Hunger Games fic: Rebellious (1/6), PG-13
Title: Rebellious
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 9,610
Beta: deathmallow
Fanmix and artwork: alinaandalion
Focus: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair
Characters: Annie Cresta, Finnick Odair, Haymitch Abernathy, Johanna Mason, Coriolanus Snow, Enobaria, original characters
Summary: Finnick and Annie become pirates and accidentally start a second rebellion.
Author's note: Written for the het_bigbang challenge, this is the sequel to and continuation of Victorious, which you can read in its entirety here. Enjoy!
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Chapter 1 - New Beginnings
“Finnick, put me down. I don’t need my arm to walk.” In spite of Annie’s half-hearted struggles, her husband refuses to let her go, lifting her from the bloody spot on the deck where she fell, grazed by a Peacekeeper bullet. He carries her to the bridge of the newly named Victorious.
The fight with the eight-man crew of the Peacekeeper cutter over a small boat caught poaching in Capitol waters had been brief but intense. Firing on the cutter - and hoping the Peacekeepers didn’t have time to call in the attack - was the only thing they could do to help the Obispo family, friends of young Luis Macray. The newest member of their group of fugitives, Luis had joined them a few days earlier when he’d helped Annie and Paul escape a Peacekeeper patrol only to find himself hunted, as well.
When they’d decided to help the Obispos, Finnick had Paul, his former Peacekeeper guard, take out the cutter’s communications array. Paul had hit it on his first shot, sending up a shower of sparks. Afterward, Annie had acted as spotter for the ex-Peacekeeper, calling out human targets until the cutter’s crew finally began to fire back at them. Although she and Paul, working as a team, had killed two Peacekeepers and injured three more, Annie was the only one injured aboard the Victorious.
She has to admit that the jagged tear in her right shoulder and arm, about two inches long and pretty deep where the bullet tore free, looks ugly even with the colors washed out by the cold light of the moon. The pain isn’t bad, but she’s sure that will change once the adrenaline wears off. The wound continues to bleed even with pressure applied and she gives up trying to convince Finnick that it’s nothing. It’s hard to make someone believe an injury isn’t bad when it clearly needs stitches.
Stepping under the roof of the bridge, Finnick sweeps his charts and instruments to the side of his chart table and sets Annie down in the clear space, careful not to jostle her arm. Mairenn, his fifteen-year-old niece and victor of the 76th Hunger Games, switches on the bridge lights and hurries over with the boat’s first aid kit; they’d cut all the lights hours ago to make themselves less of a target for Peacekeeper guns.
For an instant, all Annie sees when she looks at Mair is the girl’s cousin Rhys, who died in the Games she’d won, and she closes her eyes against that unexpected pain. Rhys had been Annie’s constant companion in the days leading up to and during the Quarter Quell, doing everything he could to distract her from the fact of Finnick in the arena. The pain of his loss, of knowing that he died because of her and Finnick as part of Snow’s punishment for their failed rebellion, is far worse than the sting of her arm.
“This’ll hurt, Annie,” Mairenn warns her just before she starts to clean the gash. Staring down at Mairenn’s head as she bends over her work, at her normally bronze-colored hair, lightened to blonde so that she no longer matches the Capitol’s wanted posters, Annie laughs. The sound is harsh in the quiet.
“Oh, Mair, this is nothing. Do what you have to do.” Mairenn, too, was part of Snow’s punishment. Nearly every tribute in the 76th Games had been dear to someone in the rebellion. Finnick’s niece and nephew, Peeta’s friend Delly, Gale Hawthorne’s brother Vick, Chaff’s daughter, Seeder’s grandson, others who Annie didn’t know, all hand-picked by the president. Vick Hawthorne was only twelve years old when he died.
“Mair?” Finnick’s voice pulls Annie back to the bridge of the Victorious. He, too, has altered his appearance, his bronze hair turned to a dark-brown at odds with the lighter, reddish stubble on his cheeks and jaw. Mairenn sets aside her bloody towel in favor of needle and thread to close the tear in Annie’s arm.
“She’s lost some blood, Uncle Finnick, but I don't think it's too bad.” Mairenn studies the wound, blood still welling, before she says, “I think three or four stitches should take care of it.” Annie has to admit, if only to herself, that she’s feeling a little light headed, giving credence to the girl’s assessment of her blood loss.
With a worried glance at Annie, Finnick nods and then starts rifling through the charts he’d pushed aside until he finds the one he’s looking for. Bringing it and a small flashlight to the chart table, he spreads the chart out, Annie shifting a few inches to the right to give him more room, and pins the curling corners in place with a book - The Fisherman’s Guide to District Four, 2nd Edition - and one of Annie’s shoes, abandoned earlier that afternoon. A good quarter of the chart curls over the edge of the table. He switches on the navigation system for a moment, jots down some information from the screen, and then switches it off again. It's so quiet on the bridge, just the three of them while the others take care of things across the water on the cutter, that Annie can hear the scratch of pencil on paper as Finnick makes his calculations.
Mairenn douses her needle and thread with alcohol from a small bottle she found in the first aid kit and then, pinching the edges of the gash together, begins to sew. Annie watches her work, unable to quite look away. It feels more odd than painful, the pin prick of the needle, the tug of the thread at her skin. She grimaces but doesn’t cry out at the more forceful tug when the girl finishes by biting off the thread before splashing the area with more of the alcohol.
Shouts from the cutter bring Finnick to his feet; on his way past her to find out what's happening, he lightly strokes Annie's hand. She shivers at the brief touch, but once Finnick is past, the shivering doesn't stop.
"Are you cold, Annie?" Mairenn asks as she tucks in the ends of the gauze that holds her bandage in place. Annie nods, glancing down at the pristine white cloth, almost glowing in the moonlight against the darker shade of her pebbling skin.
“A little.” She feels a little sick as the adrenaline rush wears off and her arm begins to throb in time with her heartbeat. She shivers again, so violently that her teeth chatter for a beat before she clenches her jaw to stop them. Okay, maybe more than just a little cold. Am I going into shock? She curls her uninjured arm protectively over her midriff and the tiny spark of life growing there as Mairenn hurries aft and returns a moment later with a light blanket that she drapes over Annie’s shoulders. Picking up the first aid kit again, Mair rummages through it, looking for something. Outside the bridge, Paul shouts something from the cutter, but Annie can’t make out the words.
Mairenn pours water into a cup from a dispenser attached to one of the columns. “This should help,” she says as she presses the cup into Annie’s hand; Annie looks down at the swirling liquid within. Finnick momentarily distracts them both when he steps back onto the bridge, but then Mairenn says, “Drink it, Annie.” She sounds so much like Finnick’s mother that Annie smiles even as she complies with Mairenn’s order. If it weren’t for Jenna sending a message to her son by way of the Final Eight interviews, she and Finnick would still be in the Capitol under Snow’s control.
“Okay, here’s the plan.” Reentering the bridge, Finnick picks up the chart from where it had fallen to the floor and partially spreads it out between where Annie still sits and the table’s edge. She shifts again to see the chart better, but has to close her eyes for a moment as a wave of vertigo washes over her. “While I’d rather just take us home,” he continues, glancing toward Annie, “Paul and I are going to take the cutter, the Obispos, and their haul back to the mainland. We have to get that fish taken care of before it goes bad or a lot of people will go hungry. Mair, you and Luis will take Annie and the ketch back to Victors’ Island.” He jots down the course for her to follow as he speaks.
“Won’t that be dangerous, Uncle Finnick?” Annie opens her eyes again, focusing on Finnick.
“It will, yes. You’ll just have to make sure you don’t run into any more Peacekeepers.” He hands her his notes and watches as she reads them. “Are you up to it? You’ll have to run dark…” Mairenn nods, her eyes darting across the page as she memorizes the course.
“Papa let me navigate our last couple of night runs before the war.” She sounds a little sad when she mentions her father and Annie recalls that Mairenn hasn’t seen him in months, not since he disappeared along with Finnick’s father and sister just ahead of Peacekeeper forces.
Annie shifts, trying to get more comfortable. Her vision swims and she sways where she sits, more light-headed than ever. When she puts out a hand to steady herself, she sees Finnick watching her with a worried frown.
“Annie?”
“I’m alright, Finnick,” she reassures him. “Just a little woozy.” He leans in and gently kisses her on the forehead, all scratchy stubble and soft lips, then scoops her up once more. Annie is too tired to protest this time as Finnick carries her from the bridge to their small cabin below. Resting her head on his shoulder, she’s asleep before they ever leave the bridge.
xXx
“How does it feel to be back in uniform?” Paul looks up at Finnick’s question, then returns to buckling on his sidearm, white metal against white tunic and trousers beneath white body armor. The only thing that isn’t white is the visor on the helmet, still hanging with its fellows on hooks screwed into the far wall.
“Weird,” Paul replies, checking to make sure his pistol is loaded before replacing it in its white leather holster. “I know it’s only been a couple of weeks, but it feels weird.” Finished dressing, the former Peacekeeper walks over to Finnick and begins tightening the straps on his armor. “These uniforms are a lot more comfortable when they fit properly.” Paul’s armor fits the best of the three, but even so, it’s too loose. Of the eight Peacekeepers on the cutter’s original crew, only three had been uninjured, and none of those unbloodied uniforms is quite the right size for the three men who wear them now. They’ll do, so long as no one looks at them too closely. But then, if all goes well, the fit of these stolen uniforms won’t matter.
“Wait a minute. You’re a ghost?” Finnick and Paul look over at Kian Obispo. The shortest of the three men, his uniform fits the worst. Where Paul, even in an ill-fitting uniform, reeks of Peacekeeper, Kian reminds Finnick of a boy in costume playing at Peacekeepers and Rebels.
“Ghost?” Finnick asks and looks back at Paul, who shrugs: he doesn’t seem to know the term either.
“Sorry,” Kian says. “It’s what we called the Peacekeepers during the war. Because of the uniforms.” Finnick makes a mental note to find out what the Obispos did during that time. Given the use of the term “ghost,” he’s pretty sure Kian’s sympathies, at least, were firmly with the rebels.
“Ex-Peacekeeper,” Paul corrects Kian, straightening the lay of Finnick’s left shoulder piece. “Or should I say ex-ghost? It was kind of a dead-end job.” Finnick laughs as Paul takes a step back to survey his work. Apparently satisfied, he turns to inspect Kian and Finnick steps out onto the deck. Two more steps to the left bring him to the ladder that leads up to the cutter’s command center.
The command center is nothing like the tiny bridge on the Victorious and it takes Finnick a few minutes to familiarize himself with the million and one readouts and switches that make up the main console. As far as he can tell, the only thing with a manual option is the steering; unlike the ketch, everything runs electronically from the command center, and there are no sails. Given the scarcity of fuel in the district, they’ll have to look into fitting the cutter for sailing if they decide to keep her. Although what choice do we have? We can’t just take her into town and sell her. He snickers. That’d go over well. For sale: one Peacekeeper cutter, slightly used, sold as is. Finnick smiles at the thought.
Behind him, Paul enters the command center and Finnick’s smile fades. Still studying the console in front of him, he asks, “Are you sure taking out the communications array killed the ability to track this beast?”
“I’m sure, Finnick, but if it’ll make you feel better…” Paul hunkers down beside the control console and reaches underneath, feeling around for a second before he rips out a pair of red and black wires, holding them up to waggle at Finnick. “Radio doesn’t seem to be working,” he deadpans and Finnick laughs.
