THG fic: "Spin Control" [20/24]
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; anorexia and exercise addition
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.
“Spin Control” on LJ: 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 -- Chapter 16 -- Chapter 17 -- Chapter 18 -- Chapter 19
Chapter 20: The Mockingjay Pin
The morning of Reaping Day was warm and bright. Finnick awoke to the sound of robins in the trees outside the open window, a breeze blowing in.
He stretched, sleepily, blinking his eyes open to see a beam of sunlight falling across the room onto his trident, cascading off the gleaming alloy so starkly that it blanketed the weapon entirely. Get up, go on a run, shower, his routine said, but it was the morning of Reaping Day, so the Capitol knew when they would have this again. Remembering the fallout of the 73rd Games, he just rolled over to Haymitch, currently presenting his broad back to Finnick, still asleep. Finnick inched closer, wrapping an arm around him and kissing the back of his neck to wake him up to something nice.
Later, they went to buy a loaf of bread off a pale-looking Dane Mellark and had breakfast together, richer than Finnick would have favored but healthier than would have been Haymitch’s choice. The little preparation that could be done for a Games had been done, so there wasn’t a lot to say now. They sat on the porch in the sun together for a while, close enough for their arms to touch. Paint had started peeling off the façade of Haymitch’s house for real these last few months, and they idly wondered if it would be worth the hassle trying to fix it up themselves. They could pay somebody from the Seam to do it and provide for a job that way, but doing it themselves would be more fun.
The wondrous Cinna and Portia would meet up with them in the Capitol, at the ready to adjust their astonishing parade costumes from the moment they could estimate the height and weight of the reaped tributes. Cherry had called the day before, giving him - and Haymitch, as a last courtesy until Portia took his measures - instructions on what he should wear. So they cleaned up for the camera when the time came, a compromise between their district garb and what the Capitol would expect, and Finnick’s hands lingered on Haymitch’s collar when he fixed it for him. During last year’s Games, they’d almost fallen apart. Ideally, they’d manage to avoid doing that another time.
But they also needed to keep working on getting one of those children home one day.
A part of Finnick had a vague, cold-hearted plan to talk Aleese into volunteering in a few years, if he promised to pay for better medicine for Mitchy in case of her death.
“Are you ready?” he quietly asked, remembering the numerous times one of them had asked the other that. Their sense of humor ran the same way in that regard: The reply had always very cynically been no.
“Might as well,” Haymitch said, hand twitching as if it wanted to wrap around a bottle neck.
Instead, he put it on Finnick’s back on the way out, anchoring them both.
At least, they knew that Finnick probably wouldn’t get out of this one hating himself even more, and Haymitch had proven to himself the last time that he could make it through without a drink. It was hard to imagine any new challenges that the Capitol could throw at them anymore.
Not that it ever ran out of those, though.
***
Finnick and Haymitch were seated on chairs at the back of the stage, while the children were registered by Games clerks below, the crowds herded onto the square. The Capitol descended upon Twelve in full on Reaping Day, a brightly colored district rash, their camera teams perched on the roofs, the Peacekeeper squads surveying the proceedings. Finnick wondered if the whole town architecture had been created specifically for Reaping Days, so that the right voices would carry and there would be spaces to mount the cameras.
He tried to make out a difference from the first time he’d stood before this population to give his arrival speech. But apart from how the children were stood in the Reaping sections this time, the adults watching on from the sidelines with drawn faces, they still all looked sickly and pale, those parents still painfully young, those thousands of eyes still filled with barely concealed suspicion and spite. At least, it wasn’t meant for him, or him or Haymitch, this time, but for the Games: the Mayor’s speech of days long past, the Capitol liberation video showing beautiful meadows and maple trees the likes of which Twelve hadn’t earned the right to grow. At least, he didn’t bring two body bags with him this time. Not yet. He still searched for traces of Raif and Bee in people’s faces sometimes.
District Thirteen on the screen, defeated and dead. What the Capitol gave, it also took away.
Effie commanded the stage with the usual ignorant enthusiasm of the escorts for the big, big day, joking and laughing into her microphone, cheerful wig of bright pink curls adorning her head. The attention paid to Twelve in recent Games had been good for her own career, and her talk of how she hoped to be promoted to a better district had recently changed to hopes that Twelve itself would keep improving with her in the lead; she was in a very good mood. “Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor!” she chirped, when the odds of Twelve had never been.
Shane “Swagger” March. Haymitch Abernathy. Our honored victor from District Four, Finnick Odair. The list of district victors wasn’t a list.
Just don’t make it Gale, Finnick prayed to the gods he didn’t even worship, refusing to look at the section of eighteens. He knew it wasn’t likely. But if Snow had decided that Games training wasn’t what he’d meant when he’d demanded they be entertaining, Gale Hawthorne would undoubtedly be reaped.
Then Effie announced, “Ladies First!” Next to Finnick, in his chair, Haymitch tensed, ever so slightly, and Finnick’s eyes automatically roamed the rows upon rows of starved dead meat, Aleese amongst the thirteens and the twins one section up, praying that all of his children would get another year to prepare.
“Primrose Everdeen!” Effie declared. Finnick felt his stomach form a pitiful knot.
We’ll make her ace the interview, she’ll look great for that parade surprise, he tried to think but he remembered Prim so well, of course, that girl who’d tried to join them because she’d been so scared, who’d been so determined to learn how to throw knives. She hadn’t, though, and there he could see her now, pale as death and fists clenched to her side and twelve, taking a small and stiff step forward. Some of the other twelves were crying; they stumbled back to form a path.
“Prim!” It was only now that Finnick remembered - shit, of course, her sister’s… sixteen, seventeen - so his eyes shot there, to the rows further up and - “Prim!” - a ball of children had formed, tiny and muscular Katniss Everdeen in their midst, struggling to get free, shock on her face, some merchant girl - the mayor’s daughter - worriedly holding onto her arm.
Then the crowd made room, anyway, and Katniss ran down the path to the stage, where Prim had almost reached the stairs up to the stage. Prim was so close Finnick could see how there was no blood left in her face. She was twelve, she was dead and she was smart enough to know. She was shaking.
Katniss pushed her sister behind herself as if she could actually protect her that way, and her voice rang through all of the square, clear as day, “I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Haymitch breathed next to him, but the turmoil on the square swallowed it up. Gale was working his way through the crowd towards the girls now, too, towering over everybody. Finnick barely stopped himself from standing up, staring at Katniss Everdeen who wasn’t quite starved and who shot her squirrels square in the eye, with her blue dress and her long fine braid that would look so nice on the television. As would the determination on her face - a camera was definitely capturing a close-up this second.
Katniss had told him once she’d volunteer to save Prim, of course, but Finnick wouldn’t have dared believe her in his wildest dreams. It was her nightmare coming true. It really wasn’t his.
That girl was as good as a Career volunteer.
The volunteer protocol for Twelve was so rusty that nobody seemed to quite know what to do next. Finnick certainly couldn’t have helped. Mayor Undersee huffed at Effie that they should just proceed, and Gale arrived and swiped Prim up in his arms to carry her away, who screamed and fought and shouted for her sister, while Katniss climbed the stairs as if her legs were moving on their own. Then, she stood onstage by the microphone, stiff from the shock of what had just happened to her, while Effie launched into excited conversation to create more material that could be aired.
