Hunger Games fic: Treading Water (24/33?), pg-13
Title: Treading Water (Part III - The Arena)
Chapter Title: Won't Let You Fall Apart
Rating: (this chapter) PG-13
Word count: 6,025
Betas: mrsdrjackson and pinkfinity - all mistakes and missteps are my own.
Focus: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair
Characters: Finnick Odair, Mags, Peeta Mellark, Katniss Everdeen, Annie Cresta, Haymitch Abernathy, original characters
Summary: “You never gave up on me,” she says aloud to the empty room. “I won’t give up on you.”
Author's note: The title for this chapter comes from The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails.
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Chapter Twenty-Four - Won’t Let You Fall Apart
By mid-afternoon, Mags and Peeta are both pretty much done in. Even with the cane Finnick fashioned for her, the walking stick he cut for Peeta, Mags stumbles with almost every step and Peeta, red in the face and having trouble breathing, clings to the stick like it’s the only thing holding him upright, which may be the literal truth. When they come across a small clearing far enough away from the force field to not accidentally stumble into it, but close enough for them to use it as a weapon if they need to, Finnick calls for a stop.
“Let’s set up camp here,” he suggests with a pointed look at Mags and Peeta when Katniss backtracks to join them. “I think we could all use the rest and we have the force field for protection. If anybody attacks, we can throw ‘em into it.” Katniss looks at the other two and must see how wiped out they both are. She turns around in place, assessing the clearing’s defensibility.
With a nod she says, “This is as good a spot as any, since we haven’t found a water source.”
“No cannons yet, so they’re not done killing each other at the Cornucopia.” Finnick sets his weapons down at the base of a tree on the edge of the clearing, wishing Katniss hadn’t mentioned water. “If we stay here and rest, we’ll have an advantage if we have to fight later.”
Mags stumps over with her cane and stretches up to kiss Finnick on the cheek. She whispers “Thank you” before heading slowly toward a shock of grass, a good five feet tall, growing at the far edge of the clearing. She studies it for a moment and then starts tugging at the grasses, trying to pull them up or break them off, but they resist her efforts. Peeta offers her the use of his knife and she saws at the blades near to the ground, but it’s difficult for her to cut through the tough fibers. The knife falls from her fingers a couple of times and Peeta moves to help her.
Kneeling down beside Mags, Peeta overbalances, catches himself before he falls, but loses hold of the knife. Mags says something to him and he shakes his head, then nods and steps away from her to start collecting nuts just inside the jungle, leaving Mags to continue harvesting grass by herself. She still has Peeta’s knife. Setting her back against a tree, she slides down to the ground and, with the elevation change, seems to have an easier time cutting.
Still watching Peeta and Mags, Finnick says to Katniss, “Water’s going to be a real problem before too much longer.” Growing thirst is taking a toll on them all. It’s getting hard for him to make simple decisions, to even think, and it’s obviously having an effect on Mags and Peeta, both of whom are far from their physical peak at the moment. Katniss seems to be the least affected; Finnick chalks that up to her youth and a lack of either injury or years of Capitol excesses.
“I know.” Katniss’ response is frustrated. “There’s water in here somewhere. We just have to find it.”
Still cutting grasses, Mags nicks her thumb and Finnick sees the blood well from where he stands with Katniss. Frowning, Mags looks at the wound blankly for a couple of seconds, then sticks her thumb into her mouth. With a glance at Katniss, Finnick hurries over to Mags, almost envying his former mentor the moisture against her tongue.
Keeping his voice light, he says, “Damn it, Mags, I can’t take you anywhere.” She grins at him around her thumb and gestures with her knife-wielding hand toward the branches of one of the trees. He looks but doesn’t see anything of note there. To his left and a little behind, he sees Katniss drawing a line in the sandy dirt near the force field. Good thinking.
“Moss,” Mags says without taking her injured thumb from her mouth and Finnick looks up again, spots the soft grayish green that covers most of the branches about halfway up the tree. Standing, he reaches for a handful of it and pulls the moss away from the bark in tangled strands. He trades with Mags, moss for knife, and helps her to wrap the moss around her thumb, tying it in place with one of the shorter, narrower blades of grass. The spongy fibers seem to absorb the blood and, as far as Finnick can tell, stop the flow.
“From my Games,” Mags tells him. Checking his work to make sure the crude bandage is secure around her thumb, she waves her other hand at Finnick. “Cortar, boy. Tejemos después.” You cut, boy. We’ll weave after. Mags hands him Peeta’s knife.
And so Finnick collects grasses under Mags’ supervision and Peeta gathers nuts while Katniss walks the perimeter of their camp. After a while, Peeta starts tossing the nuts into the force field, which sends them back blackened and smoking. He builds a tower out of them before heading back to the edge of the clearing to collect more. Mags watches him for a couple of minutes, nodding her approval, and then begins weaving the five-foot blades of grass she and Finnick collected into a flexible mat. She’s working on a second mat when Finnick cuts down the last of the grass and drops to the ground across from her to weave a mat of his own.
With everyone else busy at some self-appointed task, Katniss announces that she’s going to scout for water and whatever she can find to supplement the nuts for dinner, leaving Finnick to guard. Making sure his tridents are close at hand, Finnick waves her on and continues weaving. The mat he’s working on should be large enough to provide some water-tight shelter.
Mags points at his mat. “Roof?”
He looks up from the field of green. “Yeah. I can use some of the vines to lash it between the trees. Give us sort of a lean-to, if nothing else.” The old woman nods and begins to weave two of her mats together with one of the thinner blades of grass.
“Floor,” she tells him.
Peeta rejoins them, adding more cooked nuts to his tower. He lays out an enormous leaf, heart-shaped, at least a foot across and twice as wide, and sits on the ground facing tower and leaf, Finnick and Mags.
“What was that you said to each other earlier?” he asks as he shells nuts, discarding the burned shells on the ground and placing the meats on the leaf to keep them from the sandy dirt. “I couldn’t understand any of it.” There is suspicion in his voice and Finnick sees in the younger man’s eyes that he’s trying hard to fight encroaching distrust.
“We weren’t trying to keep secrets, Peeta,” Finnick assures him as he continues to weave. “It was the language Mags grew up with. Since her stroke, it’s sometimes easier for her to speak it.” Mags nods and smiles, reaches over to pat Peeta on the knee.
Peeta simultaneously frowns and raises one eyebrow. “You have a separate language in Four?”
Finnick grins wryly at Mags. “Not really. Not anymore. It’s technically treason to speak it, but some of the old ones still do.”
Peeta laughs. “Unless I’m missing something,” he says to Finnick, “you’re not that much older than I am.”
Mags hoots at that. Finnick smiles and shrugs, continues weaving. He’s pretty sure he has at least a thousand years on Peeta Mellark. “Mags used to babysit me when I was small, right up until I was old enough that my parents would let me fend for myself after school. It amused her to teach me to speak it with her.” He shoots Mags a look. “I’m pretty sure she did the same thing with my dad and my uncles when they were kids.” Mags just raises her brows, neither confirming nor denying that speculation, but the way her eyes dance, Finnick is sure of it.
“So what were you talking about, if not some secret plot to kill Katniss and me in our sleep?”
