finnick backstory pt. ii -- really just unfinished and miserable
The children of Four hear it so many times growing up, it becomes something of a district joke: "Never turn your back on a wave." Arnav watches his son's face scrunch up like he's heard this a thousand times in his six short years, but that doesn't mean it isn't good advice. "Really, Finnick," the man goes on. "You're safer if you face the wave and dive in. Never show the ocean your fear, and you won't get hurt."
"Okay, Dad." It's hard to tell with kids whether they're really listening or if it simply goes in one ear and out the other, but in truth, it's one of many sayings that Finnick ends up carrying with him throughout his entire life.
Johanna smacks him upside the head the first (and only) time he tries to use it on her.
Just a year before he's picked for the Games, Finnick nearly faces death.
He doesn't really mind sailing during the winter - it's freezing cold out there with no protection from the wind and sea spray, but if you keep busy, it isn't so bad. Falling asleep to the sound of rain on the ocean is comforting. The seas are choppy, but his parents both say it's the best training he'll ever get.
They didn't anticipate the storm.
So much careful star-charting and map-making goes into each winter's voyage. (Finnick went through a phase where he thought he might like to be a nautical map-maker, but it quickly passed when he realized how much work it involved.) Still, there are some shifts in the weather that can't be accounted for, and that's when a crew's true mettle comes to light.
When the sea begins to churn, when the ship begins to rock, when the men begin to panic, Finnick stands next to his father and faces the wave.
Finnick wrinkles his nose when Mags gives him the usual talk about aligning with the Careers from One and Two. He's watched the Games carefully and knows that rarely ends well for kids from Four, who are kind of Careers-but-not-actually-Careers - it's just that the fact that their district is on the wealthier side and they're put to work from a young age means they're mostly well-fed and know how to throw a spear. "I don't think I should," he says cautiously, because Mags is something of a terrifying legend in Four. She may look old and sweet, but she'll swat you with her cane the second you step out of line. "They just end up turning on each other anyway, so why should I put myself closer to them?"
Mags gives him a long, level stare. Finnick isn't saying it out of cynicism. He's just figured that it'll be easier to survive if he doesn't make connections.
When he's caught hanging around with the boy from Ten, she hisses at him, "No alliances unless you pity them, then?"
He doesn't want to admit to himself how true that is.
The female tribute from Four is eighteen and a volunteer. Her name is Cordula, and she is a terror. As soon as she learns that Finnick isn't allying with the Careers, she ignores him for the duration of training. Finnick spends as much time as possible at the stations he knows nothing about - edible plants and camouflage, building fires and archery. But Cordula is always there in the corner of his vision, throwing spears with a look of pure hatred twisted across her face.
Erram is sitting next to him, painting his arms green and brown absent-mindedly, but both stare at Cordula instead of the instructor. "Can you do that?" he whispers incredulously.
"Yes," Finnick mutters back. "But not everyone needs to know that. She's showing off to scare people."
Erram cringes and returns his attention to mixing colors. "It's working."
The night before the Games, Finnick lays with his head in Mags' lap, unable to even think of sleep.
"Mags, how'd you win your Games?"
The smile she gives him is devoid of any actual happiness. "If you make it out, I'll tell you." He thinks it's incentive, but really, Mags knows that he won't be able to handle it until he's been there himself.
The Arena looks too simple, and Finnick is suspicious immediately. It's surrounded on all sides by forest, with spiring cliffs peeking out farther off. The area in the middle with the cornucopia is desert-like, and it's hotter than hell. In his peripherals, he sees Erram - the boy has turned so his back is to the cornucopia. He's going to run. He's showing everyone he's going to run. Finnick sighs - kind, but stupid. That'll kill him in the end.
He isn't stupid enough to go to the cornucopia and fight, but instead grabs a smaller pack in the outer circle. The boy from Twelve chases him down for it, but Finnick elbows him in the throat. He falls to the ground, and Finnick only stops long enough to stomp down on his neck - as far as he can tell over the ensuing rapid cannon fire from the main fight, it's the first kill of the Game.
He runs.
He wishes it was all water.
He runs anyway.
