THG fic: "Spin Control" [5/21]
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 -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4
Chapter 5: The Abernathy Exclusive
Nobody else died that day. The fourteen surviving tributes moved to find cover from the snow in caves hidden in the hills, in tree houses and brushwood so thick that sticks taken from the core could sometimes be used to build fires. Careers received gifts of blankets, lighters and kerosene. Both mentors and Games experts were struggling to predict how the weather conditions would influence the pace of the Games; tributes were forming alliances all over the arena, instinct telling them to stick close to other warm bodies, but building campfires and leaving snow trails would also make it harder to hide from the other packs.
Bee and Raif had found a small pot in their backpacks that they could use to melt snow, some jerky rations and, most importantly, a box of lifeboat matches. Huddled up together under the tent that they shaped out of their parkas, they spent the first night underneath a rock ledge that diffused the smoke somewhat. Finnick himself fell asleep in Haymitch’s chair like he imagined the Twelve mentor having done many times; miraculously, Snow had left him without an appointment for that night. The arena couldn’t have given the two children a bigger advantage, he knew. When the blizzard had scared everybody into running towards the Cornucopia, Caramel’s tribute and - surprisingly - the One male had died in the carnage. The surviving One female and the Careers from Two had been intimidated into forming an alliance with Nine’s female, who’d thought on her feet and convinced them of her winter survival skills. Mags’ female volunteer was camping out with Johanna’s girl and the Six male, and there was another alliance in the making between the Ten tributes and Three’s surviving fourteen-year-old boy.
The only tributes who had tried to survive on their own - Eight female and Chaff’s girl - were both dead by the dawn of Day Three. The former had frozen to death at night and the latter got lost in the snow, stumbling upon Three-Ten’s camp where she was stabbed by the fumbling Ten male, who didn’t quite seem to know what to do with that knife. That could have been Raif’s kill, Finnick worried grimly, refusing to be moved. It could even have been Bee’s. A kill would have greatly improved the sponsorship situation.
There was an uproar on Day Four when the Career alliance launched an attack on Four-Six-Seven, but instead of protecting her partners’ backs, Two female - a tall eighteen-year-old called Apollinara, a name everybody would soon know to remember - ran off in a panic to hide in a grove. Even Flickerman couldn’t make that look good. Her district partner and the One female died because of it. District One was out of the Games - their worst in over thirty years, Flickerman informed the audience with pity.
Finnick was struggling to work sponsors every day, never failing to talk up his tributes whenever he had to leave his console either to see a client or to talk to the press. Day Four was when he sent Bee and Raif some more jerky and a good loaf of Twelve bread, something to remind them of home - fortunately the parachuteers had a library for stock recipes, because Finnick didn’t know anything about Twelve foods. The two children had been hiding from the field and from the vicious horse mutts roaming the grounds, but there were only so many edible plants they could uncover from under the snow. He watched them picking at the bread, discussing their families in the Seam in hushed voices.
Day Five proved to be the most boring Games day so far without any action amongst the starving and freezing tributes. The Gamemakers probably only didn’t stage an intervention because the news channels provided them with an exciting distraction from a different source.
Torturing victors was almost as much fun, after all.
***
An unfriendly hand shook him awake.
“Exclusive interview with Haymitch in five.” Johanna Mason was standing over the couch he had commandeered for his downtime, looking down at him with an unkind face. “Thought you’d want to see.”
“What?” Finnick tiredly rubbed his face. Sleep. These days, all he wanted was sleep. He’d even considered Chaff’s ridiculous notion from the talk show, using booze to stay awake. The way Chaff always seemed to have a helpful bottle at the ready, he could certainly see how that temptation might have become too strong for Haymitch to resist.
A look at the clock above the door showed that he had gotten two hours of sleep after he’d returned from the mansion of the same Mathildo Poddle who had sprung for half a loaf of bread the day before; another look at the tribute position grid on the console side of the room told him that both Raif and Bee were still alive, making their way through a grove far away from both the mutts and their opponents.
Only then did he fully sit up and try to shake himself awake, giving his best friend’s words his full attention. Because, wait. “But they have Haymitch under lock and key in that hospital.”
“Yeah well, that’s for you and me, dickhead, not for Capitol reporters,” Johanna said with a shrug. “You wanna watch this or what? If my tribute decides to do something other than shiver, I might have to leave early, so let’s not miss the beginning.”
A knot of tension growing in the pit of his stomach, Finnick let the Seven victor lead him to one of the small lounge rooms next to the main hall, where it was possible to watch the coverage off the main channel while still keeping an eye on the tribute feeds through the glass walls. Chaff was already seated in an arm chair when they arrived, waving at them lazily; next to him sat Beetee, another mentor out of the Games, following the studio coverage of the show closely and looking twitchy. Finnick hadn’t even known that he and Haymitch were close, though he supposed they were about the same age. A few minutes after the coverage had started, the door opened again and Caramel walked in, moving to lounge against the wall in the back with his arms crossed and his face tense, as far away from Finnick as possible.
“Anybody have a guess how this will go?” Finnick asked the room at large, sitting down on a leather couch alongside Johanna.
Beetee attempted a calming smile in his direction, pushing up his glasses. “Haymitch has always fared well with cameras pointed at him,” he told him, clearly understanding that Finnick had asked in hope of reassurance from somebody who had known the Twelve victor longer. “He might not have been asked for permission when this interview was scheduled, but we never are, are we? He’ll be just fine.”