Finnick’s fingers still and he looks at Peeta, debating what to tell him. Keeping secrets has become almost second nature to Finnick. Does Peeta - and by extension all of Panem - really need to know anything about Annie? Keeping her a secret has been a matter of survival for them both for years, but looking into those expectant blue eyes, Finnick thinks maybe it could help the citizens of the Capitol to see them all as human beings. Force them to understand that more lives and loves will be lost with these Games than just Katniss and Peeta, the “star-crossed lovers” of District 12. Still leaning against her tree, Mags nods at Finnick, silently says Annie’s name.
“Mags reassured me that my fiancée would be okay,” Finnick tells Peeta, picking his words deliberately, “and that Johanna can take care of herself.” He doesn’t think it’s important to tell Peeta that he disagreed with the first part.
Peeta’s eyes widen. “Your fiancée? You’re getting married?”
“Whether or not that actually happens hasn’t been decided yet,” Finnick responds dryly with a wave of his arm, indicating not just the arena but all the other things that stand between him and Annie and the freedom to live their lives.
Peeta mostly chooses to ignore the depressing aspect of Finnick’s news. The younger man shakes his head, a bemused smile on his face when he says, “That is not what I expected.”
“What?” Finnick asks, more amused by Peeta’s reaction than offended. “A slut like me can’t settle down with just one person?” Peeta’s face, already red from the sun, turns a brighter red and Finnick grins at him, pokes at his face with a blade of grass that Peeta bats away. Finnick laughs and the boy relaxes.
“What’s she like?” he asks.
At Peeta’s question, a million images of Annie Cresta fill Finnick’s mind. Laughing, dancing, hiding behind her hair or her hands, collecting shells on the beach, biting her lower lip to keep from laughing or to keep from crying out, sometimes in fear, more often in pleasure. Peeta and Mags both watch Finnick as he works through what to say and he can only hope that Annie is there to hear it, too.
“Annie’s like…” Finnick closes his eyes, the better to hold onto the images. “She’s like swimming into a dark cave only to find a shaft of sunlight slicing down through the water, illuminating all the colors of the coral and the fish, and realizing that no earth-bound rainbow could ever compare.”
Finnick had thought Annie a pretty girl from the very first, someone he would have been interested in getting to know, if his life had gone differently, but it wasn’t until he spoke to her that first time that he started to understand how unforgettable she really was. At least to him.
It was early the morning after the reaping and he hadn’t been to sleep yet, had only just returned to the Training Center after a pretty wild night. He stopped first to talk to Angel about their tributes and then gone to see Annie, to introduce himself and maybe learn a little about her as a person so they could work on a strategy for her. That was the part of mentoring that he hated the most, getting to know the tributes. It would be so much easier if he knew nothing about them at all, not their likes and dislikes or even their strengths and weaknesses. It was bad enough just knowing their names.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reaping where the Peacekeepers had to chase a volunteer down before,” Finnick remarked, leaning against the doorjamb in the open doorway of his tribute’s room. He smiled when he said it, remembering the shocked looks of those on stage with him when she bolted, but Annie didn’t see his smile. She sat in the center of the bed, staring down at her restless fingers, long legs folded under her as she picked at the bedspread.
“I would have come back.” She didn’t look up.
“Are you sure about that?” He pushed off the jamb and walked into the room, stopped a couple of feet from the bed. She looked up at him then, a slightly offended expression on her face.
“Of course I would have. It’s just…” She looked back down. “I saw my gran in the crowd and the way she looked at me.” With the palm of her hand she smoothed the picked-at section of bedspread. “It made me realize what I’d done.”
“Do you do that sort of thing often?” He couldn’t see her face from that angle, just the top of her head. Her dark hair, shot through with gold streaks from days spent in the sun, hung in a long tail that spread out over her shoulders and back.
She sighed. When she looked up at him again there was an impish light in her green eyes. “Do what? Volunteer for the Games?”
“Ha! No.” Still half smiling, he sat on the edge of the bed facing her, one foot on the floor, his other leg crossed in front of him. “Act before you think.”
The ghost of a smile played around her lips. “I suppose I do. Gran’s always telling me, ‘Think, girl!’ I guess I should have listened.” The amusement faded from her eyes, her voice, the ghostly smile retreated and she went back to picking at the bedspread. He found that he wanted to bring that light back, but pushed the thought away. That was dangerous territory.
Finnick took the opportunity then to study Annie. He hadn’t gotten the chance at her reaping; the hovercraft had arrived to take him to the Capitol just as Peacekeepers ushered the rest of the District 4 party into the Justice Building. Once in the Capitol, he was only with his client for a couple of hours, but afterward, instead of going back to the Training Center to meet the others, he’d gone to the Abyss and met a girl. Last year’s victor, Johanna Mason. He smiled at that memory, then pushed it away and forced himself to focus on the cipher that was Anwyn Cresta.
The girl was good looking enough to catch the collective eye of the Capitol and unexpected enough for them to remember her. He could work with that in regard to sponsors. He knew nothing about the boy other than that he, too, had volunteered when he shouldn’t have and that Angel was not impressed. They’d already discussed that pretty Annie was the one they should concentrate on, the one who might have a chance.
Thin, but not too thin, Annie had good muscle definition in her arms. Probably a swimmer. Long legs folded under her, disguising their length; he had seen for himself that she could run. His smile widened at the memory of the Peacekeepers’ consternation before they chased after her, giving her a few seconds’ head start. Finnick was already gone by the time the Peacekeepers returned to the Justice Building, Annie in tow, but Angel told him she made it all the way to the beach near the public docks and that one of the Peacekeepers had gone into the water after her. Annie had ended up helping the man get back to shore when she realized the overzealous idiot couldn’t swim.
“I wish I hadn’t done it. Volunteered.” Well, no shit, Finnick thought. No one in their right mind volunteers out of the blue like that. But this girl had and he wanted to know why. He read her file on the hovercraft from 4 to the Capitol. She wasn’t one of the candidates chosen to volunteer, the ones who received more intensive training once school let out for the day, although her scores were high enough to qualify. “I’m all Gran has. I don’t know what she’s going to do when I’m gone.”
Finnick frowned. That might explain why she wasn’t a candidate. “No other family?”
“When I was little, it was just me and my mom and Gran. And then Mom died at sea when I was eight and it was just me and Gran. My dad comes around sometimes, but he never stays. And he’s not related to Gran, anyway, not her family. He’s barely even mine.” Finnick made a mental note to call home and have someone check on Annie’s grandmother. His own parents would be happy to take her in, if need be, at least for the duration of the Games.
“Don’t worry about your gran, Annie,” he said. “I’ll make sure she’s taken care of.” He swung his other leg up onto the bed and turned to more fully face her, folded his own legs to mirror the way she sat.
“When I’m gone.” She looked up again, met his gaze with her own. Her green eyes were steady, focused on his, bracing herself for the worst. There was a ring of blue around the outsides of her irises.
“That’s the second time you’ve said that, ‘when I’m gone.’”
Annie shrugged. “Well, it’s not like I’m going to win.”
“Not if you’ve already written yourself off.” He was surprised at the anger he felt toward her for giving up without a fight. Annie blinked twice and frowned, her head canted to one side.
“Do you think I have a chance?” There was something just short of disbelief in her voice.
“Yeah, Annie, I do.”
