Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Finnick picks his way down the path, the mist closing in behind him, the rocks slippery from the damp air and the weeds. The swell of the ocean echoes in the distance, waves slapping against the shore, and the air is thick with the smell of seawater. Most of the path is invisible, shrouded in fog, but he knows the way well; in the first year after he won his Games, he made the journey to the lighthouse almost daily, and the steps are as familiar as ever, though he hasn’t been back since they locked him away in the Capitol on his sixteenth birthday, only allowing him to come home for official events and the odd long weekend. He breathes in the salt in the air, tasting the ocean on his tongue, and lets Four settle back into his bones.

Further inland, in the center of the district, it’s bright and blazing with the heat of a midsummer day, but the path to the lighthouse is always foggy, and the closer he gets, the thicker the air seems to get until he can feel it on his skin like tiny raindrops, wetting his curls and making his clothes stick to his body, cold and clammy. When he reaches it, he knocks softly on the weathered wooden door, and after a moment, the hinges creak loudly and Mags appears with a smile and steps back to allow him inside. The kettle is already whistling on the stove, and he toes off his shoes while she hands him an itchy, moth-eaten sweater to wear. 

He’s always been a bit jealous of Mags for getting the lighthouse. She’d won the Games before they’d built the enormous Victor’s Village at the top of the cliffs, so they’d given her the old lighthouse, so far removed from the rest of the district that it had been almost entirely forgotten about until she moved in. After her win, Capitol people had retrofitted it with a then-modern kitchen and taken out the light that had once guided sailors home, and ever since, Mags has lived here, rarely venturing out and only inviting a select few to visit when she wants company. It’s the kind of lonely existence Finnick craves when he’s in his apartment in the Capitol with a never-ending parade of strangers creeping into his bed and whispering secrets in his ears, touching him and claiming to know him better than anyone else. He wishes he could live like Mags, all alone in a huge stone tower, hidden away from the world in a cloud of fog and made invisible and untouchable by distance and age.

He knows that isn’t true, though, not even for Mags. Nobody who wins the Hunger Games is ever really alone. Not with the blood of twenty-three children on their hands, not with the Capitol’s watchful eye always at their back. Once, years ago, he’d asked Mags if the time made it easier to bear, and she’d only dropped her gaze, shaking her head and turning away from him in shame, and he’d regretted ever asking at all.

He follows Mags into the kitchen, and she busies herself with preparing their tea, dropping three sugar cubes in his cup, a habit leftover from when he was fourteen and used to come here every day to curl up on Mags’ couch and cry his eyes out while she fed him stale cookies and cups of too-sweet tea, patting his shoulders and playing him nonsensical old films on her ancient television set. She hands him his mug and settles down across from him at the kitchen table. Outside, the sun is trying its hardest to break through the haze, and the odd shadow passes over them as they drain their cups, not speaking, while he works up the courage to acknowledge why he’s here. 

It’s been a week now since the 70th Hunger Games ended — since Annie Cresta swam for her life in the flooded arena, treading water for hours while the rest of the children slowly drowned, so exhausted by the end of it that they hadn’t even been able to scream, just sank into nothingness while Annie floated away, her long hair fanning out beneath her, the dirty water washing away the last of the blood from her cheeks. 

Technically, it’s his first win as a mentor, and Finnick supposes he should feel proud, but instead, he feels vaguely disturbed by the whole thing. He honestly finds himself wishing it had never happened at all. Not that he wishes Annie were dead, but he does wish that she’d won in a less haunting way, or maybe he just wishes that he could sleep at night without seeing the look on her face when their other tribute, the boy named Mast, had had his head chopped off halfway into the Games. But she’d won all the same, and after, he’d been told to go back to Four for the next six months to help her recover ahead of the upcoming Victory Tour. 

It isn't standard practice for someone like Finnick to be sent home with his tribute. He’s too beloved in the Capitol, too precious to be sent home for such a simple reason, and it’s the unspoken other part of his assignment that’s the troubling part. What they really want him to do is to make her into something more appealing, make her into someone the public can love. Make her into someone like him.

It’s the worst possible task he could’ve been given. In part because he can’t bear the thought of condemning someone else to a life like his, but mostly because he doesn’t think it’s even possible to shape a deranged, half-dead, mad girl into something the Capitol could stomach, much less learn to love. No matter how much he hates his life in the Capitol, he finds himself thinking that it would be far easier if he’d just been told to stay there after the Games, if he could have kept himself numb and distracted with the familiar depravity of that life, instead of sitting here in Mags’ old lighthouse, trying to fathom how to glue the pieces of a thoroughly broken thing back together into something resembling a victor. 

Mags clears their empty teacups and washes the last of the dregs down the drain, then puts her hands on her hips and turns back to Finnick. 

“Time to see the girl,” she says, her voice warm but firm, the same way she used to tell him when it was time to go home after he’d spent another day sobbing into a pillow. 

Finnick doesn’t move from the table, and Mags looks at him for a long moment, then goes to the door and wraps a shawl around her bony shoulders. 

“You don’t want to,” she says from the doorway, slipping her feet into her boots and leaning down to do up the laces. It isn’t a question, simply an observation, and he swallows hard. 

