Scylla and Charybdis [6/9] (The Hunger Games, Finnick/Annie)
Chapter Six! In which Annie wears pretty dresses, Finnick tries to dodge PR nightmares, and Snow talks about gardening. And is a dick.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [6/9] ( 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, ~6500.
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 Six: Labors Twelve The Victory Tour for the seventieth Hunger Games spirals through Panem, and Finnick has more at stake than he expected.
District 12 holds a simple party in the town square. Annie stares out at the woods and the meadow, and thanks the mayor and the tributes’ families the way we practiced on the train. At the party, she drinks a deep mouthful of whatever Haymitch is having and curls up coughing, then falls asleep in a corner of the mayor’s house. I carry her back to the train and think we might get through this.
On the way to District 11, she compares the fields to the sea when the sun’s almost up, and I see what she means. Chaff scares her at first, but she spends the rest of dinner holding his wrist where his hand used to be until he tells her where it’s gone. He tells her, and I whisper thank you to him, and now I know I’ll be going drinking with Chaff and Haymitch the next chance I get, and if I can I’ll stay sober enough to hear all of their stories.
She doesn’t sleep very well before we get to District 10. The train’s too hot, she says, and I agree, but she’s fitful through the night even though I stay with her. In the morning, we watch the cows in the fields, out the windows of the train. She hates the meat at the mayor’s house, and the spices, and the melting desserts. She doesn’t sleep at all between 10 and 9.
At least in 9, there’s the river. The mayor takes us out on his boat, but the boat is moored, and the water is brown and choked with snow, and no fish swim up to the sides. Annie spends most of the party reaching a hand over the edge and smoothing it over the brittle ice.
She sleeps before 8, I make sure she does, but I think she only manages because she’s exhausted. We bundle up the blankets between us because the wind is roaring and cold through the walls of the train. Drusus doesn’t design her a dress for 8; Cecelia and her children present her with one, like they did for Johanna Mason last year, and Annie is so thankful that she cries. They don’t seem to have been expecting that. She dances with me in it, says she likes the way it sounds.
We’re delayed by a blizzard on the way to District 7. I tell her not to worry about the snow but Annie’s not afraid of it. She starts to talk about how far out she’s sailed, how her mother and father have been to the white cliffs farther north than 3, and I want to hear everything but she should stop, other people might be listening. Instead, I talk about Johanna and the other people I know from 7, what they’re like, how they live, how to deal with meeting them when we finally arrive.
Johanna wears a dress with a fur mantle at the feast, and whatever animal it is, it still has a head. Annie doesn’t eat. Sadly, I can’t punch Johanna in the face. Yet.
District 6 is awful, and we all know it’s going to be awful. Annie and I practice what she’s supposed to say to Axel’s family over and over, but when the time comes she goes off script and collapses in a heap at the edge of the podium, burrows into her dress and covers her ears. When the mayor tries to comfort her, she shoves him hard enough that he knocks over the lectern. After, when Drusus tries to help her change for the ball, she scratches his face.
By the time we get to 5, you can’t see any of the marks, but Drusus has the prep team file down her nails to stumps. He and I have a fight that night, once Annie and I are back from the party, which isn’t a complete disaster. It’s the calm before the storm, Drusus says. District 3 hates Annie. District 3 has good reasons to hate Annie. No matter what he and I do, they’ll still see Annie dragging Telluria into the flood, destroying District 3’s first real contender in years, shattering their chances to let Wiress off the mentoring hook. Telluria was like me, Drusus says. Their chance. Their savior. Their god from the sea.
Annie sleeps that night. I don’t.
***
District 3 grows out of the forest that surrounds it, one electrical pole at a time. They start to replace the trees, and birds gather on the wires, pulling them taut and triangular. Annie stares at them, says she always wondered how District 3 lit up so brightly she could see it from the ocean, as much as a mile away. Soon, the poles are metal instead of wood, and twice as tall as our houses, and they merge into a barbed wire fence that bells out around the city.
By now, she’s seen the Capitol, of course, and Districts 8 and 6, and she says 3 is like both and neither. I can see what she means; 3 has the Capitol’s public television screens, but only some of them play Capitol programming. The others play streams of names and numbers in red and white that I never remember to ask Beetee about. But the buildings are like 6’s in shape, homes piled on top of homes, and 8’s in scale, packed tightly side by side. If it weren’t for the jagged hills, I’d think nothing could ever have grown here.
The train station is indoors, under a dome of glass with thick metal beams like a cage. It pulls in on a raised platform so that the cameras, all a story down, look up at us like sharks. I reach for Annie’s hand, then remind myself not to. Annie looks up, away from the cameras, at the undersides of the birds on the glass roof. “Backwards,” she says. “Everything is backwards.”
“More like upside-down,” I say. “You remember what we worked on last night?”
I hope the cameras didn’t pick that up.
She nods, hastily, and hangs her head.
“Good. That’s all you have to say.”
The mayor, the District 3 victors, and the tributes’ families are waiting at the bend on the stairs. The cameras swoop around and take us in as we walk down to meet them. Annie takes a breath that rattles, and pulls the jacket of her dress tighter over her waist. She says, quietly, like we practiced, “I would have been honored to fight Telluria and Kyle on their own terms.”
The mayor shakes Annie’s hands, and passes her off to do the same to both of Kyle’s parents, and then Telluria’s father. She’s holding up, but I can see her shoulders quaking, can hear the heels of her shoes stammering on the floor. Come on, Annie, I will her silently. Just keep standing.
“I don’t blame you,” Telluria’s father says.
“Yes, you do,” Annie whispers. “But I blame me too.” She cries, but her makeup doesn’t run, Drusus saw to that.
The cameras whirr and flash, and I stand solemnly to the mayor’s left and wait for them to turn off. They don’t, of course. Even after the mayor finishes his remarks, after he formally invites Annie to dinner at the town hall that evening and promises that the entire city will shine for her tonight, after the screens flare white and gold to match the fireworks going off overhead, after night creeps in and the square starts to empty, the cameras keep recording.
They’re waiting for her to fall. They click like insects, scuttle closer to her now that there’s less in their way. The segmented metal covering their lenses parts, withdraws, and the pinpricks of light within swell. I can’t weave a net tight enough to keep them from slipping through.
She does fall, but it’s late enough that the cameras can’t ignore how much she stood up to. On our way back to the train, her toe catches on the rail and she sinks to the floor and cries. But Wiress and Beetee are with us, and Wiress makes it to her before I do, maybe even before she starts falling, and sits with her on the concrete, sings a song about a little brown bug. It makes Annie laugh, but she doesn’t stop crying until we get her inside.
“When does the dinner start?” I ask Beetee, and squeeze Wiress’s hand in thanks.
“Five-thirty,” he says. “On time.”
I nod. “Annie?”
“Little brown bug sings quite off-key,” she hums, and tries to wipe the tears off her cheek. “That’s how it goes?”
Wiress grins.
“I think so,” I say, “here,” and blot her tears away with my handkerchief. “See? You learn something new in every District.”
She nods. “Wiress, will you stay with me while I get dressed?”
“Yes.” She takes Annie’s hand and starts off in the right direction for the train’s remake room, even if she probably hasn’t been on a train like this in years.
Beetee watches them go, smiling, and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “The two of them should stick together at dinner,” he says. “I can tell the staff to seat them next to each other.”
