THG fic: "Spin Control" [22/24]
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 addiction
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.
“Spin Control” on LJ: 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 -- Chapter 20 -- Chapter 21
Chapter 22: A Swimmer In A Storm
The tributes rose early the morning of this Games. Pale and worn and maybe moribund, they made their goodbyes and boarded the Hovercraft to the arena, wherever in Panem it may have been set up this year.
Once they were gone, there was suddenly not a lot to do anymore. The Games broadcast started as early as seven, but in the Capitol, Games season was considered a holiday, a time of celebration, and mandatory viewing was regarded a privilege. The Capitol rose slowly, tuning in one by one. Only by nine-thirty did the Games channel pompously show Templesmith and Flickerman marching into their respective studios like champions of the Capitol circus, majestic theme songs heralding their entrance. Reporters expectantly recapped district statistics, tribute analyses, not breathlessly excited just yet, but gearing up for it. Last minute pre-Games bets were placed. If you filed a winning bet before the bloodbath, you made a lot more money, and the victor wasn’t the only thing you could guess: You could bet on who’d die first and how long until the first death, who’d reach Final Eight, tribute or district, how many survival deaths there would be, who’d get the best sponsorship but still perish. Twelve was in the lead on that last one all morning.
After the victors had been filmed entering Mentor Central as a group, Finnick and Haymitch both made sure to show their face in the foyer another time, supplying paparazzi footage, each separately stumbling into the right reporter of the right magazine as if by accident and dropping tantalizing lines too inspirational to not work into an article; every extra moment of showtime would be worth its weight in gold. This was when Finnick smoked his only cigarette of the year; it gave him an excuse to enter the smoking area behind the delivery gates, where the addict journalists couldn’t believe their luck. It was where he saw Brutus, biting down on a cigar as if he wasn’t just as big a health freak as Finnick, shaking his head in a sorrowful way and telling his reporter of choice what a shame it was that his male would have to kill his best friend in the end. But of course, he would; that was understood, it was the way of Two. Finnick leaned against a wall and blinked into the sun, letting his beauty and this year’s media pull work for him. Mooching that cigarette off the Trophy’s editor in chief, he sighed and said it was hard, looking at Peeta and being reminded of his own love affairs. He assured her in a confidential voice that leaving the Capitol had, more than once, broken his heart. Then, he assured her that she could quote him on that.
You weren’t supposed to give these interviews, but everybody with a shot at media attention gave them anyway; every mentor learned which rules you were supposed to break and which were carved in stone. This one, you broke, if you could.
At nine-fifty, the tributes had to be waiting in the tube rooms, somewhere in Panem, alongside their stylists, and Cinna and Portia would hopefully find the right last words for their kids - possibly the last advice that would ever reach them in their rapidly expiring lives.
When Finnick made it back to the Mentor Central floor, Haymitch was waiting for him outside next to a Peacekeeper guard, giving him a small nod and falling into step on the way in. Down the console rows in the dimmed room, the tribute screens still brightly blue and empty, Chaff and Seeder had taken their seats, Chaff next to Twelve and Seeder next to Ten - not like Chaff had conceded to do it last year. Finnick hardened his face. He fell back a step, allowing Haymitch to pick his seat first; but their sponsor potential lists had already been stored on their assigned consoles, and Haymitch plopped into his usual spot. He didn’t look at Chaff. Chaff didn’t look at him.
Chaff and Seeder started talking quietly to each other after a moment; Chaff’s display was already lit with notes. Everybody knew that those two only got along when they needed to, when there was a tribute to save, and Chaff was mentoring that strong boy with the high score this year.
Finnick took his own seat, reaching for his headset and getting his part of the console online with a bit more ease than most of the victors on this side of Central had, having won so young and having gotten so used to the computers. If everything went right, Haymitch and he would be calling potential sponsors all day. A green light lit up and told them that Effie had connected to their console from her office, at the ready to send over relevant intel on the betting and media situation. He knew that not one, but three Avoxes were lurking at their backs, expecting more demands than usual from Eleven and Twelve. It was almost like mentoring for Four.
The monitors suddenly flickered to life, the bluescreens replaced, one by one, by live footage of empty launch tubes, slick and sterile, death elevators that would carry the children to be executed for their ancestors’ sins.
Finnick tried to relax into his seat; he tried to breathe into his belly, concentrate on that.
“Tell me you really know how to spin this one,” he breathed low enough for only Haymitch to hear, who turned to throw him a glance, leaning in readily.
“I really know how to spin this one,” he said, but it didn’t make Finnick feel any better, anyway. He still didn’t see it. It scared him how he had to trust in Haymitch to see it.
“Stop me before I can do something stupid.” Haymitch had said that on the train. Finnick tried telling himself that this wasn’t what he’d meant; they both wanted to bring this one home.
A voice rang through the speakers, asking them to take their seats; it was nine fifty-eight.
***
On Day Three, Katniss was stumbling through the woods, eyes glazed and dry lips starting to crack, when she raised her head to look roughly in the direction of the camera with none of a Career’s media prowess but all of an outlier’s desperation, begging Haymitch to send water for her.
“So send her water,” Finnick said, because yes, it left a bad impression if a tribute needed sponsorship to get basic survival sorted in an arena that was full of resources, but that didn’t matter if your tribute got too dehydrated to fight and died. However, Haymitch reached out to still his hand, as if Finnick might make that call above his head.
Maysilee Donner’s pin hovered above them day and night. Haymitch had taken to vanishing in the bathroom, where he vigorously scrubbed his hands and washed his face.
“Not yet,” he said now. “She ain’t that far from that creek. Bit of luck, she’ll realize how close she is once there’s no parachute.”
One screen over, Peeta was laughing at a joke that the Four female had made, helping her start a fire at the now fortified Career pack camp. He was smart enough to try and not befriend Beetee’s boy, the odd kid with the explosives, scheduled to die first once the pack broke apart, buying Peeta buffer space. Across the camp, the Two male and female were ignoring each other and not ignoring each other at once, playing out a whole story so skillfully, without words, just with looks. I don’t want to have to kill you. But I will.
Peeta hadn’t been sent any gifts as of yet. That was mostly because Peeta hadn’t needed any gifts; the Careers had it all this year.
It was the third day, two days after the bloodbath, the day when the outlier tributes who’d made it so far but without supplies, often curled up somewhere and just never got up again. The death toll had been high this time around. Eleven children were dead as of Day One. Hopefully, that meant this Games wouldn’t drag on for weeks.
Katniss had - of course - foregone all advice, engaging in the bloodbath just to immediately be targeted by the Two female with her ridiculously precise throwing knives, barely making it out but gaining a sheet of plastic, a hunting knife, a garishly colored survival bag in return. It meant they hadn’t had to waste any sponsorship money on her yet, either. The sooner they managed to gather enough and send her that bow, the cheaper it would be to pay - before the prices skyrocketed at Final Eight.
Peeta had managed to wound the Six male at the bloodbath before Glimmer, from One, took that tribute out, and then he’d put his hand on that Eight female’s forehead and shushed her while he slit her throat, left to die after the pack found her campfire at night. He had his share of fans now, too. Everybody now thought of him as a particularly kind Career, looking all the more competent and determined when he fought. You had to be good at what you did, if you could afford to be like that.
The audience had oo’ed and aah’ed every time he made clear that he was secretly trying to lead the pack away from Kat, although the Careers hadn’t caught on to it yet - they would though, given time. Katniss herself didn’t know, attempting to throw the audience a sparse smile when she spied on the pack from a tree - she probably meant to convey that she was on to them now, though from the outside, it had just looked shaken and grim and unsure.
Last year’s arena had been a garbage dump; the blizzard Games the year before, they called the snow globe arena these days. The 71st had featured barren city ruins covered with moss, and Annie Cresta’s arena had been a majestic canyon, until that dam collapsed and transformed the desert into the sea in a well-planned, terrible display of Gamesmaker power. So this year, Seneca Crane had turned traditional. With its plush forests and those endless fields and that lake, the arena appeared to have been made for Eleven and Twelve. It was as if it had been made for Katniss Everdeen and the boy Finnick knew now was called Thresh; he couldn’t help but think of the Careers as decoration pieces, although he knew how dangerous that view could turn out to be.
He couldn’t stop hating this Games; his skin still crawled every time he looked at the screens.
***
Games success was a two-edged sword for the likes of Finnick.
On the one hand, the President couldn’t send Finnick on all too many public dates anymore once Twelve had skyrocketed into the spotlight; the journalists would document it all and speculate about why he’d stopped taking care of his promising tribute like a proper, dedicated mentor should - especially one supposed to support his addict partner. It would shake up the betting pool; the media’s screams for explanations would create the kind of attention that Snow didn’t favor. On the other hand, popularity went up and so did demand, and Snow had made so very clear to Finnick that Games success would never be a way out.