“No,” he says. “To be honest, I’m sort of afraid of her.” The words are out of his mouth before he can regret them, and he quickly adds on, trying to explain himself. “You heard the way she screamed when — well, you remember what happened. And the way she couldn’t even get through the final interview. How she was on the train. I don’t know. She doesn’t seem well.”

Mags finishes tugging on her boots, then stands up, frowning in disapproval. “If you think you’re afraid of her, imagine how she must feel about herself.” 

The door slams and Mags is gone. Finnick looks down at the table, focusing on the woodgrain that circles around a knot in the pattern, a stain where a branch once grew, smoothed down by years of use. How many others have sat at this same table before him, cried to Mags about what they’d done, seen their nightmares reflected in a teacup? His shame subsumes him. When he leaves to follow her up the hill, he doesn’t bother locking the door behind him. 

He catches up with Mags in the streets of Four’s Old Town, and while she doesn’t say anything to acknowledge him, she slows her pace to match his, which he understands to be her tacit forgiveness for what he said in the lighthouse. This is new for him, she knows that. She won’t make it harder than it needs to be. 

None of the mist from the coast is in the air here. On the cramped sidewalks of the Old Town, the summer sun has been warming the cobblestones all day, and Finnick can feel the heat beneath his thin sandals. The harbor is spread out huge and crowded to the left, and the air is filled with the sounds of ship’s horns and seagulls crying out in the wind, punctuated by loud arguments between sailors on their midday break. The wind whistles between the buildings, all of the sounds resting on the steady rhythm of waves crashing against the shore. It’s the sound of Four that Finnick misses the most when he’s gone, the constant push and pull of the ocean. In the Capitol, everything is sharp and loud, with car horns honking in the streets at odd intervals and constant construction battering the pavement. The ocean softens everything in Four. Even the bell that announces the arrival of the train sounds like it could be just another part of the land.

As they walk, Finnick remembers just how much he loves the Old Town. While the district sprawls out far beyond the twisting alleyways of the city center, most people still have to pass through for work or just to get down to the piers, and there’s always a bustling energy in the streets, with fishermen and factory workers spilling out of buildings, smoking on the stone steps, and selling worthless trinkets to dumb Capitol tourists on the street corners. 

Although he grew up further back in the hills, Finnick had discovered early that the Old Town was where everything interesting happened in Four. His family got by on what little money they had, his father usually absent on long fishing voyages, and his mother, anxious and flighty as she was, was forced to spend most of her time working in various factories, trying to make ends meet. In Finnick’s house, money was always tight — clothes had to be mended, not bought new, and dinner almost always the same tinned fish on dry crackers. It wasn’t miserable, exactly, but it was boring. There was always just enough money for what was absolutely needed, but there was never anything left over for more, for what was wanted. It felt both suffocating and utterly barren at the same time.

With neither of his parents around to pay attention to what Finnick was doing during those long, lonely days, he’d started coming down to the Old Town for free entertainment, watching drunk old men lose all their money in games of cards and sneaking into the illegal wrestling matches that took place in one of the abandoned warehouses at night. Nobody really should have been letting a child inside any of those places, letting a little boy into bars and seedy back alleys, but for Finnick it was different. Things had always been different for him — because he was beautiful. 

At some point, it had become clear to him that, though everyone told their children they were lovely, he really was. In Finnick’s world, a certain kind of smile could convince anyone that he was trustworthy, fluttering his eyelashes could always get him out of trouble, and he only had to pretend to be helpless or sad for a moment and someone would always swoop in and save him from feeling any pain. Not having any money, the only thing Finnick had to bargain with was beauty, and he was determined to use it however he could to get the things he really wanted.

He’d sharpened beauty like a weapon, getting into bad situations and then charming his way out of them, growing bolder each time he got away with something, daring himself to do it just because he could. In the beginning, he’d used his looks on lonely sailors and sad middle-aged women, letting them hand him coins and stroke his curls, and then he’d collected the coins until they turned into money, real money, and then the world had opened up to him like an oyster shell.  

If beauty had bought him money, then money had bought him freedom, and Finnick was hooked. He’d buy himself huge platters of food and devour the entire thing in one sitting, not even because he was hungry, but simply because it was possible. He’d sneak onto fishing boats and gamble, buy beer from the local shops, and trick packs of tourists into buying him tacky, expensive souvenirs and then sell them to someone else, pocketing the money for himself. Every coin in his pocket was something he could trade in for a new experience, a chance to escape his sad, silent childhood, a real life.

When his mother discovered his secret, heard about the scandalous things her young son was getting up to every day in the Old Town, she’d thrown a fit, and the next day she had enrolled him in the Academy to train for the Games. Perhaps she’d hoped the strict rules of the training schedules would shock him into obedience, tame his insatiable need to experience everything life had to offer. Instead, he’d thrown himself entirely into the exercises and quickly risen through the ranks, training with the oldest groups until, at only fourteen, he’d been deemed both charming and deadly enough to volunteer, and the headmaster had handed him a slip of paper before the reaping that sent him on a one-way trip to the Capitol.