And then, as one, the crowd grew even stiller, when one after the other, the children and men and women on the square raised their left arm into the air instead of giving the demanded applause, touching three of their fingers to their lips and holding them up steadily.
“Is this a good thing or bad?” Finnick muttered at Haymitch without looking at him, because he had no idea if that meant fuck you or goodbye or something else, and Haymitch muttered, surely without a twitch on his face that the cameras could catch, “The Capitol won’t know either way.”
Then can we make them do that every time somebody volunteers? Finnick wanted to say, fiercely imagining the scope of that on screen once they’d given the Capitol a context to understand it, all those people, while Haymitch abruptly got up. Because, Finnick saw now, Katniss Everdeen was still very much facing the cameras, but close to tears.
“You come stand with your mentor over there, that’s how the volunteers do it in Twelve,” Haymitch jovially said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and pushing her off shot for some steps. It was a small thing, but Haymitch was broad and Katniss was tiny and it shielded her for a second or two, enough for her to clear her face. From his position, Finnick could see her swallow hard and desperately.
Effie was announcing the drawing of the boys as if the best was yet to come, and something terrible suddenly constricted in Finnick’s chest because maybe Gale would be reaped, and maybe now he’d volunteer. It made no sense - if he’d been thinking clearly, he’d have known - for Gale to take a weaker boy out of the competition to replace with himself. But he knew how Gale sometimes looked when he spoke of Katniss Everdeen and…
“Peeta Mellark!” Effie shouted. The strong, shy, friendly baker’s boy who’d once drawn a bird-flipping Haymitch onto a cake for them was stumbling forward, shock on his face giving way to a battle for composure. A path cleared, he reached the stage, no voice rang through the square and of course, Gale didn’t volunteer. Finnick shook off his paralysis and got up to shake the boy’s hand to correspond with Haymitch standing next to Katniss. A thought occurred to him that this was just as bad as Gale. Worse even, because Peeta couldn’t shoot or run traps and this was so cruel. Especially since Snow couldn’t have set it up.
Snow couldn’t have known that Finnick still remembered how he’d first arrived in Twelve, and Peeta Mellark had been the first to dare and give him a smile on the street. He’d been the first glimpse at a welcome gesture that Finnick had gotten here, the only one until Haymitch started recovering from his depression.
Finnick fiercely decided that Katniss Everdeen or not, he’d do his all to give this boy a fighting chance, too. He wouldn’t let Peeta just die.
***
“Finnick!”
Finnick wouldn’t have heard the voice through the noise of the scattering crowd if he hadn’t been half-expecting it. About to make his way alongside Haymitch into the Justice Building for preliminary interviews and tech talk with Effie, Finnick turned to see Gale making his way past the last remaining eighteens, climbing the podium and catching up with him. The camera teams were already breaking up camp to make the Hovercrafts; nobody would care why this boy was on the stage. Finnick waited for him, drawing him into the shadow of a pillar where nobody would notice them, either.
“If there’s anybody in Twelve who can survive a Games, it’s her,” Finnick told him, catching his eyes, voice firm. “Of all the people here, you and she were the kids with the best shot to get home alive this year.”
Gale’s eyes looked dark against the sickly paleness of his skin.
“Promise me,” he said. “I don’t care who mentors her, promise me you’ll do anything to bring her home.”
“If she makes district interviews, don’t tell them you’re her friend,” Finnick rode right over him. They didn’t have much time. “You haven’t spoken for months, tell them that. Tell them everybody admires her, say she needed to focus on the Games instead of friends, get Prim to tell them Kat’s always wanted to be a tribute all her life because of the glory and honor and don’t ever…”
“I need you to bring her home, I need you to not fuck half the Capitol this time,” Gale interrupted him, desperate, angry.
Finnick pressed his lips together.
“Don’t let them know you’re friends,” he repeated, taking a breath. That would stop the fucking, maybe, at least for Katniss, if she really stood a chance. He would not let Gale become blackmail material. “If you can pull it off at all, claim she’s estranged from her mother as well, they only live under the same roof anymore. It’s too late to leave out Prim.” If Katniss made it out, if Prim died in a mining accident, Katniss would be free. A lot of ifs.
Gale’s eyes darkened.
“Promise me you’ll do everything…”
“I’m always doing everything I fucking can!” Finnick harshly said, and there was a hand on his arm. He twirled around to face Haymitch.
“Trinket’s looking for us,” he told Finnick and nodded a sober acknowledgement at Gale. “Get her gym teacher to talk to the press at Final Eight, if she makes it that far. Athletic’s code for Career.
“That better not have been recorded by any bugs,” he lowly added at Finnick when he dragged him through the Justice Building halls, leaving Gale to helplessly look after them, condemned to stay behind.
Finnick snorted at him. “Like you wouldn’t do anything for a tribute like that girl.”
“I know,” Haymitch said. “Could get the best odds Twelve’s ever had in a Games since before Swagger and me.”
Both of these kids stood a better chance at getting home than anybody had seen from District Twelve since before the Career districts were established. Katniss Everdeen was a straight-out lottery win, but Finnick had seen the Mellark boys hauling flour bags, and he’d bet a lot that Peeta Mellark was charismatic. The crowds would be charmed by that nice smile of his. And now, they even had the parade costumes to make everybody look up and take notice.
Everything had just changed.
***
They’d all be watching the complete Reaping together later, but Finnick snuck off when they first got on the train to see a first quick preliminary recap, as Twelve had been the last to go. Arms tightly crossed in front of his chest and the remote still in hand, his mind worked overtime as he surveyed the hideously diverse field. They weren’t the only ones who’d lucked out. Multiple districts had strong, non-starved children from the upper age range in the running. Four had produced two volunteers. Finnick didn’t like that hard expression on Beetee Corelli’s face when he greeted that deceptively timid fifteen-year-old male. A bulky eighteen-year-old with a stormy face like a Career had taken the stage in Eleven, of all places. And the Two male was huge, but Finnick knew they couldn’t hope for a repeat performance of last year’s Games when Two had tried to play it safe instead of marketing towards victory. The fact that the female was only seventeen set him on edge; Two only volunteered eighteen-year-olds usually. Something was up with that.
District One would be flawless and deadly as always, eager to score their fourth consecutive. They were always vicious after a victory year.
At least, the commentators were already busy spinning Twelve’s fuck you or whatever that gesture had been into the display of a charming district custom. Finnick really needed to find out if they’d be doing that again, ask Haymitch how to handle it in interviews. If they made the wrong claim, Twelve might collectively decide to keep their hands down forever out of spite.
When he and Haymitch arrived at the dinner table later, Effie was already cheerfully prattling away at a still shaken-looking Peeta Mellark. Katniss slunk in just after them, looking equally lost.
Finnick clapped Peeta on the back when he sat down next to him, throwing him what he hoped was an easy and reassuring smile. “We didn’t really plan to divide you up in any special way beforehand, but it looks like you’ll be with me. I hope that’s fine with you.”
Exclaiming an affirmative grunt, Haymitch pointed his fork at Katniss. “Means you’ll be with me, obviously. I’m sure we’ll find some fancy things to discuss with each other.”
