Scylla and Charybdis [5/9] (The Hunger Games, Finnick/Annie)
Chapter Five! In which Finnick is stampeded by cousins and goes skinny-dipping. Also, Annie teaches him how to sew.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [5/9] ( or read the whole thing at AO3 )
Authors: puella_nerdii and mithrigil
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Characters: Finnick/Annie; Mags, Haymitch, Johanna, Snow, various victors and denizens of the Capitol, and original characters.
Words: About 61000 in total. This chapter, ~8000.
Rating: R (expected THG violence, sexuality, recreational drug use, forced prostitution)
Spoilers: Backstory revealed in Mockingjay.
Summary: Finnick decides that, come hell or high water, he is bringing his tribute home from the seventieth Hunger Games. That tribute is Annie Cresta. But Finnick never thought that he would have to choose between bringing her home and keeping her safe, and he wants both. How Annie Cresta crept up on Finnick Odair.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine
Chapter Five: Black Sails for Homecoming Finnick returns to his family, but even his life outside the Capitol is slipping out of his control.
I shut the door behind me as quietly as possible, but not quietly enough. “Finnick!” twelve voices chorus when the lock clicks into place--more like ten than twelve, Patrick and Timothy haven’t quite figured out how to say my name yet. They join the stampede down the stairs, though, and my cousins scamper towards me, nearly sweep me off my feet. Jamie and Maeve cling to my legs, Connor and Lindsay tug my arms, and Katie, who’s really too old for this, jumps on my back.
“Oof!” I say, but right myself before I fall on my cousins, and ruffle Connor’s curls. “Hey, squid.”
“Don’t call me that!” he says, scrunches up his face and tries to squirm out from under my hand. Katie’s laughter shrieks in my ear.
“I saw you lots on the television,” Laura says, hanging back from the tangle. “I liked the blue suit. Not the black one.”
“Aunt Hannah says you’ll freeze in the Capitol if you don’t put on a shirt,” Aidan adds helpfully.
Right, I haven’t run the gauntlet of aunts yet. I steel myself for that.
Someone tugs on my hair. “It’s too long,” Helen says. She must be the only one tall enough to reach.
“It’s in style in the Capitol.” I neglect to mention I’m the one who set the style.
“It’s longer than mine in front,” she complains. “Aunt Ruth says it’ll get tangled in the grates.”
“I’ll let her trim it,” I say, and smile. What Drusus doesn’t know won’t hurt him. By the time I get back to the Capitol it’ll have grown out.
Helen gives my hair one more tug, then kisses me on the cheek and steps back. She’s the oldest after me, and little Timothy and Patrick call her an aunt sometimes. Crescent might, too, once she learns how to talk. “Is Crescent asleep?” I ask.
“No, Aunt Coral has her, she woke up a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah, she was crying and crying!” Jamie sounds altogether too cheerful about that. “She never stops. I think it keeps the squids away.”
“I’m not a squid!” Connor yells.
Lucy pokes him in the ribs and shouts, “Squid!” I feel bad for the poor kid, it must be hell growing up with two older sisters. His eyes do bulge like a squid’s, though, especially when he’s about to cry. Then Katie gets in on the poking too, and Patrick and Timothy even though they probably don’t understand what’s going on, and Roarke shouts at them to knock it off and stop but it only gets louder. And then Aidan and Maeve are tugging on my arms and my jacket and asking “Finnick, what did you bring me from the Capitol?”
The door to the kitchen flies open, and my aunts are silhouetted in a burst of light. “He walks through the door and you pounce on him like a pack of wild animals!” Aunt Ruth may be the smallest of them, but she glowers the best, and Aidan and Maeve take shelter behind me. “I thought Finnick had cousins, not beasts.”
“I do,” I say. “It’s all right, I’m glad to see them, too.”
“And he said he’d let you cut his hair!” Lindsay says. I see she hasn’t stopped echoing Helen.
“Ma, they’re still calling me a squid!”
“One at a time,” Aunt Hannah says, strides out from the back and brandishes her rolling pin. “Give us all some air. Sorry, Finnick, been a long day for them.”
“They didn’t show you arriving at the station this year,” Aunt Coral says, bouncing baby Crescent a little in her arms to shush her. “And then someone told the little ones that the Capitol had snatched you up for good,” she adds, glares sidelong at Aunt Shannon, who purses her lips like she’s swallowed a lemon.
“I took a while getting back, that’s all.” I shrug, manage to dislodge Katie. “There wasn’t much to show this year.”
All my aunts cluck at once. I don’t know how they do that.
“Probably for the best, after what that poor girl’s been through,” Coral says.
“Is that the crazy one, Ma?” Jamie asks, before Laura and Maeve swat him and whisper Jamie! We’re not supposed to call her that.
I kneel so I’m at Jamie’s level. “She’s not crazy,” I say. “She needs some time to get back on her feet.”
“Is she going to be moving in next door?” Roarke asks.
“Her and her family. She has a little sister about Lindsay’s age.”
“Great,” Roarke says, wrinkles his nose. “More girls. Just what we need.”
“Oh,” I say, “they’re not so bad,” and give him the kind of wink that makes Helen scoff and Katie and Lucy shriek with laughter.
“Roarke’s got a girlfriend!” Katie squeals, and Lucy joins in too. “Roarke’s got a girlfriend!”
“Shut up, I haven’t even met her!”
I bite my fist to keep from laughing too much. I don’t get to spend much time with kids in the Capitol, unless you count the tributes, which I don’t. Come to think of it, I don’t see kids in the Capitol much at all; I know people have them, enough of them mention children offhandedly, but their kids are always off at school or with a nanny or getting shuttled to some activity or childcare center or sport. I do remember standing in Bianca Greendown’s kitchen trying to figure out how her coffeemaker worked when her son got home early from violin practice, spent ten seconds staring at me in shock, and yelled “Mommy, why is Finnick Odair making coffee in our kitchen?” at the top of his lungs. I wish I’d gotten to have more of a conversation with him. He seemed like a funny kid.
(Bianca writes television programs and commercials, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw an actor playing me on television a few months later, fighting with a newer model of that same brand of coffeemaker. “Mommy, why is Finnick Odair making coffee in our kitchen?” “It’s the Avox’s day off, dear!” The studio audience howled their heads off.)
“You’ll have plenty of time to later,” I say, and Roarke claps his hands over his ears.
I grip Maeve’s hand tighter than I meant to, because she yelps.
“Don’t all go over there at once, though, all right? Give Annie and her family time to settle in.” She should almost be finished moving, unless she and her family decided to bring everything over themselves and not rope in any help. I can’t imagine doing that, but what do I know about her family, other than the little she told me and what I saw at the station?
“That poor girl’s had enough people gawping at her.” Aunt Coral shifts Crescent to her hip to slap Roarke’s shoulder. “That goes for all of you lot, do you hear? I won’t have you scaring her overboard.”
“Yes, Aunt Coral,” most of them say, though Laura and Aidan and Jamie substitute “Mommy” for that last part, and Katie and Lucy are a beat behind everyone else. “But we can still see her, right?” Katie asks.
“When she’s ready,” Aunt Coral says. Thank you, I mouth to her over my cousins’ heads. She winks.
“All right, you.” Aunt Shannon claps her hands at everyone. “Now let Finnick get through the door and sit down.”
“But he hasn’t told us what he brought for us yet!” Jamie says.
“He won’t bring you anything at all if you don’t scoot,” Aunt Ruth says. “And some of you still have a few nets to mend.”
“Ma!” Connor’s eyes open wide, start to darken and tear up, and the way he puckers his lips bears an uncanny resemblance to a squid’s beak.
“Don’t you Ma me,” she says. “Now scoot.”
Grumbling, and shooting me the most forlorn looks I’ve seen since Johanna’s time in the Arena, my cousins trudge back up the stairs.
Aunt Coral sweeps me into a hug. “We are glad to see you, Finnick dear.” Crescent coos her agreement in my ear.
“Can I hold her?” I ask.
“After she’s calmed down a little more.”
“And after you’ve taken a load off,” Aunt Shannon adds. They usher me into the kitchen, which has full picture windows and a table that face the ocean, and Aunt Hannah shoves a plate of something warm at me, dusts the flour from her sleeves, and commands me to eat.
“You been to see your mother yet?” Aunt Ruth asks before I’ve so much as torn open the bread.
“I wanted to drop things off here first,” I say. The best thing about Aunt Hannah’s bread is that it never needs butter or oil, and the salt’s always enough on its own. “Is she out on the boat?”
“Since yesterday,” Aunt Shannon says. “I can’t say I blame her. I watched that interview and I didn’t want to see any more either.”
I set Aunt Hannah’s bread down, nudge my plate to the side. I’d spit out the piece in my mouth--the salt’s gone sour--but my aunts would never forgive me for wasting food like that, no matter how much of it we have now. “I’m not proud of that,” I say.
Aunt Hannah clucks at me, shakes her head. “Pulling her through, you mean? Finnick, you brought the girl home! I’d be proud as anything.”
“It’s complicated.” I sigh. “You remember how it was for me. This isn’t the end. There’s her Victory Tour, at the very least.”
“Well, the salt air should do the poor dear some good,” Aunt Coral says. “Maybe things will have blown over by then.”
“I hope so,” I say, but you can hope for anything. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen.
My aunts watch me until I finish everything on my plate. That hasn’t changed.
***
“So it all happened at once.” My mother shuts her eyes, takes a sip of her tea. “Varin, Annie, and Mags, all in one stroke.”
I set my cup down. The tea’s lost most of its heat. “Literally.”
“I only heard about Mags when Pike came by to tell me and your father.” She grimaces. “You’d think the Capitol would care about the oldest living victor.”
“She spent most of the rest of the Games recovering from her stroke,” I say. “She couldn’t be as visible as they wanted her to be, so they dropped her.”
“It’s hateful. They’ll show young people slaughtering each other, but they can’t show dignity in old age.”
I’m glad, suddenly, for the mile of ocean separating us from the shore. “They don’t like old age in the Capitol.”
