Chapter Text
Finnick knows this year’s girl is doomed, before she’s even called. There’s no female Volunteer set for this year—and that’s Finnick’s fault.
He won because he was pretty. He’s sure heard it enough times since, as praise, as a jeer. And District Four seized on the example of their golden-boy champion, breaker of a decade’s losing streak, with perhaps too much hope. For the past four years, instead of sending the oldest Volunteers, the ones gauged to have the best chance, they sent the prettiest of the fourteens and fifteens.
None of them had very pretty deaths.
The other Districts call them Careers, the kids who are trained for the Games, who stand up when some innocent’s name is pulled. Finnick doesn’t know exactly how it works in Districts One or Two. One, where wealth is seen as worth dying for. Two, where would-be Volunteers near bludgeon each other to get to go and test their mettle. In Four, the Volunteers are culled from orphanages, from too-large families with fathers lost at sea, from the tall and strong the Trainers judge worth making a trade.
Finnick’s father bartered him for a boat. The one Finnick climbed over all his early boyhood, The Nereid , which Finnick’s father shared with four other men, was scuttled in a storm. They had no resources to replace her. So Finnick’s father took him to see a big man behind a bigger desk.
“He’s growing fast,” his father said, gruff and choked. “And he’s quick with his hands.”
“A lot of men come to me with tall sons,” said the big man, dismissively. But when he looked up, he stared hard at Finnick’s face, not his ropey arms or broadening chest, and offered good money for Finnick Odair to be groomed as a Volunteer.
Finnick understood the need, and all his father’s friends clapped him on the back and offered him sips of their drinks, though he wasn’t quite eleven. From then on he went to morning training with the other potential tributes, his name secretly went into the yearly ballots a few more times than it ought to, rules aside, and he knew that when he was seventeen or so, he’d likely be told to step forward.
But his name was pulled at fourteen, and since he was meant as a Volunteer anyways, since he’d bested even the older boys at least a time or two in training, no one stood up in his place.
They have a name, in District Four, for untrained Tributes: Corpses.
Finnick came home with a crown, instead of in a box, and proved he deserved the name Career. The pretty, too-young, Tributes since, though Volunteers all, could not do the same.
And now, as the District powers-that-be decide that it’s better odds to shift back to how it was, that their trained do need another year or two to grow, they’re out of girls of a certain age.
So Finnick doesn’t pay much attention, when the name Annie Cresta is drawn, when no one steps forward for her. He’s never even met her, but she’s already a ghost.
Finnick met this year’s boy before the Reaping. He can pick Callum Makray out in the crowd, bouncing nervously, not because he’s scared to stand up but because if a boy of seventeen or eighteen is ever drawn, Callum will be told to stand down, there’s next year. But the name drawn is a sickle-thin young man who faints in the sand (District Four’s Reaping is always on a beach. For atmosphere, the Capitol reporters say.)
Before Neeve finishes asking for volunteers, Callum bursts out with “Me!”
He’s a puppy.
Callum looks to Finnick as he clambers up on stage, big brown eyes asking if he’s done well. Finnick gives him a nod, and a smile takes over the kid’s whole face. Good-looking kid, but not when he smiles that big. Finnick will have to teach him how to smile for the Capitol, and the thought chills his marrow. He can handle people who want him. But Callum, who was ten years old during Finnick’s Games, who asked first thing for Finnick to show him the move with his net he’d used to yank a spear out from the hands of a boy from District 5, who wants to be him…
Finnick’s not sure he wants to see this kid as a Victor. “He’d be happier dead,” Finnick told Mags, the night before the Reaping.
Mags squinted with her right eye, glared with the left. “No,” she said. And she waited a while, stretching her worn and skin-cracked hands and contemplating Finnick, before saying, “So, he could come out of the arena, this one.”
Callum was better than Finnick had been with knives. Longer reach, better timing, if not as reflex-fast. He could throw spears farther, though not with as much force. Too much of a show-off with a sword, clumsy with an axe, deadly with a whip if he could get one. He’d never touch Finnick’s skill with a trident, but if by some miracle Finnick got him one, Callum probably wouldn’t embarrass himself with the weapon.
Finnick sighed gustily. “His chance has some real fight to it,” he allowed. That made Mags smile, slowly, and as always when she smiled, Finnick couldn’t help but crack one, too.