“But we generally work together,” Finnick added. “I know it doesn’t always look like that on the screen, but that’s how it works in our case. So if you need anything or if you have any questions and your mentor isn’t around, feel free to just approach the other one.”
The children nodded, clearly still in shock and not quite processing things in real time. Finnick had done this often enough by now to know they’d eventually start wondering about some questions, like for example what would happen if they had to go up against each other and the other one’s mentor had all the dirt on them. He’d definitely grown accustomed to Twelve’s obsession with that concept, as if this district had ever made Final Two with both its tributes even once in those seventy-three previous Games. He still remembered how scared Bee and Raif had been about that. Maybe it stemmed from something Swagger had said to the district about how he’d let his district partner walk into a trap.
Leaning back in his chair, Finnick looked at Katniss and Peeta in turns for a while - the poacher and volunteer, who’d hopefully provide a heartwarming tale of sisterly love and Games glory in her interview and who’d mastered three kinds of weapon that Finnick knew of so far. And the merchant boy with the nice smile and the broad shoulders, who maybe had some idea how to handle the Capitol from a lifetime of handling his mother - even Finnick knew that everybody in the district looked the other way stiffly when the talk was of Mother Mellark, an unfortunate situation nobody could have done anything about. Katniss and Peeta were amongst the strongest children who’d stood in that square today, in terms of nourishment, but both still dug into their bland proteins as if they hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe they could bump them up to real food tomorrow.
“At least, you two have decent manners,” Effie was remarking with quite some satisfaction. “The pair last year ate everything with their hands like savages. It completely upset my digestion.” Rodey Wills, who had bled out in the mud after the Careers had hunted him down. Aster Cagney, who had made a splash and died to help the district that hadn’t understood her, just because she might as well.
Finnick’s eyes wandered to Haymitch. Haymitch was another one who unapologetically gorged himself on the Capitol food at every opportunity. Then, he paused, though, because Haymitch hadn’t much touched his food much as of yet. Hunched over his plate, he seemed to have half forgotten his fork, scowling, eyes glued onto Katniss Everdeen.
It seemed that they were on a gold pin she had fastened to the chest piece of her dress, a little stylized bird - a mockingjay, Finnick thought after a second - framed by a golden ring. It was pretty and delicate, a sentimental district token, looking far outside the price range of a girl from the Seam. Her mother looked merchant though, so who knew what they kept in the attic.
Katniss eventually felt the eyes on her, looking up to shoot Haymitch a defensive look.
“What?”
“That pin,” Haymitch said, pointing his fork in its direction and ignoring how that repeated misappropriation of cutlery made Effie frown in offense. “Didn’t wear that before at the Reaping.”
Katniss’ face became even more guarded. “So? I can wear a district token in there.”
“Where did you get it from?”
“A friend gave it to me,” she muttered at her plate.
“Must be quite some friend,” Finnick remarked, wondering what he was missing.
“I guess,” Katniss said as if she’d rather not, while her face conveyed something along the lines of how it didn’t matter anyway because she was dead, and Peeta was dead too, and she’d never see her friend again.
Haymitch put down his fork and got up.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, as if he’d just be in the other room to do a thing.
***
“So who gave her that pin?” Finnick said, plopping down on the narrow bed in Haymitch’s train compartment.
Having waited long enough so that nobody would raise any eyebrows, he’d gotten up himself and employed the victors’ popular excuse of Games preparation that needed to be finished, which everybody always accepted, because it made them look so pompous and busy, when really there wasn’t a lot to prepare when you led little children to their deaths. It gave him an excuse to talk to Haymitch in private.
He’d passed the bar compartment on the way here, feeling a little uneasy about how a small part of him was still involuntarily relieved when he didn’t find Haymitch there.
But Haymitch was standing in his small bathroom alcove, sliding door open, splashing water on his face perched over the basin. The smell of the flowery Capitol soap wafted out, nothing like the stench of fear and sweat in his arena.
Now he shook his head without looking up.
“Wrong question,” he said. “One of the Undersees must have given it to her, I guess. It used to belong to the Donners, but I suppose that Iris took it along when she married Dahey. I mean, you don’t sell a thing like that, and it’s not like the Undersees would have been desperate for the money.”
“And you know the Donners how?” Finnick asked, making himself sound casual on purpose when it was so clear that this was leading up to something. He’d didn’t know of any Donners, but he supposed that the mayor’s wife and Haymitch had to be about the same age. Mayor Undersee, he thought, was a little bit older than them.
It was the first time Haymitch shot him a quick look.
“Maysilee Donner wore that pin as a token in her Games,” he said. “She was one of my district partners in the Quell.”
Oh.
Oh.
Haymitch would have had three district partners obviously, what with his Quell featuring the double amount of tributes. But of course, Finnick still knew immediately who he meant. Haymitch had only been in an alliance with one of them. The recaps only ever showed one of them, the anguish so beautiful on sixteen-year-old Haymitch’s face when she died in his arms, her face and his hands stained with too-red blood in the fairytale arena.
Maysilee. The name Haymitch gasped sometimes at night when he startled awake.
The Capitol media preferred showing Haymitch and Maysilee’s fight against the Careers, and her death, over the final battle and its subversive tactics.
“The blonde girl,” Finnick said blandly, because they hadn’t talked about this besides, “She isn’t here, you aren’t there anymore, listen to me, that was twenty years ago, you’re in Twelve.” They’d never talked about Finnick’s pack mates either. None of them wanted to drag up their Games if they didn’t absolutely have to and at night, after nightmares, Haymitch hovered too closely on the brink of flashbacks for that topic to ever be an option, anyway.
Haymitch threw him a weak smirk, drying his hands. “The blonde girl.”
Drawing the sliding door shut, he stepped back into the compartment and sank down on the bed next to Finnick, sleeves still rolled up and cufflinks unbuttoned.
“Not like I didn’t know this Games would turn to shit, isn’t like they don’t always go like that,” he muttered, rubbing his face.
Finnick drew up his legs onto the bed, inching over to get comfortable against the footrest, eyes on Haymitch who in turn was staring at the wall. There were times for touch, but he knew Haymitch well enough to recognize this wasn’t one of them. Haymitch battled things out on his own in his head first, where it was safe because nobody could hear and get hurt.
“The Games won’t be decided by a district token,” he pointed out after a moment. It wasn’t a reply to what Haymitch had said, but Finnick still thought he might need the reminder.
Haymitch slumped into himself, just a bit.
It was sometimes hard to recognize the scared sixteen-year-old in him, helpless and panicked - the same age as Katniss and Peeta - except when suddenly it wasn’t.
Opening and closing his mouth, Haymitch paused.
Then he settled on: “I’ve never much talked about her anymore since. I mean, nobody remembers her much beside Iris and me. They were twins, they looked the same. The first couple of years, every time I looked at her, I just saw Maysilee and freaked.
“She probably had a similar problem with me.
“Remember your district partner’s name?” Glancing at Finnick, he nudged at Finnick’s foot, resting next to his thigh.
“It was Landa Doe,” Finnick replied without having to think. “Before she changed it for the marketing, it was Landa Molere. I was in the big alliance with her.” He hesitated for a beat, knowing he was touching on an unpopular topic. “I thought I’d have to kill her, but the girl from Seven beat me to it when the pack broke apart.”