“They don’t. Not old age, and not sickness...” She trails off and drinks, her knuckles edged in white.
I know what she’s going to say, but it’s worth asking, the way I do every year. “I could get you to one of the doctors.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me that I’d let their kind fix,” she says, and smiles at me. “I may not be whole, but I’m certainly not broken.”
“No. You’re not.” I reach across the table, lace her fingers with mine. Her legs have withered but her hands are strong as ever, steady and firm and warm, able to braid rope and haul in nets. No, this isn’t what it looks like when they break you.
She pats the back of my hand. “So. Tell me about this Annie Cresta. Is she settled in next door yet?”
“She’s mostly finished moving.” I pull my hand away and pick up my cup again but don’t drink, just roll it between my palms, trace the rim. “Settled--I don’t know.”
“They interviewed her family before the flood. They seem like strong people, good neighbors. You tell them that if there’s anything we can do to make it easier for them, we will.”
I nod. It’s a calm night. The tea in my cup tilts side to side with the motion of the boat, fractions of an inch either way, but the surface of the tea is still smooth enough to see my reflection in. I could close my eyes and drift if I wanted, let the waves rock me to sleep the way they used to when I was little. My father used to throw his coat over me when I dozed off on the boat, bundle me up and carry me belowdecks to my mother, and I’d wake up to her humming one of Mags’s songs. I don’t think I can fit under my father’s coat anymore. Is he sleeping on the deck right now? Maybe I’ll end up carrying him to bed.
“She should get a boat,” I say, turn the teacup around again. “Her own, I mean. She has more than enough for two: one for her family, one for her.”
“Is she well enough to sail out alone?”
“I think she’d get better if she did.” She shouldn’t sail alone now, I doubt she can handle a boat on her own if she’s anything like she was the last time I saw her, but being in the sea would help. Lying on deck, the sun beaming down, the waves supporting her from beneath.
“But I’d worry about her not coming back, the way I used to worry about you.” My mother smiles, tilts her head as if to say she doesn’t worry any more. “So. Is she as lovely as she looked on television?”
I shake my head. “It’s not like that.”
“That’s not what I’m asking, dear. I just think she’s striking.”
I lean back in my chair, thinking, and the sway of the boat drags me back further. Striking? Haunting, I’d have said if anyone asked. Never mind Drusus’s handiwork, the smudged makeup and yards of floating fabric, I can’t forget the way she looked in the Arena, the tangle of her hair, the sharp shadows under her eyes, the bones in her fingers protruding as she dragged Telluria down. Striking, though. I consider that. I think of her eyes again, how looking into them is like looking into the ocean.
“There was a moment before the flood,” my mother says, “when she was floating in the reservoir, before you sent her the medicine. She was injured, and it was awful, but in the river, clothing and all--it was beautiful. She smiled, like she forgot where she was and what she was there to do.” She sighs. “If it weren’t for the Games, and the cuts on her face, I would have thought she was just a girl in a river.”
“She is beautiful,” I say slowly, setting my cup down. “I didn’t think about it then, but she is.”
My mother finishes her tea and sets the cup down. “Well, it’s a good thing you weren’t thinking about it. You brought her home, Finnick. You helped keep that girl alive. And I don’t need any more reasons to love you, and to be thankful every day that you survived the Games and came back home to us, but if I ever needed another reason this girl would be it.”
I can’t tell my mother why I put my face in my hands and start shaking, but I don’t have to. She’s my mother. She holds me until I ride it out.
***
The District is barely in sight. We’re still out past the first buoy and the sun is high, shining almost straight down on the water so that the surface is nearly white. I dip my hand in the spray and laugh as it slaps my palm. It feels like the water’s shooting straight out from my fingers, that I’m directing it, making it rise and fall and scatter.
It’s a crime to stay dry on a day like this.
“Dad,” I say, “I’m going in.”
He laughs. “Can’t blame you. Should I drop anchor?”
I crane my head; the shoreline’s a vague shape in the distance, but I can’t make out any specific markers. “You should. I’m not sure how far out we are.”
He nods, cuts the motor and brings us around, and everything slows.
The sun blazes down on my back, and I strip off my shoes, shorts, underwear. I get a running start off the prow, the heat from the deck stinging the soles of my feet, and dive in. My body arcs, and I’m suspended in the air for a shining moment, hanging between sea and sky. Then the water rushes up below me and welcomes me in, eases all the stings away. I spread my arms and legs as wide as I can and spiral down, down, down until my ears feel ready to burst. I know better than to surface quickly after a dive like that, but when my head breaks through the waves I fling it back, scatter droplets of water everywhere, breathe in the salt and seaweed around me.
I swim laps around the boat as fast as I can--no particular stroke, I can’t stick to one. I butterfly-kick, whip my arms forward in a breaststroke, flip on my back and reach my arms as far overhead as I can. I turn somersaults in the water, see how tightly I can coil myself and how high I can spring up when I release. Bracing my feet on the side of the boat, I push off and shoot straight back. I can’t laugh, I don’t want to get water in my lungs, but I don’t need to. The ocean is laughing with me, bearing me aloft and showing me off to the sun. He’s home, it says. I found him.
I paddle more quietly to the side of the boat. My dad’s back is turned, so I hoist myself up on the rail and spray him with a mouthful of salt water, then dive back under the waves before he can retaliate. He laughs and shouts at me, but I can’t hear the words this far under. I swim under the boat, twist under the rudder, and surface on the other side, feet away from a new boat.
Annie is staring down at me from the stern. Her hair doesn’t know which way to tangle and her chest doesn’t know which way to fall, and she wets her lips, covers her mouth. Her eyes are wide and shadowed, like she’s never seen me at all before.
“Hi,” I say, tread water and give her a little wave.
I think she says “Hi” too, but it’s small and choked in her throat and muffled by the hand on her lips.
I run my fingers through my hair, squeeze some of the excess water out, not that it makes much of a difference in the ocean. “New boat?”
She nods quickly. “Margaret.”
“She’s beautiful,” I say, swim to the side and give her a pat, the kind I’ve seen some people give to passing dolphins. She feels like a sturdy boat, smooth and solid and warmed from the sun, and well, I’m inclined to like her because of her name, anyway.
Annie ‘s hand falls from her cheek and she reaches over the edge towards me, but she’s too far up for our fingers to touch. “Mom and Emily picked her, but I named her.”
I nod, and almost reach for the rail to start climbing over the side before I realize I left my underwear on the other boat. I can stay in the water a while longer, that’s no hardship. “Want to come in?” I ask her. “The water’s great.”
Color fills her cheeks and she lifts her hand to cover them again. She stares at me over her fingers. Everything about her shines. “Yes?”
I laugh. “Is that a yes?”
She laughs and runs a hand through her hair, pushing it off her face. “Yes. I. Just--give me a second.” She ducks behind the rail of the boat and I realize she must be taking off her clothes. A moment later, she puts her hands on the rails and pulls herself back up, looks around for me. “Finnick?”
“Right here,” I say, propel myself out of the water, grab her wrist, and pull her in.
She shrieks, but the water cuts her off, so she sputters in my face instead, sprays me with salt. I hold her up until she finds her balance and then let go, swim away enough to splash her. She’s still short of breath but ducks under the waves, darts closer to me like she’s going to try and pull me under but she stops short just out of arm’s reach and comes up for air, red in the cheeks. I laugh and kick away, flip over on my back and check to see if she’s following me. She isn’t, she’s treading water and watching me, and I float back to her side. “Want to go a little farther out?”
I can hear her heart racing, even over the sounds of the ocean. Should I help her back onto the boat? She remembered how to swim in the Arena--and what if that’s what she’s seeing now, what if she sees a dome over her head instead of an open sky, hears screams cut short instead of the boat’s motor? I might as well ask Drusus to give me a full-body tattoo reading I SCREWED UP at this rate. That shouldn’t be funny. Annie isn’t laughing.
“Is this all right?” I ask. “You said you wanted to see the ocean again last time, and I thought--”
She doesn’t answer, only reaches out her hand towards me, touches her fingers to my ear. I smile and turn my head towards her, stroke the back of her hand. She’s keeping afloat, at least; her knees knock against mine as she treads water. She’s not shrinking against the hull. I swim backwards as slowly as I can, draw her away from the lee of the boats and out to the open water. “It’s the ocean,” I say. “You remember the ocean.”
Her fingers tighten in my hair. “No, it’s you.”
“What about me?”
“You’re here.”
I blink the water out of my eyes. “Is there somewhere else I should be?”
“No, no. You should be here.” She swims closer, but looks down between us and turns away, pulling us both a little farther out. “You weren’t. I didn’t know where you were.”
Rather than tease out where she thought I was, I say, “But I’m here now, right?”
Her hand slips down my cheek, her thumb presses against my lips. She doesn’t answer, sinks down in the water until it’s covering the red flush across her nose. Forget the comments about me being here or not here, I’m having a hard enough time figuring out what that meant. I touch my lips, try to recapture how she did it, but I can’t get it right. “Annie?”
She takes one look at my mouth and dives under, slips clean away from me and out of sight.
I can’t see through the waves to find out where she went, so I swim away, hover a little closer to the boats. She’ll need to surface for air soon, and then I’ll see where she went, she can’t swim that far away on one breath. I think. “Annie?” I call again, but only the waves answer. “Annie?”
She surfaces not too far from where we were, her hands coming up before her hair. She pushes it out of her eyes and she’s still blushing, but calmer, enough to float on her back just like in the river. She looks for me, lying back on the waves, and I kick my way over to her side. “Are you all right?”
“No,” she says. “But I want to be here.”
I nod, offer her my hand. She takes it, and our thumbs nudge together, slippery from the water. I take her other hand and draw her out so she’s stretched out on her stomach in front of me and kick for her so she doesn’t have to do much of the work, the way I used to teach people how to swim. It’s not that she needs to learn, she keeps up and follows me out without missing a beat, but she’s never looked me in the eyes this way before, never held on to my face the way she held on to my hands at the Capitol or my neck at the station.
I don’t know what she’s seeing. I want to.