After he’d won the Games, all of a sudden he’d found himself with more money than he could have ever dreamed of having, and just like that, it lost all its allure. It was no fun buying things when people were always shoving gifts at him, huge, gaudy jewels and piles of cosmetics he’d never use. He’d always been hungry for more: more food, more money, more love. Only when he’d finally gotten his fill of it, it all felt hollow and pointless. The food was tasteless and bland anyway, and the love wasn’t real, just obsession and empty attraction. And so his life had become a production, an empty imitation, beautiful on the outside but with nothing of any value beneath its shiny surface.

Mags turns onto the main street through the center of town, and Finnick follows her, keeping her in his sight by following her mass of gray hair in the crowd. Outside the cannery, a woman recognizes him and stops to ask if she can shake his hand, and Finnick has the odd yet now familiar sensation of being not himself, but only his body. It’s a feeling he has often, though it doesn’t make it any less strange. He knows why, of course. Most everyone in the nation has seen his image a thousand times in photographs and on television, and they feel entitled to him because of it. In the Capitol, this means that his body is for sale, an object for the enjoyment of the wealthy, but here at home, it means they see him more like a walking statue, a representation of a person instead of an actual man. 

The woman shaking his hand has tears in her eyes while she speaks. “You just mean so much to me,” she warbles. “When I heard you were coming home, I —” Here she trails off, overcome with emotion. Finnick gives her a practiced smile and pats her shoulder. She leans heavily into his touch and makes a sound somewhere between a sob and a wail, then releases his hand and turns away, unable to bear another second in his presence.

By the time that’s all over, Mags is already passing through the gate that leads to the path up the cliff, starting the climb up the stone steps to the Victor’s Village, and he has to jog a bit to catch up with her. As they climb, Finnick tries to shake off the strange feeling he’d gotten from the woman in the streets, reminding himself that hollow celebrity is the price he pays for getting to keep his life. On the hillside, crops of summer wildflowers are beginning to bloom, tiny bursts of blossoms dotting the dying grass with color. Beneath them, the ocean foams and sprays against the rocks, and as they climb higher towards the Victor’s Village, the Old Town shrinks behind them, the huge houses looming large and ominous atop the cliff. 

When they finally reach Annie’s front porch, both sweating and dizzy from the heat, Mags puts a hand against his chest to stop him. 

“Breathe,” she says, and Finnick steadies himself, trying again to wipe his mind clean of the memory of Annie in the arena, hoping that inside the house is a simple, silly girl instead of the phantom he remembers from the tribute train. He recalls the way she hadn’t met anybody’s eyes the whole way home, just drifted between the compartments refusing to eat or sleep, her cheeks hollowed out and her hair a matted mess. It was unsettling, and Finnick wasn’t used to being unsettled; he was used to being numb. When his breathing finally settles back down, Mags gives him a final pointed look and they push their way inside. 

The first thing he notices is how dark it is. It’s a shock at first, since outside it’s midday and the world is lit with the too-bright shades of summer, but inside, all the curtains are drawn and the lamps are off. The second thing he notices is that the floor is wet, and he can hear the rush of running water from somewhere in the back of the house. He and Mags exchange a look, then set off running up the stairs. 

Water is flowing down the steps and dripping from the banister, and when they reach the landing, the carpet is soggy beneath their feet. Annie’s house looks nearly the same as Finnick’s, and though he’s hardly spent any time there, he knows as he follows Mags down the hallway that they’re headed for the bathroom that connects to the main bedroom upstairs. They find her in there, the bathtub overflowing while she lies in the water, naked, her eyes fixed on some invisible point on the ceiling. 

Something twists in Finnick’s chest, and he sees that even Mags has to take a beat to register what they’re looking at: the poor girl, half-dead but still breathing, dirty bathwater up to her ears while the water continues to flow, spilling out over the sides of the bathtub and flooding over the tiles. Next to him, Mags closes her eyes and breathes in sharply through her nose, then lets it out. She steadies herself and gives Finnick a hard look, moving to turn off the tap. As Mags rummages through the cupboards for something to soak up the water, Finnick reaches into the bathtub and picks up Annie’s limp form, carrying her into the bedroom and wrapping her up in one of the blankets he finds folded at the edge of her bed. When he lays her down, she curls her body away from him towards the wall, folding her limbs into one another and burying her head beneath the fabric. 

Unsure what to do with himself, Finnick sits on the edge of the bed, resting his chin in his palm. He can hear Mags still moving around in the bathroom, but he’s too nervous to leave Annie alone, so he simply waits. At least she’s alive, he consoles himself — at least they found her before she’d drowned in the bathtub. That would’ve been something, trying to explain that to the Capitol people when they came back to collect her for the Tour. Oh, my tribute, the one who only survived because she could swim for hours at a time, drowned in her bathtub a week after the Games.

Finnick closes his eyes, sighing heavily. Victor, he reminds himself. Not tribute. The girl in the bed beside him is a victor. 

Mags comes back into the room, holding a bundle of wet rags. 

