THG fic: "Spin Control" [12/22]

[trovia]

Title: Spin Control
Pairings: Finnick/Haymitch, Kat/Peeta
Characters: Finnick, Haymitch, Chaff, Peeta, Gale, Kat; plus appearances by Mags, Johanna, Caesar Flickerman, President Snow, Effie, Claudius Templesmith, Beetee, Prim, Thresh, Rue, District Twelve ensemble and various OC
Rating: adult
Warnings: forced prostitution & non-con; people dealing

Comments

[roguedemon]

So, here I am for some brief meta. What with the high dose of steroids I have been taking, this has been one strange week. And I am not sure if having my ENT probe my sinuses today actually removed more of the blockage, but I'm going to keep at it. Not taking steroids for again for awhile -- this was just a long shot, I normally avoid them except extreme duress because they can send me really manic. I am honestly embarrassed to look at my tumblr feed right now, I imagine it looks like the food of a crazy person, which would be fitting. :-p It's like herding cats inside my head right now, and I started tapering off the steroids a couple of days ago when it became apparent that I could not sleep. On the other hand it is a great high taken in extremely small doses, so there's that. I am just going to have to be very careful to avoid crashing too hard. I should be around to chat on Saturday or Sunday this weekend, btw, barring unforeseen circumstances.

Last night I was lying in bed thinking about Haymitch, his emotional hypersensitivity, and the way he was forced to use alcohol to try to shut himself down enough to cope. I was thinking that as one goes through life being bombarded by pain, you either learn to harden yourself naturally or you catch hold of whatever coping method happens to work. Addicts are generally the unlucky ones whose brains happen to have the perfect lock for one or more substance keys. Anyway, I was just feeling like an open nerve this week and it reminded me of the process I fight against: the thickening of my boundaries, the hardening of my heart. It's so hard to strike a balance between protecting yourself in a healthy way and closing yourself off to empathy. And you did a great job of illuminating that in this fic as Finnick gets to know Haymitch and sees that he was drinking because he cared so much he couldn't stand it, not because he was callous.

Haymitch is so good at hiding, but it this chapter it was possible to see the little clues, like the way he was uncharacteristically quiet while they were hiking. As you say later in the fic, when he runs out of sarcasm, he runs out of words. And when his snark generator is disrupted that is generally a good indicator that he's scrambling emotionally.