THG fic: "Spin Control" [19/24]
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 with sexual trauma; rape fantasies; self-hate; canon-typical violence; minor character death (of major canon characters); implied physical abuse of children (in the Mellark household); alcoholism & drug abuse; anorexia and exercise addition
Summary: When Haymitch Abernathy’s alcoholism makes the prime time news, Finnick Odair is sent to live in District Twelve to pick up the pieces. But it’s hard to save a friend if you can barely stand looking yourself in the eye. And it might become impossible once that friend decides to move hell and high water to bring two of his tributes home at once, even if it should cost him his own life.
Prologue -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7 -- Chapter 8 -- Chapter 9 -- Chapter 10 -- Chapter 11 -- Chapter 12 -- Chapter 13 -- Chapter 14 -- Chapter 15 -- Chapter 16 -- Chapter 17 -- Chapter 18
Chapter 19: The End Of The Line
It was a week later that Finnick found himself knocking on Haymitch’s door, huddled into the thin jacket of his running clothes. It provided little protection against the lukewarm spring rain that had been drizzling down for days on end. The workout had soaked him to his bones, boots squishing when he moved, but he knew he’d lose his courage if he went home to change first. Anxiety was raging through him instead of the pleasant buzz of exhaustion that should have settled in, if the sport had done its trick. But the sport hadn’t done its trick for a week.
When Haymitch opened the door, he looked Finnick over with sharp eyes, and his face said, What’s wrong? He knew that Finnick shouldn’t be back for another hour.
Finnick buried his hands in his pockets. “Let’s go on a walk towards Swagger’s,” he said, which had been code long since for, Let’s talk where the Capitol can’t hear.
“Alright,” Haymitch said warily, gesturing at Finnick to take shelter from the rain in the hallway while he vanished into his house to fetch his coat and shoes.
Finnick stayed where he was, unable to shake the feeling of foreboding that said he was about to break everything apart. Like this was the unavoidable reckoning that he’d known would come ever since they fell for each other, maybe even since he’d run away to District Twelve.
Still better than lying to him, he told himself, but he knew the reason he had to remind himself of that was that his guts told him the exact opposite was true. It was a bit like standing on the platform at the beginning of his Games - so focused but so frightened, knowing that the odds said fourteen-year-olds had to die.
***
Running hadn’t been working anymore.
That evening, after a workout with the spears alongside a handful of the oldest children, staying later than the others, Finnick had taken off to cover some ground on his feet. He’d run along the fence, through the Seam and across the barren, rocky fields that followed behind it in that direction. One or two Seam denizens had looked up when they saw him racing past, including a skinny woman who he thought was Larkspur’s aunt, but they still just stared at him, never quite accepting enough of the stranger in their midst to wave and greet.
It had been a week since his long conversation with Haymitch about sex and that escort and so many things. Finnick didn’t know why it was still haunting him, his mind returning to it at the oddest times, when he got dressed in the morning or stood in the kitchen stirring soup. It did so now, leaving him too aware that running along the district fence would only lead him in a circle.
It still boggled Finnick’s mind that Haymitch was refusing to want things, refusing to take this opportunity of finally getting things he needed, as if the idea of it scared him too much. For Haymitch’s sake, he worried about it. However, much more than that, he kept dwelling on the shame on Haymitch’s face when he had told him about Catriona Wink.
Finnick still didn’t know what it meant - if doing one thing wrong could really make somebody a bad person, if that was really possible. What that said about Finnick himself.
It confused him, everything about it. How could they blame any victor for anything - that was what he thought when he looked at Haymitch - or how could they not blame any victor for everything they’d done since they’d won? That was what he thought when he looked at himself. He’d killed people, children. He’d liked killing them, utilizing their murder to get sponsorship even, systematically, which had to be the worst kind. But how could he think that of himself, then never pause and think it about Haymitch, about Johanna or Mags, too? How was it different? How could he feel so bad about the people he’d fucked if he didn’t feel bad about the people he’d killed, how could he not be blaming Haymitch for having lost control for real if he felt so ashamed of losing control over himself in his dreams?
It always came down to the dreams, and even now, thinking of them made Finnick shudder, disrupting his measured breathing on an exhale, the veil of rain clouding his sight.
Finnick was sick of it, sick and tired of all of it to his bones. Nothing ever just made sense. He should have control over who he was, but he didn’t.
Haymitch would know, he thought, miserable.
He’d left the fields behind and made his way towards the storage facilities, not as steadily as he was used to. Rain still drizzling down thinly, his running clothes damper by the minute, while he tried to chase after his rhythm.
Finnick gave up. Breathing harshly, he came to a halt. He blinked, rain drops running into the corners of his eyes and down his face, dripping off his chin. He’d reached the loading tracks for the coal transports, behind the passenger station, abandoned after the late-shifters went home. It was the end of the line of those tracks. They only ever led to the Capitol from here.
Twelve must be the ugliest place in the world, he couldn’t help but think, staring at the black coal mud that the rain was washing down the pavement everywhere around. Everybody who lived in this district would leave if they could. It was an ugly, pathetic, starved place that never had enough of anything and still had spat Haymitch back out because he hadn’t tasted good enough for its liking; and now he was staring at the trains, only ever fetching coal and tributes and victors and making them whores.
He hated hiding, with a passion. There was nothing in the world he hated more, not even the Capitol, not even the coal.
For a wild moment, Finnick pictured the victors getting on a television screen, telling the Capitol and the districts exactly what it was like. The mentoring, the whoring, the sheer despair.
Then, he snorted a bitter laugh to himself, considering that would be a spectacularly good way of getting them all killed and still changing nothing. Nothing could change the Capitol’s love for the Games.
What a shitty place he had chosen to make his.
Finnick stared at the abandoned facilities, water running into his eyes.
It’s mine, he thought. He was suddenly asking himself if he’d rather be back in District Four, and the answer was still no. Not because he wanted to be away from Four anymore, though. But because Twelve was his. This was his life.
I guess that means I won that Games.
The thought felt foreign, as if it hadn’t quite settled in. A wave by Larkspur’s mom had never been what he had tried to achieve by coming here.
That rotten feeling was still gnawing at Finnick, eating him up from the inside very slowly, and he was so sick of that, too. He was sick of hiding those bad things about himself and not acting and knowing that they’d never go away if he kept handling them like that. He was sick of running away.
But he’d felt like he’d always run away, ever since he’d stolen that golden trident from President Snow and made it his. No matter the relationship he’d started with Haymitch, the school they were building in Twelve, the power he’d gained over his Capitol persona. As long as he kept hiding from the truth about himself, he’d only ever end up back where he’d started, running along the district fence.
So he’d turned around and taken the direct route back home, through the merchants’ part of town - to his real, new, self-made home, to Haymitch’s house - half-convinced already that he was about to just destroy it all, but still unable to stop.
***
Finnick was terrified, he could admit that to himself. It did a strange number on his head, waiting on Haymitch’s porch in the rain, in front of that familiar door that he’d stepped through as often as his own. He’d memorized all the scratches of faded blue paint peeling off that wall; he’d sat on that bench more often than he could count. Effie had had that bench replaced when Haymitch first returned, with reporters in his wake.
Haymitch reappeared in the doorway, having donned his coat and shoes, a couple of blankets thrown over one arm, balancing two steaming mugs of tea.
“You’re soaked, in case you haven’t noticed,” he informed him when Finnick gave them a confused look, handing him one of them. It smelled of chamomile. “Remember how we trained not catching a cold in winter, shrimper boy. And I’m not gonna waste this, anyway.”
The mug was too hot to hold. On the way to Swagger’s, Finnick had to cover his palms with the corners of his jacket sleeves before he could properly wrap them around it. They didn’t talk, Haymitch probably assuming that whatever Finnick had to say better wait until they reached the bug-free destination, trudging along with the occasional concerned glance at Finnick.
