THG fic: "Spin Control" [1/21]
Title: Spin Control
Pairings: Finnick/Haymitch, Kat/Peeta
Characters: Finnick, Haymitch, Chaff, Peeta, Gale, Kat; plus appearances by Mags, Johanna, Caesar Flickerman, President Snow, Effie, Claudius Templesmith, Beetee, Prim, Thresh, Rue, District Twelve ensemble and various OC
Rating: adult
Warnings: forced prostitution & non-con; people dealing with sexual trauma; rape fantasies; self-hate; canon-typical violence; minor character death (of major canon characters); implied physical abuse of children (in the Mellark household); alcoholism & drug abuse
Summary: When Haymitch Abernathy’s alcoholism makes the prime time news, Finnick Odair is sent to live in District Twelve to pick up the pieces. But it’s hard to save a friend if you can barely stand looking yourself in the eye. And it might become impossible once that friend decides to move hell and high water to bring two of his tributes home at once, even if it should cost him his own life.
Where’s My Victor? If you’re looking for the Peeta/Kat bits but don’t want to bother with the whole story, I’d recommend starting at around Chapter 17, where that gets going for real, though they do make their share of appearances before that too. Gale’s appearances will be scattered through the fic more evenly. Gale and Peeta both are scheduled to make their first appearance in Chapter 6. Kat, probably Chapter 11. Chaff will be featured prominently as well.
Prologue on LJ -- Fic on AO3
Chapter 1: Newsflash
The thing was that the victors who bothered thinking about it had always assumed that Haymitch didn’t drink all that much between the Games and the Victory Tour, that is. It made perfect sense to get drunk at those times, after all. A lot of people did. He was an alcoholic, certainly; nobody but an addict would ever be able to maintain such a high level of blood alcohol for a whole Games. But surely, he had to be drinking less than that when home amongst friends. A man who drank as much as Haymitch all year would eventually slip in the shower and hit his head or be found unconscious from alcohol poisoning one morning. And that had never happened, as far as the other victors were aware, so Haymitch simply couldn’t be that terrible a drunk.
It hadn’t happened, at that, until now.
“Fuck. Fuck,” Caramel Doll wouldn’t stop muttering again and again, such terrible words out of the District Four victor’s beautiful mouth. There had been a time when Caramel - who’d changed his name in this unfortunate prophetic way when he had volunteered - had been almost as popular with the Capitol as Finnick. Finnick couldn’t say he liked being in a room with him any more than the other victor liked spending time with Finnick. But now, Caramel’s attention wasn’t on him for once. “Fuck.”
Neither of them was having any time to watch the other out of the corner of their eye in that usual nervous way. Instead, their focus was trained on the flatscreen mounted on the wall of the train’s bar compartment. And Finnick couldn’t say he disagreed with the other man’s sentiment.
It was the dawn of the 72nd Hunger Games - an hour after Finnick had hopped the train to the Capitol alongside this year’s tributes and mentors to spend another Games praying that the children would die fast so that he wouldn’t have to spread his legs for all too many people. The tributes had been herded out of the room by Honestia, the escort, when it had become clear that Reaping Day live coverage wouldn’t progress with the usual recap after District Twelve’s two o’clock slot. Nothing about the last Reaping in District Twelve had followed regular procedure, because Twelve’s only mentor had just never shown up, not even after a crying thirteen-year-old girl and a starved boy with a walking impairment had been reaped by a befuddled escort and a paling district mayor, both unsure what to do.
Finnick was sitting on the couch, arms propped on his knees while he tried to tell himself that this couldn’t be as bad as the horror scenarios unfolding in his head. There was no family of Haymitch’s left to kill, he tried to remind himself. President Snow wouldn’t want for his only victor of Twelve to become unfit to use. But Snow was inventive enough to find something other than family to punish his victors with, and Twelve had participated in the Games without a district mentor before.
Haymitch just hadn’t shown up for the Reaping for whatever reason, leaving an entire district waiting uncomfortably while it became clearer and clearer to them that whatever this was, it wouldn’t be good for any of them. Speculation had commenced amongst the Twelve media correspondents - when had the victor last been seen? Could he be sleeping still? What if he was hurt! Surely he had to be hurt.
The female tribute hadn’t been able to stop crying.
