THG fic: "Spin Control" [16/23]
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.
Prologue -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7 -- Chapter 8 -- Chapter 9 -- Chapter 10 -- Chapter 11 -- Chapter 12 -- Chapter 13 -- Chapter 14 -- Chapter 15
Fic on AO3
Chapter 16: Capitol Reprise
“Good to have you back, man,” Chaff said, clapping Haymitch on the back before he took the seat at his console. It seemed like a light-hearted gesture, but nothing was ever light-hearted on Day One of the Games, and Chaff’s hand lingered a little too long, gripped a little too tight. “Nothing exciting ever happens when you aren’t here to puke in company. No offense,” he added, leaning over to smirk at Finnick.
“None taken,” Finnick chimed back, getting his side of the Twelve console online, while in the corner of his eye, Haymitch glanced at Chaff.
“Got started early with the liquor, did you?” he asked with a strange kind of uncertainty in his voice. The stench of Chaff’s alcohol breath was so strong that it even reached Finnick, who felt Haymitch stiffening uncomfortably next to him, as if stopping himself from leaning away. The motion made Finnick look up in sudden concern.
Chaff raised his eyebrows. “And that’s new how?”
Haymitch gave him a tense shrug. “Never noticed before,” he muttered without looking at his friend and reached for his headset.
When Finnick flashed a look at his face, he was busy logging in on his console in that careful way that most of them had, of people who hadn’t grown up with computers, pointedly focused.
“You ready?” he said in a low voice, wondering if it would be too awkward to offer changing seats; Haymitch had always sat next to Eleven, and of course, Chaff was his friend.
“No,” Haymitch replied, exhaling a small breath. “Here’s hoping it’ll be quick.”
Nodding at that, Finnick refocused on the task at hand. The bloodbath would be on in five, the tributes long seen off to the secret location of this year’s arena, and he couldn’t say he disagreed with the sentiment. It had been a long Training Week, another client every night for him. So Haymitch had mostly handled their tributes on his own although he wasn’t supposed to have to do that, not if anybody in the Capitol really gave a shit. He’d also waded through a sea of reporters who cared none about their kids, but wanted to know everything about his struggle with addiction. Finnick didn’t know what drained the other man more - prostituting his personal life in this new way or coaching his tributes with a marketing plan in mind that already planned for their probable deaths. And Finnick tried hard to not think of Caramel at that, one soul who’d apparently already fallen through a marketing strategy’s gaps. He’d spent all week trying not to think of Caramel.
“I told her not to cry when she goes down,” Haymitch had said to Finnick just yesterday, after Aster had asked him in her strange, disconnected way what would help Twelve most, apart from victory. Victory, she’d derisively said as if it didn’t concern her as a person, was out of question anyway. It figured, Finnick had tiredly thought, now that they’d unexpectedly gotten a tribute with the smarts to strategize, that that tribute would be some sort of sociopath. She was just strange, impossible to read. “Make a splash. Be extraordinary. Make them remember you long after you’re dead, and don’t beg or cry when you die. That’s what I said.”
Finnick looked up at his screen, where their boy, Rodey Wills was waiting in his tube, ashen, trying so hard not to shake. Underfed, of course, not at all looking thirteen. They’d be incredibly lucky, if that boy made it through his first night. It was hard to even look at him; he was just a scared kid who’d soaked everything they’d told him up out of sheer desperation, without any of the brains or maturity to do anything with the information.
Then the anthem sounded and the lights were dimmed, and Finnick stopped himself from reaching for Haymitch’s hand and squeezing it when Templesmith’s voice started booming through Central with the countdown, although chances were that nobody would have noticed that he did it. Everybody’s eyes were on the main screen, the camera following the Ten male, as the predecessor of last year’s victor, racing up his tube, then panning out to encompass all of the grounds.
The arena looked… very much like a garbage dump.
Finnick wasn’t the only one in Mentor Central who exclaimed a sound of disgust at the sheer implications of that, the bacteria and the mutts; the Gamesmakers remained ever creative.
The Cornucopia was towering on a pile of what appeared to be rusty parts of dismantled cars. The tributes were perched on smaller, ramshackle metal piles, and everything around them looked like a swamp of tattered garbage bags and steaming rot and rotten food, swimming in a greasy substance, browns and yellows and greys. The camera moved on greedily to display it all, and Finnick could perfectly picture the delightedly repulsed “Eww!” running through the Capitol this second.
There were small lakes between the hilly piles that looked deep, but no telling if any water would be drinkable. Little fires were burning here and there like baby geysers, emanating green and blue flames. Every now and then, there was movement, something slithering and wet, hopefully edible, probably snakes. The stench had to be unbearable; the small girl from Three had started heaving the moment she’d emerged.
“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Chaff exclaimed.
“Thought you’d been complaining that the lakes and forests favor Four and Seven,” Haymitch wryly said, though his hand had grabbed the armrest of his chair.
“While the trash arena’s gonna favor my district how?” Chaff sounded like his friend had lost his mind.
Haymitch broke into a slightly unhinged laugh.
Chaff abruptly got up.
“Getting a drink,” he announced, while Templesmith was reaching “twenty, nineteen.” He pointed his finger at Seeder. “I figure he should make it for ten minutes, but holler if he, you know, is backstabbed by a sewage monster and dies.” And off he’d gone, not swaying in the slightest despite his apparent blood alcohol level. Finnick wondered if he just couldn’t bear to see.
Forcing his eyes away from the other victor, he said, “They’re going to catch diseases in there.” Worriedly, he started scanning the field for real, the breeding ground of diseases that it had to be. He didn’t know much about that, Effie would have to research it for them. He thought that most bacteria and parasites could probably wait until whoever won had made it out of the arena, but if anything in there infected an open wound, that tribute likely wouldn’t survive.
Haymitch nodded abruptly, focusing on the screen, outwardly calm now. “Let’s see what the food and water situation’s like before we start prioritizing.”
Rodey was trembling like a leaf, dark skin almost yellow from nerves, and Finnick was suddenly scared that he’d freeze at the go. Some kids snapped out of it and grew stronger for the experience, but Rodey was just shaking now, eyes white from panic. “Seven,” Templesmith was counting, “Six.”
“Good girl, that’s it, check for the mutts,” Haymitch was muttering at Aster, whose face was as infuriatingly detached as it had been at her interview, but whose eyes were fixed on the swamp now, scanning for movement underneath.
Then the gong went off, Templesmith announced the launch of the 73rd Hunger Games of Panem, and the first of the Careers had already armed themselves with metal rods and shards from the trash on their way to the Cornucopia, heavy boots sinking deeply into the slurry.
Aster was off, inexpertly jumping from heap to heap but avoiding the soft dirt, and since nobody knew how to move fast in the waste, everybody focused on themselves instead of her while she scrambled away.
“No, no, don’t do that, don’t do that to me,” Finnick was whispering, because Rodey really was just standing there, eyes wildly scanning the struggling and screaming children. He wasn’t even checking behind himself, in the direction he was supposed to run, and that would just be worse, if he didn’t just die on the platform but actually ran along with the other kids into the fight because he couldn’t think.
“Breathe.” Haymitch’s hand was on his shoulder, digging in too hard.
The male and female from Two were running the show at the Cornucopia; there was no ounce of creativity in their clubs bashing in heads and their hands grabbing the screaming smallest ones.
Johanna’s boy was down when the One male broke his neck, and the Four’s male Career was trying to reach the Three female for that easy kill but the Two female beat him to it, punching her down and suffocating her in the mud.
Then Finnick could hear Seeder clucking her tongue, at the edge of his awareness, and yeah, that was the Eleven male down, simultaneously pierced by the spear of Mags’ girl and the throwing star of the One female, who had defiantly wiped her dirty hand across her cheek as if to say she didn’t care about diminishing her beauty for a Games.