They climbed through their usual window, making their way to what had used to be Swagger’s living room. It was growing dark outside, but while they couldn’t get the heating going at the dead victor’s house, the switch on the wall still turned on a forgotten ceiling lamp, covering the room in uneasy shadows. It had been stripped off its contents otherwise, nothing left but the skeletons of empty bureaus and shelves. Finnick had often wondered about that - who’d decided what would stay behind and what wouldn’t, whether the people from the Capitol had confiscated Swagger’s private possessions, too, whether the district people had been smart and brave enough to break in and take what they wanted after he died.
The floor was still covered by warm, plush, old-fashioned carpet in a faded shade that must have been fuchsia once. Finnick took a blanket from Haymitch, taking a seat on the floor next to a drawer, wrapping himself in it, putting the mug at his feet. Haymitch moved to sit next to him, but Finnick threw him a pleading look, so he reconsidered and chose a space at the wall, putting distance between them and looking more worried than he had before.
Finnick put the mug back in his hands, feeling it burn against his palms. He blew on it, softly, feeling the heat retreating from his face, then wafting back when he stopped doing so.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” he said, sounding strangely detached to his own ears, like that was another man who’d spoken. Not the suave one he became when a camera was pointed at him, who was still very much him. But somebody new and calm, who’d taken his place for the occasion. “I should have said something a long time ago, but I didn’t know how. I was scared that you’d find out. I didn’t want to stay over at night anymore, because you’d find out.”
Narrowing his eyes at him, Haymitch leaned forward a bit. “Okay.”
I’ll lose him, he thought, actually putting words to that greatest fear in his mind. What he had with Haymitch - their relationship and friendship - had become his whole life. Haymitch and the Hunger Games. That was another thing that scared him out of his mind if he thought about it too hard.
“You told me…” He had to stop when his voice broke, wetting his lips. “You told me all these things last week, about what you’ve done, and there’s something, too… not something that I’ve done but something I want, maybe. I’ve never told anybody,” he added in a whisper. “Not even before, in District Four.”
“Go on.” Haymitch sounded uneasy, and Finnick exhaled a long breath.
“I have that… kink,” he said. “I get off on getting raped.”
The words rang too loudly through the room.
There was a moment of silence, until Haymitch, very carefully, put his tea mug down on the carpet and leaned back against the wall, elbows propped on his knees.
“I have a hard time believing that,” he eventually said.
Finnick swallowed down that lump.
“It’s true,” he said. “I dream about it all the time.”
“That may be so,” Haymitch said. “But you and I both know that that’s just how these things go. Of course, it gets you off; your body’s gotta react to it, but that’s a survival thing. It’s gotta do that if you want your family to stay safe. That doesn’t mean it’s what you want if you’re giving a choice.”
But Finnick was already shaking his head. “You don’t understand,” he breathed, so of course Haymitch closed his mouth, waiting for further information, and Finnick suddenly had trouble putting words to that thing. He’d carried it around so long, but he’d always refused to think about it in detail if he didn’t have to. So he chose each word very carefully now, staring at his mug instead Haymitch.
“I…” he said, starting again. “I… That’s not what I’m talking about.” His voice was still calm, but something in it also sounded very, very dead to him. “I know that what they do to me in the Capitol, it’s rape.” Such an important thing to say aloud for the first time, degenerating into an aside in a conversation about something so much more terrifying. “I know that, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I… When I’m in the Capitol, it’s rape, but it doesn’t feel like rape. They want it to feel like consensual sex. But when I dream about it… when I think of it, during, when I… you know…” President Snow pursing his lips when Finnick reached down to open his pants. “…that’s different from that. I… fantasize… about, about how I struggle and these people won’t let me go although I tell them to stop…” His voice was turning high and thin. “…and they don’t and I’m scared but I still… It’s a kink. I have a kink.”
When he looked up, that Haymitch’s face had taken a strange pale shade, and he was just staring at Finnick, expressionless.
I should run and hide, he thought, but couldn’t move.
Haymitch shook it off with obvious effort, looking away and then giving Finnick the side-eye.
“Okay,” he breathed after a moment. “Okay, yeah, I get it now, shit. I get it.”
Run and hide. But there was no other place left to run away to.
End of the train tracks.
“I’m so sorry,” Finnick whispered, looking down.
He’d never wanted to cause Haymitch pain.
There wasn’t an immediate reply. None of Haymitch’s usual, “Oh shove it” or “Whatever”. Finnick didn’t dare looking up, but then there were clothes rustling. The sound of boots on carpet told him that Haymitch had gotten up, a looming shadow in the corner of his eye now; he couldn’t help but tremble a little bit. He’d never been hit much by anybody in his life, baring the occasional slap by his mom, or otherwise, kinky stuff during sex play with clients where he’d given as much as he got, but for a glimpse, in that moment, he still expected a fist flying at his face.
He’d grown to rely too much on Haymitch laughing those apologies off, like a safety net catching him when he fell.
The fingers around his tea mug were shaking too much. He wished that it were still too hot to hold.
“Okay,” he heard Haymitch say, muttering to himself. He was moving through the room, not leaving, just pacing. “Alright.”
A sudden wave of gratitude hit Finnick, just because Haymitch hadn’t just gone, but that didn’t make his hands feel any steadier.
“Alright. Okay.” Haymitch took an audible breath. “Give me some details to work with here, I guess.”
“Details?” Finnick replied, voice still so thin, glancing up just enough to focus on Haymitch’s legs and the seam of his heavy coat, standing above him in the middle of the room.
“Yeah,” Haymitch said with a hard voice. “What do you expect me to say if I barely know anything yet? It’s a broad topic, alright? Tell me how this is supposed to go.”
“What do you mean?” Now he just felt hoarse.
Haymitch sounded adamant. “Like how many people?” he ground out.
“I… what? That’s not the point, it depends…”
“Guess it doesn’t matter if it’s only two of us anyway, can’t hardly rope another person into this,” Haymitch muttered like an aside, and Finnick was just confused. He didn’t know what was happening. He hadn’t expected this.
There was an angry edge in Haymitch’s voice.
“Alright, what else?” he said. “These people in your fantasies, they hurt you? Beat you up? They use their fists or something else or what? Are you gonna want implements?”
A surge of nausea hit Finnick; he could barely stop himself from lowering his head between his knees and shutting down. Images rose in his head, unbidden - President Snow licking his lips, the dream images transforming into something like reality, hands on him real enough to feel the callouses on a person’s fingers, their breath too hotly on his neck. He wanted to scream. He didn’t think he could have screamed.
“No,” he managed, scrambling. “No, no, that’s not the point, listen, I mean, yes. Sometimes, they beat me up, they use things…” They used whatever his clients of the season had used, really, the dreams weren’t all that imaginative in that way. He’d gotten his ideas in the Capitol. “They beat me up, they fuck me and they spit and they laugh at me, and I tell them no and they laugh…”
“You cry when they do it to you?”
“…and I want them to stop and they don’t, of course I cry, they hurt me, what do you think…” He was actually crying, that was why Haymitch had asked that in that strange, aggressive way. He was crying without any control over it, tears just running and running and running down his face like the rain had before and he’d dropped the tea, spilling it all over the carpet, clutching his face and still unable to get a grip.
“The fuck, Finnick,” Haymitch breathed, but that didn’t help Finnick’s head to clear up, either.
Something weird had happened inside of him, breaking open some kind of dam that he hadn’t known was there. Hearing himself say those obvious words - of course, I cry, they hurt me - had unlocked something that maybe didn’t even have to do with the dreams and the sex. Or maybe it had everything to do with it, and he couldn’t even attach a specific feeling to it. It just made tears pouring out. He threatened to break.
He tried to focus on the things he needed to say.
