THG fic: "Moss On The Ruins" [3/5]
Title: Moss On The Ruins
Author: trovia
Characters: Finnick Odair, also featuring Haymitch Abernathy, Johanna Mason and Mags, as well as an ensemble of victors and OC
Pairings: Finnick/OC, Haymitch/OC, Johanna/OC - pre-Finnick/Annie
Warnings: forced prostitution, dub con / non con, explicit non-consensual bondage & spanking, depression, PTSD, alcoholism, suicide of minor characters and discussion of suicide, Games-related violence
Rating: adult / R / M (for the sex, but this is still pretty much gen)
Wordcount: ~ 20,000 overall
Summary: At the 71st Hunger Games, Finnick Odair is ordered to mentor a boy he isn’t even sure he wants to bring home. With Johanna Mason alienating her friends and Haymitch Abernathy falling off the wagon, he finds himself struggling to not lose the last shreds of his sanity and soul.
A/N: Again, thank you very much, millari, for the beta, and I hope you and deathmallow will enjoy all the shout-outs to your fic and head canon.
Chapter 1 - Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Early next morning, the Career pack woke up to the sound of the cannon: Corina was dead. As all of their captivated audience could have told them, it had been One’s female who’d snuck out of her sleeping bag at night and suffocated her with her blanket. Neither the hosts nor the occupants of Mentor Central could even make out a clear reason why; strategically, it weakened the alliance and put her in the danger of having to face an inquisition of four angry Careers. Meanwhile, the pack just knew that one of them had betrayed them, and none of them knew who. But they knew that the Five-Eleven quartet was still around, fortifying a ruined house with spear traps while they improvised fire grenades with the supplies they’d received, so they reluctantly stuck together for another day, each suspecting the others.
Mags was out of the Games, and it looked like Snow had decided she could watch Finnick’s tribute for him now. He’d received a summons to remake, and to one Juno Sundown, before he’d finished breakfast, an hour after the kill.
Not that he finished it after he read the note. Finnick was in the bathroom and puking his guts out seconds later. Groaning, he sank back against the wall, and muttered a thanks when Clara, his Avox handed him a towel with pity in her eyes.
That reaction was new, and he didn’t even know what was wrong with him. Juno was a regular and she wasn’t a bad sort, so he knew this one would be almost pleasant even and it absolutely wouldn’t hurt. His subconscious had decided otherwise, though. He resolved to send Clara for a pill to numb his stomach, and got on his way to have his body hair ripped out.
The rest of the afternoon, Finnick spent tied to a bed by careful textbook knots that wouldn’t tighten if he struggled, remembering to emanate the occasional sound of pleasure while Juno prattled on to a business partner on the phone. She got a kick out of letting him wait, and Finnick knew she actually trusted him to safeword out if something went wrong while she wasn’t looking. It had somehow slipped Juno’s attention that her paying copious amounts of money for the pleasure of Finnick’s company probably meant he’d rather be home reading a book. “But you have an erection,” he could imagine her arguing full of alarm. Yes, he thought, grimly searching his mind for something that would keep him aroused without any other stimulation. And I worked on it hard. That had been much less of a problem at sixteen, when everything had gotten him going.
“Minister Crooks can have my ass,” Juno was saying pleasantly to her friend on the phone, and, “Well he can try, but you wouldn’t believe the dirt I have on him.” Stroking along the length of Finnick’s body with the riding crop she never seriously used, Juno gave him a smirk when she walked by. Finnick bit his lip and squirmed and tried to breathe through the unsettling feeling in his guts. “No seriously, I haven’t told you about that before?”
It had to be nice, having a phone that wasn’t bugged, Finnick thought. Twenty minutes later, he’d learned more about the District Logistics Department than he had ever needed to know. Apparently the freight trains between Five and Nine needed to be rerouted through Four, and Minister Crooks possibly had a dead body buried in his basement from a tax fraud coup. Another half an hour later, he’d managed to push himself back into the appropriate mind frame deep enough for a rather decent orgasm, and Juno was happy with the two she’d given herself riding him, so she kissed him on the cheek and let him leave for the day with a new bracelet around his wrist.
His life was just strange, Finnick thought, staring at a public screen across Juno’s building to check if Niko was still alive. The answer was yes, as the camera was showing him just now, flirting with the male of One again - Velvet was his name - as safe and sound as it got during Games.
Really, really strange.
The Career pack launched an ambush on the Five-Eleven alliance. It wasn’t a bad plan, but bound to cost lives on both sides. Finnick stood by and watched, arms tightly wrapped across his chest. Around him, all the victors followed his example one by one eventually with varying expressions of tension, weariness or sheer curiosity, even if it didn’t concern them. It was a rather involved battle concept for a Games and a bunch of teenagers.
Soon enough, Clarity Rudder was done for the day. The One female slipped and fell into a cavern spiked with spears, and that was that. Clarity shot Finnick another angry look when she dropped back into her chair and rubbed her face, as if her girl killing Mags’ tribute and then dying was Finnick’s fault instead of cosmic justice.
The two children from Eleven were the next to go. With Eleven-Five in shreds, that promising Two male decided to turn on his team, and a secondary little bloodbath commenced. Half an hour later, Niko was running through the ruins for his life, eyes wide and scared, and Finnick found himself urging him on despite himself. There was a nasty burn wound on Niko’s leg from a grenade, but he had the presence of mind to hide behind a wall and let Velvet race by, the echoes of his own steps too loud in the One’s ears to hear that Niko’s had stopped.
It was the fourth day only, yet they were down to the Final Eight. Flickerman and Templesmith assured them that, so far, it had been the fastest Hunger Games in twenty-seven years - “A very bad year for bathroom breaks,” Flickerman quipped with a laugh. A shudder ran through Mentor Central, when, in a startling change, tributes suddenly had names again: Interviews flashed across the screen all day, transforming males and females back into real children, scared to die and starkly alive. That wasn’t the Six female anymore who raided Five-Eleven’s supply while they battled it out, dramatically shaking up the betting pool. It was Ralda’s Camilla Charms, sixteen years of age, who’d wanted so much to be a nurse. The bull from Two was Fulvius Tucker, Brutus’ tribute, and had three uncles who all looked exactly like him, convinced that he’d win, each holding a beer mug and singing a fan chant at the camera with desperate enthusiasm. People said “Niko,” when they spoke to Finnick now, not “yours.”