After regular programming had been so thoroughly disrupted, the excited crowd of reporters, in the spotlight for the first time in their careers, was closing in on Haymitch’s house in the district’s Victors’ Village, breathlessly recapping how the Peacekeepers would break open the door to calm the audience’s terrible concern for the victor. Panem needed to see what was going on here.
“This is bad,” Finnick muttered to nobody specific, feeling sick. Next to him Caramel, who was standing in the middle of the room with his arms crossed, just said, “Fucking hell” again without looking away from the screen; Finnick flinched a little, having forgotten to expect a reply from him. Mags, who had sat down on her chair, looked deeply concerned meanwhile, and probably not because she shared the reporters’ belief that only a “crippling injury, possibly to the leg” could have kept Haymitch from attending Panem’s most joyful celebration. Finnick thought they all had a pretty clear idea of why Haymitch had most likely not shown up at the Reaping, because misconceptions about his addiction or not, the answer as to why Haymitch did anything had been ‘Hob liquor, white’ for a couple of years.
Haymitch’s house looked a mess even from the outside, the remains of bright blue paint peeling off the walls, and wildly growing fern covering the lawn. It stood amidst an otherwise perfectly maintained anonymous town, like when a picture was drawn with a different material from the rest. It took Finnick a moment to understand that this was because it was a ghost town, inhabited by Haymitch only. But the reporters remained blind to what they were exposing, focusing only on the threats of the story they were weaving. The door screeched when a Peacekeeper broke it open with the handle of a gun. It was dark inside the house.
“What the fuck, Haymitch,” Finnick could hear Caramel muttering under his breath and sort of felt himself agreeing. Sole victor of the district and all, fine, they all knew that but he hadn’t pictured it like this, without even a housekeeper in evidence when the man was a victor, richest man of his district. And it was painful to look at, too, when all of Panem could see. The Capitol wouldn’t know where to look, but the districts did. The victors did. Haymitch’s friends.
This was not the house of a healthy man. The handheld camera panned wildly through a darkened living room covered in litter. Years’ worth of Capitol food delivery boxes were stacked in corners, never thrown out. Empty bottles on the living room table, shards of broken glass crunching under the intruders’ feet on stained carpet.
Somebody screamed then, “I found him!” The camera went into motion. When the lifeless lump of Haymitch at the foot of a stairway came into view, the cameraman took the time to zone in on his face. Lying barely conscious in a puddle of vomit, Haymitch’s eyes were sluggishly trying to open - possibly concussed on top of drunk, Finnick thought in a daze - clearly not understanding what was going on around him. Only then did people start acting, turning him on his back and saying his name and frantically calling for a doctor when he just groaned in a sickly way.
“Oh no,” Mags was exhaling it in one long breath as if to say, there is no way this is going to end well.
As if anything ever ended well for them, Finnick snorted to himself darkly.
“…found here in his own house.” The reporter-in-chief was filling the camera frame now, talking to a tiny image of Flickerman in the lower right corner of the screen, who was calling in from the studio with a concerned face. The reporter, eyes round, high on the adrenaline of a real story, didn’t seem to even have noticed that her orange wig had come slightly askew on her hurried track to the Village. “Apparently passed out from alcohol, Caesar. The district is in shock and everybody has gathered to see what is happening to their only victor.”
“Of course they would,” Flickerman supplied with feeling, “We here in the studio are in shock as well. What can you tell us about Haymitch’s condition?”
“It is hard to say,” the reporter replied. “This might be alcohol poisoning or Haymitch might have fallen down the stairs. Possibly, I’m afraid to tell you, Caesar, it is both. As you can see, Mayor Undersee’s people are already arranging for a transport so that Haymitch can be brought to the Capitol for proper, civilized treatment…”
Finnick noticed that he was holding his breath.
“Come on,” Caramel was urging on the television through clenched teeth. “Spin it in a way that won’t screw him completely here.” And to the side, like he couldn’t really believe a positive turn of events was even possible, “Oh the fuck, Haymitch.”
Mags’ whole face was blank now, Finnick saw. He’d seen her worried, when he’d mentored for the first time at her side last year, when that One tribute had snuck out of her sleeping bag towards Corina, their girl. He’d seen her with deadly focus. But that had been in a situation Mags had seen play out over a hundred of times in her mentoring career. This, on the other hand, wasn’t mediated by Games rules. It was created on the fly, spinning out of control.