“How’d you know that was there?” Paul straightens and sets the wires on a narrow shelf near the door. “You never served on the water…?”
“The powers that be try to keep things like that console as universal as possible. It makes cross-training more efficient.” Kian, just coming up the ladder, pauses for a moment, his eyes on a level with the wires dangling beneath the console.
“You are like no Peacekeeper I’ve ever met,” he tells Paul, stepping up fully into the small room. Abruptly filled with three adult males, all wearing body armor, the command center is more than a little cramped.
“Nope. But then I’m not one anymore. Remember?” Facing Finnick, Paul asks, “Where do you want me, boss?”
“Take a rifle up top and yell if you see anything we should worry about.” Paul nods and squeezes between Finnick and Kian to head back down the ladder. Once he’s past, Finnick leans across the console and slides the closest window open then does the same on the other side, the better to hear if Paul does call down to them. Since they have no radio.
“Do you think we’ll run into trouble?” Kian looks and sounds anxious and it occurs to Finnick that the older man is under a good deal of stress, leaving his wife and son - however temporarily - with complete strangers, their livelihood destroyed, their last bit of potential income stored in jury-rigged coolers aboard a stolen government vessel.
“No,” he tells Kian, reasonably sure that it’s not a lie. “It’s two in the morning and as far as anyone we might run into between here and the mainland is concerned, we’re the big threat.” He’s far more worried about the Victorious; they’d left for Victors’ Island a good twenty minutes ago, maybe a little longer. He’d given Mairenn a straightforward course making the assumption that the cutter they’re on now was the only one in the area and that her former crew hadn’t called for help. What else could he do? Both Stefana and Kevan Obispo are experienced sailors, as is Mairenn.
Annie, too, knows her way around boats in general and the ketch in particular, but she was out cold by the time he’d laid her in their bunk. He’d thought at the time it was the shock of her injury, but now he’s not so sure. Okay, so maybe I’m a little anxious, too. Let’s just get this done, Odair, so you can go home to your wife.
“All right, Obispo, where are we heading?” Looking out into the night, Kian jumps at the sound of Finnick’s voice. He turns as Finnick fires up the engines and the navigation system. Finnick knows in general where they’re going and expects something along the lines of “two klicks south of the public docks” or the like, but Kian surprises him by rattling off specific coordinates. It would be easy enough to enter them into the computer and let it calculate the fastest course, but he doesn’t want to risk it even with Paul’s reassurances. Instead, he makes note and sends the cutter forward, spinning the wheel until they’re heading in the right direction.
“The harbor master was expecting us at moonrise,” Kian continues and Finnick’s eyebrows shoot upward as he dials the lights down, leaving the command center in near darkness, lit only by the glow of the navigational instruments - speed, depth, compass heading - the better to see what’s out ahead of them. Moonrise was a good two and a half hours ago.
“The harbor master?” Arturo Fallon had been harbor master back when Finnick helped his father with the fishing, including the occasional “night fishing” trip. That had been before Tom began to distrust his younger son, before he believed that Finnick had become “too Capitol” and feared that he’d turn them in for poaching. “So who has the honor these days?” According to Luis’ father, the Capitol had replaced most of those in key positions when they retook the district.
“Arturo Fallon’s held the job for… ten years?” Kian says. “He’s done a good job, although I have to admit I never expected him to survive the purge.” Finnick laughs, not at all surprised.
“My dad always said Fallon was part cat.” Fallon was a man known for both his shrewdness and his greed. “Dad also said the man would sell his own mother if he thought he could make a profit.” Snow would love the guy.
“Well, I just hope he’s still willing to take care of our haul.”
The cutter slices through the water toward town and the two men fall silent, Kian lost in his own thoughts while Finnick considers the things he’s seen and heard in the past few days, trying to distract himself from worrying about Annie.
The news shows proclaim that things are improving in the districts as rapidly as they are in the Capitol, proof that the rebels hadn’t done much damage in a rebellion that was doomed from the start. But while things might be improving in the Capitol, Finnick had seen with his own eyes that that isn’t the case in the districts, at least not in District 11 when they’d passed through or here in 4.
The Peacekeeper presence when they’d gone into town for supplies just a few days ago was heavier than it had been before the Quarter Quell and the Peacekeepers themselves more arrogant. According to Luis, the curfews are strict and the sanctions for even minor infractions are harsh. Those sanctions are the reason the boy is with them now, instead of in school or helping his father in the general store. Peacekeepers had tried to stop Annie and Paul for questioning when they saw them with Luis in violation of an order against public congregation. Luis had helped Annie and Paul escape and the Peacekeepers had identified him in the process. At sixteen, the laws of Panem might not see him as an adult yet, but that wouldn’t stop them from charging him with anything up to and including treason.
And earlier that day, Peacekeepers had stopped the Obispos with every intention of confiscating their day’s haul for their own profit. They might not have killed them outright, but they’d taken the fish aboard the cutter along with the family and then scuttled the boat.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Kian breaks the silence along with Finnick’s train of thought and it takes him a beat to catch up.
“Your boat?” he asks and Kian nods.
“She was finally paid for. We owned her outright and now…” He leans back against a clear space on the wall, the Peacekeeper uniform making of him a pale blob in the darkness - a “ghost.” Kian scrubs a hand over his face and continues, “It took the last of our savings to pay her off. There’s nothing else. We even lived on her after the Capitol took over the housing complex we lived in.”
“The Capitol took your home?” Again, Kian nods.
“They convicted the couple who owned it of treason after the war. The Capitol confiscated all their property, so a dozen or so families were suddenly homeless.” He pushes away from the wall and walks over to stand beside Finnick. “Lucky us, they said we could stay, but we had to pay the new rate.” He looks at Finnick. “It was too high.”
Finnick makes a slight adjustment to their course. He can see the ebb and flow of light on the horizon from the lighthouse on the mainland, just outside of town, and judges that they’ll reach their destination in another twenty minutes or so. They’ll need to get the cutter in, unloaded, and out as quickly as possible, and the sooner he gets back to Annie, the better.
Between her injury and her pregnancy, he won’t feel at ease until they’re together again. What he’d like to do is hide her away someplace safe, but there isn’t any such place. And they’d both decided they no longer wanted to run, which was why they’d returned to 4 in spite of the risks. It’s home. He glances over at Kian again, and an idea percolating in the back of his mind crystallizes.
“Join us,” he says, following his gut.
“I… What?”
“You said it yourself. Your boat is gone. You have nowhere else to go. So join us on Victors’ Island. We don’t have much, but there’s plenty of work to do, both on the island and on the boats.” They’d built a small shelter on what had been the uninhabited side of the island - a different kind of ghosts haunted where the victors of District 4 had once lived - but mostly they’d been living on the ketch. Or at least, he and Annie and Mairenn had; Paul and Luis used the shelter or simply slept on the beach under the stars. “We’ll feed you,” he offers as incentive, “and there’s no rent.” Kian snorts at that.
Out of the corner of his eye, Finnick sees another ghost appear in the open doorway, helmet in place and rifle hanging by a pale sling over his right shoulder. “Paul? Everything okay?”
Pulling off the helmet, Paul hooks it on the door’s prominent hinge. “Yeah, there’s nothing out there,” he tells Finnick and, when he sees both him and Kian watching the helmet sway on its hook point, he pokes it. “The optics are a hell of a lot better than straining my eyes in the dark.” He glances at Kian. “You should stay with us,” he says, a clear indication that he heard most if not all of their conversation. And then he looks pointedly at Finnick once more. “And we should have killed the rest of those Peacekeepers. They didn’t get a good look at you or Annie or your niece, but they I.D.ed both me and Luis, not to mention our friend here.”
“I’ve had enough of killing, Paul.” He knows Paul is right, that letting them live will create yet more trouble, but he’s been killing people off and on for almost half his life. Killing those men and women would have been more blood on hands he could never wash clean. More faces and voices to parade through his sleep. Beside him, Paul sighs.
“I know, Finnick, but things would be so much simpler. It’s not going to be safe for us on the mainland for a while.” Shaking off his own maudlin thoughts, Finnick forces a grin.
“I’m sorry. Was it safe before?” he says and Paul laughs.
Glancing from Finnick to Paul and back again, Kian asks, “What kind of work?” Finnick makes one last minor course adjustment before answering.
“Landfall in ten,” he announces and then turns toward Kian. Paul shifts to stand just outside the doorway, where he can both hear whatever Finnick and Kian say and watch the enveloping darkness.
“The island was pretty well flattened by the Capitol,” Finnick begins. “We’ve only been there for a few days, and a good chunk of that has been spent teaching Paul here and Luis Macray to sail.”
“I thought that was Luis I saw on your boat. Rumor has it he ran into trouble with the Peacekeepers maybe a week ago.”
“That would be when he helped us elude a patrol,” Finnick confirms.
“Fucking ghosts,” Kian mutters under his breath, but Finnick ignores it.
“We need to pick through the debris for whatever’s salvageable, figure out if we can use it ourselves or get it to someone else who can.” In truth, they’d been avoiding the other side of the island. Neither he nor Annie is quite ready yet to face the ghosts - the echoes of the dead, not the kind that wear white uniforms - they’ll find there, and the others haven’t pressed them on that. “Of course, at some point, we’ll need to figure out what we’re doing long term. And there’s the little matter of having stolen a Peacekeeper cutter…”
The feel of the cutter slicing through the water changes and Finnick cuts back on the throttle, gesturing for quiet as he kills the remaining lights. He can see in the moonlight what appears to be an abandoned dock up ahead, the attached boathouse half caved in on itself. The nearby beach, white sand glowing under the moon’s cold light, ends abruptly in a rocky wall, the drop from above a good twenty feet, the rock face itself pockmarked by black holes that Finnick suspects hold nothing more sinister than birds’ nests. Farther along the rock wall he sees a patch of deeper darkness, a shadow large enough to swallow the cutter. Probably a cave, he thinks and glances over his shoulder at Kian.
“Yes, this is the place,” he confirms and Finnick slows the cutter, guiding her in the last few yards to a dock that looks almost as unstable as the boathouse, but the feel of it is as solid as that rock wall when the cutter bumps against it.
“Now what?” Finnick asks Kian as he kills the engines and lashes down the wheel. He tells Paul to head forward to tie her off as he heads aft to do the same, but even as he steps out of the command center he glances down as a red dot blooms on his body armor.
“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kill you where you stand, Ghost.” The cutter drifts a little away from the dock, but only on one end; the forward end is stable and Finnick hears the unmistakable sound of a round jacked into a rifle’s chamber.
“Don’t shoot! We’re not Peacekeepers!” Kian shouts, running forward. “I’m Kian Obispo!”
After a tense moment, the red light winks out and the same voice calls out, “You’re late, Obispo.”
Finnick calls, “Let it go, Paul,” and a beat later Paul steps into view, his rifle pointed at the planks beneath his feet rather than at the man standing at the far end of the pier.
“If you’re not ghosts, then who the fuck are you?”
xXx
Annie wakes to the scent of wood smoke and roasting fish and the sea, to a metallic taste on her tongue and a stiffness in her muscles. Her stomach growls loudly, embarrassingly, but there’s no one there to care. She’s alone. There’s no sign of Finnick save the depression his head had made in the pillow beside hers and a circle of knotted rope in the center of that depression: a bracelet, by the look of it, with a lovers’ knot as its centerpiece. She smiles, wondering when he wove it, and notices that bitter, metallic taste again. She rolls onto her right side to reach for the bottle of water she keeps handy on the small shelf beside the bunk, wanting to wash that taste from her mouth, but bites off a cry of pain as flame seems to engulf her shoulder and upper arm.