“Why? You don’t know anything about me. I’m not even a Career, just a stupid girl who volunteered and can’t take it back.”
He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands as he studied her again. “You may not be a Career, Annie, but then neither was I. And I do know a little something about you.”
“Oh, really?” Looking unconvinced, she drew her knees up and put her arms around them, her legs crossed at the ankles. “So tell me, Mr. Know It All. What do you know about me? What am I like?”
“Well, for one thing, Miss Skeptical, I know you’re impulsive.” She rolled her eyes at that and Finnick grinned at her again. “You’re not stupid. You are compassionate and, I think, empathetic. Creative. Friendly enough, if not necessarily outgoing. Loyal.”
“I sound like a Golden Retriever.” Her eyes seemed to dance with suppressed laughter as she bit her lower lip.
“You’re smarter than you look.” She stuck her tongue out at him and he forced himself to look away from her mouth. “You’re a swimmer. You have a tendency to do the right thing, but we definitely need to work on your self-preservation instincts. They’re there, but they kind of get lost in your impulse control issues.”
She mouthed “impulse control issues?” and pointed at her own chest. “You know all that just from looking at me?”
He smirked at her. “Baby, I am just that good.” The words spilled out and he tried hard not to cringe. Shit, Odair! Do not flirt with the tributes. Especially not your tribute! Trying to cover up his embarrassment, he continued, “Or I might have read your file.” One fine, golden-brown brow rose.
“I have a file?”
“Of course you have a file. Everyone in school has a file.” The other brow joined the first.
“Can I see it?” Finnick almost choked on another laugh.
The report of a cannon wrenches him from the memory. The harsh sound repeats eight times. Eight lives snuffed out. Eight of his fellow tributes dead, fully one quarter in just the first few hours of the Games. The number isn’t unprecedented, but still it hits hard. Even if Finnick doesn’t know all of them well, he does know them all, and there are a few whose loss will leave a gaping hole inside him. Mags winces with each resounding boom and he knows she feels their loss even more deeply. It’ll be hours yet before they even know who to mourn.
xXx
Rough hands pull her from sleep, fingers digging into her arms, pinpoints of pain. Annie opens her eyes. She is surrounded by a brilliant golden glow, growing brighter and brighter, blinding her. She falls to her knees, slips further, catches herself on the heels of her hands in the scorching sand.
A clash of metal on metal rings out, vibrates through her whole body and Finnick shouts “Duck!” But before she can respond to his shout - meant for someone else, anyway - a pale hand reaches to help her to her feet and she looks up into the watery blue eyes of President Snow. He smiles and flecks of dried blood flake from his teeth, ashes and dust. She scrambles away from him, but his laughter follows her. She runs, heart pounding in her chest, lungs sucking in copper-tainted air, sickeningly sweet. She runs faster, desperate to escape Snow’s harsh laugh, but there’s nowhere she can hide.
She runs up a path through the jungle, jumping over rocks and vines. Only a few feet ahead a sword swings toward her - she can’t see who wields it - and a trident blocks it across her path. She slides under the sharp and glittering arch half a second before the sword forces the trident aside, comes crashing down to cleave the sandy dirt she just left. “Don’t be stupid, girl!” Haymitch shouts and Annie rolls, springs to her feet and turns toward the sound of his voice in time to see Katniss draw back an arrow aimed at Finnick’s heart where he stands, trident in hand. Finnick looks at Katniss and his eyes focus on the mockingjay pin on the collar of her jumpsuit. He smiles and stretches his arms wide.
“Lucky thing we’re allies, right?” he says and Katniss lets her arrow fly.
“NO, Finnick! You can’t die!” Annie screams and launches herself at Finnick, but she pulls up short. She struggles against the web that holds her back, but she can’t break free.
Annie wakes, her heart pounding. She sits up, her shirt tugging at her arms and twisting around her waist. Still anxious from the dream, frustrated, she yanks the shirt over her head and flings it across the bedroom to land behind the chair in the corner.
Feeling a little calmer, she looks around the quiet room. There is still sunlight outside the window and she glances over at the clock on the table. 4:13. She slept for a little over three hours. Leaning forward, she hides her head beneath her arms, her forehead against the silky bedspread, and tries to recall what she dreamed. Her heart rate slowly returns to normal as she chases after the wisps, but they slip further away until all that remains for her to hold onto is that Finnick might sacrifice himself if she isn’t there to stop it.
She straightens and her hands fall to her lap. She doesn’t want to be away from the control room for this long again. She wouldn’t want it even if the signal for the headsets would reach this far, but the targeted feed that allows her to hear what’s going on with Finnick cuts off beyond the floor that houses the control room. And if she could hear it here in the Training Center, it would still be only a little better than nothing, because sometimes the bad things that happen are purely visual until it’s too late. Annie shudders and swings her legs over the side of the bed.
She sits there for a couple of minutes and tries to center herself by focusing on something good, anything to keep her grounded here, where she needs to be, but she there is nothing. All she can think about is Finnick in the arena. She fights against the siren song of the sea, the waves that always seem to be just beneath the surface in this place, trying to pull her back under where she doesn’t have to be strong, can just float and float until she floats away. She feels it pulling at her, the undertow of the arena, closer here than it ever was back home, more seductive. Finnick isn’t here to help her fight it; Snow took him away.
Finnick. She promised Finnick a lifetime ago, it seems, that she would do her best to go on without him, if she had to. And he promised her another lifetime before that that he would bring her home. Annie stands. “You never gave up on me,” she says aloud to the empty room. “I won’t give up on you.”
She pulls a fresh shirt from the dresser and pulls it on. Then it takes her a few seconds to find her shoes - one of them slipped under the bed when she took them off earlier to lie down - but she returns to the mentor’s control room as quickly as she can. When she slides into her seat beside Martin and pulls on her headset, he glances at her and nods a greeting, then turns back to his screen. Annie’s headset hums in her ears as it comes back to life.
“If you want to take a nap, Martin, you can,” she says into the microphone pickup.
“Nah. I’m still good for a while longer. Nothing much happened after you left.”
On her screen, the four allies are eating a dinner of some sort of roasted meat and Mags’ nuts. They’re on the edge of a clearing in the jungle, sitting on the ground in front of a crude hut fashioned of… something green; Annie can’t quite tell what, but it looks big enough that all four of them could sleep inside it. They’re eating from bowls of the same stuff, whatever it is.
“Not much happened?” Martin looks over at her, brows raised in question. “They built a house. They have dishes.” Martin laughs.
“Mags took her frustration out on a stand of really tall grass.” Half smiling, Annie turns back to her monitor, wonders if it’s worth it to back things up and watch them build the hut. She watches as they eat their simple meal and her stomach growls. Apparently, it’s louder than she thought, loud enough to hear through the headsets, because both Martin and Rae to her left look at her.
“When’s the last time you ate, Annie?” Martin asks.
“You need to eat as well as sleep, child,” Rae admonishes. “You can order food down in the lounge, if you don’t want to walk all that way over to the Training Center.” Annie looks at the older woman sharply at the note of sarcasm in her tone, but then Rae winks at her, taking the sting from it.
Martin laughs again and stands. “Leave her alone, Rae. She’s new at this.” He squeezes Annie’s shoulder as he moves past her toward the door. “I’ll grab us both something to eat.” The door closes behind him and Annie turns back to her monitor.
