THG fic: "Spin Control" [8/21]
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 make their first appearance in Chapter 6. Kat, probably Chapter 11. Chaff is featured prominently as well.
Prologue -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7
Chapter 8: The Hunger Games Angle
Two weeks later, Finnick’s biggest problem wasn’t keeping Haymitch from drinking. Haymitch wasn’t drinking.
However, Haymitch also, apparently, wasn’t sleeping.
Or if he was doing so, he wasn’t doing it at night, and he definitely wasn’t doing it enough.
It soon became glaringly obvious that whatever issues the alcohol had served to neutralize, Haymitch didn’t have the first idea how to cope with them now that his old tool was out of commission.
Finnick had first noticed it one night days after Haymitch’s return, when he couldn’t manage to stay asleep himself, nodding off and waking up again with little starts, until he finally grew aware enough of his surroundings to realize that light was shining through the window onto his sheets, although all of Victors’ Village should have been covered in darkness.
It had originated from Haymitch’s house across the lawn, illuminated like a lighthouse, every single lamp turned on even in rooms Finnick was reasonably sure had once been furnished for Mrs. Abernathy and her youngest and weren’t in use. Haymitch had to have specifically made a round to turn them all on before the sun went down.
Too sleepy for full comprehension, Finnick had gazed at it for a while. Eventually, he had caught a glimpse of Haymitch through one of the windows, walking past an open door through a hallway, still very much dressed in the same grey shirt from the day before. His hair had been wet, curling in the nape of his neck. It occurred to Finnick that he’d caught Haymitch on his way back from a shower various times, even during previous summers in the Capitol; he took them religiously, and even made use of the subtler options of the opulent Capitol showers’ soap generators that most victors couldn’t be bothered to figure out.
Thinking it all a little unusual, Finnick had asked Haymitch about it the next morning when he paid him a visit after his morning run. He’d found the other victor in a new set of clothes and definitely still awake. Spooning jam out of a can with a Capitol logo on it without bothering to put it on bread first, he seemed to be determined to ignore the dark circles under his eyes. They hadn’t just appeared there this morning either, now that Finnick thought about it. They’d been there for almost as long as Haymitch had been back.
“So what’s with the light show last night?” he had asked, flopping down on a chair at the kitchen table and resting his feet on another. If Haymitch wasn’t going to care about keeping his house clean, Finnick wasn’t either. “That has to be eating up mad amounts of electricity.”
Haymitch shrugged. “Well, there was that one time they paid me lots of money for stabbing some children to death, so I think I’m gonna be covered for the bill.”
Finnick smirked, looking him over with sympathy. “Having trouble sleeping?”
He wouldn’t have found anything wrong with it, if Haymitch had admitted to a fear of the dark; you didn’t need that many lights in your house just to fend off nightmares. But they didn’t know each other all that well. He had a strong feeling that Haymitch wouldn’t have appreciated that insinuation. He’d already lost too much dignity and privacy to the Capitol for that. Both of those were in rare supply for a victor.
So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Haymitch said, with an edge, “I’m having trouble keeping people’s nose out of my business.” And Finnick had shrugged it off with no more than a grimace when he got up.
Fair enough, he had supposed.
But that was before he noticed the lights during the following night and the one after that, and again the one after that. All lamps burning brightly, chasing the darkness out of the house, and Haymitch wide awake through the night. There were some serious problems brewing on that front, loud and clear. Problems that would start boiling over if things continued in that vein. And it didn’t look like Haymitch was starting to get a grip on them on his own.
***
Eventually, Haymitch’s cheeks started taking a seriously unhealthy yellow tint. Everything about him seemed sunken, as if he was hollowing out from the inside, in stark opposition to that carefully crafted healthy character that he had played for Templesmith’s interview, that supposed new man. Whenever Finnick went over to visit - more and more reluctantly with every passing day, because those visits were never returned - Haymitch would be awake and he would be at home. He didn’t leave to go anywhere, not even to buy groceries, living off supremely unhealthy supplies of Capitol food that apparently Effie had been sending him for years - though Finnick had listened to that interview with Mrs. Mellark and knew for a fact that Haymitch had used to eat normally like anybody.
That was maybe the most disconcerting thing of all, seeing that Haymitch was losing even more weight by the day, when he’d already returned from rehab more slender than anybody had a right to be after that short a timeframe. Haymitch just wasn’t supposed to be slender, not in Finnick’s head.
His trademark wit was starting to suffer, too. There were moments when he just stared at Finnick until he caught up to what Finnick had said, his mind visibly trailing behind. He seemed to trail off in the middle of conversations, yawning constantly even when he was clasping cups of Capitol coffee that he didn’t like or bother to sweeten, if his grimaces were anything to go by. He was still taking showers, because he always smelled soapy and clean, but he seemed to be caring about his laundry less and less, and he definitely couldn’t be bothered to take care of his house.
Worried, Finnick called Effie and asked her to look up the effects of insomnia to understand what he was dealing with, since the Twelve Justice Building didn’t have anything resembling a well-stocked library. She got back to him within hours, and Finnick didn’t like her answer one bit. Hallucinations. Paranoia. Irritability. In some cases, heart problems and even death, especially when connected to this kind of rapid weight loss. Finnick vividly remembered Haymitch asleep on the couch in Mentor Central with a knife clutched in his hand and decided that a paranoid Haymitch Abernathy was exactly the last thing District Twelve needed to see.
He forgot to factor in that Effie Trinket being flighty didn’t mean she was stupid.
It was only a day after the conversation that he returned from his grocery shopping only to be stopped on his way past Haymitch’s by a loud, impatient rap against one of the windows from the inside of the house. When he looked around, the victor motioned for him to come in.
He found Haymitch waiting for him in his hallway with his arms crossed in front of his chest, as if forming a physical barrier between Finnick and the privacy of his life.
“So I just got a phone call by Trinket,” he said, face carefully schooled.
“Okay?” Finnick said, not making the connection, and waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Still he put the shopping bags down, leaning them against the wall between a heap of old shoes and a stash of books, both having gathered a layer dust so thick that he didn’t even disturb it.
“Apparently she’s very concerned,” Haymitch said with a slow-building hint of menace. “Because somebody was asking questions about lack of sleep, so this better not be me fucking up my duty to the Capitol to be healthy.”
That didn’t quite sound like Effie, but Finnick could immediately imagine it anyway - the escort chirping a mile a minute at Haymitch in concern about how he had to take his recovery seriously because it was a disease, and had he ever tried meditation techniques like everybody in the Capitol was doing for stress therapy this season and he had to call his therapist before it got worse. Just think of all your fans, now that they don’t have to be embarrassed about you anymore.
So Finnick groaned, giving Haymitch a look of chagrin. “I’m sorry,” he said, instinctually making it sound heartfelt as well as casual, because they both were killers, and Haymitch was angry. It automatically set a part of Finnick on edge, made him ready to deflect. “I didn’t think she’d figure out what I was asking for. I guess I’m just worried. And, I mean, yes, she’s Effie, but she probably is too.”
“Capitol being concerned about me is what got me in this mess in the first place, so I think I’ll pass this time,” Haymitch crisply replied. “And if the Capitol was stupid, we wouldn’t be here either.”
“Yes,” Finnick said, nodding immediately. “I know. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“It better not,” Haymitch said. “You want to live in this shithole of a district, that’s up to you. But I won’t let you fuck around with my life just because you’re here. None of your business what I do and don’t do when the cameras are off, as long as I’m sober meanwhile.”
Finnick shrugged. “I was worried,” he repeated in an appeasing tone.
His arms still crossed in front of his chest imperviously, Haymitch stiffened his jaw. “This isn’t me gearing up to get smashed, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
There was a strongly defensive edge to those words, and Finnick couldn’t help it; he sighed. “I know,” he said. “And honestly, that’s what I was so worried about, but different than you think, I guess? I mean, I can see that this…” He made a vague gesture, encompassing Haymitch’s house and the last couple of weeks and everything Haymitch had been saying and doing since he returned. It was as good a chance as any to bring it up, he supposed. “I guess I can see that it’s hard, staying sober in this situation? I just wish I could help. I mean, I got you into this. I want to help.”
“I think you’ve done quite enough,” Haymitch said.
The fact that he said it so calmly just meant that it felt even more like a slap, as if Finnick had been physically hit. Except a physical blow, he would automatically have blocked.
“Shit,” Finnick muttered, suddenly shaky, drawing a breath.
Haymitch was watching him unmoved, only the slightest tautness in the corner of his mouth betraying that he was probably sorry to have said it, yet still resolved in his anger. And Finnick got it, he really did. He had gotten Haymitch into this situation.
A wave of guilt about it had hit him, tasting foul, and Finnick fought to push it back. Haymitch, he reminded himself firmly, had been the one found with alcohol poisoning during Reaping Day, and that would have had consequences whether Finnick got involved or not.
Then he reminded himself that Haymitch wasn’t malicious, had never been malicious, not even when drunk - not before he’d stopped sleeping regularly for weeks and weeks on end.
So he pulled himself up. “I had to do something,” he informed Haymitch. “I wanted to know what I was even dealing with. Don’t think I’ll apologize for caring. I mean, I know you barely sleep. You’re not eating enough and when you do, it’s just this crappy…”
“Again, not me gearing up to get back into the bottle.”