She had forgotten about her injury, but with the surge of pain, it all comes flooding back. The tense, hours-long game of cat and mouse with the Peacekeeper cutter… The ensuing fight… Three dead Peacekeepers… The bullet that tore through her arm… Moving more gingerly, she sits up, swinging her bare legs over the side of the bunk.
Keeping her injured arm close to her chest, she grabs up the pair of shorts on the end of the bunk. It’s difficult pulling them on and fastening them with one hand, but she manages; she doesn’t bother putting on a bra or changing her shirt, deciding that the t-shirt she slept in will do, under the circumstances. The shirt isn’t the same one she wore when the Peacekeepers shot her.
Along with the smells of food and home, laughter and a rhythmic tapping dance in on the breeze. Tap. Tap. Taptap. Scrape tap. Planting one knee in the center of the thin mattress, she leans toward the small window. Just outside, maybe fifteen or twenty feet away, the Peacekeeper cutter floats at anchor, the sun so high in the sky - what her Gran always called “the crack of noon” - that she casts barely any shadow onto the surrounding water flashing blue-green in the bright light.
Standing on either end of a small boat tethered to the cutter’s starboard side, Luis and Mairenn apply paint to the hull, he with a roller and she with a large brush. Two sections that were once white are now the muddy gray-blue-green of a stormy sea; they’ll soon merge to become nearly a quarter of the starboard side. The paint, rollers, and brushes had been part of the supplies they’d picked up the day they’d added Luis to their little family.
“What are you going to do below the water line?” Annie calls out and Luis turns sharply toward the sound of her voice, nearly dropping his roller. She hears Mairenn laugh again as he juggles it, flinging paint out to float in speckles on the water.
“Uncle Finnick, Annie’s awake,” she calls and Annie pushes back from the window. Snatching up the bracelet and stuffing it into the pocket of her shorts, she climbs the few steps up to the deck of the Victorious, heading toward the port side railing, bare feet slapping on the planks. Shading her eyes against the sudden glare, Annie sees Finnick step out of the cutter’s command cabin and she stumbles. Feeling more than a little off kilter - you’re a beautiful man, Finnick Odair, but you’re not that beautiful - she steadies herself on the railing, holding on tightly with her left hand until the vertigo passes, wondering what caused it. She didn’t lose that much blood.
“I still want to know how you’re going to paint the underside,” Annie calls to them and Mairenn smiles up at her.
“Uncle Finnick said to just worry about the parts people can see.”
“Annie, wait there!” Finnick shouts across from the cutter. “I’ll come get you.”
But Mairenn forestalls him. “Don’t worry about her, Uncle Finnick. We’ll bring her ashore.” She grins at Annie. “Now that you’re awake, we get to eat.”
A few minutes later, they’re all on the beach around a simple meal of roast fish and dried fruit from their last supply run into town. Annie nibbles at her food - in spite of her growling stomach, after her first bite, she’s afraid she won’t be able to keep it down - and stares into the still-glowing embers of the fire Stefana Obispo had used to roast the fish. Conversations swirl around her - Paul and Kian, Finnick and Mairenn, Stefana and her son Kevan and Luis - but their words don’t touch her and she drifts, fades out.
The sound of splashing and laughter draws her back, disoriented, the sun noticeably lower in the deep blue sky. Glancing over her shoulder toward the water, she sees Kevan and Luis chase after Mairenn into the waves. A little way from where they run, Finnick sits alone on the beach and Annie braces her weight on her left arm and rolls to her knees.
“Do you need a hand, Annie?” Stefana offers. Paul and Kian glance her way and Paul starts to get up, but Annie waves him off.
“I’m just a little stiff from sitting too long,” she tells them and they return to their conversation as she rises awkwardly to her feet.
Annie shuffles through the soft sand to sit beside her husband; Finnick glances at her and his expression softens for a moment before he looks out once more over the water. Annie follows his gaze to the two boats swaying with the motion of the waves that roll in from the deeper water, breaking apart when they meet the boats’ hulls or the slope that leads up to the beach. Although he’s there with her physically, he’s miles away.
“Finnick?” Sitting to his right, she shoulder bumps him - carefully - and asks, “What can I do?”
He drags his gaze away from the boats and gives her a lopsided half smile. “Don’t mind me. I’m just thinking about how the hell we got here.” Annie takes his right hand and lifts it so she can kiss his palm before twining her fingers with his. Finnick shifts and pulls her into the circle of his arms, maneuvering until she’s in front of him, his legs to either side of hers. He doesn’t let go of her hand even when he carefully slides his free hand under her damaged arm to spread his fingers out over her still-flat stomach. When he rests his chin on her good shoulder, a wave of contentment washes over her.
“Do you regret it?” she asks him after a time, the fleeting moment of peace fading as her worries begin to creep back in. “The baby? Running away? The Peacekeepers last night?” Even though she never clearly saw their faces, they fell endlessly in her dreams, splattering her hands with their blood. Finnick shakes his head, then brushes his lips against her temple, the lightest of kisses.
“No…” He shifts again, just a little, and she can feel him looking down at her. “I don’t think we could have done anything differently.” He tightens his arms around her then, and whispers into her hair, “Except for the part where you got shot.”
“Finnick, I’m fine.”
“You lost a lot of blood.”
“No, I really didn’t. It just looked like a lot.”
“You needed stitches,” he reminds her, pulling his hand from her stomach to trace his index finger along her right arm.
“Yes,” she agrees, shivering at the light touch, “and Mairenn did a great job of that. I bet it won’t even scar.”
He starts to say something else, but Annie twists, raises two fingers to his lips to stop him. He does stop talking, but only to nip at her fingers and then suck them into his mouth. Annie gasps at the sudden heat that shoots through her and Finnick slants his mouth over hers, taking full advantage of her parted lips. Everyone and everything else fades away as Annie sinks into his kiss, only to rush back in all too soon when a shriek of laughter and a series of violent splashes nearby remind her that they’re not alone. She breaks the kiss and Finnick makes a disappointed sound low in his throat. He doesn’t let her go, but neither does he kiss her again.
“Later,” she promises, tracing his lower lip with her fingertip; again, he nips at her finger.
“Isn’t this what started this in the first place?” he laughs. Pulling her back against his chest, Finnick changes the subject to something less volatile, if no less important. “So what comes next? Not just for you and me, but for all of us.” They both watch as a smiling Mairenn trudges dripping out of the water, wringing her hair out as she goes and leaving the boys to splash at each other.
“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t thought much about it.” For so long, all she could think about was simply staying alive and free, more worried about what might happen if they were caught and taken back to the Capitol - back to Snow - than what a real future might hold.
“Short term, we need to make sure Paul can pass for a local.” Annie smiles at that; Paul is very much a product of his native District 2, from his Career swagger to his military precision, even the short cut of his dark hair, which he’s letting grow out again after several weeks of shaving it all off.
“You can take the boy out of the district…” she starts.
“But you can’t take the district out of the boy,” they both finish. It was something Mags used to say, usually in regard to tributes or new victors. Annie had first heard it during the week leading up to her Games, mostly directed at Finnick, but the old woman would occasionally change it to “girl” and apply it to Annie, too.
“I miss Mags,” she says and Finnick’s arms tighten for a moment.
“So do I, love,” he tells her in a rough whisper and kisses her hair. When he speaks again, returning to their previous topic, his voice is steadier.
“There are too many of us now to just live on the boats; we have to do something about building a real shelter soon. We’ve been damned lucky we haven’t had any bad storms yet.” Annie nods. The storm that took her mother when Annie was eight had hit in early September; it’s the sixth of September now, or maybe the seventh.
“And then there’s the matter of keeping ourselves out of trouble,” Finnick continues. “The ketch was made for pleasure cruises. The cutter is meant to chase down criminals.” He laughs. “I don’t know how to work that into the fact that we are the criminals.”
Annie quips, “Maybe we should just become pirates.”
“That would certainly be easier than rigging that cutter out for fishing. We could go after smaller cargo ships…” Hearing the smile in his voice, she grins up at him.
“We could lure Capitol tourists with the promise of a pleasure cruise on the Victorious and then hit them with the cutter and take all their valuables.” The cutter that, earlier that day, Mairenn and Luis worked on painting a more neutral color than white, a gray harder to see from a distance and harder to keep track of once it is seen. Annie’s grin fades as her thoughts begin to spin.
“We could give whatever we take to the people in the district who need it more,” Finnick is saying, but then he interrupts himself to laugh. “Who am I kidding? We’re talking about Capitol citizens. They wouldn’t have anything we need.”
Still frowning, Annie says, “But we could sell their jewelry and use it to buy things from local merchants. Things people do need, like food or medicine.” Finnick looks at her sharply.
“Annie, what’s wrong?”
“Us,” she tells him, troubled. “What we’ve already done. This conversation.”
“Annie…”
“Up until last night, we’ve done what we had to do to survive. If we do this thing we’re talking about, then we really are criminals.”
“Annie, we already are. If the Peacekeepers take Mairenn, she’s a victor, with all that entails. Her life will be hell, but she’ll live. Even Snow can’t truly claim she’s done anything wrong. But Paul? You and me? I’m surprised no one has tried to collect on those wanted posters we saw in Eleven. We’ve embarrassed him, love. He won’t go back to selling us; he’ll kill us.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I do. He saw an opportunity before to keep profiting from us, but he won’t make that mistake a second time.” He pulls away from her then, shifting again so that he’s facing her. He reaches out to cup her cheek in the palm of his hand.
“Annie, we could help the people of our district. Kian told me on the way back this morning that last night wasn’t the first time Peacekeepers stopped them and took their haul. And he said that’s been happening more often, and because of it more people are going hungry.” He strokes her lips with the pad of his thumb as he searches her eyes. “We were joking before, yes, but… We could do this.” He finally looks away, drops his hand to his lap. “I don’t want to just wait around for the day someone decides the reward is too high to pass up.”
Swallowing hard, she grabs his right hand with her left, pulling his attention back to her. “We should talk to Mr. Macray,” she tells him. “Find out all we can about what’s happening in the district. Maybe no one has tried to collect on those posters because they don’t want to give us back. And maybe rather than turning us in, someone will want to work with us.” She raises his hand to her mouth and kisses his knuckles. “If we’re going to crew two boats, we need more people.”
A grin slowly spreads across Finnick’s face. Standing, he offers Annie his hand and they walk together back toward their camp.
xXx
Even now, months after the Capitol dropped its bombs, the stench of burned plastic is acrid and cloying, invading his nostrils and clinging to his clothes as Finnick stands in the middle of what was once his kitchen. He exhales sharply in an attempt to blow it out, but only succeeds in sucking in more of it when he inhales and he begins to cough, his eyes to water.
Thin tendrils of acrid mist climb up from the ground like ghostly fingers, creeping up past his knees, his hips, growing more insistent as they pull themselves higher, catching at his throat. Inescapable. Burning his skin. Burning his mouth and his throat and his lungs…
With a sharp cry, Finnick slams his fist into his thigh and the phantom mist vanishes. Annie watches him from a few feet away, concern in her beautiful eyes and a scrap of bright red cloth in her hands; the ends of it ripple in the breeze that blows in from the sea. He recognizes it as the silk scarf that Angel Banyan used to use to tie her hair back from her face when she worked in her garden. He waves to Annie and forces his expression into something he hopes is a reassuring smile, although he’d be happy if it just covered up a little of the anxiety.