“Thanks,” I say. Annie should have someone she can talk to.
“You on one side, the girls in the middle, I’ll be on the other.”
“Thanks. Again. For everything.” I knot my fingers in my hair, tug on it to cut through the heaviness gathering in my eyelids.
Beetee shakes his head. “I’m only doing what I can. I should warn you, I have to stay close to you both so no one tries anything stupid.”
“They’re not happy, are they.” It isn’t a question.
“To the point where I’ll ask you to make sure Annie doesn’t eat anything put directly in front of her.”
I flinch, can’t help but look down the corridor where Wiress led Annie and strain to see, to hear anything--calm down, I remind myself, it’s Wiress. Is that what the people in District 7 wanted to do to me on my Tour?
No. Annie isn’t me. I have to start remembering that.
“I can’t apologize,” I say. “But I can guess what she meant to them.”
He nods. “They wouldn’t kill her, but they do want her to embarrass herself. Security’s going to be tight all night, but I thought you should know. I can give you the full layout if you think that would help.”
“I don’t know how much it would, but I’d like to see it.” Then I can spend the rest of the night fretting about hidden passages and blind spots and escape routes, most of which I have no idea how to cover, but it’s better to know than not know. Most of the time.
So he sits down with me in a compartment on the train, draws a quick layout of the town hall and its surrounding buildings, points out where the cameras will and won’t be covering, where the Peacekeepers will stand.
“I’ve been keeping up on the Tour,” Beetee says.
My stomach’s getting even better at tying knots than my hands are. “How does it look?”
“Hard to say. Sometimes it looks like she’s trying to ask everyone to forgive her for winning. Other times, she’s barely there at all. It’s not like Wiress. She won, but no one was sorry, least of all her. I can’t tell if you’re trying to make it easier for everyone to accept that Annie won, or if you’re trying to get this over with so no one ever thinks about her again.”
"Both?" I shrug, roll out some of the tension in my shoulders and sigh. "I want to keep her safe."
"She's a victor, Finnick," Beetee says.
"I know. That's why it's hard."
He nods. He understands. If I miss anything about the Capitol it's this, the room full of people who aren't all my friends but who know me better than any friend could, know what it is to sleep with one eye open, to scout a room for traps, to feel cameras blinking in the corners like wasps and sharks. "Has Snow said anything about her yet?"
Cold crawls under my skin. "No." That's what I'm afraid of, I don't have to say. "I can't imagine why he'd want her in the Capitol, though." I could, actually, but I refuse to. Not now. "These last Games weren't exactly a success."
"She won't have to mentor?"
I shake my head. "There are at least eight victors still alive in Four, not counting her. Neal may be deaf, but he’s got a couple more years. And Mags is off the hook too. She won't have to go back to the Games, or to the Capitol."
"You will," Beetee says, fiddles with the earpiece of his glasses.
"I know." My smile hangs crookedly. "But she doesn't have to play on my terms."
I can hear her and Wiress laughing, all the way down the corridor. The walls ring with it, and then Wiress starts singing again, a song about trombones and guitars and carnivals. If Annie is singing too, I can’t hear it, but her laughter and her clapping make it down the hall to us. Beetee smiles, takes off his glasses and cleans the lenses.
“I’d say you should bring her here sometimes, but...” Beetee trails off, and once his glasses are back on he glances out the window. “Well.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “Thanks for the offer.”
***
I don’t know whether to tell Annie about the cameras and the security or not, so in the end I don’t.
It doesn’t matter. She can feel them watching the same way any victor can.
***
The train is dark, but the city is bright and the station is made of glass, so I don’t have to look for the lights. When I find Annie’s compartment, the door is open, and so is the window, and the beads on her dress rattle as she shivers.
She’s curled up on her bed again. I remember this, from the night before the Games began. But that dress covered everything and spilled out over the edges, and this dress keeps close to her but doesn’t keep her warm at all. I can see her hipbones contouring the fabric and beads, more jagged than they should be. But her bare feet are the same, though this time it’s because she left her shoes at the mayor’s house, under the dinner table, and the soles of her feet are filthy from running through the streets.
I think I might apologize, but I don’t know what for.
And she doesn’t seem to hear me.
“I managed to convince the reporters that they didn’t need a final clip of you,” I say. “You’re off the hook until we reach Two.”
“Never off the hook,” she says. Her mouth is right against the pillow, but the words come through clear. “It goes through your lips. Even if they throw you back.”
“You can rest, at least.” I lean against the doorjamb, fidget with the lapel of my jacket. Drusus seems to think that District 3 always requires us to have something on our clothes to catch the lights. At least my sequins are getting subtler.
She shakes her head. Her dress rattles and scrapes against the blankets, and her shoulders hitch, like the bones are trying to crash into each other. Her hair is so wild I can’t tell whether she’s covering her ears or not.
“Can’t sleep?” I ask her, and perch on the edge of her bed, stare at my shoes because looking at her makes everything too tight. I see why she hates trains. I’m starting to hate them, too. I’d shove this one off the rails if I could, or I’d spin it around and push it towards District 4. Towards home. But the track’s winding towards the Capitol, and if she’s this lost here I don’t know what she’ll find there.
“Can’t.” She gathers herself up even tighter, shies away from where I’m sitting. I found her like this in a dark corner of the mayor’s house before she ran off, couldn’t get through to her then either.
“I could get something to help you with that. If you wanted.”
She shakes her head no, vehemently, and it turns into a shiver.
Someday I’ll learn to keep my mouth shut around Annie. I sink deeper into the bed, fight the urge to curl up on it next to her. “I know how hard this has been for you. How hard this is,” I add. “I know how much you want to go home.”
“You do too,” she whispers.
Are cameras tucked away somewhere in this room? Probably. “I do,” I say.
“You do things you aren’t.” I’m close enough to see now that she is covering her ears, and if she still had fingernails they’d be digging into her skull. “I hate it.”
I settle my hands over hers, ease them enough away from her ears that she hears me say, “I hate it, too.”
She pushes her hands into my palms, intertwines our fingers. I can feel her strength but everything about her shakes, and she pulls herself closer to me, turns her face away from the bed and looks up through the dark. She holds my hand against her cheek. Everything’s so cold.
“I’m sorry I can’t do more,” I whisper.
Her skin may be freezing but her breath is warm on my wrist. “I believe you.”
“I wish--” I close my eyes, trap her fingers between mine, try to draw some of the chill away. “I wish I could do more.”
She presses her lips to the heel of my palm, but I think it might just be because she doesn’t know what to say. Then she turns her face into the cup of my hand and kisses it, eyes closed, warm, lingering.
My breath stutters, stalls. “Annie,” I finally manage, mean it to be a warning but I can barely speak, barely move, barely see.
Her eyes are open when she draws me down and kisses me. Her lashes flutter against my cheek when she closes them. And then kissing her hits me all at once, like coming up for air. Should I stop? I should. I need to. But her hand twists in my hair, her lips press against mine and part softly, invite me in. Her skin still chills me wherever it touches mine but her mouth is so warm and her lips catch on mine and I can’t break away--
No. No. I have to. I grip her by the hair and wrench myself away, hold her back. “No,” I say, once I have enough breath to, once my chest has started to steady. “Annie, no.”
