Scylla and Charybdis [9/9] (The Hunger Games, Finnick/Annie)
Last chapter, at last. In which things finally start to look up.
I don't even know, you guys. Writing this was so exhilarating, and this fandom has really animated me in a way I haven't been for a while. I've missed having stories eat my life like this. In addition to the always-amazing mithrigil, I'd like to thank lassarina for betaing and lindensphinx, meltedpeep, and wizzard890 for letting us talk about this thing. A lot. (Especially Linden.)
I hope y'all (or some of y'all, at any rate) have been enjoying this and I do apologize for the spam for those of you who are like "what the fuck is this series and what the fuck is Puel going on about".
...and no, I don't know why I'm getting stupidly nervous. I will spare you the rest of the babbling and get to the fic.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [9/9] ( 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, ~7300.
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 Nine: He That Wounded Shall Heal Finnick decides that there are some things in his life that he won’t let Snow take away--and some things that he wants and can take for himself.
At least when I get home, Drusus only rips me apart with words. He shoves me into the shower, comes in behind me with all of his clothes on, and I have no idea what he does to the cuts on my back but they sting in an entirely different way by the time we get out. He reams me out over the pounding water, “You self-destructive little idiot,” he says, and “You hate remake, why do you do this to yourself?” and “Next time, hire a professional, or I’ll hire one for you, you stupid kid.”
I’m glad he loves me.
I pass out when he’s applying medicine to my back. Then Caesar Flickerman, of all people, comes to visit me, and says he’s got just the thing, the same treatment he’s used for years. His face melts off and there’s another one under it, and he laughs and makes a joke about someplace beyond Beauty Base Zero, like it’s all a television commercial. He touches my skin and it scalds red, then smooths away, white like his makeup, a blank canvas, and everywhere, everywhere he’s ever touched me. Even my tongue is white when I scream.
I blink awake with a freestanding IV next to the bed and my scars all knit away. I don’t want them gone, I try to say, but my mouth is too dry to form anything more than a croak, so I rake furrows into my arms instead, claw at all that healthy shiny remade skin until it looks like it should. I’m aching all over and I don’t care, I want it off, I want it gone, I want to peel myself out of my skin and throw it away and burn it and then maybe I will be clean, cleaner than the machines here could ever make me. Blood flecks my nails and I tear harder, scour myself down until there’s nothing left.
Drusus comes in and screams at me again. I don’t hear him. But when he and the prep team hold down my arms and threaten to restrain me if I make it any worse, I listen.
“I can call you out tonight,” he says, when I’ve calmed down, but he’s still holding me by the wrists, a gentle reminder. “It’s the Games, people sometimes understand.”
Snow won’t. I shake my head, though it’s more of a twitch than anything. “I can’t.”
“Probably not,” Drusus sighs. “And it won’t be the first time you’ve gone to work with a supplement. Just don’t be an idiot.”
“Story of my life.” I stare at the ceiling. It’s easier than looking at my arms.
“If you come back here with a scratch on you that Calpurnia Houston didn’t put there, I will treat it with the foulest peroxide I know. And stay the hell out of the tabloids.”
I’d salute him, but even the thought of moving makes my arms sting.
A few hours later, I’m out the door, in a netted undershirt that distracts me and everyone else from looking at the fading lines on my back and arms. The cab drops me off at Calpurnia’s apartment building, where she lives on the second-highest floor. I take one look at the furnishings and I know she’s not one of the ones Snow is using me to run into debt. Calpurnia herself has an eerie ageless face and sculpted body, and long hair that’s blue-black at the roots and blue at the ends.
We have drinks but not dinner, pleasantries but no conversation. She takes control immediately, tells me what to call her when I’m allowed to speak, makes me strip, makes me get myself hard. After what Johanna called me yesterday, the things Calpurnia says barely sting at all, but I don’t mind faking offense. I wear myself out for her, and then she uses me until I can’t move my hands anymore.
“Better than I expected,” she says afterward, stretching out on her side of the bed. “When the President said you’d be coming instead of dear little Annie, I was a bit skeptical. But it was worth it in the end, don’t you think so?”
She would have been Annie’s first. I can’t see for a moment, can’t hear, can’t speak for all the blackness welling inside me, strangling the air and warmth out of me and wringing me bone-dry. I should have known it wasn’t a bluff. Knowing it wasn’t makes it worse. I think I say I do, thank you to Calpurnia, but all I hear is Annie’s voice, Annie’s laugh, Annie humming to herself as she mends, Annie whistling on our boat, Annie whispering to me in the dark. No. I’m keeping her away from people like this, I can’t bring her in here now, that’s the worst thing I could do to her.
But the sounds don’t stop, and I fall asleep dreaming of her face.
I wake up to the roar of the waves, and the short sharp bursts of Annie knocking on my window. I slide out of bed and let her in, steady her against me as she climbs over the ledge. There’s sweat on her forehead, sharpened with salt from the ocean still threaded through her hair. I lean in to breathe that in, and after that it’s natural to press my lips to her forehead, kiss the roots of her hair, the arch of her brow. She laughs, and I pull back to ask her why, but she touches her thumb to my lips. I touch it back with my tongue. She shivers, whispers my name, and I draw her close again, bear her down to the bed and kiss her until I have to come up for air. Finnick, Finnick, she says, the same way she said it on the dam with her fingers against her thigh, and I rest mine there now, call her name. She says she’s here. I keep her here, cling to her and hold her down and have her because I want to, because she wants me, because our voices tangle together and break a thousand times in the dark. I touch every inch of her I can reach, stroke her open for me, and she takes me in so deep I never want to come out again.
“Well, isn’t this interesting,” Calpurnia says, and my eyes snap open on hers, not Annie’s.
That was the dream. This is real. I’m in Calpurnia Houston’s bed and she’s stroking my thigh, tapping her fingertips right at the joint of my leg. She’s so cold.
When we finish, I can’t go back to sleep. I lace my fingers behind my head and she pulls a pack of cigarettes off the nightstand, lights up. She offers one to me, but I decline. “I don’t usually do that,” she says.
“Smoke?”
“That,” she corrects, lifting her knee and rubbing it against my groin. “Looks like I’m making a lot of exceptions for you, Finnick Odair.”
“I’m honored.”
She smiles, tilts herself on to her side to let a curl of smoke out. “So what, does it cost extra?”
“That? No. You’re billed for time, not for services rendered.” I assume as much, at least. I haven’t exactly gotten to look at the financial records, if they exist.
“Still,” she says. “I’ve been known to tip for good service. Is there anything you need?”
I blow away the smoke drifting over my mouth. “Not really. I’m not hurting for money.” It’s the most honest thing I’ve said to her all night, and if I were somewhere else I could laugh at it. There is nothing I need here, nothing these people can give me.
But they need me. Or they think they do, at least. I twirl my hair between my fingers, considering that.
“I’d hate to send you away with nothing,” she says, pouting her lower lip around the cigarette.
“Then don’t,” I say, roll over to face her. “Give me something only you can.”
She laughs, leans closer. “Like what?”
“Something that’s yours. Something you haven’t shared with anyone else.” Something more useful than another string of pearls or sapphire bracelet. What is the real currency around here? “A secret.”
She hums, high in her throat. “A secret,” she repeats. “And what would you do with it?”
“Keep it, of course. Isn’t that what you do with any kind of payment?”
“You have me there,” she says, and climbs on top of me, puts herself on display as she stubs out the cigarette. “All right. It really is the least I can do.”
I don’t ask her what the most she can do is.
“The new Head Gamemaker is the one who really designed that dam last year,” she says, nipping at my ear. “Furroughs took the fall for it, but it was Crane all along.”
...well. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. A thousand other questions flood in, but I restrain myself, rest my hands on her hipbones. “How do you know that?”
“He’s my brother-in-law,” she says. “Crane. He married my sister when he couldn’t have me. So the sentimental fool comes barging in the day they executed Furroughs, and, well. People talk.”
Being a Gamemaker isn’t the honor I thought it was, then, or at least not an unqualified one. I smile wider at that than I should, flash my teeth. “What did he say?”
“That this was our chance to run away. I told him that I happen to like my tongue.”
It has its uses, I’ll admit now. “Where would he have run?”
“I thought you asked for one secret.”
“Then I’d better get back to work,” I say, and stretch my shoulders, roll off my back. “Because I charge for services rendered.”
***
“You’re not the only one, you know.”
Floor 7 of the Training Center looks about the same as floor 4, except for the view. It smells different, if I try to break past the makeups and cleansers and fabric glue, but the layout is exactly the same. Johanna’s sitting on the windowsill, and I took the couch once she let me in. “The only one who what?”