“Finnick!” someone yells from the boats--from Annie’s boat.
I steer us in that direction. “Hello?”
“Just making sure it’s you out there!” Annie’s mother waves from the back of her boat. “Afternoon.”
“Afternoon,” I say. “And it’s us. Hey, Dad, I guess you know the Crestas now?”
He waves too, first at me and then at Annie’s mother. “Was hoping to make your acquaintance on land, but this’ll do fine.”
“I think so too. Glad to hear it.”
“Give me a minute, let me bring my wife out to meet you.”
“Parents,” I mutter to Annie, and she laughs. Her hands tighten on mine, and she ducks under, starts swimming us both back towards the boats.
***
Mags insists on walking off the train. Nobody in District 4 dares to disagree, even now. I wait on the platform, offer her my arm when she hobbles out. Her left foot drags across the wood; she tries her best to steer it around obstacles but ends up smacking it into a pole. I tighten my grip on her arm, steer her better. She’s getting used to it, I tell myself. She’s a little unsteady on her feet, that’s all. I smile at Mags, and she tries to return it. “Did they give you a rejuvenation treatment, too?” I ask her, and almost poke her in the ribs the way I used to before I remember that’s not the best idea right now. “Because you don’t look a day over twenty-five to me.”
She looks at me like I’ve grown fins and an extra set of teeth.
“Sorry,” I mutter, scuff my toes against the platform’s edge. “I--never mind. Welcome home, Mags.”
She smiles, shakes her head slowly, and holds my arm tighter as we near the platform stairs. Pike greets us with a single jerk of his head, the muscle in his jaw twitching, sweat staining the stiff collar of his shirt. His wife squeezes his hand, stares straight ahead as though she’s seeing through Mags, as if she’s still waiting for the train.
Mags reaches out to them with her free arm, and Pike stares soundlessly at it for long seconds before he shakes her hand. “It’s good that you came home,” he says. “You always hated the Capitol.”
She hadn’t been shaking his hand firmly, but her hand goes limp, and she withdraws it, looks her son in the eyes.
“Thank you,” Pike’s wife says quietly, “for doing all you could with Varin.”
It’s high tide, but I wish the sea would rise a little higher and swallow them up, sweep them away.
Mags has been a mentor since the 13th Hunger Games. This year’s were the 70th. I’m not the only victor she’s brought home in that time, but we’re still few and far between, and to think about how every other year she’d come back home and see the tributes’ families turn away when they passed her makes my skin crawl. I remember how it felt last year. Mags has felt that fifty times.
At least her son is trying to look at her.
***
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to reach you? I’ve been calling for the past three days. Where have you been, on a boat?”
“More or less,” I say, shift the phone to my other ear and grin, even if it’s wasted because Drusus can’t see. “You should see my hair.”
“No, I shouldn’t, because I’m certain if I did I’d be out of the job.” He waits a moment, and then asks, “Please tell me you haven’t gone ahead and cut it.”
“I haven’t.” I cover my mouth to muffle my snorts. It doesn’t work very well.
He sighs. “Let it grow out so I have something to work with when you come back in two months. Remember, there’s that gala, Gaius Frey is holding it this year, and then I have you for a spread in The Victarion--”
I twist the phone’s coil around my finger, pick at the knot I’ve formed in it. “The Victory Tour’s in four months, not two.”
“Yes, but as I said. Gaius’s sponsorship gala. And your spread in The Victarion. The issue’s supposed to go out before the tour, we’ll need you and possibly Annie, depending on whether that article gets cleared after all.”
What article? I almost ask, and then decide it isn’t important because there won’t be any article, because like hell I’m taking Annie to the Capitol to get dolled up until she disappears, shrinks and shrivels under the studio lights and cameras. “I’m not mentoring this year,” I say, flatly enough that I don’t open the issue up for debate. “And The Victarion can pull one of the photos of me already floating around, if they have to.”
“You’re not mentoring this year?”
“No. Brine agreed to.” Brine’s not flashy but he’s solid, paunchy around the middle and thinning at the top, with the broadest shoulders and firmest grip in District 4. He’ll do fine with whoever he’s assigned. “You should invite him to the gala.”
“Whether I invite him or not, I’m not the one that invited you. I’m just here to make sure when you show up, you’re at your best. Don’t negotiate your schedule with me, Finnick. I’m not the one who makes it.”
“I know,” I say, and have to ease up on the phone cord, because it’s cutting off the circulation to my finger. “So is my presence required or requested?”
“At the gala? Requested. In The Victarion, required.”
“Then I’ll skip the gala and give them a phone interview for The Victarion.” I sit down, stretch my feet out, crack my toes. My mother and aunts would yell at me to get my feet off the table if they were here, but they aren’t, so I revel in it for a while, lean back in my chair and close my eyes, the knots in my shoulders uncoiling for the first time in a week.
“Or The Victarion could come out to you, I suppose. Especially if they do need Annie for the shoot. If you’re not mentoring I’m sure she isn’t but, like it or not, she won. She’s got obligations before and after the Tour.”
My shoulders reknot, sharp and shudden, twist in ways they haven’t before and make my spine stiffen. The legs of my chair slam back onto the floor, and I jerk forward, snatch at the table’s edge and try to find my balance again. “Not after,” I say, speak slowly enough to convince myself, to ease whatever’s clawing at my chest. “There are enough female victors from Four, she won’t have to mentor.”
“But she’s supposed to attend the Games themselves, of course, and the President’s made it clear that he wants her in the Capitol if her reputation can be salvaged.”
“Drusus, she still won’t talk to anyone but me or her parents. She covers her ears and goes away and I still don’t always know what spooks her. She laughs at things I can’t hear, looks at things I can’t see. She won’t sleep unless one of us is sitting by her bed, and even then she wakes up sobbing--”
Echoes of my voice ring from the corners of the room. Damn. I rest my forehead in my free hand, drag it down my face, let my shoulders slump and hope I haven’t woken up Crescent or troubled any of my cousins. “Forget her reputation. I’m worried about her.”
Drusus doesn’t say anything for a long while, but I still hear him breathing. “You know,” he finally says, “you could bring her here. There might be something in the Capitol that can--”
I cut him off. “There isn’t.”
He sighs. “Fine. There isn’t. But you can’t stop the Tour. And she has to be ready for it.”
“I’ll do what I can, Dru.” I know better than to promise anything more than that.
“I know. And so will I.” And just when I think this has resolved, he goes on, “But you’re not off the hook. I can pass your cancellation on to Gaius’s people, but either you’re coming here or The Victarion’s coming to you. And I don’t know what the President is going to say if you don’t come to the Capitol at all between now and the Tour.”
I drum my fingers against the table: no rhythm, no pattern, just sound working its way out of me. “He can say I’m trying to cut down on unnecessary transportation costs in my District. Most victors don’t come to the Capitol at all between the Games and the Tour.”
“Most victors aren’t Finnick Odair.”
Good for them, I almost say, but can’t decide how it should sound. “Let them pine after me for a while. It never killed anyone.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “So I should tell The Victarion to come to you?”
I sigh. “If you must. And that’s all I’m doing before the Tour.”
“If you must,” he repeats. “I have to say, I’ll miss you.”
“Don’t worry, Dru. You’ll get sick of me before long on that train.”
***
A couple of weeks ago, my aunts figured out that if they left all the mending with Annie in the morning, they’d have time for everything else they had to do in a day. Aunt Ruth can’t get enough of it, praises Annie’s tiny and sturdy stitches, waves them in my cousins’ faces. Sometimes, if they aren’t at school and Annie is having a calmer day, they’ll sit and sew together, Annie and Helen and Lucy and Aidan, and they’ll ask Annie to look them over and help tie the tiny knots.
Today, they’re at school, and some of the mending is mine; I caught my pantsleg on an open grate in the town square and ripped it clean across the seam, and then it frayed on both sides when I tried to take them off. “X marks the spot,” Annie said when she first saw it. By now, it looks more like an L.
“This is why I don’t usually bother with them,” I say.
“Pants?”
“Pants.” I stretch my arms overhead, hiss as my back pops and releases. At the rate it’s been acting up lately, I’m going to walk hunched over like Uncle Jonas before I’m half his age. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth, most of the time.”
She laughs, and lifts them up to get a closer look at the stitches, or maybe to cover her face. “They hide things.”
I laugh, too. “What, is there something I need to hide?”
“No,” she says. “That’s why they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
I throw one of Uncle Niall’s shirts at her, and she bats it out of the way, still smiling. I like it when I know what she’s smiling at. She tucks a lock of hair behind her ears, picks up her needle and traces the stitches she’s already made, chews her tongue. I lean in, bat at one of the knots in the thread. “Who taught you how to do this?” I ask.
“Sew?”
“Yes.”
“Uncle John and Aunt Aisling,” she says. “He knows better which stitches go where, but she knew how to do them.”
I nod and watch her work for a while, gathering the fabric under her fingers and almost flicking the needle through, one small stitch at a time. The thread twists back, knots in on itself, and she smooths the stitches down, braces the new seam on her finger and squints to see that nothing shows through.
“I’m better with rope than thread,” I say, thumb at the hem of the pants she’s mending. “I always pulled too hard on it, and it snapped.” Or I’d jab the needle into my thumb, but she doesn’t need to know everything.
She laughs, pauses to bite her lip and tie a knot. “It’s not pulling, it’s stretching,” she says. “Like knives aren’t throwing, they’re reaching.”
I groan. “Now that’s a stretch.”
She shakes her head and draws the thread tight, looks me in the eyes and shows me. “A stretch. You wouldn’t pull your spine if you just wanted to make it a little longer.”
“I’m tall enough already,” I say, but follow the motion of her hands. “Show me?”
She offers me the needle, and the pants, then comes around behind me to take my hand. “Hold the fabric together, line the needle up against it pointing the way you want it to go.” I let the needle slip into the groove made by the seam, let her hands reposition mine. “Then move the fabric, not the needle. Hold the needle steady. It’s more like...” She trails off. Her hands shiver over mine, like something’s crawled up her fingers.
“Annie?”