The scream of the dying boy so close to him seemed to shake Rodey awake, who suddenly was looking around with wide open eyes and then sucked in a breath, scrambling off his pile, stumbling on his way away from the fight and almost falling but not even noticing the spear hitting the platform a second after he slid down. That would have been a kill for Mags’ girl, too, a tiny and grim Career with the traditional spear.
“Thirteen’s ashes,” Finnick breathed, daring to cover his eyes with his hand for a second.
There would never be anything worse than this, having to watch the bloodbath slaughter of children at the Games and being unable to get involved.
That was when Chaff returned with a bottle in hand, half-empty already, giving the Eleven screen one look and saying to Seeder, “Is he dead? See, I knew he was a goner. Why didn’t you call? I missed it all.”
Then he grabbed an empty bottle from next to his console, hurling it at the far wall and screaming, “Fuck!”
Various mentors down the console row flinched.
Chaff slumped down in his chair.
There was a tense moment of pause.
Leaning towards Haymitch, Chaff pointed at the screen with the bottle. “Thought he probably wouldn’t make it, but he was a smart kid, too smart to stay an apple picker. He’d have gotten out of the bloodbath, I’d have found him some sponsors for sure.”
“We still have the girl,” Seeder almost sing-songed it, under her breath. Her and Chaff’s uneasy mentoring truce wasn’t a secret in Central. “Let’s focus on her.”
“I tried to feed that girl a chicken leg and she asked me what it was,” Chaff told Haymitch.
Then he toasted the screen, raising his voice. “Happy Hunger Games and may the odds be ever up your fucking ass!
“Some Gamesmaker better get executed for this literally shitty idea,” he muttered darkly into his drink.
He definitely hadn’t been that drunk last year.
Then again, there hadn’t been any hope for his tributes last year.
The bloodbath raged on. Seven’s second kid fell to the axe of the Two male, who gave the weapon another test twirl, then threw it away and reached for a club again, having earned free choice of weapon. Aster was scrambling onto a plateau, the noises of the battle quieting behind her the further she got away, throwing looks over her shoulder and hurrying on. Rodey still hadn’t thought to get his feet out of the swamp, not having gotten that far, but if there were mutts underneath, they left him be in this early stage of the Games.
Finnick’s head snapped around when Chaff’s hand appeared at the edge of his vision, playfully placing a small flask in front of Haymitch with a soft click, metal on metal.
His vision stuttered.
“Just on the slim chance that we’d need to celebrate the misery, I’ve brought you a special treat from back home,” Chaff drawled. “The wife says hi and good bingeing.”
Finnick saw that Haymitch’s eyes fell on the bottle and just stayed there, never moving away, while the screams and the battle noises of the bloodbath raged on.
Well shit.
So what, he’ll tell him no, Finnick blankly thought.
Then, he remembered that he’d never seen Haymitch declining a drink, because Finnick had made all the liquor disappear, from the house, from the Victory Tour celebration, and Haymitch hadn’t even gone to the Hob without him for the longest time and what if Haymitch just didn’t know how?
Haymitch’s eyes were still on the bottle, his sobriety suddenly this uneasy truce where he didn’t seek it out as long as there wasn’t any alcohol right in his face.
He’d never wanted to stop in the first place.
A ball of fear was tightening in Finnick’s stomach.
Leaning onto his armrest, Chaff was eyeing Haymitch with a curious, indulgent look on his face that said, why yes, of course he’d known exactly what Haymitch had needed right now, but hey, no big deal, because that was what friends were for here in Mentor Central, where the world was glum.
Finnick forced himself to move, not listening - mom, dad, KeanuPerriCoral… and Haymitch was on that list now, too. He just felt like he’d puke.
He snatched the flask away from under Haymitch’s nose, a loose and unthreatening motion, like he behaved when there was a camera on his face.
“And the newbie doesn’t get a welcome drink?” he said. “I’m hurt.”
Taking a token sip - the booze was vile and hurt his throat - he screwed on the lid and put it away into a pocket of his jacket, from where it was already scheduled to be thrown in the trash, violently. It wasn’t a subtle move, he knew, but he wasn’t caring one lick.
Chaff gave him the side-eye. “Oh come on,” he said, shaking his head and turning to focus on Seeder’s tribute, who was hiding behind a pile not far from the fight.
Haymitch was coming out of it more slowly.
He cleared his throat, relaxing limb by limb.
“Not doing that anymore, you know,” he said to Chaff, just loud enough for Finnick to catch it. There was an unsure note in his voice, as if he didn’t quite know the right words. It was the opposite of what he sounded like when he talked alcoholism on the television. It was hard. Of course, it was hard. There was the liquor and that’s what you do with it, you drink it. “Haven’t been drinking all year.”
“Right,” Chaff said and snorted at him.
***
The Games just went downhill from there, transforming into the worst experience Finnick had had since he’d won.
A lot of victors had addictions. Finnick, hailing from a professionalized district with a tight, supportive, stable group of victors, knew that intellectually, although it was treated as somewhat of a taboo subject. Victors treasured the right to privacy, and if one of them chose to play pretend, that was perfectly within his or her right. Every year, Mentor Central turned into a cage, the air dense from the strain of keeping those panic attacks, those trigger reactions at bay. If Six’s Manoli dissolved into a giggle fit at her console, they averted their eyes; if Johanna had noticed that young Kyle Akumi’s pupils were too wide these days, even she knew to point it out to Finnick in quiet when only he could hear.
Everybody was busy with themselves during the Games, desperately keeping up that frail façade of calm, and nobody had time or cause to notice the bottle that often dangled from Chaff’s hand in those days, Chaff who didn’t slur or sway, most of the time, Chaff who was a companionable, mellow drunk, who teased new victors mercilessly, then offered them a shoulder to cry on and a drink. Much like Mags, Chaff was a gift to all of them; he made things so much easier to bear.
Finnick remembered how Chaff had lounged in a chair on Flickerman’s show a year ago, where he’d shaken his head sadly and cleverly drawn in the audience by saying, if he hadn’t seen Haymitch’s addiction coming, nobody else could be blamed. He hadn’t wanted to see, he’d said. It was his fault; he’d failed as a friend.
What made Finnick angriest about that now was that he’d tricked himself into believing that a thing said on the air could have had any meaning. That Chaff had cared in the same way Finnick had. He didn’t know Chaff well beyond their brief acquaintance during last year’s Games but Chaff was Haymitch’s friend, Haymitch who’d barely known what to do when Mags declared him part of the family and who needed some friends, and he just felt betrayed on behalf of the implicit trust he’d thought they all shared.
Haymitch didn’t have to deal with alcohol, that was the deal.
It wasn’t a matter of not being ‘strong enough,’ they didn’t have that luxury - it was a matter of what worked.
“What did you think you were doing in there?”
He’d followed Chaff out of Central, both Twelve tributes safe for now, and from the look Haymitch threw him when he got up right after Chaff, he’d known exactly what Finnick was up to. He’d looked ashen for a moment, and then he hadn’t moved to stop him, anyway, as if he knew what could happen and hated it, but he, too, knew he had to rely on what worked best.
The hallway was empty, no Peacekeepers or escorts in sight, so Finnick grabbed Chaff by one bulky, muscular shoulder, twisting the smaller man around and pushing him against the wall.
Something dangerous flashed in Chaff’s eyes, just for the blink of an eye. Then it was gone and he went limp, slumping against the wall and raising his hands in mock surrender. You survived the Games by being very dangerous indeed, and afterwards, you stayed alive by never being dangerous again.
“Whoa, kiddo,” Chaff said. “What’s that for?”
“Are you kidding?” Finnick said, disbelieving, throwing a furtive look over his shoulder but no, still nobody close by who could hear, apart from the bugs in the walls. But there was nothing to be done about those.
“Sure, kid, I joke, because the Games are so much fun.”
“I can’t believe that you just did that in there,” Finnick said. “What were you thinking, offering him drinks like that? You know people will pay for it if he has a relapse. He will pay.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t the startled expression on Chaff’s face before he regrouped and snorted, in a way that somehow highlighted the thirty years he had on Finnick, quips forgotten.