Now that he was substituting for him in the Games, it kept striking Finnick how little he really knew about Haymitch. He talked to him about things, important things throughout the years, had seen his Games of course - both because Mags had made him and because Snow had, along with the footage of the Abernathy execution. He knew Haymitch had had a mother who had looked so much like him and a kid brother and a half-starved girlfriend with a frame built to be curvy, because he had seen these people die. But he barely even knew anything about District Twelve except for how it was futile and tiny and starving - and cold in winter - certainly not what it was like for Haymitch to live there and if there had been any friends of his watching on from the sidelines when that Hovercraft carried him to the hospital. Thinking of the ruins of a house during the Reaping Day coverage, though, he had a pretty safe feeling that all of Haymitch’s closest friends were sitting in this room with Finnick right now - the way Beetee seemed so focused and Caramel seemed just gloomy.
When the camera cut to White Feathers Rehab Center, Finnick had to blink to reconcile the man seated across the journalist with the victor who had chatted with him outside a night club last year. It was in the clinical atmosphere of a hospital room; there was a tall window in the background, overlooking the grounds of a beautiful park. Reclined in his chair tentatively, Haymitch seemed to have lost ten pounds in two weeks. But it just made him look haggard, and the sunshine filling the room made him appear sickly, like somebody who had only barely started recovering from a disease. Although Finnick knew that those cinematographic choices would work in Haymitch’s favor, concern still twisted something in his guts.
The almond-eyed journalist sported a wild mob of spiky blue hair as well as turquoise flower tattoos around his eyes. In contrast to the low-level Twelve correspondent with the disheveled wig who had covered the original news report, this one was all professionalism, perfectly artificial. The caption informed the audience that he was Cheeks Calamius, Capitol star reporter. Finnick knew his work quite well. Cheeks tended to be harmless, until he suddenly went for the jugular.
“So, Haymitch,” Cheeks said, taking an over-exaggerated deep breath for dramatics. “You’ve been throwing the Capitol in quite the frenzy these past two weeks, now haven’t you?”
Finnick wasn’t sure what he had expected of Haymitch in his first camera appearance after all that had transpired, but the smile that made that man’s lips twitch in reply to Cheeks’ question wasn’t it. It seemed sickly and lacking in energy, yes, but it also looked honest and surprisingly sheepish.
“Yeah,” that man who was Haymitch replied, pausing to clear his voice. “Sorry about that.” He moved his hand to scratch his chin, then lowered it again into his lap without following through. From the way the camera zoomed in on it for a moment, he was trying to cover up how it was shaking. “Looks like I took it a little too far these last few years, huh? What can I say? Those Capitol drinks are just pretty damn addictive. Literally, turns out. And so easy to have them ordered to my district, too. I dunno, it’s like celebrating the Games just became an endless affair.”
“Go get ‘em, old man,” Johanna breathed next to Finnick, her façade of anger dropping for a moment, as if she’d forgotten to hide that she, too, cared.
“He’s gonna make it through this,” Chaff muttered, thumping the knuckles of his good hand against his teeth.
“We were very, very shocked to find you in your house like that,” Cheeks prompted, his face a picture of anguished concern.
Haymitch nodded. “No kidding,” he agreed with a light chuckle, though Finnick had never heard him make that particular sound for real. “And jokes aside…” Donning a more serious expression, he continued. “I’m really embarrassed about what’s been happening, Cheeks. I’ve been having a couple of pretty rough days in here, I’m not gonna lie about that. But they let me see the footage eventually, and I can’t believe that’s me. I can’t believe any of the guy I was these past few years is me. Can’t remember anything about that night before the Games either. Just, knowing there’d be another Reaping the next day, and, knowing I wouldn’t ever manage to bring these kids home no matter what I did…”
“The Capitol knows you’ve always tried to be at your best…” Cheeks rushed to reassure him, but Haymitch waved it off.
“Failed at it though, didn’t I? All of it… It was such an honor and I…” Breathing a sigh, he looked away as if to compose himself. All of his expressions looked just foreign to Finnick. Of course, Haymitch was following a script; this had Snow written all over it. The only surprise was how well he was doing it, but it still seemed so surreal. Now, he looked straight at the reporter again and spoke on vehemently. “There aren’t any words for how grateful I am to the people in the Capitol, all the things they have been doing to help me when I’m just some district bumpkin, honestly. Everybody here at this place, likewise, the doctors and the therapists, and President Snow, of course. The reporters, too, the way they reacted when they found me like that.”
“Aw Haymitch,” Cheeks exclaimed. “We all want to help, it’s a disease…”
“I’ll get better,” Haymitch interrupted him. “I’ll get out of here and I’ll do a better job…”
“And all our thoughts are with you.” The reporter smiled at him brightly. “Now, I’ve been told that I shouldn’t ask you any questions about the Hunger Games, but…” He lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper and winked. “I’m going to sneak one in anyway.” With a dramatic flourish, he leaned forward. “You must have been delighted to hear that both of the Twelve tributes are still in the running so far on this fifth day of the 72nd Hunger Games, and under supervision by the notorious Finnick Odair no less. What do you think of their odds so far?”
“Yeah, I’ve been following the Games as much as I can.” Haymitch’s lips twitched again in that odd self-depreciating way. “They don’t always let me.” Cheeks dutifully chuckled. “I know I’ve said this a lot of times before and turned out wrong, so people might have stopped believing me, but, you know, this is the new me. I think we might stand a real chance with those two. That boy has good arms on him. Pretty athletic. I don’t think anybody has noticed that much, yet. Don’t let his little limping act fool you. He has yet to get into a fight and I think he’s probably holding out on us…”
“Ah, I hear the Games enthusiast coming through. Please remember you are supposed to be recovering instead of mentoring, and answer one last question - how did you react when you learned that Finnick had been assigned to mentor your district alongside you? Did it make your pride twitch at least a little?”