Haymitch threw him a look. “You Careers are so weird,” he said, and Finnick smirked.
“Part of our selling point, didn’t you know.”
“The thing about that Quell arena was,” Haymitch said with a stronger voice as if they’d been talking about that all along, “that everything was out to get you in there, even water. Even grass. The more harmless it looked, the more likely it had a thing about it that would kill you. Sort of like the Capitol,” he added with a mutter, and Finnick grimaced at him.
“Later when Ralda won,” Haymitch continued, “I thought I was so lucky that I didn’t end up like her. She wouldn’t trust food anymore. She was thinking all the time, what if that dinner, that breakfast was poisoned, what if she’d poisoned it herself but had forgotten to mark it in some way. I could have gotten like that, I could have come out and gotten scared of the forest, the Meadow, everything. I mean, Twelve’s kind of shaped like an arena with that electrical fence all around. Year after the Games, I still got kind of relieved every time it rained, because rain had been good, that’s how we got water. But then, I’d think, it could have been acid this time. How did I just assume it wouldn’t be.”
He took a deep breath. “That arena killed almost twenty of those forty-eight with the environment, they were dropping like rag dolls all over, it was total chance who figured the right things out and who didn’t in time. Those were all judgment calls. But how do you make a judgment call like that? That’s chance.”
Finnick thought about that for a moment, thinking about the beauty of that Games, about what it would have been like to be a beautiful child on a beautiful stage. That could have helped or screwed him over both. Thinking about the jungle in his own arena, the oil of the vines between his fingers, the humidity that always loomed in the back of his neck. The dark parts of that jungle had been so cold, though - chilling. He hadn’t thought about what it had actually felt like on his skin in years. It made him shudder.
He toed the blanket with tip of his fancy Capitol boot, the likes of which he hadn’t owned before he won.
“Mine had these waterfalls,” he said. “I camped out at one after the pack had broken up. Mosquito mutts, too, and snakes. But those waterfalls, too. I cleaned up in one, in that pond that had formed underneath. Drowned one of the Careers in it later, with a net. After the Games on the victory recap, I saw that they all had those geysers at the ground, turned on every noon and heated up the water so quickly that you’d get boiled. None of us figured that out, except the ones who died that way.” He paused for a moment, considering. “The snakes were awful, but they were big and lazy. Easy to spot. I kept waiting for a chance of luring one of the others at them, but I was never sure who in the alliance knew how to see them coming, too. So that never worked out.”
“In my Victory Tour interviews,” Haymitch said, “I got a lot of questions about Maysilee and me, although they’d all seen Alsey giving interviews during the Games. If there’d been feelings between us. Like you can get attracted to a girl’s pretty eyes or some such nonsense if all you can think of how at least one of you is as good as dead.
“Not that I ever did, but I just wanted to see Alsey again.” He said that a little more quietly.
“Later on, it kept bugging me, how there had to have been a way to get both of us home, any kind of way. That’s what I was like then, always trying to outsmart the system. Clever Haymitch, they called me, like that hadn’t gotten all my family killed. I tried to stop because it kept biting me in the ass but I thought, there had to have been a way, any way, something that people hadn’t thought up. Not that I’ve ever even gotten a tribute home as mentor, other than in a coffin.”
“If you want, we can still switch tributes,” Finnick said. He’d wanted Peeta, who’d smiled at him first, but he didn’t want Peeta that much. “I just used the Games prep excuse with Effie, anyway. I can take on Katniss and we’ll call it a late change of strategy.”
The last thing they needed was Haymitch flashing back and forth between his Quell and this Games, Katniss and Maysilee, Maysilee and Katniss, when they stood a real chance with that girl. Finnick wasn’t as concerned about Haymitch’s alcoholism all the time anymore as he’d used to, but he knew they still couldn’t risk taking that chance. That would never be an option.
But Haymitch was already waving it off. “Nah, she’s nothing like her. I’d still have to look at the damn pin on the screens all the time. Just stop me if I cook up something clever again that’ll get us all dead.”
Then, he groaned, rubbing his face in this tired and ancient and frustrated way.
“Shit,” he muttered, staring at the ceiling. The skin on the crook of his throat was still gleaming wet, part of the collar soaked. “Shit, we’ll still have to see how she plays on a screen but we could stand a real shot with that girl, couldn’t we? Isn’t she the one who taught Gale how to do those tricks with his knife?”
“She’s really good at throwing them, too,” Finnick provided. “If we play it right, we can either bring her home or at least use her to convince everybody that we’re serious contenders now. She could give us a real marketing boost and change the odds for everybody after her. Peeta as well. He’ll look better next to her, like there are plenty more tributes like that at the ready now. He won’t even have to do much for that, we’ll just tell him to drop a line or two about how everybody’s getting so excited about the Games back home. We’ll have to see who of the two of them is better at working off a script.”
Haymitch was nodding along. “You’re the punch line of that story, of course, they got excited because you arrived and made everything different,” he said, talking tech now. This was what they’d been doing since last Games, telling the Capitol a story. It was Haymitch’s strength, too, making everything come together. “The chariot surprise is gonna help and bring that home visually, too.”
Finnick nodded firmly and grimly. “We’re the fire district now.”
Cinna and Portia’s was a brilliant idea. Fire would still be the Twelve thing long after they’d retired, Finnick was perfectly sure of that.
Haymitch could balance the marketing easily, and Finnick would be there to keep him steady, if it all became too much.
Peeta would definitely be sold off for a time if he won, Finnick thought uneasily, leaning back against the footrest, considering that soft face and those shoulders and that smile. No Caramel, no Finnick, but a Haymitch or Calina for sure. Katniss might be as well, depending on what her brittleness screen-tested like. But not for long, he told himself - clung to. The Capitol had last year’s stunning Timber Doyle to play with right now, Finnick and Johanna were both still fairly young, and the new stylist team emphasized fieriness and bravery over sex. They might even be able to take more of a District Two approach with Katniss, make her a focused and stone-faced Career, but he’d promised himself to take the approach most likely to get a child home. He couldn’t save them from prostitution if he didn’t get them home first. It didn’t mean he’d be creating another Caramel. Another Finnick.
There were too many different emotions on Haymitch’s face, the pain of remembering his Games and that girl, the fear of having to see another tribute wearing Maysilee Donner’s pin die, the knowledge that this could be the best Games that Twelve would ever have played. They had the perfect preconditions so far. They’d never get this chance again; Gale was out of the Reaping bowl as of this year, and there was no second Katniss Everdeen.
“Let’s not expect too much, let’s not do that,” Haymitch breathed. “They could fuck up the interviews and screen-test like frogs, or they die in the bloodbath or they stumble down a hill and break their fucking necks.”
“Or they won’t,” Finnick reminded him, determined, refusing to consider any of those options just yet. They’d take it as it came along. There was chance in every Games. He’d usually have called that an advantage.
The 74th Hunger Games would still be very different from any other Games that they could otherwise have played. They’d brought Katniss fucking Everdeen who shot her squirrels in the eye. Squirrels weren’t much bigger than the eye.
The train engine hummed faintly underneath them, carrying them closer to the Capitol.