“Ah, Odair, the fuck. Come on. I know you’re new to our side of Central, kid, but me and Haymitch have been at this for a good long while; none of that just now was new.”
“Of course it’s new!” Finnick lowered his voice, barely containing a hiss. “I know you didn’t get all the details last year, but can’t you see he’s sober now? He’s better, better than he’s been since I’ve known him. Even if Snow wouldn’t start killing…” His voice flipped, and he pressed his eyes shut while he took a breath, forcing himself to stay outwardly calm. “Even if Snow wouldn’t force him to stay sober, you still can’t want him to go back to how he was, he almost died that day. He would have died if he hadn’t been found.”
Chaff rolled his eyes at him in a fond way, reaching out - to give him a friendly pat on the arm maybe - then deciding otherwise when he saw Finnick shift away from the motion, shrugging and lowering his hand again.
He waited a moment as if to make sure Finnick wouldn’t hyperventilate or lash out, with the exact same kind of casual patience Finnick had grown used to from Haymitch; it was so familiar it was startling, making him wonder who had taught the two of them that patience. Caramel Doll. It came to him in a flash, leaving him unbalanced and irrationally edgy.
Then Chaff said, “Right.” He waited another moment, eyeing Finnick critically. “Kiddo. Odair. Not gonna treat you like a child here, you’ve seen too much shit go down for that. I know it all sucks, alright? It always sucks. First day’s hard on everybody every time. But this is business as usual, it’s just new to you right now, that’s all. Just, this ain’t the Career districts anymore, alright? We handle matters differently in Five to Twelve. Not as shiny and proper, but it’s all that we’ve got. You get wasted in Central all you want, nobody cares. Haymitch’s good, he’s been doing this for a real long time now. He’s a real smart guy. I ain’t gonna offer him a drink if I think he’ll go on camera too drunk. And he’s a grown man, anyway, he knows when to stop.”
There would always be a part of Finnick that clung to believing that crap like that only ever happened in the Capitol media, on the television, a part that would always be stumped when he heard it coming out of a real person’s mouth. He stared at Chaff.
“What has ever given you the impression that Haymitch can stop?” he said, helplessly.
“He’s gotta make those decisions for himself,” Chaff patiently rephrased.
“He’s an addict. He can’t stop. Didn’t you see him? Do you think it’s normal that it’s me talking to you instead of him? This isn’t the kind of thing where you test yourself to see how much you can take.”
Chaff smirked at him. “You gonna tell me next that it’s a disease?”
“I’m going to tell you that you have to stop making things worse!” Finnick snapped, hot anger starting to boil in his gut. It just simmered there, and it was so foreign that he barely even noticed it as his. “You think he’d let me have this conversation for him if he knew how to have it himself? He needs our help, he needs us to help him through. Do you believe for one second that Snow isn’t already aware of what just went down in there?” Oh, he could just picture Snow leaning back in the chair behind his desk looking pleased. Snow liked to act like he needed them to behave themselves the way he wanted it, but Finnick didn’t doubt that he’d delight in their failure just the same because for him, it was another game, and Finnick’s whole skin prickled tightly at the thought. This had long stopped being just about saving his family, even before he and Haymitch had started that thing between them, it was about saving them and Haymitch, at once, because Haymitch wouldn’t recover from failure. He wouldn’t be able to live with it if he got more people killed. And then, Finnick would have failed too. “People will die if he drinks anything.”
But Chaff was still not getting it; Finnick could see in his face that he didn’t get a word of what Finnick had just said.
“You,” Chaff told him with a level gaze, “shouldn’t believe everything you see on the television.” He got more comfortable, lounging against the wall like it was his, shrugging. “Drinking’s just a decision that we make. It’s just a couple of bottles during Games to ease him through, it won’t do any harm.”
And that, Finnick realized suddenly, was the problem. He didn’t know where that sudden insight was from, but suddenly, it became clear. Haymitch couldn’t be a drunk. Haymitch couldn’t be unable to stop once he started. Because if he was, Chaff would have to face up to the fact that maybe he himself was unable to stop, as well.
Chaff had a wife back home and suddenly, Finnick wondered how much he drank when he was home with her, what measures he took to make sure she wouldn’t find out. What lies he told himself when he hid those bottles, going about his day. As long as Chaff didn’t admit to any of that - and he wouldn’t, not to Finnick, maybe not even to Haymitch - Finnick had no way of convincing him that Haymitch needed his help.
It was the Capitol all over again, walls closing in around him wherever he turned because he was just helpless all over again, no solution available. Caramel was right, he thought, almost panicked. Everybody is too busy thinking of themselves to care about anything but themselves. Chaff was Haymitch’s friend, but it didn’t matter. Haymitch would die. Finnick’s family would die, they would all die.
You’re not being rational.
Finnick wasn’t listening. He was scrambling to cling to that sense of control he’d been feeling during those recent months in Twelve. Sudden, terrifying clarity was shaping itself into the remembered image of Caramel in the Four apartments, coldly advising him, those Games statistics blaring in the background: ”Fuck it. Fuck all of it.”.
The fear of losing Haymitch and all the happiness he’d given him clinging to him like a vice, he suddenly knew exactly what he could do, what he was capable of doing to protect the people he cared about, to protect himself. And if Haymitch fell through the cracks for Chaff, well then, Chaff could damn well fall through the cracks for Finnick.
The problem was the solution too.
Finnick felt that he was pulling himself up, letting go of the air of harmlessness that he’d learned to project even before his Games because he was tall and muscular and everybody else was not.
It was obvious that Chaff had noticed the subtle change, because his eyes flickered across Finnick and he tensed up when he tried to retreat to gain reach, but couldn’t because there was the wall in his back.
Finnick had never in his life struggled harder to pull a punch, clenching and unclenching his fist so hard that his fingernails hurt his palm. He’d never been a violent person, despite how great he had felt wielding his trident - like a god. It would have been so easy if this could have been solved with brawn. But life in Panem was never as simple as that. Nothing about victory was ever clean.
Desperation was a rotting, ugly thing, like they all had become by this point; maybe this year’s arena was the most honest of all.
“I’m only going to explain this once,” Finnick heard himself say in a voice that wasn’t quite his own. Snow taught me that. He gave me that voice. “You’re going to stay away. Haymitch won’t drink even a sip because of you. If you see him with alcohol, you take it away from him. You won’t offer it. You won’t drink when he can see. You’ll switch seats with Seeder and you won’t so much as turn towards him when there’s alcohol on your breath.”
Chaff’s expression was still slack, a careful mask that said he didn’t care, the one he donned on the television. Finnick thought if he could have recalled what Chaff had looked like during his Games, when he lost his hand, he wouldn’t be surprised if that was exactly what Chaff had looked like then, too. Oh look, it’s missing. How about that.
Chaff was all too aware of every shift of Finnick’s body, Finnick could see it in his eyes.
“And if I don’t,” the older victor said, “then what?”
Finnick breathed.
“I’ll have the media come down on you so hard that you won’t have time to blink,” he said. “They’d go wild about any story that has me at the center. If they think you’re too boring to warrant a feature, I’ll go and fuck the Chief of Public Affairs on the backseat of her car to make her do it. I’ll tell her you and your drinking need some saving, too. I’ll tell them living with Haymitch has taught me how to see the signs, and how worried I am about you, my dear, poor, disfigured friend.” He paused for a moment, breathing, contemplating, terribly calm. “I can make sure that you’ll never bring a tribute home again, if you and your wife survive me.”
His trident was at home in Twelve, hanging on the wall across from his bed to remind him of his killing skills. But he hadn’t won his Games because of that trident. It had been stupid to think that his trident had had anything to do with victory.
A tilt of his head, a smile, some skin, cameras going off and gifts falling out of the sky.
And that had been before he even had been old enough to offer sex where people could see.
If this were a Games, Chaff would have just realized that he’d lost.
“You’re a bastard,” he breathed.