“Not at all. Everybody can see that Finnick’s a natural. I wouldn’t be surprised if he brought one of these two home. Any district would be glad to have him on the team.” Finnick, the young natural. Haymitch, the experienced one. It was the obvious choice for how they’d play it come next year, but Finnick was still quietly relieved to see Haymitch starting to set the stage for it on his end. It meant he’d seen some of Finnick’s interviews. Obviously, he’d seen Raif’s and Bee’s.
“Using those wonderful sporting last words to cap this off. Haymitch, let me again wish you a speedy recovery and a healthy, happy Hunger Games.” Cheeks turned to face the camera. “This was Cheeks Calamius talking to District Twelve’s Haymitch Abernathy from the White Feathers Capitol Rehabilitation Center. Back to the studio, and happy Hunger Games to you folks back home as well.”
A touch on the remote by Chaff to mute the sound when the Games studio reappeared on the screen, and for a couple of seconds, the small room full of victors was covered in silence as they all pondered what they had seen.
“This is good,” Caramel grimly said. “This could have been a lot more fucked up than it turned out.”
“Who would have thought the old bastard still had it in him,” Johanna said, using the opportunity to stretch, rolling her shoulders, before she got up from the couch. “Considering I’ve seen dead tributes who’ve looked better.”
Beetee gave her a befuddled look; Finnick had a sense he didn’t quite understand her presence in this room. Haymitch and Johanna had hit it off from the beginning, though, odd imbalanced couple that they made. “Well,” the Three victor said. “Well. Let’s not forget that he is undergoing withdrawal…”
“Not like it’ll last for long,” Chaff interrupted him. When he got up from his chair, Finnick could see that inappropriately, there was a wine bottle dangling from between his fingers. He’d been wondering about Chaff, who he hadn’t known that well before this Games. In Haymitch’s wake, nobody ever took much notice of Chaff’s drinking, but just because he was functioning and taking everything so lightly… well. Raising his bottle to salute everybody in the room, Chaff smirked at them. “Not like he’ll have to stay like that once he’s back home. This whole fucked up charade would make anybody need a drink or two. Cheers, everyone.” With that, he wandered off to go wherever you had to be as a victor if both of your tributes were dead, and nobody wanted to fuck you.
Uneasily, Finnick looked after him.
Because, yeah - there was that.
He wondered what Snow had said to Haymitch to scare him into that perfect performance.
***
Finnick was shaken awake by Two’s Lyme the following night when a band of wild horse mutts with furious red demon eyes raced towards his tributes, the drumming of their hooves making the ground of their grove shake and waking them up.
“I think those are horses,” exhausted Bee whispered at Raif when they spied at them across a pile of snow, wrapped in the additional blankets Finnick had been able to send from the money stirred by Haymitch’s interview. His handful of surviving fans had dared to show their colors for the first time in years.
Raif grimaced. “I’ve never seen a horse. Only goats.”
“They do look like goats,” Bee said and giggled.
“Thank you very much,” Finnick told the screen between two yawns, toasting it with his cup of coffee, although nobody was close enough to hear.
That was before two of those crazy animals decided to desert the herd and go after his tributes instead, who soon found themselves running through the woods, sinking into several inches of soft powder snow that even Bee’s dancing feet couldn’t handle.
Raif couldn’t keep up anymore soon, dragging his busted leg like it was dead weight. His face a mask of that spite that he seemed to feel for everything, he hissed at the girl to keep running and to leave him behind. Like Finnick had coached her to do, she did, no questions asked. They’d barely been separated when Raif was overrun by the mutt, a fury beast of hooves and teeth breaking his skull and ripping him into bits like a real horse never could.
Bee stood there and just screamed and screamed when it came after her and for a wild moment, Finnick madly grew convinced that those screams would make the thing turn around and run, but a little girl that panicked when she so much didn’t want to die couldn’t sway a Gamesmaker’s creation. It left her bleeding from a bite to her belly and Finnick kept watch for almost two hours until she was dead, spending every second praying that she wouldn’t wake up again before her cannon blared. Other victors came to check on him, but he barely noticed them, his eyes always on the screen, on unconscious Bee’s face and how it twitched sometimes.
It was much later that he realized that Raif and Bee would have made Final Eight if they’d only outlasted one more tribute; it had been nine tributes at that point, and now there were seven. Technically, Bee would still be placed eighth in the stats. Good for long-term district marketing, he tried to think, knowing that was how Mags would look at it, what she had built on in the early days of Four, but right now it just meant that he had failed these children and they were dead.
***
While Finnick made his way from Capitol bed to Capitol bed, the Games continued. Alliances broke apart and reformed by the minute when nobody wanted to face the snow alone.
That was why Nine female hadn’t left Two’s Apollinara to die after she had freaked, but a sponsoring gift of a spear prompted her into action now. The hosts reached new levels of bad taste when they played it as comic relief: The Two volunteer panicked again, running away and leading Nine into a dead tribute’s trap by coincidence, the most pointless death in this whole Games. Lyme had completely lost control of her marketing and would likely face the consequence once she got home whether Apollinara made it or not; but no mentor could have salvaged that one.
