Chapter Text
Beetee heard somewhere (he thinks from Seeder, to Mags when Lucy Gray died) that grief is supposed to happen in five stages. But he doesn’t think that’s true, at least not for him. He can’t deny something that happened right in front of him, anger requires more energy than he has, and it was the Capitol that killed her. If he knows anything in the world, it’s that there's no bargaining with them.
So what that leaves, of course, is this– the fact that for some reason, he can’t seem to get out of bed, even though his communicuff is buzzing that he needs to get up. He doesn’t know why there’s suddenly a heaviness in his limbs, and he wonders if it might be the nerve pain acting up again, but he knows it’s not.
He needs to get up. Gale wanted to show him something he’s been working on, and he needs to give Finnick his trident because he’ll be shooting soon and he told Katniss to tell him, but she apparently forgot, and he also needs to talk to Boggs and Paylor about how he’s pretty sure they’re converting some factories in Three to make weapons.
But should he tell them about that without a plan to fix it? (This is good. If he thinks about this he doesn’t have to think about Wiress. If he thinks about this he doesn’t have to think about where she is right now, up north and away from him and they’ve probably already buried her and her sister probably hates him if she’s still alive and–)
And he needs to get up. He needs to get up. A million things to do and a million reasons to do them and it’s impossible, still. He can’t seem to make himself move. As a last resort, he goes for something low and cheap, thinks to himself that Wiress would want him to be getting out and talking to Finnick and Gale.
There’s a knock on the door and good, he needs someone to drag him out of this. But he has to open the door, and that requires leaving bed, and he can’t do that. It’s selfish, is what it is. He realizes it’s going to be medical that’s at the door, because he does have a severe spinal injury and all and it’s natural that the worst is being assumed.
The last thing he wants to deal with is lots of people. There’s another, harsher knock that sounds fueled by anxiety, then a pause. It’s Finnick’s voice that speaks.
“Are you all right in there? I talked medical out of coming, it’s just me. I promise.”
If Beetee speaks, it means that this episode will have been real. It’s already too real, honestly. He never thought he’d say this, but he misses the unreal feeling he gets sometimes. Because he could function in that state.
(He could kill people in that state. He still is, just for a different side).
“Wait,” says Finnick, and Beetee almost hear the younger man’s brain work, and it occurs to him that he in no way deserves this level of effort. “Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?"
It’s true that sometimes Beetee will end up in places without knowing how he got there, but if the place is somewhere he’s been before he’ll always remember it when he comes back down. And the only familiar person he’s ever had trouble recognizing is himself. It’s a strange line of questioning, and entirely off the mark.
"I know who you are, Finnick," and there's definitely a note of indignation in his voice but he doesn't have it in him to care.
"Don't act like that's some great leap," Finnick mutters so quietly that Beetee doesn't think he was supposed to hear. "Can you open the door? People are getting worried. I am getting worried."
He should be able to open the door. There is no logical reason he can't open the door. But there's a weight on his chest, and even breathing feels like too much effort.
Unfortunately, so does talking, but if he doesn't say anything Finnick will call in medical. So he has to say something. "I would if I could. It's not a physical thing, I just…I feel like I'm stuck in bed for some reason. Like there's a weight."
"Okay," says Finnick, very calmly. "do you think it would be easier if the door was open?" He pauses. "Also, I'd really like to be able to message and tell everyone I got in the room and that you're not secretly dying or something."
It would be easier if Finnick were there. He needs another person to drag him up and out. "Yes. I'm so sorry, Finnick. I don't know what's wrong with me today."
"Okay," Finnick responds, and Beetee is getting very tired of Finnick saying okay. "I can't get in with my key card. Who has access to the permissions? Paylor? Lyme?"
"You are not saying anything about this to Paylor, and it's what, 5AM in Two?" An idea occurs to him— still an insane effort, but the lesser of several evils. He has a tablet by his bed for jotting things down when they occur to him, and he can use that to change the key access.
He’s moving so incredibly slowly that it’s surreal, like a slowed-down tape. The only time in his life he’s ever felt this lethargy, this physical sort of exhaustion, was when he was nineteen and coming off dex.
When he relays this to Finnick, there's something panic-adjacent (at least Beetee thinks, he's never been good with tone) in Finnick's voice when he responds: "Wait, you can see the access permissions?"
"They had me redo some things after everything that happened with the 12 refugees and the food." Beetee says, and he swears he can hear Finnick snort. He asks for Finnick's ID number, types it in, and suddenly realizes why Finnick had been resorted to running around the mess hall at 2AM.
Medical has placed a restriction on him. He's not allowed into the workout and training facilities at all.
Beetee knows he should bring this up. He should do a lot of things.
The door beeps and swings open. Finnick looks like hell. Like sleepless, dreamless hell. They both do. Beetee realizes there's still a tear on his face. In this state of crushing grief, he remains hopelessly disconnected from his body.
Finnick sits down, back up against the bed with his knees drawn into his chest. At this point, Finnick seems to have realized the best way to get Beetee to talk is to stay absolutely nothing and trust the years of memorizing the social rules that compel him to fill silence.