“Leave him alone,” Finnick said.
There were things that victors, mentors didn’t do. There were lines they didn’t cross. They were tied together by a bond that nobody else in Panem could hope to understand.
But they were also people ready to cross lines to survive.
“Fuck you,” Chaff said and Finnick stepped aside, watching him stalk down the hallway, out of sight.
He wondered what Haymitch would say, whether he’d lost Haymitch just now.
But when he joined Haymitch at the Twelve console some minutes later, Haymitch just looked at him for a while until he turned to the screen again without a word.
Finnick thought he should feel bad about himself, like something inside of him should just have broken; he should feel like something was gone.
But he didn’t.
He just, in a terrible way, felt more like he knew what he was.
***
The next time Finnick and Chaff met, Chaff had switched seats with Seeder who rarely addressed anybody, lost in her own world when she stared at the screen and prayed for her tribute to a god whose existence she wasn’t permitted to acknowledge. If Chaff talked at all, it was to Cooper at the Ten console or clipped tech talk with Seeder sometimes drifting over. Finnick had a feeling he was often very drunk, but then Seeder’s girl died too and the two of them vanished from Central entirely, leaving one more empty console behind.
Finnick thought that surely Haymitch had had a conversation with his friend himself but he didn’t offer, he never said anything whatsoever about what had transpired, and, unable to find the words to talk about it himself, Finnick suddenly felt so terribly tired. He just wanted the Games to end so that they could go home.
Instead, it dragged on and on for a never-ending eighteen days when the children just refused to crumble, despite the arena having been designed to poison them.
Finnick saw clients, every day. Clients, he tried to remind himself a little more fiercely every time and at every touch, not patrons, and appointments, not dates. Rape, he tried to tell himself and shuddered at the thought. It’s rape. Never had that awareness hovered so close to the surface before. It hurt, suddenly, hands on his chest and his cock when he just wanted them to stop. People telling him what to do and expecting him to look good and make sounds, when he just wanted to be anywhere else, back in the arena if need be. He entertained fantasies, not of just dying but of dissolving in acid, of vanishing out of existence, nothing left to even bury. It had been a mistake, he worried, learning what it could be like, unable to forget now that he knew. He couldn’t stop thinking about what it would sound like if he said no. But he couldn’t say no and the weeks dragged on, and he tried not to be so relieved every time another child died, one step closer to the end.
Haymitch, too was looking more drawn every passing day, glued to his console even when Finnick took over after appointments. It seemed twenty years of seeing it through to the end were hard to shake. But Haymitch didn’t want to talk about it; all his energy was tied up by his refusal to break down. Finnick himself was too exhausted to talk. They waved it off, telling themselves that it was just what Games were like; this was just what happened. Rodey had died late on Day Three after the Careers found him and let him run away for sport, leaving him to bleed out in a puddle of dirt with a cut throat.
Aster made it through most of the Games, easily reaching Final Eight. Barely anybody noticed though. She stole food from the Five female but she didn’t use the opportunity to kill. She polled as uninspiring, the commentators couldn’t settle on a story for her, and the camera always cut away from her too fast. “Wait for it,” Finnick promised their sponsors on Days Five, Seven, Nine, in his most velvet voice, “she’s doing exactly as she was told.” They sent her water and food but she still hollowed out from the same disease that most of the tributes had caught. She captured a snake, roasted it on a geyser, and she ran from the Careers. Unable to hope it would end well, Finnick asked Haymitch for his thoughts once, but Haymitch just stared at the screen for a while, then shook his head. She had sponsors because Finnick smiled at them and because some people just didn’t know how to gamble.
The Capitol loved the arena. It was everything they were not. Finnick slept with people wearing stylized mud streaks on their cheeks, who mixed dimmed greys and browns to contrast with fiery Capitol neon, chasing this year’s greens out of the stores.
His clients were older than they used to be, men and women rich enough to never care about propriety, people who kept special rooms with special toys for special whores. Collectors. They sold him alongside Gloss one time and he thought that was worst of all, having to touch somebody who didn’t want him to.
Despite the fact that he and Haymitch barely felt like touching anymore, rumors were making the round about them in Central. But Finnick couldn’t make himself smile when he saw Beetee clapping Haymitch on the back, he couldn’t smirk about Cashmere and Cordelia at the One console thinking that the whole idea of the two of them was too bizarre to believe, of Johanna snickering.
The night of Day Ten, Finnick returned to the Twelve quarters at dawn with his shirt clinging to his chest from sweat and body fluids that mostly weren’t his.
Haymitch was waiting for him in the brightly lit lounge of the Twelve floor, a tired figure in an armchair underneath the window. He looked too tired.
“Is she dead?” Finnick asked, although she hadn’t been on the tiny Games screen in his limousine, asleep and covered in grime.
Haymitch shook his head. “Just waiting up for you,” he said. “You alright?”
“In a moment like this, the answer to that question will never be yes,” Finnick said, peeling out of that hideous shirt and throwing it into a corner. “I hate this life.”
I hope you picked that up with your bugs loud and clear.
“You should be in bed,” he added, pausing to take in Haymitch, his sunken face, the phantom withdrawal visible in the tremor of his hands that had started two days ago and just hadn’t stopped.
“Doubt I could sleep,” Haymitch said.
Finnick wanted to cross the space between them and hug him then, actually hug like they barely ever did and comfort both Haymitch and himself, but they shouldn’t get that close to each other while he was stinking of sex.
***
Fifteen days into the Games, Aster leveled a metal pole out of a garbage pile, destroying a construction that effectively amounted to a dam. It was a bit like Annie Cresta’s Games except no accident and more terrible. Four of the five remaining Careers drowned in the manure or were buried underneath debris. The sole survivor, the beautifully blonde One female, made quick work of Aster once she’d made it to the shore. Aster never batted an eyelash. Her face, unreadable even in death, looked faintly curious when the throwing star bashed in her skull.
She might have thought she was dead either way in a field of Careers, but it didn’t seem like she’d even cared about victory. She’d done what Haymitch had advised her to do, she’d gone and made a splash.
“Told you so,” Finnick purred at all the sponsors who hadn’t given them any money, sucking a cocktail cherry in his mouth. Aster made 10 Best Moments Of The Games; parts of the recap would be dedicated to her villainy tale, plotting against the Careers. The Cornucopia published a two-page analysis of her Games, reading meanings into every move she’d made.
“Yeah, of course that was the plan all along, I mean, obviously,” Haymitch told the reporters right after she died. “We knew not to expect too much, it just takes time until the sponsors start trusting that you know what you’re doing. Can’t blame them for that. But that was the strategy. I think it was a good one. A bit of luck and, yeah, we’d have brought this one home. We ain’t complaining. It was a first try at a new thing. Still fine-tuning stuff.”
“I supposed we’ve used up that ruse,” Finnick added, quirking his lips at one of the reporters, who blushed a crimson red. “We won’t get the cameras to ignore our tributes that easily again in future Games.”
Eventually, Aster’s killer, eighteen-year-old Timber Doyle from District One was crowned the victor of the 73rd Hunger Games. Once the grime was washed off her face and golden hair and they put her in a queen’s white gown, a young woman of striking beauty emerged from the arena like a fairytale swan. She was tall and pale and graceful, and Finnick tried to not look at her at all. She was from One, he reminded himself, convincing himself that made it all better. In One, all tributes knew what to expect before they volunteered.
Or they thought that they knew, anyway.
“Guess we can go places with that,” muttered Haymitch, when all was said and done, clapping Finnick on the shoulder on the way to the train, then letting go again as if he’d been burned. It had been a Games; every year, the Games surprised Finnick anew with how much they destroyed.
What Haymitch really meant and what Finnick heard was instead, Another one dead. Another one we failed.
And what he heard also was, I can’t stand this anymore. I need to run away and forget what it’s like for a year.
He could still feel the touch of his clients - his rapists - on his skin. He needed to go home, too. He needed to try and forget what kind of person the Games had managed to make him, this time around.
on to chapter 17
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.