“--like the tide,” she says. “Sorry. The tide pulls you out. The fabric pulls the needle.”
“The fabric pulls the needle,” I repeat, and lift the fabric up and then down just slightly, how she’s showing me. The stitch is much smaller than the ones I usually make.
“Now stretch it through,” she says. “Not the whole way, just until the needle’s through. Good. And bring it back, loop it through the thread, and then out. One half-hitch.”
I have to coax the thread into the shape I want, not force it there, I’m finding. Annie looks over my handiwork and makes a sound somewhere between a cluck and a hum. I can’t tell whether or not it’s approval, but it’s something, and whatever it is I’ll take it. I should get her to teach me to do other things, I think. Find shells, cook salmon, make traps out of fishing twine, see what she sees. It gives her something to focus on, calls her back better than anything else I’ve tried. This is the most she’s said to me in a row in weeks, and it’s nice not to have to pry answers out of her.
I make a second stitch like the first, repeat her instructions in my head, but her hands don’t guide mine, only rest on the backs of my knuckles like ghosts. “Doesn’t look too bad,” I say, hold the stitches up to the light. “Not as good as yours, though. You should make this your talent.”
“Talent?”
Did I ever explain talents to her? I don’t think so. I’ve had enough on my plate. “It’s something victors are supposed to have,” I explain. “You don’t have to work or go to school, so you figure out something else to do with your time. That’s your talent. Some people cook, some people pick up an instrument--I know Chaff carves and Beetee designs...something, I’ve never asked for the specifics.” I doubt I’d understand them if I did. “Sewing could be yours.”
She takes the pants and the needle back, nodding. “What’s yours?”
“Ropework, officially,” I say. “Weaving baskets and mats, rigging things up, braiding jewelry sometimes.” They’ve never asked me much about it on-camera, though, not for years.
“Then I could sew. They’ll ask?”
“They’ll ask. Enough of them know what sewing is that they might know what questions to ask you.” I smile, pat her arm.
She nods again, sits back down in her chair and goes back to mending. The L’s almost closed on one side, turning into an I. “I’m not sewing anything interesting.”
“My pants aren’t interesting?”
“They’re more trouble than they’re worth,” she laughs. “You said so.”
“I did.” I lace my fingers behind my head, rest against the wall, look up at the ceiling. “A lot of things are.”
She reaches the end of the thread and ties it off, the strand of hair she tucked away earlier slipping in front of her ear, and I can’t do it. She’s focused, she’s smiling, she’s laughed today, laughed at all my stupid jokes about my pants. I brought up her talent, that’s enough for one day, I can work my way up to the Victory Tour tomorrow. I can let her have this, at least, even if it’s only a quiet afternoon mending clothes.
“Finnick?”
I look down, and she’s turned away from threading her needle, hands limp in her lap.
“Finnick, where’d you go?”
“I’m here,” I say.
She stammers a little. “I know. But you weren’t.”
“I was thinking, that’s all.” I try to smile. “I guess I drifted.”
“You’re still there,” she says, and bows her head, threads the needle and knots the end of the thread.
Now I’ve upset her. Damn. “Annie, it’s all right, it really is--”
“You come here and you hide. What’s the point?”
“I’m not--” I sigh, run my hands through my hair, resist the urge to rip it out by the roots. (Drusus would give me the tongue-lashing of my life. I’d almost look forward to it.) “I’m trying not to, Annie. I’m trying to help.”
She’s not even listening any more, lost in the rhythm of her stitches.
“Annie, please. Look at me.”
Her hands still.
I’m going to regret this. “Do you want to know what I was thinking about?” I ask, and hope she says no.
She doesn’t say yes either, but she looks up, finds my eyes.
I can’t hide from hers. Here or not, she pins me where I am, fixes me in place and locks up everything: my feet, my chest, my throat. “The Victory Tour’s almost here,” I say, and instantly wish I could snatch those words out of the air.
“Oh,” she says, and looks back down at her sewing.
“You know what that is,” I say. She’s seen it televised her whole life. So have I.
She sews. Her stitches might be getting even tinier.
I go on, almost taste my foot in my mouth as I do. “You’ll get to see some of the other Districts. Not much of them, we only have about a night in each, but some. And some of them are beautiful--we’re going to Twelve first, and the town’s not much to look at but the woods beyond are so thick and dark...”
I trail off.
I should be thankful that she knots off the thread and holds the needle out of the way before she curls up, knees to her chest, and buries her face in her arms.
My stomach sinks to my knees but I cross to her side anyway, hold her shoulders, bring my face level with where hers would be if she was looking at me. “Annie?”
She shakes her head, covers her ears. The needle dangles by its thread, swings and bats against her leg.
“Annie,” I say, scoop up the needle before it sticks in her skin. “Annie, I need you here for this.”
“You said it was over,” she whispers.
I didn’t think it was possible for my stomach to plummet any lower, but it does. “The Arena is,” I say. “But--”
“--the Games aren’t.” She tangles her hands in her hair, screws her eyes shut. I weave my fingers between hers, try to loosen them, but she yanks her head away, drags her hair in front of her face and hides behind it.
“The Tour won’t last forever,” I say.
“That’s what you said about the Games.”
She was better, damn it, better just a moment ago. She was here, she was responsive, she was listening to me and joking with me and teaching me how to sew a seam, and I’ve dropped her into the Games again. Great. I slouch away from her, holding my head in my hands because I can’t keep it level anymore. “Annie. Please.” What am I asking her? Please what? Please listen to me? Please follow me? Please believe me once more, just once, once until I ask you to do it again?
“Please,” she echoes. She shakes her head, and it becomes a shiver that wracks her, all the way down the curve of her spine. “I don’t have a choice.”
***
I could sail out alone. If I came back before dawn, maybe no one would even notice. But it’s the kind of night where the clouds overhead make me think there won’t be dawn at all, and what few stars make it through cast haze instead of light. So I sit on the wharf, with the all the houses behind me, and the ocean swallowing up whatever glow even reaches the shore. I dangle my toes in the water; the cold shoots straight through my skin and chills me to the bone, but I grit my teeth and ease more of my feet in, inch by fraction of an inch, let the shock numb everything else. My teeth chatter hard enough that I’m afraid I’ll chip them, but I don’t.
Even the sea’s trying to push me out today.
The shivers build, wrack my body enough that I need to cling to the edge of the wharf so I won’t kick too hard and launch myself into the water. I keep my feet in, though, dig my nails into the wood until splinters threaten under them, push down and down again and wait for that to push everything else down, freeze the chorus of I screwed up, I screwed up in my head.
I know Annie’s walking down the gangway towards me. I don’t let go of the edge, but she lies down beside me, slips her head under my arm to rest against my thigh. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she murmurs.
The waves slap against my ankle, higher than I’ve reached before, and my foot jerks high enough out of the water that I almost crash my knee into Annie’s skull. Shivering, I scoot away from the edge, get my toes clear of the ocean. “I shouldn’t have sprung that on you,” I say.
She shakes her head, almost as quickly as I shivered. “You didn’t. I knew I have to go. I just didn’t want to.”
“I know.” Her hair slips in front of her face and I draw it back, gather it behind her ear. “I saw how happy you were earlier, and--” I shake my head. “I didn’t mean to take that away so soon.”
When she turns her face away again, that same strand I tucked back slips forward, over her cheek. “You never mean it.”
I sigh, tug her hair harder than I meant to and decide to let go of it if I’m going to be this careless around her. “I guess my track record’s pretty bad, isn’t it.”
“Yes.” She nods, and her chin digs into my thigh. “I just wish I knew what you did mean.”
“By what?”
“By what you do. Sometimes you’re not the one who does it.”
I blink, try to lean back to get more than a glimpse of her face under those tangles, but I can’t read her at all in this light. “I’m not the one who does it?” I repeat.
“You do things you don’t want to do. You do things you aren’t.”
It’s hard to deny that first charge, at least, even if I wanted to. Do I want to? I look out over the sea, search for some kind of shine off the waves to let me know where they are, what they look like, but the water’s darker than I’ve seen it in months, black and deep. “Sometimes you have to do that, Annie.”
“I know.” She buries her face against my thigh. “But you always do. I can see it.”
This isn’t the time for this conversation. I prop my hand under her chin, tilt it up. “I know you’ve heard this before, Annie, and I know it’s a lousy answer, but there are more important things than whether or not you want to, sometimes.”
Her eyes had been soft, apologetic. Now they harden. “I know,” she says. “That doesn’t make it less sad.”
“No,” I agree. “Guess it doesn’t.”
“So I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t want to go. I want--” Her throat shakes when she breathes. “--I want things that don’t matter. But you do. And I know I’m being difficult. I know I am. Difficult. And I’m sorry.”
“You’re not being difficult,” I say, “you’re having difficulties.” There is a difference, but not much of one in the way I say it.
She turns away, her cheek nestling into my palm, and I wish I could fling myself into Mags’s arms and say tell me what to do, tell me what to say, I’m only two years older than she is, why is it my responsibility. But I can’t drag Mags on the Victory Tour, and I can’t drag her out on a dock in the middle of the night, and Annie needs me. I swallow, run over what I know of her itinerary in my head. If she has to do this (and she does), I can warn her about what’s coming. At least she’ll know.
“It’s only a few weeks,” I say, “and the last stop is home. I can talk to the mayor about that one, if you want. We can have the party on a boat.” She brightens, but closes her eyes to keep it in. “A big one,” I continue, “with little boats docked on the side. We could steal one once the party starts to die down.”
“Just us?”
“Just us,” I say, stroke her temple. I still don’t know what to think about how she looks at me, how her face opens and searches and how her eyes draw me in. I think of diving, of how close the ocean presses around me the deeper I go, how long I could stay here without having to breathe. I wish I didn’t have to, wish I’d never have to come up for air again, wish I couldn’t find a bottom to the depths of her eyes.
Somewhere in the distance, a boat’s horn sounds softly.
“But it won’t be just us for the rest of the Tour. You know that, right?” I say, and pray she does.
“I know,” she whispers. “I know you won’t be there at all.”