“All clean?” he asks, and Mags nods tersely. He watches her take in the scene in the bedroom: Annie curled up in the bed, Finnick sitting beside her, close but not touching, the curtains drawn, the room still dark. 

“I’ll stay with her,” Finnick says, and Mags gives him an approving look. She dumps the bundle of rags in the hamper and squeezes his shoulder when she goes, leaving him alone in the room with this strange girl, who still hasn’t moved or made a sound since he put her in the bed. 

He can hear Mags cleaning the floors downstairs, then after a little while, he hears the front door close. As the time drags on, he finds himself wishing he had something to do — he should’ve thought to bring a book or at least a length of rope he could practice his knots with. At the very least, he wishes the curtains were open so he could see where the sun was in the sky, so he could gauge how much time has passed. But he won’t do that to Annie. He won’t make her think about the rest of the world right now while she fights off whatever is happening inside of her head. He knows what it’s like to come home after the Hunger Games, remembering the days and months he’d spent on Mags’ couch, and his heart aches — both for his past self and for Annie in the bed, unable to fathom what’s happened to them, the only remaining witnesses to the horrors they’ve survived. 

Finally, after what feels like several hours of this blank cavity of time and feeling, Annie shifts and a voice trembles out from beneath the blankets. 

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself, just so you know.”

That wasn’t what he’d been expecting her to say, but he simply replies, “Alright.” He doesn’t necessarily believe her, though he supposes he doesn’t have a reason to doubt her either. 

The blanket shifts again, and the top half of her face emerges, a pair of huge green eyes meeting his. “I wasn’t,” she says. “It’s just — I forgot where I was. Sometimes, my mind goes to another place and I forget where my body is. I forgot I was in the bath. That’s all.”

“I get it,” Finnick says, and he’s surprised at how true the words feel. But he does understand. There have been countless times when he’s had to let his mind escape his body — mostly during nights in the Capitol when he can’t remember the name of the stranger lying next to him because he’s so distant from reality, his body moving without any permission from his mind, the real world feeling more like a dream than anything else. 

Annie buries her face back in the sheets and starts to cry. Finnick finds himself wanting to reach out and touch her, to offer her some kind of comfort, but all he can think is how awful it feels to be touched when he doesn’t want to be, so instead he just sits there, listening to her cry. He keeps trying to think of something else to say, but he comes up blank, feeling helpless and, for the first time in a long time, far too young and immature to be where he is. 

After a while, Annie’s sobs subside, and when he looks back down at her, he realizes she’s fallen asleep. He goes to the window and peers out of the curtain, where a crescent moon is already hanging high in the sky. He takes one more look at Annie, her face hidden by her mass of dark hair, and when he’s confident she’s really asleep, he creeps out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him and stepping out alone into the night.

*

He starts visiting Annie every morning. Sometimes Mags joins him, but since he’s the one that’s technically her neighbor, he doesn’t bother going down to the lighthouse to fetch her, so most of the time he goes alone, usually after a morning swim, his hair still damp with seawater when he knocks on Annie’s door.

After a few weeks, a sharper picture of her begins to emerge in his mind. She’s not actually mad, or at least he doesn’t think she is. Sure, there are some days when he arrives and she’s sitting in the dark with the television on, facing away from it with her hands over her ears. The first few times he walks in on that, he just sits on the couch, watching her, trying to figure out what she’s doing, but after a while, he works up the nerve to tap her elbow and ask her what she’s looking at. When she hears him say something, she jumps up suddenly and looks at him in surprise as if she hadn’t noticed him come in, and then simply flips off the program and goes around opening up all the curtains as if nothing out of the ordinary had been happening, babbling about a series of nonsensical stories she had been thinking about the day before.

The rest of the time, she’s fairly lucid, and the more time he spends with her, the more intriguing he finds her. She’s odd — he still finds her a bit unsettling at times — but he learns that she’s also perceptive, startlingly honest, and has a surprising, dry sense of humor that he finds himself laughing at more than he would’ve expected. Most notably, she counts everything she sees: stitches in a mended sock, fence posts in a neighbor’s yard, and she reports these things back to him with a sense of deep gravity, as if there having been four bees on her window yesterday is a matter of life or death.

Once, they’re sitting out on the back porch, eating tomato sandwiches that Mags had sent over and enjoying the summer air, when she says calmly, “There were thirty-eight boats in the north marina yesterday, and today there are thirty-seven.”

“Oh?” Finnick says, wiping crumbs off his lap. He’s growing used to these sorts of conversations with Annie, and he mostly just tries to keep her talking for as long as possible, knowing she has some point but having no idea how to predict where she’s going with it.

“Yes, and nobody is authorized to move any of the boats right now,” she says. “So it means somebody did it without getting permission.”

“Who would do that?” Finnick says.

“One of the Capitol people, I bet,” Annie says. “They’re always doing things like that. They think once you own a yacht you don’t have to follow any rules anymore.”

Finnick laughs. “I don’t think it’s the yachts making them think that. I think that’s just how they are.”

“You’re probably right,” Annie says, the ghost of a smile passing over her lips, “but I think the yachts make it worse.”