“Who Snow’s got by the balls,” she says.
“I know that.” We victors don’t hold a whole lot of secrets from each other. Hard to, when our stories are so similar.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sure you do. But I bet you don’t know whose balls he’s got in jars.”
“The ones he’s neutered, you mean?” I ask. “Haymitch, apparently,” though I’m not sure neutered is the right word for him. Drunk, disconsolate, distant, but not neutered.
She winces from the jaw down like she’s got a bad taste in her mouth. “I don’t want to think about that. But it might by why. I’m just saying he--Snow--he makes that decision more often than you think, you know?”
“I can guess,” I say, and let that one sit.
“Can you?”
I reach for the sugar and dump about a third of the pot into my coffee. You’d think they’d serve better stuff at the training center, but apparently the other victors got to it first. Johanna’s eyes don’t leave mine. “Despite your best efforts, you’re not unappealing,” I say. “I mentored the year you won. People talked about you. You gave the Capitol something they hadn’t seen for a while, something they didn’t expect. They don’t always take surprises well, but sometimes they like being kept on their toes.” The coffee’s still too bitter when I sip it. Damn. “And you’re good-looking even by their standards. You were sixteen when you won, too. Old enough.”
The sneer on her face tapers off into a thin, dark-edged line. “And then what?” she snaps, tilting her head, narrowing her eyes. “What happened after that, Finnick?”
“You didn’t.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the victor of the sixty-fifth Hunger Games.” She claps her hands twice, sliding enough on her palms that I hear her nails scrape. “How long did it take you to figure that out?”
“Not that long, once I sobered up enough to think about it,” I say. “You didn’t know last year, obviously, so I’m guessing Snow approached you sometime between then and now. Unless he didn’t at all, and if not, I admit I don’t know why.” If he was willing to use--
I stop myself before I finish that thought.
“No, he did. But, Snow, wait a year? Ha.” She leans against the windowpane, cracks her shoulder. “He as good as told me at the end of my Victory Tour. I called his bluff.” She crosses her arms, under her breasts. “No point in calling his bluff when he’s not bluffing, you know?”
My cup rattles in my hand, so I set it down. “You thought you were the only one who’d have to do it, when he asked you?”
“What else was I supposed to think? I see all of you clowns with your stupid happy families and ugly old Haymitch at the bottom of a bottle. It didn’t add up.”
“So he didn’t tell you about Haymitch.”
“Haymitch told me about Haymitch.”
I nod. There’s a photograph one of Snow’s men keeps on file of Haymitch when he was younger, a few months before his Games. He’s smiling--reluctantly, like someone off-camera’s coaxing him into it--but he has his arm around his younger brother, and a young woman who must’ve been his girlfriend holds his other arm, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. (When I asked, Haymitch wouldn’t talk about her.) Snow’s man showed me the photo when I was eighteen. Old enough to read between the lines. That kept me quiet for a few months.
“Is that what happened to you?” I ask, so softly I can barely hear myself over the low drone of the machinery in the walls.
She nods, but her head doesn’t come up from it. “I didn’t have that much. I liked it better that way, even before--” She wrings her shirt in her hands. “It was just me and my dad. And my dog. He killed my fucking dog, it sounds so stupid, who does that--”
I look away so I don’t see her start to cry. She’d never forgive me for that.
“His name was Patch,” she says, sniffs angrily. When I look at her, she’s wiping her wrist over her nose like she’s backhanding herself. “My dog, I mean. Dad got him for me when I was ten. He had the biggest paws.” She holds her fists up to demonstrate. “He used to trip over them when he was a puppy. Dummy. I called him Patch ‘cause he had gray fur all over, except for black splotches on his back and over his eye.”
I wait.
“After--” She swallows. “After I told Snow to go fuck himself--”
“Did you really?”
Her grin, when it breaks out, seems to startle her into laughing. “Yeah. I did. Hoped I’d give him a heart attack. We should be so lucky, huh?”
“We should,” I agree.
“Anyway.” She curls up to the glass again. “Two weeks later, I get back home from a trip up north, and they tell me there was a hunting accident.” Her mouth twists at the corner. “And when they bring me to him, his head’s been blown clean off, I can see--I can’t even see his face, there’s nothing there, I could’ve tried to say they were faking it but I knew.”
“Your dog.” I’d shake my head, but I know now as well as she did back then. “It didn’t even occur to me to think about pets.”
“Let me guess, you got a little kitty cat for your love boat with Annie.” She grimaces.
I chuck the sugar spoon at her; she dodges, and it smacks the window, bounces off and rolls under the table. “It’s not a love boat, and we don’t have a cat.” One more thing for Snow to take away from her if I screw up.
But then I picture how she’d light up, how she’d cradle a kitten close and tickle its belly and flop with it on the deck in the sun. The way she’d laugh. How beautiful her laugh is when it rings out over the water, how the waves catch the sound and reflect it back up until it feels like the sea’s rolling with her laughter. And I can’t let that get taken away from her, either.
“Maybe we should get one, though,” I say, duck under the table to get the spoon so I can stir my coffee. “They’re great at keeping vermin off boats.”
Johanna rolls her eyes. “You’re disgusting. But sure, go ahead. Like you need any more strings for Snow to jerk you with. What’s another?”
If the roof is bugged, then the fourth floor probably has even more bugs, so I don’t dare tell her about all the wheels starting to turn in the back of my head, the ideas starting to flow. “He hasn’t needed to jerk them, that’s the thing,” I say. “I dance the way he wants me to because I know he can make me if I don’t. But he’s still holding the strings, no matter how well I perform.”
“So you’ll just keep dancing like they’re not there at all,” she finishes.
“That’s what I’ve been doing.” There’s the spoon. I crawl out from under the table and wipe it on my pants, swirl it through my coffee, watch the patterns it carves in the cream. “Doesn’t make me free, though, does it?”
“Nope,” she says, uncurls and pushes off the windowsill to stretch. “Like there’s still a tracker in your arm.”
I run my thumbnail over the spot, wonder how deep I’d have to cut to rip it out. It’d hurt. But I’ve survived worse.
***
By the time I reach my apartment, my head’s clearer than it’s been for days. The air of the Capitol at night carries its own kind of haze, though, expensive perfume and too-vibrant flowers and cloying smoke, and purging that out of my system takes more than Capitol drugs. Once I’m inside, I slump against the door, take a moment to breathe, to rest. No more social calls, no more obligations, no more outings, not for tonight.
“Good,” Haymitch says from my kitchen floor. “I was starting to think I’d have to sleep in your bed.”
I drop my bag harder than I need to. “What the hell is everyone doing in my apartment?” I ask the ceiling, which doesn’t answer.
“Making coffee,” Haymitch says.
“Ha.”
“No, really. I can’t figure this thing out.” He stands up, bends over the countertop and peers at the buttons. “Does it have a tequila option?”
“My apartment is not a full-service bar,” I tell him.
“You say that now,” Haymitch points out. “Wait until you see the modifications Beetee made.” He raises his voice on Beetee.
Something in the walls clicks and turns.
“What the--”
“I thought he told you he swept the place.”
I smack my forehead. “Say his name, problems go away.”
He leans against the counter, grinning. “And you’ve got a problem with people taking away your privacy.”
“So he debugged my apartment. And didn’t think to warn me about it beforehand.” I pick my bag back up, empty its contents on the couch and start sorting through them because otherwise I’m going to pick Haymitch up by the front of his shirt and throttle him. “You know, I’m tired of being left out of the loop on these things.”
“He didn’t debug it. Ask him, if you can do it without getting a tail. What he did was make it so you could have a half hour, here and there, if you need it. And now that no one’s listening I’m fine telling you that the only reason you’re out of the loop is we know you don’t want to get Annie killed. I think that’s a fair point.”
I drop the jacket I’ve been folding, let it crumple to the ground and twitch like I’ve been slapped with cold water. The chill fades, but the shivers don’t. “Has something happened to Annie? Is she all right?” I did everything Snow asked me to, everything, they couldn’t possibly--
“If this is going to keep being all about her, Finnick, I’m going to walk out that door and you can keep the feedback loop as a souvenir,” Haymitch growls. “Stupid kid. You think I need privacy to tell you if your girl’s gone under? Get some damn perspective.”
“She’s not my girl,” I say; it’s almost a mantra at this point, a talisman against some force I have to hold myself back from naming. I sigh. “Fine. This isn’t about her. What is it about, and why did you bring her up?”
“Because I know what you’re doing to keep her alive, and I was hoping that you could do more.”