“I don’t think I’ve always been like that.” That part was so important suddenly. Haymitch needed to know that before he went away. Finnick hadn’t started out this way, he’d been a normal boy from the fishing district, with normal dreams. He’d wanted people to like him. He’d wanted to give something back to the community one day. He’d wanted to own his own boat. “It didn’t use to be like this. I think they made me like this. But now it’s still me.”
“What the actual fuck,” he heard Haymitch say, caught in a complete lack of expression - unable to settle on a reaction maybe.
Then there was a flurry of motion. When Finnick glanced up, Haymitch had moved, resting his hands so violently on the sill of a window that the whole frame had cluttered, staring outside. Presenting his profile to Finnick. His face looked angry and troubled and rigid, and the breath that he took didn’t sound like it resolved anything for him. He turned to look at Finnick again, dangerous like a whip.
“And how exactly do you expect that I do anything like that to you it breaks you into fucking bits like that?” he growled.
Finnick just flinched. Hitting the sill in that frustrated, helpless way again, Haymitch let it go.
“Shit,” he muttered, rubbing his face.
“I don’t know,” Finnick whispered, but he wasn’t sure if it had been loud enough for Haymitch to hear.
There was a banging sound so loud that a part of Finnick honestly wondered if the bugs in one of the other houses could have picked it up, because Haymitch had punched the wall so hard that it left an actual dent.
No matter what happened to him, Haymitch tended to react to the world with that pointed, passive inactivity, a phlegmatic, unconcerned kind on the good days and a frozen, helpless kind on the bad ones. Finnick suddenly was struck by the realization that that was because the alternative would have been reactions like this one, too much emotion at once. And Finnick had been the one finally bringing one of them out.
An angry Haymitch Abernathy, he thought in a detached, hysterical way, was a very scary sight.
“Not gonna do anything like that to you,” Finnick heard him muttering, in a determined, agitated way, prowling the room like a tiger in a cage. He sounded like he’d reached a decision. “What the fuck do you even think, proposing something like that, not gonna do that when you’re fucking coming apart at the seams here, how sick a thing would that be.”
It was impossible not to picture it anymore: Not the faceless strangers looming over him anymore, but Haymitch, angry Haymitch forcing himself on Finnick and slapping him so hard that it twisted his head around, Haymitch and the familiar way he smelled and felt. Free fall. It twisted everything around, taste of metal flooding his mouth. Finnick felt like he could just lean over and puke, or like he should sway.
“I don’t think I can do it with you like that,” he somehow managed to croak.
Haymitch twirled around to him.
“Then why propose it like that, huh?” he snapped. “Thirteen’s fucking ashes, Finnick, what in the whole fucking world?”
Again, Finnick flinched, too hard to hide it. Haymitch recoiled like he’d been slapped.
“Fucking dirt of all the districts,” he said, breathing harshly.
Not that Finnick should have expected anything else, baring something worse. Of course, Haymitch thought it was sick because it was sick.
“So what’s this all about then?” Haymitch demanded, standing still in the middle of the room again.
Finnick couldn’t make himself look up. “You should know about it,” he whispered. “You should know what I’m like.”
“Well alright,” Haymitch said. “What does it mean?”
He waited for a reply, getting into motion again when Finnick managed a shaky, “What?”
“I get that it’s not just some fun fantasies… fuck,” he added, as if just saying that aloud boggled his mind. “It’s not just some fantasies and you don’t want to do it like that with me. So what else does it mean? What’s it about?”
“I don’t know,” Finnick said, considering that very question had been eating him up for over two years; he could have laughed. “I don’t know what it means, it means I’m sick, that’s what it means…” Haymitch was turning around to look at him again, but Finnick didn’t give him time to speak. “What if it means it’s something that I’ll want to do to you?”
At a loss for words yet again, Haymitch just looked down at him for another moment.
“Now that’s not even making a lick of sense from what you’ve told me so far, kid,” he eventually said.
He hadn’t called Finnick that - kid - since long before they started kissing, not since - Finnick guessed - before he’d started feeling attracted to him.
It felt like a good fit now, considering Finnick felt about as helpless as the day he’d first been Reaping age. His first Reaping Day, a whisper had spread through his town like a wildfire that a male volunteer had been scheduled but bailed. Of course, in the end, that day, he’d still gotten another reprieve of two years.
Then, he’d gone to the Capitol to smile and wave during his parade, embraced by the crowds, and his transformation into that thing had commenced.
His first patron had been a very wealthy, very powerful vice minister from the District Affairs office; she’d come all the way to District Eight to meet him on his Victory Tour, in secret, where nobody would see. She could have been his mother. She’d been very soothing and very kind and it had hurt so fucking much when she put things inside him before she put him inside her, making sure to take him in every way. He never thought of her; he never did.
“But how would it be different?” Finnick heard himself say. “It’s where we’re going with the things we’ve done. I’m always in charge. You always do what I want. You’re just there, and I use you like some kind of…”
“That’s got shit to do with being forced.” Haymitch’s interruption was actually a bark. He just sounded disturbed, determined. “Nothing, you hear me?” He paused, angrily, then added, “I’m not some kind of submissive, never mind your victim. You can pull my hair all you want, doesn’t make it rape.”
With a pained groan - this low, unfiltered animal sound - Finnick buried his head in his hands, clutching his hair so hard it hurt. He couldn’t do this. It was too confusing, and there were too many contradicting thoughts in his head at once, and he couldn’t deal.
“I don’t think I know the difference anymore,” he said, voice muffled. “What if it means I don’t know the difference anymore…?”
It hadn’t been the greatest orgasm he’d ever had, that day two years ago when the light of that delicate desk lamp fell on President Snow’s face. It had been mechanical, even after he’d spit on his hand, though the chafing had hurt and that had helped. He’d tried remembering clients he’d found attractive, young women with full breasts and perfect men with narrow hips. He’d dragged up a memory from when he’d been young, the expectant way a girl’s skin felt when he put his hand under her shirt. He’d run a litany of no in his head and wished that Snow would just reached out and hurt him already, hurt him or touch him, make it cruel or the usual, or that he could reach out and hurt Snow. And then, he’d come, in this perfunctory way, Snow’s eyes still all over him, feeling bare.
“I really don’t think that’s a thing you can forget,” Haymitch very quietly said.
Clothes rustled, closer by. It took a while until Finnick managed to raise his head a bit, his fingers loosening. Haymitch had crouched down in front of him, far away enough to not intrude, but near enough to look at him very closely, their eyes on the same level. When Finnick met his gaze, Haymitch was studying him. He looked drawn.
“What is it that you really want to be doing with me?” he said. “Truth time, none of that bullshit of how it should be about me. You wanna stop altogether? Because if you want to stop, we stop, you don’t have to feel guilty about that.”
The thought sending this instant shot of pain through his chest, fear of the loss of that good thing, Finnick mutely shook his head.
“Alright,” Haymitch said. “So what do you want to be doing instead?”
The words just came without thought; Finnick didn’t know where they’d been hiding. Maybe behind the other secret.
“I want to go back to how it was,” he said. “I don’t want you to start touching me more. I want to keep making the decisions, I… I don’t want a blowjob.” He was stuttering. He didn’t want to say that he wanted a blowjob and then have to go through with it in a year because he’d said it. He wanted to not have to do it. “I thought it would be temporary, so we’d get started, but I don’t want to change it anymore, I don’t think I could make myself…”
“Then that’s what’s gonna happen, alright?” Haymitch said it with an edge.
Finnick looked away, feeling miserable and ashamed. “It shouldn’t be all about me.”
“Well, it is now, so fucking deal with it,” Haymitch said.
He grimaced, rocking in his crouched position as if it was starting to bother his knees.
“I want to make you happy,” Finnick whispered, desperate, and Haymitch stood up.
“Then make me happy on your own terms,” he said, as if that concluded that topic.
Staying where he was standing, he eyed Finnick at his seated position for a moment, as if unsure how to proceed.