She’s still leaning in, cards a hand through her hair to latch on to mine, and her mouth forms my name but no sound comes out. My fingertips brush her cheek, slip down to her jaw, and I can’t tell which of us is shaking harder. Her eyes are wider than I’ve ever seen them, searching through the darkness for me. Has she been looking for me all this time? Is that where she goes when she leaves? To find me?
I screwed up. I screwed up and I’m going to get her killed and I’ve spent half a year doing everything I could to keep her alive and it’s not fair.
“I can’t,” I say, and turn my head away, but not fast enough that I don’t see her crying.
Her dress tangles around her ankles as she scrambles off the bed, turns tail, and runs. I only manage to get my feet on the floor when I hear a door slam shut. The door to my room, most likely.
I fall back onto her bed, bury my face in the sheets and try not to breathe any of her in.
***
“Someone’s in the wrong bed,” Drusus says, and that’s what wakes me up.
I stick Annie’s pillow over my ears and try to burrow deeper under the covers, but Drusus yanks them off.
“Long story,” I mumble.
“I hope it involves you wanting to do her share of the prep before we get to Two.” He sighs. “Where is she?”
“My room.”
“Finnick--”
“Oh for the love of--nothing happened!” I fling the pillow off and chuck it at Drusus, who still makes the best indignant noises out of anyone I’ve met in the Capitol.
“Come on, you’re naked in her bed. What did you expect me to think?”
Sore and tired as I am, I have to admit he has a point. I roll up and crack my shoulders, groaning. It feels like someone fused all the bones in my back together during the middle of the night. No wonder she hasn’t been sleeping well. “I wasn’t thinking about what you’d think.”
In addition to making the best indignant noises I’ve ever heard, Drusus’s face makes some of the best revelation expressions I’ve ever seen. “Something did happen,” he says, once that particular fact washes down his face. “And as soon as I’ve woken Annie up and sent her off to prep you’re going to tell me what.”
I rake my fingers through my hair--it’s mussed enough that Drusus can hardly scoff at whatever I do to it between now and prep--and sigh.
“Go get coffee,” he commands as he leaves. “You’re insufferable.”
He goes into the hall and knocks on my door, no matter how gauche it is. “Annie? Annie, are you in there?”
“No,” she says, loud enough that it carries over the engines.
“Then I suppose it’s all right for me to come in,” Drusus says, and does just that.
I stumble down the hallway before she can see me, wonder if I should’ve taken the pillow along so I’d have something to hide behind. The coffee’s stronger than usual this morning, and I must half-fill the cup with sugar before I can choke any of it down. We’re going through the mountains, so the train practically stirs the coffee for me. I’ve almost polished it off when Drusus clears his throat expectantly behind me. “You can’t hide anything behind that coffee cup,” he says.
“Wasn’t trying to.” I set it down. “She’s up?”
“In prep. So pliant she might as well be sleeping.” He sits down across from me, picks a bunch of grapes out of the fruit bowl for himself. “So.”
“We didn’t sleep together.”
“That’s evident from context. She’d be glowing if you had.”
“She kissed me.” I pluck a grape but don’t eat it, roll it around in my palm instead. “I told her it was a bad idea.”
“Good, because it was a bad idea.” He eats slowly, chews thoughtfully. “You turned her down and she ran off.”
“Into my room. And I know it was a bad idea.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
I wish I could slide down my chair and keep sliding until the floor swallowed me up, but my back’s too stiff to bend like that. “I’m trying to figure that out.”
“Let me highlight your options,” he says, and puts down the grape he’d been about to eat. “You’re about the only person who can keep her together, you know. Can you still do that if you push her away?”
I hang my head in my hands. “I don’t know.” I have the feeling I’m going to be saying that a lot.
“Fine. Something you do know. You can’t stay with her.”
“No.” I list off the reasons. “I can’t be there all the time. I have the Games. I have--everything I do in the Capitol. It’s dangerous.”
“For both of you,” Drusus agrees.
“I promised her I’d keep her safe.” I’ve botched that horribly so far, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get it right, somehow. Eventually. I’ll find something that works, I just have to keep working at it.
“And she’d be safer with you out of her life.” Drusus says it so simply, like it’s choice between one jacket or the other. “Or in the Capitol, where they can take care of her.”
My fists come down on the table hard enough to make it jump. “No,” I say, the muscles in my arms quivering. “No. She’d die there, Drusus, or she’d as good as.”
He shuts his eyes, taps his fingers on the edge of the table. “Fine. But it’s still true. If you think you’re making her a liability, you have to get out of this now.”
“I am. But I don’t know what she’d do without me, either.” I am going to ask Drusus to tattoo I SCREWED UP on my forehead. It might start a trend. Double meanings. Annie would like that, that part was her. This isn’t doing me any good. The walls of the train inch closer around me, stretch higher, curve into a dome over my head. I want to fling the windows open, but looking at the grey-brown blur of District 2 makes my stomach curdle and I put my head between my knees before I retch.
Drusus asks, “Do you care?”
“Of course I care,” I say, drag my head back up once I’ve gotten enough air.
“Look,” he says, so I do, shift down from his braided eyebrows to his eyes. “As your stylist, your servant, and so help me Finnick I think I can call myself your friend, you have to decide what you’re going to do about her. And for that, you have to decide what she means to you. Not what you’ll let her mean to you. What she actually is. Because the girl I woke up this morning would have torn her mouth off with her nails if I let her keep them, just because you didn’t want to kiss it.”
I’m glad, suddenly, for the solid weight of the chair under me. At least I know what that is. When I try to think about the rest, when I try to untangle Annie in my head--the depths of her eyes, the sound of her laugh, the warmth and weight of her hands--I don’t know where I stand. If I can stand, even. The images flood me, surge and drag even more memories forward in their wake: Annie collapsing with laughter on the bed, Annie surfacing next to me in the ocean, Annie bending over a difficult tear and stitching it shut. How can I decide what all that means? She’s Annie. All of that is Annie.
“Which is more important,” Drusus asks, “that she lives, or that she loves you?”
I say, “I’m afraid to ask her that.”
***
Snow takes the back of Annie’s hand and kisses it.
I wish she’d rip his mouth clean off his chin. I’d do it myself if I could.
“I understand how difficult it must have been for you,” he says when he lets her go, smiling all across his jaw. “But you’ve faced this tour with the same grace and perseverance you showed in your games, Annie. Perhaps I should have expected that of you, but then, if I had, I would not be so pleasantly surprised.”
My smile strains at the corners, and I clench my jaw as hard as I can to lock it into place. I know exactly what he’s saying. I wonder who else does. More people than I’d like, and I suspect that’s the point. Can I get away with punching him again? No. Not in front of thousands, not on live television. But oh, what I wouldn’t trade away for that chance. My hands tighten at my sides, and I have to work to force them flat.
Annie hangs her head, and whispers, “Thank you, Mister President,” from behind the curtain of her hair.
“Don’t thank me,” he demurs, and reaches toward her face to tuck that hair behind her ear, so the cameras can see everything. “Thank your prep team, and your District representative, and Finnick most of all.”
“Oh, Mister President,” I say. “I’m just doing my job.”
“Aren’t we all,” he says, turning his grin in my direction. The crowd loves it.
***
“You know, Finnick, this room isn’t bugged at all,” Snow says, drawing the curtain shut with a quick jerk of the cord. “It’s a privilege I’ll admit to being somewhat fond of. I like my privacy, even if it’s only an illusion.”
