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In the thick onset of darkness he’s not sure what makes him say it. The world around him is heavy and pulsing like blood within veins, humming with bugs and heat and dormant revolution, and it is perfectly uncalled for. He’s not sure what makes him say it. He says it anyway.
“What makes you love her?” he asks, his voice coiled gingerly around the words like it’s a far less dangerous question than it is. He swings his spire and smirks, his eyes trained on Peeta’s hunched-over shoulders in the rising dark. “Your little girl on fire.”
“She’s not little,” Peeta answers, and his hands don’t slip on the wire. He looks up. “Does that answer your question?”
Finnick’s eyes meet Peeta’s, but his lips are still curved into a half-smile, unfazed. He swings his trident again, an easy circular motion. “What it must be like,” he says. “To be so madly and desperately in love.”
Peeta laughs, a joyless sound. There’s a cut on his forehead from the tear of a baboon’s teeth, and sweat drips over it, slick and profuse. “You can quit talking like that,” he suggests. “I know you know how she feels. Doesn’t feel.”
“I wasn’t talking about her,” Finnick tells him, strident and immediate. Peeta’s hands stop moving for a moment; then they pick up again, and he falls silent.
“I loved somebody once,” Finnick says, suddenly, the words slipping out of his lips hot and fast, coiled like snakes, and he feels all at once the frightening vulnerability in his voice, the obviousness of its bravado, the terror of its truth.
Peeta laughs again. “You still do,” he says.
* * *
The hours drag on.
It is three hours till midnight. Peeta leans, exhausted, against the tree’s base, the timespan of his blinks growing longer and longer, his head lolling to one side. Finnick paces around the circumference of the clearing, at intervals swinging his trident and stopping, stock-still, to stare out toward the shore. Time is drawn tight around his ribs, a pocket-watch gold chain wrapped round his torso. Peeta has no idea.
“Are you worried?” Peeta asks, and Finnick turns around. It’s a stupid question, he thinks -- this is the hunger games, this is the jungle, this is Panem -- until he asks the second question, “About Johanna?”
“Johanna?” Finnick repeats blankly, like the word is new to him. “Am I worried about Johanna?”
“She’s your friend, isn’t she?” says Peeta. “Shouldn’t you be worried?”
Finnick turns his head, the roar of the trees and the ocean. Humidity, thick, settles in around him. “Johanna doesn’t have any friends,” he says. “She’s a wild animal. She’s a predator.”
“All victors are,” Peeta says. “All victors are.”
Finnick shakes his head. “Not Annie,” he says.
* * *
Two hours to midnight. Finnick lays in the lush soil in between the tree’s buried roots; Peeta sits on a fallen trunk in the foliage.
“You said her name,” Peeta says, an opening in a black expanse of silence. His voice is calm, unhurried. “I never thought you would.”
Finnick’s eyes slide closed, and he feels the buzz of everything in the hollows of his ears, this unending plane of life and savagery seeping into his bones. “Mm,” he answers. “Mm.”
“Why don’t you talk about her?” Peeta asks him. “Katniss is all I talk about. She’s all I think about. I could talk about her for hours, days. There aren’t enough weeks in a year for me to talk about her. Or enough words. Why don’t you talk about Annie?”
Finnick is silent for a long moment or two. In this moment Peeta’s voice is low and soft and he sounds so young, so young and poetic and in love. Stupid, too. They go together. “My life is a matter of keeping secrets,” Finnick tells him. “Keeping secrets buried between my ribs like notes in the pages of a book, swallowing secrets like sugar cubes.” He pauses for a moment, blinks a few times, sighs. “Peeta, do you know what the most important rule of secrets is?”
“What?” Peeta humors him. “What is it?”
“Knowing when to share them, all but your own.”
Peeta’s silent for a moment, his body unmoving.
“I’m not very good at keeping secrets,” Finnick hears him say.
“I know you aren’t,” says Finnick.
* * *
It is one hour to midnight. They are leaned against the tree.
“Listen,” says Finnick. “You are not going to die.”
“Of course I am,” says Peeta, his shoulder hot, shivering, against Finnick’s own. “We’re all going to die. And I’m going to die tonight.”
“Listen,” says Finnick, and his palms, sweaty, shaking with heat, find the back of Peeta’s neck. He pulls Peeta’s forehead toward his own, presses their feverish skulls together. Eyes wild with fear and flurry, Peeta’s wide and blue, resigned. “You are not going to die tonight.” There is so much to say. He cannot say any of it. He’s said too much already, about this, about everything. Peeta will not die tonight. It is no longer just about the girl on fire. Peeta will not die.
“I don’t know,” Peeta whispers, “I don’t know what I -- ”
Finnick kisses him, lips messy and open against Peeta’s mouth. Peeta’s response is slow and uncoordinated, more out of surprise and wired heat-sickness than anything else. The night is long and not yet half over, Peeta’s lips are hot. It’s almost over, it’s about to begin. The baker boy will not die.
In the distance, a crack. The Careers are at the shoreline.
“Shit,” Finnick whispers. “It’s starting.”