Prologue -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7 -- Chapter 8 -- Chapter 9 -- Chapter 10 -- Chapter 11 -- Chapter 12 -- Chapter 13 -- Chapter 14 -- Chapter 15
Fic on AO3
Chapter 16: Capitol Reprise
“Good to have you back, man,” Chaff said, clapping Haymitch on the back before he took the seat at his console. It seemed like a light-hearted gesture, but nothing was ever light-hearted on Day One of the Games, and Chaff’s hand lingered a little too long, gripped a little too tight. “Nothing exciting ever happens when you aren’t here to puke in company. No offense,” he added, leaning over to smirk at Finnick.
“None taken,” Finnick chimed back, getting his side of the Twelve console online, while in the corner of his eye, Haymitch glanced at Chaff.
“Got started early with the liquor, did you?” he asked with a strange kind of uncertainty in his voice. The stench of Chaff’s alcohol breath was so strong that it even reached Finnick, who felt Haymitch stiffening uncomfortably next to him, as if stopping himself from leaning away. The motion made Finnick look up in sudden concern.
Chaff raised his eyebrows. “And that’s new how?”
Haymitch gave him a tense shrug. “Never noticed before,” he muttered without looking at his friend and reached for his headset.
When Finnick flashed a look at his face, he was busy logging in on his console in that careful way that most of them had, of people who hadn’t grown up with computers, pointedly focused.
“You ready?” he said in a low voice, wondering if it would be too awkward to offer changing seats; Haymitch had always sat next to Eleven, and of course, Chaff was his friend.
“No,” Haymitch replied, exhaling a small breath. “Here’s hoping it’ll be quick.”
Nodding at that, Finnick refocused on the task at hand. The bloodbath would be on in five, the tributes long seen off to the secret location of this year’s arena, and he couldn’t say he disagreed with the sentiment. It had been a long Training Week, another client every night for him. So Haymitch had mostly handled their tributes on his own although he wasn’t supposed to have to do that, not if anybody in the Capitol really gave a shit. He’d also waded through a sea of reporters who cared none about their kids, but wanted to know everything about his struggle with addiction. Finnick didn’t know what drained the other man more - prostituting his personal life in this new way or coaching his tributes with a marketing plan in mind that already planned for their probable deaths. And Finnick tried hard to not think of Caramel at that, one soul who’d apparently already fallen through a marketing strategy’s gaps. He’d spent all week trying not to think of Caramel.
“I told her not to cry when she goes down,” Haymitch had said to Finnick just yesterday, after Aster had asked him in her strange, disconnected way what would help Twelve most, apart from victory. Victory, she’d derisively said as if it didn’t concern her as a person, was out of question anyway. It figured, Finnick had tiredly thought, now that they’d unexpectedly gotten a tribute with the smarts to strategize, that that tribute would be some sort of sociopath. She was just strange, impossible to read. “Make a splash. Be extraordinary. Make them remember you long after you’re dead, and don’t beg or cry when you die. That’s what I said.”
Finnick looked up at his screen, where their boy, Rodey Wills was waiting in his tube, ashen, trying so hard not to shake. Underfed, of course, not at all looking thirteen. They’d be incredibly lucky, if that boy made it through his first night. It was hard to even look at him; he was just a scared kid who’d soaked everything they’d told him up out of sheer desperation, without any of the brains or maturity to do anything with the information.
Then the anthem sounded and the lights were dimmed, and Finnick stopped himself from reaching for Haymitch’s hand and squeezing it when Templesmith’s voice started booming through Central with the countdown, although chances were that nobody would have noticed that he did it. Everybody’s eyes were on the main screen, the camera following the Ten male, as the predecessor of last year’s victor, racing up his tube, then panning out to encompass all of the grounds.
The arena looked… very much like a garbage dump.
Finnick wasn’t the only one in Mentor Central who exclaimed a sound of disgust at the sheer implications of that, the bacteria and the mutts; the Gamesmakers remained ever creative.
The Cornucopia was towering on a pile of what appeared to be rusty parts of dismantled cars. The tributes were perched on smaller, ramshackle metal piles, and everything around them looked like a swamp of tattered garbage bags and steaming rot and rotten food, swimming in a greasy substance, browns and yellows and greys. The camera moved on greedily to display it all, and Finnick could perfectly picture the delightedly repulsed “Eww!” running through the Capitol this second.
There were small lakes between the hilly piles that looked deep, but no telling if any water would be drinkable. Little fires were burning here and there like baby geysers, emanating green and blue flames. Every now and then, there was movement, something slithering and wet, hopefully edible, probably snakes. The stench had to be unbearable; the small girl from Three had started heaving the moment she’d emerged.
“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Chaff exclaimed.
“Thought you’d been complaining that the lakes and forests favor Four and Seven,” Haymitch wryly said, though his hand had grabbed the armrest of his chair.
“While the trash arena’s gonna favor my district how?” Chaff sounded like his friend had lost his mind.
Haymitch broke into a slightly unhinged laugh.
Chaff abruptly got up.
“Getting a drink,” he announced, while Templesmith was reaching “twenty, nineteen.” He pointed his finger at Seeder. “I figure he should make it for ten minutes, but holler if he, you know, is backstabbed by a sewage monster and dies.” And off he’d gone, not swaying in the slightest despite his apparent blood alcohol level. Finnick wondered if he just couldn’t bear to see.
Forcing his eyes away from the other victor, he said, “They’re going to catch diseases in there.” Worriedly, he started scanning the field for real, the breeding ground of diseases that it had to be. He didn’t know much about that, Effie would have to research it for them. He thought that most bacteria and parasites could probably wait until whoever won had made it out of the arena, but if anything in there infected an open wound, that tribute likely wouldn’t survive.
Haymitch nodded abruptly, focusing on the screen, outwardly calm now. “Let’s see what the food and water situation’s like before we start prioritizing.”
Rodey was trembling like a leaf, dark skin almost yellow from nerves, and Finnick was suddenly scared that he’d freeze at the go. Some kids snapped out of it and grew stronger for the experience, but Rodey was just shaking now, eyes white from panic. “Seven,” Templesmith was counting, “Six.”
“Good girl, that’s it, check for the mutts,” Haymitch was muttering at Aster, whose face was as infuriatingly detached as it had been at her interview, but whose eyes were fixed on the swamp now, scanning for movement underneath.
Then the gong went off, Templesmith announced the launch of the 73rd Hunger Games of Panem, and the first of the Careers had already armed themselves with metal rods and shards from the trash on their way to the Cornucopia, heavy boots sinking deeply into the slurry.
Aster was off, inexpertly jumping from heap to heap but avoiding the soft dirt, and since nobody knew how to move fast in the waste, everybody focused on themselves instead of her while she scrambled away.
“No, no, don’t do that, don’t do that to me,” Finnick was whispering, because Rodey really was just standing there, eyes wildly scanning the struggling and screaming children. He wasn’t even checking behind himself, in the direction he was supposed to run, and that would just be worse, if he didn’t just die on the platform but actually ran along with the other kids into the fight because he couldn’t think.
“Breathe.” Haymitch’s hand was on his shoulder, digging in too hard.
The male and female from Two were running the show at the Cornucopia; there was no ounce of creativity in their clubs bashing in heads and their hands grabbing the screaming smallest ones.
Johanna’s boy was down when the One male broke his neck, and the Four’s male Career was trying to reach the Three female for that easy kill but the Two female beat him to it, punching her down and suffocating her in the mud.
Then Finnick could hear Seeder clucking her tongue, at the edge of his awareness, and yeah, that was the Eleven male down, simultaneously pierced by the spear of Mags’ girl and the throwing star of the One female, who had defiantly wiped her dirty hand across her cheek as if to say she didn’t care about diminishing her beauty for a Games.