Like mine, I think, fold my hands in my lap so they won’t fidget.
He turns toward me over his shoulder. I wonder if he thinks his smile is inviting. “The more powerful you become, the more public you become, the less you can partake of your own luxuries. Did you know, I used to be a fair hand at gardening? A regular green thumb. But now I don’t grow my own roses. Do you know why?”
“No,” I say, hope he doesn’t notice how my fingers tighten. Of course he notices. I don’t know who I’m trying to fool. Myself, maybe.
“A gardener’s secrets are just that,” he says, “secrets. This room may not be bugged, but the exterior of my house certainly is. My gardening is, was, very personal to me. I stopped sharing it with the country, so that I’d have something of my own.”
I study the floor. It’s easier than staring at his mouth, watching the beads of blood gather at the corners of his lips.
“But it has been years since I picked up a spade, and I may have forgotten how,” he says. His tongue darts out to stop the red from leaking past his teeth. “What on earth was I trying to accomplish? If I’d kept at it, I might have to endure a few stares, a few impertinent questions, but I’d probably have the best-looking garden in the Capitol.”
“I’m sure you would,” I say as neutrally as possible, though I’ve never been all that good at neutral. Sultry’s what I do best these days, and the thought of doing that here makes me want to scream loud enough for the bugs in the hall to pick up.
“And all because I wanted something to call my own.” He tsks. “The lesson here is threefold, Finnick. What’s the most obvious one to you?”
I resist the urge to say Give me a moment, it’s been five years since I’ve had to go to school. Instead, I say, “Nothing is out of the public eye.”
“Very good.” He comes away from the window and circles his desk, leaning a hand on the mat, the tiered outbox, the coffeecup of pens that reads BEST GRANDFATHER in brightly-colored letters. “You’ve been learning a lot of lessons this year, since the Games. Haymitch Abernathy isn’t the first person I’d think of as a positive influence, but he’s certainly been around as an example.”
Guess that’s your lesson for the year. Johanna learns they’re gonna die, you learn that you can’t save ‘em. I nearly smack my forehead, but my hands are knotted too tightly for my arm to jerk free. The roof is bugged. Of course the roof is bugged, why wouldn’t the roof be bugged?
“Last year, you learned what it is to mentor and lose. This year, to mentor and win. I don’t lie, Finnick, and when I said that I was pleasantly surprised by Annie Cresta’s behavior on the tour, it was as true as when I told you that you would be suited to life in the Capitol.”
There’s too much I want to say to that, and under no circumstances should I say over my dead body to Snow, so I keep my mouth shut, my hands locked, my feet flat on the floor.
He picks a pen out of the coffeecup, rolls it through his fingers, and looks at it instead of me. “And the more I watch you handling that girl, the more I prove that true. It’s validating, Finnick. You’ve come into your own. I think you have a gift for bringing out what’s in the hearts of your charges.”
He’s expecting a thank you. I say, “I’m just doing my job.”
“Then what is this I hear about you bowing out of next year’s Games?”
“District Four has other victors,” I say. “Seems like we should spread the duty around.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve tired of it so soon.” The pen clatters back into the cup, and he takes out a letter-opener instead, smooths his fingers on the blade. “I only thought, since you’d have to be in the Capitol anyway, and you did such a wonderful job juggling the Games with your other obligations, that you’d prove even better-suited with a less...difficult situation.”
I bite my cheek hard enough that blood begins to well. It reminds me of him, and I want to spit, smear it over his beautiful hardwood floor. “Frankly, whoever’s reaped this year from Four will be lucky to make it past the Cornucopia, no matter how good they are.”
“And do you blame yourself, or Annie?”
“I don’t,” I say. “It’s just the way it is.”
He smiles. The letter-opener makes less sound than the pen, sliding back home. “Finnick. Let’s go back to my anecdote about gardening. Can you think of any other lessons you might learn from that story?”
Yes. “If you try to keep something to yourself, you’ll lose it.”
“What do you come to the Capitol for, Finnick? What are your obligations here?”
I feel him jerking my strings, trotting me towards the answers he wants, and I’m tired of pretending I can’t see his hand above me. “To fuck whoever you tell me to. Sir.”
He laughs, startled. It’s the first time I’ve surprised him since I punched him in the jaw three years ago, I’d bet. “You put it bluntly, but yes, in a sense. You’re here to make them love you. To make some of them remember why they loved you enough to make sure you won.”
I unwind my hands, finally, relace my fingers behind my head. “What, has my asking price dropped?”
“Not the price, but the frequency, considering the extent to which you have been shirking your commitments.”
So we are dealing with each other honestly now. Good. If I have to sit through one more anecdote about his gardening habits and pore over it for hidden meanings, I’ll shove that letter opener into my eye. “I thought the money I draw from sponsors went to the same place as the money you get for me.”
“It does,” he says. “And if that was all I was concerned about I wouldn’t have resorted to siphoning it off during these past Games.”
So that’s why the parachutiers kept trying to update me on my budget. I grind my teeth hard enough that I almost expect chips of enamel to come off.
“And I believe you offered Olivia Bowen a refund for walking out on her.”
“Not explicitly.”
“Well, she called me expecting one.”
“Seems reasonable enough.”
“It’s not your money to refund.”
“It’s my services.”
“Then if you’re so intent on dispensing with our arrangement, I can turn to other avenues,” he says, and stands straight, comes closer to me, enough that I smell the flower on his lapel, the blood underneath. “Everyone will be so disappointed.”
“How ever will they get by,” I say flatly.
“How ever will you, alone in District Four?” He shrugs. “How old is little Crescent now? Can she walk yet? Swim?”
My blood turns to ice. I can’t move. The Capitol’s always cold this time of year, but something leeches the warmth from my hands, my stomach, my chest, and creeps higher to steal the rest. “Not yet,” I whisper.
Satisfied, Snow turns away, back to the window. “I look forward to watching her grow up. I can only hope it happens on camera.”
I nod, mutely, wish my hands would thaw enough so I could clap them over my ears like Annie, block out the sounds of Crescent cooing, Maeve and Jamie giggling, Connor shrieking, Lucy and Katie whispering together. Aunt Hannah singing as she slaps bread dough down on the table. Uncle Jonas pitching his voice like Mags’s, and Uncle Brian’s deep roar of laughter. Even the clucking sound Aunt Shannon makes in the back of her throat.
“And the third lesson about my gardening, Finnick? That even if the roses aren’t mine, if I didn’t plant them and water them and prune them myself, there’s still a fresh flower in my lapel whenever I need it.” He turns, holds me with his stare like a snake, and points to his chest. “We have so little that belongs to us, people like you and I. We give ourselves to the world, and the world loves us for it, and we may be its slaves; but in the end, the choice is ours. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say, close my eyes because I can’t bear to look at anything right now.
“Good.” And he waits at the window, for me to keep speaking.
“Thank you. Sir,” I add.
“What was that?”
The full title, he means. I swallow, push everything down, say, “Thank you, Mister President.”
“Now look me in the eye and make me believe it.”
All I have to do is raise my eyes, sweeten my voice, smile. All I have to do. I want to rip off every inch of my skin, strip myself to the bone, and even then I won’t be clean. “Thank you, Mister President.”