It actually doesn't take long to come across a source of water. There are tiny ponds scattered everywhere, but they're so algae-encrusted that they won't be useful in the long run. He keeps walking until he hits gold - there's a huge rushing river that separates the forest from the cliffs. Perfect. This will be his camp.
As soon as he settles, tiny silver parachutes fall from the sky. Sunscreen, water, bread, cheese, meat, a few knives, a skein, notes of affection from women in the Capitol. Finnick hides how baffled he is, instead stripping down to cool off in the river. This nets a few more parachutes.
They all hold rope.
Finnick grins up at the sky. Someone out there knows him well. It was a talent he never revealed to anyone but Mags and the Game Makers, but now the whole country is about to see what he can do.
Night falls, and Finnick starts stripping the long grass that grows around the riverbed. He's settling into a nice rhythm of weaving when the faces flash in the sky - six dead on the first day. Erram, surprisingly, isn't one of them.
By sunrise, no other cannons have fired. He's exhausted but well-fed, with three nets large enough to hold at least three tributes uncomfortably.
Why bother to make them comfortable? If they get snared, everyone knows what's coming.
Finnick feels bad for hoping he'll get a chance to show off his handiwork.
It's easy to learn to play it up for the cameras - the Capitol loves two things: violence and sex appeal. When both the tributes from Seven step into one of the net traps as they try to cross the river, the parachutes start raining down even before he stabs them through. One of them has a spear, which he gladly steals.
And when it's been too long since he ran across anyone, all he has to do is get naked, and he could sew together an entire new outfit from all the silver fabric.
Erram crashes through the forest, screaming loud enough to attract every other tribute to his campsite. Finnick jumps to his feet, spear in hand, when he sees the girl from Eight right behind him. He doesn't think twice before throwing it straight to her heart, and the cannon fire still can't drown out Erram's cries.
He's badly wounded from the girl's throwing knives, so Finnick helps patch him up with the kit he's not yet had a use for. This is bad, he tells himself - allying is only going to hurt you in the end. If it were anyone else, he could let them bleed out in the river, he could smash their skull against the rocks and send their body downstream. But not this shepherd boy.
Cordula squares off against him. Finnick knows he just needs to drive her closer to the cliffs, trigger one of his traps, but she's a deadly combination of brutish and smart. She's waiting for him to move first. And she's a kid from Four at heart - one look at the trident gripped in his hands and her eyes narrow. Disgust drips from her mouth like venom when she snarls, "She chose you. They all chose you."
He should think of how Mags would want him to answer to keep up his image of the cocksure pretty boy, but Finnick melts a little at that. Sweat drips into his eyes, the wound in his side still bleeding, but he refuses to let his hands shake. Cordula has a broken half of a spear she took from the cornucopia. He has a solid gold trident. It isn't fair - then again, nothing about the Games is.
It definitely isn't fair that Anisa, the last tribute from Two, sends an arrow straight through her neck. Cordula falls before being peppered with three more for good measure, and Finnick barely has time to process what happened before the cannon fires. He's in terrible pain and dehydrated and not thinking straight. Anisa advances, her bow raised-
And she jumps off the cliffside, right into his trap.
Finnick throws his trident before he fully realizes what's going on. The blast of the cannon shakes him so badly that he topples to the ground. Three parachutes immediately rain down on him - fresh water, a kit for his wound, and all sorts of miscellaneous food.
Mags chose him.
Panem chose him.
The thought honestly hadn't occurred to him until now - he's obviously watched the games, but never really stopped to think about the choices everyone has to make. He looks around for shelter and before retreating back into the woods, winks in the general direction of what he hopes is a camera. "Thank you for choosing me," Finnick says, his voice dry and cracked. "I won't disappoint you."
It's just Finnick and the boy from Five, Doyle. When a full day passes without so much as a warning shot from either side, the Game Makers take things into their own hands - and overnight, the river dries up.
The arena is blanketed in eerie silence. The ring of rushing water that sat at the foot of the cliffs had been a great cover for noise, and without it, it's just the whistling of wind through the trees.
Carefully avoiding his nets, Finnick tries to climb a tree to get a better look around the arena. It's pathetic - his palms scrape open as he slides back down, bits of bark mixing with his blood. The cliffs are too dangerous, he doesn't want to be on uneven footing. So his only choice is to start walking toward the center and hope that they come to face to face before long.