“That isn’t all that matters,” Finnick replied, feeling pushed against the wall. “Maybe it isn’t going to make you drink, but it’s sure going to get you killed.”
There was a moment of silence when they just looked at each other, when that word echoed back at both of them and shattered.
Because death, for a victor, was rarely ever just a figure of speech. Not after they’d seen eyes glass over and blood stop spurting when heartbeats stuttered off. Death was death.
Not a muscle in Haymitch’s face was moving, but Finnick still understood that he’d hit the mark. That was it, what Haymitch was doing, whether he was aware of that fact or not - refusing to participate in life, choosing to just sit the rest of it out quietly and soberly, until it was done with, and slowly fade away in the hopes that nobody would notice before it was too late.
“Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Haymitch muttered eventually, looking away.
But he did. Of course, he did. Victors barely ever killed themselves, but often enough, they still refused to engage anymore, finding ways of disconnecting. Haymitch had made a choice to just go away when he took to the bottle, working around what he was and wasn’t allowed to do. Now that the alcohol was gone, he was reaching for a new, more permanent way of saying no. Not just to the Games. But to everything.
Finnick pressed his lips together.
“You’re not okay,” he said, his voice clipped, casting about for something, although he suddenly was having a terrible feeling that there was nothing he could ever say that would make Haymitch see his point. “You need to start sleeping and eating and you need to talk to someone…”
“Like talking to Effie fucking Trinket is going to…”
“… could be me, could be that sales woman from the Hob or anybody, I don’t even care,” Finnick spoke right over him. “You need to start getting a grip on all this. I can help. How about I start bringing you food…”
“I don’t need a maid…”
“…and I’ve been thinking about the insomnia issue, I mean, I don’t know how things work in Twelve. But I’m positive that we can order medicine through Effie. I know some of the victors in One and Two take sleeping pills, they have the escorts requisition them, too. Even mood stabilizers, although you and I probably shouldn’t experiment with…”
“Dammit Odair, you like servicing the Capitol so much that you have to play Avox for me now, too?”
The first part would have made him terribly angry if the second part hadn’t made it too bizarre for that, so he just stared at the other man for a second, disbelieving. He wondered if Haymitch was just too tired by this point to come up with anything better. It wasn’t like he’d ever before had problems coming up with retorts that hit where they hurt most, though usually those hadn’t been directed at victors he was friends with.
Finnick took a breath. “You need sleep,” he levelly said. “You need sleep, fluids and food. Then, we’ll see about the rest.”
“Supposedly I need to be sober, too, and look how well that’s working out.”
“And don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re losing way too much weight.”
At that, Haymitch snorted out an actual surprised laugh. “Good one,” he said, pointing a finger at Finnick. Not that it diffused any of the tension.
“I’m serious,” Finnick said softly. “You’re not even looking like yourself anymore.”
“And I’m sure all of Panem is rejoicing about that,” Haymitch said, as if he had decided to pour all his remaining resources into his verbal defenses. “Haven’t you been listening to how they all think that I suddenly look real peachy?” The change of pace was far more disturbing than his anger had been, more unhinged, and Finnick suddenly remembered - gossip channels showing close-ups of Haymitch’s waistline, analyzing how much weight he had gained since the last Games. Almost fuckable again, he could imagine Haymitch joking about it cynically, if he was more together than this. If all his walls were up.
It made Finnick swallow, hard and compulsively when the metal taste of adrenaline started gathering in his mouth, when that wave of discomforting feelings hit him about what he himself looked like, how people looked at him, how there was never a difference between being looked at and being touched.
It made him angry, in a terrible, helpless way, because he’d liked the way Haymitch had used to look, like nobody else ever did.
“And that would be the same people who think holding a Hunger Games is really fun and exciting,” he heard himself say derisively.
Haymitch was smirking at him, almost companionably, just for a moment.
“You think a little magic pill is gonna solve all of our problems, you’re misunderstanding something about life in Panem as such.”
“I think a good night of rest and a couple of bread rolls are going to solve some of your problems,” Finnick replied.
Haymitch sunk into himself a little then and yawned, wide and cracking. It reminded Finnick of how long he had been back home already, how long he’d been going on like that, how little energy had to be left in his body and mind to even have this conversation.
It again made him think that Haymitch was just going to keep fading and fading if things went on his way, until nothing was left of him. That scared him, for a dozen different reasons.
Haymitch yawned another time, so hard he seemed to sway.
“Nah,” the victor said, waving it off. “That’d just make it easier to see how many of them there are, and how you and I can’t do anything to change them.
“Now, Odair,” he continued, pulling himself up. “You stay out of my life in the future, and Trinket or any of her cronies better never hear about me from you again.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some coffee boiling in the kitchen.”
He just left Finnick standing there, turning and vanishing into the guts of his disorderly house. Still no trail of booze wafting after him, although Finnick suddenly had a bad feeling that everything would be better for Haymitch if one did. He’d been dealing better when he was that silly drunk from Twelve who everyone overlooked, the way he had wanted them to.
***
Autumn came early. Thick mists covered the darkened brushwork when Finnick left the house in the morning, running along the fence for distance, through Victor’s Village and then along the Seam, or towards the other direction past the grassland and hills of the mines, pebbles crushing under his shoes. Morning chill and coal dust sneaking underneath his clothes. One day, he thought he might cover the whole district in one run. No sandy beaches to exhaust himself on here, no Games school to help out in anymore, preparing to start teaching a class of his own. In Twelve, you could just run and run and eventually arrive back where you started.
Haymitch wasn’t talking to him whenever he could avoid it, holing up in his house; there wasn’t anything Finnick could do if he wouldn’t let him. The visits of the prostitutes had died down eventually after every desperate young woman of Twelve had assured herself that she wasn’t to Mr. Odair’s taste, either, and he wasn’t talking to anybody anymore but Mrs. Mellark, who hit her children, and Mr. Butterworth, the butcher, selling him fresh pork of his butchered pigs from under the counter rather than the frozen goods from Ten. Gale Hawthorne, counting his coins carefully. The mayor, nodding at him on the street. To District Twelve, he was Capitol, and at best, that meant money.
Still flooded with relief whenever he thought of home, of his family, of the looks of his brothers and parents and Mags’ searching eyes in his back, Finnick had started missing them, just talking to them, despite that. He was missing the thick taste of salt in the air, the way the ocean swallowed the humidity. He was missing the heat of the dog days of summer that just hadn’t ever properly hit Twelve. He was missing talking to people, other victors who got him, waving at Calina across the lawn, old Rory who had won some years after Mags, Clipper’s strange sense of humor that he’d never gotten, and Shania, who’d won thirty years before him and still beat him sometimes when they spared. He’d never felt so lonely.
He grew morbidly interested in Lyra’s life in Twelve, what it had been like for her, whether everybody had dragged their children away from her on the street as well with those suspicious looks. And what it had been like for Swagger March, why he had decided to quit, what tree he had chosen to hang himself. At the butcher’s, he caught the tail end of some gossip about a Seam woman found burnt and dead, tangled in the fence, where the Peacekeepers had had to cut her down, and nobody knew why she had done that. Or nobody knew why everybody in Twelve didn’t just do that.
It was a quiet time of year in Twelve, the months following the Games when the mourning of the tributes’ families reached its first quiet plateau, when the Four population would stop wearing black bracelets again. In Twelve, every death hurt everybody. Those were not nameless future corpses from another village. They were always friends from school and neighbors and cousins, everybody knit together by the tight connections of the Seam.
Finnick wanted to cry after he went into town one day and Peeta Mellark gave him a short shy smile from the other side of the street, the first greeting he had gotten in Twelve given freely, because Peeta, he was sure, somehow hadn’t been tainted by the business sense of his mother.
Then he came home one evening to find a boy waiting in front of his house, illuminated by Haymitch’s bright lights. He couldn’t be older than sixteen, mid-Reaping age, having spiked his thick dark hair with some home-made concoction, Reaping shirt starkly clean and shining white. He introduced himself as Owin, Owin Cagney of the Seam Cagneys, not the candlemaker Cagneys, and word was that Mr. Odair didn’t like the girls in the district. But Owin Cagney thought he just knew the thing that Mr. Odair would like instead. Mr. Odair could trust in his discretion.
Also, Owin had no diseases and absolutely wouldn’t steal.
His sass almost covered up the scent of fear clinging to him, fear and uncertainty about what the mechanics of what he had proposed would even be.
Finnick could still smell that fear when he was clutching the toilet, feeling like the heaving would just never stop, nor would the tears. His throat, his eyes were burning, and he couldn’t stop shaking, thinking he might pass out in here and just never be found.
He wished he could have asked Haymitch how he’d managed so long in this district before it cracked him up for good, but he had a feeling that this sharper, sober, sleep-deprived Haymitch would just have laughed at him harshly, and told him that he hadn’t.
***
Finnick still felt miserable the following day. He hadn’t slept well, confused dreams haunting him all night; his feet didn’t seem to want to move during his run. So he grabbed his spears, heading for the Meadow in the Seam. It was still early in the morning; first shift would be in the mines, the children in school. Richer folks would be busy doing groceries in town. The Seam was half empty, half asleep.