“So nothing obvious like a pond or a stream,” Finnick is saying, part of an ongoing conversation between him and Katniss. “Where else do you find water?”
“There’s a lot of water downhill from here.”
Mags throws a nut at Peeta. “Can’t drink.”
Peeta laughs. “But it is water.”
Katniss swallows a bite of meat. “If the tree rat found it, we can find it.”
Finnick picks up a cube of meat. “Which brings us back to where.” He pops the meat into his mouth and slowly chews. Annie can practically feel the gumminess imparted to the meat by the lack of moisture, just from the way the muscles in his jaws work and the effort he makes to swallow.
Martin returns with a tray bearing wrapped sandwiches and water, setting it on the clear space between their controls. He sits and picks up a sandwich, turns back to his monitor.
“Do we know where the water is?” Annie asks Martin. He shakes his head as she peels back the wrapping from a cheese sandwich and takes a bite.
“No. Too much of an advantage. If the Gamemakers didn’t want it to be a part of the Games, they would’ve made it easier to find.”
“Can we send them water?” She eyes her glass, feeling a little guilty.
Martin shakes his head. “It’s not practical. Water would give them a huge advantage in this arena. The greater the advantage, the more expensive the gift. Sending them even a little would exhaust what we have in the coffers so far, and there’s no guarantee there’ll be any more funds coming in.”
She looks at her screen again as Finnick asks, “So what was our dinner doing before you shot it?”
Beside her, Martin’s eyes flicker down from the monitor to the control console and back up again. He stands and turns toward the other side of the room. Wadding up the wrapper from his sandwich, he throws it at Haymitch, who paces beside his console, seemingly lost in thought. The wad hits him in the back of the head and he stops in his tracks, turns toward Martin and Annie with a scowl. Martin motions him toward the door and takes Annie by the hand, leading her out of the room behind Haymitch.
Once in the hallway, Haymitch asks, “What’s up?”
Martin taps a button on the right side of his headset and then pulls the earpiece on that side away from his head. He reaches over and taps a button on the right earpiece of Annie’s as Haymitch does the same on his own. The slight hum of the headset fades, even though she can still hear Finnick talking to the others about tree rats and plants and water in her right ear. Experimentally, she blows into the mouthpiece. Nothing. He turned off the microphones, then.
“They need water,” Martin states. He glances at Annie. “It isn’t apparent from watching them, but Mags isn’t doing well. Her vitals are all over the place. Food helped, but if she doesn’t have water soon, I’m afraid she’s going to have another stroke.”
Annie holds her breath as the ever-present waves threaten to swamp her. She blinks rapidly, then squeezes her eyes shut, pushing the darkness back, away. Distantly, she hears Martin relay to Haymitch their earlier conversation about water and the feasibility of sending it into the arena. When she opens her eyes, both men are silent, watching her.
“Hang in there, Annie,” Haymitch tells her when he sees she’s with them again. “Water’s too expensive, but the means to access it isn’t.”
Annie forces herself to breathe deeply and steadily. “What do you mean?” she asks.
“They’re smart. Give ‘em enough clues and they’ll figure it out. Katniss and Finnick are on the right trail. I’m sure of it.”
“You mean the tree rats?” Annie asks and Haymitch nods.
“We just need to come up with something to give ‘em that last push. Those rats are the key. They know where the water is.”
Annie turns toward Martin. “But I thought we’re not allowed to tell them even if we know where it is.”
Haymitch snorts. “Screw that. We can’t draw ‘em a map or send ‘em a note with detailed instructions, but we can still send something that’ll help.”
“If we figure out ourselves where the water is,” Martin reminds them both.
Through the window in the door to the control room, Annie watches the monitors across from where they stand, just outside the door. She can’t hear any of what’s going on, and she doesn’t know whose monitors they are, but they show the same tree rats in the background of the scene, snuffling around as they climb the trunks of the trees. She looks up at Haymitch.
“It’s in the trees.”
Haymitch blinks, stops talking in the middle of a sentence.
“What’s in the trees?” Martin asks.
“The water,” Annie and Haymitch say in tandem.
Annie steps closer to the door. There’s a large “7” in the corner of the monitors that show the tree rats. “See?” Annie points toward Johanna Mason arguing with an older man wearing glasses as she wraps a strip of blue cloth torn from a jumpsuit around his back and shoulder. Beyond Johanna, a tree rat is gripping a tree trunk and gnawing a hole in the bark, licking at the tree. “But what can we send to tell them that?” she continues.
“I have no idea,” Martin says, frowning.
Haymitch grins. “I do.” He taps at his headset and replaces the earpiece over his right ear. “Fulfillment. District 12.” He waits for a couple of seconds, then, “I need you to drop in a metal spile.” Another pause as Haymitch listens then growls, “Look it up if you don’t know what it is.” Another growl. “No, no. A spile.” He spells it. “It’s used to extract sap from trees.” Another pause. “Yes. That’s it. Make sure it’s made of metal. I don’t want the damn thing breaking apart the first time they try to use it.” Haymitch rolls his eyes at whatever the person on the other end of the conversation says. “That’s fine. Less than I thought it’d cost.”
He taps the headset and pulls back the earpiece again as Martins says, “Thanks, Haymitch.”
“No problem, Perch. My kids or yours don’t matter. They all need the water and it’s not like they’re gonna hold out on each other. I don’t know if Peeta’s familiar with a spile, but I’m sure Katniss is.”
The anthem begins to play over their headsets. “I guess we’d better go back in,” Martin says reluctantly, a look of trepidation in his eyes. He opens the door and holds it for Annie and Haymitch; the mentor from 12 breaks right and Annie and Martin return to their stations to the left. While the death toll floats in the sky for those confined to the arena, the faces of the dead appear and then fade out on all the monitors around the control room.
Annie sees Martin react from the corner of her eye as the dead are displayed and each one seems to hit him like a fist. When Cecelia from District 8 appears, he pushes back from the console and closes his eyes, unable to continue watching. She hears a gasp and turns toward the sound. Rae watches the screen to Annie’s left, unblinking as the tears fall.
But even as Rae’s and Martin’s pain registers, Annie focuses on her monitor, on Finnick where he sits at the entrance of the hut they built for shelter, an arm around Mags as she leans her head against his shoulder. The expression on his face doesn’t change. He shows no emotion for the dead, even though Annie knows he feels Cecelia’s loss in particular, knows that she was a friend. Tears run freely down Mags’ face.
Martin’s back is to their monitors when he says, “Mags and Woof have been friends for… sixty years? More?” He wipes his eyes hard with the heels of his hands. “Damn it.”
To her other side, Rae says, “Trayn loved to paint flowers.” She laughs, the sound unsteady. “And they were always yellow, no matter what kind of flower it was.”
One last face appears - Seeder, District 11’s victor in the 33rd Hunger Games - and fades away into the seal of Panem. But the image in Annie’s mind of Seeder dying before Annie left the control room a few hours before is suddenly replaced by a more vivid memory: Seeder laughing as she bounced a ball, keeping it away from Martin just before Finnick swept in and stole it from them both. The feed returns to normal, filling the screens around the control room with scenes of jungle or beach as the moon rises high over the arena. Silence falls as those who watch mourn.