“More for what?”
He takes a swig from his bottle, down almost to the dregs. “For us.”
For the first time in days, my hands still, fall to my sides. Us. I roll the word around, give it the space it needs, deserves. “I’d ask if you meant the rest of the victors, but I don’t think you do.”
“Good, you’re starting to think.” He leans back on the counter, smiling. I wonder if he’s capable of doing that evenly, or if one of the corners of his mouth is always higher than the other. “I’m glad you sobered up, we’re running out of time.”
“Pot, kettle,” I say, deadpan.
“Black as coal,” he agrees. “But I’ve been taking care of this drunk for longer than you’ve been alive.”
“This,” I say, and hope to hell that whoever else is included in this has other intermediaries for when Haymitch is too busy spending his time passed out to--what is it that he does? He’s been a mentor as long as I’ve been alive; he knows even more people than I do. Us could mean almost anyone. “You planning on telling me what this is?”
“Soon as you plan on telling me what you wouldn’t do to drown Snow in his own blood.”
What I wouldn’t do? I can feel a nothing starting up in my throat, but I remember my family, and Mags, and Annie, and it withers into silence.
“That’s why you’re a hard one to tell,” Haymitch says, takes another drink. “The rest of us, we’ve got nothing to lose. But you, you’ve got people to save. Makes you want it more; makes you easier to take down. Hell, you know this better than I do, what am I doing preaching to you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I want in.”
Haymitch throws back his head and laughs, raises his bottle to toast. “So you figured us out, huh?”
“The part about drowning Snow in his own blood was a clue.”
“Get in line.”
I stop fiddling with my bag and simply sit, my hands on my knees, facing him. “I’m serious. And you’re right. I do have people to save. But I can’t save them like this.” He can still call Helen and Roarke and Lucy and Katie up for the Games. He can still cut Aunt Coral’s wages at the docks, and force Uncle Niall and Uncle Jonas to give up their boats and work on one of the fishing trawlers they’re trying to shove everyone in 4 onto. He can decide that my mother has to get treatment, or that Mags has to come to the Capitol and stay.
He can still hurt Annie. He has hurt Annie. I can’t take that away no matter how nicely I play.
“You have no idea how glad I am that someone who still has people to save figured that out,” Haymitch says, shutting his eyes.
“I’m still figuring it out.” I shake my head; it’s still not as clear as I’d like it to be.
“You’ve got time. And you don’t have to while it away alone.”
“You know,” I say, “I don’t think I want to.”
“Then don’t.” Haymitch offers me the bottle, drums his fingers on its clear neck. “Do whatever the hell you want about your people, and here? Here, you can call your whiling days over.”
I lean back. My back protests, but it fades into a vague sort of grumbling. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he says, with a smile sour enough to curdle cream. “Hate to put it this way, but you’re as close to an inside man as we’ve got right now.”
“You pick up a lot of things in my line of work,” I say carefully. “So to speak.”
“People talk to their whores,” Haymitch agrees.
“It’s like talking to the bartender. Different kind of tipping, though.”
He laughs through his nose. The walls chirr, and he glances at them, takes the bottle back since I haven’t made a move to drink. “Tell you what. Sleep on it. Come to the victor’s lounge tomorrow. Sit on my couch.”
“Sit on your couch?” I repeat, raise my eyebrows.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’ll kick you off like I always do.” He smiles. “But I’ll know you want to be there.”
***
Drusus, his timing as impeccable as ever, walks in on me as I’m flushing the last of what I bought last weekend down the toilet.
“It won’t turn the water any prettier colors,” he says.
“And it won’t put anything in the Capitol’s water supply that they can’t handle.” I pause. “I think.”
He raises an eyebrow, and all the silver tips catch the bathroom light, one after the other. “You’re up to something.”
I put on my best innocent expression, which hasn’t really worked since I was fifteen or so, but I might as well try. “Just cleaning up before I head home for the season.”
He doesn’t believe it for a second, but he does lean over my shoulder to watch the pills dissolve. “You’re due back in three months.”
Could be worse. “Then I’ll be back. But I need the break.”
When I look up, Drusus is smiling in the bathroom mirror. “You and me both. I’m trying to take on more event planning these days, and you’re a full-time commitment.”
“Good for you,” I say, and mean it. “I guess you’ve gotten enough practice managing my schedule.”
“Let’s hope. And besides, you’re almost old enough to take care of yourself.”
I laugh. “Weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, gods don’t usually do that.” He ruffles my shoulder and leaves me alone.
I doubt gods spend half an hour flushing drug stockpiles down their toilets. Come to think of it, I’m not precisely sure what gods do. Not much, from what I’ve heard. Sit on top of the clouds and spy on mortals below and throw lightning bolts when things get dull. I’d go crazy with boredom in a day if I tried it. Better to be me.
***
The platform is more crowded this year than last, even though we haven’t brought a victor home. Brine’s and Beatriz’s families cluster around the tracks, welcoming them home, and my cousins bound towards me before I fully open the door. They almost knock me back into the train compartment, but Aunt Ruth shouts at them to let me out. I peer over their heads and see my aunts and uncles shaking their heads, my dad wheeling my mother onto the platform, Mags setting her cane aside and walking forward.
Where’s Annie? I scan the crowd again, but I can’t pick her out. She’s not great with crowds, I know, but neither is my mother and she’s here, and I wanted her to be here, I hoped she’d want to see me as soon as I came home. I wanted, want, to see her better than when I left her.
“How’s Annie been?” I ask my mother once I pry enough of my cousins loose.
Mother gasps, and then smiles, shaking her head. “Not even a hello, Finnick.”
Oh. Right. I lean down and hug her. “Hello, Mother. Is Annie all right?”
She laughs, and my dad laughs too, craning over the back of the chair to look at her.
“I’ve been worried,” I say, scuff my heel against the wood. “It’s not like I get much news from the district when I’m in the Capitol, and--well.”
Mags grabs me by the arm, and points to the docks.
I breathe in deep for the first time in weeks, let the salt air fill my lungs until I could burst. “Mags, you are the second most beautiful woman in the world right now.”
She grins, as bright as ever. “Second most?”
I laugh and chuck her under the chin. “There’s someone I have to see,” I say by way of explanation. It’s as much of one as I can give now. My head’s swimming, currents flowing faster than I can follow, and I need to sift through it all and I can’t here. I kiss Mags on the cheek, murmur, “Thank you.” She squeezes my arm, gives me a little shove, and lets me go.
She always knows when to do that.
I break for the docks, leave the crowd at the station behind. Our boat is moored where it should be, and the Victor’s Wharf is far, but I can’t stop running, can barely even hear my feet on the pavement, then on the planks. People shout out to me as I pass, wave me over, but I don’t even have time to smile in their direction--I’ll greet them later, give them their due, but right now I’m running too fast to keep track of anything other than where I have to go. The world blurs, and the wind in my ears erodes all other noise. This is what swimming feels like, the currents caressing me, the air in my lungs keeping me afloat, my feet so light that I don’t feel anything under them at all. I jump clean over the guardrail of the boat almost before I get there and swing in to the cabin, her name on the tip of my tongue--
And she’s curled up asleep on the cots, her arm draped across to mine, her hair spilling over the pillows and glinting red in the sun. I stop, panting, and try to regain my balance, my breath. The sleeves of her shirt are rolled up to her elbows, and her shorts are loose over her hips, twisted with the bedsheets trapped between her knees. Her face is turned up into the light and I know there’s nothing weighing her down at all either, no beads or gold or jewels. She’s not sleeping, she’s floating.
I should wake her up. I should keep watching. I want to do both. I compromise, kneel on my cot and stretch out next to her, my head pillowed on my hand, my legs angled to fit the bend of her knees. She breathes with the sway of the boat, and my fingers spread out inches from her hair, reaching towards her, reaching for her. “Hey,” I say.
Her eyes open, blink and flutter, and she sinks deeper into the pillow, smiling. “Hi.”
“I missed you.” My throat draws tight. Everything does.
“You’re here,” she says, curling closer. “You don’t have to now.”
“I want to be here,” I say. Twining her fingers with mine should be easy, we’ve done it a thousand times before even if the motion of our thumbs is always different, but this time my hand takes so long to fold over hers, and the heat between our palms makes mine sweat. “Wherever I go, I can’t leave you behind. Or maybe it’s that a part of me stays here.”
Her thumb slides on mine, her fingers grip mine tight. “The part of you I found.”
“The best part of me.”
“It’s you,” she whispers. Her cheeks are flushed. I wonder if she’s as warm as I am. I brush her cheek to find out, and she flushes brighter.