There was a majestic oak looming over the Meadow, older than Panem. Finnick used knives to drill into the trunk for markers, weighing the spears in his hands, each a different size and balance, and started to work on his aim, circling the target. The way he’d learned to exercise had been intrinsically connected to Games preparation. You couldn’t trust in the perfect weapon waiting for you in the arena. It might just not have been put there, like his trident hadn’t been, because he hadn’t been considered a serious enough contender. Or somebody else might snatch it first, maybe just so that you couldn’t have it.
Throwing spears didn’t require brains, not the way knife throwing did, where you had to calculate the number of half-turns of the blade. It did, however, require strength. Finnick didn’t have biceps like steel because they looked so pretty; he’d been taught how to be deadly from an early age.
He fired them off until his arm tired out. He kept at it until he felt a muscle cramping up in his shoulder, then continued, grimly reminding himself of how the Games didn’t wait for you to catch your breath. He tried picturing Snow’s puffy face instead of the bark, and that felt good. He pictured the tributes he’d killed and that was better. He pictured himself, and that was best of all.
When he returned to reality, breathing hard and sweat running down his neck, there was a girl sitting close by, on one of the big rocks growing out of the grass next to where he’d left his things.
Time had passed and the morning fogs had dispersed, but autumn chill still rang in the air, heavy and wet.
The girl had wrapped her arms around herself, her summer jacket not near warm enough. Seam kid with those grey eyes but with darker skin than most, she was skinny and tall for her age, as tall as an adult, but she couldn’t be older than twelve. Finnick, who’d been a tall child as well, thought her classmates probably teased her for her size. She looked at him defiantly when he stared at her, jerking his spears and knives out of the trunk without letting her out of his sight, dropping them in the grass next to his jacket and water bottle.
Somewhere in the Seam, there was a mother who’d have to fight a panic attack if she detected him this close to her child, assuming she was a good mother. In Four, this girl would have been a friend of Coral’s, and the two would have nagged at him to carry things for them, to show them a knot, to make it a braid.
“Don’t you have to be in school?” he asked, because there had to be a reason she had paused here to watch how he was pinning imaginary opponents like butterflies.
She was probably a little too young to gather how he, in actuality, was that pinned butterfly, even if he had tried to explain it to her.
The girl shrugged. “My teacher suspended me, so I had to leave,” she said, each word drawn out in that awkward way kids of that age group sometimes had. “She does that a lot. But it’s cool.” Again, a shrug. “They never teach us anything interesting.”
Finnick raised his eyebrow. “Interesting like throwing spears?”
She shrugged again, wringing her fingers together.
Well. Whatever. Finnick took a breath, trying to focus on how some of that tightness in his chest had cleared up at least a little, reminding himself of how that was good. His arm would thank him for the break for sure; he could just imagine what Mags would have to say about the stupidity of pulling something for that reason, no proper medic available anywhere.
Finnick dropped down into the moist grass next to the girl’s rock, leaning back onto his elbows and blinking straight into the cloudy sky. It might rain today, he thought, resigned. Maybe in this part of Panem, that clammy chilly air meant that it would rain.
“You’re Finnick Odair,” the girl said.
Finnick nodded. “That’s me. Call me Finnick.”
“You won the Games when I was a kid.”
“Mhm,” Finnick agreed, not in the mood to try any harder when it wouldn’t lead anywhere, anyway.
“You’ll take us away for the Hunger Games when we get reaped,” the girl informed him; in the corner of his eye, Finnick had seen that her eyes had never left him when he sat down, following his every move, abiding whatever the adults had told her about him. As if victors were dangerous animals, some dark threat that was real even if you didn’t have the full explanation of it.
“Well, yes,” he admitted after a moment. “But it’s not like I want to. It’s what you have to do if you win the Hunger Games, you have to take care of the tributes that come after you. Help them survive.” He gave her a glance, trying to figure her out. “What’s your name?”
Again the shrug, as if it didn’t quite matter. “Aleese,” she still said. “I’m gonna be Reaping age next Games. It’s my birthday next month.”
Ah.
“I’m gonna be taking a lot of tesserae right away,” she continued, sounding determined. “Because I’m the oldest. My little brother is sick. He needs a lot of herbs.” And after a moment, “His name is Haymitch.”
Finnick couldn’t stop himself from giving her an amused look. “Really?”
Aleese curled into herself in a defensive way. “He’s named after my uncle,” she mumbled. “It was my ma’s stupid idea. My ma always has stupid ideas, like when she tells me I need school for the mines. Like the mine’s not gonna kill me or anything. I call him Mitchy,” she added, even more defensively. “The other boys tell him people called Haymitch are all useless and drunks but I tell him people with that name survive the Hunger Games. I wouldn’t care if he was a useless drunk if he won and he’d get real medicine if he did.”
Finnick couldn’t help it; he laughed. “Good for you.”
Aleese pulled herself up, looking faintly satisfied. “But my ma says that the other Haymitch and you take children to the Hunger Games if they don’t behave in school, so it’s probably gonna be me.” She said it matter-of-factly.
He squinted at her. “What did you do to get suspended?”
“Oh. I punched this girl.” And there the shrug was again. “She had it coming, though.”
Wouldn’t that be nice if they got reaped by that standard, Finnick couldn’t help but wryly think. Twelve might actually stand a real chance if they sent all the bullies. That was sort of how they did it in Three, he knew for a fact. Children without the brains for academia were strongly encouraged to volunteer, earning their families a pension by doing so, scholarships for their siblings. Saving a valuable kid, getting rid of a spare. Three’s Chips said the smart kids insulted the big slow ones like that on the playground. “Just go die in the Games.”
“So you think the Reaping ball is rigged?” Finnick asked. He didn’t bother trying to find out why she’d hit the other kid - probably defending her brother’s honor, from how this conversation was going.
The girl suddenly looked peevish, and Finnick understood she’d been properly taught that there were things you didn’t ever say, not even outside where there probably weren’t any bugs. Especially not when you talked to the new victor that everybody gossiped about, but only in hushed voices when they thought the children didn’t hear.
“I hope they are,” she eventually muttered, preoccupied with her interlaced fingers. “Mitchy and Janna wouldn’t ever get reaped if they were.”
Then she carefully turned her eyes to look at the spears lying scattered between them in the grass. “Did you win your Games with spears?”
It occurred to Finnick that she would have been four when he won; if she hadn’t happened to catch a rerun, she wouldn’t know. And they didn’t show his Games a lot. He had enough screen time to remain in people’s minds without that, and a fourteen-year-old killer wasn’t fuckable for most. Nobody seemed to remember these days that he was a killer, or that he’d ever been a child, too young for anything.
“With a spear, I killed two,” he answered truthfully. You had no right keeping the Games away from children. “But later, my sponsors sent me a trident. That’s… it’s a little like a pitchfork?” At her blank look, he tried to draw a shape of it into the air. “Three prongs. A long shaft. It’s meant for fishing.” He hadn’t been the first Four to fight or even win with a trident - Calina, who’d taught his class in Games school, had been the first. He’d been singled out for the weapon by her, as close to a Career as a non-volunteer could get.
Aleese mulled that over for a moment. “What was it like?”
“What was what like?”
The trademark shrug was the first reply again. “Playing the Games?” she asked uncertainly, but Finnick had a sense he understood what she meant, anyway. It could be her up there soon - she needed to know what it was like. What it felt like, all the things on the television each year, but what it would be like if it was her.
Twelve was so small, all the children of Reaping age would fit into that town square during Reaping Day. It wasn’t like in Four, where Games school had mostly been a way of excelling at sports, before that terrible moment when his name was inexplicably drawn - like the danger of drowning in the ocean if you swam too far, a distant threat that happened to other people. In Twelve, the children had to be thinking about it all the time. Effie Trinket could call their name and they would have to leave their district; the Capitol would cheer while they died.
Frustration hit Finnick, grating and bone-deep, as if he’d been here for twenty years already like Haymitch. This district suffered. Everything was set up to take away any chance for their children to survive the Games. Inside the fence, there wasn’t even a forest to teach them basic survival skills. Nobody knew how to teach fighting, except for the victors, but nobody let their children get close to those.
Finnick took a deep breath, faintly tasting dry and bitter coal dust on his tongue. He thought back to his Games. He thought of those twenty-three excruciating days, of a pack of mostly Careers who’d all been three years his senior at least, of being starkly aware at every minute that they were only keeping him alive as long as Mags sent him bread for them to eat. Stay charming and get fed, she’d advised him, until you get a chance to kill them all. Except she was Mags and had softened that up.
“Well,” he said. What had it been like? “Well. I had made an alliance with the Career pack. But I was only fourteen. I knew they only kept me around because they thought I’d be an easy kill once the pack fell apart. The second kill on their list. That was my advantage. I knew I’d get that moment to make my move when they turned against each other.”
“Why second?” Aleese asked.