He smiles back. “Now if you can make me believe you’re thankful after all I’ve done for you, I’m sure you can make up to all the lovers you’ve slighted these past few months. You’re dismissed. Please send Annie in.”
---
--
.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [6/9] ( 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, ~6500.
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 Six: Labors Twelve The Victory Tour for the seventieth Hunger Games spirals through Panem, and Finnick has more at stake than he expected.
District 12 holds a simple party in the town square. Annie stares out at the woods and the meadow, and thanks the mayor and the tributes’ families the way we practiced on the train. At the party, she drinks a deep mouthful of whatever Haymitch is having and curls up coughing, then falls asleep in a corner of the mayor’s house. I carry her back to the train and think we might get through this.
On the way to District 11, she compares the fields to the sea when the sun’s almost up, and I see what she means. Chaff scares her at first, but she spends the rest of dinner holding his wrist where his hand used to be until he tells her where it’s gone. He tells her, and I whisper thank you to him, and now I know I’ll be going drinking with Chaff and Haymitch the next chance I get, and if I can I’ll stay sober enough to hear all of their stories.
She doesn’t sleep very well before we get to District 10. The train’s too hot, she says, and I agree, but she’s fitful through the night even though I stay with her. In the morning, we watch the cows in the fields, out the windows of the train. She hates the meat at the mayor’s house, and the spices, and the melting desserts. She doesn’t sleep at all between 10 and 9.
At least in 9, there’s the river. The mayor takes us out on his boat, but the boat is moored, and the water is brown and choked with snow, and no fish swim up to the sides. Annie spends most of the party reaching a hand over the edge and smoothing it over the brittle ice.
She sleeps before 8, I make sure she does, but I think she only manages because she’s exhausted. We bundle up the blankets between us because the wind is roaring and cold through the walls of the train. Drusus doesn’t design her a dress for 8; Cecelia and her children present her with one, like they did for Johanna Mason last year, and Annie is so thankful that she cries. They don’t seem to have been expecting that. She dances with me in it, says she likes the way it sounds.
We’re delayed by a blizzard on the way to District 7. I tell her not to worry about the snow but Annie’s not afraid of it. She starts to talk about how far out she’s sailed, how her mother and father have been to the white cliffs farther north than 3, and I want to hear everything but she should stop, other people might be listening. Instead, I talk about Johanna and the other people I know from 7, what they’re like, how they live, how to deal with meeting them when we finally arrive.
Johanna wears a dress with a fur mantle at the feast, and whatever animal it is, it still has a head. Annie doesn’t eat. Sadly, I can’t punch Johanna in the face. Yet.
District 6 is awful, and we all know it’s going to be awful. Annie and I practice what she’s supposed to say to Axel’s family over and over, but when the time comes she goes off script and collapses in a heap at the edge of the podium, burrows into her dress and covers her ears. When the mayor tries to comfort her, she shoves him hard enough that he knocks over the lectern. After, when Drusus tries to help her change for the ball, she scratches his face.
By the time we get to 5, you can’t see any of the marks, but Drusus has the prep team file down her nails to stumps. He and I have a fight that night, once Annie and I are back from the party, which isn’t a complete disaster. It’s the calm before the storm, Drusus says. District 3 hates Annie. District 3 has good reasons to hate Annie. No matter what he and I do, they’ll still see Annie dragging Telluria into the flood, destroying District 3’s first real contender in years, shattering their chances to let Wiress off the mentoring hook. Telluria was like me, Drusus says. Their chance. Their savior. Their god from the sea.
Annie sleeps that night. I don’t.
***
District 3 grows out of the forest that surrounds it, one electrical pole at a time. They start to replace the trees, and birds gather on the wires, pulling them taut and triangular. Annie stares at them, says she always wondered how District 3 lit up so brightly she could see it from the ocean, as much as a mile away. Soon, the poles are metal instead of wood, and twice as tall as our houses, and they merge into a barbed wire fence that bells out around the city.
By now, she’s seen the Capitol, of course, and Districts 8 and 6, and she says 3 is like both and neither. I can see what she means; 3 has the Capitol’s public television screens, but only some of them play Capitol programming. The others play streams of names and numbers in red and white that I never remember to ask Beetee about. But the buildings are like 6’s in shape, homes piled on top of homes, and 8’s in scale, packed tightly side by side. If it weren’t for the jagged hills, I’d think nothing could ever have grown here.
The train station is indoors, under a dome of glass with thick metal beams like a cage. It pulls in on a raised platform so that the cameras, all a story down, look up at us like sharks. I reach for Annie’s hand, then remind myself not to. Annie looks up, away from the cameras, at the undersides of the birds on the glass roof. “Backwards,” she says. “Everything is backwards.”
“More like upside-down,” I say. “You remember what we worked on last night?”
I hope the cameras didn’t pick that up.
She nods, hastily, and hangs her head.
“Good. That’s all you have to say.”
The mayor, the District 3 victors, and the tributes’ families are waiting at the bend on the stairs. The cameras swoop around and take us in as we walk down to meet them. Annie takes a breath that rattles, and pulls the jacket of her dress tighter over her waist. She says, quietly, like we practiced, “I would have been honored to fight Telluria and Kyle on their own terms.”
The mayor shakes Annie’s hands, and passes her off to do the same to both of Kyle’s parents, and then Telluria’s father. She’s holding up, but I can see her shoulders quaking, can hear the heels of her shoes stammering on the floor. Come on, Annie, I will her silently. Just keep standing.
“I don’t blame you,” Telluria’s father says.
“Yes, you do,” Annie whispers. “But I blame me too.” She cries, but her makeup doesn’t run, Drusus saw to that.
The cameras whirr and flash, and I stand solemnly to the mayor’s left and wait for them to turn off. They don’t, of course. Even after the mayor finishes his remarks, after he formally invites Annie to dinner at the town hall that evening and promises that the entire city will shine for her tonight, after the screens flare white and gold to match the fireworks going off overhead, after night creeps in and the square starts to empty, the cameras keep recording.
They’re waiting for her to fall. They click like insects, scuttle closer to her now that there’s less in their way. The segmented metal covering their lenses parts, withdraws, and the pinpricks of light within swell. I can’t weave a net tight enough to keep them from slipping through.
She does fall, but it’s late enough that the cameras can’t ignore how much she stood up to. On our way back to the train, her toe catches on the rail and she sinks to the floor and cries. But Wiress and Beetee are with us, and Wiress makes it to her before I do, maybe even before she starts falling, and sits with her on the concrete, sings a song about a little brown bug. It makes Annie laugh, but she doesn’t stop crying until we get her inside.
“When does the dinner start?” I ask Beetee, and squeeze Wiress’s hand in thanks.
“Five-thirty,” he says. “On time.”
I nod. “Annie?”
“Little brown bug sings quite off-key,” she hums, and tries to wipe the tears off her cheek. “That’s how it goes?”
Wiress grins.
“I think so,” I say, “here,” and blot her tears away with my handkerchief. “See? You learn something new in every District.”
She nods. “Wiress, will you stay with me while I get dressed?”
“Yes.” She takes Annie’s hand and starts off in the right direction for the train’s remake room, even if she probably hasn’t been on a train like this in years.
Beetee watches them go, smiling, and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “The two of them should stick together at dinner,” he says. “I can tell the staff to seat them next to each other.”
“Thanks,” I say. Annie should have someone she can talk to.
“You on one side, the girls in the middle, I’ll be on the other.”