"You know the thing about living with a smoker that a lot of people don't realize?" Beetee asks, and the words are coming out of him like a rush. "The smoke…it gets absorbed by all the surfaces and it's everywhere, throughout the whole house. And eventually you start to associate that smell with home, you start to feel out of place without it."
He's finally figured out what his problem is with mornings. "And so every morning I have to wake up and I don't even get that minute or two of denial. The air is wrong and I know that— I know that she's gone."
When he thinks about it, his most vivid memories of her aren't related to things she said or did. They're all sensory. The way her brown eyes narrowed as she focused on a problem. Her laugh, harsh and bitter even in her happier moments. The smell of the house, coffee and tea and smoke. And maybe most of all, her skin, a map of pain and texture. Her hands, winter-bitten and dry.
Finnick shakes his head slowly, sighs deeply. “I wish you didn’t have to get up at all. I wish you got to have bad days. But all of us have to just keep going and going and going. They have me doing these ‘We Remember’ propos, and they want me to talk about Mags.”
“At least the first time around we got to go home for six months,” Beetee agrees. “Rest, recover, develop a drug problem…”
Finnick chuckles at that, then glances at his wrist. “You think you can make it out of bed now?” he asks, his voice soft and neutral. “Production kind of needs me right now.”
Beetee nods, and Finnick is about to leave when he catches sight of a bottle on the bedside table. The bottle of morphling capsules that was given to him in the very beginning, by a blonde woman ten or fifteen years younger than him with a low, soft Twelve accent. (He swears he’s seen her before, but he can’t place where). She’d told him the bottle would last about two weeks, but Beetee has taken a grand total of three pills in ten days because pain to him is a tool. It still feels like a major oversight that he's allowed to keep them, but people are always assuming he is fine.
But what this probably looks like to Finnick is that he’s stockpiling them.
Finnick leans over and swiftly grabs the bottle, reads the label. “Do I need to be worried about these?” he asks, and the full power of Finnick’s gaze is actually terrifying when he decides to turn it on. It’s the same intensity he had in the bathroom.
But Beetee doesn’t even have to consider the answer. He knows that this is a deeply offensive thing to believe in most circumstances, but he can’t help but think that for him personally? That would be the coward’s way out. There’s no proper way out for him but through, if he even deserves out at all.
He probably shouldn’t say that out loud. What he says instead, in a tone that aims for wry but misses by a small note, is that he knows he’s more useful alive.
Finnick’s brows raise again. “That was nowhere near as reassuring as you think it is,” he says, but he does put the bottle back down. “By the way, you have some free time this evening, yes?”
“Yes, why?”
“Because according to Katniss, I was promised a spiky fork.”
The fact that in the span of ten seconds they’ve gone from discussing the idea of Beetee attempting suicide to spiky fork of all things makes him at least crack a smile, and Finnick is actually laughing again.
“I have to admit,” says Finnick, “I didn’t think it would still be this funny once we’d eaten and slept, but nope, still is. We can never let that joke die, you understand?”
“Yes,” Beetee says, because somehow finding humor is actually helping, “because you’ve been doing so much eating and sleeping lately.”
Finnick somehow looks both struck and impressed, like he has no idea where that came from.
“I liked you better before you learned sarcasm,” he says, reaching the door. It suddenly occurs to Beetee that he thinks Finnick had genuinely been under the impression that his behaviors around food, around exercise, had gone completely unnoticed. Suddenly he’s struck with the impulse to manuever the conversation in a less loaded direction.
“But I agree. We have to remember spiky fork for when Johanna gets back,” Beetee says, as if speaking it aloud that it will happen will somehow make it so. When, not if. When, not if.
“My point exactly. It’s what she would want.”
Finnick says his goodbyes, says he’ll be back in twenty if he hasn’t seen Beetee out there, and leaves.
All his life, Beetee had been under the impression that he was unable to conceptualize or vocalize what he was feeling, couldn’t put it into words that make sense. But what he’s starting to realize now is that he doesn’t have to. He can just exist near people, and let that be enough.
And that gives him the strength to do two things he should have done a long time ago.
First, he goes back in and restricts Finnick’s access to wide open spaces in 13. He has no idea if this is the right thing to do, but he’s spent too long doing nothing. (And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).
The bottle of morphling is still on the table, and with it, the knowledge that even though he doesn’t think he wants to die, he didn’t think he wanted to die when he wandered away from the group in the arena either– and he would have, if it hadn’t been for Johanna. He needs to stay one step ahead of himself, because he knows what he can do when he’s in a fog.
So he pours the pills down a toilet in something resembling pique. It should feel like a more significant moment than it really is, and signals a return to numbness.
Finnick comes back later, carrying a canvas bag. They spend a while going over the features of the new trident, before Beetee asks what’s in the bag.
“Just to thank you for everything,” Finnick says with a tone that suggests he’s come to learn about the access restrictions. He pulls out a mug and several packets of single-use pour-over coffee.
“How did you even get this?” Beetee asks, in absolute shock and acute awareness that he does not deserve this kindness. “And how did you even know about my caffeine addiction?”
“They’re called social skills, Beetee. And because it’s the logical next step off dex, and because someone never shut up about a certain coffee machine,” Finnick admits sheepishly.
Finnick’s faith in him is misplaced. but he’ll take it anyways.