when you don’t know who designed them.
“Suit yourself.” Beetee goes to another corner, pulls over a stepladder and starts knocking gently on the wall. “If you ever have a problem, just say my name. That’s how this works.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “I’m going to shower.”
“Good. See you when you get out.” Then the drill cranks to life and I leave.
I step into the shower, fill the stall with steam, and think of the softness of Annie’s hands.
***
Gnaeus has kept me up all night. I’ve gotten a few breaks to tend the rope burns, to drink, to take a pill, but nothing else. So when he stops paying a bizarre amount of attention to my left elbow and says the Games are starting, I almost welcome it because it means I can sleep.
I should wait until Paula and Roy die at the Cornucopia. But I can sleep after that.
Gnaeus has his bets on the girl from 2, whose name is Merry but whose disposition is anything but, and he’s cheering her on as she barrels to the Cornucopia over the twitching bodies of the two who made it there seconds before her. I study her with professional interest. She’s tall and broad-shouldered, clearly knows her way around a sword and a spear, and if the broken back of the tribute she’s standing on is any indication, is fine enough without either. If she guards her supplies well, she has a decent shot at winning.
The cameras cut to the bodies on the rocks, pan over their faces, and I recognize the one she’s standing on: Roy. I can only hope she puts him out of his misery before someone else has to. From across the circle, Paula sees him fall and screams something--it might be his name, but the cameras are soaking up and magnifying each sound and it’s hard to pick out one voice amidst all that. She rushes forward, hesitates just a second too long to elbow a small boy out of her way, and I know she’s dead.
I’m right. I tend to be about these things, I’ve noticed. Call it observation, call it practice, call it instinct. The javelin pierces her throat, and skewers the other boy for good measure. They crash to the ground, locked together. The boy from 1 threw it, I see now from the way he’s sizing up his kills, but he doesn’t retrieve his weapon. Why should he? He’s a Career, he’ll get more.
Let the commentators dissect how the traditional alliances seem to be breaking down this year. They’ll have fun with it.
“Look at them go,” Gnaeus cheers. “They’re a regular bunch of live wires.”
“My district’s out,” I say, turn away from the screen. I will Paula and Roy’s faces to leave my mind, retreat to the shadows with the faces of every other kid who’s died since I started watching these things, but they stay cemented there, their eyes wider in death than they were in life. Could I have done better for them than Brine and Beatriz? No, and I cut that thought off there. She’s home. She’s home, and this isn’t home, and I swore I wouldn’t bring her here, and I need to stop breaking my promises like this.
“Shame,” Gnaeus says, and keeps watching.
***
Drusus almost cries with joy when I ask him to get me dressed for a nightclub. He needs something to be excited about. His tributes just died. It really isn’t funny. I should stop laughing, even if it’s only inside my head. But Drusus is ecstatic to wrangle me into even tighter pants than I usually wear to work, and work tendrils of things that shine into my hair, and he and the prep team (who are a little more vocally disappointed about the poor tributes) spend hours working abstract designs onto my back and chest, black and gold and glittering.
I don’t tell them I’m meeting Johanna Mason at the club.
Augustus’s Daughter is packed to the gills when I get there. There’s barely any room to dance, even dancing the way they do here, slicked up and practically inside each other. There’s a list, and I’m on it of course, and the cameras seem surprised and thrilled to see me. I talk up Drusus’s efforts and the tragedy that was District 4’s poor showing this year and insist I’m just here to put that in the past where it belongs and have myself a good time. The cameras eat it up. Back home, they probably choke on it.
“Someone looks like a harlot,” Johanna hisses behind me.
“Someone sounds as charming as ever.” I smile tightly. The music inside the club pulses, swells, and it should be loud enough to drown her out if she insists on whispering things in my ear for the rest of the evening. Her and everyone else.
“Well the way I sound and the way you look, it’s a perfect match,” she says. Never mind the way she looks; her hair has streaks of blood red in it that seem to suck the light and smoke out of the air, and she’s wearing about as much fur as you could find on an otter pelt, covering only what she needs to. Her nails glint whenever someone comes by carrying glasses, catch the light just the same. “Dance with me.”
“Oh, Johanna.” I step in closer, cup her shoulderblades and trail my fingers down her back in time with the music. “Does this mean you do like spending time with me?”
“Let’s find out,” she says sweetly, up on her toes and teetering heels to put her mouth just under mine. “How many songs can we get through without me breaking your face?”
I laugh and press her back down before she breaks her ankle. “Let’s see, huh?”