Chapter Twenty-Five - If the Sky Can Crack...
Chapter Title: Won't Let You Fall Apart
Rating: (this chapter) PG-13
Word count: 6,025
Betas: mrsdrjackson and pinkfinity - all mistakes and missteps are my own.
Focus: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair
Characters: Finnick Odair, Mags, Peeta Mellark, Katniss Everdeen, Annie Cresta, Haymitch Abernathy, original characters
Summary: “You never gave up on me,” she says aloud to the empty room. “I won’t give up on you.”
Author's note: The title for this chapter comes from The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails.
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Chapter Twenty-Four - Won’t Let You Fall Apart
By mid-afternoon, Mags and Peeta are both pretty much done in. Even with the cane Finnick fashioned for her, the walking stick he cut for Peeta, Mags stumbles with almost every step and Peeta, red in the face and having trouble breathing, clings to the stick like it’s the only thing holding him upright, which may be the literal truth. When they come across a small clearing far enough away from the force field to not accidentally stumble into it, but close enough for them to use it as a weapon if they need to, Finnick calls for a stop.
“Let’s set up camp here,” he suggests with a pointed look at Mags and Peeta when Katniss backtracks to join them. “I think we could all use the rest and we have the force field for protection. If anybody attacks, we can throw ‘em into it.” Katniss looks at the other two and must see how wiped out they both are. She turns around in place, assessing the clearing’s defensibility.
With a nod she says, “This is as good a spot as any, since we haven’t found a water source.”
“No cannons yet, so they’re not done killing each other at the Cornucopia.” Finnick sets his weapons down at the base of a tree on the edge of the clearing, wishing Katniss hadn’t mentioned water. “If we stay here and rest, we’ll have an advantage if we have to fight later.”
Mags stumps over with her cane and stretches up to kiss Finnick on the cheek. She whispers “Thank you” before heading slowly toward a shock of grass, a good five feet tall, growing at the far edge of the clearing. She studies it for a moment and then starts tugging at the grasses, trying to pull them up or break them off, but they resist her efforts. Peeta offers her the use of his knife and she saws at the blades near to the ground, but it’s difficult for her to cut through the tough fibers. The knife falls from her fingers a couple of times and Peeta moves to help her.
Kneeling down beside Mags, Peeta overbalances, catches himself before he falls, but loses hold of the knife. Mags says something to him and he shakes his head, then nods and steps away from her to start collecting nuts just inside the jungle, leaving Mags to continue harvesting grass by herself. She still has Peeta’s knife. Setting her back against a tree, she slides down to the ground and, with the elevation change, seems to have an easier time cutting.
Still watching Peeta and Mags, Finnick says to Katniss, “Water’s going to be a real problem before too much longer.” Growing thirst is taking a toll on them all. It’s getting hard for him to make simple decisions, to even think, and it’s obviously having an effect on Mags and Peeta, both of whom are far from their physical peak at the moment. Katniss seems to be the least affected; Finnick chalks that up to her youth and a lack of either injury or years of Capitol excesses.
“I know.” Katniss’ response is frustrated. “There’s water in here somewhere. We just have to find it.”
Still cutting grasses, Mags nicks her thumb and Finnick sees the blood well from where he stands with Katniss. Frowning, Mags looks at the wound blankly for a couple of seconds, then sticks her thumb into her mouth. With a glance at Katniss, Finnick hurries over to Mags, almost envying his former mentor the moisture against her tongue.
Keeping his voice light, he says, “Damn it, Mags, I can’t take you anywhere.” She grins at him around her thumb and gestures with her knife-wielding hand toward the branches of one of the trees. He looks but doesn’t see anything of note there. To his left and a little behind, he sees Katniss drawing a line in the sandy dirt near the force field. Good thinking.
“Moss,” Mags says without taking her injured thumb from her mouth and Finnick looks up again, spots the soft grayish green that covers most of the branches about halfway up the tree. Standing, he reaches for a handful of it and pulls the moss away from the bark in tangled strands. He trades with Mags, moss for knife, and helps her to wrap the moss around her thumb, tying it in place with one of the shorter, narrower blades of grass. The spongy fibers seem to absorb the blood and, as far as Finnick can tell, stop the flow.
“From my Games,” Mags tells him. Checking his work to make sure the crude bandage is secure around her thumb, she waves her other hand at Finnick. “Cortar, boy. Tejemos después.” You cut, boy. We’ll weave after. Mags hands him Peeta’s knife.
And so Finnick collects grasses under Mags’ supervision and Peeta gathers nuts while Katniss walks the perimeter of their camp. After a while, Peeta starts tossing the nuts into the force field, which sends them back blackened and smoking. He builds a tower out of them before heading back to the edge of the clearing to collect more. Mags watches him for a couple of minutes, nodding her approval, and then begins weaving the five-foot blades of grass she and Finnick collected into a flexible mat. She’s working on a second mat when Finnick cuts down the last of the grass and drops to the ground across from her to weave a mat of his own.
With everyone else busy at some self-appointed task, Katniss announces that she’s going to scout for water and whatever she can find to supplement the nuts for dinner, leaving Finnick to guard. Making sure his tridents are close at hand, Finnick waves her on and continues weaving. The mat he’s working on should be large enough to provide some water-tight shelter.
Mags points at his mat. “Roof?”
He looks up from the field of green. “Yeah. I can use some of the vines to lash it between the trees. Give us sort of a lean-to, if nothing else.” The old woman nods and begins to weave two of her mats together with one of the thinner blades of grass.
“Floor,” she tells him.
Peeta rejoins them, adding more cooked nuts to his tower. He lays out an enormous leaf, heart-shaped, at least a foot across and twice as wide, and sits on the ground facing tower and leaf, Finnick and Mags.
“What was that you said to each other earlier?” he asks as he shells nuts, discarding the burned shells on the ground and placing the meats on the leaf to keep them from the sandy dirt. “I couldn’t understand any of it.” There is suspicion in his voice and Finnick sees in the younger man’s eyes that he’s trying hard to fight encroaching distrust.
“We weren’t trying to keep secrets, Peeta,” Finnick assures him as he continues to weave. “It was the language Mags grew up with. Since her stroke, it’s sometimes easier for her to speak it.” Mags nods and smiles, reaches over to pat Peeta on the knee.
Peeta simultaneously frowns and raises one eyebrow. “You have a separate language in Four?”
Finnick grins wryly at Mags. “Not really. Not anymore. It’s technically treason to speak it, but some of the old ones still do.”
Peeta laughs. “Unless I’m missing something,” he says to Finnick, “you’re not that much older than I am.”
Mags hoots at that. Finnick smiles and shrugs, continues weaving. He’s pretty sure he has at least a thousand years on Peeta Mellark. “Mags used to babysit me when I was small, right up until I was old enough that my parents would let me fend for myself after school. It amused her to teach me to speak it with her.” He shoots Mags a look. “I’m pretty sure she did the same thing with my dad and my uncles when they were kids.” Mags just raises her brows, neither confirming nor denying that speculation, but the way her eyes dance, Finnick is sure of it.
“So what were you talking about, if not some secret plot to kill Katniss and me in our sleep?”