“Thanks. Again. For everything.” I knot my fingers in my hair, tug on it to cut through the heaviness gathering in my eyelids.
Beetee shakes his head. “I’m only doing what I can. I should warn you, I have to stay close to you both so no one tries anything stupid.”
“They’re not happy, are they.” It isn’t a question.
“To the point where I’ll ask you to make sure Annie doesn’t eat anything put directly in front of her.”
I flinch, can’t help but look down the corridor where Wiress led Annie and strain to see, to hear anything--calm down, I remind myself, it’s Wiress. Is that what the people in District 7 wanted to do to me on my Tour?
No. Annie isn’t me. I have to start remembering that.
“I can’t apologize,” I say. “But I can guess what she meant to them.”
He nods. “They wouldn’t kill her, but they do want her to embarrass herself. Security’s going to be tight all night, but I thought you should know. I can give you the full layout if you think that would help.”
“I don’t know how much it would, but I’d like to see it.” Then I can spend the rest of the night fretting about hidden passages and blind spots and escape routes, most of which I have no idea how to cover, but it’s better to know than not know. Most of the time.
So he sits down with me in a compartment on the train, draws a quick layout of the town hall and its surrounding buildings, points out where the cameras will and won’t be covering, where the Peacekeepers will stand.
“I’ve been keeping up on the Tour,” Beetee says.
My stomach’s getting even better at tying knots than my hands are. “How does it look?”
“Hard to say. Sometimes it looks like she’s trying to ask everyone to forgive her for winning. Other times, she’s barely there at all. It’s not like Wiress. She won, but no one was sorry, least of all her. I can’t tell if you’re trying to make it easier for everyone to accept that Annie won, or if you’re trying to get this over with so no one ever thinks about her again.”
"Both?" I shrug, roll out some of the tension in my shoulders and sigh. "I want to keep her safe."
"She's a victor, Finnick," Beetee says.
"I know. That's why it's hard."
He nods. He understands. If I miss anything about the Capitol it's this, the room full of people who aren't all my friends but who know me better than any friend could, know what it is to sleep with one eye open, to scout a room for traps, to feel cameras blinking in the corners like wasps and sharks. "Has Snow said anything about her yet?"
Cold crawls under my skin. "No." That's what I'm afraid of, I don't have to say. "I can't imagine why he'd want her in the Capitol, though." I could, actually, but I refuse to. Not now. "These last Games weren't exactly a success."
"She won't have to mentor?"
I shake my head. "There are at least eight victors still alive in Four, not counting her. Neal may be deaf, but he’s got a couple more years. And Mags is off the hook too. She won't have to go back to the Games, or to the Capitol."
"You will," Beetee says, fiddles with the earpiece of his glasses.
"I know." My smile hangs crookedly. "But she doesn't have to play on my terms."
I can hear her and Wiress laughing, all the way down the corridor. The walls ring with it, and then Wiress starts singing again, a song about trombones and guitars and carnivals. If Annie is singing too, I can’t hear it, but her laughter and her clapping make it down the hall to us. Beetee smiles, takes off his glasses and cleans the lenses.
“I’d say you should bring her here sometimes, but...” Beetee trails off, and once his glasses are back on he glances out the window. “Well.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “Thanks for the offer.”
***
I don’t know whether to tell Annie about the cameras and the security or not, so in the end I don’t.
It doesn’t matter. She can feel them watching the same way any victor can.
***
The train is dark, but the city is bright and the station is made of glass, so I don’t have to look for the lights. When I find Annie’s compartment, the door is open, and so is the window, and the beads on her dress rattle as she shivers.
She’s curled up on her bed again. I remember this, from the night before the Games began. But that dress covered everything and spilled out over the edges, and this dress keeps close to her but doesn’t keep her warm at all. I can see her hipbones contouring the fabric and beads, more jagged than they should be. But her bare feet are the same, though this time it’s because she left her shoes at the mayor’s house, under the dinner table, and the soles of her feet are filthy from running through the streets.
I think I might apologize, but I don’t know what for.
And she doesn’t seem to hear me.
“I managed to convince the reporters that they didn’t need a final clip of you,” I say. “You’re off the hook until we reach Two.”
“Never off the hook,” she says. Her mouth is right against the pillow, but the words come through clear. “It goes through your lips. Even if they throw you back.”
“You can rest, at least.” I lean against the doorjamb, fidget with the lapel of my jacket. Drusus seems to think that District 3 always requires us to have something on our clothes to catch the lights. At least my sequins are getting subtler.
She shakes her head. Her dress rattles and scrapes against the blankets, and her shoulders hitch, like the bones are trying to crash into each other. Her hair is so wild I can’t tell whether she’s covering her ears or not.
“Can’t sleep?” I ask her, and perch on the edge of her bed, stare at my shoes because looking at her makes everything too tight. I see why she hates trains. I’m starting to hate them, too. I’d shove this one off the rails if I could, or I’d spin it around and push it towards District 4. Towards home. But the track’s winding towards the Capitol, and if she’s this lost here I don’t know what she’ll find there.
“Can’t.” She gathers herself up even tighter, shies away from where I’m sitting. I found her like this in a dark corner of the mayor’s house before she ran off, couldn’t get through to her then either.
“I could get something to help you with that. If you wanted.”
She shakes her head no, vehemently, and it turns into a shiver.
Someday I’ll learn to keep my mouth shut around Annie. I sink deeper into the bed, fight the urge to curl up on it next to her. “I know how hard this has been for you. How hard this is,” I add. “I know how much you want to go home.”
“You do too,” she whispers.
Are cameras tucked away somewhere in this room? Probably. “I do,” I say.
“You do things you aren’t.” I’m close enough to see now that she is covering her ears, and if she still had fingernails they’d be digging into her skull. “I hate it.”
I settle my hands over hers, ease them enough away from her ears that she hears me say, “I hate it, too.”
She pushes her hands into my palms, intertwines our fingers. I can feel her strength but everything about her shakes, and she pulls herself closer to me, turns her face away from the bed and looks up through the dark. She holds my hand against her cheek. Everything’s so cold.
“I’m sorry I can’t do more,” I whisper.
Her skin may be freezing but her breath is warm on my wrist. “I believe you.”
“I wish--” I close my eyes, trap her fingers between mine, try to draw some of the chill away. “I wish I could do more.”
She presses her lips to the heel of my palm, but I think it might just be because she doesn’t know what to say. Then she turns her face into the cup of my hand and kisses it, eyes closed, warm, lingering.
My breath stutters, stalls. “Annie,” I finally manage, mean it to be a warning but I can barely speak, barely move, barely see.
Her eyes are open when she draws me down and kisses me. Her lashes flutter against my cheek when she closes them. And then kissing her hits me all at once, like coming up for air. Should I stop? I should. I need to. But her hand twists in my hair, her lips press against mine and part softly, invite me in. Her skin still chills me wherever it touches mine but her mouth is so warm and her lips catch on mine and I can’t break away--
No. No. I have to. I grip her by the hair and wrench myself away, hold her back. “No,” I say, once I have enough breath to, once my chest has started to steady. “Annie, no.”
She’s still leaning in, cards a hand through her hair to latch on to mine, and her mouth forms my name but no sound comes out. My fingertips brush her cheek, slip down to her jaw, and I can’t tell which of us is shaking harder. Her eyes are wider than I’ve ever seen them, searching through the darkness for me. Has she been looking for me all this time? Is that where she goes when she leaves? To find me?