Finnick grimaced, the situation vividly unfolding in front of him as if it had happened only days before. He could still feel the oil from the vines on his fingers when he’d fashioned his nets. He still remembered what it had felt like to be a whole foot shorter and gangly. “Because each of them had somebody else they needed to kill first, see. Depending on their strategy. Katrin - from Seven - needed to take out Ophelia - from One - because Ophelia couldn’t stand her, and Katrin knew Ophelia would come for her first. Everybody wanted to get rid of Marco because he was the biggest and strongest, he’d even had an eleven training score. So they all thought, get rid of that person first, then kill Finnick. He’s an easy bonus kill. You’ll get more sponsors.”
“Well that was dumb. I mean, didn’t they ever see you fight or anything?” Apparently his workout routine had been properly impressive to her.
But that wasn’t the point. Finnick searched for a more comfortable position, growing more focused while he explained. He’d never had to do that, explain his Games, not even when he helped Calina train her trident students. Nobody ever asked, thinking it inappropriate and rude.
“Oh, sure. I’d piled up two kills right away, the two Nine tributes. But nobody had time to watch the others in the bloodbath. They got away from it agreeing that I’d killed one. And I’d fumbled through it a bit.” Life lesson learned - don’t expect your weapon to be balanced for your size.
“Then I don’t get why they even wanted to make an alliance with you.”
His smirk became grim. “Because I was a pretty child, Aleese. Everybody had been commenting on it during the training week. Their mentors had told them to keep me around, because the cameras would follow me a lot. More screen time means more sponsors. It was a dumb strategy for them, because they were screwed the moment the cameras started liking me too much. They should have taken me out right away. But they screwed up.”
It wasn’t right, Finnick thought, angry and miserable. How could he break down and cry when a Seam boy propositioned to him, but he could still sit here and discuss his Games with Aleese. Back in the Village, Haymitch wasn’t sleeping, and working so hard on not drinking, and his weird fear of the dark surely was arena related, too. Other victors had nightmares, forceful startle reflexes, they self-medicated against flashbacks and memories to fight what the Capitol refused to acknowledge was a traumatic experience. Finnick Odair, in comparison, mounted his trident on the wall across his bed so to remember all the best things in his life.
“But what was it like?” Aleese asked quietly.
“It was…” Finnick paused. “It was like nothing else,” he admitted, although he’d never said it aloud. “I always knew I would probably win. I knew I’d understood the way the Games was played. It felt… it felt that there was nothing I could do wrong if I just paid enough attention. That’s not how it works, I know. I could have been killed in my sleep or by a mutt. But it still felt like I was in charge. Every time I got a sponsor gift, I knew how I had earned that and what I needed to do to get more. I always knew what was going on in the other tributes’ heads and how I could be faster than them.”
He’d felt like a shark amongst baitfish, all twenty-three days of it, entirely in control of the arena - of the world. He’d known who he could best in a fight, who to get rid of safely by leaving them to kill each other. In that moment when the beautiful golden trident dropped out of the sky, that annihilator built for his hands, he had been filled by that wild power rush of knowing that everyone in this arena was dead. He’d kill everybody who was left, with that.
“Were you scared?”
“Yes,” Finnick nodded very firmly. “Everybody in there is always scared.”
One of the many big advantages of the Careers - always knowing you could make it, because so many had made it before. This year’s Apollinara from Two had been an aberration, Annie Cresta had been. Panic arose only if you knew there was nothing you could do.
Finnick had won his Games rightfully; not once had he thought back, like many other victors couldn’t resist doing, to single out the tributes who should have won in his place. There hadn’t been a one who’d have been smart and strong enough compared to him. And he hadn’t needed to do it with a ruse like Johanna, not by twisting the rules like Haymitch - he’d never even have known how to do that; his brain didn’t work like that. He’d played it exactly by the rules, not sparing a second to consider what it all meant, what it said about him that he knew how to do that. That had come later, when Snow had tasked him to do perfectly another thing. Give him a field and a firm set of rules, and he’d play.
Except in District Twelve, where he’d found his match. Everybody was playing the Games here, and Finnick didn’t even know how to fight back.
Then he paused, replaying that thought.
At fourteen, he would have supposed that there was no such thing, and he’d have been right. Mags - and any Four victor - would have told him that he was right.
“I don’t want to go in there just to die, if I’m reaped,” Aleese whispered next to him, as if telling him her biggest secret, when it was just the secret of so many children in so many districts.
Finnick pushed himself up, rolled over to rearrange himself on his belly, propped up on his arms. Able to look up to the girl sitting on her rock. Looking her over properly, like a tribute, like a future Career. She was so tall. Give her some more years, and she would even tower over most of the boys, like Finnick had despite his age. But she was starved, and her arms were skinny as sticks. Even if she managed more growth spurts without food, she’d still need to fill out.
“I know,” Finnick told her. “I didn’t want to die in there either. That’s why I trained for it ever since I was nine. I never had to take any tesserae, but I still couldn’t stop thinking that I should be prepared. Everybody said in Four that all the children always needed to be prepared. I slept better at night after a work-out, because I knew I was doing everything I could.” They’d said he wouldn’t have to ever fight again after his Games, but he didn’t think he’d ever be able to stop being prepared.
Aleese looked away. It was one thing to decide to take more tesserae so you could feed your siblings. It was another knowing that it got you so much closer to dying in the Games, before you’d ever have a chance to grow up and find out who you wanted to be.
“You know what I’d do?” Finnick asked her, not certain yet where he was going, but - District Twelve is an arena, too. What if Twelve was an arena, too? It’s got rules. It’s got traps. What would be a victory, in the arena of Twelve? Aleese shook her head, squinting at him. “If I was you, I’d start training for it, just in case. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t tell anybody about it, so nobody could think to stop me. You don’t have any weapons here, it’s true, but everything can be a weapon in the Games. I’d start running. Work on endurance and learn how to sprint. You’ve got great legs for running,” he told her, nodding at her endless skinny legs. “You can’t be killed if you run away fast enough, right? Then,” he pointed at her arm. “You pick a trunk and learn how to throw rocks at it, as hard as you can. As far as you can, too. Get bigger rocks, it’ll make you stronger. Work on your aim. Every arena has got rocks. You could try throwing knives, too. I know for a fact that a couple of people here know how. Ask one of the Hawthorne kids. Don’t tell them I told you to,” he added, and she smirked.
“And then if you ever get reaped, you’ll be able to run faster than anybody, and you’ll throw your rocks at the other tributes, and I’ll tell everybody that I trained you since you were eleven, so it’ll be like you’re a Career.”
“But you won’t have trained me,” Aleese pointed out, skeptical. “Telling me to throw rocks at trees isn’t training.”
Calina would disagree, Finnick thought immediately, feeling so much more alert than just minutes ago, as if the conversation had woken something up inside of him. As if this train of thought had. “Everything is training, Odair,” she’d have said. “Practicing that pretty smile of yours is fucking training.” Take what you can get and work with that and stop whining about how it is all so unfair.
He’d offer Aleese to throw some spears, but who was he kidding - somebody was bound to see and would certainly use that opportunity to end the silent treatment. And a single lesson at eleven wouldn’t do much but show her how much more training it would take, anyway. Better nobody ever learned they’d even talked; Aleese wouldn’t tell on him, he was reasonably sure, unlike Effie had. Pick your allies carefully, he thought, snorting to himself.
He resisted an urge to tell Aleese to pick more fights at school for practice.
With a little luck, she would think of that herself though.
“True, it isn’t training,” he said leisurely, because he wasn’t Calina and Aleese wasn’t him. “I just want to take the credit for your victory.”
Aleese’s lips twitched then and Finnick thought, maybe she’d die in the arena if she was reaped, two, three, four years from today. Maybe she wouldn’t.
What if Twelve was an arena, Finnick again thought, rolling around again to spread out on his back in the moist grass and stare at the clouds that were gathering with growing determination now. Definitely, rain was brewing in the air, and if he memorized the signs, he’d know it sooner the next time around. District Twelve was just like an arena.
There were two kinds of victors, Finnick knew. Bee or Raif would have been the one kind if they’d ever have made it, winning by avoiding dangers and by sheer dumb luck, winning because there was nobody else left in the end. Instead of them, Ten’s Tobin had won, by sheer chance just the same way. But people like Finnick and Johanna won because they played the field - because they forced a story, a story that required their survival. Mags had won like that, once upon a time, enchanting the audience with her sheer determination and her passion and her fiery red hair.
And Finnick hadn’t just done that the one time during his Games. He’d taken control of Flickerman’s show and his audience not once, but twice, at fourteen and then again this July. It had worked flawlessly each time.
That story hadn’t fully played out yet, was the thing. He’d been working the cameras ever since, alongside Haymitch, telling the Capitol a story of future success. But he needed to play that Games just the same way here in Twelve.
So maybe the district hated his guts. So what. So had the Career pack, despising him for the screen time he stole, but Finnick hadn’t needed them to like him to win. He didn’t need the Seam to fall in love with him to be content in this place. He neither needed it to make it as a mentor, save a child or two and fill the Village, nor to build a life.
Haymitch, he thought, almost immediately. What he needed was Haymitch, and if this was a Games, he wouldn’t give a fuck what Haymitch thought of that.
If this was a Games, Finnick asked the sky, then what’s my field?