“I’m still figuring out who that is,” I say.
“I’ve seen him. It’s you in the water. It’s you, here. It’s--” She holds tight to my hand, but her other comes between us to touch my lips. Her hands aren’t soft: they’re callused and dented, spiderweb cracks on her fingertips and bitten cuticles and broken nails, and they’re real, so wonderfully real, so wonderfully hers.
“You see me,” I say, and my lips press just enough into her fingers.
She nods, shivers.
“You’ve always seen me.”
“No,” she murmurs, “not always, but I can now.”
My breath comes shorter, barely passes through my throat. “How could I take so long to see you?”
We’re close now, so close strands of her hair are pinned under my shoulder. “You weren’t looking?” she asks, like she can’t believe it, like she needs to know.
“I’m looking now.”
She breathes against my lips.
I whisper her name, stutter over it. She cranes her head to the side, her hair spilling over my hand. My skin tingles where she touches me, I realize, like she’s calling parts of me to life, like they’re awakening from a long sleep and shaking off all the pins and needles. “Annie?” I ask again.
“I’m here,” she whispers.
“I’m here,” it feels true, I say it and I believe it, “and I want--I want this.”
“Then have it, have it, please--”
I nudge her thumb out of the way and cover her lips with mine.
She breathes me in as soon as we kiss, draws my mouth to hers, and I don’t have time to take more of her in before we pull apart and she finds my eyes, stares into them. Everything hangs suspended between us, everything, and then she surges against me, kisses me and tangles her fingers in my hair and pulls herself up from the bed to press our bodies together like our lips. I can’t stop touching her, weaving her fingers with mine and breaking apart to reform again, tracing the contours of her neck, her shoulders, her spine. I know somewhere in the back of my head that I’m not touching her anywhere I haven’t already, but I don’t believe it, can’t, because if I had I’d never have left her side, never have stopped exploring all she’s giving me. She can’t stop touching either, I can feel her hands on my neck, my back, my chest, but her lips never leave mine.
I pull her down on top of me and she gasps into my mouth, shivers in my hands but everything is warm, everything I touch and taste. “Here,” she says, kissing the spike of my jaw, “here,” and I bring my lips to her collar, the dip of her neck, and lower, lower until she writhes against my hips. I rise to meet her, trace the line of her jaw with my thumb and the hollow between her breasts with my tongue, don’t know if I’m holding her or myself steady. It can’t be me, I decide, I’m rocking too much, buckling under the weight and warmth of her, shifting to take more of her in my mouth, my hands. I want her there. I want her everywhere. I want her. I tell her.
She asks me how.
I can’t speak. I show her instead, slide her shirt over her head and grip her hips and kiss a line from her throat to her breast. She struggles to pull my jacket off my shoulders and bows her head, but the sleeves gather at my elbows and she holds them there, holds on tight, to keep herself where I can reach. I draw wet circles over her breast with my tongue, take enough between my teeth to make her squirm and cant her hips over mine. Sea-salt and sweat mingle on her skin, and I suck until I can separate out the tastes. The way she whispers my name, here, like this, isn’t the way she said it in the river. It’s harsher, needier, stronger. Please. Finnick, please.
“Have you ever done this before?” I ask.
“No?” It comes out as a question, but the way she can’t stop moving, I don’t know if it could sound certain. “I know how it works, but--no.”
“Tell me if anything hurts,” I say, and roll her to her back, thank our foresight in pushing the cots together. She props herself up on her elbows to draw me down and kiss me but I pull back, get her shorts unbuttoned and tug them down her legs. “Promise?”
“Yes,” she says, “yes,” and I’m not sure whether she’s saying yes to the promise or yes to something else, but either way I’ll take it. I’ll take everything she’s laid bare, trail my mouth and hands over every part of her I can see and touch and taste. I learn the curve of her hip, the arch of her back, the soft lines of her thighs. I kiss and suck and stroke until she thrashes under me, sobs things I half-understand, but I don’t need words to know what she means. And she is clinging to my hair, scrabbling to hold on to any part of me she needs, but I’m already so close, kissing inside her, that when she comes I can’t pull away. I wouldn’t. I drink her down until her hips start to stir again, until the cot starts to creak.
“You,” she says, ragged and parched, “Finnick, I want to take care of you. Your turn. Please.” She holds on to my shoulders and tries to turn us over, kisses my mouth and down my chest until her lips reach the waist of my pants and I nearly spring a foot off the bed.
“Annie,” I say when my mind unfogs enough, “you don’t have to--”
“I want to try,” she says, “I want you to feel this good.”
I can’t say no. I don’t want to. She kisses me there through my clothes and fumbles with the buttons, settles between my legs and draws me out and rubs her cheek against my groin. It takes restraint I don’t really have right now not to grip her by the hair and hold her there, but I manage to summon it from somewhere, mostly, settle for curling my fingers against her scalp and letting her kiss, as enthusiastically as she kissed my mouth. Her tongue is so warm and quick, I can’t follow it, can’t keep her where I want her and can’t help moving to meet her, lifting my hips off the cot and trying not to hurt her. She looks up at me, chews her bottom lip, and stretches out her jaw to take me down.
I tug harder on her hair, hold her back. The walls of her mouth close on me, hot and soft and tight, and I want to stay but I want this more. “I don’t want to finish yet,” I tell her, hoarser than I meant to. My blood pounds through my hips, urging me forward, but if I held off for a year I can hold off for a few minutes more. She leans forward and keeps trying, tightening my grip on her hair, but I slide back along the cot and tell her, “Annie. Please. I want to do this together.”
Her chest pushes against my thigh when she breathes. “Yes. All right. How?”
“Climb up on your knees,” I tell her, and position her over my hips when she does. I still my hands for a moment and look at her, blushing from her cheeks all the way to her breasts, shining with sweat, her eyes depthless and wild and always on mine, taking me in. I hold her apart and watch how it changes her, how a shudder ripples through her from my fingers to her knees, how she closes them over my hips to drive me deeper.
“Have you touched yourself before?” I ask her.
“Yes,” she breathes. “There. And deeper, some.”
I push in further, twist my fingers and find the spot that makes her grind against my hand, stroke her outside with my thumb and inside with the rest and trap her there. Her eyes glass over but they don’t leave mine, don’t stop watching me, waiting for me. She’s warm and wet and shuddering everywhere but here especially; here she’s burning hot enough to sear me, dripping on my fingers and making me strain for more as hard as she is.
“Finnick,” she says, “Finnick--”
“Hold on,” I say, wonder if I can, and keep my fingers in enough so I can guide myself inside.
There’s nothing else. Nothing but her, her knees framing my hips, her hips sharp against my skin, her warmth and tightness closing around even the parts of me she isn’t touching. I feel her everywhere. Every breath I take makes me swell against her, every beat of my heart makes me pulse inside her. I can’t move, not now, not for a while. It’s all I can do to take her in, to stay. Sunlight streaks through the sweat on her arms as she holds on to mine, holds herself close, holds us together. Her hips pull forward and her eyes flash wide, the scant breath on her lips rustling her hair, and she does it again, rocks forward atop me and around me. I cling to her with everything I have, and she surges, cries out, tightens everywhere. There’s more, I know there’s more, I’m striving for the surface, the waves are overhead, they’ve found me, I’m home, I’m here, and the moment before I come up for air I’m certain that I can breathe water.
She collapses against me moments after. Her hair sticks to my chest, her skin to my skin. I don’t know how long we lie there, mouths parted, lips chapped. The boat sways beneath us, the cot shifts with the deck, my chest rises and falls and each time, she nestles closer.
“Can’t breathe,” she says, but when I touch her cheek and look at her, she’s smiling.
“Here. With me.” We fall into sync, and I kiss her as we breathe out, knot my fingers in her hair.
“You breathe, I breathe,” she whispers, laughing, holding me close. “You stay, I stay.”
“Always,” I say, and kiss her again.
***
The sun sets over the ocean, sets the surface aglow all the way to the west-facing windows of out boat. It casts the white sheets orange, the dark walls gold, our skin silver where the sweat refracts the light. Her breath beads on my shoulder, and she kisses me there, like she doesn’t know what else to say. Neither do I.
Her hair is tangled, but I can never get enough of piecing through it, letting the snarls part on my knuckles. I know we’ll have to wake up soon, have to step out onto the docks, go ashore, see our families, choose what secrets to keep. They know, they’ve known longer than either of us.
But we know now, and that’s enough.
My name is Finnick Odair. I am twenty years old. I am the victor of the sixty-fifth Hunger Games. I was born at sea.