“I cannot believe Haymitch was as irresponsible as to get drunk the night before the Reaping,” he imagined the reporter telling Flickerman, feeling cold at the thought. Or, “How would any mentor endanger their ability to attend the Reaping! It is, after all, the greatest of honors…”
It’ll be as if he told the Capitol ‘fuck you.’ They’ll say he chose getting drunk over attending the Games and Snow will… oh fuck, Snow will make him pay…
“We all seem to vastly have underestimated Haymitch’s situation here in his home district, Caesar,” the reporter intoned. “It has been known for a good while that Haymitch has a drinking problem…”
“Yes, yes,” Flickerman readily chimed in. “I can see where you are going, Chantal. We have all seen it but none of us…”
“It’s a disease, of course, it is not under his control,” Chantal agreed breathlessly. “We can see it here. Who would over-indulge in such a positively shocking fashion on the greatest day of the year?”
“Only an addict,” Flickerman finished gravely.
“Yes!” Chantal agreed dramatically. “It is a disease, Caesar. And we are all very, very lucky that we have been alerted about it in time to stop it. I hope that it isn’t too late! The generous help of the Capitol is the one thing that can help Haymitch Abernathy now.” Posing exuberantly, she gave the camera a bright smile. “Thanks to the generosity of the Capitol, Haymitch will be sober in no time.”
The first time Chantal, relegated to the dark horse district, had ever taken point at all, and already she had changed the fate of a man.
She’d probably be receiving a promotion, maybe even get to cover the Careers.
It could be worse, Finnick tried to tell himself, but he still groaned and rubbed his temple to fight the headache that he felt creeping up. It could be worse. If they’ve decided he’s sick, it could be one hell of a lot worse. If Haymitch was sick, not showing up at the Reaping hadn’t been under his control. It hadn’t been because he didn’t care what the Capitol wanted him to do. That would have meant starvation for the whole district and probably an ‘accidental’ death for Haymitch. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The problem with this scenario was that the reporters were apparently chartering Haymitch off to some Capitol rehab facility right now, and once he left it, he had better stay sober for the cameras forever, or there’d be hell to pay for his district, possibly for all the victors too.
Except they all knew that there was no chance that Haymitch Abernathy would ever stay sober in a world where there were Hunger Games.
“Fuck,” Caramel said.
on to chapter 2
Pairings: Finnick/Haymitch, Kat/Peeta
Characters: Finnick, Haymitch, Chaff, Peeta, Gale, Kat; plus appearances by Mags, Johanna, Caesar Flickerman, President Snow, Effie, Claudius Templesmith, Beetee, Prim, Thresh, Rue, District Twelve ensemble and various OC
Rating: adult
Warnings: forced prostitution & non-con; people dealing with sexual trauma; rape fantasies; self-hate; canon-typical violence; minor character death (of major canon characters); implied physical abuse of children (in the Mellark household); alcoholism & drug abuse
Summary: When Haymitch Abernathy’s alcoholism makes the prime time news, Finnick Odair is sent to live in District Twelve to pick up the pieces. But it’s hard to save a friend if you can barely stand looking yourself in the eye. And it might become impossible once that friend decides to move hell and high water to bring two of his tributes home at once, even if it should cost him his own life.
Where’s My Victor? If you’re looking for the Peeta/Kat bits but don’t want to bother with the whole story, I’d recommend starting at around Chapter 17, where that gets going for real, though they do make their share of appearances before that too. Gale’s appearances will be scattered through the fic more evenly. Gale and Peeta both are scheduled to make their first appearance in Chapter 6. Kat, probably Chapter 11. Chaff will be featured prominently as well.
Prologue on LJ -- Fic on AO3
Chapter 1: Newsflash
The thing was that the victors who bothered thinking about it had always assumed that Haymitch didn’t drink all that much between the Games and the Victory Tour, that is. It made perfect sense to get drunk at those times, after all. A lot of people did. He was an alcoholic, certainly; nobody but an addict would ever be able to maintain such a high level of blood alcohol for a whole Games. But surely, he had to be drinking less than that when home amongst friends. A man who drank as much as Haymitch all year would eventually slip in the shower and hit his head or be found unconscious from alcohol poisoning one morning. And that had never happened, as far as the other victors were aware, so Haymitch simply couldn’t be that terrible a drunk.
It hadn’t happened, at that, until now.