Apparently it works, as Annie returns to picking through the ruins, pausing now and again when bits of debris catch her eye: a broken picture frame here, a melted bit of glass or misshapen piece of metal there. He focuses on her instead of on their current surroundings - she centers him as nothing else can.
Rather than returning to the ketch last night to sleep in relative comfort, they’d stayed on the beach under the open sky; he wonders if that might have something to do with the memories surfacing of his most recent stint in the arena. When he woke that morning, later than he’d wanted, Annie was already gone and although the sun was well up over the horizon, the only other person stirring was Stefana, starting a fire to boil water for coffee. He’d looked around for Annie, but didn’t see her until Stefana waved a greeting and then pointed toward the beach grass higher up the slope toward the island’s interior. He’d waved his thanks and gone in the direction Stefana indicated. He’d caught up with Annie halfway to the cove where the flattened houses of 4’s Victors’ Village had been and then walked with her the rest of the way holding hands, neither of them saying anything.
A bright flare draws him toward a jumble of burned timbers and twisted metal approximately where his and Annie’s bedroom used to be. He toes at the debris, glad he decided to wear shoes instead of going barefoot. Partially uncovering a length of delicate silvery chain, he bends to hook it with a finger. One tug and it easily slips most of the way free of the larger bits of debris surrounding it, but then stops. Crouching, Finnick digs, not wanting to destroy something so fragile, yet that had survived the Capitol’s violence, finally freeing a diamond pendant that had lodged in a tangle of wires.
Finnick, my dear, I know this is meant for a woman to wear, and you are decidedly not a woman, but I’d like you to have it anyway. Consider it a thank you for a lovely evening.
He lets the pendant hang from its platinum chain; the diamond catches the weak sunlight that filters through the low scudding clouds and returns it in bright flashes of yellow and green and blue. Mrs. Tanger had been the first of his patrons to salve her conscience with an expensive gift; he’d still lived with his parents then and thought to give it to his mother, but when he’d unpacked his things, he’d decided he didn’t want anything of his life in the Capitol to touch his family. But he’d never gotten rid of it.
He stands, twirls it around his index finger once, twice, then catches it and slips it into his pocket. If nothing else, it’ll help pay for some of our expenses, he thinks as he goes back to sifting through the pile of blackened, burned rubble he’d once called home.
The ghosts had come out to play before he and Annie had reached the high point of the island, courtesy of the rooftops that should have been visible over the scrubby vegetation, but weren’t. At first, it was memories of his friends: a whiff of Mags’ jambalaya, spicy with a touch of sweet; a peal of laughter from one of Jack’s little girls; a wordless growl of irritation from the always intense Angel, directed at the rarely serious Martin, who had loved to tease her. But when they crested the hill to look down on the pitted, scorched ruins and the smell had hit him, it was as though the mutts had come to play, bringing with them arenas and sewers, the stench of war and of human cruelty.
A light touch on his arm and he jumps, stumbling on a twisted length of metal. His arms pinwheel as he fights to regain his balance and Annie grabs his right wrist and tugs him toward her. He crashes into her, his arms reflexively closing around her, and she laughs even as she hisses in pain when he jostles her injured arm. Her laughter makes a little of the grayness fade from the morning.
Before he can apologize for hurting her, she rises up on her toes to kiss him. “It’s okay, Finnick. You didn’t hurt me.” No longer in danger of falling, he loosens his hold on her as she brings her left hand up to cradle his face in her palm, leaving her right arm sandwiched between their bodies. Searching his face, not letting him look away from her, she asks, “But what about you? Are you okay?” He thinks about lying to her, but not for long. He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against hers.
“No, I’m not okay.” She strokes his cheek and jaw with her thumb. “Annie, we’ve got to look for someplace else. I can’t stay here. So many ghosts…”
“I know.” She tilts her head, shifts so that she can kiss his lips. “I might have been one of them, if you hadn’t made me promise to stay with your family.” He tightens his hold on her and buries his face in her hair. “The Capitol didn’t leave us anything to rebuild.”
“No. I kind of pissed them off.”
“Oh, Finnick. This wasn’t you.” She forces him to look at her again and the love he sees reflected in her eyes might have sent him to his knees if she weren’t holding him so tightly. He doesn’t answer that; he knows she’s right, that Snow is ultimately responsible for the wreckage, but he’s right, too. Snow wouldn’t have destroyed their homes so thoroughly if he hadn’t been so clearly part of the conspiracy that brought down the Quarter Quell arena.
“We could somehow rebuild on the other side of the island,” Annie offers, sounding tentative, and Finnick shakes his head.
“It’s alright for now, but not long term. The houses were on the leeward side for a reason.” Before Annie became a victor, Jack Hull and his boy had built a playhouse a few years ago on the windward side, not far from where they’re camping out now, but it had only lasted a few weeks of almost constant wind, and storms every few days. They’d found it in pieces scattered over the beach and the sandy hill following a storm that hadn’t even reached hurricane intensity. That playhouse had been small, but it was as sturdy as any of the Capitol-built houses in the cove.
“So we’ll have to find someplace else.” Finnick nods, thinking.
“Why don’t we grab Luis and take the Victorious into town. We can talk to his dad about other living considerations and…” He grins down at her. “And maybe about other lifestyle choices.”
xXx
The moment she sets foot on the skiff, her head starts spinning and her stomach roils. Annie quickly retreats, sloshing through the surf back to the beach. Finnick calls her name, standing almost knee deep in the water. Luis is already on board. She wants to be with them when Finnick talks to Mr. Macray, feels like she’s letting him down when she calls to him, “I’d better stay here, Finnick.” Rather than yelling at him some more, she pantomimes being sick, holding her stomach and then holding the back of her hand to her forehead and making a face at him. Shaking his head, he laughs and nods, hopping into the little boat and setting it rocking. He starts the motor and she waves at them as they head out across the bay.
When Annie can no longer see the skiff, she wanders along the beach, listening to the wind and the surf. She didn’t want to worry Finnick, but she isn’t convinced this dizziness has anything to do with her pregnancy. It doesn’t feel the same as it did with her first pregnancy and she suddenly remembers the cup of water Mairenn gave her the night before. Annie stops and turns, looking back toward their camp.
This should help… Drink it, Annie. At the time, Annie had thought she referred to the water itself, but now she thinks maybe Mair gave her more than just water.
A gust of wind makes her shiver and she starts to walk again, still moving farther down the beach, away from the others. Their voices grow less distinct as the distance increases, morphing into the remembered laughter of a pair of little girls and Annie feels the sting of tears behind her eyes.
“Oh, Moira, Mia, I miss you, little ones.” The last time she saw the girls was the night their father committed suicide rather than face the possibility of returning to the arena. Peacekeepers had taken them away along with their mother and brother and no one had heard from them or of them again. She wonders if any of them are still alive.
She doesn’t know how far she walked or how long she’s been gone when a wave of nausea hits her. It’s so strong she simply drops to her knees and leans forward, retching onto the wet send; a moment later the surf glides in, swirling around her knees and retreating, taking some of the sand supporting her with it. She wipes her mouth with the back of her right hand, the other she curls around her stomach; she tenses when someone else’s hand comes down lightly between her shoulder blades.
“Annie?” Paul asks. “Are you okay?” He doesn’t try to follow when she scrambles away from him, simply leans back on his haunches and watches as her brain slowly makes the connections between that unexpected touch and his identity. Friend, not foe. Not someone who would hurt or use her. She closes her eyes even as she fights the sudden impulse to cover her ears with her hands, blocking out sound along with sight.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Annie.” She hears his voice above the surf, hears the concern threaded through it, and she feels heat rise in her cheeks. She forces herself to breathe normally. In. Out. In. Out.
“I know you won’t, Paul,” she says, opening her eyes. “You startled me, that’s all.”
“You didn’t eat much at lunch.” She offers him a somewhat shaky smile.
“The baby’s making it hard to keep anything down.” Relaxing, she shifts until she’s sitting in the sand, no longer trying to curl up and hide, and Paul moves to sit beside her, careful to keep a little distance between. She’s grateful for that. “Hopefully, it’ll pass soon.” It had with the first pregnancy, only lasting a few weeks. “Why were you following me?”
“Your husband asked me not to let you out of my sight.” Annie raises one eyebrow at that.
“He did, did he?”
“He worries,” Paul says, grinning. That simple statement holds a wealth of meaning and Annie’s irritation fades. Of course Finnick is worried about her. Sometimes she’s surprised he’s even willing to leave her side, with all that they’ve been through.
xXx
There are four of them tacked to the left side of a notice board at the end of the main pier, just before the walk drops off onto Dock Street. Wanted posters. They look like they’ve been there a while, with that not quite wrinkly, fragile look paper gets when it gets wet and then dries, but yet they’re not so old that they’ve either faded or yellowed, like several of the other notices. The posters for both Finnick and Annie use photographs taken during Mairenn’s Closing Ceremonies. He assumes Paul’s is from around the same time, but since he’s in uniform, it’s hard to tell; regardless, it’s a recent picture. The one for Luis looks like it might be from his school identification card and is the only one that resembles the person the Peacekeepers hunt.
When Luis comes up beside Finnick, the boy glances at the posters, whistling at the sums offered for the two victors and the ex-Peacekeeper; Finnick makes note of the fact that Snow wants them dead or alive, something Paul neglected to mention when he first saw wanted posters for them a few weeks ago, when they passed through District 11. “I’m going to have to have a little talk with Paul about withholding information,” he mutters under his breath, because it’s either that or something has changed. Across the street, a pair of Peacekeepers are looking in Finnick’s direction.
“Wow. Nobody’ll even look twice at me once they see the reward for you.”
“Stow it, Luis,” Finnick orders with a nod toward the Peacekeepers. He pushes Luis into the shadow of the notice board, hoping that he’s out of their line of sight. His heart in his throat, Finnick nods to them as they pass, keeping his expression neutral but with a hint of subservience. His appearance is either different enough from a distance of thirty yards or so that they’ll ignore him and move on, or it isn’t; there’s nothing he can do about it either way, since they’ve already seen him. The male ignores him and the female returns his nod, but they both accept the sight of a brown-haired, stubble-bearded fisherman without a second glance. They don’t seem to notice Luis and Finnick releases the breath he holds.
“Stay where you are,” he tells the boy and moves to the other side of the board, pretending to read the notices there, more copies of the posters among them. The poster for Luis is torn, as though someone ripped it from the board and then reattached it using extra tacks to put the pieces back together. His eyes catch on an older poster, yellowed and stained and peppered with holes where other things were posted on top of it. He stares at the faces of his father, his brother and sister, his uncles and his niece, all labeled as traitors and rebels. Finnick’s fingers itch to tear them all down, but he forces himself to leave them there. Nothing says your targets are in the area like wanted posters suddenly gone missing.
“Let’s go,” Finnick says when the Peacekeepers turn a corner. “Keep your head down.”
They hurry to the shop, not stopping along the way except to let a group of Capitol tourists in their too bright clothing and with their unnatural hair and skin colors pass. Overhearing them talk about being late for their harbor cruise, Finnick turns to watch them go, smiling as he recalls Annie’s joking suggestions about tourists and cruises.