Annie Cresta loves me.
---
--
.
I don't even know, you guys. Writing this was so exhilarating, and this fandom has really animated me in a way I haven't been for a while. I've missed having stories eat my life like this. In addition to the always-amazing mithrigil, I'd like to thank lassarina for betaing and lindensphinx, meltedpeep, and wizzard890 for letting us talk about this thing. A lot. (Especially Linden.)
I hope y'all (or some of y'all, at any rate) have been enjoying this and I do apologize for the spam for those of you who are like "what the fuck is this series and what the fuck is Puel going on about".
...and no, I don't know why I'm getting stupidly nervous. I will spare you the rest of the babbling and get to the fic.
Title: Scylla and Charybdis [9/9] ( 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, ~7300.
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 Nine: He That Wounded Shall Heal Finnick decides that there are some things in his life that he won’t let Snow take away--and some things that he wants and can take for himself.
At least when I get home, Drusus only rips me apart with words. He shoves me into the shower, comes in behind me with all of his clothes on, and I have no idea what he does to the cuts on my back but they sting in an entirely different way by the time we get out. He reams me out over the pounding water, “You self-destructive little idiot,” he says, and “You hate remake, why do you do this to yourself?” and “Next time, hire a professional, or I’ll hire one for you, you stupid kid.”
I’m glad he loves me.
I pass out when he’s applying medicine to my back. Then Caesar Flickerman, of all people, comes to visit me, and says he’s got just the thing, the same treatment he’s used for years. His face melts off and there’s another one under it, and he laughs and makes a joke about someplace beyond Beauty Base Zero, like it’s all a television commercial. He touches my skin and it scalds red, then smooths away, white like his makeup, a blank canvas, and everywhere, everywhere he’s ever touched me. Even my tongue is white when I scream.
I blink awake with a freestanding IV next to the bed and my scars all knit away. I don’t want them gone, I try to say, but my mouth is too dry to form anything more than a croak, so I rake furrows into my arms instead, claw at all that healthy shiny remade skin until it looks like it should. I’m aching all over and I don’t care, I want it off, I want it gone, I want to peel myself out of my skin and throw it away and burn it and then maybe I will be clean, cleaner than the machines here could ever make me. Blood flecks my nails and I tear harder, scour myself down until there’s nothing left.
Drusus comes in and screams at me again. I don’t hear him. But when he and the prep team hold down my arms and threaten to restrain me if I make it any worse, I listen.
“I can call you out tonight,” he says, when I’ve calmed down, but he’s still holding me by the wrists, a gentle reminder. “It’s the Games, people sometimes understand.”
Snow won’t. I shake my head, though it’s more of a twitch than anything. “I can’t.”
“Probably not,” Drusus sighs. “And it won’t be the first time you’ve gone to work with a supplement. Just don’t be an idiot.”
“Story of my life.” I stare at the ceiling. It’s easier than looking at my arms.
“If you come back here with a scratch on you that Calpurnia Houston didn’t put there, I will treat it with the foulest peroxide I know. And stay the hell out of the tabloids.”
I’d salute him, but even the thought of moving makes my arms sting.
A few hours later, I’m out the door, in a netted undershirt that distracts me and everyone else from looking at the fading lines on my back and arms. The cab drops me off at Calpurnia’s apartment building, where she lives on the second-highest floor. I take one look at the furnishings and I know she’s not one of the ones Snow is using me to run into debt. Calpurnia herself has an eerie ageless face and sculpted body, and long hair that’s blue-black at the roots and blue at the ends.
We have drinks but not dinner, pleasantries but no conversation. She takes control immediately, tells me what to call her when I’m allowed to speak, makes me strip, makes me get myself hard. After what Johanna called me yesterday, the things Calpurnia says barely sting at all, but I don’t mind faking offense. I wear myself out for her, and then she uses me until I can’t move my hands anymore.
“Better than I expected,” she says afterward, stretching out on her side of the bed. “When the President said you’d be coming instead of dear little Annie, I was a bit skeptical. But it was worth it in the end, don’t you think so?”
She would have been Annie’s first. I can’t see for a moment, can’t hear, can’t speak for all the blackness welling inside me, strangling the air and warmth out of me and wringing me bone-dry. I should have known it wasn’t a bluff. Knowing it wasn’t makes it worse. I think I say I do, thank you to Calpurnia, but all I hear is Annie’s voice, Annie’s laugh, Annie humming to herself as she mends, Annie whistling on our boat, Annie whispering to me in the dark. No. I’m keeping her away from people like this, I can’t bring her in here now, that’s the worst thing I could do to her.
But the sounds don’t stop, and I fall asleep dreaming of her face.
I wake up to the roar of the waves, and the short sharp bursts of Annie knocking on my window. I slide out of bed and let her in, steady her against me as she climbs over the ledge. There’s sweat on her forehead, sharpened with salt from the ocean still threaded through her hair. I lean in to breathe that in, and after that it’s natural to press my lips to her forehead, kiss the roots of her hair, the arch of her brow. She laughs, and I pull back to ask her why, but she touches her thumb to my lips. I touch it back with my tongue. She shivers, whispers my name, and I draw her close again, bear her down to the bed and kiss her until I have to come up for air. Finnick, Finnick, she says, the same way she said it on the dam with her fingers against her thigh, and I rest mine there now, call her name. She says she’s here. I keep her here, cling to her and hold her down and have her because I want to, because she wants me, because our voices tangle together and break a thousand times in the dark. I touch every inch of her I can reach, stroke her open for me, and she takes me in so deep I never want to come out again.
“Well, isn’t this interesting,” Calpurnia says, and my eyes snap open on hers, not Annie’s.
That was the dream. This is real. I’m in Calpurnia Houston’s bed and she’s stroking my thigh, tapping her fingertips right at the joint of my leg. She’s so cold.
When we finish, I can’t go back to sleep. I lace my fingers behind my head and she pulls a pack of cigarettes off the nightstand, lights up. She offers one to me, but I decline. “I don’t usually do that,” she says.
“Smoke?”
“That,” she corrects, lifting her knee and rubbing it against my groin. “Looks like I’m making a lot of exceptions for you, Finnick Odair.”
“I’m honored.”
She smiles, tilts herself on to her side to let a curl of smoke out. “So what, does it cost extra?”
“That? No. You’re billed for time, not for services rendered.” I assume as much, at least. I haven’t exactly gotten to look at the financial records, if they exist.
“Still,” she says. “I’ve been known to tip for good service. Is there anything you need?”
I blow away the smoke drifting over my mouth. “Not really. I’m not hurting for money.” It’s the most honest thing I’ve said to her all night, and if I were somewhere else I could laugh at it. There is nothing I need here, nothing these people can give me.
But they need me. Or they think they do, at least. I twirl my hair between my fingers, considering that.
“I’d hate to send you away with nothing,” she says, pouting her lower lip around the cigarette.
“Then don’t,” I say, roll over to face her. “Give me something only you can.”
She laughs, leans closer. “Like what?”
“Something that’s yours. Something you haven’t shared with anyone else.” Something more useful than another string of pearls or sapphire bracelet. What is the real currency around here? “A secret.”
She hums, high in her throat. “A secret,” she repeats. “And what would you do with it?”
“Keep it, of course. Isn’t that what you do with any kind of payment?”
“You have me there,” she says, and climbs on top of me, puts herself on display as she stubs out the cigarette. “All right. It really is the least I can do.”
I don’t ask her what the most she can do is.
“The new Head Gamemaker is the one who really designed that dam last year,” she says, nipping at my ear. “Furroughs took the fall for it, but it was Crane all along.”
...well. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. A thousand other questions flood in, but I restrain myself, rest my hands on her hipbones. “How do you know that?”
“He’s my brother-in-law,” she says. “Crane. He married my sister when he couldn’t have me. So the sentimental fool comes barging in the day they executed Furroughs, and, well. People talk.”
Being a Gamemaker isn’t the honor I thought it was, then, or at least not an unqualified one. I smile wider at that than I should, flash my teeth. “What did he say?”
“That this was our chance to run away. I told him that I happen to like my tongue.”
It has its uses, I’ll admit now. “Where would he have run?”
“I thought you asked for one secret.”
“Then I’d better get back to work,” I say, and stretch my shoulders, roll off my back. “Because I charge for services rendered.”
***
“You’re not the only one, you know.”
Floor 7 of the Training Center looks about the same as floor 4, except for the view. It smells different, if I try to break past the makeups and cleansers and fabric glue, but the layout is exactly the same. Johanna’s sitting on the windowsill, and I took the couch once she let me in. “The only one who what?”