Honestia called and reported that somebody had set-up a fan page for Niko on the digital networks, and it was steadily gathering momentum now. It didn’t impact on sponsorship yet, but that was bound to change if it reached critical mass, and if Niko didn’t die first. Finnick still had enough money to send him the burn medicine that allowed Niko to heal while sleeping through the night under the ledge of a former balcony; Finnick himself lounged in front of his console all night. He was working on the fighting sticks.
Everybody’s head turned when Haymitch walked into the room.
He’d apparently taken a shower after he finally returned from his client; his hair was still wet now. The smell of clean district soap and something flowery was unexpected, making Finnick startle when Haymitch walked by. His shirt was buttoned properly. His feet were steady, his eyes reasonably sharp. No smell of booze that Finnick could make out.
“What’d I miss?” he asked and screened the life stats and position charts with the practiced eye of two decades. He was adding a gracious shot of liquor to the cup of tea he’d grabbed from the bar, but he was still the most put together Finnick had seen him in years.
Juno decided to book Finnick for the rest of this Games.
She didn’t even touch him the next evening. Not with her hands anyway. After a dinner at her favorite restaurant that Finnick spent serenading her skill with a rope, she had him kneel on her kitchen table and urged him on with symbolic little slaps of her riding crop while she watched him jerking off. I’ll get used to it again, Finnick desperately thought, moaning and working on himself and casting for something, anything in his mind that would get him off at Juno’s pace. Clarity Rudder blowing him on the couch of the Training Center bar. Why not. Fucking Juno bent across the arm of her own couch. She had nice breasts, he supposed. Pounding into her and making her cry that he should stop, not just for show but full of fear, and spitting on her when he was done.
“Would you mind if I cleaned up?” he asked in a subdued voice, come dripping off his hand. It didn’t quite sound like his own voice.
Juno let him go without a blink, without noticing anything amiss. She probably thought he needed to pee. Most of his regulars weren’t that kind, but Finnick knew there were other clients who would have liked to, say, watch. He closed the bathroom door behind him and breathed and breathed, until the swaying all around him stopped.
I hate this, he helplessly thought and splashed water on his face. And, I’m not like that. I don’t want to be like that. But he refused to look into the mirror when he did so, at his lush lips and flawless skin and at his shoulders that he’d always hoped would stay somewhat gangly but, not so much. He longed to stare and let the hallucination of his Games scars soothe him but was too afraid that doing so would make him crack for good.
A man with fantasies like that should have a demon scar.
He could eat candy as much as he wanted, Finnick thought. He could start drinking beer, whatever. No matter how Cherry liked to fret, his metabolism was a piece of art as well.
He’d never get fat.
“Is he dead?” he asked when he walked into the Four quarters later to find Mags and Honestia hunched over a sponsorship sheet. Honestia waved it off and Mags said, “Seeder is watching him for us. We’re talking district marketing for future Games. Go to bed.” And Finnick shouldn’t, because Niko was his tribute and Mags was so damn old, but he felt oddly empty, and light, as if he was only carrying around half his weight tonight. He wanted nothing but to shower and to draw a blanket up to his chin in bed, as if it was winter and cold.
Mags knocked on his door softly at some point, but he didn’t let her in and eventually, she left him alone, although she must have noticed the light shining through the gap underneath his door.
Secretia Colbert was an actress. Finnick faintly remembered her holographic face flickering across a big screen while he gave someone a hand job at a private theater. It had been the kind of movie Chaff and Haymitch would laugh themselves silly about - country bumpkin victor introduced to city life by Secretia, the sophisticated escort.
This season, Secretia had chosen long neon green hair that fell all the way down to her knees and often served as substitute for clothes, strategically fastened to her bra. She could definitely have afforded Finnick. It wasn’t Finnick, though, who the gossip news channels showed pressing her against a wall in an alley behind a club. It was Haymitch.
Secretia would give shrill laughs, loud enough for the camera to pick it up, when Haymitch leaned in and whispered something into her ear. The camera managed to capture his face, and when he noticed it did, he gave it a somewhat shark-like grin across her shoulder in return.
It was… sort of bizarre, actually.
“Never knew Haymitch screen-tests that well,” Kyle Akumi remarked.
“Never knew he cleans up. At all,” Clarity Rudder said.
“I think he’s falling in love with her,” Gang Chen said, and pretty much everybody turned to look at him. “What?” he said. “He’s been pretty relaxed since he met her, pretty sober, too. You all thought he’d self-destruct again, just admit it, and look at him now. He’s happy.”
“You should know,” Johanna snapped unpleasantly before she left the room. Gang rolled his eyes. Nobody quite got him - he’d left District Seven to live in the Capitol for a career in music. Since he’d never offered much of an explanation as to how that had come to pass, it made people talk.
Cecilia chortled meanwhile. “If anybody shouldn’t buy everything they see on the television, it’s us. Especially when sex is involved, if you know what I mean. Right, Finnick?”
“He should know,” Clarity said.
“I love each of my acquaintances with passion at a given time, didn’t you know?” Finnick said, and threw Clarity a kiss that made her snort. Then he turned to look at Ralda, and asked more soberly, when he was sure the others wouldn’t be listening anymore, “What do you think?”
She’d wrapped her arms around herself again, giving the screen an unhappy look.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
Finnick shuddered at her tone against his will.
None of them knew that Niko’s fighting sticks had been waiting at the parachuteers’ for an hour, wrapped and fully paid off and ready to be deployed.
It was just that he couldn’t make himself give the okay.