Chapter 2 - There Once Was a Pirate
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 9,610
Beta: deathmallow
Fanmix and artwork: alinaandalion
Focus: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair
Characters: Annie Cresta, Finnick Odair, Haymitch Abernathy, Johanna Mason, Coriolanus Snow, Enobaria, original characters
Summary: Finnick and Annie become pirates and accidentally start a second rebellion.
Author's note: Written for the het_bigbang challenge, this is the sequel to and continuation of Victorious, which you can read in its entirety here. Enjoy!
------------------------------
Chapter 1 - New Beginnings
“Finnick, put me down. I don’t need my arm to walk.” In spite of Annie’s half-hearted struggles, her husband refuses to let her go, lifting her from the bloody spot on the deck where she fell, grazed by a Peacekeeper bullet. He carries her to the bridge of the newly named Victorious.
The fight with the eight-man crew of the Peacekeeper cutter over a small boat caught poaching in Capitol waters had been brief but intense. Firing on the cutter - and hoping the Peacekeepers didn’t have time to call in the attack - was the only thing they could do to help the Obispo family, friends of young Luis Macray. The newest member of their group of fugitives, Luis had joined them a few days earlier when he’d helped Annie and Paul escape a Peacekeeper patrol only to find himself hunted, as well.
When they’d decided to help the Obispos, Finnick had Paul, his former Peacekeeper guard, take out the cutter’s communications array. Paul had hit it on his first shot, sending up a shower of sparks. Afterward, Annie had acted as spotter for the ex-Peacekeeper, calling out human targets until the cutter’s crew finally began to fire back at them. Although she and Paul, working as a team, had killed two Peacekeepers and injured three more, Annie was the only one injured aboard the Victorious.
She has to admit that the jagged tear in her right shoulder and arm, about two inches long and pretty deep where the bullet tore free, looks ugly even with the colors washed out by the cold light of the moon. The pain isn’t bad, but she’s sure that will change once the adrenaline wears off. The wound continues to bleed even with pressure applied and she gives up trying to convince Finnick that it’s nothing. It’s hard to make someone believe an injury isn’t bad when it clearly needs stitches.
Stepping under the roof of the bridge, Finnick sweeps his charts and instruments to the side of his chart table and sets Annie down in the clear space, careful not to jostle her arm. Mairenn, his fifteen-year-old niece and victor of the 76th Hunger Games, switches on the bridge lights and hurries over with the boat’s first aid kit; they’d cut all the lights hours ago to make themselves less of a target for Peacekeeper guns.
For an instant, all Annie sees when she looks at Mair is the girl’s cousin Rhys, who died in the Games she’d won, and she closes her eyes against that unexpected pain. Rhys had been Annie’s constant companion in the days leading up to and during the Quarter Quell, doing everything he could to distract her from the fact of Finnick in the arena. The pain of his loss, of knowing that he died because of her and Finnick as part of Snow’s punishment for their failed rebellion, is far worse than the sting of her arm.
“This’ll hurt, Annie,” Mairenn warns her just before she starts to clean the gash. Staring down at Mairenn’s head as she bends over her work, at her normally bronze-colored hair, lightened to blonde so that she no longer matches the Capitol’s wanted posters, Annie laughs. The sound is harsh in the quiet.
“Oh, Mair, this is nothing. Do what you have to do.” Mairenn, too, was part of Snow’s punishment. Nearly every tribute in the 76th Games had been dear to someone in the rebellion. Finnick’s niece and nephew, Peeta’s friend Delly, Gale Hawthorne’s brother Vick, Chaff’s daughter, Seeder’s grandson, others who Annie didn’t know, all hand-picked by the president. Vick Hawthorne was only twelve years old when he died.
“Mair?” Finnick’s voice pulls Annie back to the bridge of the Victorious. He, too, has altered his appearance, his bronze hair turned to a dark-brown at odds with the lighter, reddish stubble on his cheeks and jaw. Mairenn sets aside her bloody towel in favor of needle and thread to close the tear in Annie’s arm.
“She’s lost some blood, Uncle Finnick, but I don't think it's too bad.” Mairenn studies the wound, blood still welling, before she says, “I think three or four stitches should take care of it.” Annie has to admit, if only to herself, that she’s feeling a little light headed, giving credence to the girl’s assessment of her blood loss.
With a worried glance at Annie, Finnick nods and then starts rifling through the charts he’d pushed aside until he finds the one he’s looking for. Bringing it and a small flashlight to the chart table, he spreads the chart out, Annie shifting a few inches to the right to give him more room, and pins the curling corners in place with a book - The Fisherman’s Guide to District Four, 2nd Edition - and one of Annie’s shoes, abandoned earlier that afternoon. A good quarter of the chart curls over the edge of the table. He switches on the navigation system for a moment, jots down some information from the screen, and then switches it off again. It's so quiet on the bridge, just the three of them while the others take care of things across the water on the cutter, that Annie can hear the scratch of pencil on paper as Finnick makes his calculations.
Mairenn douses her needle and thread with alcohol from a small bottle she found in the first aid kit and then, pinching the edges of the gash together, begins to sew. Annie watches her work, unable to quite look away. It feels more odd than painful, the pin prick of the needle, the tug of the thread at her skin. She grimaces but doesn’t cry out at the more forceful tug when the girl finishes by biting off the thread before splashing the area with more of the alcohol.
Shouts from the cutter bring Finnick to his feet; on his way past her to find out what's happening, he lightly strokes Annie's hand. She shivers at the brief touch, but once Finnick is past, the shivering doesn't stop.
"Are you cold, Annie?" Mairenn asks as she tucks in the ends of the gauze that holds her bandage in place. Annie nods, glancing down at the pristine white cloth, almost glowing in the moonlight against the darker shade of her pebbling skin.
“A little.” She feels a little sick as the adrenaline rush wears off and her arm begins to throb in time with her heartbeat. She shivers again, so violently that her teeth chatter for a beat before she clenches her jaw to stop them. Okay, maybe more than just a little cold. Am I going into shock? She curls her uninjured arm protectively over her midriff and the tiny spark of life growing there as Mairenn hurries aft and returns a moment later with a light blanket that she drapes over Annie’s shoulders. Picking up the first aid kit again, Mair rummages through it, looking for something. Outside the bridge, Paul shouts something from the cutter, but Annie can’t make out the words.
Mairenn pours water into a cup from a dispenser attached to one of the columns. “This should help,” she says as she presses the cup into Annie’s hand; Annie looks down at the swirling liquid within. Finnick momentarily distracts them both when he steps back onto the bridge, but then Mairenn says, “Drink it, Annie.” She sounds so much like Finnick’s mother that Annie smiles even as she complies with Mairenn’s order. If it weren’t for Jenna sending a message to her son by way of the Final Eight interviews, she and Finnick would still be in the Capitol under Snow’s control.
“Okay, here’s the plan.” Reentering the bridge, Finnick picks up the chart from where it had fallen to the floor and partially spreads it out between where Annie still sits and the table’s edge. She shifts again to see the chart better, but has to close her eyes for a moment as a wave of vertigo washes over her. “While I’d rather just take us home,” he continues, glancing toward Annie, “Paul and I are going to take the cutter, the Obispos, and their haul back to the mainland. We have to get that fish taken care of before it goes bad or a lot of people will go hungry. Mair, you and Luis will take Annie and the ketch back to Victors’ Island.” He jots down the course for her to follow as he speaks.
“Won’t that be dangerous, Uncle Finnick?” Annie opens her eyes again, focusing on Finnick.
“It will, yes. You’ll just have to make sure you don’t run into any more Peacekeepers.” He hands her his notes and watches as she reads them. “Are you up to it? You’ll have to run dark…” Mairenn nods, her eyes darting across the page as she memorizes the course.
“Papa let me navigate our last couple of night runs before the war.” She sounds a little sad when she mentions her father and Annie recalls that Mairenn hasn’t seen him in months, not since he disappeared along with Finnick’s father and sister just ahead of Peacekeeper forces.
Annie shifts, trying to get more comfortable. Her vision swims and she sways where she sits, more light-headed than ever. When she puts out a hand to steady herself, she sees Finnick watching her with a worried frown.
“Annie?”
“I’m alright, Finnick,” she reassures him. “Just a little woozy.” He leans in and gently kisses her on the forehead, all scratchy stubble and soft lips, then scoops her up once more. Annie is too tired to protest this time as Finnick carries her from the bridge to their small cabin below. Resting her head on his shoulder, she’s asleep before they ever leave the bridge.
xXx
“How does it feel to be back in uniform?” Paul looks up at Finnick’s question, then returns to buckling on his sidearm, white metal against white tunic and trousers beneath white body armor. The only thing that isn’t white is the visor on the helmet, still hanging with its fellows on hooks screwed into the far wall.
“Weird,” Paul replies, checking to make sure his pistol is loaded before replacing it in its white leather holster. “I know it’s only been a couple of weeks, but it feels weird.” Finished dressing, the former Peacekeeper walks over to Finnick and begins tightening the straps on his armor. “These uniforms are a lot more comfortable when they fit properly.” Paul’s armor fits the best of the three, but even so, it’s too loose. Of the eight Peacekeepers on the cutter’s original crew, only three had been uninjured, and none of those unbloodied uniforms is quite the right size for the three men who wear them now. They’ll do, so long as no one looks at them too closely. But then, if all goes well, the fit of these stolen uniforms won’t matter.
“Wait a minute. You’re a ghost?” Finnick and Paul look over at Kian Obispo. The shortest of the three men, his uniform fits the worst. Where Paul, even in an ill-fitting uniform, reeks of Peacekeeper, Kian reminds Finnick of a boy in costume playing at Peacekeepers and Rebels.
“Ghost?” Finnick asks and looks back at Paul, who shrugs: he doesn’t seem to know the term either.
“Sorry,” Kian says. “It’s what we called the Peacekeepers during the war. Because of the uniforms.” Finnick makes a mental note to find out what the Obispos did during that time. Given the use of the term “ghost,” he’s pretty sure Kian’s sympathies, at least, were firmly with the rebels.
“Ex-Peacekeeper,” Paul corrects Kian, straightening the lay of Finnick’s left shoulder piece. “Or should I say ex-ghost? It was kind of a dead-end job.” Finnick laughs as Paul takes a step back to survey his work. Apparently satisfied, he turns to inspect Kian and Finnick steps out onto the deck. Two more steps to the left bring him to the ladder that leads up to the cutter’s command center.
The command center is nothing like the tiny bridge on the Victorious and it takes Finnick a few minutes to familiarize himself with the million and one readouts and switches that make up the main console. As far as he can tell, the only thing with a manual option is the steering; unlike the ketch, everything runs electronically from the command center, and there are no sails. Given the scarcity of fuel in the district, they’ll have to look into fitting the cutter for sailing if they decide to keep her. Although what choice do we have? We can’t just take her into town and sell her. He snickers. That’d go over well. For sale: one Peacekeeper cutter, slightly used, sold as is. Finnick smiles at the thought.
Behind him, Paul enters the command center and Finnick’s smile fades. Still studying the console in front of him, he asks, “Are you sure taking out the communications array killed the ability to track this beast?”
“I’m sure, Finnick, but if it’ll make you feel better…” Paul hunkers down beside the control console and reaches underneath, feeling around for a second before he rips out a pair of red and black wires, holding them up to waggle at Finnick. “Radio doesn’t seem to be working,” he deadpans and Finnick laughs.