“Who Snow’s got by the balls,” she says.
“I know that.” We victors don’t hold a whole lot of secrets from each other. Hard to, when our stories are so similar.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sure you do. But I bet you don’t know whose balls he’s got in jars.”
“The ones he’s neutered, you mean?” I ask. “Haymitch, apparently,” though I’m not sure neutered is the right word for him. Drunk, disconsolate, distant, but not neutered.
She winces from the jaw down like she’s got a bad taste in her mouth. “I don’t want to think about that. But it might by why. I’m just saying he--Snow--he makes that decision more often than you think, you know?”
“I can guess,” I say, and let that one sit.
“Can you?”
I reach for the sugar and dump about a third of the pot into my coffee. You’d think they’d serve better stuff at the training center, but apparently the other victors got to it first. Johanna’s eyes don’t leave mine. “Despite your best efforts, you’re not unappealing,” I say. “I mentored the year you won. People talked about you. You gave the Capitol something they hadn’t seen for a while, something they didn’t expect. They don’t always take surprises well, but sometimes they like being kept on their toes.” The coffee’s still too bitter when I sip it. Damn. “And you’re good-looking even by their standards. You were sixteen when you won, too. Old enough.”
The sneer on her face tapers off into a thin, dark-edged line. “And then what?” she snaps, tilting her head, narrowing her eyes. “What happened after that, Finnick?”
“You didn’t.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the victor of the sixty-fifth Hunger Games.” She claps her hands twice, sliding enough on her palms that I hear her nails scrape. “How long did it take you to figure that out?”
“Not that long, once I sobered up enough to think about it,” I say. “You didn’t know last year, obviously, so I’m guessing Snow approached you sometime between then and now. Unless he didn’t at all, and if not, I admit I don’t know why.” If he was willing to use--
I stop myself before I finish that thought.
“No, he did. But, Snow, wait a year? Ha.” She leans against the windowpane, cracks her shoulder. “He as good as told me at the end of my Victory Tour. I called his bluff.” She crosses her arms, under her breasts. “No point in calling his bluff when he’s not bluffing, you know?”
My cup rattles in my hand, so I set it down. “You thought you were the only one who’d have to do it, when he asked you?”
“What else was I supposed to think? I see all of you clowns with your stupid happy families and ugly old Haymitch at the bottom of a bottle. It didn’t add up.”
“So he didn’t tell you about Haymitch.”
“Haymitch told me about Haymitch.”
I nod. There’s a photograph one of Snow’s men keeps on file of Haymitch when he was younger, a few months before his Games. He’s smiling--reluctantly, like someone off-camera’s coaxing him into it--but he has his arm around his younger brother, and a young woman who must’ve been his girlfriend holds his other arm, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. (When I asked, Haymitch wouldn’t talk about her.) Snow’s man showed me the photo when I was eighteen. Old enough to read between the lines. That kept me quiet for a few months.
“Is that what happened to you?” I ask, so softly I can barely hear myself over the low drone of the machinery in the walls.
She nods, but her head doesn’t come up from it. “I didn’t have that much. I liked it better that way, even before--” She wrings her shirt in her hands. “It was just me and my dad. And my dog. He killed my fucking dog, it sounds so stupid, who does that--”
I look away so I don’t see her start to cry. She’d never forgive me for that.
“His name was Patch,” she says, sniffs angrily. When I look at her, she’s wiping her wrist over her nose like she’s backhanding herself. “My dog, I mean. Dad got him for me when I was ten. He had the biggest paws.” She holds her fists up to demonstrate. “He used to trip over them when he was a puppy. Dummy. I called him Patch ‘cause he had gray fur all over, except for black splotches on his back and over his eye.”
I wait.
“After--” She swallows. “After I told Snow to go fuck himself--”
“Did you really?”
Her grin, when it breaks out, seems to startle her into laughing. “Yeah. I did. Hoped I’d give him a heart attack. We should be so lucky, huh?”
“We should,” I agree.
“Anyway.” She curls up to the glass again. “Two weeks later, I get back home from a trip up north, and they tell me there was a hunting accident.” Her mouth twists at the corner. “And when they bring me to him, his head’s been blown clean off, I can see--I can’t even see his face, there’s nothing there, I could’ve tried to say they were faking it but I knew.”
“Your dog.” I’d shake my head, but I know now as well as she did back then. “It didn’t even occur to me to think about pets.”
“Let me guess, you got a little kitty cat for your love boat with Annie.” She grimaces.
I chuck the sugar spoon at her; she dodges, and it smacks the window, bounces off and rolls under the table. “It’s not a love boat, and we don’t have a cat.” One more thing for Snow to take away from her if I screw up.
But then I picture how she’d light up, how she’d cradle a kitten close and tickle its belly and flop with it on the deck in the sun. The way she’d laugh. How beautiful her laugh is when it rings out over the water, how the waves catch the sound and reflect it back up until it feels like the sea’s rolling with her laughter. And I can’t let that get taken away from her, either.
“Maybe we should get one, though,” I say, duck under the table to get the spoon so I can stir my coffee. “They’re great at keeping vermin off boats.”
Johanna rolls her eyes. “You’re disgusting. But sure, go ahead. Like you need any more strings for Snow to jerk you with. What’s another?”
If the roof is bugged, then the fourth floor probably has even more bugs, so I don’t dare tell her about all the wheels starting to turn in the back of my head, the ideas starting to flow. “He hasn’t needed to jerk them, that’s the thing,” I say. “I dance the way he wants me to because I know he can make me if I don’t. But he’s still holding the strings, no matter how well I perform.”
“So you’ll just keep dancing like they’re not there at all,” she finishes.
“That’s what I’ve been doing.” There’s the spoon. I crawl out from under the table and wipe it on my pants, swirl it through my coffee, watch the patterns it carves in the cream. “Doesn’t make me free, though, does it?”
“Nope,” she says, uncurls and pushes off the windowsill to stretch. “Like there’s still a tracker in your arm.”
I run my thumbnail over the spot, wonder how deep I’d have to cut to rip it out. It’d hurt. But I’ve survived worse.
***
By the time I reach my apartment, my head’s clearer than it’s been for days. The air of the Capitol at night carries its own kind of haze, though, expensive perfume and too-vibrant flowers and cloying smoke, and purging that out of my system takes more than Capitol drugs. Once I’m inside, I slump against the door, take a moment to breathe, to rest. No more social calls, no more obligations, no more outings, not for tonight.
“Good,” Haymitch says from my kitchen floor. “I was starting to think I’d have to sleep in your bed.”
I drop my bag harder than I need to. “What the hell is everyone doing in my apartment?” I ask the ceiling, which doesn’t answer.
“Making coffee,” Haymitch says.
“Ha.”
“No, really. I can’t figure this thing out.” He stands up, bends over the countertop and peers at the buttons. “Does it have a tequila option?”
“My apartment is not a full-service bar,” I tell him.
“You say that now,” Haymitch points out. “Wait until you see the modifications Beetee made.” He raises his voice on Beetee.
Something in the walls clicks and turns.
“What the--”
“I thought he told you he swept the place.”
I smack my forehead. “Say his name, problems go away.”
He leans against the counter, grinning. “And you’ve got a problem with people taking away your privacy.”
“So he debugged my apartment. And didn’t think to warn me about it beforehand.” I pick my bag back up, empty its contents on the couch and start sorting through them because otherwise I’m going to pick Haymitch up by the front of his shirt and throttle him. “You know, I’m tired of being left out of the loop on these things.”
“He didn’t debug it. Ask him, if you can do it without getting a tail. What he did was make it so you could have a half hour, here and there, if you need it. And now that no one’s listening I’m fine telling you that the only reason you’re out of the loop is we know you don’t want to get Annie killed. I think that’s a fair point.”
I drop the jacket I’ve been folding, let it crumple to the ground and twitch like I’ve been slapped with cold water. The chill fades, but the shivers don’t. “Has something happened to Annie? Is she all right?” I did everything Snow asked me to, everything, they couldn’t possibly--
“If this is going to keep being all about her, Finnick, I’m going to walk out that door and you can keep the feedback loop as a souvenir,” Haymitch growls. “Stupid kid. You think I need privacy to tell you if your girl’s gone under? Get some damn perspective.”
“She’s not my girl,” I say; it’s almost a mantra at this point, a talisman against some force I have to hold myself back from naming. I sigh. “Fine. This isn’t about her. What is it about, and why did you bring her up?”
“Because I know what you’re doing to keep her alive, and I was hoping that you could do more.”
“More for what?”