Finnick’s fingers still and he looks at Peeta, debating what to tell him. Keeping secrets has become almost second nature to Finnick. Does Peeta - and by extension all of Panem - really need to know anything about Annie? Keeping her a secret has been a matter of survival for them both for years, but looking into those expectant blue eyes, Finnick thinks maybe it could help the citizens of the Capitol to see them all as human beings. Force them to understand that more lives and loves will be lost with these Games than just Katniss and Peeta, the “star-crossed lovers” of District 12. Still leaning against her tree, Mags nods at Finnick, silently says Annie’s name.
“Mags reassured me that my fiancée would be okay,” Finnick tells Peeta, picking his words deliberately, “and that Johanna can take care of herself.” He doesn’t think it’s important to tell Peeta that he disagreed with the first part.
Peeta’s eyes widen. “Your fiancée? You’re getting married?”
“Whether or not that actually happens hasn’t been decided yet,” Finnick responds dryly with a wave of his arm, indicating not just the arena but all the other things that stand between him and Annie and the freedom to live their lives.
Peeta mostly chooses to ignore the depressing aspect of Finnick’s news. The younger man shakes his head, a bemused smile on his face when he says, “That is not what I expected.”
“What?” Finnick asks, more amused by Peeta’s reaction than offended. “A slut like me can’t settle down with just one person?” Peeta’s face, already red from the sun, turns a brighter red and Finnick grins at him, pokes at his face with a blade of grass that Peeta bats away. Finnick laughs and the boy relaxes.
“What’s she like?” he asks.
At Peeta’s question, a million images of Annie Cresta fill Finnick’s mind. Laughing, dancing, hiding behind her hair or her hands, collecting shells on the beach, biting her lower lip to keep from laughing or to keep from crying out, sometimes in fear, more often in pleasure. Peeta and Mags both watch Finnick as he works through what to say and he can only hope that Annie is there to hear it, too.
“Annie’s like…” Finnick closes his eyes, the better to hold onto the images. “She’s like swimming into a dark cave only to find a shaft of sunlight slicing down through the water, illuminating all the colors of the coral and the fish, and realizing that no earth-bound rainbow could ever compare.”
Finnick had thought Annie a pretty girl from the very first, someone he would have been interested in getting to know, if his life had gone differently, but it wasn’t until he spoke to her that first time that he started to understand how unforgettable she really was. At least to him.
It was early the morning after the reaping and he hadn’t been to sleep yet, had only just returned to the Training Center after a pretty wild night. He stopped first to talk to Angel about their tributes and then gone to see Annie, to introduce himself and maybe learn a little about her as a person so they could work on a strategy for her. That was the part of mentoring that he hated the most, getting to know the tributes. It would be so much easier if he knew nothing about them at all, not their likes and dislikes or even their strengths and weaknesses. It was bad enough just knowing their names.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reaping where the Peacekeepers had to chase a volunteer down before,” Finnick remarked, leaning against the doorjamb in the open doorway of his tribute’s room. He smiled when he said it, remembering the shocked looks of those on stage with him when she bolted, but Annie didn’t see his smile. She sat in the center of the bed, staring down at her restless fingers, long legs folded under her as she picked at the bedspread.
“I would have come back.” She didn’t look up.
“Are you sure about that?” He pushed off the jamb and walked into the room, stopped a couple of feet from the bed. She looked up at him then, a slightly offended expression on her face.
“Of course I would have. It’s just…” She looked back down. “I saw my gran in the crowd and the way she looked at me.” With the palm of her hand she smoothed the picked-at section of bedspread. “It made me realize what I’d done.”
“Do you do that sort of thing often?” He couldn’t see her face from that angle, just the top of her head. Her dark hair, shot through with gold streaks from days spent in the sun, hung in a long tail that spread out over her shoulders and back.
She sighed. When she looked up at him again there was an impish light in her green eyes. “Do what? Volunteer for the Games?”
“Ha! No.” Still half smiling, he sat on the edge of the bed facing her, one foot on the floor, his other leg crossed in front of him. “Act before you think.”
The ghost of a smile played around her lips. “I suppose I do. Gran’s always telling me, ‘Think, girl!’ I guess I should have listened.” The amusement faded from her eyes, her voice, the ghostly smile retreated and she went back to picking at the bedspread. He found that he wanted to bring that light back, but pushed the thought away. That was dangerous territory.
Finnick took the opportunity then to study Annie. He hadn’t gotten the chance at her reaping; the hovercraft had arrived to take him to the Capitol just as Peacekeepers ushered the rest of the District 4 party into the Justice Building. Once in the Capitol, he was only with his client for a couple of hours, but afterward, instead of going back to the Training Center to meet the others, he’d gone to the Abyss and met a girl. Last year’s victor, Johanna Mason. He smiled at that memory, then pushed it away and forced himself to focus on the cipher that was Anwyn Cresta.
The girl was good looking enough to catch the collective eye of the Capitol and unexpected enough for them to remember her. He could work with that in regard to sponsors. He knew nothing about the boy other than that he, too, had volunteered when he shouldn’t have and that Angel was not impressed. They’d already discussed that pretty Annie was the one they should concentrate on, the one who might have a chance.
Thin, but not too thin, Annie had good muscle definition in her arms. Probably a swimmer. Long legs folded under her, disguising their length; he had seen for himself that she could run. His smile widened at the memory of the Peacekeepers’ consternation before they chased after her, giving her a few seconds’ head start. Finnick was already gone by the time the Peacekeepers returned to the Justice Building, Annie in tow, but Angel told him she made it all the way to the beach near the public docks and that one of the Peacekeepers had gone into the water after her. Annie had ended up helping the man get back to shore when she realized the overzealous idiot couldn’t swim.
“I wish I hadn’t done it. Volunteered.” Well, no shit, Finnick thought. No one in their right mind volunteers out of the blue like that. But this girl had and he wanted to know why. He read her file on the hovercraft from 4 to the Capitol. She wasn’t one of the candidates chosen to volunteer, the ones who received more intensive training once school let out for the day, although her scores were high enough to qualify. “I’m all Gran has. I don’t know what she’s going to do when I’m gone.”
Finnick frowned. That might explain why she wasn’t a candidate. “No other family?”
“When I was little, it was just me and my mom and Gran. And then Mom died at sea when I was eight and it was just me and Gran. My dad comes around sometimes, but he never stays. And he’s not related to Gran, anyway, not her family. He’s barely even mine.” Finnick made a mental note to call home and have someone check on Annie’s grandmother. His own parents would be happy to take her in, if need be, at least for the duration of the Games.
“Don’t worry about your gran, Annie,” he said. “I’ll make sure she’s taken care of.” He swung his other leg up onto the bed and turned to more fully face her, folded his own legs to mirror the way she sat.
“When I’m gone.” She looked up again, met his gaze with her own. Her green eyes were steady, focused on his, bracing herself for the worst. There was a ring of blue around the outsides of her irises.
“That’s the second time you’ve said that, ‘when I’m gone.’”
Annie shrugged. “Well, it’s not like I’m going to win.”
“Not if you’ve already written yourself off.” He was surprised at the anger he felt toward her for giving up without a fight. Annie blinked twice and frowned, her head canted to one side.
“Do you think I have a chance?” There was something just short of disbelief in her voice.
“Yeah, Annie, I do.”
“Why? You don’t know anything about me. I’m not even a Career, just a stupid girl who volunteered and can’t take it back.”