“Are you going to kill yourself?” Finnick asked as soon as Haymitch opened the door.
Haymitch gave him a look like he’d lost it. “Is this Ralda again?”
“It’s me,” Finnick said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his pants.
Haymitch sighed.
“Roof’s nice this time of day,” he said.
That turned out to be untrue. Harsh wind blew across the roof today. It was supposed to be summer, but the temperature had rapidly dropped over night. Cherry was scrambling to alter Finnick’s outfits. She usually wouldn’t bother, but Juno had complained to her that even Finnick couldn’t walk around without a proper suit in bad weather, it would give him a cold.
Juno would be off to a business trip in few days. Finnick didn’t know who’d be the next client yet. If the Games were already over by then, probably a group event. There tended to be group events when people had to bridge the time until the victor could be crowned. Finnick almost looked forward to them right now. No need to worry about maintaining your erection at those, not with the abundance of hands on your cock and cocks shoved up your ass, fortunately not usually more than one at the same time.
Finnick found that this almost sober Haymitch felt steady at his side, steady and safe.
“So does it actually get easier?” he asked, leaning on the railing and looking down onto the streets. He wondered what would happen if he spit at the force field, whether that would bounce back up, too. He was almost tempted to try.
“What, the whoring?” Haymitch asked. Watching him out of the corner of his eye until Finnick nodded, he turned to stare contemplatively across the towers himself. “Probably not.”
It felt strangely safe to stand up here, wind blowing his hair into shambles, like it would on his father’s shrimper on a rough day, far off shore. On the other side of the roof, the wind chimes were tinkling so madly that they still almost drowned out their voices. But Haymitch felt steady like a rock, and Finnick thought, maybe Secretia Colbert had just seen something in him when others hadn’t bothered to look.
He wondered if it could be true, if Haymitch was falling in love with a Capitol woman. If something like that could ever possibly happen.
But Haymitch would just laugh at him if he asked, no matter if it was ludicrous or true.
“Is it true that there was another victor at Twelve who killed himself?” Finnick asked instead, remembering what Johanna had said.
Haymitch was quiet for a while.
“Yeah,” he eventually said. “Shane March. 39th Games. Everybody called him Swagger. He was found on the Meadow, hanging from a tree, when I was twelve. Never talked to the guy.” Another moment of silence. “He gave a little speech every year he came home from the Games. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t make it this time. I tried, I tried hard, but there was nothing I could do. Next year will be different’.” Haymitch snorted half through his imitation of Swagger March, but there was a strained quality to his voice when he finished the recital. “‘Next year we’ll win.’”
“But you didn’t.”
Haymitch shrugged. “Just doesn’t work like that.”
Finnick thought of Niko Genero. He thought of the fighting sticks waiting for deployment, the ones that would transform Niko into a menace like Finnick had been. It wasn’t that his favored weapon would guarantee he’d win. But the Capitol’s love might just. Finnick had seen the boy with his sticks during training week. He’d be aflame with grace and speed. He’d steal their hearts with the beauty of his kills.
Just before they stole his.
“Ralda thought you’d have an episode,” he said. “You’d drink yourself to death.”
“Whole fucking Games is an episode,” Haymitch said.
Finnick laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was.
Maybe he should look at it like that once he got home, like it was practice.
Though practice for what, he wasn’t sure.
Rolling his shoulders, Finnick leaned over the railing and looked straight down the building, like he’d done when he was fourteen and Cherry brought him here. He’d never quite understood why she did it at the time, because it wasn’t like she explained about the bugs or even said anything that would have been incriminating. She never had. But she’d been busy throwing out her whole plans for the tribute costumes once she had a look at his face, and almost fainted from exhaustion half through her frenzy, desperate to be magnificent. That day on the roof, she’d leaned against the railing and watched the wind destroying his hair. And she’d touched his cheek and said, she’d wanted to see who he really was before she made him somebody else.
Thousands of colorful Capitol ants filled the streets underneath, so far away, spilling over crosswalks and past cars.
“If Niko was your tribute,” Finnick asked the older man, “would you want him to get home?”
Haymitch turned to him very slowly. In the corner of his eye, Finnick could see him searching Finnick’s face. His voice was carefully blank. “Now why would I not want that?”
“Because you die in the Games, either way,” Finnick said. “Because if Niko does get back, he’ll spend the rest of his life slutting himself out.”
“Being raped doesn’t make you a slut,” Haymitch said.
Finnick flinched so hard that it hurt him inside.
Haymitch kept watching him.
Finnick wished he wouldn’t.
“A tribute with those odds,” Haymitch said, turning towards the city, propping his elbows up as if he didn’t have a care in the world. His words were casual, but they were firm as well, and the wind didn’t threaten to carry them away. “A tribute with those odds, I’d bring him home to Twelve, or I’d die trying.”
“Why?”
“Because he can always walk into the fence by his own choice if he doesn’t agree with the lifestyle.”
“But victors barely ever kill themselves,” Finnick argued, the words like ashes in his mouth, still struggling with what Haymitch had said just before, the words he’d used. “We’re survivors. If we knew how to give up, we would have done so during our Games.”
“So that’s your answer right there,” Haymitch said.
Finnick didn’t know why being forced into a relationship had sobered Haymitch up. Gang Chen’s theory suddenly scared him out of his mind. It reminded him of Juno Sundown, who made him feel good things like gratitude and relief because she knew the difference between kink and cruelty, because she honestly wanted him to enjoy himself, she even got off on it. Because she’d let him safeword out if she’d just understand that President Snow wouldn’t. Capitol child she was, she’d done her homework; she’d just read the wrong books.
It was so easy to picture himself settling for that, if it just wore him down enough - that infinite relief of finding that what he had been served by fate had been what he’d wanted all along. Like Gang Chen, moving to the Capitol to play the violin.
It made something awful pulsate inside him, some awful ancient pain right underneath his sternum. Finnick knew, instinctively, that it wouldn’t be like the nausea and tears, which haunted him but came from him whenever nothing else did anymore. That pain was something else, something that would never go away once it settled in there, a bleeding wound that wouldn’t ever start scaring.