Tbc
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; anorexia and exercise addition
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.
“Spin Control” on LJ: 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 -- Chapter 16 -- Chapter 17 -- Chapter 18 -- Chapter 19
Chapter 20: The Mockingjay Pin
The morning of Reaping Day was warm and bright. Finnick awoke to the sound of robins in the trees outside the open window, a breeze blowing in.
He stretched, sleepily, blinking his eyes open to see a beam of sunlight falling across the room onto his trident, cascading off the gleaming alloy so starkly that it blanketed the weapon entirely. Get up, go on a run, shower, his routine said, but it was the morning of Reaping Day, so the Capitol knew when they would have this again. Remembering the fallout of the 73rd Games, he just rolled over to Haymitch, currently presenting his broad back to Finnick, still asleep. Finnick inched closer, wrapping an arm around him and kissing the back of his neck to wake him up to something nice.
Later, they went to buy a loaf of bread off a pale-looking Dane Mellark and had breakfast together, richer than Finnick would have favored but healthier than would have been Haymitch’s choice. The little preparation that could be done for a Games had been done, so there wasn’t a lot to say now. They sat on the porch in the sun together for a while, close enough for their arms to touch. Paint had started peeling off the façade of Haymitch’s house for real these last few months, and they idly wondered if it would be worth the hassle trying to fix it up themselves. They could pay somebody from the Seam to do it and provide for a job that way, but doing it themselves would be more fun.
The wondrous Cinna and Portia would meet up with them in the Capitol, at the ready to adjust their astonishing parade costumes from the moment they could estimate the height and weight of the reaped tributes. Cherry had called the day before, giving him - and Haymitch, as a last courtesy until Portia took his measures - instructions on what he should wear. So they cleaned up for the camera when the time came, a compromise between their district garb and what the Capitol would expect, and Finnick’s hands lingered on Haymitch’s collar when he fixed it for him. During last year’s Games, they’d almost fallen apart. Ideally, they’d manage to avoid doing that another time.
But they also needed to keep working on getting one of those children home one day.
A part of Finnick had a vague, cold-hearted plan to talk Aleese into volunteering in a few years, if he promised to pay for better medicine for Mitchy in case of her death.
“Are you ready?” he quietly asked, remembering the numerous times one of them had asked the other that. Their sense of humor ran the same way in that regard: The reply had always very cynically been no.
“Might as well,” Haymitch said, hand twitching as if it wanted to wrap around a bottle neck.
Instead, he put it on Finnick’s back on the way out, anchoring them both.
At least, they knew that Finnick probably wouldn’t get out of this one hating himself even more, and Haymitch had proven to himself the last time that he could make it through without a drink. It was hard to imagine any new challenges that the Capitol could throw at them anymore.
Not that it ever ran out of those, though.
***
Finnick and Haymitch were seated on chairs at the back of the stage, while the children were registered by Games clerks below, the crowds herded onto the square. The Capitol descended upon Twelve in full on Reaping Day, a brightly colored district rash, their camera teams perched on the roofs, the Peacekeeper squads surveying the proceedings. Finnick wondered if the whole town architecture had been created specifically for Reaping Days, so that the right voices would carry and there would be spaces to mount the cameras.
He tried to make out a difference from the first time he’d stood before this population to give his arrival speech. But apart from how the children were stood in the Reaping sections this time, the adults watching on from the sidelines with drawn faces, they still all looked sickly and pale, those parents still painfully young, those thousands of eyes still filled with barely concealed suspicion and spite. At least, it wasn’t meant for him, or him or Haymitch, this time, but for the Games: the Mayor’s speech of days long past, the Capitol liberation video showing beautiful meadows and maple trees the likes of which Twelve hadn’t earned the right to grow. At least, he didn’t bring two body bags with him this time. Not yet. He still searched for traces of Raif and Bee in people’s faces sometimes.
District Thirteen on the screen, defeated and dead. What the Capitol gave, it also took away.
Effie commanded the stage with the usual ignorant enthusiasm of the escorts for the big, big day, joking and laughing into her microphone, cheerful wig of bright pink curls adorning her head. The attention paid to Twelve in recent Games had been good for her own career, and her talk of how she hoped to be promoted to a better district had recently changed to hopes that Twelve itself would keep improving with her in the lead; she was in a very good mood. “Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor!” she chirped, when the odds of Twelve had never been.
Shane “Swagger” March. Haymitch Abernathy. Our honored victor from District Four, Finnick Odair. The list of district victors wasn’t a list.
Just don’t make it Gale, Finnick prayed to the gods he didn’t even worship, refusing to look at the section of eighteens. He knew it wasn’t likely. But if Snow had decided that Games training wasn’t what he’d meant when he’d demanded they be entertaining, Gale Hawthorne would undoubtedly be reaped.
Then Effie announced, “Ladies First!” Next to Finnick, in his chair, Haymitch tensed, ever so slightly, and Finnick’s eyes automatically roamed the rows upon rows of starved dead meat, Aleese amongst the thirteens and the twins one section up, praying that all of his children would get another year to prepare.
“Primrose Everdeen!” Effie declared. Finnick felt his stomach form a pitiful knot.
We’ll make her ace the interview, she’ll look great for that parade surprise, he tried to think but he remembered Prim so well, of course, that girl who’d tried to join them because she’d been so scared, who’d been so determined to learn how to throw knives. She hadn’t, though, and there he could see her now, pale as death and fists clenched to her side and twelve, taking a small and stiff step forward. Some of the other twelves were crying; they stumbled back to form a path.
“Prim!” It was only now that Finnick remembered - shit, of course, her sister’s… sixteen, seventeen - so his eyes shot there, to the rows further up and - “Prim!” - a ball of children had formed, tiny and muscular Katniss Everdeen in their midst, struggling to get free, shock on her face, some merchant girl - the mayor’s daughter - worriedly holding onto her arm.
Then the crowd made room, anyway, and Katniss ran down the path to the stage, where Prim had almost reached the stairs up to the stage. Prim was so close Finnick could see how there was no blood left in her face. She was twelve, she was dead and she was smart enough to know. She was shaking.
Katniss pushed her sister behind herself as if she could actually protect her that way, and her voice rang through all of the square, clear as day, “I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Haymitch breathed next to him, but the turmoil on the square swallowed it up. Gale was working his way through the crowd towards the girls now, too, towering over everybody. Finnick barely stopped himself from standing up, staring at Katniss Everdeen who wasn’t quite starved and who shot her squirrels square in the eye, with her blue dress and her long fine braid that would look so nice on the television. As would the determination on her face - a camera was definitely capturing a close-up this second.
Katniss had told him once she’d volunteer to save Prim, of course, but Finnick wouldn’t have dared believe her in his wildest dreams. It was her nightmare coming true. It really wasn’t his.
That girl was as good as a Career volunteer.
The volunteer protocol for Twelve was so rusty that nobody seemed to quite know what to do next. Finnick certainly couldn’t have helped. Mayor Undersee huffed at Effie that they should just proceed, and Gale arrived and swiped Prim up in his arms to carry her away, who screamed and fought and shouted for her sister, while Katniss climbed the stairs as if her legs were moving on their own. Then, she stood onstage by the microphone, stiff from the shock of what had just happened to her, while Effie launched into excited conversation to create more material that could be aired.