Only Mags would know that the smile Finnick gives Callum, when he shakes the boy’s hand and loudly lauds his bravery, isn’t real. But his promise that this year, a District Four tribute will come home: that, Finnick means, with whatever’s left of his heart.
After, behind the platform stage, they finally turn off the cameras, and Finnick can stop holding every muscle in his chest and arms tight. His jaw hurts from smiling. He’s rubbing it when he turns around and sees tribute Annie Cresta staring at him.
No, not at him. Through him, like all she sees is the white sand and washing waves.
On impulse, he moves closer, until he’s close enough to block her view, and she jerks to alertness. She’s taller than he expected from a distance, and her eyes are cool and clear as they meet his. Composed , he thinks, the one trait he’d noted when she first walked out of the crowd, taking visibly deep but steady breaths.
She’s near the end of Reaping eligibility, he’d guess seventeen. He’s not sure if that makes it better, that she got a little more life, or worse, to be caught up when freedom’s in sight.
“Hello, Annie,” he says and goes to kiss her on the cheek. As apology, maybe, or to try to make her smile, maybe because it’ll make him feel a little better, for being kind to the girl who’s dying with every step and second taking her toward that Capitol train.
She turns her head, which he’s used to, but not so he’ll catch her lips. His mouth lands on her ear instead.
He takes a breath of surprise and feels the warmth of it bounce back to him off the curve of flesh. He expects a glare when he pulls back.
She’s unreadable, instead. “That’s awfully familiar, for a man I’ve never met.”
“I think you might have seen my face before,” he says drily.
Annie laughs. It’s an unhappy sound, hoarser than he expects. “Is that the same thing? Knowing who you are, and knowing you?”
It’s what most people think. Finnick isn’t sure of the difference anymore, beyond what everyone sees and what he actually might be. “I’m easy to know,” he says. “I suppose you’re much deeper than that.”
“Fathoms,” says Annie. She doesn’t seem to be reflecting his ironic tone in the least.
“Unplumbed, are you?” he drawls. Her mouth parts in surprise, and Finnick curses himself out in his head. That’s not how he talks to tributes, particularly doomed ones. “I don’t mean to tease.”
“So what do you mean, Finnick Odair?” She’s finally directly focused on nothing but him, her eyes catching his directly. They’re green like his, a common color in their District, as if the sea had seeped so into its people it showed up in their irises. It’s a shame, his Capitol self thinks, her eyes aren’t intense or bright enough to particularly compel the crowds. A little too dark and deep, not the inviting end of the ocean, but the shade of the water when turned over by a passing storm.
“To feel you out, I suppose,” he says. He realizes belatedly he has only stayed one preposition away from innuendo. “To see where your head’s at. That’s half the job, as a mentor.” The mentors’ job boils down to two things: keep their tributes’ heads on straight, figuratively, and keep their tributes’ heads on, literally.
Annie lifts her hand, purposelessly, as if she’s testing the way the wind blows. “I don’t think you’re my mentor,” she says, again with disturbing directness.
“No, Mags is yours, really,” Finnick says. “But we’re a team, of sorts.”
“I’m sure,” Annie says calmly.
“You’re much better off with Mags. She’s made of fathoms, too.” It’s time he disentangles himself from this conversation, before he’s missed, especially by the escort Neeve; best to end with reassurance. He prepares to segue into one of his stock champion phrases, but there’s something so stark in Annie’s eyes he doesn’t quite get that far. “It’s not a bad thing to have, depth, for the Games. To hide away what you’re thinking, to have somewhere to go away to…” Finnick almost says it can save you , but to this doomed girl that would be an unnecessary lie. “Well, it can help, to keep who you are under the surface.” And before Finnick, who never does or says anything unintentionally, goes on saying more than he ever meant to, he clears his throat and turns his charm back on. “Whoever you really are, Annie.”
Annie looks away. “Doesn’t matter, does it,” she says. “The Capitol won’t care any more than you do.”
It’s hard for Finnick to protest when he’s already been mentally writing her off. Before he comes up with a smoothing reply, before he comes up with anything to say at all, the escort Neeve is coming for her, and someone from District publicity is after him about final preparations (someone is always after him), and Annie Cresta has turned her back on him without a second glance.
He’s suddenly glad she’s Mags’ Tribute and that he won’t have much more to do with her.
Because strangely enough, Finnick thinks he’s just had his feelings hurt.