“Fair enough,” Finnick concedes, setting his plate down on the ground next to his chair. “Have you ever been on a yacht, Annie?”

He’s been on plenty of them — usually, when he’s sent home to Four it’s with one of his high-paying clients, and several of them choose to moor their ridiculously expensive boats in Four for most of the year. He’s aware that owning a boat in Four is something of a status symbol in the Capitol, and they love to brag to him about how fast and how far the yachts can travel, something Finnick has always found odd, considering most of them never bother to leave the marina at all.

Annie sniffs. “I’ve never been on a yacht,” she says, “and I wouldn’t want to. I don’t like boats.”

Finnick raises his eyebrows, susprised. Almost everyone in Four loves to sail; it's a part of them, as natural as breathing. “Why not?”

“They make me feel trapped,” Annie replies. “When you’re in the water, swimming, I mean, you can go any way you like. You can go as deep as you want so long as you can hold your breath for it. But on a boat, you’re stuck — and you can’t hide or escape.” She finishes with her sandwich, holding her plate against her chest like a shield. “Once, when they took us out on one of the big fishing boats with school, I got scared by the boiler and tried to hide from it. Only they found me and dragged me out in a matter of minutes. And then later when I got lost in the hold, the captain himself had to come and get me. Only he didn’t even call out or anything, he just appeared from around a corner and brought me back with him to bridge. Like he’d known where I was the whole time. It was so strange — like being in a dollhouse.” She glances over at Finnick nervously. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard her say so many words at once. She coughs slightly. “That’s just how it is on boats. Everyone sees everything you do.”

Finnick picks at the fraying edge of his shirt. He isn’t really sure what to make of anything that Annie’s just said, so he just says, “I’ve had some nice times on boats.”

“That’s because you’re famous,” Annie says matter-of-factly. “Your whole life is like that.”

The statement shocks him, though it shouldn’t, since she hasn’t said anything untrue. It’s just that it’s the first time since coming home that she’s said anything to reference life outside of this strange bubble they’re living in, the first time either of them has really come close to acknowledging anything remotely real about their situation. And yet, in this random, odd statement about boats, she hit on something that has troubled Finnick for years now. The complete lack of privacy in his world, the constant feeling of being watched, monitored. Even right now, everybody in the Capitol knows he’s in Four, and they know he’s here to take care of Annie. It’s not that he wants it to be a secret — not that he could anyway, since she’s a victor now too, famous in her own right — but it annoys him to think that people might be imagining them together right now, inserting the outside world into a moment that belongs to them and them alone. Something about her feels precious to him, and he wants to protect her from the prying eyes and gossip of the Capitol. He doesn’t want her to end up like him, detached and miserable. He wants to take her somewhere far away from here, where nobody can hurt her again. If only he hadn’t been sent here on purpose to ruin her for them.

Annie leans forward in her chair suddenly. “Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be a tree?”

”I haven’t.” Finnick replies. He has to stifle a laugh, but he's oddly charmed by the sudden pivot. Annie isn't interested in lamenting about all the various inconveniences and small tragedies of fame. She wants to talk about trees. To his surprise, Finnick finds that he does, too.

“Sometimes I wonder what it feels like,” Annie says. “You know how they say trees are alive? But they aren’t alive the same way as you and me. They can’t feel or think the same way we do. So, I’ve always imagined that it’s a bit like being asleep. But not dreaming. Like living a thousand years in a completely dreamless sleep.” She sighs softly. “I think I’d like it.”

Finnick just nods along as if that makes any sense. “I’ve honestly never really thought about it.”

“That’s odd,” Annie says, closing her eyes and leaning back again, the afternoon sun turning her cheeks a pretty shade of pink. “I think about it all the time.”

*

Finnick shouldn’t be surprised to receive the letter, but he is anyway. He’d assumed that being sentenced to six months in Four would mean a reprieve from snakes from the Capitol slithering into his bed, though it seems foolish to have even considered that now, and the letter burns in his hands. There’s nowhere to place the anger though, and after a moment, he just deflates, letting the hollowness take hold again.

The letter looks the same as most of the ones he receives when he’s in the Capitol itself – a name, a few defining details, a time. The man this time is exorbitantly wealthy, owning several of the factories in Six, and he’s on holiday in Four for the next week and wants Finnick on Saturday. Normally he’d be invited onto a yacht for a weekend if the man had one, but since Finnick is known to be staying in his own house for once, the man has requested a night in the Victor’s Village with him. He hates when these nights take place in his own bed, in his own home. His Capitol apartment is famous, but he still prefers to meet clients in their own homes. It’s easier to erase himself in unfamiliar surroundings, easier to pretend he’s someone else. But the huge house on the hill has never felt like his anyway — he’s never bothered to decorate it or make it personal in any way, and it often feels more like a set piece than an actual house, as if the walls would fall down and reveal themselves to be nothing but illusions if he pushed on them just a bit too hard.

He throws the letter on the fire when he’s finished with it, hating the evidence. On Saturday night, he takes a long shower and lets the hot water run down his back, then he gets dressed and sits in the living room to wait for the knock on his door. 