And then, as one, the crowd grew even stiller, when one after the other, the children and men and women on the square raised their left arm into the air instead of giving the demanded applause, touching three of their fingers to their lips and holding them up steadily.
“Is this a good thing or bad?” Finnick muttered at Haymitch without looking at him, because he had no idea if that meant fuck you or goodbye or something else, and Haymitch muttered, surely without a twitch on his face that the cameras could catch, “The Capitol won’t know either way.”
Then can we make them do that every time somebody volunteers? Finnick wanted to say, fiercely imagining the scope of that on screen once they’d given the Capitol a context to understand it, all those people, while Haymitch abruptly got up. Because, Finnick saw now, Katniss Everdeen was still very much facing the cameras, but close to tears.
“You come stand with your mentor over there, that’s how the volunteers do it in Twelve,” Haymitch jovially said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and pushing her off shot for some steps. It was a small thing, but Haymitch was broad and Katniss was tiny and it shielded her for a second or two, enough for her to clear her face. From his position, Finnick could see her swallow hard and desperately.
Effie was announcing the drawing of the boys as if the best was yet to come, and something terrible suddenly constricted in Finnick’s chest because maybe Gale would be reaped, and maybe now he’d volunteer. It made no sense - if he’d been thinking clearly, he’d have known - for Gale to take a weaker boy out of the competition to replace with himself. But he knew how Gale sometimes looked when he spoke of Katniss Everdeen and…
“Peeta Mellark!” Effie shouted. The strong, shy, friendly baker’s boy who’d once drawn a bird-flipping Haymitch onto a cake for them was stumbling forward, shock on his face giving way to a battle for composure. A path cleared, he reached the stage, no voice rang through the square and of course, Gale didn’t volunteer. Finnick shook off his paralysis and got up to shake the boy’s hand to correspond with Haymitch standing next to Katniss. A thought occurred to him that this was just as bad as Gale. Worse even, because Peeta couldn’t shoot or run traps and this was so cruel. Especially since Snow couldn’t have set it up.
Snow couldn’t have known that Finnick still remembered how he’d first arrived in Twelve, and Peeta Mellark had been the first to dare and give him a smile on the street. He’d been the first glimpse at a welcome gesture that Finnick had gotten here, the only one until Haymitch started recovering from his depression.
Finnick fiercely decided that Katniss Everdeen or not, he’d do his all to give this boy a fighting chance, too. He wouldn’t let Peeta just die.
***
“Finnick!”
Finnick wouldn’t have heard the voice through the noise of the scattering crowd if he hadn’t been half-expecting it. About to make his way alongside Haymitch into the Justice Building for preliminary interviews and tech talk with Effie, Finnick turned to see Gale making his way past the last remaining eighteens, climbing the podium and catching up with him. The camera teams were already breaking up camp to make the Hovercrafts; nobody would care why this boy was on the stage. Finnick waited for him, drawing him into the shadow of a pillar where nobody would notice them, either.
“If there’s anybody in Twelve who can survive a Games, it’s her,” Finnick told him, catching his eyes, voice firm. “Of all the people here, you and she were the kids with the best shot to get home alive this year.”
Gale’s eyes looked dark against the sickly paleness of his skin.
“Promise me,” he said. “I don’t care who mentors her, promise me you’ll do anything to bring her home.”
“If she makes district interviews, don’t tell them you’re her friend,” Finnick rode right over him. They didn’t have much time. “You haven’t spoken for months, tell them that. Tell them everybody admires her, say she needed to focus on the Games instead of friends, get Prim to tell them Kat’s always wanted to be a tribute all her life because of the glory and honor and don’t ever…”
“I need you to bring her home, I need you to not fuck half the Capitol this time,” Gale interrupted him, desperate, angry.
Finnick pressed his lips together.
“Don’t let them know you’re friends,” he repeated, taking a breath. That would stop the fucking, maybe, at least for Katniss, if she really stood a chance. He would not let Gale become blackmail material. “If you can pull it off at all, claim she’s estranged from her mother as well, they only live under the same roof anymore. It’s too late to leave out Prim.” If Katniss made it out, if Prim died in a mining accident, Katniss would be free. A lot of ifs.
Gale’s eyes darkened.
“Promise me you’ll do everything…”
“I’m always doing everything I fucking can!” Finnick harshly said, and there was a hand on his arm. He twirled around to face Haymitch.
“Trinket’s looking for us,” he told Finnick and nodded a sober acknowledgement at Gale. “Get her gym teacher to talk to the press at Final Eight, if she makes it that far. Athletic’s code for Career.
“That better not have been recorded by any bugs,” he lowly added at Finnick when he dragged him through the Justice Building halls, leaving Gale to helplessly look after them, condemned to stay behind.
Finnick snorted at him. “Like you wouldn’t do anything for a tribute like that girl.”
“I know,” Haymitch said. “Could get the best odds Twelve’s ever had in a Games since before Swagger and me.”
Both of these kids stood a better chance at getting home than anybody had seen from District Twelve since before the Career districts were established. Katniss Everdeen was a straight-out lottery win, but Finnick had seen the Mellark boys hauling flour bags, and he’d bet a lot that Peeta Mellark was charismatic. The crowds would be charmed by that nice smile of his. And now, they even had the parade costumes to make everybody look up and take notice.
Everything had just changed.
***
They’d all be watching the complete Reaping together later, but Finnick snuck off when they first got on the train to see a first quick preliminary recap, as Twelve had been the last to go. Arms tightly crossed in front of his chest and the remote still in hand, his mind worked overtime as he surveyed the hideously diverse field. They weren’t the only ones who’d lucked out. Multiple districts had strong, non-starved children from the upper age range in the running. Four had produced two volunteers. Finnick didn’t like that hard expression on Beetee Corelli’s face when he greeted that deceptively timid fifteen-year-old male. A bulky eighteen-year-old with a stormy face like a Career had taken the stage in Eleven, of all places. And the Two male was huge, but Finnick knew they couldn’t hope for a repeat performance of last year’s Games when Two had tried to play it safe instead of marketing towards victory. The fact that the female was only seventeen set him on edge; Two only volunteered eighteen-year-olds usually. Something was up with that.
District One would be flawless and deadly as always, eager to score their fourth consecutive. They were always vicious after a victory year.
At least, the commentators were already busy spinning Twelve’s fuck you or whatever that gesture had been into the display of a charming district custom. Finnick really needed to find out if they’d be doing that again, ask Haymitch how to handle it in interviews. If they made the wrong claim, Twelve might collectively decide to keep their hands down forever out of spite.
When he and Haymitch arrived at the dinner table later, Effie was already cheerfully prattling away at a still shaken-looking Peeta Mellark. Katniss slunk in just after them, looking equally lost.
Finnick clapped Peeta on the back when he sat down next to him, throwing him what he hoped was an easy and reassuring smile. “We didn’t really plan to divide you up in any special way beforehand, but it looks like you’ll be with me. I hope that’s fine with you.”
Exclaiming an affirmative grunt, Haymitch pointed his fork at Katniss. “Means you’ll be with me, obviously. I’m sure we’ll find some fancy things to discuss with each other.”