So appointments were rescheduled by the minute; no day passed that Finnick didn’t receive three, four, five quick notes carried by Avoxes, juggling dates, shortening stylist time and adding it again after Cherry complained, replacing addresses of dance clubs and restaurants with those of hotel rooms and private retreats, replacing clients greedy for the prestige with the ones who just wanted a fuck. It was as good a confirmation that they were doing well as any, Finnick supposed. Soon though, he was tired of sex, tired of hurting, all fucked out. He kept expecting that his body would turn on him, make him flinch at the wrong time, or that he just wouldn’t get it up out of the blue, though it never happened like that; he asked Cherry if she had pills for that, too, not just wake-up medication, but she just laughed at him, in that forced and startled way that meant that she’d have to acknowledge what those dates really were if she took the request as anything but a joke, and she could never do that.
Finnick always was busy; Peeta could start needing him at any time. His world narrowed down: to being touched, to following cues or orders on where to lick and how to thrust, to trying to get breakfast in, to eating power bars and sugar cubes instead. To curling up in his seat next to Haymitch, preferring his proximity over a real bed, falling asleep with Haymitch’s hand rubbing his shoulder. There was no attention left to pay to Chaff, who showed up very drunk repeatedly starting Day Two, but Finnick just was too exhausted and anxious to enforce his rules and Chaff, probably, was too sick with concern for his tribute to remember them. One afternoon when Chaff was sweating out liquor like a distillery, Haymitch just stood up and left and vanished for hours without saying anything to either of them; when Finnick went after him although he should have been on his way to a client, he only ran into Caramel, who tightened his face, then said he would take care of it. Chaff was mostly sober the day after that.
Katniss was targeted by fire balls because the Gamesmakers were assholes, and she was as good as dead, but then she ran and ducked and made it out somehow with a burn mark smoldering on her leg as big as a man’s palm. They lost precious money to get that crazily expensive medicine to her. But she did find water and she did find food, while the Careers found her, Peeta’s attempts to lead them astray foiled. She tried to rest on a tree, and he tried to rest at its foot, finally convincing the last Capitol citizen of how he felt when he blinked up at the branches all through the night, wrapped in his sleeping bag with that pale face and that lost expression. Finnick praying, telepathically telling the screen, Don’t do a stupid thing. Don’t get yourself killed. Not now. Not for a girl. It’s you or her.
The little dark-skinned Eleven girl appeared in the trees, the one everybody had forgotten when she ran away from the bloodbath and hid in the trees.
On the channel, faintly ringing through Central, Flickerman hurried to remind the audience that this girl’s name was Rue and she was twelve and she’d had a surprise score of seven that stemmed clearly from her ability to hide very effectively. Katniss noticed her. Rue pointed at the tracker jacker nest above Katniss’ head.
“Are you fucking stupid, little stupid girl?” Chaff viciously hissed, almost out of his chair while an empty bottle slipped out of his hand and crashed to the ground.
Seeder muttered something at him, something very calculating and very composed, and he angrily slumped back down. Seeder leaned forward, elbows on the console, very focused now. She never gave up on a tribute, no matter their age. No matter how hopeless they were.
Although Chaff’s male was far away, camping out securely in his territory that he’d claimed in the wheat field, left alone by the Gamesmakers after he’d satisfied the crowds with his two bloodbath kills, Chaff reached for another bottle and took an uneasy sip. However, Chaff wasn’t like Haymitch had used to be and Chaff functioned quite well, and it would be dangerous to underestimate him now just because he was slurring his vowels.
Rue Capaldi had charmed the audience in her interview. The Games channel scrambled to recap it all through the night, while Katniss worked on sawing off the nest, now clearly with a plan in mind. They showed the girl jumping from tree to tree on silent feet, the slingshot she had built, her big brown eyes, her startling street-smartness. Katniss saw Primrose in her, every inch of her. It was so obvious, in that unexpected way after Katniss had refused to display clear emotion on screen for so long, that Finnick and Haymitch never even had to nudge the reporters towards that connection, her love for her sister all over the screens for everybody to see. Her blackmail list laid out for Snow.
Finnick hated it, every second of it. You didn’t bond with cute little children in the Games. You died if you bonded with cute little children in the Games, and they were in this to win.
Haymitch sat through all of it with stoic, well-practiced calm, expecting nothing and expecting everything.
The siege imploded, courtesy of Rue. It would be all the channel recapped for days. Katniss cut down the nest, and she was smart about it too, calculating the risks. Experts explained what was happening to those kids, the bloating stings, the screams not just of pain but terror, the hallucinations, the way they would be feeling like the ground was shaking underneath their feet. An invisible, cold hand reached into Finnick’s chest and squeezed until he thought he couldn’t breathe; he knew that Peeta would side with Katniss now. Her scrambling away. Scrambling back, prying that bow out of that slaughtered One’s hand. Peeta confronting Cato, the Two male. Screaming at Katniss that she should run, making everything clear about his Games plan to everybody except maybe Katniss, who’d been stung by the wasps. He should never have survived that confrontation with Cato, but he did. Fleeing down the stream, stumbling, fighting, that terrible wound on his thigh still gushing. At first, Finnick was sure it was the artery. But then, it couldn’t have been the artery. Five minutes in, he was still on his feet, coloring the water red and catching bacteria, instead of bleeding to death.
That was the moment Finnick shook off that stupor, mentally returning to Mentor Central and getting on the phone, not getting off until he’d called every potential sponsor he still had up his sleeve. He had money at the ready for that boy. He didn’t have enough. Half an hour later, he thought he’d promised one of those sponsors to fuck her for free, but he couldn’t remember who. An hour in, he had the money. Peeta had settled down to rest against a rock near the stream, face white, breathing too hard; his life statistics reported arrhythmia. The gift, powerful antibiotics and bandages saturated with salve, dropped down onto the ground next to his feet. He looked up, wet his lips, whispered, “Thank you” at the sky. And then, all districts bless that boy, he added a promise: “I’m gonna save her yet.” If Finnick had still had space in his mind left for a sense of humor, he might have called Effie to ask if anybody in Flickerman’s studio audience had fainted at that. The Capitol was celebrating itself and how much they loved this Games - Peeta, Katniss, Cato, Clove.
The field was down to ten surviving tributes. The Careers unsurprisingly stuck together after Peeta had been expelled from the pack; the Three boy was still in, now that they needed the man power, being down to four, but Finnick couldn’t help but think that the boy had missed his chance - either he’d blow up the entire pack soon, since clearly something like that had to be his play, or he was dead. Thresh was still holing up in the wheat field, where he started losing more attention and screen time by the minute, but from the way Chaff was watching the screens and stats like a hawk, he and the boy were both on their end calculating a careful mixed strategy of half engaging and half waiting out the field. Peeta recovered, slowly, in a cave that he had found; Finnick sent him not a loaf of bread but a cheap little bag full of berries to show him what was edible in the brushwork close by. The boy spent a whole day painting a beautiful likeliness of Katniss onto a cave wall with mud, and all the cameras were on that. Sponsors called Finnick, for the first time, instead of him calling them. Some of Katniss’ switched to Peeta - some in a calculated move to support her, some because they just liked him best. One person who called was an artist who didn’t have any money but blabbed at Finnick about how that talent had to survive, how he’d get Peeta into an art academy after. Finnick encouraged him to start a networks website for sponsorship donations, but was ultimately happy when he got him to hang up.
The Ten male, an unassuming fourteen-year-old mostly ignored, lurked at the edges of the woods and built inexpert traps - there’d been tributes before him who had won that way, some barely older than him. The Five female kept stealing from the Careers. She was a slim, mousy redhead, sharp-faced, zero kills or confrontations, but despite her non-aggressive approach, she clearly remained one to watch. Finnick knew she reminded Haymitch of the late Ralda Cavalera; pain sometimes crossed his face when he looked at that screen.
Katniss had slipped into unconsciousness after the jacker tracker stings, and little Rue with her big eyes and her fragile bird features made her second cameo like a movie star. Instead of killing her right then, she took care of her wounds, flat-out refusing to play the Games properly like only twelve-year-old innocence could prompt. Seeder serenely made notes, getting Chaff’s input on everything quietly, as if it didn’t matter that they never agreed.
“What are we making of this?” Finnick asked. More than a little lost about it all, he was staring at Katniss and Rue sharing a goosling leg, wondering, contemplating, trying to figure out this new alliance and how it had broken Katniss’ lone Career image wide open. His eyes wandered from Katniss’ screen above Haymitch’s head to the main channel screen further up on the wall. It showed the same image but with the usual two-seconds lag that allowed the cutting room to edit out political statements and the occasional tribute who suddenly leaned over to puke.