But still. Still. The Haymitch at his side was almost sober, his profile sharp and clear, still in command of those shreds of himself without a doubt, and still there. If that had been Secretia Colbert’s doing, Finnick found he didn’t care. He didn’t want that for himself, the thought more unbearable than anything the Capitol could ever do to him. But for his friends, for Haymitch, if it just worked for Haymitch, he wanted every little bit of peace available, no matter the cost. He wanted it so much that it hurt him all over again.
Moss growing on the ruins, he thought, until you couldn’t recognize the stone underneath.
And he wasn’t even sure if he meant Haymitch by that, or himself.
“So while we’re chatting so nicely with each other anyway,” Haymitch said. “About Johanna.”
“I’m sorry,” Finnick said, pushing the door open before Johanna could throw it in his face.
She hissed angrily. Finnick was stronger and taller than her, and that had been enough to push himself inside, forcing her back into the room. It was at her quarters on the Seven floor, lush fur carpets covering the floor and carvings etched into the wooden walls. Benjamin, the male tribute from Seven was still in the running and Gang had been watching him at Central the last time Finnick had been there.
There was no make-up on Johanna’s face. Her hair was wet, cheeks still flushed from the hot shower she’d taken, the sharp smell of sex that always clung to her these days strangely absent right now. She was dressed in a loose shirt, her feet bare. He’d seen her like that once before, he suddenly realized. At her Reaping, when all of Panem had laughed because that girl had broken down and cried. Her Games had been all strategy, he knew, carefully crafted. But that moment, that had been pure Johanna as much as the deadly girl with the axe had been later. Maybe more.
“The fuck, Finnick,” Johanna said.
“I’m sorry about what happened to your dad,” Finnick said. “I really am. So sorry. Haymitch figured it out, he talked to Gang. I was too… damn, I’m so sorry. I should have realized something was wrong. I knew he was your only family left.”
The door had slowly fallen shut while he spoke. None of them reacted when it clicked gently into its angles now, swift and smooth and soundless like everything always was at the Capitol. Doors in Four were made of heavy oak, and they creaked.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
But Johanna had frozen. Her face a mask when she looked at him, she just didn’t move. Safe empty space of several feet between them.
“Blight even warned me,” she finally said, jerking out of it, as if it didn’t really matter. She grimaced, voice trembling from barely suppressed anger, starting to look away but training her eyes back on Finnick again after all, like a challenge. “He said not to tell. Not to tell my dad. What I was doing in the Capitol. But I thought, what would Blight McCall ever know, he sure was wrong when he wrote me off at my Games.” She sneered, but the expression dropped away again immediately. “What should I have said, Finnick? It’s compulsory television. He saw me up there, making out with people in clubs. He kept saying I should stop if it hurt me so much. That he didn’t care what I did but I shouldn’t hurt myself and I should stop.” Her voice flipped. “So I told him, okay? So he wouldn’t think I was like that.”
“Oh Johanna…” Finnick said helplessly. “He… it killed him?” He was executed? was what he wanted to say but there were always all those bugs in all kinds of places, and he stopped himself in time, just to be safe.
The thought of his mom and the concern in her eyes, his brothers wanting to know, made something twist in his guts.
Johanna snorted, wiping away an angry tear. “No,” she said. “He slit his wrists. So that I’d be safe.”
For a moment, Finnick just stared at her.
They’d all been shown the tape of the Abernathy execution. A haggard starved woman with Haymitch’s eyes. An eight-year-old boy with a round face. A half-starved sixteen-year-old girl. And they’d all been informed that Haymitch had still done what Snow ordered afterwards. That was the whole point. Finnick would rather die than see his district punished for his behavior, his numerous cousins, his childhood friends. Haymitch would have rather died, when he’d already lost so much. And as much as Johanna would hate to admit it, so would she.
Others had been threatened with their status, their reputation, the money they’d made by killing children.
Who knew, maybe Gang Chen had a story to tell about that, after all.
Finnick thought of how angry Johanna had been when they met up during prep week, the way the Avox with the note informing her about the name and date had just waited for her tribute to die. Snow was so fucking talented when it came to making points.
“Johanna,” he managed, unsure what it was he even planned on saying but then, they’d already both moved. Johanna, fighting to just stand by now as if the whole integrity of her body had come loose, was suddenly in his arms. He hugged her reflexively, drawing her close. She was naked underneath her shirt, he could feel it through his clothes, and it startled him to notice that his body had no sexual response to that.
Johanna’s shoulders were shaking silently, a wet spot forming on his chest where her face pressed against him. Finnick pulled her closer, feeling like he’d never want to let her go, even if it was just this small thing that he could do, a small thing to make her feel better, nothing but a gesture filled with want.
Maybe that was it, Finnick thought, stroking Johanna’s wet hair. He closed his eyes, breathing in her scent of tears and district soap, and thought of home at Four. The soothing endlessness of the sea. The harsh wind and the gulls and his brothers and Mags, who all saw things in him he hated them to see, but at least they were still there.
Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to help Haymitch, if Haymitch hadn’t been able to help himself. But maybe if Haymitch helped Finnick, Finnick could help Johanna and Mags could help them all and in the end, that would be enough.
“I’m sorry that there isn’t more I can do,” he muttered in Johanna’s ear.
She sniffed, not raising her head from his chest. “Fucking do-gooder idiot,” she said.
It was a tight smile that he managed in reply, but it was real, and it was his.
Mags raised her eyebrows at him when he slid into the chair next to hers and put on his headset.
“It’s that time right now when most people watch, right?” he said. Compulsory television was still relative in a world where people ate and slept and made money, especially in the Capitol where everybody thought it a right rather than law. Right now, he knew, they needed everybody in the Capitol to see and fall in love.
“That it is,” Mags said.