Johanna’s girl was left behind by her partner when she was wounded by a horse, freezing to death without supplies. Ten-Three fell apart when Three suffocated Ten female in her sleep, but Mags’ Sara took him out. She formed a temporary alliance with Apollinara, who shared her bread with her, but she still died of her injuries after another day. Mags hadn’t known that she had blood poisoning. Sara hadn’t known that she had blood poisoning, collapsing where she had been standing and just never getting up again - the Games pathologist had a field day giving interviews. She’d died of a scratch.
Two eventless days after that, District Ten’s sixteen-year-old Tobin McKenzie was declared victor of the 72nd Hunger Games. He had holed up in the mountains and cut open a dead horse mutt’s belly, crawling in to warm himself against its steaming intestines. Apollinara just lay down and froze to death. The audience had found her amusing, but ultimately hated her; a box of matches would have been all she’d have needed to survive.
Tobin became a rare victor with only one kill. He didn’t know how to fight and should rightfully not have stood a chance; he’d stabbed the thirteen-year-old Eleven girl when it was three of them against one, and he’d held the knife the way his mum would have taught him for cutting up steak.
That could have been Bee or Raif, Finnick tiredly thought. But it just hadn’t been.
Mentoring this Hunger Games had been draining enough for a whole lifetime.
***
After the ceremonies, his stylist Cherry frantically started composing a diet plan, sans seafood, while Finnick was allowed to return to his district one last time. He had to pack, and the cameras wanted to catch the goodbyes.
His family was all waiting for him at the train station when he arrived; they hadn’t done that since he returned from his Victory Tour. His father stepped forward and pulled him into a hug; there were tears in his eyes. Somehow Finnick had always managed to fool his parents and brothers about what he was really doing on his dates with all those celebrities, but now that he’d actually stepped forward and volunteered for real, they suddenly chose to believe that it couldn’t possibly have been Finnick’s idea to move away.
Trying not to feel like dirt, Finnick gratefully accepted all the hugs and didn’t rid them of the sentiment. At least, he thought, they’d enjoy the excuse to move away from Victors’ Rock. They’d always been uncomfortable amongst all those district heroes, and it wasn’t like they couldn’t afford life without him by now.
Everything he ever did had been to protect these people. He could do this one thing for himself and leave.
***
The gleaming golden trident from his Games was mounted on the wall across his bed. It was too beautiful to use for sparring, too deadly to yield when he didn’t mean to harm. For a practiced observer, the gold alloy couldn’t cover that it was pure death, meant for destruction.
Victors weren’t usually allowed to keep their arena weapons; those went to the arena museums, where people could take pictures of the artifacts on the guided tours for a hefty service charge. But Finnick, age fourteen, had played the masses to get what he wanted for the first time then, although he hadn’t realized at the time that that was what he was doing. “I can’t keep it?” he’d asked in alarm during his victory interview, “I thought I could keep it!” On replays, he had seen how his face had fallen, such an enchanting little crushed boy, murderer disguised as child. The audience had cheered and waved their banners until the President had tilted his head into a nod.
It had felt inconceivable, letting go of that trident ever again.
Now, Finnick took it down.
Even now that he had grown another couple of inches and his shoulders had filled out into the size of a man, it still had perfect balance in his hands, as if it would forever change shape to remain his. No scratch had ever marred it, the alloy supplying it with the weight and resistibility of steel without taking any of its beauty away.
It still would fit him perfectly, Finnick knew. He could still take that thing and walk out of this house into town and nobody - not even the other victors of Four, not even next year’s volunteers, armed to their teeth - would be able to stop him. It still would transform him into a god of life and death, brimming with power.
It wasn’t possible to wrap a trident. It would be fastened to some box or trunk, for everybody to see when it was brought to his new home.
All the better.
Anything to please the cameras.
***
During one of his last nights in Four, Finnick awoke from the echoes of a dream resounding in his head. Far away, through the open windows carrying in the cooling salty breeze of the sea, he could hear the waves crashing against the Rock. In front of his inner eyes, patrons - no, clients - were still pushing him down, holding him open, making him scream in panic, like he never would be allowed in reality.
In reality, they always expected him to moan and beg for more.
Finnick shuddered, turning to his other side and trying to force it away, so that it would be gone but it didn’t work. It never did. He hadn’t expected it would.
Arousal was burning through him like fire.
No, he thought, tired. No. Please no.
But he reached down to touch himself anyway, despite the wave of nausea that hit him when he did, pressing his eyes shut and letting the images come - just five minutes, quickly, just so that it would be gone.
Backhanded across his face. Somebody clenching his jaw with their hand. Telling him to suck it, now although he was crying, and whispering, please and I can’t and please don’t hurt me. That was when he started coming, to the image of spreading his legs because they were making him but still chanting no no no, biting his lip and swallowing a moan and grabbing his cock tighter so it wouldn’t slip out of his hand too soon, while it was shrinking.
Breathing hard, Finnick curled up into himself as if he was five and still tiny, not twenty-one and a giant of a guy, hairless only because remake made it so, some sort of disturbing slut. He wished there was a way of turning his head away from himself.
It made sense, he tried to tell himself shakily. All he wanted to do every time was scream and hide. It made sense, in that situation, for him to eroticize…
Shame had replaced his arousal, hot and smoldering and dirty.
There was no excuse.
He didn’t want to be that man. He never wanted to be anywhere close to being that.
And he needed to be sure that nobody he loved would ever see that thing he had become. They might never notice if he hid it well, but he would still feel better about it once he had left, once that danger was gone.
Two days, he feebly chanted to himself, curling up tighter. Two days.
You’ll be in District Twelve.
Nobody will ever have to see.
Nobody but Haymitch, and he won’t care.