He’d just have to beat the odds.
on to chapter 9
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 make their first appearance in Chapter 6. Kat, probably Chapter 11. Chaff is featured prominently as well.
Prologue -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7
Chapter 8: The Hunger Games Angle
Two weeks later, Finnick’s biggest problem wasn’t keeping Haymitch from drinking. Haymitch wasn’t drinking.
However, Haymitch also, apparently, wasn’t sleeping.
Or if he was doing so, he wasn’t doing it at night, and he definitely wasn’t doing it enough.
It soon became glaringly obvious that whatever issues the alcohol had served to neutralize, Haymitch didn’t have the first idea how to cope with them now that his old tool was out of commission.
Finnick had first noticed it one night days after Haymitch’s return, when he couldn’t manage to stay asleep himself, nodding off and waking up again with little starts, until he finally grew aware enough of his surroundings to realize that light was shining through the window onto his sheets, although all of Victors’ Village should have been covered in darkness.
It had originated from Haymitch’s house across the lawn, illuminated like a lighthouse, every single lamp turned on even in rooms Finnick was reasonably sure had once been furnished for Mrs. Abernathy and her youngest and weren’t in use. Haymitch had to have specifically made a round to turn them all on before the sun went down.
Too sleepy for full comprehension, Finnick had gazed at it for a while. Eventually, he had caught a glimpse of Haymitch through one of the windows, walking past an open door through a hallway, still very much dressed in the same grey shirt from the day before. His hair had been wet, curling in the nape of his neck. It occurred to Finnick that he’d caught Haymitch on his way back from a shower various times, even during previous summers in the Capitol; he took them religiously, and even made use of the subtler options of the opulent Capitol showers’ soap generators that most victors couldn’t be bothered to figure out.
Thinking it all a little unusual, Finnick had asked Haymitch about it the next morning when he paid him a visit after his morning run. He’d found the other victor in a new set of clothes and definitely still awake. Spooning jam out of a can with a Capitol logo on it without bothering to put it on bread first, he seemed to be determined to ignore the dark circles under his eyes. They hadn’t just appeared there this morning either, now that Finnick thought about it. They’d been there for almost as long as Haymitch had been back.
“So what’s with the light show last night?” he had asked, flopping down on a chair at the kitchen table and resting his feet on another. If Haymitch wasn’t going to care about keeping his house clean, Finnick wasn’t either. “That has to be eating up mad amounts of electricity.”
Haymitch shrugged. “Well, there was that one time they paid me lots of money for stabbing some children to death, so I think I’m gonna be covered for the bill.”
Finnick smirked, looking him over with sympathy. “Having trouble sleeping?”
He wouldn’t have found anything wrong with it, if Haymitch had admitted to a fear of the dark; you didn’t need that many lights in your house just to fend off nightmares. But they didn’t know each other all that well. He had a strong feeling that Haymitch wouldn’t have appreciated that insinuation. He’d already lost too much dignity and privacy to the Capitol for that. Both of those were in rare supply for a victor.
So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Haymitch said, with an edge, “I’m having trouble keeping people’s nose out of my business.” And Finnick had shrugged it off with no more than a grimace when he got up.
Fair enough, he had supposed.
But that was before he noticed the lights during the following night and the one after that, and again the one after that. All lamps burning brightly, chasing the darkness out of the house, and Haymitch wide awake through the night. There were some serious problems brewing on that front, loud and clear. Problems that would start boiling over if things continued in that vein. And it didn’t look like Haymitch was starting to get a grip on them on his own.
***
Eventually, Haymitch’s cheeks started taking a seriously unhealthy yellow tint. Everything about him seemed sunken, as if he was hollowing out from the inside, in stark opposition to that carefully crafted healthy character that he had played for Templesmith’s interview, that supposed new man. Whenever Finnick went over to visit - more and more reluctantly with every passing day, because those visits were never returned - Haymitch would be awake and he would be at home. He didn’t leave to go anywhere, not even to buy groceries, living off supremely unhealthy supplies of Capitol food that apparently Effie had been sending him for years - though Finnick had listened to that interview with Mrs. Mellark and knew for a fact that Haymitch had used to eat normally like anybody.
That was maybe the most disconcerting thing of all, seeing that Haymitch was losing even more weight by the day, when he’d already returned from rehab more slender than anybody had a right to be after that short a timeframe. Haymitch just wasn’t supposed to be slender, not in Finnick’s head.
His trademark wit was starting to suffer, too. There were moments when he just stared at Finnick until he caught up to what Finnick had said, his mind visibly trailing behind. He seemed to trail off in the middle of conversations, yawning constantly even when he was clasping cups of Capitol coffee that he didn’t like or bother to sweeten, if his grimaces were anything to go by. He was still taking showers, because he always smelled soapy and clean, but he seemed to be caring about his laundry less and less, and he definitely couldn’t be bothered to take care of his house.
Worried, Finnick called Effie and asked her to look up the effects of insomnia to understand what he was dealing with, since the Twelve Justice Building didn’t have anything resembling a well-stocked library. She got back to him within hours, and Finnick didn’t like her answer one bit. Hallucinations. Paranoia. Irritability. In some cases, heart problems and even death, especially when connected to this kind of rapid weight loss. Finnick vividly remembered Haymitch asleep on the couch in Mentor Central with a knife clutched in his hand and decided that a paranoid Haymitch Abernathy was exactly the last thing District Twelve needed to see.
He forgot to factor in that Effie Trinket being flighty didn’t mean she was stupid.
It was only a day after the conversation that he returned from his grocery shopping only to be stopped on his way past Haymitch’s by a loud, impatient rap against one of the windows from the inside of the house. When he looked around, the victor motioned for him to come in.
He found Haymitch waiting for him in his hallway with his arms crossed in front of his chest, as if forming a physical barrier between Finnick and the privacy of his life.
“So I just got a phone call by Trinket,” he said, face carefully schooled.
“Okay?” Finnick said, not making the connection, and waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Still he put the shopping bags down, leaning them against the wall between a heap of old shoes and a stash of books, both having gathered a layer dust so thick that he didn’t even disturb it.
“Apparently she’s very concerned,” Haymitch said with a slow-building hint of menace. “Because somebody was asking questions about lack of sleep, so this better not be me fucking up my duty to the Capitol to be healthy.”
That didn’t quite sound like Effie, but Finnick could immediately imagine it anyway - the escort chirping a mile a minute at Haymitch in concern about how he had to take his recovery seriously because it was a disease, and had he ever tried meditation techniques like everybody in the Capitol was doing for stress therapy this season and he had to call his therapist before it got worse. Just think of all your fans, now that they don’t have to be embarrassed about you anymore.
So Finnick groaned, giving Haymitch a look of chagrin. “I’m sorry,” he said, instinctually making it sound heartfelt as well as casual, because they both were killers, and Haymitch was angry. It automatically set a part of Finnick on edge, made him ready to deflect. “I didn’t think she’d figure out what I was asking for. I guess I’m just worried. And, I mean, yes, she’s Effie, but she probably is too.”
“Capitol being concerned about me is what got me in this mess in the first place, so I think I’ll pass this time,” Haymitch crisply replied. “And if the Capitol was stupid, we wouldn’t be here either.”
“Yes,” Finnick said, nodding immediately. “I know. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“It better not,” Haymitch said. “You want to live in this shithole of a district, that’s up to you. But I won’t let you fuck around with my life just because you’re here. None of your business what I do and don’t do when the cameras are off, as long as I’m sober meanwhile.”
Finnick shrugged. “I was worried,” he repeated in an appeasing tone.
His arms still crossed in front of his chest imperviously, Haymitch stiffened his jaw. “This isn’t me gearing up to get smashed, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
There was a strongly defensive edge to those words, and Finnick couldn’t help it; he sighed. “I know,” he said. “And honestly, that’s what I was so worried about, but different than you think, I guess? I mean, I can see that this…” He made a vague gesture, encompassing Haymitch’s house and the last couple of weeks and everything Haymitch had been saying and doing since he returned. It was as good a chance as any to bring it up, he supposed. “I guess I can see that it’s hard, staying sober in this situation? I just wish I could help. I mean, I got you into this. I want to help.”
“I think you’ve done quite enough,” Haymitch said.
The fact that he said it so calmly just meant that it felt even more like a slap, as if Finnick had been physically hit. Except a physical blow, he would automatically have blocked.
“Shit,” Finnick muttered, suddenly shaky, drawing a breath.
Haymitch was watching him unmoved, only the slightest tautness in the corner of his mouth betraying that he was probably sorry to have said it, yet still resolved in his anger. And Finnick got it, he really did. He had gotten Haymitch into this situation.
A wave of guilt about it had hit him, tasting foul, and Finnick fought to push it back. Haymitch, he reminded himself firmly, had been the one found with alcohol poisoning during Reaping Day, and that would have had consequences whether Finnick got involved or not.
Then he reminded himself that Haymitch wasn’t malicious, had never been malicious, not even when drunk - not before he’d stopped sleeping regularly for weeks and weeks on end.
So he pulled himself up. “I had to do something,” he informed Haymitch. “I wanted to know what I was even dealing with. Don’t think I’ll apologize for caring. I mean, I know you barely sleep. You’re not eating enough and when you do, it’s just this crappy…”
“Again, not me gearing up to get back into the bottle.”