“Then let’s give them a show,” Finnick said, took a deep breath, and dialed up the parachuteers.
on to chapter 4
Author: trovia
Characters: Finnick Odair, also featuring Haymitch Abernathy, Johanna Mason and Mags, as well as an ensemble of victors and OC
Pairings: Finnick/OC, Haymitch/OC, Johanna/OC - pre-Finnick/Annie
Warnings: forced prostitution, dub con / non con, explicit non-consensual bondage & spanking, depression, PTSD, alcoholism, suicide of minor characters and discussion of suicide, Games-related violence
Rating: adult / R / M (for the sex, but this is still pretty much gen)
Wordcount: ~ 20,000 overall
Summary: At the 71st Hunger Games, Finnick Odair is ordered to mentor a boy he isn’t even sure he wants to bring home. With Johanna Mason alienating her friends and Haymitch Abernathy falling off the wagon, he finds himself struggling to not lose the last shreds of his sanity and soul.
A/N: Again, thank you very much, millari, for the beta, and I hope you and deathmallow will enjoy all the shout-outs to your fic and head canon.
Chapter 1 - Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Early next morning, the Career pack woke up to the sound of the cannon: Corina was dead. As all of their captivated audience could have told them, it had been One’s female who’d snuck out of her sleeping bag at night and suffocated her with her blanket. Neither the hosts nor the occupants of Mentor Central could even make out a clear reason why; strategically, it weakened the alliance and put her in the danger of having to face an inquisition of four angry Careers. Meanwhile, the pack just knew that one of them had betrayed them, and none of them knew who. But they knew that the Five-Eleven quartet was still around, fortifying a ruined house with spear traps while they improvised fire grenades with the supplies they’d received, so they reluctantly stuck together for another day, each suspecting the others.
Mags was out of the Games, and it looked like Snow had decided she could watch Finnick’s tribute for him now. He’d received a summons to remake, and to one Juno Sundown, before he’d finished breakfast, an hour after the kill.
Not that he finished it after he read the note. Finnick was in the bathroom and puking his guts out seconds later. Groaning, he sank back against the wall, and muttered a thanks when Clara, his Avox handed him a towel with pity in her eyes.
That reaction was new, and he didn’t even know what was wrong with him. Juno was a regular and she wasn’t a bad sort, so he knew this one would be almost pleasant even and it absolutely wouldn’t hurt. His subconscious had decided otherwise, though. He resolved to send Clara for a pill to numb his stomach, and got on his way to have his body hair ripped out.
The rest of the afternoon, Finnick spent tied to a bed by careful textbook knots that wouldn’t tighten if he struggled, remembering to emanate the occasional sound of pleasure while Juno prattled on to a business partner on the phone. She got a kick out of letting him wait, and Finnick knew she actually trusted him to safeword out if something went wrong while she wasn’t looking. It had somehow slipped Juno’s attention that her paying copious amounts of money for the pleasure of Finnick’s company probably meant he’d rather be home reading a book. “But you have an erection,” he could imagine her arguing full of alarm. Yes, he thought, grimly searching his mind for something that would keep him aroused without any other stimulation. And I worked on it hard. That had been much less of a problem at sixteen, when everything had gotten him going.
“Minister Crooks can have my ass,” Juno was saying pleasantly to her friend on the phone, and, “Well he can try, but you wouldn’t believe the dirt I have on him.” Stroking along the length of Finnick’s body with the riding crop she never seriously used, Juno gave him a smirk when she walked by. Finnick bit his lip and squirmed and tried to breathe through the unsettling feeling in his guts. “No seriously, I haven’t told you about that before?”
It had to be nice, having a phone that wasn’t bugged, Finnick thought. Twenty minutes later, he’d learned more about the District Logistics Department than he had ever needed to know. Apparently the freight trains between Five and Nine needed to be rerouted through Four, and Minister Crooks possibly had a dead body buried in his basement from a tax fraud coup. Another half an hour later, he’d managed to push himself back into the appropriate mind frame deep enough for a rather decent orgasm, and Juno was happy with the two she’d given herself riding him, so she kissed him on the cheek and let him leave for the day with a new bracelet around his wrist.
His life was just strange, Finnick thought, staring at a public screen across Juno’s building to check if Niko was still alive. The answer was yes, as the camera was showing him just now, flirting with the male of One again - Velvet was his name - as safe and sound as it got during Games.
Really, really strange.
The Career pack launched an ambush on the Five-Eleven alliance. It wasn’t a bad plan, but bound to cost lives on both sides. Finnick stood by and watched, arms tightly wrapped across his chest. Around him, all the victors followed his example one by one eventually with varying expressions of tension, weariness or sheer curiosity, even if it didn’t concern them. It was a rather involved battle concept for a Games and a bunch of teenagers.
Soon enough, Clarity Rudder was done for the day. The One female slipped and fell into a cavern spiked with spears, and that was that. Clarity shot Finnick another angry look when she dropped back into her chair and rubbed her face, as if her girl killing Mags’ tribute and then dying was Finnick’s fault instead of cosmic justice.
The two children from Eleven were the next to go. With Eleven-Five in shreds, that promising Two male decided to turn on his team, and a secondary little bloodbath commenced. Half an hour later, Niko was running through the ruins for his life, eyes wide and scared, and Finnick found himself urging him on despite himself. There was a nasty burn wound on Niko’s leg from a grenade, but he had the presence of mind to hide behind a wall and let Velvet race by, the echoes of his own steps too loud in the One’s ears to hear that Niko’s had stopped.
It was the fourth day only, yet they were down to the Final Eight. Flickerman and Templesmith assured them that, so far, it had been the fastest Hunger Games in twenty-seven years - “A very bad year for bathroom breaks,” Flickerman quipped with a laugh. A shudder ran through Mentor Central, when, in a startling change, tributes suddenly had names again: Interviews flashed across the screen all day, transforming males and females back into real children, scared to die and starkly alive. That wasn’t the Six female anymore who raided Five-Eleven’s supply while they battled it out, dramatically shaking up the betting pool. It was Ralda’s Camilla Charms, sixteen years of age, who’d wanted so much to be a nurse. The bull from Two was Fulvius Tucker, Brutus’ tribute, and had three uncles who all looked exactly like him, convinced that he’d win, each holding a beer mug and singing a fan chant at the camera with desperate enthusiasm. People said “Niko,” when they spoke to Finnick now, not “yours.”