He repeated it until it became a mantra, falling back asleep.
on to chapter 6
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 -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4
Chapter 5: The Abernathy Exclusive
Nobody else died that day. The fourteen surviving tributes moved to find cover from the snow in caves hidden in the hills, in tree houses and brushwood so thick that sticks taken from the core could sometimes be used to build fires. Careers received gifts of blankets, lighters and kerosene. Both mentors and Games experts were struggling to predict how the weather conditions would influence the pace of the Games; tributes were forming alliances all over the arena, instinct telling them to stick close to other warm bodies, but building campfires and leaving snow trails would also make it harder to hide from the other packs.
Bee and Raif had found a small pot in their backpacks that they could use to melt snow, some jerky rations and, most importantly, a box of lifeboat matches. Huddled up together under the tent that they shaped out of their parkas, they spent the first night underneath a rock ledge that diffused the smoke somewhat. Finnick himself fell asleep in Haymitch’s chair like he imagined the Twelve mentor having done many times; miraculously, Snow had left him without an appointment for that night. The arena couldn’t have given the two children a bigger advantage, he knew. When the blizzard had scared everybody into running towards the Cornucopia, Caramel’s tribute and - surprisingly - the One male had died in the carnage. The surviving One female and the Careers from Two had been intimidated into forming an alliance with Nine’s female, who’d thought on her feet and convinced them of her winter survival skills. Mags’ female volunteer was camping out with Johanna’s girl and the Six male, and there was another alliance in the making between the Ten tributes and Three’s surviving fourteen-year-old boy.
The only tributes who had tried to survive on their own - Eight female and Chaff’s girl - were both dead by the dawn of Day Three. The former had frozen to death at night and the latter got lost in the snow, stumbling upon Three-Ten’s camp where she was stabbed by the fumbling Ten male, who didn’t quite seem to know what to do with that knife. That could have been Raif’s kill, Finnick worried grimly, refusing to be moved. It could even have been Bee’s. A kill would have greatly improved the sponsorship situation.
There was an uproar on Day Four when the Career alliance launched an attack on Four-Six-Seven, but instead of protecting her partners’ backs, Two female - a tall eighteen-year-old called Apollinara, a name everybody would soon know to remember - ran off in a panic to hide in a grove. Even Flickerman couldn’t make that look good. Her district partner and the One female died because of it. District One was out of the Games - their worst in over thirty years, Flickerman informed the audience with pity.
Finnick was struggling to work sponsors every day, never failing to talk up his tributes whenever he had to leave his console either to see a client or to talk to the press. Day Four was when he sent Bee and Raif some more jerky and a good loaf of Twelve bread, something to remind them of home - fortunately the parachuteers had a library for stock recipes, because Finnick didn’t know anything about Twelve foods. The two children had been hiding from the field and from the vicious horse mutts roaming the grounds, but there were only so many edible plants they could uncover from under the snow. He watched them picking at the bread, discussing their families in the Seam in hushed voices.
Day Five proved to be the most boring Games day so far without any action amongst the starving and freezing tributes. The Gamemakers probably only didn’t stage an intervention because the news channels provided them with an exciting distraction from a different source.
Torturing victors was almost as much fun, after all.
***
An unfriendly hand shook him awake.
“Exclusive interview with Haymitch in five.” Johanna Mason was standing over the couch he had commandeered for his downtime, looking down at him with an unkind face. “Thought you’d want to see.”
“What?” Finnick tiredly rubbed his face. Sleep. These days, all he wanted was sleep. He’d even considered Chaff’s ridiculous notion from the talk show, using booze to stay awake. The way Chaff always seemed to have a helpful bottle at the ready, he could certainly see how that temptation might have become too strong for Haymitch to resist.
A look at the clock above the door showed that he had gotten two hours of sleep after he’d returned from the mansion of the same Mathildo Poddle who had sprung for half a loaf of bread the day before; another look at the tribute position grid on the console side of the room told him that both Raif and Bee were still alive, making their way through a grove far away from both the mutts and their opponents.
Only then did he fully sit up and try to shake himself awake, giving his best friend’s words his full attention. Because, wait. “But they have Haymitch under lock and key in that hospital.”
“Yeah well, that’s for you and me, dickhead, not for Capitol reporters,” Johanna said with a shrug. “You wanna watch this or what? If my tribute decides to do something other than shiver, I might have to leave early, so let’s not miss the beginning.”
A knot of tension growing in the pit of his stomach, Finnick let the Seven victor lead him to one of the small lounge rooms next to the main hall, where it was possible to watch the coverage off the main channel while still keeping an eye on the tribute feeds through the glass walls. Chaff was already seated in an arm chair when they arrived, waving at them lazily; next to him sat Beetee, another mentor out of the Games, following the studio coverage of the show closely and looking twitchy. Finnick hadn’t even known that he and Haymitch were close, though he supposed they were about the same age. A few minutes after the coverage had started, the door opened again and Caramel walked in, moving to lounge against the wall in the back with his arms crossed and his face tense, as far away from Finnick as possible.
“Anybody have a guess how this will go?” Finnick asked the room at large, sitting down on a leather couch alongside Johanna.
Beetee attempted a calming smile in his direction, pushing up his glasses. “Haymitch has always fared well with cameras pointed at him,” he told him, clearly understanding that Finnick had asked in hope of reassurance from somebody who had known the Twelve victor longer. “He might not have been asked for permission when this interview was scheduled, but we never are, are we? He’ll be just fine.”