He takes a swig from his bottle, down almost to the dregs. “For us.”
For the first time in days, my hands still, fall to my sides. Us. I roll the word around, give it the space it needs, deserves. “I’d ask if you meant the rest of the victors, but I don’t think you do.”
“Good, you’re starting to think.” He leans back on the counter, smiling. I wonder if he’s capable of doing that evenly, or if one of the corners of his mouth is always higher than the other. “I’m glad you sobered up, we’re running out of time.”
“Pot, kettle,” I say, deadpan.
“Black as coal,” he agrees. “But I’ve been taking care of this drunk for longer than you’ve been alive.”
“This,” I say, and hope to hell that whoever else is included in this has other intermediaries for when Haymitch is too busy spending his time passed out to--what is it that he does? He’s been a mentor as long as I’ve been alive; he knows even more people than I do. Us could mean almost anyone. “You planning on telling me what this is?”
“Soon as you plan on telling me what you wouldn’t do to drown Snow in his own blood.”
What I wouldn’t do? I can feel a nothing starting up in my throat, but I remember my family, and Mags, and Annie, and it withers into silence.
“That’s why you’re a hard one to tell,” Haymitch says, takes another drink. “The rest of us, we’ve got nothing to lose. But you, you’ve got people to save. Makes you want it more; makes you easier to take down. Hell, you know this better than I do, what am I doing preaching to you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I want in.”
Haymitch throws back his head and laughs, raises his bottle to toast. “So you figured us out, huh?”
“The part about drowning Snow in his own blood was a clue.”
“Get in line.”
I stop fiddling with my bag and simply sit, my hands on my knees, facing him. “I’m serious. And you’re right. I do have people to save. But I can’t save them like this.” He can still call Helen and Roarke and Lucy and Katie up for the Games. He can still cut Aunt Coral’s wages at the docks, and force Uncle Niall and Uncle Jonas to give up their boats and work on one of the fishing trawlers they’re trying to shove everyone in 4 onto. He can decide that my mother has to get treatment, or that Mags has to come to the Capitol and stay.
He can still hurt Annie. He has hurt Annie. I can’t take that away no matter how nicely I play.
“You have no idea how glad I am that someone who still has people to save figured that out,” Haymitch says, shutting his eyes.
“I’m still figuring it out.” I shake my head; it’s still not as clear as I’d like it to be.
“You’ve got time. And you don’t have to while it away alone.”
“You know,” I say, “I don’t think I want to.”
“Then don’t.” Haymitch offers me the bottle, drums his fingers on its clear neck. “Do whatever the hell you want about your people, and here? Here, you can call your whiling days over.”
I lean back. My back protests, but it fades into a vague sort of grumbling. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he says, with a smile sour enough to curdle cream. “Hate to put it this way, but you’re as close to an inside man as we’ve got right now.”
“You pick up a lot of things in my line of work,” I say carefully. “So to speak.”
“People talk to their whores,” Haymitch agrees.
“It’s like talking to the bartender. Different kind of tipping, though.”
He laughs through his nose. The walls chirr, and he glances at them, takes the bottle back since I haven’t made a move to drink. “Tell you what. Sleep on it. Come to the victor’s lounge tomorrow. Sit on my couch.”
“Sit on your couch?” I repeat, raise my eyebrows.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’ll kick you off like I always do.” He smiles. “But I’ll know you want to be there.”
***
Drusus, his timing as impeccable as ever, walks in on me as I’m flushing the last of what I bought last weekend down the toilet.
“It won’t turn the water any prettier colors,” he says.
“And it won’t put anything in the Capitol’s water supply that they can’t handle.” I pause. “I think.”
He raises an eyebrow, and all the silver tips catch the bathroom light, one after the other. “You’re up to something.”
I put on my best innocent expression, which hasn’t really worked since I was fifteen or so, but I might as well try. “Just cleaning up before I head home for the season.”
He doesn’t believe it for a second, but he does lean over my shoulder to watch the pills dissolve. “You’re due back in three months.”
Could be worse. “Then I’ll be back. But I need the break.”
When I look up, Drusus is smiling in the bathroom mirror. “You and me both. I’m trying to take on more event planning these days, and you’re a full-time commitment.”
“Good for you,” I say, and mean it. “I guess you’ve gotten enough practice managing my schedule.”
“Let’s hope. And besides, you’re almost old enough to take care of yourself.”
I laugh. “Weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, gods don’t usually do that.” He ruffles my shoulder and leaves me alone.
I doubt gods spend half an hour flushing drug stockpiles down their toilets. Come to think of it, I’m not precisely sure what gods do. Not much, from what I’ve heard. Sit on top of the clouds and spy on mortals below and throw lightning bolts when things get dull. I’d go crazy with boredom in a day if I tried it. Better to be me.
***
The platform is more crowded this year than last, even though we haven’t brought a victor home. Brine’s and Beatriz’s families cluster around the tracks, welcoming them home, and my cousins bound towards me before I fully open the door. They almost knock me back into the train compartment, but Aunt Ruth shouts at them to let me out. I peer over their heads and see my aunts and uncles shaking their heads, my dad wheeling my mother onto the platform, Mags setting her cane aside and walking forward.
Where’s Annie? I scan the crowd again, but I can’t pick her out. She’s not great with crowds, I know, but neither is my mother and she’s here, and I wanted her to be here, I hoped she’d want to see me as soon as I came home. I wanted, want, to see her better than when I left her.
“How’s Annie been?” I ask my mother once I pry enough of my cousins loose.
Mother gasps, and then smiles, shaking her head. “Not even a hello, Finnick.”
Oh. Right. I lean down and hug her. “Hello, Mother. Is Annie all right?”
She laughs, and my dad laughs too, craning over the back of the chair to look at her.
“I’ve been worried,” I say, scuff my heel against the wood. “It’s not like I get much news from the district when I’m in the Capitol, and--well.”
Mags grabs me by the arm, and points to the docks.
I breathe in deep for the first time in weeks, let the salt air fill my lungs until I could burst. “Mags, you are the second most beautiful woman in the world right now.”
She grins, as bright as ever. “Second most?”
I laugh and chuck her under the chin. “There’s someone I have to see,” I say by way of explanation. It’s as much of one as I can give now. My head’s swimming, currents flowing faster than I can follow, and I need to sift through it all and I can’t here. I kiss Mags on the cheek, murmur, “Thank you.” She squeezes my arm, gives me a little shove, and lets me go.
She always knows when to do that.
I break for the docks, leave the crowd at the station behind. Our boat is moored where it should be, and the Victor’s Wharf is far, but I can’t stop running, can barely even hear my feet on the pavement, then on the planks. People shout out to me as I pass, wave me over, but I don’t even have time to smile in their direction--I’ll greet them later, give them their due, but right now I’m running too fast to keep track of anything other than where I have to go. The world blurs, and the wind in my ears erodes all other noise. This is what swimming feels like, the currents caressing me, the air in my lungs keeping me afloat, my feet so light that I don’t feel anything under them at all. I jump clean over the guardrail of the boat almost before I get there and swing in to the cabin, her name on the tip of my tongue--
And she’s curled up asleep on the cots, her arm draped across to mine, her hair spilling over the pillows and glinting red in the sun. I stop, panting, and try to regain my balance, my breath. The sleeves of her shirt are rolled up to her elbows, and her shorts are loose over her hips, twisted with the bedsheets trapped between her knees. Her face is turned up into the light and I know there’s nothing weighing her down at all either, no beads or gold or jewels. She’s not sleeping, she’s floating.
I should wake her up. I should keep watching. I want to do both. I compromise, kneel on my cot and stretch out next to her, my head pillowed on my hand, my legs angled to fit the bend of her knees. She breathes with the sway of the boat, and my fingers spread out inches from her hair, reaching towards her, reaching for her. “Hey,” I say.
Her eyes open, blink and flutter, and she sinks deeper into the pillow, smiling. “Hi.”
“I missed you.” My throat draws tight. Everything does.
“You’re here,” she says, curling closer. “You don’t have to now.”
“I want to be here,” I say. Twining her fingers with mine should be easy, we’ve done it a thousand times before even if the motion of our thumbs is always different, but this time my hand takes so long to fold over hers, and the heat between our palms makes mine sweat. “Wherever I go, I can’t leave you behind. Or maybe it’s that a part of me stays here.”
Her thumb slides on mine, her fingers grip mine tight. “The part of you I found.”
“The best part of me.”
“It’s you,” she whispers. Her cheeks are flushed. I wonder if she’s as warm as I am. I brush her cheek to find out, and she flushes brighter.