“It’s not as bad as it could be,” Haymitch replied after a contemplative moment of pause. “Lone-wolf routine or not, it’s good for people to see her showing a little bit of heart again…”
“I can make sure they tie it in with how she volunteered for Prim again, when they’ll spring me on the way to my limousine…”
“Yeah. Make it subtle, though, let them figure that one out themselves.” Haymitch nodded at him. “So it continues the theme, that’s good. As long as she doesn’t start collecting strays on principle, and I don’t see who’d be left in there to collect, it’s probably not gonna damage her image. Plus from what Trinket says, looks like the media are liking the twist.”
Finnick didn’t ask what it would do to Katniss if she had to kill Rue once Rue finally attempted to backstab her, but Haymitch wouldn’t have known an answer to that question, anyway. Rue had missed her best shot already. It was ten tributes in, nine kills to go. Peeta or Katniss. Katniss or Peeta or somebody else. District Two really wanted this one for themselves.
On Day Seven, Peeta broke camp, starting to make his way off the edge of the arena before the Gamesmakers could find a way to force him back into the fight - the cave drawing had bought him a day in that way. In a move that beautifully symbolized everything that Finnick and Haymitch had tried to do for Twelve in the Games, Katniss and Rue laid out an involved plan to attack the Careers. No matter what came of it, Finnick knew that this one would be replayed for years, not just in Games recaps, but also in documentaries about Twelve and the two of them; he could just bet that one of those was going into pre-production right about now. Mockingjays were singing their song in the trees, the same breed Katniss was so proudly wearing on her chest. They spread those girls’ theme through all the arena; the camera caught how a startled Thresh looked up when he heard, recognizing it from home, on his way through his wheat.
Rue climbed tree after tree, collecting branches, building fires, lying in wait to set them off.
Peeta was marching through the woods, never knowing how closely he passed Adriano by - the Ten male - hiding behind a tree bark when he heard Peeta coming.
Katniss crouched behind the brushwork, spying on the pack, trying to figure out what booby traps she wasn’t understanding yet when Five’s sneaky Eleanor Weed returned to do her morning dance. Stealing apples and dried beef strips like every day, she accidentally spelled it all out for her opponent from Twelve.
They didn’t have to worry about Katniss’ screen-tests anymore. Katniss was all in her element, all focus, all fight.
It was sheer dumb luck that she never got close enough to the pile to be killed by the explosion, since she had no way of estimating how far she needed to stay away. The shockwave thundered through the arena, rippling through all of the field and reverberating when it bounced off the force fields in the sky to resonate back. Kat was blown off her feet, her ear-drum likely ruptured, blood running down her face and neck. Eleanor skirting to a halt on her way through the forest, looking over her shoulder, then running in the opposite direction as fast as her feet could carry her.
Bumping face-first into Peeta, who grabbed her shoulder, before she could fall.
“Whoa there,” he said, healthy and recovered, but out of breath.
Katniss crawling into the brush at the edge of the forest, just in time for the Careers to break out of the woods, and Cato viciously breaking Three’s neck who arguably could be blamed to have set this one up.
Marvel, from One, smarter than his mates, not having followed them to the camp but coming to a halt for a moment, narrowing his eyes at the smoke of that one fire, then the other fire, mind at work and setting off to chase after Rue. He gave up soon; Rue gave tail the moment she heard movement, like a squirrel up a tree. But it was clear he’d found a neat little way to distinguish himself from Cato and Clove, thinking on his feet, starting to go it alone. He did need that, at this point, if he wanted to win, and he was smart enough to know.
Eleanor and Peeta, staring at each other. Waiting for the other to attack first.
Peeta’s hand crept towards his back pack, built out of a sackcloth that had come with one of his gifts.
The Five’s eyes flickered there.
“Don’t panic, alright?” Peeta said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not going to kill you. I don’t want to kill you. I don’t know about you, but something just happened over there, and I’d rather not kill anybody if I don’t even know how many tributes are still in the Games. That would be very stupid of me, wouldn’t it?”
Eleanor was breathing hard, near savage. She glanced at his hands again.
“The boy from Three,” she said, licking her lips. “You know him, you were with them at first. He, he must have made it all explode. I think that’s what he planned all along. I thought he’d kill you all that way in the end.”
On the other screen, Katniss crawled deeper into the brushwork, like a wounded animal. Next to Finnick, Haymitch alternated between looking at her, looking at Peeta, looking at her life stats, trying to figure out if there was any help that could and needed to be sent. They still had money left. They’d never used it for a bow.
“The pack would see the parachute,” Finnick muttered, and Haymitch nodded, removing his hand from his headset.
“Thank you,” Peeta breathed.
Another moment of stand-off, before he moved again to reach for his back pack, slow and measured motions made to not startle that vigilant, near-panicked girl, like a wild animal almost ready to gnaw off her own leg. Eleanor hadn’t talked to anybody since the beginning of the Games, and it showed; she’d been on her own ever since she’d bumped into Katniss at the bloodbath, when the two of them had silently agreed to let the other go.
“Just putting this down, okay?” Peeta said to her. His face was all placating, all open honesty. I don’t want to kill anybody. Let’s make an alliance, you and me. Let’s not play their Games. Let’s be smart. “Just putting it down and then we can talk.”
“Okay,” Eleanor agreed, cautiously, eyes never leaving his face.
“Here,” Peeta said. “I collected some berries we could share.”
Then he moved quicker than Eleanor could have seen coming, than the audience would have seen coming, although Finnick had, a little bit. The knife was in Peeta’s hand, instead of a sachet. It penetrated underneath her sternum, pointing upwards, piercing her lungs and possible her heart. It was as if he held her upright, for a moment. Eleanor stared in his face, close enough that Peeta should be feeling her breath on his face, blood bubbling out of her mouth and sprinkling his lips. Close enough to kiss. He stared back at her, suddenly pale.
“I’m so sorry,” Peeta whispered, mouth opening and closing as if he’d meant for more words to spill out but they’d gotten lost on the way. She fell lifelessly to the ground, just dead meat now.
The cannon fired.
In the brush at the explosion side, Katniss didn’t even flinch at the sound, lying curled up like a child. There was a worrisome implication in that, saying that she hadn’t heard the sound.
“Fuck,” Haymitch breathed, rubbing his face as if he just had no more energy left.
Finnick’s hand was already reaching for the phone dial. He had a lot of sponsor calls to make, yet again; any number of people only got interested after a tributes’ first proper first-degree murder.
That boy was on.
***
Chaff and Haymitch hadn’t said a word to each other, not one, through the whole time their girls had sat together up on the screens, talking to each other, whispering, breaking bread and sharing stories from home. Eleven’s monitor mirroring Twelve’s, displaying the same camera feed. Occasionally, Seeder had leaned past her partner, saying to Haymitch, “Let’s see how long this lasts before we talk pooling,” or, “Mine is good with slingshots, how is yours with knives?” But Chaff had only ever raised his chin slightly when they did that, not looking up from his console. Haymitch had never looked at him, in return, answering those questions blandly and in a very polite voice, like people working a business transaction while having a rule about private interactions at work. Chaff always held a bottle in his hand, dangling it between his legs. It made Finnick remember how the strong tribute last year had made Chaff drink more, too, while the starved children in the snow globe two years back hadn’t bothered him much, as if the hope was worst of all to bear.
Although Twelve had the worst district statistics in the Games technically, with only two victors, the last Eleven who had won a Games had been Chaff at the 45th, their district waiting to achieve victory again five years longer. Both Chaff and Seeder had been mentored by Old Pots, who was fragile and senile these days. Neither Chaff, nor Seeder had ever saved a child’s life.
Their little girl Rue hadn’t even made it to the third bonfire yet before the shockwave hit. Marvel had been roaming the forest for her all night with his night-vision goggles, probably supposing that it would be Peeta who he’d find allied with Kat so that he could play villain to that tale. Or at very least, he’d find Thresh. Unlike Cato and Clove from Two, he didn’t have a script to follow and that gave him an advantage, freedom to adapt and move; he had the training for Cashmere to trust that he’d know how to improvise around the other tributes’ stories.
Of course, it was Rue whom he found instead and that was fine with Marvel, too. She never stood a chance. Barely reaching to that tall boy’s sternum, surely less than half his weight, she was twelve and she was starved and not a volunteer. Just a second ago, she’d teased another song out of her Mockingjays, telling Katniss in that hopeful way she was alright. Now she was screaming. It might have been to warn off Katniss. Probably it was just mindless panic because she was twelve and she was dead. White showing in her eyes, she struggled, caught in the net Marvel had used to trap her in a move that One must have added to the training plan after Finnick won that way nine years ago; he’d never seen a One do that before. An older tribute with training would have cut herself out of that net.
Katniss never hesitated, never even a second. Her bow was strung. It was a beautiful, flawless, deadly shot, an almost lavish display of skill.
The sound of Marvel’s cannon followed instantly, but that didn’t save Rue.