A weird unhinged feeling had spread in Finnick’s chest, as if something massive had come loose, but there was no telling where it would dock next.
“What I want right now…” Haymitch sounded undecided, venturing into foreign verbal territory. “I wouldn’t mind sitting down next to you right now.”
Finnick managed a faded chuckle. He looked around himself, noticing that he’d lost his blanket and that his clothes were still all so damp, and there was a wet puddle of tea that had soaked into the carpet all around.
“I spilled the tea,” he inanely said.
“Fun fact,” Haymitch said, a little wildly, fiercely reclaiming balance. “When Swagger moved into this house, he brought his sister, who quit the mines and grew tea in the garden. Swagger allegedly hated her tea, and fled to the Hob every day to trade for different flavors, so he could drink it in her presence and act like it was hers. Whole Seam made fun of how its biggest wuss had won the Games.”
“I thought you’d never talked to him,” Finnick faintly said, voice shaking, eyes on the ruined carpet.
“I didn’t,” Haymitch said. “As far as I was concerned as a kid, he was some kind of far-away district celebrity. Then, I turned Reaping age and we found him dangling from a tree in the Meadow, right in time for me to face shit on my own. And they brought in the scary woman from Two. But, in the Seam, you know that stuff just because, it’s what we did instead of television.”
Finnick nodded, the inane chat washing right over him, while he tried to move so that the carpet underneath him would be dry, and a big enough dry spot next to him materialized for Haymitch, too. He was moving on autopilot, now. Everything was faint.
After glancing a question at Haymitch, he waited until Haymitch had gotten comfortable next to him, stretching out his legs and shifting into a comfortable position.
“Talk to me, kid,” he said. Instead of relaxing against the drawer, he picked up the discarded blanket, starting to drape it over Finnick’s shoulders with the cautious motions of a person who didn’t have a lot of experience with that gesture. “I’m vastly realizing it’s a shitty idea to let you just think.”
Finnick tried to listen into himself, figuring out what was left. But he just felt bad. He had a faint notion that he should be better than this, though he couldn’t quite grasp it anymore.
Haymitch sighed. “Shit, Finnick,” he said. “This is just… shit.”
Instead of replying, Finnick grabbed the seams of the blanket and huddled into it more tightly, leaning against Haymitch, who put an arm around him without prompting. Finnick was considerably taller than Haymitch, but he was sitting more hunched, so it worked, and he also felt much younger than Haymitch. Of course, he’d always been much younger than Haymitch. But he didn’t usually feel that young anymore.
“I’m scared,” he told Haymitch quietly. He’d set out to share all of his secrets, after all. He was so very scared. “I don’t know what it means, about me.”
His head on Haymitch’s shoulder, he could feel the rise and fall of the other man’s lungs, in and out. Deeply and calmly, like he’d once told Haymitch he should breathe when he swam. It hadn’t been a thing he’d had to teach Haymitch first, though, who’d been good at staying calm from the start.
“Neither do I,” Haymitch admitted after a moment. “I’m sorry. I haven’t got a clue what it could mean.”
“I’m sorry,” Finnick whispered, and Haymitch said, “Yeah, yeah.”
He paused, his body against Finnick’s not altogether relaxed.
“So you’ve got dreams,” he added, vehemently and angrily. “We’ve all had fucking dreams.”
“You’ve…” Finnick started saying, but Haymitch shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I’ve… I’ve had dreams of killing you in a Games. You just lying there and all that blood and that axe and those birds…” His voice trailed off for a moment, before it grew stronger again, and he arm tightened around Finnick in anger. “Doesn’t mean it’s a thing I could make myself do.”
It was a big thing to say for a victor. It was an incredible thing to say.
Haymitch’s hand was stroking along where it was resting on Finnick’s arm, thoughtful and soothing and firm.
“You ever want to go out there and hurt people? Some girl, some kid, Fallon or Larkspur or that baker boy, Peeta, maybe? Or me? That a thing you ever think about? Making plans? Like with that trident of yours?”
“No,” Finnick exclaimed, shuddering at the thought.
“Alright,” Haymitch said. “So if you could choose right now, never be sold again against your will or going on with a patron of your choice, would you make it all stop?”
“Of course.”
He was trembling again, in Haymitch’s embrace, halfway safe.
“Then my best guess would be that it doesn’t mean a fucking thing,” Haymitch said. “I mean, I’m out of other ideas here. You don’t want to do a thing, you don’t do it and screw what’s in your head. Maybe…” He paused, trying to figure this out. “Maybe it’s just some fantasies. You don’t have to wanna do every shitty thing that’s in your head. Maybe they’ll just go away one day, and then, that’s that. Maybe they just don’t… matter.”
“But what if…”
“There really isn’t an if here, Finnick. It’s either a thing you wanna do for real and you don’t…” The arm around him tensed again. “…or you don’t even want it and who gives a fuck if it’s there if you don’t. I mean, what else could there be, right? What else is there?”
He paused. “None of the people in the Capitol dream about hurting us and they still do it. That ain’t better,” he said. “That’s worse.”
Finnick pushed himself closer against Haymitch until Haymitch drew him further in, so he buried his face against Haymitch’s chest. Breathing in chamomile and laundry detergent and soap, Haymitch’s own clean scent underneath that never reminded him of his sweaty, spent, satisfied clients, he didn’t want to ever move. He didn’t want to think about anything anymore. He’d spent all his energy that he had on it, and now he just had come to a halt.
It was a dizzying feeling. It scared him a little bit, because he couldn’t remember having felt like that, like he didn’t want to move anymore. He still wasn’t sure where all these thoughts in his head would settle down, once he thought them through. In a better place, he thought, but that was hard to believe.
And Haymitch was still there. He hadn’t gone away.
Maybe it was true. Maybe he could choose to do none of those things, and that was alright.
If Finnick kept making the calls when they had sex, maybe that even meant he could decide to make it about Haymitch, too. He could make it about Haymitch all he wanted. It was Finnick who made the decisions, but it was Haymitch he was focusing on.
The thought made him feel adrift.
“You look like you’re about to drop,” Haymitch muttered against his temple after a minute. “Want to go home? Warm up, take a hot shower, go to bed? I’d even make you more tea.”
“Not yet,” Finnick muttered back.
“Alright,” Haymitch said. “Never say I didn’t do anything fancy for you, though.”
Finnick snorted, but he didn’t move.
It should be so easy a thing, wanting things, he thought. He didn’t understand how such a simple thing could be so hard.
He’d told Haymitch. And Haymitch was still there. And it felt like he could decide to do things, today or tomorrow, and not do the other things, and that would be just okay. It had been fixed. Something had been.
Maybe, he didn’t even have to hate himself as much as he’d thought.
***
In April, the last stylist application package arrived.
Finnick found it lying on the steps of Haymitch’s house when he returned from a bakery run one morning. Bright warm sun coloring the paper a stark white, he shoved the bakery bag into the crook of his arm to open it up, and a single folder dropped into his hands.
They hadn’t actually expected more applicants; working closely with Effie, who had proven an unsurprisingly Capitol-attuned fashion sense, they’d narrowed it down to ten stylist teams with equally mediocre parade costume drafts, trying to weigh strategy against actual skill.
We’ve found them!! said Effie’s flowery handwriting on a post-it glued at the top, doubly underlined with a pink glitter pen.
Portia Birdfeather, the first vita said and the second right behind, Cinna Blue.
A note informed him that this team had already received offers from both District Eight and District Three to be signed for the upcoming Quarter Quell, but for a bullshit reason phrased in application prose, it had chosen to apply to District Twelve before signing a contract. They claimed, in all ludicrous seriousness, that their style would lend itself to coal mining best. Either, Miss Birdfeather and Mr. Blue had a very, very special outlook on fashion indeed, or they were complete and utter self-possessed idiots.
Balancing the bag on his arm, Finnick turned to the page with the drafts.