“I’m still figuring out who that is,” I say.
“I’ve seen him. It’s you in the water. It’s you, here. It’s--” She holds tight to my hand, but her other comes between us to touch my lips. Her hands aren’t soft: they’re callused and dented, spiderweb cracks on her fingertips and bitten cuticles and broken nails, and they’re real, so wonderfully real, so wonderfully hers.
“You see me,” I say, and my lips press just enough into her fingers.
She nods, shivers.
“You’ve always seen me.”
“No,” she murmurs, “not always, but I can now.”
My breath comes shorter, barely passes through my throat. “How could I take so long to see you?”
We’re close now, so close strands of her hair are pinned under my shoulder. “You weren’t looking?” she asks, like she can’t believe it, like she needs to know.
“I’m looking now.”
She breathes against my lips.
I whisper her name, stutter over it. She cranes her head to the side, her hair spilling over my hand. My skin tingles where she touches me, I realize, like she’s calling parts of me to life, like they’re awakening from a long sleep and shaking off all the pins and needles. “Annie?” I ask again.
“I’m here,” she whispers.
“I’m here,” it feels true, I say it and I believe it, “and I want--I want this.”
“Then have it, have it, please--”
I nudge her thumb out of the way and cover her lips with mine.
She breathes me in as soon as we kiss, draws my mouth to hers, and I don’t have time to take more of her in before we pull apart and she finds my eyes, stares into them. Everything hangs suspended between us, everything, and then she surges against me, kisses me and tangles her fingers in my hair and pulls herself up from the bed to press our bodies together like our lips. I can’t stop touching her, weaving her fingers with mine and breaking apart to reform again, tracing the contours of her neck, her shoulders, her spine. I know somewhere in the back of my head that I’m not touching her anywhere I haven’t already, but I don’t believe it, can’t, because if I had I’d never have left her side, never have stopped exploring all she’s giving me. She can’t stop touching either, I can feel her hands on my neck, my back, my chest, but her lips never leave mine.
I pull her down on top of me and she gasps into my mouth, shivers in my hands but everything is warm, everything I touch and taste. “Here,” she says, kissing the spike of my jaw, “here,” and I bring my lips to her collar, the dip of her neck, and lower, lower until she writhes against my hips. I rise to meet her, trace the line of her jaw with my thumb and the hollow between her breasts with my tongue, don’t know if I’m holding her or myself steady. It can’t be me, I decide, I’m rocking too much, buckling under the weight and warmth of her, shifting to take more of her in my mouth, my hands. I want her there. I want her everywhere. I want her. I tell her.
She asks me how.
I can’t speak. I show her instead, slide her shirt over her head and grip her hips and kiss a line from her throat to her breast. She struggles to pull my jacket off my shoulders and bows her head, but the sleeves gather at my elbows and she holds them there, holds on tight, to keep herself where I can reach. I draw wet circles over her breast with my tongue, take enough between my teeth to make her squirm and cant her hips over mine. Sea-salt and sweat mingle on her skin, and I suck until I can separate out the tastes. The way she whispers my name, here, like this, isn’t the way she said it in the river. It’s harsher, needier, stronger. Please. Finnick, please.
“Have you ever done this before?” I ask.
“No?” It comes out as a question, but the way she can’t stop moving, I don’t know if it could sound certain. “I know how it works, but--no.”
“Tell me if anything hurts,” I say, and roll her to her back, thank our foresight in pushing the cots together. She props herself up on her elbows to draw me down and kiss me but I pull back, get her shorts unbuttoned and tug them down her legs. “Promise?”
“Yes,” she says, “yes,” and I’m not sure whether she’s saying yes to the promise or yes to something else, but either way I’ll take it. I’ll take everything she’s laid bare, trail my mouth and hands over every part of her I can see and touch and taste. I learn the curve of her hip, the arch of her back, the soft lines of her thighs. I kiss and suck and stroke until she thrashes under me, sobs things I half-understand, but I don’t need words to know what she means. And she is clinging to my hair, scrabbling to hold on to any part of me she needs, but I’m already so close, kissing inside her, that when she comes I can’t pull away. I wouldn’t. I drink her down until her hips start to stir again, until the cot starts to creak.
“You,” she says, ragged and parched, “Finnick, I want to take care of you. Your turn. Please.” She holds on to my shoulders and tries to turn us over, kisses my mouth and down my chest until her lips reach the waist of my pants and I nearly spring a foot off the bed.
“Annie,” I say when my mind unfogs enough, “you don’t have to--”
“I want to try,” she says, “I want you to feel this good.”
I can’t say no. I don’t want to. She kisses me there through my clothes and fumbles with the buttons, settles between my legs and draws me out and rubs her cheek against my groin. It takes restraint I don’t really have right now not to grip her by the hair and hold her there, but I manage to summon it from somewhere, mostly, settle for curling my fingers against her scalp and letting her kiss, as enthusiastically as she kissed my mouth. Her tongue is so warm and quick, I can’t follow it, can’t keep her where I want her and can’t help moving to meet her, lifting my hips off the cot and trying not to hurt her. She looks up at me, chews her bottom lip, and stretches out her jaw to take me down.
I tug harder on her hair, hold her back. The walls of her mouth close on me, hot and soft and tight, and I want to stay but I want this more. “I don’t want to finish yet,” I tell her, hoarser than I meant to. My blood pounds through my hips, urging me forward, but if I held off for a year I can hold off for a few minutes more. She leans forward and keeps trying, tightening my grip on her hair, but I slide back along the cot and tell her, “Annie. Please. I want to do this together.”
Her chest pushes against my thigh when she breathes. “Yes. All right. How?”
“Climb up on your knees,” I tell her, and position her over my hips when she does. I still my hands for a moment and look at her, blushing from her cheeks all the way to her breasts, shining with sweat, her eyes depthless and wild and always on mine, taking me in. I hold her apart and watch how it changes her, how a shudder ripples through her from my fingers to her knees, how she closes them over my hips to drive me deeper.
“Have you touched yourself before?” I ask her.
“Yes,” she breathes. “There. And deeper, some.”
I push in further, twist my fingers and find the spot that makes her grind against my hand, stroke her outside with my thumb and inside with the rest and trap her there. Her eyes glass over but they don’t leave mine, don’t stop watching me, waiting for me. She’s warm and wet and shuddering everywhere but here especially; here she’s burning hot enough to sear me, dripping on my fingers and making me strain for more as hard as she is.
“Finnick,” she says, “Finnick--”
“Hold on,” I say, wonder if I can, and keep my fingers in enough so I can guide myself inside.
There’s nothing else. Nothing but her, her knees framing my hips, her hips sharp against my skin, her warmth and tightness closing around even the parts of me she isn’t touching. I feel her everywhere. Every breath I take makes me swell against her, every beat of my heart makes me pulse inside her. I can’t move, not now, not for a while. It’s all I can do to take her in, to stay. Sunlight streaks through the sweat on her arms as she holds on to mine, holds herself close, holds us together. Her hips pull forward and her eyes flash wide, the scant breath on her lips rustling her hair, and she does it again, rocks forward atop me and around me. I cling to her with everything I have, and she surges, cries out, tightens everywhere. There’s more, I know there’s more, I’m striving for the surface, the waves are overhead, they’ve found me, I’m home, I’m here, and the moment before I come up for air I’m certain that I can breathe water.
She collapses against me moments after. Her hair sticks to my chest, her skin to my skin. I don’t know how long we lie there, mouths parted, lips chapped. The boat sways beneath us, the cot shifts with the deck, my chest rises and falls and each time, she nestles closer.
“Can’t breathe,” she says, but when I touch her cheek and look at her, she’s smiling.
“Here. With me.” We fall into sync, and I kiss her as we breathe out, knot my fingers in her hair.
“You breathe, I breathe,” she whispers, laughing, holding me close. “You stay, I stay.”
“Always,” I say, and kiss her again.
***
The sun sets over the ocean, sets the surface aglow all the way to the west-facing windows of out boat. It casts the white sheets orange, the dark walls gold, our skin silver where the sweat refracts the light. Her breath beads on my shoulder, and she kisses me there, like she doesn’t know what else to say. Neither do I.
Her hair is tangled, but I can never get enough of piecing through it, letting the snarls part on my knuckles. I know we’ll have to wake up soon, have to step out onto the docks, go ashore, see our families, choose what secrets to keep. They know, they’ve known longer than either of us.
But we know now, and that’s enough.
My name is Finnick Odair. I am twenty years old. I am the victor of the sixty-fifth Hunger Games. I was born at sea.
Annie Cresta loves me.
---
--
.