The man is younger than Finnick had expected when he arrives — most of the wealthy businessmen who can afford him are sad, lonely, middle-aged divorced husbands who come to him for comfort and cry when things are over, but the man tonight can’t be more than a few years older than Finnick himself. He’s dressed far too smartly for the districts, and Finnick lets him in the back just after midnight, not bothering to turn on any of the lights. 

They don’t waste any time talking, which is how Finnick prefers it. He leads the man up to his bedroom and they make quick work of things, the man’s smart suit lying in a wrinkled heap on the floor. 

Afterward, as he always does, Finnick whispers, “Tell me a secret.”

“I can’t,” the man says, and Finnick almost pities him, the self-disgust palpable in the man’s voice.

“It’s my only request,” says Finnick. “You knew that coming in.” He stopped accepting money for these nights a long time ago, after money had lost all its value and he knew most of it was being passed into other hands somewhere high above him anyway. The secrets at least kept things interesting, gave him something to think about when it was all over. 

“I — I killed my own father,” the man whispers shakily. “I don’t even regret doing it. He was going to run our family business into the ground, and I needed my inheritance early, so one night at dinner — I just did it. I slipped rat poison into his wine glass and he was dead by morning.”

Years ago, this sort of thing might have been shocking, but these kinds of confessions barely register in Finnick’s mind anymore. A family torn to shreds by greed and jealousy is nothing he hasn’t heard before. And rat poison isn’t even a particularly interesting method of murder; he’s heard of at least two others who chose the same exact same method, down to the wine glass at dinner. At least the last woman he remembers had killed her husband in a fit of jealousy. That was almost more forgivable than something as boring as a dispute over an inheritance. Secrets were always better when there was some passion involved.

Sighing, Finnick rolls over, pulling the bedsheets around his waist and closing his eyes.

“You can let yourself out when you’re ready,” he says. “Just be sure to put the key back in the mailbox when you leave.”

Chapter Text

He wakes after only a few fitful hours of sleep, coming to with a gasp, gulping the cold night air into his lungs. Finnick is used to the nightmares by now; most nights, some awful memory or fantastical horror will rip through his mind and force him awake, breathing heavily and trying to calm himself down in the dark. The man in his bed has disappeared, and Finnick is grateful for that, at least. It’s always embarrassing to wake from a nightmare to the face of a stranger staring over him in shock.

In the dream tonight, he had been in Annie’s Games. She’d been in there with him, and when the arena flooded, they both sank like stones. In the dream, she had been tugging on his arm, trying to get him to swim for the surface, only his body had been limp and heavy and he knew if she kept trying to save him, he’d drag her down with him and they’d both drown. Only no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t speak or move a muscle, and she wouldn’t leave him behind. He’d kept sinking, knowing that when she died it would be his fault, and now, even though he’s awake, he still can’t shake the feeling, the memory of his limp, deadened dream body still lingering. After a while, when it’s clear there’s no chance of sleep for the rest of the night, he gets out of bed, pulling on an old sweater over his sleeping clothes, and heads down to the beach. 

It’s somewhere between two and three in the morning, and the Victor’s Village is completely dark, the moon nothing more than a sliver in the sky and only a few thin clouds dotting the horizon. He unlatches the gate that leads to the steps down to the beach, wincing at the loud creak it emits, disrupting the silence of the night. 

The Victor’s Village beach is one of the only truly beautiful places left in Four. Most of the public beaches in the district are covered in beach chairs that Capitol tourists can rent for the day, and littered with garbage and half-eaten bags of food. The rest of the shoreline is taken up by the marina and various ports, and the old piers have mostly fallen into disrepair, sinking into the murky water at odd angles on sad, off-kilter legs. Sometimes Finnick wonders if the Capitol tourists are disappointed when they see the real state of the beaches in Four. They look nothing like they do in the postcards that they sell on the boardwalk, with none of the crystal clear waters and long, empty stretches of soft white sand. But most people don’t vacation in Four for the sake of relaxation anyway, Finnick knows. They mostly do it so they can buy useless trinkets to display on their mantles in the Capitol and tell their friends and acquaintances which of the beachfront hotels they stayed at as a subtle way to indicate their wealth.

The Victor's Village beach is different though, hidden from tourists and the rest of the district alike, down a set of stone steps carved into the cliffside. It’s a stretch to even call it a beach, really; it’s just a little cove and a small patch of sand that appears at low tide. But it’s untouched by anyone save for the ten or so victors who know about its existence, and they have an unspoken agreement to keep it clean and private, a little safe haven where they can protect themselves from the prying eyes of the district and the Capitol. They each use it in their own ways — Sal, the huge, grizzled winner of the 29th Games, Finnick knows comes down every morning for a sunrise swim and a set of calisthenics on the rocks, and Mari, now a squat, middle-aged woman with frizzy black hair, was apparently once famous for taking teenage boys from the Academy to the beach for the night in the years just following her win in the 43rd. 

Finnick isn’t in Four often enough to know the schedule for the beach — most of the victors come down here for one reason or another, but most of them also like to be left alone, and he knows they’ve developed an unspoken timetable for its use — but he knows enough to know that none of them will be down here at this time of night. The tide is at its lowest when he reaches the rocks that surround the little patch of sand, and he breathes in the salt in the air, the sound of the water already calming him down, bringing him back to reality after the dream. 