Tbc.
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 with sexual trauma; rape fantasies; self-hate; canon-typical violence; minor character death (of major canon characters); implied physical abuse of children (in the Mellark household); alcoholism & drug abuse; anorexia and exercise addition
Summary: When Haymitch Abernathy’s alcoholism makes the prime time news, Finnick Odair is sent to live in District Twelve to pick up the pieces. But it’s hard to save a friend if you can barely stand looking yourself in the eye. And it might become impossible once that friend decides to move hell and high water to bring two of his tributes home at once, even if it should cost him his own life.
Prologue -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7 -- Chapter 8 -- Chapter 9 -- Chapter 10 -- Chapter 11 -- Chapter 12 -- Chapter 13 -- Chapter 14 -- Chapter 15 -- Chapter 16 -- Chapter 17 -- Chapter 18
Chapter 19: The End Of The Line
It was a week later that Finnick found himself knocking on Haymitch’s door, huddled into the thin jacket of his running clothes. It provided little protection against the lukewarm spring rain that had been drizzling down for days on end. The workout had soaked him to his bones, boots squishing when he moved, but he knew he’d lose his courage if he went home to change first. Anxiety was raging through him instead of the pleasant buzz of exhaustion that should have settled in, if the sport had done its trick. But the sport hadn’t done its trick for a week.
When Haymitch opened the door, he looked Finnick over with sharp eyes, and his face said, What’s wrong? He knew that Finnick shouldn’t be back for another hour.
Finnick buried his hands in his pockets. “Let’s go on a walk towards Swagger’s,” he said, which had been code long since for, Let’s talk where the Capitol can’t hear.
“Alright,” Haymitch said warily, gesturing at Finnick to take shelter from the rain in the hallway while he vanished into his house to fetch his coat and shoes.
Finnick stayed where he was, unable to shake the feeling of foreboding that said he was about to break everything apart. Like this was the unavoidable reckoning that he’d known would come ever since they fell for each other, maybe even since he’d run away to District Twelve.
Still better than lying to him, he told himself, but he knew the reason he had to remind himself of that was that his guts told him the exact opposite was true. It was a bit like standing on the platform at the beginning of his Games - so focused but so frightened, knowing that the odds said fourteen-year-olds had to die.
***
Running hadn’t been working anymore.
That evening, after a workout with the spears alongside a handful of the oldest children, staying later than the others, Finnick had taken off to cover some ground on his feet. He’d run along the fence, through the Seam and across the barren, rocky fields that followed behind it in that direction. One or two Seam denizens had looked up when they saw him racing past, including a skinny woman who he thought was Larkspur’s aunt, but they still just stared at him, never quite accepting enough of the stranger in their midst to wave and greet.
It had been a week since his long conversation with Haymitch about sex and that escort and so many things. Finnick didn’t know why it was still haunting him, his mind returning to it at the oddest times, when he got dressed in the morning or stood in the kitchen stirring soup. It did so now, leaving him too aware that running along the district fence would only lead him in a circle.
It still boggled Finnick’s mind that Haymitch was refusing to want things, refusing to take this opportunity of finally getting things he needed, as if the idea of it scared him too much. For Haymitch’s sake, he worried about it. However, much more than that, he kept dwelling on the shame on Haymitch’s face when he had told him about Catriona Wink.
Finnick still didn’t know what it meant - if doing one thing wrong could really make somebody a bad person, if that was really possible. What that said about Finnick himself.
It confused him, everything about it. How could they blame any victor for anything - that was what he thought when he looked at Haymitch - or how could they not blame any victor for everything they’d done since they’d won? That was what he thought when he looked at himself. He’d killed people, children. He’d liked killing them, utilizing their murder to get sponsorship even, systematically, which had to be the worst kind. But how could he think that of himself, then never pause and think it about Haymitch, about Johanna or Mags, too? How was it different? How could he feel so bad about the people he’d fucked if he didn’t feel bad about the people he’d killed, how could he not be blaming Haymitch for having lost control for real if he felt so ashamed of losing control over himself in his dreams?
It always came down to the dreams, and even now, thinking of them made Finnick shudder, disrupting his measured breathing on an exhale, the veil of rain clouding his sight.
Finnick was sick of it, sick and tired of all of it to his bones. Nothing ever just made sense. He should have control over who he was, but he didn’t.
Haymitch would know, he thought, miserable.
He’d left the fields behind and made his way towards the storage facilities, not as steadily as he was used to. Rain still drizzling down thinly, his running clothes damper by the minute, while he tried to chase after his rhythm.
Finnick gave up. Breathing harshly, he came to a halt. He blinked, rain drops running into the corners of his eyes and down his face, dripping off his chin. He’d reached the loading tracks for the coal transports, behind the passenger station, abandoned after the late-shifters went home. It was the end of the line of those tracks. They only ever led to the Capitol from here.
Twelve must be the ugliest place in the world, he couldn’t help but think, staring at the black coal mud that the rain was washing down the pavement everywhere around. Everybody who lived in this district would leave if they could. It was an ugly, pathetic, starved place that never had enough of anything and still had spat Haymitch back out because he hadn’t tasted good enough for its liking; and now he was staring at the trains, only ever fetching coal and tributes and victors and making them whores.
He hated hiding, with a passion. There was nothing in the world he hated more, not even the Capitol, not even the coal.
For a wild moment, Finnick pictured the victors getting on a television screen, telling the Capitol and the districts exactly what it was like. The mentoring, the whoring, the sheer despair.
Then, he snorted a bitter laugh to himself, considering that would be a spectacularly good way of getting them all killed and still changing nothing. Nothing could change the Capitol’s love for the Games.
What a shitty place he had chosen to make his.
Finnick stared at the abandoned facilities, water running into his eyes.
It’s mine, he thought. He was suddenly asking himself if he’d rather be back in District Four, and the answer was still no. Not because he wanted to be away from Four anymore, though. But because Twelve was his. This was his life.
I guess that means I won that Games.
The thought felt foreign, as if it hadn’t quite settled in. A wave by Larkspur’s mom had never been what he had tried to achieve by coming here.
That rotten feeling was still gnawing at Finnick, eating him up from the inside very slowly, and he was so sick of that, too. He was sick of hiding those bad things about himself and not acting and knowing that they’d never go away if he kept handling them like that. He was sick of running away.
But he’d felt like he’d always run away, ever since he’d stolen that golden trident from President Snow and made it his. No matter the relationship he’d started with Haymitch, the school they were building in Twelve, the power he’d gained over his Capitol persona. As long as he kept hiding from the truth about himself, he’d only ever end up back where he’d started, running along the district fence.
So he’d turned around and taken the direct route back home, through the merchants’ part of town - to his real, new, self-made home, to Haymitch’s house - half-convinced already that he was about to just destroy it all, but still unable to stop.
***
Finnick was terrified, he could admit that to himself. It did a strange number on his head, waiting on Haymitch’s porch in the rain, in front of that familiar door that he’d stepped through as often as his own. He’d memorized all the scratches of faded blue paint peeling off that wall; he’d sat on that bench more often than he could count. Effie had had that bench replaced when Haymitch first returned, with reporters in his wake.
Haymitch reappeared in the doorway, having donned his coat and shoes, a couple of blankets thrown over one arm, balancing two steaming mugs of tea.
“You’re soaked, in case you haven’t noticed,” he informed him when Finnick gave them a confused look, handing him one of them. It smelled of chamomile. “Remember how we trained not catching a cold in winter, shrimper boy. And I’m not gonna waste this, anyway.”
The mug was too hot to hold. On the way to Swagger’s, Finnick had to cover his palms with the corners of his jacket sleeves before he could properly wrap them around it. They didn’t talk, Haymitch probably assuming that whatever Finnick had to say better wait until they reached the bug-free destination, trudging along with the occasional concerned glance at Finnick.