Honestia called and reported that somebody had set-up a fan page for Niko on the digital networks, and it was steadily gathering momentum now. It didn’t impact on sponsorship yet, but that was bound to change if it reached critical mass, and if Niko didn’t die first. Finnick still had enough money to send him the burn medicine that allowed Niko to heal while sleeping through the night under the ledge of a former balcony; Finnick himself lounged in front of his console all night. He was working on the fighting sticks.
Everybody’s head turned when Haymitch walked into the room.
He’d apparently taken a shower after he finally returned from his client; his hair was still wet now. The smell of clean district soap and something flowery was unexpected, making Finnick startle when Haymitch walked by. His shirt was buttoned properly. His feet were steady, his eyes reasonably sharp. No smell of booze that Finnick could make out.
“What’d I miss?” he asked and screened the life stats and position charts with the practiced eye of two decades. He was adding a gracious shot of liquor to the cup of tea he’d grabbed from the bar, but he was still the most put together Finnick had seen him in years.
Juno decided to book Finnick for the rest of this Games.
She didn’t even touch him the next evening. Not with her hands anyway. After a dinner at her favorite restaurant that Finnick spent serenading her skill with a rope, she had him kneel on her kitchen table and urged him on with symbolic little slaps of her riding crop while she watched him jerking off. I’ll get used to it again, Finnick desperately thought, moaning and working on himself and casting for something, anything in his mind that would get him off at Juno’s pace. Clarity Rudder blowing him on the couch of the Training Center bar. Why not. Fucking Juno bent across the arm of her own couch. She had nice breasts, he supposed. Pounding into her and making her cry that he should stop, not just for show but full of fear, and spitting on her when he was done.
“Would you mind if I cleaned up?” he asked in a subdued voice, come dripping off his hand. It didn’t quite sound like his own voice.
Juno let him go without a blink, without noticing anything amiss. She probably thought he needed to pee. Most of his regulars weren’t that kind, but Finnick knew there were other clients who would have liked to, say, watch. He closed the bathroom door behind him and breathed and breathed, until the swaying all around him stopped.
I hate this, he helplessly thought and splashed water on his face. And, I’m not like that. I don’t want to be like that. But he refused to look into the mirror when he did so, at his lush lips and flawless skin and at his shoulders that he’d always hoped would stay somewhat gangly but, not so much. He longed to stare and let the hallucination of his Games scars soothe him but was too afraid that doing so would make him crack for good.
A man with fantasies like that should have a demon scar.
He could eat candy as much as he wanted, Finnick thought. He could start drinking beer, whatever. No matter how Cherry liked to fret, his metabolism was a piece of art as well.
He’d never get fat.
“Is he dead?” he asked when he walked into the Four quarters later to find Mags and Honestia hunched over a sponsorship sheet. Honestia waved it off and Mags said, “Seeder is watching him for us. We’re talking district marketing for future Games. Go to bed.” And Finnick shouldn’t, because Niko was his tribute and Mags was so damn old, but he felt oddly empty, and light, as if he was only carrying around half his weight tonight. He wanted nothing but to shower and to draw a blanket up to his chin in bed, as if it was winter and cold.
Mags knocked on his door softly at some point, but he didn’t let her in and eventually, she left him alone, although she must have noticed the light shining through the gap underneath his door.
Secretia Colbert was an actress. Finnick faintly remembered her holographic face flickering across a big screen while he gave someone a hand job at a private theater. It had been the kind of movie Chaff and Haymitch would laugh themselves silly about - country bumpkin victor introduced to city life by Secretia, the sophisticated escort.
This season, Secretia had chosen long neon green hair that fell all the way down to her knees and often served as substitute for clothes, strategically fastened to her bra. She could definitely have afforded Finnick. It wasn’t Finnick, though, who the gossip news channels showed pressing her against a wall in an alley behind a club. It was Haymitch.
Secretia would give shrill laughs, loud enough for the camera to pick it up, when Haymitch leaned in and whispered something into her ear. The camera managed to capture his face, and when he noticed it did, he gave it a somewhat shark-like grin across her shoulder in return.
It was… sort of bizarre, actually.
“Never knew Haymitch screen-tests that well,” Kyle Akumi remarked.
“Never knew he cleans up. At all,” Clarity Rudder said.
“I think he’s falling in love with her,” Gang Chen said, and pretty much everybody turned to look at him. “What?” he said. “He’s been pretty relaxed since he met her, pretty sober, too. You all thought he’d self-destruct again, just admit it, and look at him now. He’s happy.”
“You should know,” Johanna snapped unpleasantly before she left the room. Gang rolled his eyes. Nobody quite got him - he’d left District Seven to live in the Capitol for a career in music. Since he’d never offered much of an explanation as to how that had come to pass, it made people talk.
Cecilia chortled meanwhile. “If anybody shouldn’t buy everything they see on the television, it’s us. Especially when sex is involved, if you know what I mean. Right, Finnick?”
“He should know,” Clarity said.
“I love each of my acquaintances with passion at a given time, didn’t you know?” Finnick said, and threw Clarity a kiss that made her snort. Then he turned to look at Ralda, and asked more soberly, when he was sure the others wouldn’t be listening anymore, “What do you think?”
She’d wrapped her arms around herself again, giving the screen an unhappy look.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
Finnick shuddered at her tone against his will.
None of them knew that Niko’s fighting sticks had been waiting at the parachuteers’ for an hour, wrapped and fully paid off and ready to be deployed.
It was just that he couldn’t make himself give the okay.
“Are you going to kill yourself?” Finnick asked as soon as Haymitch opened the door.