My hand falls into my lap, and I stare at the sea again, wait for the night to break.
---
--
.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [5/9] ( or read the whole thing at AO3 )
Authors: puella_nerdii and mithrigil
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Characters: Finnick/Annie; Mags, Haymitch, Johanna, Snow, various victors and denizens of the Capitol, and original characters.
Words: About 61000 in total. This chapter, ~8000.
Rating: R (expected THG violence, sexuality, recreational drug use, forced prostitution)
Spoilers: Backstory revealed in Mockingjay.
Summary: Finnick decides that, come hell or high water, he is bringing his tribute home from the seventieth Hunger Games. That tribute is Annie Cresta. But Finnick never thought that he would have to choose between bringing her home and keeping her safe, and he wants both. How Annie Cresta crept up on Finnick Odair.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine
Chapter Five: Black Sails for Homecoming Finnick returns to his family, but even his life outside the Capitol is slipping out of his control.
I shut the door behind me as quietly as possible, but not quietly enough. “Finnick!” twelve voices chorus when the lock clicks into place--more like ten than twelve, Patrick and Timothy haven’t quite figured out how to say my name yet. They join the stampede down the stairs, though, and my cousins scamper towards me, nearly sweep me off my feet. Jamie and Maeve cling to my legs, Connor and Lindsay tug my arms, and Katie, who’s really too old for this, jumps on my back.
“Oof!” I say, but right myself before I fall on my cousins, and ruffle Connor’s curls. “Hey, squid.”
“Don’t call me that!” he says, scrunches up his face and tries to squirm out from under my hand. Katie’s laughter shrieks in my ear.
“I saw you lots on the television,” Laura says, hanging back from the tangle. “I liked the blue suit. Not the black one.”
“Aunt Hannah says you’ll freeze in the Capitol if you don’t put on a shirt,” Aidan adds helpfully.
Right, I haven’t run the gauntlet of aunts yet. I steel myself for that.
Someone tugs on my hair. “It’s too long,” Helen says. She must be the only one tall enough to reach.
“It’s in style in the Capitol.” I neglect to mention I’m the one who set the style.
“It’s longer than mine in front,” she complains. “Aunt Ruth says it’ll get tangled in the grates.”
“I’ll let her trim it,” I say, and smile. What Drusus doesn’t know won’t hurt him. By the time I get back to the Capitol it’ll have grown out.
Helen gives my hair one more tug, then kisses me on the cheek and steps back. She’s the oldest after me, and little Timothy and Patrick call her an aunt sometimes. Crescent might, too, once she learns how to talk. “Is Crescent asleep?” I ask.
“No, Aunt Coral has her, she woke up a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah, she was crying and crying!” Jamie sounds altogether too cheerful about that. “She never stops. I think it keeps the squids away.”
“I’m not a squid!” Connor yells.
Lucy pokes him in the ribs and shouts, “Squid!” I feel bad for the poor kid, it must be hell growing up with two older sisters. His eyes do bulge like a squid’s, though, especially when he’s about to cry. Then Katie gets in on the poking too, and Patrick and Timothy even though they probably don’t understand what’s going on, and Roarke shouts at them to knock it off and stop but it only gets louder. And then Aidan and Maeve are tugging on my arms and my jacket and asking “Finnick, what did you bring me from the Capitol?”
The door to the kitchen flies open, and my aunts are silhouetted in a burst of light. “He walks through the door and you pounce on him like a pack of wild animals!” Aunt Ruth may be the smallest of them, but she glowers the best, and Aidan and Maeve take shelter behind me. “I thought Finnick had cousins, not beasts.”
“I do,” I say. “It’s all right, I’m glad to see them, too.”
“And he said he’d let you cut his hair!” Lindsay says. I see she hasn’t stopped echoing Helen.
“Ma, they’re still calling me a squid!”
“One at a time,” Aunt Hannah says, strides out from the back and brandishes her rolling pin. “Give us all some air. Sorry, Finnick, been a long day for them.”
“They didn’t show you arriving at the station this year,” Aunt Coral says, bouncing baby Crescent a little in her arms to shush her. “And then someone told the little ones that the Capitol had snatched you up for good,” she adds, glares sidelong at Aunt Shannon, who purses her lips like she’s swallowed a lemon.
“I took a while getting back, that’s all.” I shrug, manage to dislodge Katie. “There wasn’t much to show this year.”
All my aunts cluck at once. I don’t know how they do that.
“Probably for the best, after what that poor girl’s been through,” Coral says.
“Is that the crazy one, Ma?” Jamie asks, before Laura and Maeve swat him and whisper Jamie! We’re not supposed to call her that.
I kneel so I’m at Jamie’s level. “She’s not crazy,” I say. “She needs some time to get back on her feet.”
“Is she going to be moving in next door?” Roarke asks.
“Her and her family. She has a little sister about Lindsay’s age.”
“Great,” Roarke says, wrinkles his nose. “More girls. Just what we need.”
“Oh,” I say, “they’re not so bad,” and give him the kind of wink that makes Helen scoff and Katie and Lucy shriek with laughter.
“Roarke’s got a girlfriend!” Katie squeals, and Lucy joins in too. “Roarke’s got a girlfriend!”
“Shut up, I haven’t even met her!”
I bite my fist to keep from laughing too much. I don’t get to spend much time with kids in the Capitol, unless you count the tributes, which I don’t. Come to think of it, I don’t see kids in the Capitol much at all; I know people have them, enough of them mention children offhandedly, but their kids are always off at school or with a nanny or getting shuttled to some activity or childcare center or sport. I do remember standing in Bianca Greendown’s kitchen trying to figure out how her coffeemaker worked when her son got home early from violin practice, spent ten seconds staring at me in shock, and yelled “Mommy, why is Finnick Odair making coffee in our kitchen?” at the top of his lungs. I wish I’d gotten to have more of a conversation with him. He seemed like a funny kid.
(Bianca writes television programs and commercials, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw an actor playing me on television a few months later, fighting with a newer model of that same brand of coffeemaker. “Mommy, why is Finnick Odair making coffee in our kitchen?” “It’s the Avox’s day off, dear!” The studio audience howled their heads off.)
“You’ll have plenty of time to later,” I say, and Roarke claps his hands over his ears.
I grip Maeve’s hand tighter than I meant to, because she yelps.
“Don’t all go over there at once, though, all right? Give Annie and her family time to settle in.” She should almost be finished moving, unless she and her family decided to bring everything over themselves and not rope in any help. I can’t imagine doing that, but what do I know about her family, other than the little she told me and what I saw at the station?
“That poor girl’s had enough people gawping at her.” Aunt Coral shifts Crescent to her hip to slap Roarke’s shoulder. “That goes for all of you lot, do you hear? I won’t have you scaring her overboard.”
“Yes, Aunt Coral,” most of them say, though Laura and Aidan and Jamie substitute “Mommy” for that last part, and Katie and Lucy are a beat behind everyone else. “But we can still see her, right?” Katie asks.
“When she’s ready,” Aunt Coral says. Thank you, I mouth to her over my cousins’ heads. She winks.
“All right, you.” Aunt Shannon claps her hands at everyone. “Now let Finnick get through the door and sit down.”
“But he hasn’t told us what he brought for us yet!” Jamie says.
“He won’t bring you anything at all if you don’t scoot,” Aunt Ruth says. “And some of you still have a few nets to mend.”
“Ma!” Connor’s eyes open wide, start to darken and tear up, and the way he puckers his lips bears an uncanny resemblance to a squid’s beak.
“Don’t you Ma me,” she says. “Now scoot.”
Grumbling, and shooting me the most forlorn looks I’ve seen since Johanna’s time in the Arena, my cousins trudge back up the stairs.
Aunt Coral sweeps me into a hug. “We are glad to see you, Finnick dear.” Crescent coos her agreement in my ear.
“Can I hold her?” I ask.
“After she’s calmed down a little more.”
“And after you’ve taken a load off,” Aunt Shannon adds. They usher me into the kitchen, which has full picture windows and a table that face the ocean, and Aunt Hannah shoves a plate of something warm at me, dusts the flour from her sleeves, and commands me to eat.
“You been to see your mother yet?” Aunt Ruth asks before I’ve so much as torn open the bread.
“I wanted to drop things off here first,” I say. The best thing about Aunt Hannah’s bread is that it never needs butter or oil, and the salt’s always enough on its own. “Is she out on the boat?”
“Since yesterday,” Aunt Shannon says. “I can’t say I blame her. I watched that interview and I didn’t want to see any more either.”
I set Aunt Hannah’s bread down, nudge my plate to the side. I’d spit out the piece in my mouth--the salt’s gone sour--but my aunts would never forgive me for wasting food like that, no matter how much of it we have now. “I’m not proud of that,” I say.
Aunt Hannah clucks at me, shakes her head. “Pulling her through, you mean? Finnick, you brought the girl home! I’d be proud as anything.”
“It’s complicated.” I sigh. “You remember how it was for me. This isn’t the end. There’s her Victory Tour, at the very least.”
“Well, the salt air should do the poor dear some good,” Aunt Coral says. “Maybe things will have blown over by then.”
“I hope so,” I say, but you can hope for anything. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen.
My aunts watch me until I finish everything on my plate. That hasn’t changed.
***
“So it all happened at once.” My mother shuts her eyes, takes a sip of her tea. “Varin, Annie, and Mags, all in one stroke.”
I set my cup down. The tea’s lost most of its heat. “Literally.”
“I only heard about Mags when Pike came by to tell me and your father.” She grimaces. “You’d think the Capitol would care about the oldest living victor.”
“She spent most of the rest of the Games recovering from her stroke,” I say. “She couldn’t be as visible as they wanted her to be, so they dropped her.”
“It’s hateful. They’ll show young people slaughtering each other, but they can’t show dignity in old age.”
I’m glad, suddenly, for the mile of ocean separating us from the shore. “They don’t like old age in the Capitol.”
“They don’t. Not old age, and not sickness...” She trails off and drinks, her knuckles edged in white.