Two seats over, Seeder was whispering a prayer to the god whose worship the Capitol forbade, in the otherwise silent Central. A swearword could be heard on the far end of the room coming from One, out of this Games as of now. Chaff watched the events that unfolded on the screens, stone-faced, reaching out without a word to grab Seeder’s shoulder, squeezing hard. Katniss was crying, singing to Rue, her voice trembling and yet strong and unexpectedly clear. This district child’s death broadcast all across Panem so that people in the Capitol could feel moved by the murder that they’d helped commit, and the districts could feel sick.
Finnick’s eyes flickered to the main channel screen, and he suddenly felt nauseous.
That channel never cut away from Katniss during her song. Not once. It had disposed of Marvel, declared his death an irrelevant distraction, refusing to let it impact on the shoot, although he’d been a runner-up. This, very suddenly, was Katniss’ scene.
Mechanically, Finnick pictured how this imagery was just spreading through the Capitol right now, like a virus infection. In clubs and bars and private homes, everybody was staring at this. They - Haymitch - had built this story of Katniss so carefully, every detail tweaked and calculated, every nuance spun. That had been then. This was something new.
He could almost physically feel that story slipping out of their hands, out of their control, because the production wasn’t cutting away and Kat still sang and that meant everybody fell in love the exact way everybody had last fallen in love with Finnick.
This wasn’t about sex, though. Finnick didn’t think that people wanted to fuck Katniss right now, and that only made it worse. It made it dangerous, because what else was there to want on this scale?
It seemed to be very quiet in the room, quieter than should be possible with eight mentors still present and the main channel commentary running, except Caesar Flickerman seemed to have shut up because he was letting the song do its magic as well, in that reverent way.
Katniss was arranging flowers around Rue, folding her hands in front of her chest and closing her eyes, and that just wasn’t done.
Forcing his eyes away from the screen despite that terrible cold feeling, Finnick looked at Chaff, Haymitch breathing very calmly between them while he took it all in, Chaff, whose face was icy and full of distaste. This was worse than the Capitol’s love for Finnick, yes. Rue had refused to play the Games alright, but she was twelve. The twelve-year-olds did that sometimes, and even if it slipped into the broadcast, everybody dismissed them as irrelevant. Now Katniss refused to act like the girl stopped mattering once she was dead, and she’d involved Chaff’s district in that and the camera still wasn’t pulling away, picking over a child’s death for their entertainment.
Until it did end, abruptly. Flickerman’s voice filled the air again after just a beat of pause, creating tension about Thresh stalking the wheat field for the Ten male, as if that were the most interesting thing that had happened all day.
“What an exciting day at the Games,” he gushed, too experienced and too good at what he did to betray that he, like Finnick, knew perfectly well that somebody had just crashed that cutting room. Somebody had just made a choice and somebody somewhere would be executed for not cutting away from Rue ealier than this.
People in the Capitol, Gamesmakers and Games executives were very, very safe until sometimes, very suddenly, President Snow reached for the phone, and they weren’t.
The districts, viewing mandatorily, had already seen it all, and they’d have had a very different spin; that was a different story that they’d seen. They weren’t supposed to be allowed to see that story.
The main channel was all on Thresh, cameras buried in the ground filming him from below and making him loom above everybody. But nobody’s mind was on Thresh.
Katniss was crying soundlessly on the screen above Haymitch while the Hovercraft took Rue away, but nobody saw.
Dazed and numb, Finnick glanced at his and Haymitch’s console and how it kept lighting up to inform them that sponsors were upping their budgets without bothering to call about it first anymore. Haymitch couldn’t know this, because this was a thing that never happened in Twelve, only sometimes in Four, but the fact that nobody was calling had to mean that so many people were doing it at once - new sponsors, journalists, more journalists - that they’d automatically been rerouted to Effie’s office, who’d weed out out what they didn’t really need to hear.
He couldn’t decide if this couldn’t get better, or if it couldn’t get worse.
How could they not win this Games now?
Seeder’s phone rang but Seeder had gotten up and quietly left the room somewhere along the way, so Chaff took it instead, saying, “Suppose you wanted me anyway, huh?” into his headset.
Then he turned his head away from them and talked with the other person, not getting louder but certainly getting more agitated. Taking more sips from his drink. It was a long call.
Haymitch was very quiet, as he’d been quiet for a long while, switching back and forth from life stats to sponsorship budgets and media reports on his console, looking at each in turn as if trying to spot a new angle.
Thresh butchered the Ten male, viciously, with his bare hands. Chaff barely looked up from his phone call, having known his tribute was almost in no danger during that one, and it seemed a stale and pale and uneventful part of the adrenaline low after the events before.
Katniss was building camp up on her screen with mechanical, robotic motions, as if she wasn’t home in her own head, never knowing of or caring about that precious hour of privacy she had gained. On the screen next to hers, Peeta was curled up under a ledge asleep, fidgeting and licking his lips where Eleanor’s blood had splashed only hours before.
Haymitch’s fingers were tapping a song onto his armrest, still immersed in the displays. His face was blank. His mind was too busy to remember facial expressions.
Chaff’s call seemed to have ended because he ripped the headset off and abruptly stood up, startling Haymitch and Finnick alongside him into glancing up. Chaff was looking down at them with very dark, very hollow, very angry eyes, as if he were a little dead inside in a way that he didn’t normally allow on the surface. His hand gripped the back of his chair so hard that his knuckles had changed color. Finnick had never seen him like that and despite everything, his mind stuttered for the fraction of a second when his hand itched, wanting to reach for the trident that he didn’t carry.
Chaff was focused on Haymitch.
“Congratulations, buddy,” he said, almost spitting it out. “You did it. You actually broke their brains. You wanted to show everybody out there that your district ain’t the worst at killing kids, after all? You did. You made even my fucking so-called people fall in love with your girl. I just had my mayor on the phone.
“Looks like, my district has made a fucking democratic choice, or something, to take the money that they all starved themselves for so that the girl could have some bread before she dies, and to give it away to District fucking Twelve out of neighborly love.”
He glanced at their screens, gaze dripping with contempt - at the child deemed more worthy of survival than his, at his district, at people and how you tried and tried and you used yourself up and in the end, it wasn’t just that you never succeeded. It also turned out nobody cared if you did. It was a strange, sharp insight into a district so unlike Four and even unlike Twelve.
Chaff took a breath.
“She doesn’t even need that bread,” he said. “Thresh needs that bread. That was my first tribute with a real chance in over twenty years. I could have brought that kid home. Now turns out that my district doesn’t even give a shit. Guess they like their little sacrificial lambs innocent. Better a dead kid than a murderer who got his hands bloody to survive.
“I transferred the money to you, and the Eleven bread recipe, so have at it.” He wet this lips. “She doesn’t even need that bread,” he muttered again, to himself, almost deranged, before he turned around and left the room as if it didn’t matter, as if he couldn’t bear to see, as if Thresh were already lost. He might as well have been; his district had just declared him irrelevant the same way the broadcast had done to Marvel when he died.
Because they liked another district’s tribute best.
“What the…” Finnick breathed, staring after him, uncomprehending.
He wanted to reach out and take Haymitch’s hand just because he suddenly needed to touch him, he suddenly just really needed that feeling of Haymitch’s hand in his, a person who was real and mattered to him. It was as if the ground were swaying underneath them, heralding a surge.
Finnick suddenly had to think of Annie Cresta’s arena again, a desert one minute, an ocean the next, those water masses crashing down, the last survivor the girl that had trod water the longest. Nothing had been possible anymore in that arena except desperately staying alive.
“Haymitch…” he said, although he didn’t know what should follow, just needing Haymitch to… to do something, say something, “I’ve got this,” maybe. “I’m still the ones who’s spinning this. I’ve got a plan.”
Haymitch was still staring at the screens, breathing in, breathing out in that very controlled way.
They had to have been screaming at the screens in One, angry at that girl, their privilege stolen away, the privilege that made their children so much safer. Panem’s most successful district, last year’s winning district, forgotten and dismissed. Katniss was doing incredible things to the masses; she’d slipped out of their control.
Haymitch abruptly breathed out.
“Wait until she’s done building camp, get that bread to her then,” he said, getting up. “Wait if anybody’ll realize it’s from Eleven and if so, call Effie to get poll results on that if you can.”
“Where are you going?”
Haymitch grimaced, hesitating for a beat.
“Just something I’d like to check out,” he said. “You might have to watch them all night.”
Patting Finnick’s shoulder in a way that didn’t feel half as reassuring as it should have, he was gone, leaving Finnick staring at the screens of those to promising children, either one of which might get to go home.
It was Day Eight of the Games, both their tributes still in and the field down to five. They’d have started interviewing Gale and Primrose back home, Hue and Dane Mellark.
Annie Cresta had won her Games because she’d trod water long enough. She’d kept breathing on. But even the best swimmer would die if there was a storm raging on and no shoreline in sight. Finnick couldn’t help but think that a Games would end without any survivors, if it happened that way.