Haymitch gave him a look like he’d lost it. “Is this Ralda again?”
“It’s me,” Finnick said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his pants.
Haymitch sighed.
“Roof’s nice this time of day,” he said.
That turned out to be untrue. Harsh wind blew across the roof today. It was supposed to be summer, but the temperature had rapidly dropped over night. Cherry was scrambling to alter Finnick’s outfits. She usually wouldn’t bother, but Juno had complained to her that even Finnick couldn’t walk around without a proper suit in bad weather, it would give him a cold.
Juno would be off to a business trip in few days. Finnick didn’t know who’d be the next client yet. If the Games were already over by then, probably a group event. There tended to be group events when people had to bridge the time until the victor could be crowned. Finnick almost looked forward to them right now. No need to worry about maintaining your erection at those, not with the abundance of hands on your cock and cocks shoved up your ass, fortunately not usually more than one at the same time.
Finnick found that this almost sober Haymitch felt steady at his side, steady and safe.
“So does it actually get easier?” he asked, leaning on the railing and looking down onto the streets. He wondered what would happen if he spit at the force field, whether that would bounce back up, too. He was almost tempted to try.
“What, the whoring?” Haymitch asked. Watching him out of the corner of his eye until Finnick nodded, he turned to stare contemplatively across the towers himself. “Probably not.”
It felt strangely safe to stand up here, wind blowing his hair into shambles, like it would on his father’s shrimper on a rough day, far off shore. On the other side of the roof, the wind chimes were tinkling so madly that they still almost drowned out their voices. But Haymitch felt steady like a rock, and Finnick thought, maybe Secretia Colbert had just seen something in him when others hadn’t bothered to look.
He wondered if it could be true, if Haymitch was falling in love with a Capitol woman. If something like that could ever possibly happen.
But Haymitch would just laugh at him if he asked, no matter if it was ludicrous or true.
“Is it true that there was another victor at Twelve who killed himself?” Finnick asked instead, remembering what Johanna had said.
Haymitch was quiet for a while.
“Yeah,” he eventually said. “Shane March. 39th Games. Everybody called him Swagger. He was found on the Meadow, hanging from a tree, when I was twelve. Never talked to the guy.” Another moment of silence. “He gave a little speech every year he came home from the Games. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t make it this time. I tried, I tried hard, but there was nothing I could do. Next year will be different’.” Haymitch snorted half through his imitation of Swagger March, but there was a strained quality to his voice when he finished the recital. “‘Next year we’ll win.’”
“But you didn’t.”
Haymitch shrugged. “Just doesn’t work like that.”
Finnick thought of Niko Genero. He thought of the fighting sticks waiting for deployment, the ones that would transform Niko into a menace like Finnick had been. It wasn’t that his favored weapon would guarantee he’d win. But the Capitol’s love might just. Finnick had seen the boy with his sticks during training week. He’d be aflame with grace and speed. He’d steal their hearts with the beauty of his kills.
Just before they stole his.
“Ralda thought you’d have an episode,” he said. “You’d drink yourself to death.”
“Whole fucking Games is an episode,” Haymitch said.
Finnick laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was.
Maybe he should look at it like that once he got home, like it was practice.
Though practice for what, he wasn’t sure.
Rolling his shoulders, Finnick leaned over the railing and looked straight down the building, like he’d done when he was fourteen and Cherry brought him here. He’d never quite understood why she did it at the time, because it wasn’t like she explained about the bugs or even said anything that would have been incriminating. She never had. But she’d been busy throwing out her whole plans for the tribute costumes once she had a look at his face, and almost fainted from exhaustion half through her frenzy, desperate to be magnificent. That day on the roof, she’d leaned against the railing and watched the wind destroying his hair. And she’d touched his cheek and said, she’d wanted to see who he really was before she made him somebody else.
Thousands of colorful Capitol ants filled the streets underneath, so far away, spilling over crosswalks and past cars.
“If Niko was your tribute,” Finnick asked the older man, “would you want him to get home?”
Haymitch turned to him very slowly. In the corner of his eye, Finnick could see him searching Finnick’s face. His voice was carefully blank. “Now why would I not want that?”
“Because you die in the Games, either way,” Finnick said. “Because if Niko does get back, he’ll spend the rest of his life slutting himself out.”
“Being raped doesn’t make you a slut,” Haymitch said.
Finnick flinched so hard that it hurt him inside.
Haymitch kept watching him.
Finnick wished he wouldn’t.
“A tribute with those odds,” Haymitch said, turning towards the city, propping his elbows up as if he didn’t have a care in the world. His words were casual, but they were firm as well, and the wind didn’t threaten to carry them away. “A tribute with those odds, I’d bring him home to Twelve, or I’d die trying.”
“Why?”
“Because he can always walk into the fence by his own choice if he doesn’t agree with the lifestyle.”
“But victors barely ever kill themselves,” Finnick argued, the words like ashes in his mouth, still struggling with what Haymitch had said just before, the words he’d used. “We’re survivors. If we knew how to give up, we would have done so during our Games.”
“So that’s your answer right there,” Haymitch said.
Finnick didn’t know why being forced into a relationship had sobered Haymitch up. Gang Chen’s theory suddenly scared him out of his mind. It reminded him of Juno Sundown, who made him feel good things like gratitude and relief because she knew the difference between kink and cruelty, because she honestly wanted him to enjoy himself, she even got off on it. Because she’d let him safeword out if she’d just understand that President Snow wouldn’t. Capitol child she was, she’d done her homework; she’d just read the wrong books.
It was so easy to picture himself settling for that, if it just wore him down enough - that infinite relief of finding that what he had been served by fate had been what he’d wanted all along. Like Gang Chen, moving to the Capitol to play the violin.
It made something awful pulsate inside him, some awful ancient pain right underneath his sternum. Finnick knew, instinctively, that it wouldn’t be like the nausea and tears, which haunted him but came from him whenever nothing else did anymore. That pain was something else, something that would never go away once it settled in there, a bleeding wound that wouldn’t ever start scaring.