“That isn’t all that matters,” Finnick replied, feeling pushed against the wall. “Maybe it isn’t going to make you drink, but it’s sure going to get you killed.”
There was a moment of silence when they just looked at each other, when that word echoed back at both of them and shattered.
Because death, for a victor, was rarely ever just a figure of speech. Not after they’d seen eyes glass over and blood stop spurting when heartbeats stuttered off. Death was death.
Not a muscle in Haymitch’s face was moving, but Finnick still understood that he’d hit the mark. That was it, what Haymitch was doing, whether he was aware of that fact or not - refusing to participate in life, choosing to just sit the rest of it out quietly and soberly, until it was done with, and slowly fade away in the hopes that nobody would notice before it was too late.
“Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Haymitch muttered eventually, looking away.
But he did. Of course, he did. Victors barely ever killed themselves, but often enough, they still refused to engage anymore, finding ways of disconnecting. Haymitch had made a choice to just go away when he took to the bottle, working around what he was and wasn’t allowed to do. Now that the alcohol was gone, he was reaching for a new, more permanent way of saying no. Not just to the Games. But to everything.
Finnick pressed his lips together.
“You’re not okay,” he said, his voice clipped, casting about for something, although he suddenly was having a terrible feeling that there was nothing he could ever say that would make Haymitch see his point. “You need to start sleeping and eating and you need to talk to someone…”
“Like talking to Effie fucking Trinket is going to…”
“… could be me, could be that sales woman from the Hob or anybody, I don’t even care,” Finnick spoke right over him. “You need to start getting a grip on all this. I can help. How about I start bringing you food…”
“I don’t need a maid…”
“…and I’ve been thinking about the insomnia issue, I mean, I don’t know how things work in Twelve. But I’m positive that we can order medicine through Effie. I know some of the victors in One and Two take sleeping pills, they have the escorts requisition them, too. Even mood stabilizers, although you and I probably shouldn’t experiment with…”
“Dammit Odair, you like servicing the Capitol so much that you have to play Avox for me now, too?”
The first part would have made him terribly angry if the second part hadn’t made it too bizarre for that, so he just stared at the other man for a second, disbelieving. He wondered if Haymitch was just too tired by this point to come up with anything better. It wasn’t like he’d ever before had problems coming up with retorts that hit where they hurt most, though usually those hadn’t been directed at victors he was friends with.
Finnick took a breath. “You need sleep,” he levelly said. “You need sleep, fluids and food. Then, we’ll see about the rest.”
“Supposedly I need to be sober, too, and look how well that’s working out.”
“And don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re losing way too much weight.”
At that, Haymitch snorted out an actual surprised laugh. “Good one,” he said, pointing a finger at Finnick. Not that it diffused any of the tension.
“I’m serious,” Finnick said softly. “You’re not even looking like yourself anymore.”
“And I’m sure all of Panem is rejoicing about that,” Haymitch said, as if he had decided to pour all his remaining resources into his verbal defenses. “Haven’t you been listening to how they all think that I suddenly look real peachy?” The change of pace was far more disturbing than his anger had been, more unhinged, and Finnick suddenly remembered - gossip channels showing close-ups of Haymitch’s waistline, analyzing how much weight he had gained since the last Games. Almost fuckable again, he could imagine Haymitch joking about it cynically, if he was more together than this. If all his walls were up.
It made Finnick swallow, hard and compulsively when the metal taste of adrenaline started gathering in his mouth, when that wave of discomforting feelings hit him about what he himself looked like, how people looked at him, how there was never a difference between being looked at and being touched.
It made him angry, in a terrible, helpless way, because he’d liked the way Haymitch had used to look, like nobody else ever did.
“And that would be the same people who think holding a Hunger Games is really fun and exciting,” he heard himself say derisively.
Haymitch was smirking at him, almost companionably, just for a moment.
“You think a little magic pill is gonna solve all of our problems, you’re misunderstanding something about life in Panem as such.”
“I think a good night of rest and a couple of bread rolls are going to solve some of your problems,” Finnick replied.
Haymitch sunk into himself a little then and yawned, wide and cracking. It reminded Finnick of how long he had been back home already, how long he’d been going on like that, how little energy had to be left in his body and mind to even have this conversation.
It again made him think that Haymitch was just going to keep fading and fading if things went on his way, until nothing was left of him. That scared him, for a dozen different reasons.
Haymitch yawned another time, so hard he seemed to sway.
“Nah,” the victor said, waving it off. “That’d just make it easier to see how many of them there are, and how you and I can’t do anything to change them.
“Now, Odair,” he continued, pulling himself up. “You stay out of my life in the future, and Trinket or any of her cronies better never hear about me from you again.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some coffee boiling in the kitchen.”
He just left Finnick standing there, turning and vanishing into the guts of his disorderly house. Still no trail of booze wafting after him, although Finnick suddenly had a bad feeling that everything would be better for Haymitch if one did. He’d been dealing better when he was that silly drunk from Twelve who everyone overlooked, the way he had wanted them to.
***
Autumn came early. Thick mists covered the darkened brushwork when Finnick left the house in the morning, running along the fence for distance, through Victor’s Village and then along the Seam, or towards the other direction past the grassland and hills of the mines, pebbles crushing under his shoes. Morning chill and coal dust sneaking underneath his clothes. One day, he thought he might cover the whole district in one run. No sandy beaches to exhaust himself on here, no Games school to help out in anymore, preparing to start teaching a class of his own. In Twelve, you could just run and run and eventually arrive back where you started.
Haymitch wasn’t talking to him whenever he could avoid it, holing up in his house; there wasn’t anything Finnick could do if he wouldn’t let him. The visits of the prostitutes had died down eventually after every desperate young woman of Twelve had assured herself that she wasn’t to Mr. Odair’s taste, either, and he wasn’t talking to anybody anymore but Mrs. Mellark, who hit her children, and Mr. Butterworth, the butcher, selling him fresh pork of his butchered pigs from under the counter rather than the frozen goods from Ten. Gale Hawthorne, counting his coins carefully. The mayor, nodding at him on the street. To District Twelve, he was Capitol, and at best, that meant money.
Still flooded with relief whenever he thought of home, of his family, of the looks of his brothers and parents and Mags’ searching eyes in his back, Finnick had started missing them, just talking to them, despite that. He was missing the thick taste of salt in the air, the way the ocean swallowed the humidity. He was missing the heat of the dog days of summer that just hadn’t ever properly hit Twelve. He was missing talking to people, other victors who got him, waving at Calina across the lawn, old Rory who had won some years after Mags, Clipper’s strange sense of humor that he’d never gotten, and Shania, who’d won thirty years before him and still beat him sometimes when they spared. He’d never felt so lonely.
He grew morbidly interested in Lyra’s life in Twelve, what it had been like for her, whether everybody had dragged their children away from her on the street as well with those suspicious looks. And what it had been like for Swagger March, why he had decided to quit, what tree he had chosen to hang himself. At the butcher’s, he caught the tail end of some gossip about a Seam woman found burnt and dead, tangled in the fence, where the Peacekeepers had had to cut her down, and nobody knew why she had done that. Or nobody knew why everybody in Twelve didn’t just do that.
It was a quiet time of year in Twelve, the months following the Games when the mourning of the tributes’ families reached its first quiet plateau, when the Four population would stop wearing black bracelets again. In Twelve, every death hurt everybody. Those were not nameless future corpses from another village. They were always friends from school and neighbors and cousins, everybody knit together by the tight connections of the Seam.
Finnick wanted to cry after he went into town one day and Peeta Mellark gave him a short shy smile from the other side of the street, the first greeting he had gotten in Twelve given freely, because Peeta, he was sure, somehow hadn’t been tainted by the business sense of his mother.
Then he came home one evening to find a boy waiting in front of his house, illuminated by Haymitch’s bright lights. He couldn’t be older than sixteen, mid-Reaping age, having spiked his thick dark hair with some home-made concoction, Reaping shirt starkly clean and shining white. He introduced himself as Owin, Owin Cagney of the Seam Cagneys, not the candlemaker Cagneys, and word was that Mr. Odair didn’t like the girls in the district. But Owin Cagney thought he just knew the thing that Mr. Odair would like instead. Mr. Odair could trust in his discretion.
Also, Owin had no diseases and absolutely wouldn’t steal.
His sass almost covered up the scent of fear clinging to him, fear and uncertainty about what the mechanics of what he had proposed would even be.
Finnick could still smell that fear when he was clutching the toilet, feeling like the heaving would just never stop, nor would the tears. His throat, his eyes were burning, and he couldn’t stop shaking, thinking he might pass out in here and just never be found.
He wished he could have asked Haymitch how he’d managed so long in this district before it cracked him up for good, but he had a feeling that this sharper, sober, sleep-deprived Haymitch would just have laughed at him harshly, and told him that he hadn’t.
***
Finnick still felt miserable the following day. He hadn’t slept well, confused dreams haunting him all night; his feet didn’t seem to want to move during his run. So he grabbed his spears, heading for the Meadow in the Seam. It was still early in the morning; first shift would be in the mines, the children in school. Richer folks would be busy doing groceries in town. The Seam was half empty, half asleep.