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 addiction
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.
“Spin Control” on LJ: 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 -- Chapter 20 -- Chapter 21
Chapter 22: A Swimmer In A Storm
The tributes rose early the morning of this Games. Pale and worn and maybe moribund, they made their goodbyes and boarded the Hovercraft to the arena, wherever in Panem it may have been set up this year.
Once they were gone, there was suddenly not a lot to do anymore. The Games broadcast started as early as seven, but in the Capitol, Games season was considered a holiday, a time of celebration, and mandatory viewing was regarded a privilege. The Capitol rose slowly, tuning in one by one. Only by nine-thirty did the Games channel pompously show Templesmith and Flickerman marching into their respective studios like champions of the Capitol circus, majestic theme songs heralding their entrance. Reporters expectantly recapped district statistics, tribute analyses, not breathlessly excited just yet, but gearing up for it. Last minute pre-Games bets were placed. If you filed a winning bet before the bloodbath, you made a lot more money, and the victor wasn’t the only thing you could guess: You could bet on who’d die first and how long until the first death, who’d reach Final Eight, tribute or district, how many survival deaths there would be, who’d get the best sponsorship but still perish. Twelve was in the lead on that last one all morning.
After the victors had been filmed entering Mentor Central as a group, Finnick and Haymitch both made sure to show their face in the foyer another time, supplying paparazzi footage, each separately stumbling into the right reporter of the right magazine as if by accident and dropping tantalizing lines too inspirational to not work into an article; every extra moment of showtime would be worth its weight in gold. This was when Finnick smoked his only cigarette of the year; it gave him an excuse to enter the smoking area behind the delivery gates, where the addict journalists couldn’t believe their luck. It was where he saw Brutus, biting down on a cigar as if he wasn’t just as big a health freak as Finnick, shaking his head in a sorrowful way and telling his reporter of choice what a shame it was that his male would have to kill his best friend in the end. But of course, he would; that was understood, it was the way of Two. Finnick leaned against a wall and blinked into the sun, letting his beauty and this year’s media pull work for him. Mooching that cigarette off the Trophy’s editor in chief, he sighed and said it was hard, looking at Peeta and being reminded of his own love affairs. He assured her in a confidential voice that leaving the Capitol had, more than once, broken his heart. Then, he assured her that she could quote him on that.
You weren’t supposed to give these interviews, but everybody with a shot at media attention gave them anyway; every mentor learned which rules you were supposed to break and which were carved in stone. This one, you broke, if you could.
At nine-fifty, the tributes had to be waiting in the tube rooms, somewhere in Panem, alongside their stylists, and Cinna and Portia would hopefully find the right last words for their kids - possibly the last advice that would ever reach them in their rapidly expiring lives.
When Finnick made it back to the Mentor Central floor, Haymitch was waiting for him outside next to a Peacekeeper guard, giving him a small nod and falling into step on the way in. Down the console rows in the dimmed room, the tribute screens still brightly blue and empty, Chaff and Seeder had taken their seats, Chaff next to Twelve and Seeder next to Ten - not like Chaff had conceded to do it last year. Finnick hardened his face. He fell back a step, allowing Haymitch to pick his seat first; but their sponsor potential lists had already been stored on their assigned consoles, and Haymitch plopped into his usual spot. He didn’t look at Chaff. Chaff didn’t look at him.
Chaff and Seeder started talking quietly to each other after a moment; Chaff’s display was already lit with notes. Everybody knew that those two only got along when they needed to, when there was a tribute to save, and Chaff was mentoring that strong boy with the high score this year.
Finnick took his own seat, reaching for his headset and getting his part of the console online with a bit more ease than most of the victors on this side of Central had, having won so young and having gotten so used to the computers. If everything went right, Haymitch and he would be calling potential sponsors all day. A green light lit up and told them that Effie had connected to their console from her office, at the ready to send over relevant intel on the betting and media situation. He knew that not one, but three Avoxes were lurking at their backs, expecting more demands than usual from Eleven and Twelve. It was almost like mentoring for Four.
The monitors suddenly flickered to life, the bluescreens replaced, one by one, by live footage of empty launch tubes, slick and sterile, death elevators that would carry the children to be executed for their ancestors’ sins.
Finnick tried to relax into his seat; he tried to breathe into his belly, concentrate on that.
“Tell me you really know how to spin this one,” he breathed low enough for only Haymitch to hear, who turned to throw him a glance, leaning in readily.
“I really know how to spin this one,” he said, but it didn’t make Finnick feel any better, anyway. He still didn’t see it. It scared him how he had to trust in Haymitch to see it.
“Stop me before I can do something stupid.” Haymitch had said that on the train. Finnick tried telling himself that this wasn’t what he’d meant; they both wanted to bring this one home.
A voice rang through the speakers, asking them to take their seats; it was nine fifty-eight.
***
On Day Three, Katniss was stumbling through the woods, eyes glazed and dry lips starting to crack, when she raised her head to look roughly in the direction of the camera with none of a Career’s media prowess but all of an outlier’s desperation, begging Haymitch to send water for her.
“So send her water,” Finnick said, because yes, it left a bad impression if a tribute needed sponsorship to get basic survival sorted in an arena that was full of resources, but that didn’t matter if your tribute got too dehydrated to fight and died. However, Haymitch reached out to still his hand, as if Finnick might make that call above his head.
Maysilee Donner’s pin hovered above them day and night. Haymitch had taken to vanishing in the bathroom, where he vigorously scrubbed his hands and washed his face.
“Not yet,” he said now. “She ain’t that far from that creek. Bit of luck, she’ll realize how close she is once there’s no parachute.”
One screen over, Peeta was laughing at a joke that the Four female had made, helping her start a fire at the now fortified Career pack camp. He was smart enough to try and not befriend Beetee’s boy, the odd kid with the explosives, scheduled to die first once the pack broke apart, buying Peeta buffer space. Across the camp, the Two male and female were ignoring each other and not ignoring each other at once, playing out a whole story so skillfully, without words, just with looks. I don’t want to have to kill you. But I will.
Peeta hadn’t been sent any gifts as of yet. That was mostly because Peeta hadn’t needed any gifts; the Careers had it all this year.
It was the third day, two days after the bloodbath, the day when the outlier tributes who’d made it so far but without supplies, often curled up somewhere and just never got up again. The death toll had been high this time around. Eleven children were dead as of Day One. Hopefully, that meant this Games wouldn’t drag on for weeks.
Katniss had - of course - foregone all advice, engaging in the bloodbath just to immediately be targeted by the Two female with her ridiculously precise throwing knives, barely making it out but gaining a sheet of plastic, a hunting knife, a garishly colored survival bag in return. It meant they hadn’t had to waste any sponsorship money on her yet, either. The sooner they managed to gather enough and send her that bow, the cheaper it would be to pay - before the prices skyrocketed at Final Eight.
Peeta had managed to wound the Six male at the bloodbath before Glimmer, from One, took that tribute out, and then he’d put his hand on that Eight female’s forehead and shushed her while he slit her throat, left to die after the pack found her campfire at night. He had his share of fans now, too. Everybody now thought of him as a particularly kind Career, looking all the more competent and determined when he fought. You had to be good at what you did, if you could afford to be like that.
The audience had oo’ed and aah’ed every time he made clear that he was secretly trying to lead the pack away from Kat, although the Careers hadn’t caught on to it yet - they would though, given time. Katniss herself didn’t know, attempting to throw the audience a sparse smile when she spied on the pack from a tree - she probably meant to convey that she was on to them now, though from the outside, it had just looked shaken and grim and unsure.
Last year’s arena had been a garbage dump; the blizzard Games the year before, they called the snow globe arena these days. The 71st had featured barren city ruins covered with moss, and Annie Cresta’s arena had been a majestic canyon, until that dam collapsed and transformed the desert into the sea in a well-planned, terrible display of Gamesmaker power. So this year, Seneca Crane had turned traditional. With its plush forests and those endless fields and that lake, the arena appeared to have been made for Eleven and Twelve. It was as if it had been made for Katniss Everdeen and the boy Finnick knew now was called Thresh; he couldn’t help but think of the Careers as decoration pieces, although he knew how dangerous that view could turn out to be.
He couldn’t stop hating this Games; his skin still crawled every time he looked at the screens.
***
Games success was a two-edged sword for the likes of Finnick.
On the one hand, the President couldn’t send Finnick on all too many public dates anymore once Twelve had skyrocketed into the spotlight; the journalists would document it all and speculate about why he’d stopped taking care of his promising tribute like a proper, dedicated mentor should - especially one supposed to support his addict partner. It would shake up the betting pool; the media’s screams for explanations would create the kind of attention that Snow didn’t favor. On the other hand, popularity went up and so did demand, and Snow had made so very clear to Finnick that Games success would never be a way out.