I screwed up. I screwed up and I’m going to get her killed and I’ve spent half a year doing everything I could to keep her alive and it’s not fair.
“I can’t,” I say, and turn my head away, but not fast enough that I don’t see her crying.
Her dress tangles around her ankles as she scrambles off the bed, turns tail, and runs. I only manage to get my feet on the floor when I hear a door slam shut. The door to my room, most likely.
I fall back onto her bed, bury my face in the sheets and try not to breathe any of her in.
***
“Someone’s in the wrong bed,” Drusus says, and that’s what wakes me up.
I stick Annie’s pillow over my ears and try to burrow deeper under the covers, but Drusus yanks them off.
“Long story,” I mumble.
“I hope it involves you wanting to do her share of the prep before we get to Two.” He sighs. “Where is she?”
“My room.”
“Finnick--”
“Oh for the love of--nothing happened!” I fling the pillow off and chuck it at Drusus, who still makes the best indignant noises out of anyone I’ve met in the Capitol.
“Come on, you’re naked in her bed. What did you expect me to think?”
Sore and tired as I am, I have to admit he has a point. I roll up and crack my shoulders, groaning. It feels like someone fused all the bones in my back together during the middle of the night. No wonder she hasn’t been sleeping well. “I wasn’t thinking about what you’d think.”
In addition to making the best indignant noises I’ve ever heard, Drusus’s face makes some of the best revelation expressions I’ve ever seen. “Something did happen,” he says, once that particular fact washes down his face. “And as soon as I’ve woken Annie up and sent her off to prep you’re going to tell me what.”
I rake my fingers through my hair--it’s mussed enough that Drusus can hardly scoff at whatever I do to it between now and prep--and sigh.
“Go get coffee,” he commands as he leaves. “You’re insufferable.”
He goes into the hall and knocks on my door, no matter how gauche it is. “Annie? Annie, are you in there?”
“No,” she says, loud enough that it carries over the engines.
“Then I suppose it’s all right for me to come in,” Drusus says, and does just that.
I stumble down the hallway before she can see me, wonder if I should’ve taken the pillow along so I’d have something to hide behind. The coffee’s stronger than usual this morning, and I must half-fill the cup with sugar before I can choke any of it down. We’re going through the mountains, so the train practically stirs the coffee for me. I’ve almost polished it off when Drusus clears his throat expectantly behind me. “You can’t hide anything behind that coffee cup,” he says.
“Wasn’t trying to.” I set it down. “She’s up?”
“In prep. So pliant she might as well be sleeping.” He sits down across from me, picks a bunch of grapes out of the fruit bowl for himself. “So.”
“We didn’t sleep together.”
“That’s evident from context. She’d be glowing if you had.”
“She kissed me.” I pluck a grape but don’t eat it, roll it around in my palm instead. “I told her it was a bad idea.”
“Good, because it was a bad idea.” He eats slowly, chews thoughtfully. “You turned her down and she ran off.”
“Into my room. And I know it was a bad idea.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
I wish I could slide down my chair and keep sliding until the floor swallowed me up, but my back’s too stiff to bend like that. “I’m trying to figure that out.”
“Let me highlight your options,” he says, and puts down the grape he’d been about to eat. “You’re about the only person who can keep her together, you know. Can you still do that if you push her away?”
I hang my head in my hands. “I don’t know.” I have the feeling I’m going to be saying that a lot.
“Fine. Something you do know. You can’t stay with her.”
“No.” I list off the reasons. “I can’t be there all the time. I have the Games. I have--everything I do in the Capitol. It’s dangerous.”
“For both of you,” Drusus agrees.
“I promised her I’d keep her safe.” I’ve botched that horribly so far, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get it right, somehow. Eventually. I’ll find something that works, I just have to keep working at it.
“And she’d be safer with you out of her life.” Drusus says it so simply, like it’s choice between one jacket or the other. “Or in the Capitol, where they can take care of her.”
My fists come down on the table hard enough to make it jump. “No,” I say, the muscles in my arms quivering. “No. She’d die there, Drusus, or she’d as good as.”
He shuts his eyes, taps his fingers on the edge of the table. “Fine. But it’s still true. If you think you’re making her a liability, you have to get out of this now.”
“I am. But I don’t know what she’d do without me, either.” I am going to ask Drusus to tattoo I SCREWED UP on my forehead. It might start a trend. Double meanings. Annie would like that, that part was her. This isn’t doing me any good. The walls of the train inch closer around me, stretch higher, curve into a dome over my head. I want to fling the windows open, but looking at the grey-brown blur of District 2 makes my stomach curdle and I put my head between my knees before I retch.
Drusus asks, “Do you care?”
“Of course I care,” I say, drag my head back up once I’ve gotten enough air.
“Look,” he says, so I do, shift down from his braided eyebrows to his eyes. “As your stylist, your servant, and so help me Finnick I think I can call myself your friend, you have to decide what you’re going to do about her. And for that, you have to decide what she means to you. Not what you’ll let her mean to you. What she actually is. Because the girl I woke up this morning would have torn her mouth off with her nails if I let her keep them, just because you didn’t want to kiss it.”
I’m glad, suddenly, for the solid weight of the chair under me. At least I know what that is. When I try to think about the rest, when I try to untangle Annie in my head--the depths of her eyes, the sound of her laugh, the warmth and weight of her hands--I don’t know where I stand. If I can stand, even. The images flood me, surge and drag even more memories forward in their wake: Annie collapsing with laughter on the bed, Annie surfacing next to me in the ocean, Annie bending over a difficult tear and stitching it shut. How can I decide what all that means? She’s Annie. All of that is Annie.
“Which is more important,” Drusus asks, “that she lives, or that she loves you?”
I say, “I’m afraid to ask her that.”
***
Snow takes the back of Annie’s hand and kisses it.
I wish she’d rip his mouth clean off his chin. I’d do it myself if I could.
“I understand how difficult it must have been for you,” he says when he lets her go, smiling all across his jaw. “But you’ve faced this tour with the same grace and perseverance you showed in your games, Annie. Perhaps I should have expected that of you, but then, if I had, I would not be so pleasantly surprised.”
My smile strains at the corners, and I clench my jaw as hard as I can to lock it into place. I know exactly what he’s saying. I wonder who else does. More people than I’d like, and I suspect that’s the point. Can I get away with punching him again? No. Not in front of thousands, not on live television. But oh, what I wouldn’t trade away for that chance. My hands tighten at my sides, and I have to work to force them flat.
Annie hangs her head, and whispers, “Thank you, Mister President,” from behind the curtain of her hair.
“Don’t thank me,” he demurs, and reaches toward her face to tuck that hair behind her ear, so the cameras can see everything. “Thank your prep team, and your District representative, and Finnick most of all.”
“Oh, Mister President,” I say. “I’m just doing my job.”
“Aren’t we all,” he says, turning his grin in my direction. The crowd loves it.
***
“You know, Finnick, this room isn’t bugged at all,” Snow says, drawing the curtain shut with a quick jerk of the cord. “It’s a privilege I’ll admit to being somewhat fond of. I like my privacy, even if it’s only an illusion.”
Like mine, I think, fold my hands in my lap so they won’t fidget.