There was a majestic oak looming over the Meadow, older than Panem. Finnick used knives to drill into the trunk for markers, weighing the spears in his hands, each a different size and balance, and started to work on his aim, circling the target. The way he’d learned to exercise had been intrinsically connected to Games preparation. You couldn’t trust in the perfect weapon waiting for you in the arena. It might just not have been put there, like his trident hadn’t been, because he hadn’t been considered a serious enough contender. Or somebody else might snatch it first, maybe just so that you couldn’t have it.
Throwing spears didn’t require brains, not the way knife throwing did, where you had to calculate the number of half-turns of the blade. It did, however, require strength. Finnick didn’t have biceps like steel because they looked so pretty; he’d been taught how to be deadly from an early age.
He fired them off until his arm tired out. He kept at it until he felt a muscle cramping up in his shoulder, then continued, grimly reminding himself of how the Games didn’t wait for you to catch your breath. He tried picturing Snow’s puffy face instead of the bark, and that felt good. He pictured the tributes he’d killed and that was better. He pictured himself, and that was best of all.
When he returned to reality, breathing hard and sweat running down his neck, there was a girl sitting close by, on one of the big rocks growing out of the grass next to where he’d left his things.
Time had passed and the morning fogs had dispersed, but autumn chill still rang in the air, heavy and wet.
The girl had wrapped her arms around herself, her summer jacket not near warm enough. Seam kid with those grey eyes but with darker skin than most, she was skinny and tall for her age, as tall as an adult, but she couldn’t be older than twelve. Finnick, who’d been a tall child as well, thought her classmates probably teased her for her size. She looked at him defiantly when he stared at her, jerking his spears and knives out of the trunk without letting her out of his sight, dropping them in the grass next to his jacket and water bottle.
Somewhere in the Seam, there was a mother who’d have to fight a panic attack if she detected him this close to her child, assuming she was a good mother. In Four, this girl would have been a friend of Coral’s, and the two would have nagged at him to carry things for them, to show them a knot, to make it a braid.
“Don’t you have to be in school?” he asked, because there had to be a reason she had paused here to watch how he was pinning imaginary opponents like butterflies.
She was probably a little too young to gather how he, in actuality, was that pinned butterfly, even if he had tried to explain it to her.
The girl shrugged. “My teacher suspended me, so I had to leave,” she said, each word drawn out in that awkward way kids of that age group sometimes had. “She does that a lot. But it’s cool.” Again, a shrug. “They never teach us anything interesting.”
Finnick raised his eyebrow. “Interesting like throwing spears?”
She shrugged again, wringing her fingers together.
Well. Whatever. Finnick took a breath, trying to focus on how some of that tightness in his chest had cleared up at least a little, reminding himself of how that was good. His arm would thank him for the break for sure; he could just imagine what Mags would have to say about the stupidity of pulling something for that reason, no proper medic available anywhere.
Finnick dropped down into the moist grass next to the girl’s rock, leaning back onto his elbows and blinking straight into the cloudy sky. It might rain today, he thought, resigned. Maybe in this part of Panem, that clammy chilly air meant that it would rain.
“You’re Finnick Odair,” the girl said.
Finnick nodded. “That’s me. Call me Finnick.”
“You won the Games when I was a kid.”
“Mhm,” Finnick agreed, not in the mood to try any harder when it wouldn’t lead anywhere, anyway.
“You’ll take us away for the Hunger Games when we get reaped,” the girl informed him; in the corner of his eye, Finnick had seen that her eyes had never left him when he sat down, following his every move, abiding whatever the adults had told her about him. As if victors were dangerous animals, some dark threat that was real even if you didn’t have the full explanation of it.
“Well, yes,” he admitted after a moment. “But it’s not like I want to. It’s what you have to do if you win the Hunger Games, you have to take care of the tributes that come after you. Help them survive.” He gave her a glance, trying to figure her out. “What’s your name?”
Again the shrug, as if it didn’t quite matter. “Aleese,” she still said. “I’m gonna be Reaping age next Games. It’s my birthday next month.”
Ah.
“I’m gonna be taking a lot of tesserae right away,” she continued, sounding determined. “Because I’m the oldest. My little brother is sick. He needs a lot of herbs.” And after a moment, “His name is Haymitch.”
Finnick couldn’t stop himself from giving her an amused look. “Really?”
Aleese curled into herself in a defensive way. “He’s named after my uncle,” she mumbled. “It was my ma’s stupid idea. My ma always has stupid ideas, like when she tells me I need school for the mines. Like the mine’s not gonna kill me or anything. I call him Mitchy,” she added, even more defensively. “The other boys tell him people called Haymitch are all useless and drunks but I tell him people with that name survive the Hunger Games. I wouldn’t care if he was a useless drunk if he won and he’d get real medicine if he did.”
Finnick couldn’t help it; he laughed. “Good for you.”
Aleese pulled herself up, looking faintly satisfied. “But my ma says that the other Haymitch and you take children to the Hunger Games if they don’t behave in school, so it’s probably gonna be me.” She said it matter-of-factly.
He squinted at her. “What did you do to get suspended?”
“Oh. I punched this girl.” And there the shrug was again. “She had it coming, though.”
Wouldn’t that be nice if they got reaped by that standard, Finnick couldn’t help but wryly think. Twelve might actually stand a real chance if they sent all the bullies. That was sort of how they did it in Three, he knew for a fact. Children without the brains for academia were strongly encouraged to volunteer, earning their families a pension by doing so, scholarships for their siblings. Saving a valuable kid, getting rid of a spare. Three’s Chips said the smart kids insulted the big slow ones like that on the playground. “Just go die in the Games.”
“So you think the Reaping ball is rigged?” Finnick asked. He didn’t bother trying to find out why she’d hit the other kid - probably defending her brother’s honor, from how this conversation was going.
The girl suddenly looked peevish, and Finnick understood she’d been properly taught that there were things you didn’t ever say, not even outside where there probably weren’t any bugs. Especially not when you talked to the new victor that everybody gossiped about, but only in hushed voices when they thought the children didn’t hear.
“I hope they are,” she eventually muttered, preoccupied with her interlaced fingers. “Mitchy and Janna wouldn’t ever get reaped if they were.”
Then she carefully turned her eyes to look at the spears lying scattered between them in the grass. “Did you win your Games with spears?”
It occurred to Finnick that she would have been four when he won; if she hadn’t happened to catch a rerun, she wouldn’t know. And they didn’t show his Games a lot. He had enough screen time to remain in people’s minds without that, and a fourteen-year-old killer wasn’t fuckable for most. Nobody seemed to remember these days that he was a killer, or that he’d ever been a child, too young for anything.
“With a spear, I killed two,” he answered truthfully. You had no right keeping the Games away from children. “But later, my sponsors sent me a trident. That’s… it’s a little like a pitchfork?” At her blank look, he tried to draw a shape of it into the air. “Three prongs. A long shaft. It’s meant for fishing.” He hadn’t been the first Four to fight or even win with a trident - Calina, who’d taught his class in Games school, had been the first. He’d been singled out for the weapon by her, as close to a Career as a non-volunteer could get.
Aleese mulled that over for a moment. “What was it like?”
“What was what like?”
The trademark shrug was the first reply again. “Playing the Games?” she asked uncertainly, but Finnick had a sense he understood what she meant, anyway. It could be her up there soon - she needed to know what it was like. What it felt like, all the things on the television each year, but what it would be like if it was her.
Twelve was so small, all the children of Reaping age would fit into that town square during Reaping Day. It wasn’t like in Four, where Games school had mostly been a way of excelling at sports, before that terrible moment when his name was inexplicably drawn - like the danger of drowning in the ocean if you swam too far, a distant threat that happened to other people. In Twelve, the children had to be thinking about it all the time. Effie Trinket could call their name and they would have to leave their district; the Capitol would cheer while they died.
Frustration hit Finnick, grating and bone-deep, as if he’d been here for twenty years already like Haymitch. This district suffered. Everything was set up to take away any chance for their children to survive the Games. Inside the fence, there wasn’t even a forest to teach them basic survival skills. Nobody knew how to teach fighting, except for the victors, but nobody let their children get close to those.
Finnick took a deep breath, faintly tasting dry and bitter coal dust on his tongue. He thought back to his Games. He thought of those twenty-three excruciating days, of a pack of mostly Careers who’d all been three years his senior at least, of being starkly aware at every minute that they were only keeping him alive as long as Mags sent him bread for them to eat. Stay charming and get fed, she’d advised him, until you get a chance to kill them all. Except she was Mags and had softened that up.
“Well,” he said. What had it been like? “Well. I had made an alliance with the Career pack. But I was only fourteen. I knew they only kept me around because they thought I’d be an easy kill once the pack fell apart. The second kill on their list. That was my advantage. I knew I’d get that moment to make my move when they turned against each other.”
“Why second?” Aleese asked.