I know what she’s going to say, but it’s worth asking, the way I do every year. “I could get you to one of the doctors.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me that I’d let their kind fix,” she says, and smiles at me. “I may not be whole, but I’m certainly not broken.”
“No. You’re not.” I reach across the table, lace her fingers with mine. Her legs have withered but her hands are strong as ever, steady and firm and warm, able to braid rope and haul in nets. No, this isn’t what it looks like when they break you.
She pats the back of my hand. “So. Tell me about this Annie Cresta. Is she settled in next door yet?”
“She’s mostly finished moving.” I pull my hand away and pick up my cup again but don’t drink, just roll it between my palms, trace the rim. “Settled--I don’t know.”
“They interviewed her family before the flood. They seem like strong people, good neighbors. You tell them that if there’s anything we can do to make it easier for them, we will.”
I nod. It’s a calm night. The tea in my cup tilts side to side with the motion of the boat, fractions of an inch either way, but the surface of the tea is still smooth enough to see my reflection in. I could close my eyes and drift if I wanted, let the waves rock me to sleep the way they used to when I was little. My father used to throw his coat over me when I dozed off on the boat, bundle me up and carry me belowdecks to my mother, and I’d wake up to her humming one of Mags’s songs. I don’t think I can fit under my father’s coat anymore. Is he sleeping on the deck right now? Maybe I’ll end up carrying him to bed.
“She should get a boat,” I say, turn the teacup around again. “Her own, I mean. She has more than enough for two: one for her family, one for her.”
“Is she well enough to sail out alone?”
“I think she’d get better if she did.” She shouldn’t sail alone now, I doubt she can handle a boat on her own if she’s anything like she was the last time I saw her, but being in the sea would help. Lying on deck, the sun beaming down, the waves supporting her from beneath.
“But I’d worry about her not coming back, the way I used to worry about you.” My mother smiles, tilts her head as if to say she doesn’t worry any more. “So. Is she as lovely as she looked on television?”
I shake my head. “It’s not like that.”
“That’s not what I’m asking, dear. I just think she’s striking.”
I lean back in my chair, thinking, and the sway of the boat drags me back further. Striking? Haunting, I’d have said if anyone asked. Never mind Drusus’s handiwork, the smudged makeup and yards of floating fabric, I can’t forget the way she looked in the Arena, the tangle of her hair, the sharp shadows under her eyes, the bones in her fingers protruding as she dragged Telluria down. Striking, though. I consider that. I think of her eyes again, how looking into them is like looking into the ocean.
“There was a moment before the flood,” my mother says, “when she was floating in the reservoir, before you sent her the medicine. She was injured, and it was awful, but in the river, clothing and all--it was beautiful. She smiled, like she forgot where she was and what she was there to do.” She sighs. “If it weren’t for the Games, and the cuts on her face, I would have thought she was just a girl in a river.”
“She is beautiful,” I say slowly, setting my cup down. “I didn’t think about it then, but she is.”
My mother finishes her tea and sets the cup down. “Well, it’s a good thing you weren’t thinking about it. You brought her home, Finnick. You helped keep that girl alive. And I don’t need any more reasons to love you, and to be thankful every day that you survived the Games and came back home to us, but if I ever needed another reason this girl would be it.”
I can’t tell my mother why I put my face in my hands and start shaking, but I don’t have to. She’s my mother. She holds me until I ride it out.
***
The District is barely in sight. We’re still out past the first buoy and the sun is high, shining almost straight down on the water so that the surface is nearly white. I dip my hand in the spray and laugh as it slaps my palm. It feels like the water’s shooting straight out from my fingers, that I’m directing it, making it rise and fall and scatter.
It’s a crime to stay dry on a day like this.
“Dad,” I say, “I’m going in.”
He laughs. “Can’t blame you. Should I drop anchor?”
I crane my head; the shoreline’s a vague shape in the distance, but I can’t make out any specific markers. “You should. I’m not sure how far out we are.”
He nods, cuts the motor and brings us around, and everything slows.
The sun blazes down on my back, and I strip off my shoes, shorts, underwear. I get a running start off the prow, the heat from the deck stinging the soles of my feet, and dive in. My body arcs, and I’m suspended in the air for a shining moment, hanging between sea and sky. Then the water rushes up below me and welcomes me in, eases all the stings away. I spread my arms and legs as wide as I can and spiral down, down, down until my ears feel ready to burst. I know better than to surface quickly after a dive like that, but when my head breaks through the waves I fling it back, scatter droplets of water everywhere, breathe in the salt and seaweed around me.
I swim laps around the boat as fast as I can--no particular stroke, I can’t stick to one. I butterfly-kick, whip my arms forward in a breaststroke, flip on my back and reach my arms as far overhead as I can. I turn somersaults in the water, see how tightly I can coil myself and how high I can spring up when I release. Bracing my feet on the side of the boat, I push off and shoot straight back. I can’t laugh, I don’t want to get water in my lungs, but I don’t need to. The ocean is laughing with me, bearing me aloft and showing me off to the sun. He’s home, it says. I found him.
I paddle more quietly to the side of the boat. My dad’s back is turned, so I hoist myself up on the rail and spray him with a mouthful of salt water, then dive back under the waves before he can retaliate. He laughs and shouts at me, but I can’t hear the words this far under. I swim under the boat, twist under the rudder, and surface on the other side, feet away from a new boat.
Annie is staring down at me from the stern. Her hair doesn’t know which way to tangle and her chest doesn’t know which way to fall, and she wets her lips, covers her mouth. Her eyes are wide and shadowed, like she’s never seen me at all before.
“Hi,” I say, tread water and give her a little wave.
I think she says “Hi” too, but it’s small and choked in her throat and muffled by the hand on her lips.
I run my fingers through my hair, squeeze some of the excess water out, not that it makes much of a difference in the ocean. “New boat?”
She nods quickly. “Margaret.”
“She’s beautiful,” I say, swim to the side and give her a pat, the kind I’ve seen some people give to passing dolphins. She feels like a sturdy boat, smooth and solid and warmed from the sun, and well, I’m inclined to like her because of her name, anyway.
Annie ‘s hand falls from her cheek and she reaches over the edge towards me, but she’s too far up for our fingers to touch. “Mom and Emily picked her, but I named her.”
I nod, and almost reach for the rail to start climbing over the side before I realize I left my underwear on the other boat. I can stay in the water a while longer, that’s no hardship. “Want to come in?” I ask her. “The water’s great.”
Color fills her cheeks and she lifts her hand to cover them again. She stares at me over her fingers. Everything about her shines. “Yes?”
I laugh. “Is that a yes?”
She laughs and runs a hand through her hair, pushing it off her face. “Yes. I. Just--give me a second.” She ducks behind the rail of the boat and I realize she must be taking off her clothes. A moment later, she puts her hands on the rails and pulls herself back up, looks around for me. “Finnick?”
“Right here,” I say, propel myself out of the water, grab her wrist, and pull her in.
She shrieks, but the water cuts her off, so she sputters in my face instead, sprays me with salt. I hold her up until she finds her balance and then let go, swim away enough to splash her. She’s still short of breath but ducks under the waves, darts closer to me like she’s going to try and pull me under but she stops short just out of arm’s reach and comes up for air, red in the cheeks. I laugh and kick away, flip over on my back and check to see if she’s following me. She isn’t, she’s treading water and watching me, and I float back to her side. “Want to go a little farther out?”
I can hear her heart racing, even over the sounds of the ocean. Should I help her back onto the boat? She remembered how to swim in the Arena--and what if that’s what she’s seeing now, what if she sees a dome over her head instead of an open sky, hears screams cut short instead of the boat’s motor? I might as well ask Drusus to give me a full-body tattoo reading I SCREWED UP at this rate. That shouldn’t be funny. Annie isn’t laughing.
“Is this all right?” I ask. “You said you wanted to see the ocean again last time, and I thought--”
She doesn’t answer, only reaches out her hand towards me, touches her fingers to my ear. I smile and turn my head towards her, stroke the back of her hand. She’s keeping afloat, at least; her knees knock against mine as she treads water. She’s not shrinking against the hull. I swim backwards as slowly as I can, draw her away from the lee of the boats and out to the open water. “It’s the ocean,” I say. “You remember the ocean.”
Her fingers tighten in my hair. “No, it’s you.”
“What about me?”
“You’re here.”
I blink the water out of my eyes. “Is there somewhere else I should be?”
“No, no. You should be here.” She swims closer, but looks down between us and turns away, pulling us both a little farther out. “You weren’t. I didn’t know where you were.”
Rather than tease out where she thought I was, I say, “But I’m here now, right?”
Her hand slips down my cheek, her thumb presses against my lips. She doesn’t answer, sinks down in the water until it’s covering the red flush across her nose. Forget the comments about me being here or not here, I’m having a hard enough time figuring out what that meant. I touch my lips, try to recapture how she did it, but I can’t get it right. “Annie?”
She takes one look at my mouth and dives under, slips clean away from me and out of sight.
I can’t see through the waves to find out where she went, so I swim away, hover a little closer to the boats. She’ll need to surface for air soon, and then I’ll see where she went, she can’t swim that far away on one breath. I think. “Annie?” I call again, but only the waves answer. “Annie?”
She surfaces not too far from where we were, her hands coming up before her hair. She pushes it out of her eyes and she’s still blushing, but calmer, enough to float on her back just like in the river. She looks for me, lying back on the waves, and I kick my way over to her side. “Are you all right?”
“No,” she says. “But I want to be here.”
I nod, offer her my hand. She takes it, and our thumbs nudge together, slippery from the water. I take her other hand and draw her out so she’s stretched out on her stomach in front of me and kick for her so she doesn’t have to do much of the work, the way I used to teach people how to swim. It’s not that she needs to learn, she keeps up and follows me out without missing a beat, but she’s never looked me in the eyes this way before, never held on to my face the way she held on to my hands at the Capitol or my neck at the station.
I don’t know what she’s seeing. I want to.
“Finnick!” someone yells from the boats--from Annie’s boat.
I steer us in that direction. “Hello?”