He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands as he studied her again. “You may not be a Career, Annie, but then neither was I. And I do know a little something about you.”
“Oh, really?” Looking unconvinced, she drew her knees up and put her arms around them, her legs crossed at the ankles. “So tell me, Mr. Know It All. What do you know about me? What am I like?”
“Well, for one thing, Miss Skeptical, I know you’re impulsive.” She rolled her eyes at that and Finnick grinned at her again. “You’re not stupid. You are compassionate and, I think, empathetic. Creative. Friendly enough, if not necessarily outgoing. Loyal.”
“I sound like a Golden Retriever.” Her eyes seemed to dance with suppressed laughter as she bit her lower lip.
“You’re smarter than you look.” She stuck her tongue out at him and he forced himself to look away from her mouth. “You’re a swimmer. You have a tendency to do the right thing, but we definitely need to work on your self-preservation instincts. They’re there, but they kind of get lost in your impulse control issues.”
She mouthed “impulse control issues?” and pointed at her own chest. “You know all that just from looking at me?”
He smirked at her. “Baby, I am just that good.” The words spilled out and he tried hard not to cringe. Shit, Odair! Do not flirt with the tributes. Especially not your tribute! Trying to cover up his embarrassment, he continued, “Or I might have read your file.” One fine, golden-brown brow rose.
“I have a file?”
“Of course you have a file. Everyone in school has a file.” The other brow joined the first.
“Can I see it?” Finnick almost choked on another laugh.
The report of a cannon wrenches him from the memory. The harsh sound repeats eight times. Eight lives snuffed out. Eight of his fellow tributes dead, fully one quarter in just the first few hours of the Games. The number isn’t unprecedented, but still it hits hard. Even if Finnick doesn’t know all of them well, he does know them all, and there are a few whose loss will leave a gaping hole inside him. Mags winces with each resounding boom and he knows she feels their loss even more deeply. It’ll be hours yet before they even know who to mourn.
xXx
Rough hands pull her from sleep, fingers digging into her arms, pinpoints of pain. Annie opens her eyes. She is surrounded by a brilliant golden glow, growing brighter and brighter, blinding her. She falls to her knees, slips further, catches herself on the heels of her hands in the scorching sand.
A clash of metal on metal rings out, vibrates through her whole body and Finnick shouts “Duck!” But before she can respond to his shout - meant for someone else, anyway - a pale hand reaches to help her to her feet and she looks up into the watery blue eyes of President Snow. He smiles and flecks of dried blood flake from his teeth, ashes and dust. She scrambles away from him, but his laughter follows her. She runs, heart pounding in her chest, lungs sucking in copper-tainted air, sickeningly sweet. She runs faster, desperate to escape Snow’s harsh laugh, but there’s nowhere she can hide.
She runs up a path through the jungle, jumping over rocks and vines. Only a few feet ahead a sword swings toward her - she can’t see who wields it - and a trident blocks it across her path. She slides under the sharp and glittering arch half a second before the sword forces the trident aside, comes crashing down to cleave the sandy dirt she just left. “Don’t be stupid, girl!” Haymitch shouts and Annie rolls, springs to her feet and turns toward the sound of his voice in time to see Katniss draw back an arrow aimed at Finnick’s heart where he stands, trident in hand. Finnick looks at Katniss and his eyes focus on the mockingjay pin on the collar of her jumpsuit. He smiles and stretches his arms wide.
“Lucky thing we’re allies, right?” he says and Katniss lets her arrow fly.
“NO, Finnick! You can’t die!” Annie screams and launches herself at Finnick, but she pulls up short. She struggles against the web that holds her back, but she can’t break free.
Annie wakes, her heart pounding. She sits up, her shirt tugging at her arms and twisting around her waist. Still anxious from the dream, frustrated, she yanks the shirt over her head and flings it across the bedroom to land behind the chair in the corner.
Feeling a little calmer, she looks around the quiet room. There is still sunlight outside the window and she glances over at the clock on the table. 4:13. She slept for a little over three hours. Leaning forward, she hides her head beneath her arms, her forehead against the silky bedspread, and tries to recall what she dreamed. Her heart rate slowly returns to normal as she chases after the wisps, but they slip further away until all that remains for her to hold onto is that Finnick might sacrifice himself if she isn’t there to stop it.
She straightens and her hands fall to her lap. She doesn’t want to be away from the control room for this long again. She wouldn’t want it even if the signal for the headsets would reach this far, but the targeted feed that allows her to hear what’s going on with Finnick cuts off beyond the floor that houses the control room. And if she could hear it here in the Training Center, it would still be only a little better than nothing, because sometimes the bad things that happen are purely visual until it’s too late. Annie shudders and swings her legs over the side of the bed.
She sits there for a couple of minutes and tries to center herself by focusing on something good, anything to keep her grounded here, where she needs to be, but she there is nothing. All she can think about is Finnick in the arena. She fights against the siren song of the sea, the waves that always seem to be just beneath the surface in this place, trying to pull her back under where she doesn’t have to be strong, can just float and float until she floats away. She feels it pulling at her, the undertow of the arena, closer here than it ever was back home, more seductive. Finnick isn’t here to help her fight it; Snow took him away.
Finnick. She promised Finnick a lifetime ago, it seems, that she would do her best to go on without him, if she had to. And he promised her another lifetime before that that he would bring her home. Annie stands. “You never gave up on me,” she says aloud to the empty room. “I won’t give up on you.”
She pulls a fresh shirt from the dresser and pulls it on. Then it takes her a few seconds to find her shoes - one of them slipped under the bed when she took them off earlier to lie down - but she returns to the mentor’s control room as quickly as she can. When she slides into her seat beside Martin and pulls on her headset, he glances at her and nods a greeting, then turns back to his screen. Annie’s headset hums in her ears as it comes back to life.
“If you want to take a nap, Martin, you can,” she says into the microphone pickup.
“Nah. I’m still good for a while longer. Nothing much happened after you left.”
On her screen, the four allies are eating a dinner of some sort of roasted meat and Mags’ nuts. They’re on the edge of a clearing in the jungle, sitting on the ground in front of a crude hut fashioned of… something green; Annie can’t quite tell what, but it looks big enough that all four of them could sleep inside it. They’re eating from bowls of the same stuff, whatever it is.
“Not much happened?” Martin looks over at her, brows raised in question. “They built a house. They have dishes.” Martin laughs.
“Mags took her frustration out on a stand of really tall grass.” Half smiling, Annie turns back to her monitor, wonders if it’s worth it to back things up and watch them build the hut. She watches as they eat their simple meal and her stomach growls. Apparently, it’s louder than she thought, loud enough to hear through the headsets, because both Martin and Rae to her left look at her.
“When’s the last time you ate, Annie?” Martin asks.
“You need to eat as well as sleep, child,” Rae admonishes. “You can order food down in the lounge, if you don’t want to walk all that way over to the Training Center.” Annie looks at the older woman sharply at the note of sarcasm in her tone, but then Rae winks at her, taking the sting from it.
Martin laughs again and stands. “Leave her alone, Rae. She’s new at this.” He squeezes Annie’s shoulder as he moves past her toward the door. “I’ll grab us both something to eat.” The door closes behind him and Annie turns back to her monitor.