So appointments were rescheduled by the minute; no day passed that Finnick didn’t receive three, four, five quick notes carried by Avoxes, juggling dates, shortening stylist time and adding it again after Cherry complained, replacing addresses of dance clubs and restaurants with those of hotel rooms and private retreats, replacing clients greedy for the prestige with the ones who just wanted a fuck. It was as good a confirmation that they were doing well as any, Finnick supposed. Soon though, he was tired of sex, tired of hurting, all fucked out. He kept expecting that his body would turn on him, make him flinch at the wrong time, or that he just wouldn’t get it up out of the blue, though it never happened like that; he asked Cherry if she had pills for that, too, not just wake-up medication, but she just laughed at him, in that forced and startled way that meant that she’d have to acknowledge what those dates really were if she took the request as anything but a joke, and she could never do that.
Finnick always was busy; Peeta could start needing him at any time. His world narrowed down: to being touched, to following cues or orders on where to lick and how to thrust, to trying to get breakfast in, to eating power bars and sugar cubes instead. To curling up in his seat next to Haymitch, preferring his proximity over a real bed, falling asleep with Haymitch’s hand rubbing his shoulder. There was no attention left to pay to Chaff, who showed up very drunk repeatedly starting Day Two, but Finnick just was too exhausted and anxious to enforce his rules and Chaff, probably, was too sick with concern for his tribute to remember them. One afternoon when Chaff was sweating out liquor like a distillery, Haymitch just stood up and left and vanished for hours without saying anything to either of them; when Finnick went after him although he should have been on his way to a client, he only ran into Caramel, who tightened his face, then said he would take care of it. Chaff was mostly sober the day after that.
Katniss was targeted by fire balls because the Gamesmakers were assholes, and she was as good as dead, but then she ran and ducked and made it out somehow with a burn mark smoldering on her leg as big as a man’s palm. They lost precious money to get that crazily expensive medicine to her. But she did find water and she did find food, while the Careers found her, Peeta’s attempts to lead them astray foiled. She tried to rest on a tree, and he tried to rest at its foot, finally convincing the last Capitol citizen of how he felt when he blinked up at the branches all through the night, wrapped in his sleeping bag with that pale face and that lost expression. Finnick praying, telepathically telling the screen, Don’t do a stupid thing. Don’t get yourself killed. Not now. Not for a girl. It’s you or her.
The little dark-skinned Eleven girl appeared in the trees, the one everybody had forgotten when she ran away from the bloodbath and hid in the trees.
On the channel, faintly ringing through Central, Flickerman hurried to remind the audience that this girl’s name was Rue and she was twelve and she’d had a surprise score of seven that stemmed clearly from her ability to hide very effectively. Katniss noticed her. Rue pointed at the tracker jacker nest above Katniss’ head.
“Are you fucking stupid, little stupid girl?” Chaff viciously hissed, almost out of his chair while an empty bottle slipped out of his hand and crashed to the ground.
Seeder muttered something at him, something very calculating and very composed, and he angrily slumped back down. Seeder leaned forward, elbows on the console, very focused now. She never gave up on a tribute, no matter their age. No matter how hopeless they were.
Although Chaff’s male was far away, camping out securely in his territory that he’d claimed in the wheat field, left alone by the Gamesmakers after he’d satisfied the crowds with his two bloodbath kills, Chaff reached for another bottle and took an uneasy sip. However, Chaff wasn’t like Haymitch had used to be and Chaff functioned quite well, and it would be dangerous to underestimate him now just because he was slurring his vowels.
Rue Capaldi had charmed the audience in her interview. The Games channel scrambled to recap it all through the night, while Katniss worked on sawing off the nest, now clearly with a plan in mind. They showed the girl jumping from tree to tree on silent feet, the slingshot she had built, her big brown eyes, her startling street-smartness. Katniss saw Primrose in her, every inch of her. It was so obvious, in that unexpected way after Katniss had refused to display clear emotion on screen for so long, that Finnick and Haymitch never even had to nudge the reporters towards that connection, her love for her sister all over the screens for everybody to see. Her blackmail list laid out for Snow.
Finnick hated it, every second of it. You didn’t bond with cute little children in the Games. You died if you bonded with cute little children in the Games, and they were in this to win.
Haymitch sat through all of it with stoic, well-practiced calm, expecting nothing and expecting everything.
The siege imploded, courtesy of Rue. It would be all the channel recapped for days. Katniss cut down the nest, and she was smart about it too, calculating the risks. Experts explained what was happening to those kids, the bloating stings, the screams not just of pain but terror, the hallucinations, the way they would be feeling like the ground was shaking underneath their feet. An invisible, cold hand reached into Finnick’s chest and squeezed until he thought he couldn’t breathe; he knew that Peeta would side with Katniss now. Her scrambling away. Scrambling back, prying that bow out of that slaughtered One’s hand. Peeta confronting Cato, the Two male. Screaming at Katniss that she should run, making everything clear about his Games plan to everybody except maybe Katniss, who’d been stung by the wasps. He should never have survived that confrontation with Cato, but he did. Fleeing down the stream, stumbling, fighting, that terrible wound on his thigh still gushing. At first, Finnick was sure it was the artery. But then, it couldn’t have been the artery. Five minutes in, he was still on his feet, coloring the water red and catching bacteria, instead of bleeding to death.
That was the moment Finnick shook off that stupor, mentally returning to Mentor Central and getting on the phone, not getting off until he’d called every potential sponsor he still had up his sleeve. He had money at the ready for that boy. He didn’t have enough. Half an hour later, he thought he’d promised one of those sponsors to fuck her for free, but he couldn’t remember who. An hour in, he had the money. Peeta had settled down to rest against a rock near the stream, face white, breathing too hard; his life statistics reported arrhythmia. The gift, powerful antibiotics and bandages saturated with salve, dropped down onto the ground next to his feet. He looked up, wet his lips, whispered, “Thank you” at the sky. And then, all districts bless that boy, he added a promise: “I’m gonna save her yet.” If Finnick had still had space in his mind left for a sense of humor, he might have called Effie to ask if anybody in Flickerman’s studio audience had fainted at that. The Capitol was celebrating itself and how much they loved this Games - Peeta, Katniss, Cato, Clove.
The field was down to ten surviving tributes. The Careers unsurprisingly stuck together after Peeta had been expelled from the pack; the Three boy was still in, now that they needed the man power, being down to four, but Finnick couldn’t help but think that the boy had missed his chance - either he’d blow up the entire pack soon, since clearly something like that had to be his play, or he was dead. Thresh was still holing up in the wheat field, where he started losing more attention and screen time by the minute, but from the way Chaff was watching the screens and stats like a hawk, he and the boy were both on their end calculating a careful mixed strategy of half engaging and half waiting out the field. Peeta recovered, slowly, in a cave that he had found; Finnick sent him not a loaf of bread but a cheap little bag full of berries to show him what was edible in the brushwork close by. The boy spent a whole day painting a beautiful likeliness of Katniss onto a cave wall with mud, and all the cameras were on that. Sponsors called Finnick, for the first time, instead of him calling them. Some of Katniss’ switched to Peeta - some in a calculated move to support her, some because they just liked him best. One person who called was an artist who didn’t have any money but blabbed at Finnick about how that talent had to survive, how he’d get Peeta into an art academy after. Finnick encouraged him to start a networks website for sponsorship donations, but was ultimately happy when he got him to hang up.
The Ten male, an unassuming fourteen-year-old mostly ignored, lurked at the edges of the woods and built inexpert traps - there’d been tributes before him who had won that way, some barely older than him. The Five female kept stealing from the Careers. She was a slim, mousy redhead, sharp-faced, zero kills or confrontations, but despite her non-aggressive approach, she clearly remained one to watch. Finnick knew she reminded Haymitch of the late Ralda Cavalera; pain sometimes crossed his face when he looked at that screen.
Katniss had slipped into unconsciousness after the jacker tracker stings, and little Rue with her big eyes and her fragile bird features made her second cameo like a movie star. Instead of killing her right then, she took care of her wounds, flat-out refusing to play the Games properly like only twelve-year-old innocence could prompt. Seeder serenely made notes, getting Chaff’s input on everything quietly, as if it didn’t matter that they never agreed.
“What are we making of this?” Finnick asked. More than a little lost about it all, he was staring at Katniss and Rue sharing a goosling leg, wondering, contemplating, trying to figure out this new alliance and how it had broken Katniss’ lone Career image wide open. His eyes wandered from Katniss’ screen above Haymitch’s head to the main channel screen further up on the wall. It showed the same image but with the usual two-seconds lag that allowed the cutting room to edit out political statements and the occasional tribute who suddenly leaned over to puke.