They climbed through their usual window, making their way to what had used to be Swagger’s living room. It was growing dark outside, but while they couldn’t get the heating going at the dead victor’s house, the switch on the wall still turned on a forgotten ceiling lamp, covering the room in uneasy shadows. It had been stripped off its contents otherwise, nothing left but the skeletons of empty bureaus and shelves. Finnick had often wondered about that - who’d decided what would stay behind and what wouldn’t, whether the people from the Capitol had confiscated Swagger’s private possessions, too, whether the district people had been smart and brave enough to break in and take what they wanted after he died.
The floor was still covered by warm, plush, old-fashioned carpet in a faded shade that must have been fuchsia once. Finnick took a blanket from Haymitch, taking a seat on the floor next to a drawer, wrapping himself in it, putting the mug at his feet. Haymitch moved to sit next to him, but Finnick threw him a pleading look, so he reconsidered and chose a space at the wall, putting distance between them and looking more worried than he had before.
Finnick put the mug back in his hands, feeling it burn against his palms. He blew on it, softly, feeling the heat retreating from his face, then wafting back when he stopped doing so.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” he said, sounding strangely detached to his own ears, like that was another man who’d spoken. Not the suave one he became when a camera was pointed at him, who was still very much him. But somebody new and calm, who’d taken his place for the occasion. “I should have said something a long time ago, but I didn’t know how. I was scared that you’d find out. I didn’t want to stay over at night anymore, because you’d find out.”
Narrowing his eyes at him, Haymitch leaned forward a bit. “Okay.”
I’ll lose him, he thought, actually putting words to that greatest fear in his mind. What he had with Haymitch - their relationship and friendship - had become his whole life. Haymitch and the Hunger Games. That was another thing that scared him out of his mind if he thought about it too hard.
“You told me…” He had to stop when his voice broke, wetting his lips. “You told me all these things last week, about what you’ve done, and there’s something, too… not something that I’ve done but something I want, maybe. I’ve never told anybody,” he added in a whisper. “Not even before, in District Four.”
“Go on.” Haymitch sounded uneasy, and Finnick exhaled a long breath.
“I have that… kink,” he said. “I get off on getting raped.”
The words rang too loudly through the room.
There was a moment of silence, until Haymitch, very carefully, put his tea mug down on the carpet and leaned back against the wall, elbows propped on his knees.
“I have a hard time believing that,” he eventually said.
Finnick swallowed down that lump.
“It’s true,” he said. “I dream about it all the time.”
“That may be so,” Haymitch said. “But you and I both know that that’s just how these things go. Of course, it gets you off; your body’s gotta react to it, but that’s a survival thing. It’s gotta do that if you want your family to stay safe. That doesn’t mean it’s what you want if you’re giving a choice.”
But Finnick was already shaking his head. “You don’t understand,” he breathed, so of course Haymitch closed his mouth, waiting for further information, and Finnick suddenly had trouble putting words to that thing. He’d carried it around so long, but he’d always refused to think about it in detail if he didn’t have to. So he chose each word very carefully now, staring at his mug instead Haymitch.
“I…” he said, starting again. “I… That’s not what I’m talking about.” His voice was still calm, but something in it also sounded very, very dead to him. “I know that what they do to me in the Capitol, it’s rape.” Such an important thing to say aloud for the first time, degenerating into an aside in a conversation about something so much more terrifying. “I know that, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I… When I’m in the Capitol, it’s rape, but it doesn’t feel like rape. They want it to feel like consensual sex. But when I dream about it… when I think of it, during, when I… you know…” President Snow pursing his lips when Finnick reached down to open his pants. “…that’s different from that. I… fantasize… about, about how I struggle and these people won’t let me go although I tell them to stop…” His voice was turning high and thin. “…and they don’t and I’m scared but I still… It’s a kink. I have a kink.”
When he looked up, that Haymitch’s face had taken a strange pale shade, and he was just staring at Finnick, expressionless.
I should run and hide, he thought, but couldn’t move.
Haymitch shook it off with obvious effort, looking away and then giving Finnick the side-eye.
“Okay,” he breathed after a moment. “Okay, yeah, I get it now, shit. I get it.”
Run and hide. But there was no other place left to run away to.
End of the train tracks.
“I’m so sorry,” Finnick whispered, looking down.
He’d never wanted to cause Haymitch pain.
There wasn’t an immediate reply. None of Haymitch’s usual, “Oh shove it” or “Whatever”. Finnick didn’t dare looking up, but then there were clothes rustling. The sound of boots on carpet told him that Haymitch had gotten up, a looming shadow in the corner of his eye now; he couldn’t help but tremble a little bit. He’d never been hit much by anybody in his life, baring the occasional slap by his mom, or otherwise, kinky stuff during sex play with clients where he’d given as much as he got, but for a glimpse, in that moment, he still expected a fist flying at his face.
He’d grown to rely too much on Haymitch laughing those apologies off, like a safety net catching him when he fell.
The fingers around his tea mug were shaking too much. He wished that it were still too hot to hold.
“Okay,” he heard Haymitch say, muttering to himself. He was moving through the room, not leaving, just pacing. “Alright.”
A sudden wave of gratitude hit Finnick, just because Haymitch hadn’t just gone, but that didn’t make his hands feel any steadier.
“Alright. Okay.” Haymitch took an audible breath. “Give me some details to work with here, I guess.”
“Details?” Finnick replied, voice still so thin, glancing up just enough to focus on Haymitch’s legs and the seam of his heavy coat, standing above him in the middle of the room.
“Yeah,” Haymitch said with a hard voice. “What do you expect me to say if I barely know anything yet? It’s a broad topic, alright? Tell me how this is supposed to go.”
“What do you mean?” Now he just felt hoarse.
Haymitch sounded adamant. “Like how many people?” he ground out.
“I… what? That’s not the point, it depends…”
“Guess it doesn’t matter if it’s only two of us anyway, can’t hardly rope another person into this,” Haymitch muttered like an aside, and Finnick was just confused. He didn’t know what was happening. He hadn’t expected this.
There was an angry edge in Haymitch’s voice.
“Alright, what else?” he said. “These people in your fantasies, they hurt you? Beat you up? They use their fists or something else or what? Are you gonna want implements?”
A surge of nausea hit Finnick; he could barely stop himself from lowering his head between his knees and shutting down. Images rose in his head, unbidden - President Snow licking his lips, the dream images transforming into something like reality, hands on him real enough to feel the callouses on a person’s fingers, their breath too hotly on his neck. He wanted to scream. He didn’t think he could have screamed.
“No,” he managed, scrambling. “No, no, that’s not the point, listen, I mean, yes. Sometimes, they beat me up, they use things…” They used whatever his clients of the season had used, really, the dreams weren’t all that imaginative in that way. He’d gotten his ideas in the Capitol. “They beat me up, they fuck me and they spit and they laugh at me, and I tell them no and they laugh…”
“You cry when they do it to you?”
“…and I want them to stop and they don’t, of course I cry, they hurt me, what do you think…” He was actually crying, that was why Haymitch had asked that in that strange, aggressive way. He was crying without any control over it, tears just running and running and running down his face like the rain had before and he’d dropped the tea, spilling it all over the carpet, clutching his face and still unable to get a grip.
“The fuck, Finnick,” Haymitch breathed, but that didn’t help Finnick’s head to clear up, either.
Something weird had happened inside of him, breaking open some kind of dam that he hadn’t known was there. Hearing himself say those obvious words - of course, I cry, they hurt me - had unlocked something that maybe didn’t even have to do with the dreams and the sex. Or maybe it had everything to do with it, and he couldn’t even attach a specific feeling to it. It just made tears pouring out. He threatened to break.
He tried to focus on the things he needed to say.