“So nothing obvious like a pond or a stream,” Finnick is saying, part of an ongoing conversation between him and Katniss. “Where else do you find water?”
“There’s a lot of water downhill from here.”
Mags throws a nut at Peeta. “Can’t drink.”
Peeta laughs. “But it is water.”
Katniss swallows a bite of meat. “If the tree rat found it, we can find it.”
Finnick picks up a cube of meat. “Which brings us back to where.” He pops the meat into his mouth and slowly chews. Annie can practically feel the gumminess imparted to the meat by the lack of moisture, just from the way the muscles in his jaws work and the effort he makes to swallow.
Martin returns with a tray bearing wrapped sandwiches and water, setting it on the clear space between their controls. He sits and picks up a sandwich, turns back to his monitor.
“Do we know where the water is?” Annie asks Martin. He shakes his head as she peels back the wrapping from a cheese sandwich and takes a bite.
“No. Too much of an advantage. If the Gamemakers didn’t want it to be a part of the Games, they would’ve made it easier to find.”
“Can we send them water?” She eyes her glass, feeling a little guilty.
Martin shakes his head. “It’s not practical. Water would give them a huge advantage in this arena. The greater the advantage, the more expensive the gift. Sending them even a little would exhaust what we have in the coffers so far, and there’s no guarantee there’ll be any more funds coming in.”
She looks at her screen again as Finnick asks, “So what was our dinner doing before you shot it?”
Beside her, Martin’s eyes flicker down from the monitor to the control console and back up again. He stands and turns toward the other side of the room. Wadding up the wrapper from his sandwich, he throws it at Haymitch, who paces beside his console, seemingly lost in thought. The wad hits him in the back of the head and he stops in his tracks, turns toward Martin and Annie with a scowl. Martin motions him toward the door and takes Annie by the hand, leading her out of the room behind Haymitch.
Once in the hallway, Haymitch asks, “What’s up?”
Martin taps a button on the right side of his headset and then pulls the earpiece on that side away from his head. He reaches over and taps a button on the right earpiece of Annie’s as Haymitch does the same on his own. The slight hum of the headset fades, even though she can still hear Finnick talking to the others about tree rats and plants and water in her right ear. Experimentally, she blows into the mouthpiece. Nothing. He turned off the microphones, then.
“They need water,” Martin states. He glances at Annie. “It isn’t apparent from watching them, but Mags isn’t doing well. Her vitals are all over the place. Food helped, but if she doesn’t have water soon, I’m afraid she’s going to have another stroke.”
Annie holds her breath as the ever-present waves threaten to swamp her. She blinks rapidly, then squeezes her eyes shut, pushing the darkness back, away. Distantly, she hears Martin relay to Haymitch their earlier conversation about water and the feasibility of sending it into the arena. When she opens her eyes, both men are silent, watching her.
“Hang in there, Annie,” Haymitch tells her when he sees she’s with them again. “Water’s too expensive, but the means to access it isn’t.”
Annie forces herself to breathe deeply and steadily. “What do you mean?” she asks.
“They’re smart. Give ‘em enough clues and they’ll figure it out. Katniss and Finnick are on the right trail. I’m sure of it.”
“You mean the tree rats?” Annie asks and Haymitch nods.
“We just need to come up with something to give ‘em that last push. Those rats are the key. They know where the water is.”
Annie turns toward Martin. “But I thought we’re not allowed to tell them even if we know where it is.”
Haymitch snorts. “Screw that. We can’t draw ‘em a map or send ‘em a note with detailed instructions, but we can still send something that’ll help.”
“If we figure out ourselves where the water is,” Martin reminds them both.
Through the window in the door to the control room, Annie watches the monitors across from where they stand, just outside the door. She can’t hear any of what’s going on, and she doesn’t know whose monitors they are, but they show the same tree rats in the background of the scene, snuffling around as they climb the trunks of the trees. She looks up at Haymitch.
“It’s in the trees.”
Haymitch blinks, stops talking in the middle of a sentence.
“What’s in the trees?” Martin asks.
“The water,” Annie and Haymitch say in tandem.
Annie steps closer to the door. There’s a large “7” in the corner of the monitors that show the tree rats. “See?” Annie points toward Johanna Mason arguing with an older man wearing glasses as she wraps a strip of blue cloth torn from a jumpsuit around his back and shoulder. Beyond Johanna, a tree rat is gripping a tree trunk and gnawing a hole in the bark, licking at the tree. “But what can we send to tell them that?” she continues.
“I have no idea,” Martin says, frowning.
Haymitch grins. “I do.” He taps at his headset and replaces the earpiece over his right ear. “Fulfillment. District 12.” He waits for a couple of seconds, then, “I need you to drop in a metal spile.” Another pause as Haymitch listens then growls, “Look it up if you don’t know what it is.” Another growl. “No, no. A spile.” He spells it. “It’s used to extract sap from trees.” Another pause. “Yes. That’s it. Make sure it’s made of metal. I don’t want the damn thing breaking apart the first time they try to use it.” Haymitch rolls his eyes at whatever the person on the other end of the conversation says. “That’s fine. Less than I thought it’d cost.”
He taps the headset and pulls back the earpiece again as Martins says, “Thanks, Haymitch.”
“No problem, Perch. My kids or yours don’t matter. They all need the water and it’s not like they’re gonna hold out on each other. I don’t know if Peeta’s familiar with a spile, but I’m sure Katniss is.”
The anthem begins to play over their headsets. “I guess we’d better go back in,” Martin says reluctantly, a look of trepidation in his eyes. He opens the door and holds it for Annie and Haymitch; the mentor from 12 breaks right and Annie and Martin return to their stations to the left. While the death toll floats in the sky for those confined to the arena, the faces of the dead appear and then fade out on all the monitors around the control room.
Annie sees Martin react from the corner of her eye as the dead are displayed and each one seems to hit him like a fist. When Cecelia from District 8 appears, he pushes back from the console and closes his eyes, unable to continue watching. She hears a gasp and turns toward the sound. Rae watches the screen to Annie’s left, unblinking as the tears fall.
But even as Rae’s and Martin’s pain registers, Annie focuses on her monitor, on Finnick where he sits at the entrance of the hut they built for shelter, an arm around Mags as she leans her head against his shoulder. The expression on his face doesn’t change. He shows no emotion for the dead, even though Annie knows he feels Cecelia’s loss in particular, knows that she was a friend. Tears run freely down Mags’ face.
Martin’s back is to their monitors when he says, “Mags and Woof have been friends for… sixty years? More?” He wipes his eyes hard with the heels of his hands. “Damn it.”
To her other side, Rae says, “Trayn loved to paint flowers.” She laughs, the sound unsteady. “And they were always yellow, no matter what kind of flower it was.”
One last face appears - Seeder, District 11’s victor in the 33rd Hunger Games - and fades away into the seal of Panem. But the image in Annie’s mind of Seeder dying before Annie left the control room a few hours before is suddenly replaced by a more vivid memory: Seeder laughing as she bounced a ball, keeping it away from Martin just before Finnick swept in and stole it from them both. The feed returns to normal, filling the screens around the control room with scenes of jungle or beach as the moon rises high over the arena. Silence falls as those who watch mourn.
Chapter Twenty-Five - If the Sky Can Crack...