Finnick finds himself imagining the final fight as he trudges through the forest, trident in hand. He hopes Doyle is in misery, dehydrated and bug-bitten and ready for death. He doesn't want to have to hurt him any more than necessary. Maybe Doyle will be stuck under rocks from a cliff avalanche, and he'll fade away as he bleeds out and the cannon will fire without Finnick ever seeing his face.
This couldn't be less likely.
Doyle's a good match against Finnick - sixteen, well-built, red hair and beady eyes, completely healthy-looking.
After the Games, as he watches the highlight reel at Caesar Flickerman's side, Finnick will see that Doyle spent most of his time stalking around the dark of the forest at night, stabbing people in their sleep. For such a large guy, he moved with silent grace and expertly maneuvered around traps. During the day, he hid. Coward, Finnick thinks, and immediately corrects himself. Smart coward.
But for the time being, he's just lucky enough to stumble across the boy's burrow.
He's like a mole person, hiding in a hole under leaves and dirt, but he's swift enough to stab Finnick in the leg as he passes by. The boy falls and Doyle clamors out, knives in both hands, and what happens next will be replayed every time Finnick is mentioned for years to come.
Doyle is climbing over him so fast that Finnick doesn't have time to move, or think, or aim - he just grabs his trident and thrusts immediately, wildly, in any direction.
The prongs go straight through his throat just as he lands one of his knives in Finnick's stomach. The last thing Finnick remembers before going blank is the boy's head hanging at an unnatural angle, eyes wide open in fear, and blood soaking both of them.
Mags is the first person he sees when he wakes up.
"Tell me," he chokes out before she can get a word in. "I made it. So tell me."
(Mags, at the age of fifteen, was the first girl to win the Games. She was cunning and ruthless and gouged out the eyes of the boy from Four, let him wander blind into a lake and drown. Set fire the Career camp in the middle of the night. Held a small girl's head underwater until she stopped thrashing. Garroted an eighteen year old boy from Three, the one who everyone swore up and down would make it home. Staggered toward her competitors, half-dead from starvation, and watched as they beat each other senselessly under a burning sun. When one died and the other was in a sorry state, she snapped his neck just to put him out of his misery.
She goes back on her promise and never tells him any of this; Finnick watches the tapes for himself. He can hardly believe the strong blonde girl is Mags, but her eyes are the same as the cameras zoom in on her victory. Gray, and sad, and full of secrets.)
Once his family's gone and all parts of him belong to the Capitol, Finnick unearths a foreign emotion: loneliness.
Sometimes he wants to visit other victors, but going to the districts would cause an uproar. Plus, what would Johanna or Haymitch do if he showed up at their door? Probably slam it in his face and laugh themselves to sleep. Finnick Odair, lonely. How pathetic. Beetee might be more forgiving, but he's in his own world of projects and gadgets, there'd be no point.
He's lying in bed with Xenia Kirling, one of his regulars - she has orange hair and sea-green tattoos and Finnick hates her less than he does most of his clients. Like the rest of them, she always sends him away with a trinket or extra money, but Finnick never does anything with them.
So when she offers him a beautiful purple robe that Finnick has absolutely no use for, he just smiles across the pillow and says, "Could I have something else?"
"Of course," Xenia purrs, and as she starts to get up to rummage around her apartment, Finnick places a hand on her forearm.
"Just… talk to me." Her flame-like eyebrows shoot up, but Finnick allays her with one smile. "Tell me about yourself," he goes on. "It seems silly that this is my fifth time meeting you, and I know nothing about you."
It melts her, and in the end, it works on every single one of them. The regulars think he's starting to really love them, the newcomers think he's forging a stronger connection. Either way, he's the Capitol's nicest whore, and his approval rating skyrockets. (His schedule gets fuller and fuller, but he lives in less fear.) And when you ask someone from the Capitol to tell you a story, it ends up being gossip. Every single time.
Finnick files away every superficial piece of information. For a while, he uses it as rudimentary human contact.
Beetee tells him countless times, "You're always welcome in District Three." Finnick takes him up on that once and goes to visit, happy to see that Beetee still has his wife. When he lets slip this new currency system, the man's eyes light up behind his glasses.