Now that he was substituting for him in the Games, it kept striking Finnick how little he really knew about Haymitch. He talked to him about things, important things throughout the years, had seen his Games of course - both because Mags had made him and because Snow had, along with the footage of the Abernathy execution. He knew Haymitch had had a mother who had looked so much like him and a kid brother and a half-starved girlfriend with a frame built to be curvy, because he had seen these people die. But he barely even knew anything about District Twelve except for how it was futile and tiny and starving - and cold in winter - certainly not what it was like for Haymitch to live there and if there had been any friends of his watching on from the sidelines when that Hovercraft carried him to the hospital. Thinking of the ruins of a house during the Reaping Day coverage, though, he had a pretty safe feeling that all of Haymitch’s closest friends were sitting in this room with Finnick right now - the way Beetee seemed so focused and Caramel seemed just gloomy.
When the camera cut to White Feathers Rehab Center, Finnick had to blink to reconcile the man seated across the journalist with the victor who had chatted with him outside a night club last year. It was in the clinical atmosphere of a hospital room; there was a tall window in the background, overlooking the grounds of a beautiful park. Reclined in his chair tentatively, Haymitch seemed to have lost ten pounds in two weeks. But it just made him look haggard, and the sunshine filling the room made him appear sickly, like somebody who had only barely started recovering from a disease. Although Finnick knew that those cinematographic choices would work in Haymitch’s favor, concern still twisted something in his guts.
The almond-eyed journalist sported a wild mob of spiky blue hair as well as turquoise flower tattoos around his eyes. In contrast to the low-level Twelve correspondent with the disheveled wig who had covered the original news report, this one was all professionalism, perfectly artificial. The caption informed the audience that he was Cheeks Calamius, Capitol star reporter. Finnick knew his work quite well. Cheeks tended to be harmless, until he suddenly went for the jugular.
“So, Haymitch,” Cheeks said, taking an over-exaggerated deep breath for dramatics. “You’ve been throwing the Capitol in quite the frenzy these past two weeks, now haven’t you?”
Finnick wasn’t sure what he had expected of Haymitch in his first camera appearance after all that had transpired, but the smile that made that man’s lips twitch in reply to Cheeks’ question wasn’t it. It seemed sickly and lacking in energy, yes, but it also looked honest and surprisingly sheepish.
“Yeah,” that man who was Haymitch replied, pausing to clear his voice. “Sorry about that.” He moved his hand to scratch his chin, then lowered it again into his lap without following through. From the way the camera zoomed in on it for a moment, he was trying to cover up how it was shaking. “Looks like I took it a little too far these last few years, huh? What can I say? Those Capitol drinks are just pretty damn addictive. Literally, turns out. And so easy to have them ordered to my district, too. I dunno, it’s like celebrating the Games just became an endless affair.”
“Go get ‘em, old man,” Johanna breathed next to Finnick, her façade of anger dropping for a moment, as if she’d forgotten to hide that she, too, cared.
“He’s gonna make it through this,” Chaff muttered, thumping the knuckles of his good hand against his teeth.
“We were very, very shocked to find you in your house like that,” Cheeks prompted, his face a picture of anguished concern.
Haymitch nodded. “No kidding,” he agreed with a light chuckle, though Finnick had never heard him make that particular sound for real. “And jokes aside…” Donning a more serious expression, he continued. “I’m really embarrassed about what’s been happening, Cheeks. I’ve been having a couple of pretty rough days in here, I’m not gonna lie about that. But they let me see the footage eventually, and I can’t believe that’s me. I can’t believe any of the guy I was these past few years is me. Can’t remember anything about that night before the Games either. Just, knowing there’d be another Reaping the next day, and, knowing I wouldn’t ever manage to bring these kids home no matter what I did…”
“The Capitol knows you’ve always tried to be at your best…” Cheeks rushed to reassure him, but Haymitch waved it off.
“Failed at it though, didn’t I? All of it… It was such an honor and I…” Breathing a sigh, he looked away as if to compose himself. All of his expressions looked just foreign to Finnick. Of course, Haymitch was following a script; this had Snow written all over it. The only surprise was how well he was doing it, but it still seemed so surreal. Now, he looked straight at the reporter again and spoke on vehemently. “There aren’t any words for how grateful I am to the people in the Capitol, all the things they have been doing to help me when I’m just some district bumpkin, honestly. Everybody here at this place, likewise, the doctors and the therapists, and President Snow, of course. The reporters, too, the way they reacted when they found me like that.”
“Aw Haymitch,” Cheeks exclaimed. “We all want to help, it’s a disease…”
“I’ll get better,” Haymitch interrupted him. “I’ll get out of here and I’ll do a better job…”
“And all our thoughts are with you.” The reporter smiled at him brightly. “Now, I’ve been told that I shouldn’t ask you any questions about the Hunger Games, but…” He lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper and winked. “I’m going to sneak one in anyway.” With a dramatic flourish, he leaned forward. “You must have been delighted to hear that both of the Twelve tributes are still in the running so far on this fifth day of the 72nd Hunger Games, and under supervision by the notorious Finnick Odair no less. What do you think of their odds so far?”
“Yeah, I’ve been following the Games as much as I can.” Haymitch’s lips twitched again in that odd self-depreciating way. “They don’t always let me.” Cheeks dutifully chuckled. “I know I’ve said this a lot of times before and turned out wrong, so people might have stopped believing me, but, you know, this is the new me. I think we might stand a real chance with those two. That boy has good arms on him. Pretty athletic. I don’t think anybody has noticed that much, yet. Don’t let his little limping act fool you. He has yet to get into a fight and I think he’s probably holding out on us…”
“Ah, I hear the Games enthusiast coming through. Please remember you are supposed to be recovering instead of mentoring, and answer one last question - how did you react when you learned that Finnick had been assigned to mentor your district alongside you? Did it make your pride twitch at least a little?”