She grinds her hips on mine, her fur on my leather, and one song blurs into another. Apparently we do get along as long as we’re not talking to each other. She’s lithe and small but forceful and eggs me on, grabs me by the neck and holds me where she wants me. I don’t stay, I never stay for long. I pin her arms over her head, twine our fingers together and pulse in time to the music and she snarls, her eyes dark and glittering. Cameras flash. We drink the light down.
The music speeds up, the bass throbbing up through the floorboards and speakers, racing at breakneck BPM. Johanna and I clash, break apart to pull other partners in and writhe against them until we leave them panting and glassy-eyed, but we find each other again and lock together, her legs straddling my thigh, my hands sliding down her hips. When we’re out of breath, I take her aside, buy something out of someone’s pocket. This time, it’s enough to share, and the music around us surges high enough to drown in.
“Look at you,” she whispers, riding my hip so her mouth can reach my ear. “You’re a regular Capitol citizen now.”
“And what does that make you?” I ask, grab her by that ridiculous fur thing and haul her off but the texture tickles my hand too much and my fingers won’t close so I seize her shoulders instead. Her skin is slick, slick and melting. I should’ve asked the guy what the hell those things did. Oh well. Hindsight. Too late now. The music booms in agreement: too late. Too late.
“Same as ever.” She jabs her fingernails into my back. I think Drusus’s design is bleeding. “Fucking your kind over.”
“Really?” I laugh in her ear. It sounds wrong, low and drawn-out. “‘Cause I don’t see anyone getting fucked.”
She looks like she likes the sound of that, out of my mouth. She licks her teeth, rakes her nails down my spine to the waist of my pants. “Look in a mirror, asshole. You’ve got snow spilling out of every orifice.”
The beat skips and shudders, spins higher and faster without stopping, and I grab Johanna by her red-streaked hair and haul her into the hallway. I think I do, anyway. We hit a wall, at least, and when her back collides with it she shuts up, groans instead, deep and feral and trembling all over.
“Like I said.” She grins, lopsided and framed in red and black. “You’re fucked.”
“And you’re desperate.”
“That’s what happens, when you’ve got no one left you care about.” Her eyes shine. For a second, they aren’t hers.
I tear her off the wall and throw her past the nearest door I see. Glass shatters on the way, purgatives splatter on our ankles. Someone green shrieks and runs by but I barely see it, shoving Johanna onto the sink’s ledge and the mirror behind it. I don’t look in. I just look at her. “You leave her out of this,” I snarl, more breath than voice.
“You brought her in,” she snaps back, chest heaving against mine. The shoulder of her top has fallen down. Her skirt’s up around her hips. She’s hot there and hateful everywhere else, tearing into my back and shoulders. Blood tangles with the designs Drusus painted on, and I feel the shapes change, slick and twisting on my skin. “And you’re pathetic. You can’t have her, so you drive her nuts and have her fuck herself over for you--”
I slam her into the mirror, widen the cracks in it, and if I didn’t have to keep my hands under her thighs I’d wrap them around her throat instead, choke off that horrible smug smile and make her swallow every last hateful whisper. “Shut up,” I hiss, my teeth grazing her neck. “Shut up, you little slut.”
She moans, high and thin, almost squeaking. “Good,” she pants. “You know the difference between a slut and a whore.”
The mirror fractures. Her legs wrap around my hips, her underwear is soaked and heavy, all too easy to shove aside. She bites my shoulder, flays my back, and either it doesn’t hurt as much as it should or I just don’t care, since I don’t stop her no matter what she calls me. Whore. Traitor. Killer. I save Murderer for her, I know there’s a difference there too. Her nails drill into my scalp and past it to my skull so the words have someplace to go. I get myself undone, hold her legs apart. I feel like she’s stripping everything away there too, boiling away my skin. She laughs like I’m fucking it out of her, asks if I wish I could do this to all the people who do it to me. I ask her how she knows I don’t.
“Because you keep doing it,” she says, reeling, her heels ramming my back, making me push in harder. “You do whatever the hell they want. I bet you’d let them ruin you if they wanted you to stop, just so you could make someone happy.”
It’s too late to stop. I ignore the gashes in my chest and back, push past them, push her and sink my teeth into her shoulder and claw at her thighs until her voice breaks, until what she’s calling me gets jumbled and tangled and splintered and it doesn’t mean anything.
I come down from the sex but not the high. Johanna slumps against the mirror, dangles a hand into the sink, and looks extremely pleased with herself for someone who’s probably going to limp out of here tonight.
“You,” I say, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, “are just like them.”
She coughs, then laughs, and untangles her limbs from around my back. My blood and makeup are all over her arms, her fingertips, under her nails. “I thought that would make it easier for you.”
I do my pants back up and shoulder the door open, slam it behind me--
--and recoil at the wall of cameras clicking in my face.
---
--
.