“How’d you know that was there?” Paul straightens and sets the wires on a narrow shelf near the door. “You never served on the water…?”
“The powers that be try to keep things like that console as universal as possible. It makes cross-training more efficient.” Kian, just coming up the ladder, pauses for a moment, his eyes on a level with the wires dangling beneath the console.
“You are like no Peacekeeper I’ve ever met,” he tells Paul, stepping up fully into the small room. Abruptly filled with three adult males, all wearing body armor, the command center is more than a little cramped.
“Nope. But then I’m not one anymore. Remember?” Facing Finnick, Paul asks, “Where do you want me, boss?”
“Take a rifle up top and yell if you see anything we should worry about.” Paul nods and squeezes between Finnick and Kian to head back down the ladder. Once he’s past, Finnick leans across the console and slides the closest window open then does the same on the other side, the better to hear if Paul does call down to them. Since they have no radio.
“Do you think we’ll run into trouble?” Kian looks and sounds anxious and it occurs to Finnick that the older man is under a good deal of stress, leaving his wife and son - however temporarily - with complete strangers, their livelihood destroyed, their last bit of potential income stored in jury-rigged coolers aboard a stolen government vessel.
“No,” he tells Kian, reasonably sure that it’s not a lie. “It’s two in the morning and as far as anyone we might run into between here and the mainland is concerned, we’re the big threat.” He’s far more worried about the Victorious; they’d left for Victors’ Island a good twenty minutes ago, maybe a little longer. He’d given Mairenn a straightforward course making the assumption that the cutter they’re on now was the only one in the area and that her former crew hadn’t called for help. What else could he do? Both Stefana and Kevan Obispo are experienced sailors, as is Mairenn.
Annie, too, knows her way around boats in general and the ketch in particular, but she was out cold by the time he’d laid her in their bunk. He’d thought at the time it was the shock of her injury, but now he’s not so sure. Okay, so maybe I’m a little anxious, too. Let’s just get this done, Odair, so you can go home to your wife.
“All right, Obispo, where are we heading?” Looking out into the night, Kian jumps at the sound of Finnick’s voice. He turns as Finnick fires up the engines and the navigation system. Finnick knows in general where they’re going and expects something along the lines of “two klicks south of the public docks” or the like, but Kian surprises him by rattling off specific coordinates. It would be easy enough to enter them into the computer and let it calculate the fastest course, but he doesn’t want to risk it even with Paul’s reassurances. Instead, he makes note and sends the cutter forward, spinning the wheel until they’re heading in the right direction.
“The harbor master was expecting us at moonrise,” Kian continues and Finnick’s eyebrows shoot upward as he dials the lights down, leaving the command center in near darkness, lit only by the glow of the navigational instruments - speed, depth, compass heading - the better to see what’s out ahead of them. Moonrise was a good two and a half hours ago.
“The harbor master?” Arturo Fallon had been harbor master back when Finnick helped his father with the fishing, including the occasional “night fishing” trip. That had been before Tom began to distrust his younger son, before he believed that Finnick had become “too Capitol” and feared that he’d turn them in for poaching. “So who has the honor these days?” According to Luis’ father, the Capitol had replaced most of those in key positions when they retook the district.
“Arturo Fallon’s held the job for… ten years?” Kian says. “He’s done a good job, although I have to admit I never expected him to survive the purge.” Finnick laughs, not at all surprised.
“My dad always said Fallon was part cat.” Fallon was a man known for both his shrewdness and his greed. “Dad also said the man would sell his own mother if he thought he could make a profit.” Snow would love the guy.
“Well, I just hope he’s still willing to take care of our haul.”
The cutter slices through the water toward town and the two men fall silent, Kian lost in his own thoughts while Finnick considers the things he’s seen and heard in the past few days, trying to distract himself from worrying about Annie.
The news shows proclaim that things are improving in the districts as rapidly as they are in the Capitol, proof that the rebels hadn’t done much damage in a rebellion that was doomed from the start. But while things might be improving in the Capitol, Finnick had seen with his own eyes that that isn’t the case in the districts, at least not in District 11 when they’d passed through or here in 4.
The Peacekeeper presence when they’d gone into town for supplies just a few days ago was heavier than it had been before the Quarter Quell and the Peacekeepers themselves more arrogant. According to Luis, the curfews are strict and the sanctions for even minor infractions are harsh. Those sanctions are the reason the boy is with them now, instead of in school or helping his father in the general store. Peacekeepers had tried to stop Annie and Paul for questioning when they saw them with Luis in violation of an order against public congregation. Luis had helped Annie and Paul escape and the Peacekeepers had identified him in the process. At sixteen, the laws of Panem might not see him as an adult yet, but that wouldn’t stop them from charging him with anything up to and including treason.
And earlier that day, Peacekeepers had stopped the Obispos with every intention of confiscating their day’s haul for their own profit. They might not have killed them outright, but they’d taken the fish aboard the cutter along with the family and then scuttled the boat.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Kian breaks the silence along with Finnick’s train of thought and it takes him a beat to catch up.
“Your boat?” he asks and Kian nods.
“She was finally paid for. We owned her outright and now…” He leans back against a clear space on the wall, the Peacekeeper uniform making of him a pale blob in the darkness - a “ghost.” Kian scrubs a hand over his face and continues, “It took the last of our savings to pay her off. There’s nothing else. We even lived on her after the Capitol took over the housing complex we lived in.”
“The Capitol took your home?” Again, Kian nods.
“They convicted the couple who owned it of treason after the war. The Capitol confiscated all their property, so a dozen or so families were suddenly homeless.” He pushes away from the wall and walks over to stand beside Finnick. “Lucky us, they said we could stay, but we had to pay the new rate.” He looks at Finnick. “It was too high.”
Finnick makes a slight adjustment to their course. He can see the ebb and flow of light on the horizon from the lighthouse on the mainland, just outside of town, and judges that they’ll reach their destination in another twenty minutes or so. They’ll need to get the cutter in, unloaded, and out as quickly as possible, and the sooner he gets back to Annie, the better.
Between her injury and her pregnancy, he won’t feel at ease until they’re together again. What he’d like to do is hide her away someplace safe, but there isn’t any such place. And they’d both decided they no longer wanted to run, which was why they’d returned to 4 in spite of the risks. It’s home. He glances over at Kian again, and an idea percolating in the back of his mind crystallizes.
“Join us,” he says, following his gut.
“I… What?”
“You said it yourself. Your boat is gone. You have nowhere else to go. So join us on Victors’ Island. We don’t have much, but there’s plenty of work to do, both on the island and on the boats.” They’d built a small shelter on what had been the uninhabited side of the island - a different kind of ghosts haunted where the victors of District 4 had once lived - but mostly they’d been living on the ketch. Or at least, he and Annie and Mairenn had; Paul and Luis used the shelter or simply slept on the beach under the stars. “We’ll feed you,” he offers as incentive, “and there’s no rent.” Kian snorts at that.
Out of the corner of his eye, Finnick sees another ghost appear in the open doorway, helmet in place and rifle hanging by a pale sling over his right shoulder. “Paul? Everything okay?”
Pulling off the helmet, Paul hooks it on the door’s prominent hinge. “Yeah, there’s nothing out there,” he tells Finnick and, when he sees both him and Kian watching the helmet sway on its hook point, he pokes it. “The optics are a hell of a lot better than straining my eyes in the dark.” He glances at Kian. “You should stay with us,” he says, a clear indication that he heard most if not all of their conversation. And then he looks pointedly at Finnick once more. “And we should have killed the rest of those Peacekeepers. They didn’t get a good look at you or Annie or your niece, but they I.D.ed both me and Luis, not to mention our friend here.”
“I’ve had enough of killing, Paul.” He knows Paul is right, that letting them live will create yet more trouble, but he’s been killing people off and on for almost half his life. Killing those men and women would have been more blood on hands he could never wash clean. More faces and voices to parade through his sleep. Beside him, Paul sighs.
“I know, Finnick, but things would be so much simpler. It’s not going to be safe for us on the mainland for a while.” Shaking off his own maudlin thoughts, Finnick forces a grin.
“I’m sorry. Was it safe before?” he says and Paul laughs.
Glancing from Finnick to Paul and back again, Kian asks, “What kind of work?” Finnick makes one last minor course adjustment before answering.
“Landfall in ten,” he announces and then turns toward Kian. Paul shifts to stand just outside the doorway, where he can both hear whatever Finnick and Kian say and watch the enveloping darkness.
“The island was pretty well flattened by the Capitol,” Finnick begins. “We’ve only been there for a few days, and a good chunk of that has been spent teaching Paul here and Luis Macray to sail.”
“I thought that was Luis I saw on your boat. Rumor has it he ran into trouble with the Peacekeepers maybe a week ago.”
“That would be when he helped us elude a patrol,” Finnick confirms.
“Fucking ghosts,” Kian mutters under his breath, but Finnick ignores it.
“We need to pick through the debris for whatever’s salvageable, figure out if we can use it ourselves or get it to someone else who can.” In truth, they’d been avoiding the other side of the island. Neither he nor Annie is quite ready yet to face the ghosts - the echoes of the dead, not the kind that wear white uniforms - they’ll find there, and the others haven’t pressed them on that. “Of course, at some point, we’ll need to figure out what we’re doing long term. And there’s the little matter of having stolen a Peacekeeper cutter…”
The feel of the cutter slicing through the water changes and Finnick cuts back on the throttle, gesturing for quiet as he kills the remaining lights. He can see in the moonlight what appears to be an abandoned dock up ahead, the attached boathouse half caved in on itself. The nearby beach, white sand glowing under the moon’s cold light, ends abruptly in a rocky wall, the drop from above a good twenty feet, the rock face itself pockmarked by black holes that Finnick suspects hold nothing more sinister than birds’ nests. Farther along the rock wall he sees a patch of deeper darkness, a shadow large enough to swallow the cutter. Probably a cave, he thinks and glances over his shoulder at Kian.
“Yes, this is the place,” he confirms and Finnick slows the cutter, guiding her in the last few yards to a dock that looks almost as unstable as the boathouse, but the feel of it is as solid as that rock wall when the cutter bumps against it.
“Now what?” Finnick asks Kian as he kills the engines and lashes down the wheel. He tells Paul to head forward to tie her off as he heads aft to do the same, but even as he steps out of the command center he glances down as a red dot blooms on his body armor.
“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kill you where you stand, Ghost.” The cutter drifts a little away from the dock, but only on one end; the forward end is stable and Finnick hears the unmistakable sound of a round jacked into a rifle’s chamber.
“Don’t shoot! We’re not Peacekeepers!” Kian shouts, running forward. “I’m Kian Obispo!”
After a tense moment, the red light winks out and the same voice calls out, “You’re late, Obispo.”
Finnick calls, “Let it go, Paul,” and a beat later Paul steps into view, his rifle pointed at the planks beneath his feet rather than at the man standing at the far end of the pier.
“If you’re not ghosts, then who the fuck are you?”
xXx
Annie wakes to the scent of wood smoke and roasting fish and the sea, to a metallic taste on her tongue and a stiffness in her muscles. Her stomach growls loudly, embarrassingly, but there’s no one there to care. She’s alone. There’s no sign of Finnick save the depression his head had made in the pillow beside hers and a circle of knotted rope in the center of that depression: a bracelet, by the look of it, with a lovers’ knot as its centerpiece. She smiles, wondering when he wove it, and notices that bitter, metallic taste again. She rolls onto her right side to reach for the bottle of water she keeps handy on the small shelf beside the bunk, wanting to wash that taste from her mouth, but bites off a cry of pain as flame seems to engulf her shoulder and upper arm.