“Fuck. Fuck,” Caramel Doll wouldn’t stop muttering again and again, such terrible words out of the District Four victor’s beautiful mouth. There had been a time when Caramel - who’d changed his name in this unfortunate prophetic way when he had volunteered - had been almost as popular with the Capitol as Finnick. Finnick couldn’t say he liked being in a room with him any more than the other victor liked spending time with Finnick. But now, Caramel’s attention wasn’t on him for once. “Fuck.”
Neither of them was having any time to watch the other out of the corner of their eye in that usual nervous way. Instead, their focus was trained on the flatscreen mounted on the wall of the train’s bar compartment. And Finnick couldn’t say he disagreed with the other man’s sentiment.
It was the dawn of the 72nd Hunger Games - an hour after Finnick had hopped the train to the Capitol alongside this year’s tributes and mentors to spend another Games praying that the children would die fast so that he wouldn’t have to spread his legs for all too many people. The tributes had been herded out of the room by Honestia, the escort, when it had become clear that Reaping Day live coverage wouldn’t progress with the usual recap after District Twelve’s two o’clock slot. Nothing about the last Reaping in District Twelve had followed regular procedure, because Twelve’s only mentor had just never shown up, not even after a crying thirteen-year-old girl and a starved boy with a walking impairment had been reaped by a befuddled escort and a paling district mayor, both unsure what to do.
Finnick was sitting on the couch, arms propped on his knees while he tried to tell himself that this couldn’t be as bad as the horror scenarios unfolding in his head. There was no family of Haymitch’s left to kill, he tried to remind himself. President Snow wouldn’t want for his only victor of Twelve to become unfit to use. But Snow was inventive enough to find something other than family to punish his victors with, and Twelve had participated in the Games without a district mentor before.
Haymitch just hadn’t shown up for the Reaping for whatever reason, leaving an entire district waiting uncomfortably while it became clearer and clearer to them that whatever this was, it wouldn’t be good for any of them. Speculation had commenced amongst the Twelve media correspondents - when had the victor last been seen? Could he be sleeping still? What if he was hurt! Surely he had to be hurt.
The female tribute hadn’t been able to stop crying.
After regular programming had been so thoroughly disrupted, the excited crowd of reporters, in the spotlight for the first time in their careers, was closing in on Haymitch’s house in the district’s Victors’ Village, breathlessly recapping how the Peacekeepers would break open the door to calm the audience’s terrible concern for the victor. Panem needed to see what was going on here.
“This is bad,” Finnick muttered to nobody specific, feeling sick. Next to him Caramel, who was standing in the middle of the room with his arms crossed, just said, “Fucking hell” again without looking away from the screen; Finnick flinched a little, having forgotten to expect a reply from him. Mags, who had sat down on her chair, looked deeply concerned meanwhile, and probably not because she shared the reporters’ belief that only a “crippling injury, possibly to the leg” could have kept Haymitch from attending Panem’s most joyful celebration. Finnick thought they all had a pretty clear idea of why Haymitch had most likely not shown up at the Reaping, because misconceptions about his addiction or not, the answer as to why Haymitch did anything had been ‘Hob liquor, white’ for a couple of years.
Haymitch’s house looked a mess even from the outside, the remains of bright blue paint peeling off the walls, and wildly growing fern covering the lawn. It stood amidst an otherwise perfectly maintained anonymous town, like when a picture was drawn with a different material from the rest. It took Finnick a moment to understand that this was because it was a ghost town, inhabited by Haymitch only. But the reporters remained blind to what they were exposing, focusing only on the threats of the story they were weaving. The door screeched when a Peacekeeper broke it open with the handle of a gun. It was dark inside the house.
“What the fuck, Haymitch,” Finnick could hear Caramel muttering under his breath and sort of felt himself agreeing. Sole victor of the district and all, fine, they all knew that but he hadn’t pictured it like this, without even a housekeeper in evidence when the man was a victor, richest man of his district. And it was painful to look at, too, when all of Panem could see. The Capitol wouldn’t know where to look, but the districts did. The victors did. Haymitch’s friends.
This was not the house of a healthy man. The handheld camera panned wildly through a darkened living room covered in litter. Years’ worth of Capitol food delivery boxes were stacked in corners, never thrown out. Empty bottles on the living room table, shards of broken glass crunching under the intruders’ feet on stained carpet.