“I don’t think I’ve always been like that.” That part was so important suddenly. Haymitch needed to know that before he went away. Finnick hadn’t started out this way, he’d been a normal boy from the fishing district, with normal dreams. He’d wanted people to like him. He’d wanted to give something back to the community one day. He’d wanted to own his own boat. “It didn’t use to be like this. I think they made me like this. But now it’s still me.”
“What the actual fuck,” he heard Haymitch say, caught in a complete lack of expression - unable to settle on a reaction maybe.
Then there was a flurry of motion. When Finnick glanced up, Haymitch had moved, resting his hands so violently on the sill of a window that the whole frame had cluttered, staring outside. Presenting his profile to Finnick. His face looked angry and troubled and rigid, and the breath that he took didn’t sound like it resolved anything for him. He turned to look at Finnick again, dangerous like a whip.
“And how exactly do you expect that I do anything like that to you it breaks you into fucking bits like that?” he growled.
Finnick just flinched. Hitting the sill in that frustrated, helpless way again, Haymitch let it go.
“Shit,” he muttered, rubbing his face.
“I don’t know,” Finnick whispered, but he wasn’t sure if it had been loud enough for Haymitch to hear.
There was a banging sound so loud that a part of Finnick honestly wondered if the bugs in one of the other houses could have picked it up, because Haymitch had punched the wall so hard that it left an actual dent.
No matter what happened to him, Haymitch tended to react to the world with that pointed, passive inactivity, a phlegmatic, unconcerned kind on the good days and a frozen, helpless kind on the bad ones. Finnick suddenly was struck by the realization that that was because the alternative would have been reactions like this one, too much emotion at once. And Finnick had been the one finally bringing one of them out.
An angry Haymitch Abernathy, he thought in a detached, hysterical way, was a very scary sight.
“Not gonna do anything like that to you,” Finnick heard him muttering, in a determined, agitated way, prowling the room like a tiger in a cage. He sounded like he’d reached a decision. “What the fuck do you even think, proposing something like that, not gonna do that when you’re fucking coming apart at the seams here, how sick a thing would that be.”
It was impossible not to picture it anymore: Not the faceless strangers looming over him anymore, but Haymitch, angry Haymitch forcing himself on Finnick and slapping him so hard that it twisted his head around, Haymitch and the familiar way he smelled and felt. Free fall. It twisted everything around, taste of metal flooding his mouth. Finnick felt like he could just lean over and puke, or like he should sway.
“I don’t think I can do it with you like that,” he somehow managed to croak.
Haymitch twirled around to him.
“Then why propose it like that, huh?” he snapped. “Thirteen’s fucking ashes, Finnick, what in the whole fucking world?”
Again, Finnick flinched, too hard to hide it. Haymitch recoiled like he’d been slapped.
“Fucking dirt of all the districts,” he said, breathing harshly.
Not that Finnick should have expected anything else, baring something worse. Of course, Haymitch thought it was sick because it was sick.
“So what’s this all about then?” Haymitch demanded, standing still in the middle of the room again.
Finnick couldn’t make himself look up. “You should know about it,” he whispered. “You should know what I’m like.”
“Well alright,” Haymitch said. “What does it mean?”
He waited for a reply, getting into motion again when Finnick managed a shaky, “What?”
“I get that it’s not just some fun fantasies… fuck,” he added, as if just saying that aloud boggled his mind. “It’s not just some fantasies and you don’t want to do it like that with me. So what else does it mean? What’s it about?”
“I don’t know,” Finnick said, considering that very question had been eating him up for over two years; he could have laughed. “I don’t know what it means, it means I’m sick, that’s what it means…” Haymitch was turning around to look at him again, but Finnick didn’t give him time to speak. “What if it means it’s something that I’ll want to do to you?”
At a loss for words yet again, Haymitch just looked down at him for another moment.
“Now that’s not even making a lick of sense from what you’ve told me so far, kid,” he eventually said.
He hadn’t called Finnick that - kid - since long before they started kissing, not since - Finnick guessed - before he’d started feeling attracted to him.
It felt like a good fit now, considering Finnick felt about as helpless as the day he’d first been Reaping age. His first Reaping Day, a whisper had spread through his town like a wildfire that a male volunteer had been scheduled but bailed. Of course, in the end, that day, he’d still gotten another reprieve of two years.
Then, he’d gone to the Capitol to smile and wave during his parade, embraced by the crowds, and his transformation into that thing had commenced.
His first patron had been a very wealthy, very powerful vice minister from the District Affairs office; she’d come all the way to District Eight to meet him on his Victory Tour, in secret, where nobody would see. She could have been his mother. She’d been very soothing and very kind and it had hurt so fucking much when she put things inside him before she put him inside her, making sure to take him in every way. He never thought of her; he never did.
“But how would it be different?” Finnick heard himself say. “It’s where we’re going with the things we’ve done. I’m always in charge. You always do what I want. You’re just there, and I use you like some kind of…”
“That’s got shit to do with being forced.” Haymitch’s interruption was actually a bark. He just sounded disturbed, determined. “Nothing, you hear me?” He paused, angrily, then added, “I’m not some kind of submissive, never mind your victim. You can pull my hair all you want, doesn’t make it rape.”
With a pained groan - this low, unfiltered animal sound - Finnick buried his head in his hands, clutching his hair so hard it hurt. He couldn’t do this. It was too confusing, and there were too many contradicting thoughts in his head at once, and he couldn’t deal.
“I don’t think I know the difference anymore,” he said, voice muffled. “What if it means I don’t know the difference anymore…?”
It hadn’t been the greatest orgasm he’d ever had, that day two years ago when the light of that delicate desk lamp fell on President Snow’s face. It had been mechanical, even after he’d spit on his hand, though the chafing had hurt and that had helped. He’d tried remembering clients he’d found attractive, young women with full breasts and perfect men with narrow hips. He’d dragged up a memory from when he’d been young, the expectant way a girl’s skin felt when he put his hand under her shirt. He’d run a litany of no in his head and wished that Snow would just reached out and hurt him already, hurt him or touch him, make it cruel or the usual, or that he could reach out and hurt Snow. And then, he’d come, in this perfunctory way, Snow’s eyes still all over him, feeling bare.
“I really don’t think that’s a thing you can forget,” Haymitch very quietly said.
Clothes rustled, closer by. It took a while until Finnick managed to raise his head a bit, his fingers loosening. Haymitch had crouched down in front of him, far away enough to not intrude, but near enough to look at him very closely, their eyes on the same level. When Finnick met his gaze, Haymitch was studying him. He looked drawn.
“What is it that you really want to be doing with me?” he said. “Truth time, none of that bullshit of how it should be about me. You wanna stop altogether? Because if you want to stop, we stop, you don’t have to feel guilty about that.”
The thought sending this instant shot of pain through his chest, fear of the loss of that good thing, Finnick mutely shook his head.
“Alright,” Haymitch said. “So what do you want to be doing instead?”
The words just came without thought; Finnick didn’t know where they’d been hiding. Maybe behind the other secret.
“I want to go back to how it was,” he said. “I don’t want you to start touching me more. I want to keep making the decisions, I… I don’t want a blowjob.” He was stuttering. He didn’t want to say that he wanted a blowjob and then have to go through with it in a year because he’d said it. He wanted to not have to do it. “I thought it would be temporary, so we’d get started, but I don’t want to change it anymore, I don’t think I could make myself…”
“Then that’s what’s gonna happen, alright?” Haymitch said it with an edge.
Finnick looked away, feeling miserable and ashamed. “It shouldn’t be all about me.”
“Well, it is now, so fucking deal with it,” Haymitch said.
He grimaced, rocking in his crouched position as if it was starting to bother his knees.
“I want to make you happy,” Finnick whispered, desperate, and Haymitch stood up.
“Then make me happy on your own terms,” he said, as if that concluded that topic.
Staying where he was standing, he eyed Finnick at his seated position for a moment, as if unsure how to proceed.