The scream of the dying boy so close to him seemed to shake Rodey awake, who suddenly was looking around with wide open eyes and then sucked in a breath, scrambling off his pile, stumbling on his way away from the fight and almost falling but not even noticing the spear hitting the platform a second after he slid down. That would have been a kill for Mags’ girl, too, a tiny and grim Career with the traditional spear.
“Thirteen’s ashes,” Finnick breathed, daring to cover his eyes with his hand for a second.
There would never be anything worse than this, having to watch the bloodbath slaughter of children at the Games and being unable to get involved.
That was when Chaff returned with a bottle in hand, half-empty already, giving the Eleven screen one look and saying to Seeder, “Is he dead? See, I knew he was a goner. Why didn’t you call? I missed it all.”
Then he grabbed an empty bottle from next to his console, hurling it at the far wall and screaming, “Fuck!”
Various mentors down the console row flinched.
Chaff slumped down in his chair.
There was a tense moment of pause.
Leaning towards Haymitch, Chaff pointed at the screen with the bottle. “Thought he probably wouldn’t make it, but he was a smart kid, too smart to stay an apple picker. He’d have gotten out of the bloodbath, I’d have found him some sponsors for sure.”
“We still have the girl,” Seeder almost sing-songed it, under her breath. Her and Chaff’s uneasy mentoring truce wasn’t a secret in Central. “Let’s focus on her.”
“I tried to feed that girl a chicken leg and she asked me what it was,” Chaff told Haymitch.
Then he toasted the screen, raising his voice. “Happy Hunger Games and may the odds be ever up your fucking ass!
“Some Gamesmaker better get executed for this literally shitty idea,” he muttered darkly into his drink.
He definitely hadn’t been that drunk last year.
Then again, there hadn’t been any hope for his tributes last year.
The bloodbath raged on. Seven’s second kid fell to the axe of the Two male, who gave the weapon another test twirl, then threw it away and reached for a club again, having earned free choice of weapon. Aster was scrambling onto a plateau, the noises of the battle quieting behind her the further she got away, throwing looks over her shoulder and hurrying on. Rodey still hadn’t thought to get his feet out of the swamp, not having gotten that far, but if there were mutts underneath, they left him be in this early stage of the Games.
Finnick’s head snapped around when Chaff’s hand appeared at the edge of his vision, playfully placing a small flask in front of Haymitch with a soft click, metal on metal.
His vision stuttered.
“Just on the slim chance that we’d need to celebrate the misery, I’ve brought you a special treat from back home,” Chaff drawled. “The wife says hi and good bingeing.”
Finnick saw that Haymitch’s eyes fell on the bottle and just stayed there, never moving away, while the screams and the battle noises of the bloodbath raged on.
Well shit.
So what, he’ll tell him no, Finnick blankly thought.
Then, he remembered that he’d never seen Haymitch declining a drink, because Finnick had made all the liquor disappear, from the house, from the Victory Tour celebration, and Haymitch hadn’t even gone to the Hob without him for the longest time and what if Haymitch just didn’t know how?
Haymitch’s eyes were still on the bottle, his sobriety suddenly this uneasy truce where he didn’t seek it out as long as there wasn’t any alcohol right in his face.
He’d never wanted to stop in the first place.
A ball of fear was tightening in Finnick’s stomach.
Leaning onto his armrest, Chaff was eyeing Haymitch with a curious, indulgent look on his face that said, why yes, of course he’d known exactly what Haymitch had needed right now, but hey, no big deal, because that was what friends were for here in Mentor Central, where the world was glum.
Finnick forced himself to move, not listening - mom, dad, KeanuPerriCoral… and Haymitch was on that list now, too. He just felt like he’d puke.
He snatched the flask away from under Haymitch’s nose, a loose and unthreatening motion, like he behaved when there was a camera on his face.
“And the newbie doesn’t get a welcome drink?” he said. “I’m hurt.”
Taking a token sip - the booze was vile and hurt his throat - he screwed on the lid and put it away into a pocket of his jacket, from where it was already scheduled to be thrown in the trash, violently. It wasn’t a subtle move, he knew, but he wasn’t caring one lick.
Chaff gave him the side-eye. “Oh come on,” he said, shaking his head and turning to focus on Seeder’s tribute, who was hiding behind a pile not far from the fight.
Haymitch was coming out of it more slowly.
He cleared his throat, relaxing limb by limb.
“Not doing that anymore, you know,” he said to Chaff, just loud enough for Finnick to catch it. There was an unsure note in his voice, as if he didn’t quite know the right words. It was the opposite of what he sounded like when he talked alcoholism on the television. It was hard. Of course, it was hard. There was the liquor and that’s what you do with it, you drink it. “Haven’t been drinking all year.”
“Right,” Chaff said and snorted at him.
***
The Games just went downhill from there, transforming into the worst experience Finnick had had since he’d won.
A lot of victors had addictions. Finnick, hailing from a professionalized district with a tight, supportive, stable group of victors, knew that intellectually, although it was treated as somewhat of a taboo subject. Victors treasured the right to privacy, and if one of them chose to play pretend, that was perfectly within his or her right. Every year, Mentor Central turned into a cage, the air dense from the strain of keeping those panic attacks, those trigger reactions at bay. If Six’s Manoli dissolved into a giggle fit at her console, they averted their eyes; if Johanna had noticed that young Kyle Akumi’s pupils were too wide these days, even she knew to point it out to Finnick in quiet when only he could hear.
Everybody was busy with themselves during the Games, desperately keeping up that frail façade of calm, and nobody had time or cause to notice the bottle that often dangled from Chaff’s hand in those days, Chaff who didn’t slur or sway, most of the time, Chaff who was a companionable, mellow drunk, who teased new victors mercilessly, then offered them a shoulder to cry on and a drink. Much like Mags, Chaff was a gift to all of them; he made things so much easier to bear.
Finnick remembered how Chaff had lounged in a chair on Flickerman’s show a year ago, where he’d shaken his head sadly and cleverly drawn in the audience by saying, if he hadn’t seen Haymitch’s addiction coming, nobody else could be blamed. He hadn’t wanted to see, he’d said. It was his fault; he’d failed as a friend.
What made Finnick angriest about that now was that he’d tricked himself into believing that a thing said on the air could have had any meaning. That Chaff had cared in the same way Finnick had. He didn’t know Chaff well beyond their brief acquaintance during last year’s Games but Chaff was Haymitch’s friend, Haymitch who’d barely known what to do when Mags declared him part of the family and who needed some friends, and he just felt betrayed on behalf of the implicit trust he’d thought they all shared.
Haymitch didn’t have to deal with alcohol, that was the deal.
It wasn’t a matter of not being ‘strong enough,’ they didn’t have that luxury - it was a matter of what worked.
“What did you think you were doing in there?”
He’d followed Chaff out of Central, both Twelve tributes safe for now, and from the look Haymitch threw him when he got up right after Chaff, he’d known exactly what Finnick was up to. He’d looked ashen for a moment, and then he hadn’t moved to stop him, anyway, as if he knew what could happen and hated it, but he, too, knew he had to rely on what worked best.
The hallway was empty, no Peacekeepers or escorts in sight, so Finnick grabbed Chaff by one bulky, muscular shoulder, twisting the smaller man around and pushing him against the wall.
Something dangerous flashed in Chaff’s eyes, just for the blink of an eye. Then it was gone and he went limp, slumping against the wall and raising his hands in mock surrender. You survived the Games by being very dangerous indeed, and afterwards, you stayed alive by never being dangerous again.
“Whoa, kiddo,” Chaff said. “What’s that for?”
“Are you kidding?” Finnick said, disbelieving, throwing a furtive look over his shoulder but no, still nobody close by who could hear, apart from the bugs in the walls. But there was nothing to be done about those.
“Sure, kid, I joke, because the Games are so much fun.”
“I can’t believe that you just did that in there,” Finnick said. “What were you thinking, offering him drinks like that? You know people will pay for it if he has a relapse. He will pay.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t the startled expression on Chaff’s face before he regrouped and snorted, in a way that somehow highlighted the thirty years he had on Finnick, quips forgotten.