“Not at all. Everybody can see that Finnick’s a natural. I wouldn’t be surprised if he brought one of these two home. Any district would be glad to have him on the team.” Finnick, the young natural. Haymitch, the experienced one. It was the obvious choice for how they’d play it come next year, but Finnick was still quietly relieved to see Haymitch starting to set the stage for it on his end. It meant he’d seen some of Finnick’s interviews. Obviously, he’d seen Raif’s and Bee’s.
“Using those wonderful sporting last words to cap this off. Haymitch, let me again wish you a speedy recovery and a healthy, happy Hunger Games.” Cheeks turned to face the camera. “This was Cheeks Calamius talking to District Twelve’s Haymitch Abernathy from the White Feathers Capitol Rehabilitation Center. Back to the studio, and happy Hunger Games to you folks back home as well.”
A touch on the remote by Chaff to mute the sound when the Games studio reappeared on the screen, and for a couple of seconds, the small room full of victors was covered in silence as they all pondered what they had seen.
“This is good,” Caramel grimly said. “This could have been a lot more fucked up than it turned out.”
“Who would have thought the old bastard still had it in him,” Johanna said, using the opportunity to stretch, rolling her shoulders, before she got up from the couch. “Considering I’ve seen dead tributes who’ve looked better.”
Beetee gave her a befuddled look; Finnick had a sense he didn’t quite understand her presence in this room. Haymitch and Johanna had hit it off from the beginning, though, odd imbalanced couple that they made. “Well,” the Three victor said. “Well. Let’s not forget that he is undergoing withdrawal…”
“Not like it’ll last for long,” Chaff interrupted him. When he got up from his chair, Finnick could see that inappropriately, there was a wine bottle dangling from between his fingers. He’d been wondering about Chaff, who he hadn’t known that well before this Games. In Haymitch’s wake, nobody ever took much notice of Chaff’s drinking, but just because he was functioning and taking everything so lightly… well. Raising his bottle to salute everybody in the room, Chaff smirked at them. “Not like he’ll have to stay like that once he’s back home. This whole fucked up charade would make anybody need a drink or two. Cheers, everyone.” With that, he wandered off to go wherever you had to be as a victor if both of your tributes were dead, and nobody wanted to fuck you.
Uneasily, Finnick looked after him.
Because, yeah - there was that.
He wondered what Snow had said to Haymitch to scare him into that perfect performance.
***
Finnick was shaken awake by Two’s Lyme the following night when a band of wild horse mutts with furious red demon eyes raced towards his tributes, the drumming of their hooves making the ground of their grove shake and waking them up.
“I think those are horses,” exhausted Bee whispered at Raif when they spied at them across a pile of snow, wrapped in the additional blankets Finnick had been able to send from the money stirred by Haymitch’s interview. His handful of surviving fans had dared to show their colors for the first time in years.
Raif grimaced. “I’ve never seen a horse. Only goats.”
“They do look like goats,” Bee said and giggled.
“Thank you very much,” Finnick told the screen between two yawns, toasting it with his cup of coffee, although nobody was close enough to hear.
That was before two of those crazy animals decided to desert the herd and go after his tributes instead, who soon found themselves running through the woods, sinking into several inches of soft powder snow that even Bee’s dancing feet couldn’t handle.
Raif couldn’t keep up anymore soon, dragging his busted leg like it was dead weight. His face a mask of that spite that he seemed to feel for everything, he hissed at the girl to keep running and to leave him behind. Like Finnick had coached her to do, she did, no questions asked. They’d barely been separated when Raif was overrun by the mutt, a fury beast of hooves and teeth breaking his skull and ripping him into bits like a real horse never could.
Bee stood there and just screamed and screamed when it came after her and for a wild moment, Finnick madly grew convinced that those screams would make the thing turn around and run, but a little girl that panicked when she so much didn’t want to die couldn’t sway a Gamesmaker’s creation. It left her bleeding from a bite to her belly and Finnick kept watch for almost two hours until she was dead, spending every second praying that she wouldn’t wake up again before her cannon blared. Other victors came to check on him, but he barely noticed them, his eyes always on the screen, on unconscious Bee’s face and how it twitched sometimes.
It was much later that he realized that Raif and Bee would have made Final Eight if they’d only outlasted one more tribute; it had been nine tributes at that point, and now there were seven. Technically, Bee would still be placed eighth in the stats. Good for long-term district marketing, he tried to think, knowing that was how Mags would look at it, what she had built on in the early days of Four, but right now it just meant that he had failed these children and they were dead.
***
While Finnick made his way from Capitol bed to Capitol bed, the Games continued. Alliances broke apart and reformed by the minute when nobody wanted to face the snow alone.
That was why Nine female hadn’t left Two’s Apollinara to die after she had freaked, but a sponsoring gift of a spear prompted her into action now. The hosts reached new levels of bad taste when they played it as comic relief: The Two volunteer panicked again, running away and leading Nine into a dead tribute’s trap by coincidence, the most pointless death in this whole Games. Lyme had completely lost control of her marketing and would likely face the consequence once she got home whether Apollinara made it or not; but no mentor could have salvaged that one.