A weird unhinged feeling had spread in Finnick’s chest, as if something massive had come loose, but there was no telling where it would dock next.
“What I want right now…” Haymitch sounded undecided, venturing into foreign verbal territory. “I wouldn’t mind sitting down next to you right now.”
Finnick managed a faded chuckle. He looked around himself, noticing that he’d lost his blanket and that his clothes were still all so damp, and there was a wet puddle of tea that had soaked into the carpet all around.
“I spilled the tea,” he inanely said.
“Fun fact,” Haymitch said, a little wildly, fiercely reclaiming balance. “When Swagger moved into this house, he brought his sister, who quit the mines and grew tea in the garden. Swagger allegedly hated her tea, and fled to the Hob every day to trade for different flavors, so he could drink it in her presence and act like it was hers. Whole Seam made fun of how its biggest wuss had won the Games.”
“I thought you’d never talked to him,” Finnick faintly said, voice shaking, eyes on the ruined carpet.
“I didn’t,” Haymitch said. “As far as I was concerned as a kid, he was some kind of far-away district celebrity. Then, I turned Reaping age and we found him dangling from a tree in the Meadow, right in time for me to face shit on my own. And they brought in the scary woman from Two. But, in the Seam, you know that stuff just because, it’s what we did instead of television.”
Finnick nodded, the inane chat washing right over him, while he tried to move so that the carpet underneath him would be dry, and a big enough dry spot next to him materialized for Haymitch, too. He was moving on autopilot, now. Everything was faint.
After glancing a question at Haymitch, he waited until Haymitch had gotten comfortable next to him, stretching out his legs and shifting into a comfortable position.
“Talk to me, kid,” he said. Instead of relaxing against the drawer, he picked up the discarded blanket, starting to drape it over Finnick’s shoulders with the cautious motions of a person who didn’t have a lot of experience with that gesture. “I’m vastly realizing it’s a shitty idea to let you just think.”
Finnick tried to listen into himself, figuring out what was left. But he just felt bad. He had a faint notion that he should be better than this, though he couldn’t quite grasp it anymore.
Haymitch sighed. “Shit, Finnick,” he said. “This is just… shit.”
Instead of replying, Finnick grabbed the seams of the blanket and huddled into it more tightly, leaning against Haymitch, who put an arm around him without prompting. Finnick was considerably taller than Haymitch, but he was sitting more hunched, so it worked, and he also felt much younger than Haymitch. Of course, he’d always been much younger than Haymitch. But he didn’t usually feel that young anymore.
“I’m scared,” he told Haymitch quietly. He’d set out to share all of his secrets, after all. He was so very scared. “I don’t know what it means, about me.”
His head on Haymitch’s shoulder, he could feel the rise and fall of the other man’s lungs, in and out. Deeply and calmly, like he’d once told Haymitch he should breathe when he swam. It hadn’t been a thing he’d had to teach Haymitch first, though, who’d been good at staying calm from the start.
“Neither do I,” Haymitch admitted after a moment. “I’m sorry. I haven’t got a clue what it could mean.”
“I’m sorry,” Finnick whispered, and Haymitch said, “Yeah, yeah.”
He paused, his body against Finnick’s not altogether relaxed.
“So you’ve got dreams,” he added, vehemently and angrily. “We’ve all had fucking dreams.”
“You’ve…” Finnick started saying, but Haymitch shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I’ve… I’ve had dreams of killing you in a Games. You just lying there and all that blood and that axe and those birds…” His voice trailed off for a moment, before it grew stronger again, and he arm tightened around Finnick in anger. “Doesn’t mean it’s a thing I could make myself do.”
It was a big thing to say for a victor. It was an incredible thing to say.
Haymitch’s hand was stroking along where it was resting on Finnick’s arm, thoughtful and soothing and firm.
“You ever want to go out there and hurt people? Some girl, some kid, Fallon or Larkspur or that baker boy, Peeta, maybe? Or me? That a thing you ever think about? Making plans? Like with that trident of yours?”
“No,” Finnick exclaimed, shuddering at the thought.
“Alright,” Haymitch said. “So if you could choose right now, never be sold again against your will or going on with a patron of your choice, would you make it all stop?”
“Of course.”
He was trembling again, in Haymitch’s embrace, halfway safe.
“Then my best guess would be that it doesn’t mean a fucking thing,” Haymitch said. “I mean, I’m out of other ideas here. You don’t want to do a thing, you don’t do it and screw what’s in your head. Maybe…” He paused, trying to figure this out. “Maybe it’s just some fantasies. You don’t have to wanna do every shitty thing that’s in your head. Maybe they’ll just go away one day, and then, that’s that. Maybe they just don’t… matter.”
“But what if…”
“There really isn’t an if here, Finnick. It’s either a thing you wanna do for real and you don’t…” The arm around him tensed again. “…or you don’t even want it and who gives a fuck if it’s there if you don’t. I mean, what else could there be, right? What else is there?”
He paused. “None of the people in the Capitol dream about hurting us and they still do it. That ain’t better,” he said. “That’s worse.”
Finnick pushed himself closer against Haymitch until Haymitch drew him further in, so he buried his face against Haymitch’s chest. Breathing in chamomile and laundry detergent and soap, Haymitch’s own clean scent underneath that never reminded him of his sweaty, spent, satisfied clients, he didn’t want to ever move. He didn’t want to think about anything anymore. He’d spent all his energy that he had on it, and now he just had come to a halt.
It was a dizzying feeling. It scared him a little bit, because he couldn’t remember having felt like that, like he didn’t want to move anymore. He still wasn’t sure where all these thoughts in his head would settle down, once he thought them through. In a better place, he thought, but that was hard to believe.
And Haymitch was still there. He hadn’t gone away.
Maybe it was true. Maybe he could choose to do none of those things, and that was alright.
If Finnick kept making the calls when they had sex, maybe that even meant he could decide to make it about Haymitch, too. He could make it about Haymitch all he wanted. It was Finnick who made the decisions, but it was Haymitch he was focusing on.
The thought made him feel adrift.
“You look like you’re about to drop,” Haymitch muttered against his temple after a minute. “Want to go home? Warm up, take a hot shower, go to bed? I’d even make you more tea.”
“Not yet,” Finnick muttered back.
“Alright,” Haymitch said. “Never say I didn’t do anything fancy for you, though.”
Finnick snorted, but he didn’t move.
It should be so easy a thing, wanting things, he thought. He didn’t understand how such a simple thing could be so hard.
He’d told Haymitch. And Haymitch was still there. And it felt like he could decide to do things, today or tomorrow, and not do the other things, and that would be just okay. It had been fixed. Something had been.
Maybe, he didn’t even have to hate himself as much as he’d thought.
***
In April, the last stylist application package arrived.
Finnick found it lying on the steps of Haymitch’s house when he returned from a bakery run one morning. Bright warm sun coloring the paper a stark white, he shoved the bakery bag into the crook of his arm to open it up, and a single folder dropped into his hands.
They hadn’t actually expected more applicants; working closely with Effie, who had proven an unsurprisingly Capitol-attuned fashion sense, they’d narrowed it down to ten stylist teams with equally mediocre parade costume drafts, trying to weigh strategy against actual skill.
We’ve found them!! said Effie’s flowery handwriting on a post-it glued at the top, doubly underlined with a pink glitter pen.
Portia Birdfeather, the first vita said and the second right behind, Cinna Blue.
A note informed him that this team had already received offers from both District Eight and District Three to be signed for the upcoming Quarter Quell, but for a bullshit reason phrased in application prose, it had chosen to apply to District Twelve before signing a contract. They claimed, in all ludicrous seriousness, that their style would lend itself to coal mining best. Either, Miss Birdfeather and Mr. Blue had a very, very special outlook on fashion indeed, or they were complete and utter self-possessed idiots.
Balancing the bag on his arm, Finnick turned to the page with the drafts.
Tbc.