“Just making sure it’s you out there!” Annie’s mother waves from the back of her boat. “Afternoon.”
“Afternoon,” I say. “And it’s us. Hey, Dad, I guess you know the Crestas now?”
He waves too, first at me and then at Annie’s mother. “Was hoping to make your acquaintance on land, but this’ll do fine.”
“I think so too. Glad to hear it.”
“Give me a minute, let me bring my wife out to meet you.”
“Parents,” I mutter to Annie, and she laughs. Her hands tighten on mine, and she ducks under, starts swimming us both back towards the boats.
***
Mags insists on walking off the train. Nobody in District 4 dares to disagree, even now. I wait on the platform, offer her my arm when she hobbles out. Her left foot drags across the wood; she tries her best to steer it around obstacles but ends up smacking it into a pole. I tighten my grip on her arm, steer her better. She’s getting used to it, I tell myself. She’s a little unsteady on her feet, that’s all. I smile at Mags, and she tries to return it. “Did they give you a rejuvenation treatment, too?” I ask her, and almost poke her in the ribs the way I used to before I remember that’s not the best idea right now. “Because you don’t look a day over twenty-five to me.”
She looks at me like I’ve grown fins and an extra set of teeth.
“Sorry,” I mutter, scuff my toes against the platform’s edge. “I--never mind. Welcome home, Mags.”
She smiles, shakes her head slowly, and holds my arm tighter as we near the platform stairs. Pike greets us with a single jerk of his head, the muscle in his jaw twitching, sweat staining the stiff collar of his shirt. His wife squeezes his hand, stares straight ahead as though she’s seeing through Mags, as if she’s still waiting for the train.
Mags reaches out to them with her free arm, and Pike stares soundlessly at it for long seconds before he shakes her hand. “It’s good that you came home,” he says. “You always hated the Capitol.”
She hadn’t been shaking his hand firmly, but her hand goes limp, and she withdraws it, looks her son in the eyes.
“Thank you,” Pike’s wife says quietly, “for doing all you could with Varin.”
It’s high tide, but I wish the sea would rise a little higher and swallow them up, sweep them away.
Mags has been a mentor since the 13th Hunger Games. This year’s were the 70th. I’m not the only victor she’s brought home in that time, but we’re still few and far between, and to think about how every other year she’d come back home and see the tributes’ families turn away when they passed her makes my skin crawl. I remember how it felt last year. Mags has felt that fifty times.
At least her son is trying to look at her.
***
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to reach you? I’ve been calling for the past three days. Where have you been, on a boat?”
“More or less,” I say, shift the phone to my other ear and grin, even if it’s wasted because Drusus can’t see. “You should see my hair.”
“No, I shouldn’t, because I’m certain if I did I’d be out of the job.” He waits a moment, and then asks, “Please tell me you haven’t gone ahead and cut it.”
“I haven’t.” I cover my mouth to muffle my snorts. It doesn’t work very well.
He sighs. “Let it grow out so I have something to work with when you come back in two months. Remember, there’s that gala, Gaius Frey is holding it this year, and then I have you for a spread in The Victarion--”
I twist the phone’s coil around my finger, pick at the knot I’ve formed in it. “The Victory Tour’s in four months, not two.”
“Yes, but as I said. Gaius’s sponsorship gala. And your spread in The Victarion. The issue’s supposed to go out before the tour, we’ll need you and possibly Annie, depending on whether that article gets cleared after all.”
What article? I almost ask, and then decide it isn’t important because there won’t be any article, because like hell I’m taking Annie to the Capitol to get dolled up until she disappears, shrinks and shrivels under the studio lights and cameras. “I’m not mentoring this year,” I say, flatly enough that I don’t open the issue up for debate. “And The Victarion can pull one of the photos of me already floating around, if they have to.”
“You’re not mentoring this year?”
“No. Brine agreed to.” Brine’s not flashy but he’s solid, paunchy around the middle and thinning at the top, with the broadest shoulders and firmest grip in District 4. He’ll do fine with whoever he’s assigned. “You should invite him to the gala.”
“Whether I invite him or not, I’m not the one that invited you. I’m just here to make sure when you show up, you’re at your best. Don’t negotiate your schedule with me, Finnick. I’m not the one who makes it.”
“I know,” I say, and have to ease up on the phone cord, because it’s cutting off the circulation to my finger. “So is my presence required or requested?”
“At the gala? Requested. In The Victarion, required.”
“Then I’ll skip the gala and give them a phone interview for The Victarion.” I sit down, stretch my feet out, crack my toes. My mother and aunts would yell at me to get my feet off the table if they were here, but they aren’t, so I revel in it for a while, lean back in my chair and close my eyes, the knots in my shoulders uncoiling for the first time in a week.
“Or The Victarion could come out to you, I suppose. Especially if they do need Annie for the shoot. If you’re not mentoring I’m sure she isn’t but, like it or not, she won. She’s got obligations before and after the Tour.”
My shoulders reknot, sharp and shudden, twist in ways they haven’t before and make my spine stiffen. The legs of my chair slam back onto the floor, and I jerk forward, snatch at the table’s edge and try to find my balance again. “Not after,” I say, speak slowly enough to convince myself, to ease whatever’s clawing at my chest. “There are enough female victors from Four, she won’t have to mentor.”
“But she’s supposed to attend the Games themselves, of course, and the President’s made it clear that he wants her in the Capitol if her reputation can be salvaged.”
“Drusus, she still won’t talk to anyone but me or her parents. She covers her ears and goes away and I still don’t always know what spooks her. She laughs at things I can’t hear, looks at things I can’t see. She won’t sleep unless one of us is sitting by her bed, and even then she wakes up sobbing--”
Echoes of my voice ring from the corners of the room. Damn. I rest my forehead in my free hand, drag it down my face, let my shoulders slump and hope I haven’t woken up Crescent or troubled any of my cousins. “Forget her reputation. I’m worried about her.”
Drusus doesn’t say anything for a long while, but I still hear him breathing. “You know,” he finally says, “you could bring her here. There might be something in the Capitol that can--”
I cut him off. “There isn’t.”
He sighs. “Fine. There isn’t. But you can’t stop the Tour. And she has to be ready for it.”
“I’ll do what I can, Dru.” I know better than to promise anything more than that.
“I know. And so will I.” And just when I think this has resolved, he goes on, “But you’re not off the hook. I can pass your cancellation on to Gaius’s people, but either you’re coming here or The Victarion’s coming to you. And I don’t know what the President is going to say if you don’t come to the Capitol at all between now and the Tour.”
I drum my fingers against the table: no rhythm, no pattern, just sound working its way out of me. “He can say I’m trying to cut down on unnecessary transportation costs in my District. Most victors don’t come to the Capitol at all between the Games and the Tour.”
“Most victors aren’t Finnick Odair.”
Good for them, I almost say, but can’t decide how it should sound. “Let them pine after me for a while. It never killed anyone.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “So I should tell The Victarion to come to you?”
I sigh. “If you must. And that’s all I’m doing before the Tour.”
“If you must,” he repeats. “I have to say, I’ll miss you.”
“Don’t worry, Dru. You’ll get sick of me before long on that train.”
***
A couple of weeks ago, my aunts figured out that if they left all the mending with Annie in the morning, they’d have time for everything else they had to do in a day. Aunt Ruth can’t get enough of it, praises Annie’s tiny and sturdy stitches, waves them in my cousins’ faces. Sometimes, if they aren’t at school and Annie is having a calmer day, they’ll sit and sew together, Annie and Helen and Lucy and Aidan, and they’ll ask Annie to look them over and help tie the tiny knots.
Today, they’re at school, and some of the mending is mine; I caught my pantsleg on an open grate in the town square and ripped it clean across the seam, and then it frayed on both sides when I tried to take them off. “X marks the spot,” Annie said when she first saw it. By now, it looks more like an L.
“This is why I don’t usually bother with them,” I say.
“Pants?”
“Pants.” I stretch my arms overhead, hiss as my back pops and releases. At the rate it’s been acting up lately, I’m going to walk hunched over like Uncle Jonas before I’m half his age. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth, most of the time.”
She laughs, and lifts them up to get a closer look at the stitches, or maybe to cover her face. “They hide things.”
I laugh, too. “What, is there something I need to hide?”
“No,” she says. “That’s why they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
I throw one of Uncle Niall’s shirts at her, and she bats it out of the way, still smiling. I like it when I know what she’s smiling at. She tucks a lock of hair behind her ears, picks up her needle and traces the stitches she’s already made, chews her tongue. I lean in, bat at one of the knots in the thread. “Who taught you how to do this?” I ask.
“Sew?”
“Yes.”
“Uncle John and Aunt Aisling,” she says. “He knows better which stitches go where, but she knew how to do them.”
I nod and watch her work for a while, gathering the fabric under her fingers and almost flicking the needle through, one small stitch at a time. The thread twists back, knots in on itself, and she smooths the stitches down, braces the new seam on her finger and squints to see that nothing shows through.
“I’m better with rope than thread,” I say, thumb at the hem of the pants she’s mending. “I always pulled too hard on it, and it snapped.” Or I’d jab the needle into my thumb, but she doesn’t need to know everything.
She laughs, pauses to bite her lip and tie a knot. “It’s not pulling, it’s stretching,” she says. “Like knives aren’t throwing, they’re reaching.”
I groan. “Now that’s a stretch.”
She shakes her head and draws the thread tight, looks me in the eyes and shows me. “A stretch. You wouldn’t pull your spine if you just wanted to make it a little longer.”
“I’m tall enough already,” I say, but follow the motion of her hands. “Show me?”
She offers me the needle, and the pants, then comes around behind me to take my hand. “Hold the fabric together, line the needle up against it pointing the way you want it to go.” I let the needle slip into the groove made by the seam, let her hands reposition mine. “Then move the fabric, not the needle. Hold the needle steady. It’s more like...” She trails off. Her hands shiver over mine, like something’s crawled up her fingers.
“Annie?”
“--like the tide,” she says. “Sorry. The tide pulls you out. The fabric pulls the needle.”