“It’s not as bad as it could be,” Haymitch replied after a contemplative moment of pause. “Lone-wolf routine or not, it’s good for people to see her showing a little bit of heart again…”
“I can make sure they tie it in with how she volunteered for Prim again, when they’ll spring me on the way to my limousine…”
“Yeah. Make it subtle, though, let them figure that one out themselves.” Haymitch nodded at him. “So it continues the theme, that’s good. As long as she doesn’t start collecting strays on principle, and I don’t see who’d be left in there to collect, it’s probably not gonna damage her image. Plus from what Trinket says, looks like the media are liking the twist.”
Finnick didn’t ask what it would do to Katniss if she had to kill Rue once Rue finally attempted to backstab her, but Haymitch wouldn’t have known an answer to that question, anyway. Rue had missed her best shot already. It was ten tributes in, nine kills to go. Peeta or Katniss. Katniss or Peeta or somebody else. District Two really wanted this one for themselves.
On Day Seven, Peeta broke camp, starting to make his way off the edge of the arena before the Gamesmakers could find a way to force him back into the fight - the cave drawing had bought him a day in that way. In a move that beautifully symbolized everything that Finnick and Haymitch had tried to do for Twelve in the Games, Katniss and Rue laid out an involved plan to attack the Careers. No matter what came of it, Finnick knew that this one would be replayed for years, not just in Games recaps, but also in documentaries about Twelve and the two of them; he could just bet that one of those was going into pre-production right about now. Mockingjays were singing their song in the trees, the same breed Katniss was so proudly wearing on her chest. They spread those girls’ theme through all the arena; the camera caught how a startled Thresh looked up when he heard, recognizing it from home, on his way through his wheat.
Rue climbed tree after tree, collecting branches, building fires, lying in wait to set them off.
Peeta was marching through the woods, never knowing how closely he passed Adriano by - the Ten male - hiding behind a tree bark when he heard Peeta coming.
Katniss crouched behind the brushwork, spying on the pack, trying to figure out what booby traps she wasn’t understanding yet when Five’s sneaky Eleanor Weed returned to do her morning dance. Stealing apples and dried beef strips like every day, she accidentally spelled it all out for her opponent from Twelve.
They didn’t have to worry about Katniss’ screen-tests anymore. Katniss was all in her element, all focus, all fight.
It was sheer dumb luck that she never got close enough to the pile to be killed by the explosion, since she had no way of estimating how far she needed to stay away. The shockwave thundered through the arena, rippling through all of the field and reverberating when it bounced off the force fields in the sky to resonate back. Kat was blown off her feet, her ear-drum likely ruptured, blood running down her face and neck. Eleanor skirting to a halt on her way through the forest, looking over her shoulder, then running in the opposite direction as fast as her feet could carry her.
Bumping face-first into Peeta, who grabbed her shoulder, before she could fall.
“Whoa there,” he said, healthy and recovered, but out of breath.
Katniss crawling into the brush at the edge of the forest, just in time for the Careers to break out of the woods, and Cato viciously breaking Three’s neck who arguably could be blamed to have set this one up.
Marvel, from One, smarter than his mates, not having followed them to the camp but coming to a halt for a moment, narrowing his eyes at the smoke of that one fire, then the other fire, mind at work and setting off to chase after Rue. He gave up soon; Rue gave tail the moment she heard movement, like a squirrel up a tree. But it was clear he’d found a neat little way to distinguish himself from Cato and Clove, thinking on his feet, starting to go it alone. He did need that, at this point, if he wanted to win, and he was smart enough to know.
Eleanor and Peeta, staring at each other. Waiting for the other to attack first.
Peeta’s hand crept towards his back pack, built out of a sackcloth that had come with one of his gifts.
The Five’s eyes flickered there.
“Don’t panic, alright?” Peeta said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not going to kill you. I don’t want to kill you. I don’t know about you, but something just happened over there, and I’d rather not kill anybody if I don’t even know how many tributes are still in the Games. That would be very stupid of me, wouldn’t it?”
Eleanor was breathing hard, near savage. She glanced at his hands again.
“The boy from Three,” she said, licking her lips. “You know him, you were with them at first. He, he must have made it all explode. I think that’s what he planned all along. I thought he’d kill you all that way in the end.”
On the other screen, Katniss crawled deeper into the brushwork, like a wounded animal. Next to Finnick, Haymitch alternated between looking at her, looking at Peeta, looking at her life stats, trying to figure out if there was any help that could and needed to be sent. They still had money left. They’d never used it for a bow.
“The pack would see the parachute,” Finnick muttered, and Haymitch nodded, removing his hand from his headset.
“Thank you,” Peeta breathed.
Another moment of stand-off, before he moved again to reach for his back pack, slow and measured motions made to not startle that vigilant, near-panicked girl, like a wild animal almost ready to gnaw off her own leg. Eleanor hadn’t talked to anybody since the beginning of the Games, and it showed; she’d been on her own ever since she’d bumped into Katniss at the bloodbath, when the two of them had silently agreed to let the other go.
“Just putting this down, okay?” Peeta said to her. His face was all placating, all open honesty. I don’t want to kill anybody. Let’s make an alliance, you and me. Let’s not play their Games. Let’s be smart. “Just putting it down and then we can talk.”
“Okay,” Eleanor agreed, cautiously, eyes never leaving his face.
“Here,” Peeta said. “I collected some berries we could share.”
Then he moved quicker than Eleanor could have seen coming, than the audience would have seen coming, although Finnick had, a little bit. The knife was in Peeta’s hand, instead of a sachet. It penetrated underneath her sternum, pointing upwards, piercing her lungs and possible her heart. It was as if he held her upright, for a moment. Eleanor stared in his face, close enough that Peeta should be feeling her breath on his face, blood bubbling out of her mouth and sprinkling his lips. Close enough to kiss. He stared back at her, suddenly pale.
“I’m so sorry,” Peeta whispered, mouth opening and closing as if he’d meant for more words to spill out but they’d gotten lost on the way. She fell lifelessly to the ground, just dead meat now.
The cannon fired.
In the brush at the explosion side, Katniss didn’t even flinch at the sound, lying curled up like a child. There was a worrisome implication in that, saying that she hadn’t heard the sound.
“Fuck,” Haymitch breathed, rubbing his face as if he just had no more energy left.
Finnick’s hand was already reaching for the phone dial. He had a lot of sponsor calls to make, yet again; any number of people only got interested after a tributes’ first proper first-degree murder.
That boy was on.
***
Chaff and Haymitch hadn’t said a word to each other, not one, through the whole time their girls had sat together up on the screens, talking to each other, whispering, breaking bread and sharing stories from home. Eleven’s monitor mirroring Twelve’s, displaying the same camera feed. Occasionally, Seeder had leaned past her partner, saying to Haymitch, “Let’s see how long this lasts before we talk pooling,” or, “Mine is good with slingshots, how is yours with knives?” But Chaff had only ever raised his chin slightly when they did that, not looking up from his console. Haymitch had never looked at him, in return, answering those questions blandly and in a very polite voice, like people working a business transaction while having a rule about private interactions at work. Chaff always held a bottle in his hand, dangling it between his legs. It made Finnick remember how the strong tribute last year had made Chaff drink more, too, while the starved children in the snow globe two years back hadn’t bothered him much, as if the hope was worst of all to bear.
Although Twelve had the worst district statistics in the Games technically, with only two victors, the last Eleven who had won a Games had been Chaff at the 45th, their district waiting to achieve victory again five years longer. Both Chaff and Seeder had been mentored by Old Pots, who was fragile and senile these days. Neither Chaff, nor Seeder had ever saved a child’s life.
Their little girl Rue hadn’t even made it to the third bonfire yet before the shockwave hit. Marvel had been roaming the forest for her all night with his night-vision goggles, probably supposing that it would be Peeta who he’d find allied with Kat so that he could play villain to that tale. Or at very least, he’d find Thresh. Unlike Cato and Clove from Two, he didn’t have a script to follow and that gave him an advantage, freedom to adapt and move; he had the training for Cashmere to trust that he’d know how to improvise around the other tributes’ stories.
Of course, it was Rue whom he found instead and that was fine with Marvel, too. She never stood a chance. Barely reaching to that tall boy’s sternum, surely less than half his weight, she was twelve and she was starved and not a volunteer. Just a second ago, she’d teased another song out of her Mockingjays, telling Katniss in that hopeful way she was alright. Now she was screaming. It might have been to warn off Katniss. Probably it was just mindless panic because she was twelve and she was dead. White showing in her eyes, she struggled, caught in the net Marvel had used to trap her in a move that One must have added to the training plan after Finnick won that way nine years ago; he’d never seen a One do that before. An older tribute with training would have cut herself out of that net.
Katniss never hesitated, never even a second. Her bow was strung. It was a beautiful, flawless, deadly shot, an almost lavish display of skill.
The sound of Marvel’s cannon followed instantly, but that didn’t save Rue.