Finnick grimaced, the situation vividly unfolding in front of him as if it had happened only days before. He could still feel the oil from the vines on his fingers when he’d fashioned his nets. He still remembered what it had felt like to be a whole foot shorter and gangly. “Because each of them had somebody else they needed to kill first, see. Depending on their strategy. Katrin - from Seven - needed to take out Ophelia - from One - because Ophelia couldn’t stand her, and Katrin knew Ophelia would come for her first. Everybody wanted to get rid of Marco because he was the biggest and strongest, he’d even had an eleven training score. So they all thought, get rid of that person first, then kill Finnick. He’s an easy bonus kill. You’ll get more sponsors.”
“Well that was dumb. I mean, didn’t they ever see you fight or anything?” Apparently his workout routine had been properly impressive to her.
But that wasn’t the point. Finnick searched for a more comfortable position, growing more focused while he explained. He’d never had to do that, explain his Games, not even when he helped Calina train her trident students. Nobody ever asked, thinking it inappropriate and rude.
“Oh, sure. I’d piled up two kills right away, the two Nine tributes. But nobody had time to watch the others in the bloodbath. They got away from it agreeing that I’d killed one. And I’d fumbled through it a bit.” Life lesson learned - don’t expect your weapon to be balanced for your size.
“Then I don’t get why they even wanted to make an alliance with you.”
His smirk became grim. “Because I was a pretty child, Aleese. Everybody had been commenting on it during the training week. Their mentors had told them to keep me around, because the cameras would follow me a lot. More screen time means more sponsors. It was a dumb strategy for them, because they were screwed the moment the cameras started liking me too much. They should have taken me out right away. But they screwed up.”
It wasn’t right, Finnick thought, angry and miserable. How could he break down and cry when a Seam boy propositioned to him, but he could still sit here and discuss his Games with Aleese. Back in the Village, Haymitch wasn’t sleeping, and working so hard on not drinking, and his weird fear of the dark surely was arena related, too. Other victors had nightmares, forceful startle reflexes, they self-medicated against flashbacks and memories to fight what the Capitol refused to acknowledge was a traumatic experience. Finnick Odair, in comparison, mounted his trident on the wall across his bed so to remember all the best things in his life.
“But what was it like?” Aleese asked quietly.
“It was…” Finnick paused. “It was like nothing else,” he admitted, although he’d never said it aloud. “I always knew I would probably win. I knew I’d understood the way the Games was played. It felt… it felt that there was nothing I could do wrong if I just paid enough attention. That’s not how it works, I know. I could have been killed in my sleep or by a mutt. But it still felt like I was in charge. Every time I got a sponsor gift, I knew how I had earned that and what I needed to do to get more. I always knew what was going on in the other tributes’ heads and how I could be faster than them.”
He’d felt like a shark amongst baitfish, all twenty-three days of it, entirely in control of the arena - of the world. He’d known who he could best in a fight, who to get rid of safely by leaving them to kill each other. In that moment when the beautiful golden trident dropped out of the sky, that annihilator built for his hands, he had been filled by that wild power rush of knowing that everyone in this arena was dead. He’d kill everybody who was left, with that.
“Were you scared?”
“Yes,” Finnick nodded very firmly. “Everybody in there is always scared.”
One of the many big advantages of the Careers - always knowing you could make it, because so many had made it before. This year’s Apollinara from Two had been an aberration, Annie Cresta had been. Panic arose only if you knew there was nothing you could do.
Finnick had won his Games rightfully; not once had he thought back, like many other victors couldn’t resist doing, to single out the tributes who should have won in his place. There hadn’t been a one who’d have been smart and strong enough compared to him. And he hadn’t needed to do it with a ruse like Johanna, not by twisting the rules like Haymitch - he’d never even have known how to do that; his brain didn’t work like that. He’d played it exactly by the rules, not sparing a second to consider what it all meant, what it said about him that he knew how to do that. That had come later, when Snow had tasked him to do perfectly another thing. Give him a field and a firm set of rules, and he’d play.
Except in District Twelve, where he’d found his match. Everybody was playing the Games here, and Finnick didn’t even know how to fight back.
Then he paused, replaying that thought.
At fourteen, he would have supposed that there was no such thing, and he’d have been right. Mags - and any Four victor - would have told him that he was right.
“I don’t want to go in there just to die, if I’m reaped,” Aleese whispered next to him, as if telling him her biggest secret, when it was just the secret of so many children in so many districts.
Finnick pushed himself up, rolled over to rearrange himself on his belly, propped up on his arms. Able to look up to the girl sitting on her rock. Looking her over properly, like a tribute, like a future Career. She was so tall. Give her some more years, and she would even tower over most of the boys, like Finnick had despite his age. But she was starved, and her arms were skinny as sticks. Even if she managed more growth spurts without food, she’d still need to fill out.
“I know,” Finnick told her. “I didn’t want to die in there either. That’s why I trained for it ever since I was nine. I never had to take any tesserae, but I still couldn’t stop thinking that I should be prepared. Everybody said in Four that all the children always needed to be prepared. I slept better at night after a work-out, because I knew I was doing everything I could.” They’d said he wouldn’t have to ever fight again after his Games, but he didn’t think he’d ever be able to stop being prepared.
Aleese looked away. It was one thing to decide to take more tesserae so you could feed your siblings. It was another knowing that it got you so much closer to dying in the Games, before you’d ever have a chance to grow up and find out who you wanted to be.
“You know what I’d do?” Finnick asked her, not certain yet where he was going, but - District Twelve is an arena, too. What if Twelve was an arena, too? It’s got rules. It’s got traps. What would be a victory, in the arena of Twelve? Aleese shook her head, squinting at him. “If I was you, I’d start training for it, just in case. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t tell anybody about it, so nobody could think to stop me. You don’t have any weapons here, it’s true, but everything can be a weapon in the Games. I’d start running. Work on endurance and learn how to sprint. You’ve got great legs for running,” he told her, nodding at her endless skinny legs. “You can’t be killed if you run away fast enough, right? Then,” he pointed at her arm. “You pick a trunk and learn how to throw rocks at it, as hard as you can. As far as you can, too. Get bigger rocks, it’ll make you stronger. Work on your aim. Every arena has got rocks. You could try throwing knives, too. I know for a fact that a couple of people here know how. Ask one of the Hawthorne kids. Don’t tell them I told you to,” he added, and she smirked.
“And then if you ever get reaped, you’ll be able to run faster than anybody, and you’ll throw your rocks at the other tributes, and I’ll tell everybody that I trained you since you were eleven, so it’ll be like you’re a Career.”
“But you won’t have trained me,” Aleese pointed out, skeptical. “Telling me to throw rocks at trees isn’t training.”
Calina would disagree, Finnick thought immediately, feeling so much more alert than just minutes ago, as if the conversation had woken something up inside of him. As if this train of thought had. “Everything is training, Odair,” she’d have said. “Practicing that pretty smile of yours is fucking training.” Take what you can get and work with that and stop whining about how it is all so unfair.
He’d offer Aleese to throw some spears, but who was he kidding - somebody was bound to see and would certainly use that opportunity to end the silent treatment. And a single lesson at eleven wouldn’t do much but show her how much more training it would take, anyway. Better nobody ever learned they’d even talked; Aleese wouldn’t tell on him, he was reasonably sure, unlike Effie had. Pick your allies carefully, he thought, snorting to himself.
He resisted an urge to tell Aleese to pick more fights at school for practice.
With a little luck, she would think of that herself though.
“True, it isn’t training,” he said leisurely, because he wasn’t Calina and Aleese wasn’t him. “I just want to take the credit for your victory.”
Aleese’s lips twitched then and Finnick thought, maybe she’d die in the arena if she was reaped, two, three, four years from today. Maybe she wouldn’t.
What if Twelve was an arena, Finnick again thought, rolling around again to spread out on his back in the moist grass and stare at the clouds that were gathering with growing determination now. Definitely, rain was brewing in the air, and if he memorized the signs, he’d know it sooner the next time around. District Twelve was just like an arena.
There were two kinds of victors, Finnick knew. Bee or Raif would have been the one kind if they’d ever have made it, winning by avoiding dangers and by sheer dumb luck, winning because there was nobody else left in the end. Instead of them, Ten’s Tobin had won, by sheer chance just the same way. But people like Finnick and Johanna won because they played the field - because they forced a story, a story that required their survival. Mags had won like that, once upon a time, enchanting the audience with her sheer determination and her passion and her fiery red hair.
And Finnick hadn’t just done that the one time during his Games. He’d taken control of Flickerman’s show and his audience not once, but twice, at fourteen and then again this July. It had worked flawlessly each time.
That story hadn’t fully played out yet, was the thing. He’d been working the cameras ever since, alongside Haymitch, telling the Capitol a story of future success. But he needed to play that Games just the same way here in Twelve.
So maybe the district hated his guts. So what. So had the Career pack, despising him for the screen time he stole, but Finnick hadn’t needed them to like him to win. He didn’t need the Seam to fall in love with him to be content in this place. He neither needed it to make it as a mentor, save a child or two and fill the Village, nor to build a life.
Haymitch, he thought, almost immediately. What he needed was Haymitch, and if this was a Games, he wouldn’t give a fuck what Haymitch thought of that.
If this was a Games, Finnick asked the sky, then what’s my field?
He’d just have to beat the odds.
on to chapter 9