But still. Still. The Haymitch at his side was almost sober, his profile sharp and clear, still in command of those shreds of himself without a doubt, and still there. If that had been Secretia Colbert’s doing, Finnick found he didn’t care. He didn’t want that for himself, the thought more unbearable than anything the Capitol could ever do to him. But for his friends, for Haymitch, if it just worked for Haymitch, he wanted every little bit of peace available, no matter the cost. He wanted it so much that it hurt him all over again.
Moss growing on the ruins, he thought, until you couldn’t recognize the stone underneath.
And he wasn’t even sure if he meant Haymitch by that, or himself.
“So while we’re chatting so nicely with each other anyway,” Haymitch said. “About Johanna.”
“I’m sorry,” Finnick said, pushing the door open before Johanna could throw it in his face.
She hissed angrily. Finnick was stronger and taller than her, and that had been enough to push himself inside, forcing her back into the room. It was at her quarters on the Seven floor, lush fur carpets covering the floor and carvings etched into the wooden walls. Benjamin, the male tribute from Seven was still in the running and Gang had been watching him at Central the last time Finnick had been there.
There was no make-up on Johanna’s face. Her hair was wet, cheeks still flushed from the hot shower she’d taken, the sharp smell of sex that always clung to her these days strangely absent right now. She was dressed in a loose shirt, her feet bare. He’d seen her like that once before, he suddenly realized. At her Reaping, when all of Panem had laughed because that girl had broken down and cried. Her Games had been all strategy, he knew, carefully crafted. But that moment, that had been pure Johanna as much as the deadly girl with the axe had been later. Maybe more.
“The fuck, Finnick,” Johanna said.
“I’m sorry about what happened to your dad,” Finnick said. “I really am. So sorry. Haymitch figured it out, he talked to Gang. I was too… damn, I’m so sorry. I should have realized something was wrong. I knew he was your only family left.”
The door had slowly fallen shut while he spoke. None of them reacted when it clicked gently into its angles now, swift and smooth and soundless like everything always was at the Capitol. Doors in Four were made of heavy oak, and they creaked.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
But Johanna had frozen. Her face a mask when she looked at him, she just didn’t move. Safe empty space of several feet between them.
“Blight even warned me,” she finally said, jerking out of it, as if it didn’t really matter. She grimaced, voice trembling from barely suppressed anger, starting to look away but training her eyes back on Finnick again after all, like a challenge. “He said not to tell. Not to tell my dad. What I was doing in the Capitol. But I thought, what would Blight McCall ever know, he sure was wrong when he wrote me off at my Games.” She sneered, but the expression dropped away again immediately. “What should I have said, Finnick? It’s compulsory television. He saw me up there, making out with people in clubs. He kept saying I should stop if it hurt me so much. That he didn’t care what I did but I shouldn’t hurt myself and I should stop.” Her voice flipped. “So I told him, okay? So he wouldn’t think I was like that.”
“Oh Johanna…” Finnick said helplessly. “He… it killed him?” He was executed? was what he wanted to say but there were always all those bugs in all kinds of places, and he stopped himself in time, just to be safe.
The thought of his mom and the concern in her eyes, his brothers wanting to know, made something twist in his guts.
Johanna snorted, wiping away an angry tear. “No,” she said. “He slit his wrists. So that I’d be safe.”
For a moment, Finnick just stared at her.
They’d all been shown the tape of the Abernathy execution. A haggard starved woman with Haymitch’s eyes. An eight-year-old boy with a round face. A half-starved sixteen-year-old girl. And they’d all been informed that Haymitch had still done what Snow ordered afterwards. That was the whole point. Finnick would rather die than see his district punished for his behavior, his numerous cousins, his childhood friends. Haymitch would have rather died, when he’d already lost so much. And as much as Johanna would hate to admit it, so would she.
Others had been threatened with their status, their reputation, the money they’d made by killing children.
Who knew, maybe Gang Chen had a story to tell about that, after all.
Finnick thought of how angry Johanna had been when they met up during prep week, the way the Avox with the note informing her about the name and date had just waited for her tribute to die. Snow was so fucking talented when it came to making points.
“Johanna,” he managed, unsure what it was he even planned on saying but then, they’d already both moved. Johanna, fighting to just stand by now as if the whole integrity of her body had come loose, was suddenly in his arms. He hugged her reflexively, drawing her close. She was naked underneath her shirt, he could feel it through his clothes, and it startled him to notice that his body had no sexual response to that.
Johanna’s shoulders were shaking silently, a wet spot forming on his chest where her face pressed against him. Finnick pulled her closer, feeling like he’d never want to let her go, even if it was just this small thing that he could do, a small thing to make her feel better, nothing but a gesture filled with want.
Maybe that was it, Finnick thought, stroking Johanna’s wet hair. He closed his eyes, breathing in her scent of tears and district soap, and thought of home at Four. The soothing endlessness of the sea. The harsh wind and the gulls and his brothers and Mags, who all saw things in him he hated them to see, but at least they were still there.
Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to help Haymitch, if Haymitch hadn’t been able to help himself. But maybe if Haymitch helped Finnick, Finnick could help Johanna and Mags could help them all and in the end, that would be enough.
“I’m sorry that there isn’t more I can do,” he muttered in Johanna’s ear.
She sniffed, not raising her head from his chest. “Fucking do-gooder idiot,” she said.
It was a tight smile that he managed in reply, but it was real, and it was his.
Mags raised her eyebrows at him when he slid into the chair next to hers and put on his headset.
“It’s that time right now when most people watch, right?” he said. Compulsory television was still relative in a world where people ate and slept and made money, especially in the Capitol where everybody thought it a right rather than law. Right now, he knew, they needed everybody in the Capitol to see and fall in love.
“That it is,” Mags said.
“Then let’s give them a show,” Finnick said, took a deep breath, and dialed up the parachuteers.
on to chapter 4