Two seats over, Seeder was whispering a prayer to the god whose worship the Capitol forbade, in the otherwise silent Central. A swearword could be heard on the far end of the room coming from One, out of this Games as of now. Chaff watched the events that unfolded on the screens, stone-faced, reaching out without a word to grab Seeder’s shoulder, squeezing hard. Katniss was crying, singing to Rue, her voice trembling and yet strong and unexpectedly clear. This district child’s death broadcast all across Panem so that people in the Capitol could feel moved by the murder that they’d helped commit, and the districts could feel sick.
Finnick’s eyes flickered to the main channel screen, and he suddenly felt nauseous.
That channel never cut away from Katniss during her song. Not once. It had disposed of Marvel, declared his death an irrelevant distraction, refusing to let it impact on the shoot, although he’d been a runner-up. This, very suddenly, was Katniss’ scene.
Mechanically, Finnick pictured how this imagery was just spreading through the Capitol right now, like a virus infection. In clubs and bars and private homes, everybody was staring at this. They - Haymitch - had built this story of Katniss so carefully, every detail tweaked and calculated, every nuance spun. That had been then. This was something new.
He could almost physically feel that story slipping out of their hands, out of their control, because the production wasn’t cutting away and Kat still sang and that meant everybody fell in love the exact way everybody had last fallen in love with Finnick.
This wasn’t about sex, though. Finnick didn’t think that people wanted to fuck Katniss right now, and that only made it worse. It made it dangerous, because what else was there to want on this scale?
It seemed to be very quiet in the room, quieter than should be possible with eight mentors still present and the main channel commentary running, except Caesar Flickerman seemed to have shut up because he was letting the song do its magic as well, in that reverent way.
Katniss was arranging flowers around Rue, folding her hands in front of her chest and closing her eyes, and that just wasn’t done.
Forcing his eyes away from the screen despite that terrible cold feeling, Finnick looked at Chaff, Haymitch breathing very calmly between them while he took it all in, Chaff, whose face was icy and full of distaste. This was worse than the Capitol’s love for Finnick, yes. Rue had refused to play the Games alright, but she was twelve. The twelve-year-olds did that sometimes, and even if it slipped into the broadcast, everybody dismissed them as irrelevant. Now Katniss refused to act like the girl stopped mattering once she was dead, and she’d involved Chaff’s district in that and the camera still wasn’t pulling away, picking over a child’s death for their entertainment.
Until it did end, abruptly. Flickerman’s voice filled the air again after just a beat of pause, creating tension about Thresh stalking the wheat field for the Ten male, as if that were the most interesting thing that had happened all day.
“What an exciting day at the Games,” he gushed, too experienced and too good at what he did to betray that he, like Finnick, knew perfectly well that somebody had just crashed that cutting room. Somebody had just made a choice and somebody somewhere would be executed for not cutting away from Rue ealier than this.
People in the Capitol, Gamesmakers and Games executives were very, very safe until sometimes, very suddenly, President Snow reached for the phone, and they weren’t.
The districts, viewing mandatorily, had already seen it all, and they’d have had a very different spin; that was a different story that they’d seen. They weren’t supposed to be allowed to see that story.
The main channel was all on Thresh, cameras buried in the ground filming him from below and making him loom above everybody. But nobody’s mind was on Thresh.
Katniss was crying soundlessly on the screen above Haymitch while the Hovercraft took Rue away, but nobody saw.
Dazed and numb, Finnick glanced at his and Haymitch’s console and how it kept lighting up to inform them that sponsors were upping their budgets without bothering to call about it first anymore. Haymitch couldn’t know this, because this was a thing that never happened in Twelve, only sometimes in Four, but the fact that nobody was calling had to mean that so many people were doing it at once - new sponsors, journalists, more journalists - that they’d automatically been rerouted to Effie’s office, who’d weed out out what they didn’t really need to hear.
He couldn’t decide if this couldn’t get better, or if it couldn’t get worse.
How could they not win this Games now?
Seeder’s phone rang but Seeder had gotten up and quietly left the room somewhere along the way, so Chaff took it instead, saying, “Suppose you wanted me anyway, huh?” into his headset.
Then he turned his head away from them and talked with the other person, not getting louder but certainly getting more agitated. Taking more sips from his drink. It was a long call.
Haymitch was very quiet, as he’d been quiet for a long while, switching back and forth from life stats to sponsorship budgets and media reports on his console, looking at each in turn as if trying to spot a new angle.
Thresh butchered the Ten male, viciously, with his bare hands. Chaff barely looked up from his phone call, having known his tribute was almost in no danger during that one, and it seemed a stale and pale and uneventful part of the adrenaline low after the events before.
Katniss was building camp up on her screen with mechanical, robotic motions, as if she wasn’t home in her own head, never knowing of or caring about that precious hour of privacy she had gained. On the screen next to hers, Peeta was curled up under a ledge asleep, fidgeting and licking his lips where Eleanor’s blood had splashed only hours before.
Haymitch’s fingers were tapping a song onto his armrest, still immersed in the displays. His face was blank. His mind was too busy to remember facial expressions.
Chaff’s call seemed to have ended because he ripped the headset off and abruptly stood up, startling Haymitch and Finnick alongside him into glancing up. Chaff was looking down at them with very dark, very hollow, very angry eyes, as if he were a little dead inside in a way that he didn’t normally allow on the surface. His hand gripped the back of his chair so hard that his knuckles had changed color. Finnick had never seen him like that and despite everything, his mind stuttered for the fraction of a second when his hand itched, wanting to reach for the trident that he didn’t carry.
Chaff was focused on Haymitch.
“Congratulations, buddy,” he said, almost spitting it out. “You did it. You actually broke their brains. You wanted to show everybody out there that your district ain’t the worst at killing kids, after all? You did. You made even my fucking so-called people fall in love with your girl. I just had my mayor on the phone.
“Looks like, my district has made a fucking democratic choice, or something, to take the money that they all starved themselves for so that the girl could have some bread before she dies, and to give it away to District fucking Twelve out of neighborly love.”
He glanced at their screens, gaze dripping with contempt - at the child deemed more worthy of survival than his, at his district, at people and how you tried and tried and you used yourself up and in the end, it wasn’t just that you never succeeded. It also turned out nobody cared if you did. It was a strange, sharp insight into a district so unlike Four and even unlike Twelve.
Chaff took a breath.
“She doesn’t even need that bread,” he said. “Thresh needs that bread. That was my first tribute with a real chance in over twenty years. I could have brought that kid home. Now turns out that my district doesn’t even give a shit. Guess they like their little sacrificial lambs innocent. Better a dead kid than a murderer who got his hands bloody to survive.
“I transferred the money to you, and the Eleven bread recipe, so have at it.” He wet this lips. “She doesn’t even need that bread,” he muttered again, to himself, almost deranged, before he turned around and left the room as if it didn’t matter, as if he couldn’t bear to see, as if Thresh were already lost. He might as well have been; his district had just declared him irrelevant the same way the broadcast had done to Marvel when he died.
Because they liked another district’s tribute best.
“What the…” Finnick breathed, staring after him, uncomprehending.
He wanted to reach out and take Haymitch’s hand just because he suddenly needed to touch him, he suddenly just really needed that feeling of Haymitch’s hand in his, a person who was real and mattered to him. It was as if the ground were swaying underneath them, heralding a surge.
Finnick suddenly had to think of Annie Cresta’s arena again, a desert one minute, an ocean the next, those water masses crashing down, the last survivor the girl that had trod water the longest. Nothing had been possible anymore in that arena except desperately staying alive.
“Haymitch…” he said, although he didn’t know what should follow, just needing Haymitch to… to do something, say something, “I’ve got this,” maybe. “I’m still the ones who’s spinning this. I’ve got a plan.”
Haymitch was still staring at the screens, breathing in, breathing out in that very controlled way.
They had to have been screaming at the screens in One, angry at that girl, their privilege stolen away, the privilege that made their children so much safer. Panem’s most successful district, last year’s winning district, forgotten and dismissed. Katniss was doing incredible things to the masses; she’d slipped out of their control.
Haymitch abruptly breathed out.
“Wait until she’s done building camp, get that bread to her then,” he said, getting up. “Wait if anybody’ll realize it’s from Eleven and if so, call Effie to get poll results on that if you can.”
“Where are you going?”
Haymitch grimaced, hesitating for a beat.
“Just something I’d like to check out,” he said. “You might have to watch them all night.”
Patting Finnick’s shoulder in a way that didn’t feel half as reassuring as it should have, he was gone, leaving Finnick staring at the screens of those to promising children, either one of which might get to go home.
It was Day Eight of the Games, both their tributes still in and the field down to five. They’d have started interviewing Gale and Primrose back home, Hue and Dane Mellark.
Annie Cresta had won her Games because she’d trod water long enough. She’d kept breathing on. But even the best swimmer would die if there was a storm raging on and no shoreline in sight. Finnick couldn’t help but think that a Games would end without any survivors, if it happened that way.
Tbc.