Somebody screamed then, “I found him!” The camera went into motion. When the lifeless lump of Haymitch at the foot of a stairway came into view, the cameraman took the time to zone in on his face. Lying barely conscious in a puddle of vomit, Haymitch’s eyes were sluggishly trying to open - possibly concussed on top of drunk, Finnick thought in a daze - clearly not understanding what was going on around him. Only then did people start acting, turning him on his back and saying his name and frantically calling for a doctor when he just groaned in a sickly way.
“Oh no,” Mags was exhaling it in one long breath as if to say, there is no way this is going to end well.
As if anything ever ended well for them, Finnick snorted to himself darkly.
“…found here in his own house.” The reporter-in-chief was filling the camera frame now, talking to a tiny image of Flickerman in the lower right corner of the screen, who was calling in from the studio with a concerned face. The reporter, eyes round, high on the adrenaline of a real story, didn’t seem to even have noticed that her orange wig had come slightly askew on her hurried track to the Village. “Apparently passed out from alcohol, Caesar. The district is in shock and everybody has gathered to see what is happening to their only victor.”
“Of course they would,” Flickerman supplied with feeling, “We here in the studio are in shock as well. What can you tell us about Haymitch’s condition?”
“It is hard to say,” the reporter replied. “This might be alcohol poisoning or Haymitch might have fallen down the stairs. Possibly, I’m afraid to tell you, Caesar, it is both. As you can see, Mayor Undersee’s people are already arranging for a transport so that Haymitch can be brought to the Capitol for proper, civilized treatment…”
Finnick noticed that he was holding his breath.
“Come on,” Caramel was urging on the television through clenched teeth. “Spin it in a way that won’t screw him completely here.” And to the side, like he couldn’t really believe a positive turn of events was even possible, “Oh the fuck, Haymitch.”
Mags’ whole face was blank now, Finnick saw. He’d seen her worried, when he’d mentored for the first time at her side last year, when that One tribute had snuck out of her sleeping bag towards Corina, their girl. He’d seen her with deadly focus. But that had been in a situation Mags had seen play out over a hundred of times in her mentoring career. This, on the other hand, wasn’t mediated by Games rules. It was created on the fly, spinning out of control.
“I cannot believe Haymitch was as irresponsible as to get drunk the night before the Reaping,” he imagined the reporter telling Flickerman, feeling cold at the thought. Or, “How would any mentor endanger their ability to attend the Reaping! It is, after all, the greatest of honors…”
It’ll be as if he told the Capitol ‘fuck you.’ They’ll say he chose getting drunk over attending the Games and Snow will… oh fuck, Snow will make him pay…
“We all seem to vastly have underestimated Haymitch’s situation here in his home district, Caesar,” the reporter intoned. “It has been known for a good while that Haymitch has a drinking problem…”
“Yes, yes,” Flickerman readily chimed in. “I can see where you are going, Chantal. We have all seen it but none of us…”
“It’s a disease, of course, it is not under his control,” Chantal agreed breathlessly. “We can see it here. Who would over-indulge in such a positively shocking fashion on the greatest day of the year?”
“Only an addict,” Flickerman finished gravely.
“Yes!” Chantal agreed dramatically. “It is a disease, Caesar. And we are all very, very lucky that we have been alerted about it in time to stop it. I hope that it isn’t too late! The generous help of the Capitol is the one thing that can help Haymitch Abernathy now.” Posing exuberantly, she gave the camera a bright smile. “Thanks to the generosity of the Capitol, Haymitch will be sober in no time.”
The first time Chantal, relegated to the dark horse district, had ever taken point at all, and already she had changed the fate of a man.
She’d probably be receiving a promotion, maybe even get to cover the Careers.
It could be worse, Finnick tried to tell himself, but he still groaned and rubbed his temple to fight the headache that he felt creeping up. It could be worse. If they’ve decided he’s sick, it could be one hell of a lot worse. If Haymitch was sick, not showing up at the Reaping hadn’t been under his control. It hadn’t been because he didn’t care what the Capitol wanted him to do. That would have meant starvation for the whole district and probably an ‘accidental’ death for Haymitch. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The problem with this scenario was that the reporters were apparently chartering Haymitch off to some Capitol rehab facility right now, and once he left it, he had better stay sober for the cameras forever, or there’d be hell to pay for his district, possibly for all the victors too.
Except they all knew that there was no chance that Haymitch Abernathy would ever stay sober in a world where there were Hunger Games.
“Fuck,” Caramel said.
on to chapter 2