“But we generally work together,” Finnick added. “I know it doesn’t always look like that on the screen, but that’s how it works in our case. So if you need anything or if you have any questions and your mentor isn’t around, feel free to just approach the other one.”
The children nodded, clearly still in shock and not quite processing things in real time. Finnick had done this often enough by now to know they’d eventually start wondering about some questions, like for example what would happen if they had to go up against each other and the other one’s mentor had all the dirt on them. He’d definitely grown accustomed to Twelve’s obsession with that concept, as if this district had ever made Final Two with both its tributes even once in those seventy-three previous Games. He still remembered how scared Bee and Raif had been about that. Maybe it stemmed from something Swagger had said to the district about how he’d let his district partner walk into a trap.
Leaning back in his chair, Finnick looked at Katniss and Peeta in turns for a while - the poacher and volunteer, who’d hopefully provide a heartwarming tale of sisterly love and Games glory in her interview and who’d mastered three kinds of weapon that Finnick knew of so far. And the merchant boy with the nice smile and the broad shoulders, who maybe had some idea how to handle the Capitol from a lifetime of handling his mother - even Finnick knew that everybody in the district looked the other way stiffly when the talk was of Mother Mellark, an unfortunate situation nobody could have done anything about. Katniss and Peeta were amongst the strongest children who’d stood in that square today, in terms of nourishment, but both still dug into their bland proteins as if they hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe they could bump them up to real food tomorrow.
“At least, you two have decent manners,” Effie was remarking with quite some satisfaction. “The pair last year ate everything with their hands like savages. It completely upset my digestion.” Rodey Wills, who had bled out in the mud after the Careers had hunted him down. Aster Cagney, who had made a splash and died to help the district that hadn’t understood her, just because she might as well.
Finnick’s eyes wandered to Haymitch. Haymitch was another one who unapologetically gorged himself on the Capitol food at every opportunity. Then, he paused, though, because Haymitch hadn’t much touched his food much as of yet. Hunched over his plate, he seemed to have half forgotten his fork, scowling, eyes glued onto Katniss Everdeen.
It seemed that they were on a gold pin she had fastened to the chest piece of her dress, a little stylized bird - a mockingjay, Finnick thought after a second - framed by a golden ring. It was pretty and delicate, a sentimental district token, looking far outside the price range of a girl from the Seam. Her mother looked merchant though, so who knew what they kept in the attic.
Katniss eventually felt the eyes on her, looking up to shoot Haymitch a defensive look.
“What?”
“That pin,” Haymitch said, pointing his fork in its direction and ignoring how that repeated misappropriation of cutlery made Effie frown in offense. “Didn’t wear that before at the Reaping.”
Katniss’ face became even more guarded. “So? I can wear a district token in there.”
“Where did you get it from?”
“A friend gave it to me,” she muttered at her plate.
“Must be quite some friend,” Finnick remarked, wondering what he was missing.
“I guess,” Katniss said as if she’d rather not, while her face conveyed something along the lines of how it didn’t matter anyway because she was dead, and Peeta was dead too, and she’d never see her friend again.
Haymitch put down his fork and got up.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, as if he’d just be in the other room to do a thing.
***
“So who gave her that pin?” Finnick said, plopping down on the narrow bed in Haymitch’s train compartment.
Having waited long enough so that nobody would raise any eyebrows, he’d gotten up himself and employed the victors’ popular excuse of Games preparation that needed to be finished, which everybody always accepted, because it made them look so pompous and busy, when really there wasn’t a lot to prepare when you led little children to their deaths. It gave him an excuse to talk to Haymitch in private.
He’d passed the bar compartment on the way here, feeling a little uneasy about how a small part of him was still involuntarily relieved when he didn’t find Haymitch there.
But Haymitch was standing in his small bathroom alcove, sliding door open, splashing water on his face perched over the basin. The smell of the flowery Capitol soap wafted out, nothing like the stench of fear and sweat in his arena.
Now he shook his head without looking up.
“Wrong question,” he said. “One of the Undersees must have given it to her, I guess. It used to belong to the Donners, but I suppose that Iris took it along when she married Dahey. I mean, you don’t sell a thing like that, and it’s not like the Undersees would have been desperate for the money.”
“And you know the Donners how?” Finnick asked, making himself sound casual on purpose when it was so clear that this was leading up to something. He’d didn’t know of any Donners, but he supposed that the mayor’s wife and Haymitch had to be about the same age. Mayor Undersee, he thought, was a little bit older than them.
It was the first time Haymitch shot him a quick look.
“Maysilee Donner wore that pin as a token in her Games,” he said. “She was one of my district partners in the Quell.”
Oh.
Oh.
Haymitch would have had three district partners obviously, what with his Quell featuring the double amount of tributes. But of course, Finnick still knew immediately who he meant. Haymitch had only been in an alliance with one of them. The recaps only ever showed one of them, the anguish so beautiful on sixteen-year-old Haymitch’s face when she died in his arms, her face and his hands stained with too-red blood in the fairytale arena.
Maysilee. The name Haymitch gasped sometimes at night when he startled awake.
The Capitol media preferred showing Haymitch and Maysilee’s fight against the Careers, and her death, over the final battle and its subversive tactics.
“The blonde girl,” Finnick said blandly, because they hadn’t talked about this besides, “She isn’t here, you aren’t there anymore, listen to me, that was twenty years ago, you’re in Twelve.” They’d never talked about Finnick’s pack mates either. None of them wanted to drag up their Games if they didn’t absolutely have to and at night, after nightmares, Haymitch hovered too closely on the brink of flashbacks for that topic to ever be an option, anyway.
Haymitch threw him a weak smirk, drying his hands. “The blonde girl.”
Drawing the sliding door shut, he stepped back into the compartment and sank down on the bed next to Finnick, sleeves still rolled up and cufflinks unbuttoned.
“Not like I didn’t know this Games would turn to shit, isn’t like they don’t always go like that,” he muttered, rubbing his face.
Finnick drew up his legs onto the bed, inching over to get comfortable against the footrest, eyes on Haymitch who in turn was staring at the wall. There were times for touch, but he knew Haymitch well enough to recognize this wasn’t one of them. Haymitch battled things out on his own in his head first, where it was safe because nobody could hear and get hurt.
“The Games won’t be decided by a district token,” he pointed out after a moment. It wasn’t a reply to what Haymitch had said, but Finnick still thought he might need the reminder.
Haymitch slumped into himself, just a bit.
It was sometimes hard to recognize the scared sixteen-year-old in him, helpless and panicked - the same age as Katniss and Peeta - except when suddenly it wasn’t.
Opening and closing his mouth, Haymitch paused.
Then he settled on: “I’ve never much talked about her anymore since. I mean, nobody remembers her much beside Iris and me. They were twins, they looked the same. The first couple of years, every time I looked at her, I just saw Maysilee and freaked.
“She probably had a similar problem with me.
“Remember your district partner’s name?” Glancing at Finnick, he nudged at Finnick’s foot, resting next to his thigh.
“It was Landa Doe,” Finnick replied without having to think. “Before she changed it for the marketing, it was Landa Molere. I was in the big alliance with her.” He hesitated for a beat, knowing he was touching on an unpopular topic. “I thought I’d have to kill her, but the girl from Seven beat me to it when the pack broke apart.”