Johanna’s girl was left behind by her partner when she was wounded by a horse, freezing to death without supplies. Ten-Three fell apart when Three suffocated Ten female in her sleep, but Mags’ Sara took him out. She formed a temporary alliance with Apollinara, who shared her bread with her, but she still died of her injuries after another day. Mags hadn’t known that she had blood poisoning. Sara hadn’t known that she had blood poisoning, collapsing where she had been standing and just never getting up again - the Games pathologist had a field day giving interviews. She’d died of a scratch.
Two eventless days after that, District Ten’s sixteen-year-old Tobin McKenzie was declared victor of the 72nd Hunger Games. He had holed up in the mountains and cut open a dead horse mutt’s belly, crawling in to warm himself against its steaming intestines. Apollinara just lay down and froze to death. The audience had found her amusing, but ultimately hated her; a box of matches would have been all she’d have needed to survive.
Tobin became a rare victor with only one kill. He didn’t know how to fight and should rightfully not have stood a chance; he’d stabbed the thirteen-year-old Eleven girl when it was three of them against one, and he’d held the knife the way his mum would have taught him for cutting up steak.
That could have been Bee or Raif, Finnick tiredly thought. But it just hadn’t been.
Mentoring this Hunger Games had been draining enough for a whole lifetime.
***
After the ceremonies, his stylist Cherry frantically started composing a diet plan, sans seafood, while Finnick was allowed to return to his district one last time. He had to pack, and the cameras wanted to catch the goodbyes.
His family was all waiting for him at the train station when he arrived; they hadn’t done that since he returned from his Victory Tour. His father stepped forward and pulled him into a hug; there were tears in his eyes. Somehow Finnick had always managed to fool his parents and brothers about what he was really doing on his dates with all those celebrities, but now that he’d actually stepped forward and volunteered for real, they suddenly chose to believe that it couldn’t possibly have been Finnick’s idea to move away.
Trying not to feel like dirt, Finnick gratefully accepted all the hugs and didn’t rid them of the sentiment. At least, he thought, they’d enjoy the excuse to move away from Victors’ Rock. They’d always been uncomfortable amongst all those district heroes, and it wasn’t like they couldn’t afford life without him by now.
Everything he ever did had been to protect these people. He could do this one thing for himself and leave.
***
The gleaming golden trident from his Games was mounted on the wall across his bed. It was too beautiful to use for sparring, too deadly to yield when he didn’t mean to harm. For a practiced observer, the gold alloy couldn’t cover that it was pure death, meant for destruction.
Victors weren’t usually allowed to keep their arena weapons; those went to the arena museums, where people could take pictures of the artifacts on the guided tours for a hefty service charge. But Finnick, age fourteen, had played the masses to get what he wanted for the first time then, although he hadn’t realized at the time that that was what he was doing. “I can’t keep it?” he’d asked in alarm during his victory interview, “I thought I could keep it!” On replays, he had seen how his face had fallen, such an enchanting little crushed boy, murderer disguised as child. The audience had cheered and waved their banners until the President had tilted his head into a nod.
It had felt inconceivable, letting go of that trident ever again.
Now, Finnick took it down.
Even now that he had grown another couple of inches and his shoulders had filled out into the size of a man, it still had perfect balance in his hands, as if it would forever change shape to remain his. No scratch had ever marred it, the alloy supplying it with the weight and resistibility of steel without taking any of its beauty away.
It still would fit him perfectly, Finnick knew. He could still take that thing and walk out of this house into town and nobody - not even the other victors of Four, not even next year’s volunteers, armed to their teeth - would be able to stop him. It still would transform him into a god of life and death, brimming with power.
It wasn’t possible to wrap a trident. It would be fastened to some box or trunk, for everybody to see when it was brought to his new home.
All the better.
Anything to please the cameras.
***
During one of his last nights in Four, Finnick awoke from the echoes of a dream resounding in his head. Far away, through the open windows carrying in the cooling salty breeze of the sea, he could hear the waves crashing against the Rock. In front of his inner eyes, patrons - no, clients - were still pushing him down, holding him open, making him scream in panic, like he never would be allowed in reality.
In reality, they always expected him to moan and beg for more.
Finnick shuddered, turning to his other side and trying to force it away, so that it would be gone but it didn’t work. It never did. He hadn’t expected it would.
Arousal was burning through him like fire.
No, he thought, tired. No. Please no.
But he reached down to touch himself anyway, despite the wave of nausea that hit him when he did, pressing his eyes shut and letting the images come - just five minutes, quickly, just so that it would be gone.
Backhanded across his face. Somebody clenching his jaw with their hand. Telling him to suck it, now although he was crying, and whispering, please and I can’t and please don’t hurt me. That was when he started coming, to the image of spreading his legs because they were making him but still chanting no no no, biting his lip and swallowing a moan and grabbing his cock tighter so it wouldn’t slip out of his hand too soon, while it was shrinking.
Breathing hard, Finnick curled up into himself as if he was five and still tiny, not twenty-one and a giant of a guy, hairless only because remake made it so, some sort of disturbing slut. He wished there was a way of turning his head away from himself.
It made sense, he tried to tell himself shakily. All he wanted to do every time was scream and hide. It made sense, in that situation, for him to eroticize…
Shame had replaced his arousal, hot and smoldering and dirty.
There was no excuse.
He didn’t want to be that man. He never wanted to be anywhere close to being that.
And he needed to be sure that nobody he loved would ever see that thing he had become. They might never notice if he hid it well, but he would still feel better about it once he had left, once that danger was gone.
Two days, he feebly chanted to himself, curling up tighter. Two days.
You’ll be in District Twelve.
Nobody will ever have to see.
Nobody but Haymitch, and he won’t care.
He repeated it until it became a mantra, falling back asleep.
on to chapter 6