His feet hit the sand when he notices a figure sitting on the beach a few yards away, and his stomach twists when he realizes who it is. 

“Annie,” he says, walking over and placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. She startles slightly at his touch but doesn’t turn to look at him. “You know, it’s not safe to come down here alone at night without telling anyone. The beach disappears at high tide. You could get swept out to sea if you’re not careful.”

“I’m a strong swimmer if you’ll recall,” she says lightly, though there’s a hint of darkness at the edges of her voice. “But don’t worry. I was watching the rocks. I was going to go back up when that little cluster over there disappeared.” Just then, she does look up at him, and he feels an odd flutter in his chest when their eyes meet. “But I’m not alone now that you’re here, so I can stay as long as I please.”

“Do you mind the company?” Usually, he’d feel guiltier for interrupting someone else’s time on the beach, but he’s so relieved to see her alive and on solid ground after his nightmare, and so desperate for a connection with somebody who actually knows him that he can’t be bothered to pretend he wants to leave. 

“Not at all,” she replies, patting a space next to her, and he settles down, pulling his knees into his chest. The full moon hangs in the sky above them, several tiny moons reflecting off the black water, just barely illuminating the side of Annie’s face. 

“How did you even find this place?” he asks. “I just mean, I hadn’t gotten around to showing it to you yet, and the gate is kind of hidden behind all the houses.”

“Sal showed me a week or two after I got home,” Annie replies. “He came by my house with a bucket of oysters and grunted at me until I followed him down here. I think he meant for me to understand that I could come to swim with him in the mornings, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. I’m not sure why. But he still brings me oysters, so I think I’m forgiven.”

“Oh,” Finnick says, his voice coming out sounding oddly petulant. “I didn’t realize you were spending so much time with the others.”

“There’s a world outside of you, Finnick Odair,” Annie says, though when he looks over, her eyes are sparkling, teasing. “But don’t let it worry you too much. You’re still my favorite.”

In that moment, he’s grateful for the cover of darkness, because his face heats up spectacularly at her comment, and he stares down at the ground, drawing a spiral in the sand next to his left foot. 

“Actually, I’ve been coming down here most nights,” Annie says. “I always come to the water when I can’t sleep and — well, I haven’t been sleeping much at all lately.”

“Me neither,” says Finnick, then immediately feels stupid for saying it. Annie’s only been out of the arena for two months. Her nightmares are still fresh and unexpected, filled with the sharp horror of something that’s just happened. They’re quiet for a long moment. The only sound interrupting the silence is the waves lapping at the edge of the beach.

“When I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me stories about these beautiful women who lived underwater,” Annie says softly after a little while, and Finnick stills, feeling as though she’s trying to tell him something truly important. “Apparently, they were so beautiful that they could lure a sailor to his death just from looking at him — whenever a boat sank or somebody was lost at sea, it was always that he had seen one of the women beneath the water and jumped in after her, only to drown because he went looking for her.” The wind starts to pick up, tangling Annie’s hair and loosening some of the front pieces from behind her ears, and for some reason, Finnick has the strangest urge to reach out and brush them back. Instead, he buries his fingers in the sand until he touches the cold, damp layer beneath the surface. 

“When my mother died, I convinced myself the women were real,” Annie goes on, “and that she had been one of them all along. She wasn't dead, just returning home after spending a few years with my father and me, and when I was old enough, I thought she’d come get me and take me down there with her. When my father remarried and my stepmother used to hit me and my father went right along with her, I would come down to the beach whenever I could to wait for my mother to come back — there were some days when I really thought she was just going to walk out of the surf and take my hand and lead me down there with her and then everything would be alright again, just as it was before.” 

Finnick is silent. He’s barely breathing, trying not to disrupt the air between them. He hadn’t known any of this about Annie — her mother’s death or her father’s abuse. He’s heard the legends about the women in the water, of course, old folktales about gods and monsters that live in the farthest corners of the oceans, but Annie’s story is heavier; it holds more weight than a sailor’s drunken ramble.

“Eventually I realized she wasn’t coming, of course. You can’t hold on to a fantasy like that forever.” Annie brushes her hair over one shoulder, twisting it into a thick rope. “That’s why I enrolled in the Academy, why I was so desperate to volunteer. I thought if I made it to the Games, either way, my father would have to care about me. If I died, he’d finally regret all those years he spent hating me, and if I won, he’d have to be so proud that he would never lay a hand on me again.” She laughs humorlessly.  “And then the training was so hard — you remember it too, I’m sure — that some days I really hoped I’d just die, not in the arena but before I even got there, just so I’d have a way out. On the worst days, I’d get through it by imagining that I was already underwater with my mother again, and I’d let myself get so lost in the idea of it that I’d forget where I was completely. I’d forget which world was the real world and which one was the fantasy.” 

Finnick swallows thickly. It’s a difficult story to hear, made worse by the way it reminds him of how awful the training for the Games was. He hates to think of what it must have been like for Annie, all alone, lonely and lost in dreams of a way out.