“The fabric pulls the needle,” I repeat, and lift the fabric up and then down just slightly, how she’s showing me. The stitch is much smaller than the ones I usually make.
“Now stretch it through,” she says. “Not the whole way, just until the needle’s through. Good. And bring it back, loop it through the thread, and then out. One half-hitch.”
I have to coax the thread into the shape I want, not force it there, I’m finding. Annie looks over my handiwork and makes a sound somewhere between a cluck and a hum. I can’t tell whether or not it’s approval, but it’s something, and whatever it is I’ll take it. I should get her to teach me to do other things, I think. Find shells, cook salmon, make traps out of fishing twine, see what she sees. It gives her something to focus on, calls her back better than anything else I’ve tried. This is the most she’s said to me in a row in weeks, and it’s nice not to have to pry answers out of her.
I make a second stitch like the first, repeat her instructions in my head, but her hands don’t guide mine, only rest on the backs of my knuckles like ghosts. “Doesn’t look too bad,” I say, hold the stitches up to the light. “Not as good as yours, though. You should make this your talent.”
“Talent?”
Did I ever explain talents to her? I don’t think so. I’ve had enough on my plate. “It’s something victors are supposed to have,” I explain. “You don’t have to work or go to school, so you figure out something else to do with your time. That’s your talent. Some people cook, some people pick up an instrument--I know Chaff carves and Beetee designs...something, I’ve never asked for the specifics.” I doubt I’d understand them if I did. “Sewing could be yours.”
She takes the pants and the needle back, nodding. “What’s yours?”
“Ropework, officially,” I say. “Weaving baskets and mats, rigging things up, braiding jewelry sometimes.” They’ve never asked me much about it on-camera, though, not for years.
“Then I could sew. They’ll ask?”
“They’ll ask. Enough of them know what sewing is that they might know what questions to ask you.” I smile, pat her arm.
She nods again, sits back down in her chair and goes back to mending. The L’s almost closed on one side, turning into an I. “I’m not sewing anything interesting.”
“My pants aren’t interesting?”
“They’re more trouble than they’re worth,” she laughs. “You said so.”
“I did.” I lace my fingers behind my head, rest against the wall, look up at the ceiling. “A lot of things are.”
She reaches the end of the thread and ties it off, the strand of hair she tucked away earlier slipping in front of her ear, and I can’t do it. She’s focused, she’s smiling, she’s laughed today, laughed at all my stupid jokes about my pants. I brought up her talent, that’s enough for one day, I can work my way up to the Victory Tour tomorrow. I can let her have this, at least, even if it’s only a quiet afternoon mending clothes.
“Finnick?”
I look down, and she’s turned away from threading her needle, hands limp in her lap.
“Finnick, where’d you go?”
“I’m here,” I say.
She stammers a little. “I know. But you weren’t.”
“I was thinking, that’s all.” I try to smile. “I guess I drifted.”
“You’re still there,” she says, and bows her head, threads the needle and knots the end of the thread.
Now I’ve upset her. Damn. “Annie, it’s all right, it really is--”
“You come here and you hide. What’s the point?”
“I’m not--” I sigh, run my hands through my hair, resist the urge to rip it out by the roots. (Drusus would give me the tongue-lashing of my life. I’d almost look forward to it.) “I’m trying not to, Annie. I’m trying to help.”
She’s not even listening any more, lost in the rhythm of her stitches.
“Annie, please. Look at me.”
Her hands still.
I’m going to regret this. “Do you want to know what I was thinking about?” I ask, and hope she says no.
She doesn’t say yes either, but she looks up, finds my eyes.
I can’t hide from hers. Here or not, she pins me where I am, fixes me in place and locks up everything: my feet, my chest, my throat. “The Victory Tour’s almost here,” I say, and instantly wish I could snatch those words out of the air.
“Oh,” she says, and looks back down at her sewing.
“You know what that is,” I say. She’s seen it televised her whole life. So have I.
She sews. Her stitches might be getting even tinier.
I go on, almost taste my foot in my mouth as I do. “You’ll get to see some of the other Districts. Not much of them, we only have about a night in each, but some. And some of them are beautiful--we’re going to Twelve first, and the town’s not much to look at but the woods beyond are so thick and dark...”
I trail off.
I should be thankful that she knots off the thread and holds the needle out of the way before she curls up, knees to her chest, and buries her face in her arms.
My stomach sinks to my knees but I cross to her side anyway, hold her shoulders, bring my face level with where hers would be if she was looking at me. “Annie?”
She shakes her head, covers her ears. The needle dangles by its thread, swings and bats against her leg.
“Annie,” I say, scoop up the needle before it sticks in her skin. “Annie, I need you here for this.”
“You said it was over,” she whispers.
I didn’t think it was possible for my stomach to plummet any lower, but it does. “The Arena is,” I say. “But--”
“--the Games aren’t.” She tangles her hands in her hair, screws her eyes shut. I weave my fingers between hers, try to loosen them, but she yanks her head away, drags her hair in front of her face and hides behind it.
“The Tour won’t last forever,” I say.
“That’s what you said about the Games.”
She was better, damn it, better just a moment ago. She was here, she was responsive, she was listening to me and joking with me and teaching me how to sew a seam, and I’ve dropped her into the Games again. Great. I slouch away from her, holding my head in my hands because I can’t keep it level anymore. “Annie. Please.” What am I asking her? Please what? Please listen to me? Please follow me? Please believe me once more, just once, once until I ask you to do it again?
“Please,” she echoes. She shakes her head, and it becomes a shiver that wracks her, all the way down the curve of her spine. “I don’t have a choice.”
***
I could sail out alone. If I came back before dawn, maybe no one would even notice. But it’s the kind of night where the clouds overhead make me think there won’t be dawn at all, and what few stars make it through cast haze instead of light. So I sit on the wharf, with the all the houses behind me, and the ocean swallowing up whatever glow even reaches the shore. I dangle my toes in the water; the cold shoots straight through my skin and chills me to the bone, but I grit my teeth and ease more of my feet in, inch by fraction of an inch, let the shock numb everything else. My teeth chatter hard enough that I’m afraid I’ll chip them, but I don’t.
Even the sea’s trying to push me out today.
The shivers build, wrack my body enough that I need to cling to the edge of the wharf so I won’t kick too hard and launch myself into the water. I keep my feet in, though, dig my nails into the wood until splinters threaten under them, push down and down again and wait for that to push everything else down, freeze the chorus of I screwed up, I screwed up in my head.
I know Annie’s walking down the gangway towards me. I don’t let go of the edge, but she lies down beside me, slips her head under my arm to rest against my thigh. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she murmurs.
The waves slap against my ankle, higher than I’ve reached before, and my foot jerks high enough out of the water that I almost crash my knee into Annie’s skull. Shivering, I scoot away from the edge, get my toes clear of the ocean. “I shouldn’t have sprung that on you,” I say.
She shakes her head, almost as quickly as I shivered. “You didn’t. I knew I have to go. I just didn’t want to.”
“I know.” Her hair slips in front of her face and I draw it back, gather it behind her ear. “I saw how happy you were earlier, and--” I shake my head. “I didn’t mean to take that away so soon.”
When she turns her face away again, that same strand I tucked back slips forward, over her cheek. “You never mean it.”
I sigh, tug her hair harder than I meant to and decide to let go of it if I’m going to be this careless around her. “I guess my track record’s pretty bad, isn’t it.”
“Yes.” She nods, and her chin digs into my thigh. “I just wish I knew what you did mean.”
“By what?”
“By what you do. Sometimes you’re not the one who does it.”
I blink, try to lean back to get more than a glimpse of her face under those tangles, but I can’t read her at all in this light. “I’m not the one who does it?” I repeat.
“You do things you don’t want to do. You do things you aren’t.”
It’s hard to deny that first charge, at least, even if I wanted to. Do I want to? I look out over the sea, search for some kind of shine off the waves to let me know where they are, what they look like, but the water’s darker than I’ve seen it in months, black and deep. “Sometimes you have to do that, Annie.”
“I know.” She buries her face against my thigh. “But you always do. I can see it.”
This isn’t the time for this conversation. I prop my hand under her chin, tilt it up. “I know you’ve heard this before, Annie, and I know it’s a lousy answer, but there are more important things than whether or not you want to, sometimes.”
Her eyes had been soft, apologetic. Now they harden. “I know,” she says. “That doesn’t make it less sad.”
“No,” I agree. “Guess it doesn’t.”
“So I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t want to go. I want--” Her throat shakes when she breathes. “--I want things that don’t matter. But you do. And I know I’m being difficult. I know I am. Difficult. And I’m sorry.”
“You’re not being difficult,” I say, “you’re having difficulties.” There is a difference, but not much of one in the way I say it.
She turns away, her cheek nestling into my palm, and I wish I could fling myself into Mags’s arms and say tell me what to do, tell me what to say, I’m only two years older than she is, why is it my responsibility. But I can’t drag Mags on the Victory Tour, and I can’t drag her out on a dock in the middle of the night, and Annie needs me. I swallow, run over what I know of her itinerary in my head. If she has to do this (and she does), I can warn her about what’s coming. At least she’ll know.
“It’s only a few weeks,” I say, “and the last stop is home. I can talk to the mayor about that one, if you want. We can have the party on a boat.” She brightens, but closes her eyes to keep it in. “A big one,” I continue, “with little boats docked on the side. We could steal one once the party starts to die down.”
“Just us?”
“Just us,” I say, stroke her temple. I still don’t know what to think about how she looks at me, how her face opens and searches and how her eyes draw me in. I think of diving, of how close the ocean presses around me the deeper I go, how long I could stay here without having to breathe. I wish I didn’t have to, wish I’d never have to come up for air again, wish I couldn’t find a bottom to the depths of her eyes.
Somewhere in the distance, a boat’s horn sounds softly.
“But it won’t be just us for the rest of the Tour. You know that, right?” I say, and pray she does.
“I know,” she whispers. “I know you won’t be there at all.”
My hand falls into my lap, and I stare at the sea again, wait for the night to break.
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