She had forgotten about her injury, but with the surge of pain, it all comes flooding back. The tense, hours-long game of cat and mouse with the Peacekeeper cutter… The ensuing fight… Three dead Peacekeepers… The bullet that tore through her arm… Moving more gingerly, she sits up, swinging her bare legs over the side of the bunk.
Keeping her injured arm close to her chest, she grabs up the pair of shorts on the end of the bunk. It’s difficult pulling them on and fastening them with one hand, but she manages; she doesn’t bother putting on a bra or changing her shirt, deciding that the t-shirt she slept in will do, under the circumstances. The shirt isn’t the same one she wore when the Peacekeepers shot her.
Along with the smells of food and home, laughter and a rhythmic tapping dance in on the breeze. Tap. Tap. Taptap. Scrape tap. Planting one knee in the center of the thin mattress, she leans toward the small window. Just outside, maybe fifteen or twenty feet away, the Peacekeeper cutter floats at anchor, the sun so high in the sky - what her Gran always called “the crack of noon” - that she casts barely any shadow onto the surrounding water flashing blue-green in the bright light.
Standing on either end of a small boat tethered to the cutter’s starboard side, Luis and Mairenn apply paint to the hull, he with a roller and she with a large brush. Two sections that were once white are now the muddy gray-blue-green of a stormy sea; they’ll soon merge to become nearly a quarter of the starboard side. The paint, rollers, and brushes had been part of the supplies they’d picked up the day they’d added Luis to their little family.
“What are you going to do below the water line?” Annie calls out and Luis turns sharply toward the sound of her voice, nearly dropping his roller. She hears Mairenn laugh again as he juggles it, flinging paint out to float in speckles on the water.
“Uncle Finnick, Annie’s awake,” she calls and Annie pushes back from the window. Snatching up the bracelet and stuffing it into the pocket of her shorts, she climbs the few steps up to the deck of the Victorious, heading toward the port side railing, bare feet slapping on the planks. Shading her eyes against the sudden glare, Annie sees Finnick step out of the cutter’s command cabin and she stumbles. Feeling more than a little off kilter - you’re a beautiful man, Finnick Odair, but you’re not that beautiful - she steadies herself on the railing, holding on tightly with her left hand until the vertigo passes, wondering what caused it. She didn’t lose that much blood.
“I still want to know how you’re going to paint the underside,” Annie calls to them and Mairenn smiles up at her.
“Uncle Finnick said to just worry about the parts people can see.”
“Annie, wait there!” Finnick shouts across from the cutter. “I’ll come get you.”
But Mairenn forestalls him. “Don’t worry about her, Uncle Finnick. We’ll bring her ashore.” She grins at Annie. “Now that you’re awake, we get to eat.”
A few minutes later, they’re all on the beach around a simple meal of roast fish and dried fruit from their last supply run into town. Annie nibbles at her food - in spite of her growling stomach, after her first bite, she’s afraid she won’t be able to keep it down - and stares into the still-glowing embers of the fire Stefana Obispo had used to roast the fish. Conversations swirl around her - Paul and Kian, Finnick and Mairenn, Stefana and her son Kevan and Luis - but their words don’t touch her and she drifts, fades out.
The sound of splashing and laughter draws her back, disoriented, the sun noticeably lower in the deep blue sky. Glancing over her shoulder toward the water, she sees Kevan and Luis chase after Mairenn into the waves. A little way from where they run, Finnick sits alone on the beach and Annie braces her weight on her left arm and rolls to her knees.
“Do you need a hand, Annie?” Stefana offers. Paul and Kian glance her way and Paul starts to get up, but Annie waves him off.
“I’m just a little stiff from sitting too long,” she tells them and they return to their conversation as she rises awkwardly to her feet.
Annie shuffles through the soft sand to sit beside her husband; Finnick glances at her and his expression softens for a moment before he looks out once more over the water. Annie follows his gaze to the two boats swaying with the motion of the waves that roll in from the deeper water, breaking apart when they meet the boats’ hulls or the slope that leads up to the beach. Although he’s there with her physically, he’s miles away.
“Finnick?” Sitting to his right, she shoulder bumps him - carefully - and asks, “What can I do?”
He drags his gaze away from the boats and gives her a lopsided half smile. “Don’t mind me. I’m just thinking about how the hell we got here.” Annie takes his right hand and lifts it so she can kiss his palm before twining her fingers with his. Finnick shifts and pulls her into the circle of his arms, maneuvering until she’s in front of him, his legs to either side of hers. He doesn’t let go of her hand even when he carefully slides his free hand under her damaged arm to spread his fingers out over her still-flat stomach. When he rests his chin on her good shoulder, a wave of contentment washes over her.
“Do you regret it?” she asks him after a time, the fleeting moment of peace fading as her worries begin to creep back in. “The baby? Running away? The Peacekeepers last night?” Even though she never clearly saw their faces, they fell endlessly in her dreams, splattering her hands with their blood. Finnick shakes his head, then brushes his lips against her temple, the lightest of kisses.
“No…” He shifts again, just a little, and she can feel him looking down at her. “I don’t think we could have done anything differently.” He tightens his arms around her then, and whispers into her hair, “Except for the part where you got shot.”
“Finnick, I’m fine.”
“You lost a lot of blood.”
“No, I really didn’t. It just looked like a lot.”
“You needed stitches,” he reminds her, pulling his hand from her stomach to trace his index finger along her right arm.
“Yes,” she agrees, shivering at the light touch, “and Mairenn did a great job of that. I bet it won’t even scar.”
He starts to say something else, but Annie twists, raises two fingers to his lips to stop him. He does stop talking, but only to nip at her fingers and then suck them into his mouth. Annie gasps at the sudden heat that shoots through her and Finnick slants his mouth over hers, taking full advantage of her parted lips. Everyone and everything else fades away as Annie sinks into his kiss, only to rush back in all too soon when a shriek of laughter and a series of violent splashes nearby remind her that they’re not alone. She breaks the kiss and Finnick makes a disappointed sound low in his throat. He doesn’t let her go, but neither does he kiss her again.
“Later,” she promises, tracing his lower lip with her fingertip; again, he nips at her finger.
“Isn’t this what started this in the first place?” he laughs. Pulling her back against his chest, Finnick changes the subject to something less volatile, if no less important. “So what comes next? Not just for you and me, but for all of us.” They both watch as a smiling Mairenn trudges dripping out of the water, wringing her hair out as she goes and leaving the boys to splash at each other.
“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t thought much about it.” For so long, all she could think about was simply staying alive and free, more worried about what might happen if they were caught and taken back to the Capitol - back to Snow - than what a real future might hold.
“Short term, we need to make sure Paul can pass for a local.” Annie smiles at that; Paul is very much a product of his native District 2, from his Career swagger to his military precision, even the short cut of his dark hair, which he’s letting grow out again after several weeks of shaving it all off.
“You can take the boy out of the district…” she starts.
“But you can’t take the district out of the boy,” they both finish. It was something Mags used to say, usually in regard to tributes or new victors. Annie had first heard it during the week leading up to her Games, mostly directed at Finnick, but the old woman would occasionally change it to “girl” and apply it to Annie, too.
“I miss Mags,” she says and Finnick’s arms tighten for a moment.
“So do I, love,” he tells her in a rough whisper and kisses her hair. When he speaks again, returning to their previous topic, his voice is steadier.
“There are too many of us now to just live on the boats; we have to do something about building a real shelter soon. We’ve been damned lucky we haven’t had any bad storms yet.” Annie nods. The storm that took her mother when Annie was eight had hit in early September; it’s the sixth of September now, or maybe the seventh.
“And then there’s the matter of keeping ourselves out of trouble,” Finnick continues. “The ketch was made for pleasure cruises. The cutter is meant to chase down criminals.” He laughs. “I don’t know how to work that into the fact that we are the criminals.”
Annie quips, “Maybe we should just become pirates.”
“That would certainly be easier than rigging that cutter out for fishing. We could go after smaller cargo ships…” Hearing the smile in his voice, she grins up at him.
“We could lure Capitol tourists with the promise of a pleasure cruise on the Victorious and then hit them with the cutter and take all their valuables.” The cutter that, earlier that day, Mairenn and Luis worked on painting a more neutral color than white, a gray harder to see from a distance and harder to keep track of once it is seen. Annie’s grin fades as her thoughts begin to spin.
“We could give whatever we take to the people in the district who need it more,” Finnick is saying, but then he interrupts himself to laugh. “Who am I kidding? We’re talking about Capitol citizens. They wouldn’t have anything we need.”
Still frowning, Annie says, “But we could sell their jewelry and use it to buy things from local merchants. Things people do need, like food or medicine.” Finnick looks at her sharply.
“Annie, what’s wrong?”
“Us,” she tells him, troubled. “What we’ve already done. This conversation.”
“Annie…”
“Up until last night, we’ve done what we had to do to survive. If we do this thing we’re talking about, then we really are criminals.”
“Annie, we already are. If the Peacekeepers take Mairenn, she’s a victor, with all that entails. Her life will be hell, but she’ll live. Even Snow can’t truly claim she’s done anything wrong. But Paul? You and me? I’m surprised no one has tried to collect on those wanted posters we saw in Eleven. We’ve embarrassed him, love. He won’t go back to selling us; he’ll kill us.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I do. He saw an opportunity before to keep profiting from us, but he won’t make that mistake a second time.” He pulls away from her then, shifting again so that he’s facing her. He reaches out to cup her cheek in the palm of his hand.
“Annie, we could help the people of our district. Kian told me on the way back this morning that last night wasn’t the first time Peacekeepers stopped them and took their haul. And he said that’s been happening more often, and because of it more people are going hungry.” He strokes her lips with the pad of his thumb as he searches her eyes. “We were joking before, yes, but… We could do this.” He finally looks away, drops his hand to his lap. “I don’t want to just wait around for the day someone decides the reward is too high to pass up.”
Swallowing hard, she grabs his right hand with her left, pulling his attention back to her. “We should talk to Mr. Macray,” she tells him. “Find out all we can about what’s happening in the district. Maybe no one has tried to collect on those posters because they don’t want to give us back. And maybe rather than turning us in, someone will want to work with us.” She raises his hand to her mouth and kisses his knuckles. “If we’re going to crew two boats, we need more people.”
A grin slowly spreads across Finnick’s face. Standing, he offers Annie his hand and they walk together back toward their camp.
xXx
Even now, months after the Capitol dropped its bombs, the stench of burned plastic is acrid and cloying, invading his nostrils and clinging to his clothes as Finnick stands in the middle of what was once his kitchen. He exhales sharply in an attempt to blow it out, but only succeeds in sucking in more of it when he inhales and he begins to cough, his eyes to water.
Thin tendrils of acrid mist climb up from the ground like ghostly fingers, creeping up past his knees, his hips, growing more insistent as they pull themselves higher, catching at his throat. Inescapable. Burning his skin. Burning his mouth and his throat and his lungs…
With a sharp cry, Finnick slams his fist into his thigh and the phantom mist vanishes. Annie watches him from a few feet away, concern in her beautiful eyes and a scrap of bright red cloth in her hands; the ends of it ripple in the breeze that blows in from the sea. He recognizes it as the silk scarf that Angel Banyan used to use to tie her hair back from her face when she worked in her garden. He waves to Annie and forces his expression into something he hopes is a reassuring smile, although he’d be happy if it just covered up a little of the anxiety.