He turns toward me over his shoulder. I wonder if he thinks his smile is inviting. “The more powerful you become, the more public you become, the less you can partake of your own luxuries. Did you know, I used to be a fair hand at gardening? A regular green thumb. But now I don’t grow my own roses. Do you know why?”
“No,” I say, hope he doesn’t notice how my fingers tighten. Of course he notices. I don’t know who I’m trying to fool. Myself, maybe.
“A gardener’s secrets are just that,” he says, “secrets. This room may not be bugged, but the exterior of my house certainly is. My gardening is, was, very personal to me. I stopped sharing it with the country, so that I’d have something of my own.”
I study the floor. It’s easier than staring at his mouth, watching the beads of blood gather at the corners of his lips.
“But it has been years since I picked up a spade, and I may have forgotten how,” he says. His tongue darts out to stop the red from leaking past his teeth. “What on earth was I trying to accomplish? If I’d kept at it, I might have to endure a few stares, a few impertinent questions, but I’d probably have the best-looking garden in the Capitol.”
“I’m sure you would,” I say as neutrally as possible, though I’ve never been all that good at neutral. Sultry’s what I do best these days, and the thought of doing that here makes me want to scream loud enough for the bugs in the hall to pick up.
“And all because I wanted something to call my own.” He tsks. “The lesson here is threefold, Finnick. What’s the most obvious one to you?”
I resist the urge to say Give me a moment, it’s been five years since I’ve had to go to school. Instead, I say, “Nothing is out of the public eye.”
“Very good.” He comes away from the window and circles his desk, leaning a hand on the mat, the tiered outbox, the coffeecup of pens that reads BEST GRANDFATHER in brightly-colored letters. “You’ve been learning a lot of lessons this year, since the Games. Haymitch Abernathy isn’t the first person I’d think of as a positive influence, but he’s certainly been around as an example.”
Guess that’s your lesson for the year. Johanna learns they’re gonna die, you learn that you can’t save ‘em. I nearly smack my forehead, but my hands are knotted too tightly for my arm to jerk free. The roof is bugged. Of course the roof is bugged, why wouldn’t the roof be bugged?
“Last year, you learned what it is to mentor and lose. This year, to mentor and win. I don’t lie, Finnick, and when I said that I was pleasantly surprised by Annie Cresta’s behavior on the tour, it was as true as when I told you that you would be suited to life in the Capitol.”
There’s too much I want to say to that, and under no circumstances should I say over my dead body to Snow, so I keep my mouth shut, my hands locked, my feet flat on the floor.
He picks a pen out of the coffeecup, rolls it through his fingers, and looks at it instead of me. “And the more I watch you handling that girl, the more I prove that true. It’s validating, Finnick. You’ve come into your own. I think you have a gift for bringing out what’s in the hearts of your charges.”
He’s expecting a thank you. I say, “I’m just doing my job.”
“Then what is this I hear about you bowing out of next year’s Games?”
“District Four has other victors,” I say. “Seems like we should spread the duty around.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve tired of it so soon.” The pen clatters back into the cup, and he takes out a letter-opener instead, smooths his fingers on the blade. “I only thought, since you’d have to be in the Capitol anyway, and you did such a wonderful job juggling the Games with your other obligations, that you’d prove even better-suited with a less...difficult situation.”
I bite my cheek hard enough that blood begins to well. It reminds me of him, and I want to spit, smear it over his beautiful hardwood floor. “Frankly, whoever’s reaped this year from Four will be lucky to make it past the Cornucopia, no matter how good they are.”
“And do you blame yourself, or Annie?”
“I don’t,” I say. “It’s just the way it is.”
He smiles. The letter-opener makes less sound than the pen, sliding back home. “Finnick. Let’s go back to my anecdote about gardening. Can you think of any other lessons you might learn from that story?”
Yes. “If you try to keep something to yourself, you’ll lose it.”
“What do you come to the Capitol for, Finnick? What are your obligations here?”
I feel him jerking my strings, trotting me towards the answers he wants, and I’m tired of pretending I can’t see his hand above me. “To fuck whoever you tell me to. Sir.”
He laughs, startled. It’s the first time I’ve surprised him since I punched him in the jaw three years ago, I’d bet. “You put it bluntly, but yes, in a sense. You’re here to make them love you. To make some of them remember why they loved you enough to make sure you won.”
I unwind my hands, finally, relace my fingers behind my head. “What, has my asking price dropped?”
“Not the price, but the frequency, considering the extent to which you have been shirking your commitments.”
So we are dealing with each other honestly now. Good. If I have to sit through one more anecdote about his gardening habits and pore over it for hidden meanings, I’ll shove that letter opener into my eye. “I thought the money I draw from sponsors went to the same place as the money you get for me.”
“It does,” he says. “And if that was all I was concerned about I wouldn’t have resorted to siphoning it off during these past Games.”
So that’s why the parachutiers kept trying to update me on my budget. I grind my teeth hard enough that I almost expect chips of enamel to come off.
“And I believe you offered Olivia Bowen a refund for walking out on her.”
“Not explicitly.”
“Well, she called me expecting one.”
“Seems reasonable enough.”
“It’s not your money to refund.”
“It’s my services.”
“Then if you’re so intent on dispensing with our arrangement, I can turn to other avenues,” he says, and stands straight, comes closer to me, enough that I smell the flower on his lapel, the blood underneath. “Everyone will be so disappointed.”
“How ever will they get by,” I say flatly.
“How ever will you, alone in District Four?” He shrugs. “How old is little Crescent now? Can she walk yet? Swim?”
My blood turns to ice. I can’t move. The Capitol’s always cold this time of year, but something leeches the warmth from my hands, my stomach, my chest, and creeps higher to steal the rest. “Not yet,” I whisper.
Satisfied, Snow turns away, back to the window. “I look forward to watching her grow up. I can only hope it happens on camera.”
I nod, mutely, wish my hands would thaw enough so I could clap them over my ears like Annie, block out the sounds of Crescent cooing, Maeve and Jamie giggling, Connor shrieking, Lucy and Katie whispering together. Aunt Hannah singing as she slaps bread dough down on the table. Uncle Jonas pitching his voice like Mags’s, and Uncle Brian’s deep roar of laughter. Even the clucking sound Aunt Shannon makes in the back of her throat.
“And the third lesson about my gardening, Finnick? That even if the roses aren’t mine, if I didn’t plant them and water them and prune them myself, there’s still a fresh flower in my lapel whenever I need it.” He turns, holds me with his stare like a snake, and points to his chest. “We have so little that belongs to us, people like you and I. We give ourselves to the world, and the world loves us for it, and we may be its slaves; but in the end, the choice is ours. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say, close my eyes because I can’t bear to look at anything right now.
“Good.” And he waits at the window, for me to keep speaking.
“Thank you. Sir,” I add.
“What was that?”
The full title, he means. I swallow, push everything down, say, “Thank you, Mister President.”
“Now look me in the eye and make me believe it.”
All I have to do is raise my eyes, sweeten my voice, smile. All I have to do. I want to rip off every inch of my skin, strip myself to the bone, and even then I won’t be clean. “Thank you, Mister President.”
He smiles back. “Now if you can make me believe you’re thankful after all I’ve done for you, I’m sure you can make up to all the lovers you’ve slighted these past few months. You’re dismissed. Please send Annie in.”
---
--
.