“Ah, Odair, the fuck. Come on. I know you’re new to our side of Central, kid, but me and Haymitch have been at this for a good long while; none of that just now was new.”
“Of course it’s new!” Finnick lowered his voice, barely containing a hiss. “I know you didn’t get all the details last year, but can’t you see he’s sober now? He’s better, better than he’s been since I’ve known him. Even if Snow wouldn’t start killing…” His voice flipped, and he pressed his eyes shut while he took a breath, forcing himself to stay outwardly calm. “Even if Snow wouldn’t force him to stay sober, you still can’t want him to go back to how he was, he almost died that day. He would have died if he hadn’t been found.”
Chaff rolled his eyes at him in a fond way, reaching out - to give him a friendly pat on the arm maybe - then deciding otherwise when he saw Finnick shift away from the motion, shrugging and lowering his hand again.
He waited a moment as if to make sure Finnick wouldn’t hyperventilate or lash out, with the exact same kind of casual patience Finnick had grown used to from Haymitch; it was so familiar it was startling, making him wonder who had taught the two of them that patience. Caramel Doll. It came to him in a flash, leaving him unbalanced and irrationally edgy.
Then Chaff said, “Right.” He waited another moment, eyeing Finnick critically. “Kiddo. Odair. Not gonna treat you like a child here, you’ve seen too much shit go down for that. I know it all sucks, alright? It always sucks. First day’s hard on everybody every time. But this is business as usual, it’s just new to you right now, that’s all. Just, this ain’t the Career districts anymore, alright? We handle matters differently in Five to Twelve. Not as shiny and proper, but it’s all that we’ve got. You get wasted in Central all you want, nobody cares. Haymitch’s good, he’s been doing this for a real long time now. He’s a real smart guy. I ain’t gonna offer him a drink if I think he’ll go on camera too drunk. And he’s a grown man, anyway, he knows when to stop.”
There would always be a part of Finnick that clung to believing that crap like that only ever happened in the Capitol media, on the television, a part that would always be stumped when he heard it coming out of a real person’s mouth. He stared at Chaff.
“What has ever given you the impression that Haymitch can stop?” he said, helplessly.
“He’s gotta make those decisions for himself,” Chaff patiently rephrased.
“He’s an addict. He can’t stop. Didn’t you see him? Do you think it’s normal that it’s me talking to you instead of him? This isn’t the kind of thing where you test yourself to see how much you can take.”
Chaff smirked at him. “You gonna tell me next that it’s a disease?”
“I’m going to tell you that you have to stop making things worse!” Finnick snapped, hot anger starting to boil in his gut. It just simmered there, and it was so foreign that he barely even noticed it as his. “You think he’d let me have this conversation for him if he knew how to have it himself? He needs our help, he needs us to help him through. Do you believe for one second that Snow isn’t already aware of what just went down in there?” Oh, he could just picture Snow leaning back in the chair behind his desk looking pleased. Snow liked to act like he needed them to behave themselves the way he wanted it, but Finnick didn’t doubt that he’d delight in their failure just the same because for him, it was another game, and Finnick’s whole skin prickled tightly at the thought. This had long stopped being just about saving his family, even before he and Haymitch had started that thing between them, it was about saving them and Haymitch, at once, because Haymitch wouldn’t recover from failure. He wouldn’t be able to live with it if he got more people killed. And then, Finnick would have failed too. “People will die if he drinks anything.”
But Chaff was still not getting it; Finnick could see in his face that he didn’t get a word of what Finnick had just said.
“You,” Chaff told him with a level gaze, “shouldn’t believe everything you see on the television.” He got more comfortable, lounging against the wall like it was his, shrugging. “Drinking’s just a decision that we make. It’s just a couple of bottles during Games to ease him through, it won’t do any harm.”
And that, Finnick realized suddenly, was the problem. He didn’t know where that sudden insight was from, but suddenly, it became clear. Haymitch couldn’t be a drunk. Haymitch couldn’t be unable to stop once he started. Because if he was, Chaff would have to face up to the fact that maybe he himself was unable to stop, as well.
Chaff had a wife back home and suddenly, Finnick wondered how much he drank when he was home with her, what measures he took to make sure she wouldn’t find out. What lies he told himself when he hid those bottles, going about his day. As long as Chaff didn’t admit to any of that - and he wouldn’t, not to Finnick, maybe not even to Haymitch - Finnick had no way of convincing him that Haymitch needed his help.
It was the Capitol all over again, walls closing in around him wherever he turned because he was just helpless all over again, no solution available. Caramel was right, he thought, almost panicked. Everybody is too busy thinking of themselves to care about anything but themselves. Chaff was Haymitch’s friend, but it didn’t matter. Haymitch would die. Finnick’s family would die, they would all die.
You’re not being rational.
Finnick wasn’t listening. He was scrambling to cling to that sense of control he’d been feeling during those recent months in Twelve. Sudden, terrifying clarity was shaping itself into the remembered image of Caramel in the Four apartments, coldly advising him, those Games statistics blaring in the background: ”Fuck it. Fuck all of it.”.
The fear of losing Haymitch and all the happiness he’d given him clinging to him like a vice, he suddenly knew exactly what he could do, what he was capable of doing to protect the people he cared about, to protect himself. And if Haymitch fell through the cracks for Chaff, well then, Chaff could damn well fall through the cracks for Finnick.
The problem was the solution too.
Finnick felt that he was pulling himself up, letting go of the air of harmlessness that he’d learned to project even before his Games because he was tall and muscular and everybody else was not.
It was obvious that Chaff had noticed the subtle change, because his eyes flickered across Finnick and he tensed up when he tried to retreat to gain reach, but couldn’t because there was the wall in his back.
Finnick had never in his life struggled harder to pull a punch, clenching and unclenching his fist so hard that his fingernails hurt his palm. He’d never been a violent person, despite how great he had felt wielding his trident - like a god. It would have been so easy if this could have been solved with brawn. But life in Panem was never as simple as that. Nothing about victory was ever clean.
Desperation was a rotting, ugly thing, like they all had become by this point; maybe this year’s arena was the most honest of all.
“I’m only going to explain this once,” Finnick heard himself say in a voice that wasn’t quite his own. Snow taught me that. He gave me that voice. “You’re going to stay away. Haymitch won’t drink even a sip because of you. If you see him with alcohol, you take it away from him. You won’t offer it. You won’t drink when he can see. You’ll switch seats with Seeder and you won’t so much as turn towards him when there’s alcohol on your breath.”
Chaff’s expression was still slack, a careful mask that said he didn’t care, the one he donned on the television. Finnick thought if he could have recalled what Chaff had looked like during his Games, when he lost his hand, he wouldn’t be surprised if that was exactly what Chaff had looked like then, too. Oh look, it’s missing. How about that.
Chaff was all too aware of every shift of Finnick’s body, Finnick could see it in his eyes.
“And if I don’t,” the older victor said, “then what?”
Finnick breathed.
“I’ll have the media come down on you so hard that you won’t have time to blink,” he said. “They’d go wild about any story that has me at the center. If they think you’re too boring to warrant a feature, I’ll go and fuck the Chief of Public Affairs on the backseat of her car to make her do it. I’ll tell her you and your drinking need some saving, too. I’ll tell them living with Haymitch has taught me how to see the signs, and how worried I am about you, my dear, poor, disfigured friend.” He paused for a moment, breathing, contemplating, terribly calm. “I can make sure that you’ll never bring a tribute home again, if you and your wife survive me.”
His trident was at home in Twelve, hanging on the wall across from his bed to remind him of his killing skills. But he hadn’t won his Games because of that trident. It had been stupid to think that his trident had had anything to do with victory.
A tilt of his head, a smile, some skin, cameras going off and gifts falling out of the sky.
And that had been before he even had been old enough to offer sex where people could see.
If this were a Games, Chaff would have just realized that he’d lost.
“You’re a bastard,” he breathed.
“Leave him alone,” Finnick said.