Apparently it works, as Annie returns to picking through the ruins, pausing now and again when bits of debris catch her eye: a broken picture frame here, a melted bit of glass or misshapen piece of metal there. He focuses on her instead of on their current surroundings - she centers him as nothing else can.
Rather than returning to the ketch last night to sleep in relative comfort, they’d stayed on the beach under the open sky; he wonders if that might have something to do with the memories surfacing of his most recent stint in the arena. When he woke that morning, later than he’d wanted, Annie was already gone and although the sun was well up over the horizon, the only other person stirring was Stefana, starting a fire to boil water for coffee. He’d looked around for Annie, but didn’t see her until Stefana waved a greeting and then pointed toward the beach grass higher up the slope toward the island’s interior. He’d waved his thanks and gone in the direction Stefana indicated. He’d caught up with Annie halfway to the cove where the flattened houses of 4’s Victors’ Village had been and then walked with her the rest of the way holding hands, neither of them saying anything.
A bright flare draws him toward a jumble of burned timbers and twisted metal approximately where his and Annie’s bedroom used to be. He toes at the debris, glad he decided to wear shoes instead of going barefoot. Partially uncovering a length of delicate silvery chain, he bends to hook it with a finger. One tug and it easily slips most of the way free of the larger bits of debris surrounding it, but then stops. Crouching, Finnick digs, not wanting to destroy something so fragile, yet that had survived the Capitol’s violence, finally freeing a diamond pendant that had lodged in a tangle of wires.
Finnick, my dear, I know this is meant for a woman to wear, and you are decidedly not a woman, but I’d like you to have it anyway. Consider it a thank you for a lovely evening.
He lets the pendant hang from its platinum chain; the diamond catches the weak sunlight that filters through the low scudding clouds and returns it in bright flashes of yellow and green and blue. Mrs. Tanger had been the first of his patrons to salve her conscience with an expensive gift; he’d still lived with his parents then and thought to give it to his mother, but when he’d unpacked his things, he’d decided he didn’t want anything of his life in the Capitol to touch his family. But he’d never gotten rid of it.
He stands, twirls it around his index finger once, twice, then catches it and slips it into his pocket. If nothing else, it’ll help pay for some of our expenses, he thinks as he goes back to sifting through the pile of blackened, burned rubble he’d once called home.
The ghosts had come out to play before he and Annie had reached the high point of the island, courtesy of the rooftops that should have been visible over the scrubby vegetation, but weren’t. At first, it was memories of his friends: a whiff of Mags’ jambalaya, spicy with a touch of sweet; a peal of laughter from one of Jack’s little girls; a wordless growl of irritation from the always intense Angel, directed at the rarely serious Martin, who had loved to tease her. But when they crested the hill to look down on the pitted, scorched ruins and the smell had hit him, it was as though the mutts had come to play, bringing with them arenas and sewers, the stench of war and of human cruelty.
A light touch on his arm and he jumps, stumbling on a twisted length of metal. His arms pinwheel as he fights to regain his balance and Annie grabs his right wrist and tugs him toward her. He crashes into her, his arms reflexively closing around her, and she laughs even as she hisses in pain when he jostles her injured arm. Her laughter makes a little of the grayness fade from the morning.
Before he can apologize for hurting her, she rises up on her toes to kiss him. “It’s okay, Finnick. You didn’t hurt me.” No longer in danger of falling, he loosens his hold on her as she brings her left hand up to cradle his face in her palm, leaving her right arm sandwiched between their bodies. Searching his face, not letting him look away from her, she asks, “But what about you? Are you okay?” He thinks about lying to her, but not for long. He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against hers.
“No, I’m not okay.” She strokes his cheek and jaw with her thumb. “Annie, we’ve got to look for someplace else. I can’t stay here. So many ghosts…”
“I know.” She tilts her head, shifts so that she can kiss his lips. “I might have been one of them, if you hadn’t made me promise to stay with your family.” He tightens his hold on her and buries his face in her hair. “The Capitol didn’t leave us anything to rebuild.”
“No. I kind of pissed them off.”
“Oh, Finnick. This wasn’t you.” She forces him to look at her again and the love he sees reflected in her eyes might have sent him to his knees if she weren’t holding him so tightly. He doesn’t answer that; he knows she’s right, that Snow is ultimately responsible for the wreckage, but he’s right, too. Snow wouldn’t have destroyed their homes so thoroughly if he hadn’t been so clearly part of the conspiracy that brought down the Quarter Quell arena.
“We could somehow rebuild on the other side of the island,” Annie offers, sounding tentative, and Finnick shakes his head.
“It’s alright for now, but not long term. The houses were on the leeward side for a reason.” Before Annie became a victor, Jack Hull and his boy had built a playhouse a few years ago on the windward side, not far from where they’re camping out now, but it had only lasted a few weeks of almost constant wind, and storms every few days. They’d found it in pieces scattered over the beach and the sandy hill following a storm that hadn’t even reached hurricane intensity. That playhouse had been small, but it was as sturdy as any of the Capitol-built houses in the cove.
“So we’ll have to find someplace else.” Finnick nods, thinking.
“Why don’t we grab Luis and take the Victorious into town. We can talk to his dad about other living considerations and…” He grins down at her. “And maybe about other lifestyle choices.”
xXx
The moment she sets foot on the skiff, her head starts spinning and her stomach roils. Annie quickly retreats, sloshing through the surf back to the beach. Finnick calls her name, standing almost knee deep in the water. Luis is already on board. She wants to be with them when Finnick talks to Mr. Macray, feels like she’s letting him down when she calls to him, “I’d better stay here, Finnick.” Rather than yelling at him some more, she pantomimes being sick, holding her stomach and then holding the back of her hand to her forehead and making a face at him. Shaking his head, he laughs and nods, hopping into the little boat and setting it rocking. He starts the motor and she waves at them as they head out across the bay.
When Annie can no longer see the skiff, she wanders along the beach, listening to the wind and the surf. She didn’t want to worry Finnick, but she isn’t convinced this dizziness has anything to do with her pregnancy. It doesn’t feel the same as it did with her first pregnancy and she suddenly remembers the cup of water Mairenn gave her the night before. Annie stops and turns, looking back toward their camp.
This should help… Drink it, Annie. At the time, Annie had thought she referred to the water itself, but now she thinks maybe Mair gave her more than just water.
A gust of wind makes her shiver and she starts to walk again, still moving farther down the beach, away from the others. Their voices grow less distinct as the distance increases, morphing into the remembered laughter of a pair of little girls and Annie feels the sting of tears behind her eyes.
“Oh, Moira, Mia, I miss you, little ones.” The last time she saw the girls was the night their father committed suicide rather than face the possibility of returning to the arena. Peacekeepers had taken them away along with their mother and brother and no one had heard from them or of them again. She wonders if any of them are still alive.
She doesn’t know how far she walked or how long she’s been gone when a wave of nausea hits her. It’s so strong she simply drops to her knees and leans forward, retching onto the wet send; a moment later the surf glides in, swirling around her knees and retreating, taking some of the sand supporting her with it. She wipes her mouth with the back of her right hand, the other she curls around her stomach; she tenses when someone else’s hand comes down lightly between her shoulder blades.
“Annie?” Paul asks. “Are you okay?” He doesn’t try to follow when she scrambles away from him, simply leans back on his haunches and watches as her brain slowly makes the connections between that unexpected touch and his identity. Friend, not foe. Not someone who would hurt or use her. She closes her eyes even as she fights the sudden impulse to cover her ears with her hands, blocking out sound along with sight.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Annie.” She hears his voice above the surf, hears the concern threaded through it, and she feels heat rise in her cheeks. She forces herself to breathe normally. In. Out. In. Out.
“I know you won’t, Paul,” she says, opening her eyes. “You startled me, that’s all.”
“You didn’t eat much at lunch.” She offers him a somewhat shaky smile.
“The baby’s making it hard to keep anything down.” Relaxing, she shifts until she’s sitting in the sand, no longer trying to curl up and hide, and Paul moves to sit beside her, careful to keep a little distance between. She’s grateful for that. “Hopefully, it’ll pass soon.” It had with the first pregnancy, only lasting a few weeks. “Why were you following me?”
“Your husband asked me not to let you out of my sight.” Annie raises one eyebrow at that.
“He did, did he?”
“He worries,” Paul says, grinning. That simple statement holds a wealth of meaning and Annie’s irritation fades. Of course Finnick is worried about her. Sometimes she’s surprised he’s even willing to leave her side, with all that they’ve been through.
xXx
There are four of them tacked to the left side of a notice board at the end of the main pier, just before the walk drops off onto Dock Street. Wanted posters. They look like they’ve been there a while, with that not quite wrinkly, fragile look paper gets when it gets wet and then dries, but yet they’re not so old that they’ve either faded or yellowed, like several of the other notices. The posters for both Finnick and Annie use photographs taken during Mairenn’s Closing Ceremonies. He assumes Paul’s is from around the same time, but since he’s in uniform, it’s hard to tell; regardless, it’s a recent picture. The one for Luis looks like it might be from his school identification card and is the only one that resembles the person the Peacekeepers hunt.
When Luis comes up beside Finnick, the boy glances at the posters, whistling at the sums offered for the two victors and the ex-Peacekeeper; Finnick makes note of the fact that Snow wants them dead or alive, something Paul neglected to mention when he first saw wanted posters for them a few weeks ago, when they passed through District 11. “I’m going to have to have a little talk with Paul about withholding information,” he mutters under his breath, because it’s either that or something has changed. Across the street, a pair of Peacekeepers are looking in Finnick’s direction.
“Wow. Nobody’ll even look twice at me once they see the reward for you.”
“Stow it, Luis,” Finnick orders with a nod toward the Peacekeepers. He pushes Luis into the shadow of the notice board, hoping that he’s out of their line of sight. His heart in his throat, Finnick nods to them as they pass, keeping his expression neutral but with a hint of subservience. His appearance is either different enough from a distance of thirty yards or so that they’ll ignore him and move on, or it isn’t; there’s nothing he can do about it either way, since they’ve already seen him. The male ignores him and the female returns his nod, but they both accept the sight of a brown-haired, stubble-bearded fisherman without a second glance. They don’t seem to notice Luis and Finnick releases the breath he holds.
“Stay where you are,” he tells the boy and moves to the other side of the board, pretending to read the notices there, more copies of the posters among them. The poster for Luis is torn, as though someone ripped it from the board and then reattached it using extra tacks to put the pieces back together. His eyes catch on an older poster, yellowed and stained and peppered with holes where other things were posted on top of it. He stares at the faces of his father, his brother and sister, his uncles and his niece, all labeled as traitors and rebels. Finnick’s fingers itch to tear them all down, but he forces himself to leave them there. Nothing says your targets are in the area like wanted posters suddenly gone missing.
“Let’s go,” Finnick says when the Peacekeepers turn a corner. “Keep your head down.”
They hurry to the shop, not stopping along the way except to let a group of Capitol tourists in their too bright clothing and with their unnatural hair and skin colors pass. Overhearing them talk about being late for their harbor cruise, Finnick turns to watch them go, smiling as he recalls Annie’s joking suggestions about tourists and cruises.
Chapter 2 - There Once Was a Pirate