Haymitch threw him a look. “You Careers are so weird,” he said, and Finnick smirked.
“Part of our selling point, didn’t you know.”
“The thing about that Quell arena was,” Haymitch said with a stronger voice as if they’d been talking about that all along, “that everything was out to get you in there, even water. Even grass. The more harmless it looked, the more likely it had a thing about it that would kill you. Sort of like the Capitol,” he added with a mutter, and Finnick grimaced at him.
“Later when Ralda won,” Haymitch continued, “I thought I was so lucky that I didn’t end up like her. She wouldn’t trust food anymore. She was thinking all the time, what if that dinner, that breakfast was poisoned, what if she’d poisoned it herself but had forgotten to mark it in some way. I could have gotten like that, I could have come out and gotten scared of the forest, the Meadow, everything. I mean, Twelve’s kind of shaped like an arena with that electrical fence all around. Year after the Games, I still got kind of relieved every time it rained, because rain had been good, that’s how we got water. But then, I’d think, it could have been acid this time. How did I just assume it wouldn’t be.”
He took a deep breath. “That arena killed almost twenty of those forty-eight with the environment, they were dropping like rag dolls all over, it was total chance who figured the right things out and who didn’t in time. Those were all judgment calls. But how do you make a judgment call like that? That’s chance.”
Finnick thought about that for a moment, thinking about the beauty of that Games, about what it would have been like to be a beautiful child on a beautiful stage. That could have helped or screwed him over both. Thinking about the jungle in his own arena, the oil of the vines between his fingers, the humidity that always loomed in the back of his neck. The dark parts of that jungle had been so cold, though - chilling. He hadn’t thought about what it had actually felt like on his skin in years. It made him shudder.
He toed the blanket with tip of his fancy Capitol boot, the likes of which he hadn’t owned before he won.
“Mine had these waterfalls,” he said. “I camped out at one after the pack had broken up. Mosquito mutts, too, and snakes. But those waterfalls, too. I cleaned up in one, in that pond that had formed underneath. Drowned one of the Careers in it later, with a net. After the Games on the victory recap, I saw that they all had those geysers at the ground, turned on every noon and heated up the water so quickly that you’d get boiled. None of us figured that out, except the ones who died that way.” He paused for a moment, considering. “The snakes were awful, but they were big and lazy. Easy to spot. I kept waiting for a chance of luring one of the others at them, but I was never sure who in the alliance knew how to see them coming, too. So that never worked out.”
“In my Victory Tour interviews,” Haymitch said, “I got a lot of questions about Maysilee and me, although they’d all seen Alsey giving interviews during the Games. If there’d been feelings between us. Like you can get attracted to a girl’s pretty eyes or some such nonsense if all you can think of how at least one of you is as good as dead.
“Not that I ever did, but I just wanted to see Alsey again.” He said that a little more quietly.
“Later on, it kept bugging me, how there had to have been a way to get both of us home, any kind of way. That’s what I was like then, always trying to outsmart the system. Clever Haymitch, they called me, like that hadn’t gotten all my family killed. I tried to stop because it kept biting me in the ass but I thought, there had to have been a way, any way, something that people hadn’t thought up. Not that I’ve ever even gotten a tribute home as mentor, other than in a coffin.”
“If you want, we can still switch tributes,” Finnick said. He’d wanted Peeta, who’d smiled at him first, but he didn’t want Peeta that much. “I just used the Games prep excuse with Effie, anyway. I can take on Katniss and we’ll call it a late change of strategy.”
The last thing they needed was Haymitch flashing back and forth between his Quell and this Games, Katniss and Maysilee, Maysilee and Katniss, when they stood a real chance with that girl. Finnick wasn’t as concerned about Haymitch’s alcoholism all the time anymore as he’d used to, but he knew they still couldn’t risk taking that chance. That would never be an option.
But Haymitch was already waving it off. “Nah, she’s nothing like her. I’d still have to look at the damn pin on the screens all the time. Just stop me if I cook up something clever again that’ll get us all dead.”
Then, he groaned, rubbing his face in this tired and ancient and frustrated way.
“Shit,” he muttered, staring at the ceiling. The skin on the crook of his throat was still gleaming wet, part of the collar soaked. “Shit, we’ll still have to see how she plays on a screen but we could stand a real shot with that girl, couldn’t we? Isn’t she the one who taught Gale how to do those tricks with his knife?”
“She’s really good at throwing them, too,” Finnick provided. “If we play it right, we can either bring her home or at least use her to convince everybody that we’re serious contenders now. She could give us a real marketing boost and change the odds for everybody after her. Peeta as well. He’ll look better next to her, like there are plenty more tributes like that at the ready now. He won’t even have to do much for that, we’ll just tell him to drop a line or two about how everybody’s getting so excited about the Games back home. We’ll have to see who of the two of them is better at working off a script.”
Haymitch was nodding along. “You’re the punch line of that story, of course, they got excited because you arrived and made everything different,” he said, talking tech now. This was what they’d been doing since last Games, telling the Capitol a story. It was Haymitch’s strength, too, making everything come together. “The chariot surprise is gonna help and bring that home visually, too.”
Finnick nodded firmly and grimly. “We’re the fire district now.”
Cinna and Portia’s was a brilliant idea. Fire would still be the Twelve thing long after they’d retired, Finnick was perfectly sure of that.
Haymitch could balance the marketing easily, and Finnick would be there to keep him steady, if it all became too much.
Peeta would definitely be sold off for a time if he won, Finnick thought uneasily, leaning back against the footrest, considering that soft face and those shoulders and that smile. No Caramel, no Finnick, but a Haymitch or Calina for sure. Katniss might be as well, depending on what her brittleness screen-tested like. But not for long, he told himself - clung to. The Capitol had last year’s stunning Timber Doyle to play with right now, Finnick and Johanna were both still fairly young, and the new stylist team emphasized fieriness and bravery over sex. They might even be able to take more of a District Two approach with Katniss, make her a focused and stone-faced Career, but he’d promised himself to take the approach most likely to get a child home. He couldn’t save them from prostitution if he didn’t get them home first. It didn’t mean he’d be creating another Caramel. Another Finnick.
There were too many different emotions on Haymitch’s face, the pain of remembering his Games and that girl, the fear of having to see another tribute wearing Maysilee Donner’s pin die, the knowledge that this could be the best Games that Twelve would ever have played. They had the perfect preconditions so far. They’d never get this chance again; Gale was out of the Reaping bowl as of this year, and there was no second Katniss Everdeen.
“Let’s not expect too much, let’s not do that,” Haymitch breathed. “They could fuck up the interviews and screen-test like frogs, or they die in the bloodbath or they stumble down a hill and break their fucking necks.”
“Or they won’t,” Finnick reminded him, determined, refusing to consider any of those options just yet. They’d take it as it came along. There was chance in every Games. He’d usually have called that an advantage.
The 74th Hunger Games would still be very different from any other Games that they could otherwise have played. They’d brought Katniss fucking Everdeen who shot her squirrels in the eye. Squirrels weren’t much bigger than the eye.
The train engine hummed faintly underneath them, carrying them closer to the Capitol.
Tbc