There were things that victors, mentors didn’t do. There were lines they didn’t cross. They were tied together by a bond that nobody else in Panem could hope to understand.
But they were also people ready to cross lines to survive.
“Fuck you,” Chaff said and Finnick stepped aside, watching him stalk down the hallway, out of sight.
He wondered what Haymitch would say, whether he’d lost Haymitch just now.
But when he joined Haymitch at the Twelve console some minutes later, Haymitch just looked at him for a while until he turned to the screen again without a word.
Finnick thought he should feel bad about himself, like something inside of him should just have broken; he should feel like something was gone.
But he didn’t.
He just, in a terrible way, felt more like he knew what he was.
***
The next time Finnick and Chaff met, Chaff had switched seats with Seeder who rarely addressed anybody, lost in her own world when she stared at the screen and prayed for her tribute to a god whose existence she wasn’t permitted to acknowledge. If Chaff talked at all, it was to Cooper at the Ten console or clipped tech talk with Seeder sometimes drifting over. Finnick had a feeling he was often very drunk, but then Seeder’s girl died too and the two of them vanished from Central entirely, leaving one more empty console behind.
Finnick thought that surely Haymitch had had a conversation with his friend himself but he didn’t offer, he never said anything whatsoever about what had transpired, and, unable to find the words to talk about it himself, Finnick suddenly felt so terribly tired. He just wanted the Games to end so that they could go home.
Instead, it dragged on and on for a never-ending eighteen days when the children just refused to crumble, despite the arena having been designed to poison them.
Finnick saw clients, every day. Clients, he tried to remind himself a little more fiercely every time and at every touch, not patrons, and appointments, not dates. Rape, he tried to tell himself and shuddered at the thought. It’s rape. Never had that awareness hovered so close to the surface before. It hurt, suddenly, hands on his chest and his cock when he just wanted them to stop. People telling him what to do and expecting him to look good and make sounds, when he just wanted to be anywhere else, back in the arena if need be. He entertained fantasies, not of just dying but of dissolving in acid, of vanishing out of existence, nothing left to even bury. It had been a mistake, he worried, learning what it could be like, unable to forget now that he knew. He couldn’t stop thinking about what it would sound like if he said no. But he couldn’t say no and the weeks dragged on, and he tried not to be so relieved every time another child died, one step closer to the end.
Haymitch, too was looking more drawn every passing day, glued to his console even when Finnick took over after appointments. It seemed twenty years of seeing it through to the end were hard to shake. But Haymitch didn’t want to talk about it; all his energy was tied up by his refusal to break down. Finnick himself was too exhausted to talk. They waved it off, telling themselves that it was just what Games were like; this was just what happened. Rodey had died late on Day Three after the Careers found him and let him run away for sport, leaving him to bleed out in a puddle of dirt with a cut throat.
Aster made it through most of the Games, easily reaching Final Eight. Barely anybody noticed though. She stole food from the Five female but she didn’t use the opportunity to kill. She polled as uninspiring, the commentators couldn’t settle on a story for her, and the camera always cut away from her too fast. “Wait for it,” Finnick promised their sponsors on Days Five, Seven, Nine, in his most velvet voice, “she’s doing exactly as she was told.” They sent her water and food but she still hollowed out from the same disease that most of the tributes had caught. She captured a snake, roasted it on a geyser, and she ran from the Careers. Unable to hope it would end well, Finnick asked Haymitch for his thoughts once, but Haymitch just stared at the screen for a while, then shook his head. She had sponsors because Finnick smiled at them and because some people just didn’t know how to gamble.
The Capitol loved the arena. It was everything they were not. Finnick slept with people wearing stylized mud streaks on their cheeks, who mixed dimmed greys and browns to contrast with fiery Capitol neon, chasing this year’s greens out of the stores.
His clients were older than they used to be, men and women rich enough to never care about propriety, people who kept special rooms with special toys for special whores. Collectors. They sold him alongside Gloss one time and he thought that was worst of all, having to touch somebody who didn’t want him to.
Despite the fact that he and Haymitch barely felt like touching anymore, rumors were making the round about them in Central. But Finnick couldn’t make himself smile when he saw Beetee clapping Haymitch on the back, he couldn’t smirk about Cashmere and Cordelia at the One console thinking that the whole idea of the two of them was too bizarre to believe, of Johanna snickering.
The night of Day Ten, Finnick returned to the Twelve quarters at dawn with his shirt clinging to his chest from sweat and body fluids that mostly weren’t his.
Haymitch was waiting for him in the brightly lit lounge of the Twelve floor, a tired figure in an armchair underneath the window. He looked too tired.
“Is she dead?” Finnick asked, although she hadn’t been on the tiny Games screen in his limousine, asleep and covered in grime.
Haymitch shook his head. “Just waiting up for you,” he said. “You alright?”
“In a moment like this, the answer to that question will never be yes,” Finnick said, peeling out of that hideous shirt and throwing it into a corner. “I hate this life.”
I hope you picked that up with your bugs loud and clear.
“You should be in bed,” he added, pausing to take in Haymitch, his sunken face, the phantom withdrawal visible in the tremor of his hands that had started two days ago and just hadn’t stopped.
“Doubt I could sleep,” Haymitch said.
Finnick wanted to cross the space between them and hug him then, actually hug like they barely ever did and comfort both Haymitch and himself, but they shouldn’t get that close to each other while he was stinking of sex.
***
Fifteen days into the Games, Aster leveled a metal pole out of a garbage pile, destroying a construction that effectively amounted to a dam. It was a bit like Annie Cresta’s Games except no accident and more terrible. Four of the five remaining Careers drowned in the manure or were buried underneath debris. The sole survivor, the beautifully blonde One female, made quick work of Aster once she’d made it to the shore. Aster never batted an eyelash. Her face, unreadable even in death, looked faintly curious when the throwing star bashed in her skull.
She might have thought she was dead either way in a field of Careers, but it didn’t seem like she’d even cared about victory. She’d done what Haymitch had advised her to do, she’d gone and made a splash.
“Told you so,” Finnick purred at all the sponsors who hadn’t given them any money, sucking a cocktail cherry in his mouth. Aster made 10 Best Moments Of The Games; parts of the recap would be dedicated to her villainy tale, plotting against the Careers. The Cornucopia published a two-page analysis of her Games, reading meanings into every move she’d made.
“Yeah, of course that was the plan all along, I mean, obviously,” Haymitch told the reporters right after she died. “We knew not to expect too much, it just takes time until the sponsors start trusting that you know what you’re doing. Can’t blame them for that. But that was the strategy. I think it was a good one. A bit of luck and, yeah, we’d have brought this one home. We ain’t complaining. It was a first try at a new thing. Still fine-tuning stuff.”
“I supposed we’ve used up that ruse,” Finnick added, quirking his lips at one of the reporters, who blushed a crimson red. “We won’t get the cameras to ignore our tributes that easily again in future Games.”
Eventually, Aster’s killer, eighteen-year-old Timber Doyle from District One was crowned the victor of the 73rd Hunger Games. Once the grime was washed off her face and golden hair and they put her in a queen’s white gown, a young woman of striking beauty emerged from the arena like a fairytale swan. She was tall and pale and graceful, and Finnick tried to not look at her at all. She was from One, he reminded himself, convincing himself that made it all better. In One, all tributes knew what to expect before they volunteered.
Or they thought that they knew, anyway.
“Guess we can go places with that,” muttered Haymitch, when all was said and done, clapping Finnick on the shoulder on the way to the train, then letting go again as if he’d been burned. It had been a Games; every year, the Games surprised Finnick anew with how much they destroyed.
What Haymitch really meant and what Finnick heard was instead, Another one dead. Another one we failed.
And what he heard also was, I can’t stand this anymore. I need to run away and forget what it’s like for a year.
He could still feel the touch of his clients - his rapists - on his skin. He needed to go home, too. He needed to try and forget what kind of person the Games had managed to make him, this time around.
on to chapter 17