Suddenly, he becomes useful.
Haymitch is the one who buys him his first drink.
Finnick is pretty sure that Haymitch buys every victor their first drink. Not out of kindness, but because it's the only thing he knows he can do right.
When he asks for wine, the man laughs in his face and hands him expensive scotch instead. Capitol-provided, of course. He chokes on it, and the man claps him on the back so hard that his eyes water. But he straightens up and smiles, and - perhaps this is what wins Haymitch's favor - hands the glass back to the man. "Thanks, but you can have the rest."
"Thank god," Haymitch mutters, and downs it in one gulp.
In the midst of a particularly violent fit, Finnick watches the way Annie's family shirks away from her. He tries not to blame them - it must be terrifying to see your little girl, your older sister, fall apart in such a way. Plus, he once saw her kick Mr. Cresta in the teeth as he tried to restrain her.
Finnick throws himself into the wave headfirst and wraps his arms around the shaking girl. Her nails carve crescent moons into him and her broken cries dig holes in his heart, but Finnick persists.
He isn't sure how long they stay like that on her bedroom floor - her family moves away, he loses himself in muttering nonsense phrases that he thinks might be comforting. Eventually Annie stills, and then he isn't sure what to do.
Apparently, Finnick's only good at intimacy when he's being forced into it.
He has no frame of reference for this. Finnick fought hard to survive - Annie survived with luck. With every difficult and terrible thing he's had to do since winning the Games, Finnick could just tell himself: you're a Victor, you're made to get through the impossible. With Annie, it's different. She didn't want any of this. Finnick knew it when he watched Byron's head get lopped off. He knew that she wanted to die, then and there, and he gritted his teeth and willed her not to. In the end, it can't be attributed to either of them. Just luck.
So instead of giving her his well-rehearsed speech on strength and perseverance and survival against the worst odds, Finnick pulls her limp body closer, and only lets out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding when she hugs him back.
The most they do on Annie's first tour of the Capitol is hold hands - and it's always late at night as they chastely share a bed, because Finnick lives in fear of cameras. Deep down, he knows he shouldn't even begin to risk hurting Annie and her family, but he isn't thinking clearly these days. Maybe the girl is rubbing off on him.
"What do you do while you're here?" she asks innocently one night, and Finnick can't formulate an answer. He doesn't want to lie, but the truth might break her.
He settles on something innocuous: "Just publicity… things." Smooth, Odair. Very smooth. It's been so long since he let himself actually feel anything that he's still working on how to speak honestly to a woman.
Annie nods knowingly, her wide sleepless eyes trained on his. "You're very popular," she whispers, as if that's a secret. "I remember watching you in the Games. Everyone loved you."
Finnick grimaces. Yes, everyone loved him. Somehow, he won over every single district, even when he brutally slaughtered their children. They wanted him to win. Annie manages to read him, and she places her fingertips on the back of his palm, the corners of her lips just barely turning up. "I know this isn't who you are."
In that moment, he wants to kiss her. But not in the loveless Capitol, not while the Games are going on- it's all wrong. Instead, Finnick thanks her and spends a sleepless night turning this over in his head.
There's a festival in Four that only happens once a decade, paying respect and admiration to the sea for its continued bounty. That's the formality behind it, anyway. It's also a way of saying, we made it ten more years. There's no outright defiance against the Capitol - of course not, that'd be an instant death wish, look what happened to Thirteen - but the fact that they get a week of celebration is enough.
It happens a few months after the 72nd Games end, and though the pain of losing Erik and Marnie is still fresh, the district is buzzing with preparations. Finnick's presence has been requested to help organize and lead the festival, and he gets a whole month off to return to Four.
In truth, there isn't much for Finnick to do. The mayor of Four simply thought it'd be a good idea to have him there, to help everyone get into the spirit of things. For the most part, the committees have it under control - his aunt Kai is in charge of food stalls, and she averts her eyes when they pass each other. Her husband died on the ship with his parents.
He takes Annie out on the ship as soon as the mayor lets him go. This is a better place, he tells himself. In Four, at sea - this is the place to tell her.