He clears his throat. “Have you heard from your father since you got back?”

Annie shakes her head. “He hasn’t said a word to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Finnick says honestly. 

“Don’t be. He’s nothing to me. And anyway, it’s almost — freeing, in a sad sort of way. Now I can be sure that there’s nothing I could have done. Not volunteering. Not dying. Not even winning the Games. None of it would have mattered. He never cared about me.” She shifts, crossing her legs beneath her and brushing her hands together, letting the sand fall freely in her lap. “I’ve accepted that. I don’t even really think about it all that often. But ever since I left the arena, I keep finding myself going underwater to visit my mother. I just slip away to go see her, to get away from here. Sometimes I can’t get out. That first day, when you found me in the bath — that’s where I was. I was with my mother, safe, under the sea.”

Her story makes Finnick’s whole body ache. He’s not even particularly close to his parents anymore, but he’s never doubted their love for him. His mother had sent him to the Academy, not because she couldn’t stand to see him, but because she’d hoped it would at least keep him under control for a few years. She hadn’t expected him to actually volunteer, much less to go into the Games at just fourteen. She’d only wanted to keep him distracted with the training so he wouldn’t have time to get into any more trouble. Finnick can’t imagine what Annie must have felt, sending herself to the arena with nobody to come back home to if she made it out. He thinks back to her scream when the other boy died, remembering how she’d cared for him in the weeks leading up to the Games, how close the two had gotten in the Training Center. He wonders if that boy had somehow brought out the last of her that she’d had left to give and if that last final fragment had shattered when she lost him, too. It starts to make sense to him why she barely fought after that, why her win seemed almost accidental. She probably never intended to come out of the arena alive. In the last moments, it was just her body fighting for itself, refusing to surrender to the flood, the water her savior at last. 

“The rocks are gone,” Annie says, straightening up, gesturing to the place where the water has risen around the land. Finnick stands too, unfolding his legs and rubbing the kinks out of his spine. Slowly, they make their way back across the rocks together to the base of the stairs, climbing back up to their houses in silence, letting the beach get swallowed up by the tide. 

Outside Annie’s house, she pauses on the front porch, looking up at Finnick with those green eyes, her hair still tangled and wild from the ocean air. 

“Finnick,” she says slowly, “those women I told you about before, the ones who live underwater. They’re not real, are they?”

“No, they’re not,” he answers gently, and she looks so despondent at the thought, so wrecked and small and lonely, that he opens her arms and lets her walk straight into them. She’s shivering, which only adds to the ache in his chest, and without thinking, he leans down and presses his lips to the crown of her head. 

“Get some sleep,” he says, releasing her and waiting while she fumbles with the lock and pushes her way inside. He keeps waiting there for a long time, even when she’s long gone, not sure what he’s looking for but unable to tear his eyes away from her bedroom window. 

By the time he sinks back into his own bed, the first gleam of sunrise is already stitching itself into the corner of the sky, and as he falls back asleep, he rolls Annie’s story over in his mind, half-delirious from the long night. For a moment, he finds himself almost believing in the women too, the world under the waves where everything is perfect and easy. His last thought before sleep pulls him under is that, if it were all real, he's pretty sure he would do the same thing as the men in the legend: dive into the ocean for just one more look at her, happily accepting his fate while he drowned himself waiting for Annie to come back for him.

*

Summer seems determined to linger, and for Annie’s eighteenth birthday, someone proposes that they throw her a party on the lawn between all the victor’s houses. They set up a long table and decorate it with seashells and lanterns, and everyone brings food and too many bottles of wine to count. 

By the time the whole thing is set up, the sun is already falling fast behind the cliffs, and they light the lanterns giving the whole lawn a warm, orange glow. The air is warm, despite the occasional breeze that rustles through the grass, and the distant lull of the ocean gives the whole evening a dreamlike quality, like a scene from a painting come to life. 

Annie comes out of her house in a pretty white dress, her hair falling in waves down her back. Someone places a crown of tiny flowers on her head, and when she takes her place at the head of the table, she leans over to inform Finnick that there are nineteen rolls in the bread basket and six types of fish, not counting the oysters. Finnick feels a rush of affection for her just then and fills her glass with the sweetest wine he can find, telling her how he’d noticed a new Capitol yacht in the harbor last week and how he’d wondered which of the old boats was going to have to give up their spot in the marina. He’s started keeping track of the boats ever since realizing that Annie loves to speculate about their movements and who might be living on each one of them. 

The air darkens as night settles over the lawn, and the dinner devolves into loud, half-drunken conversations and meaningless arguments. Someone brings up Mari’s old love affairs on the private beach and she tells them stories about nervous boys and teenage romance that make the table shake from how hard everyone is laughing. 

“I was young!” Mari says finally, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “You know how it is when you’re young.”

Mags sits at the opposite end of the table, her eyes twinkling, and she winks at Finnick when he catches her gaze. 

Eventually, the dinner quiets down and someone brings out a cake decorated with even more flowers. Annie clasps her hands together when they place it in front of her and closes her eyes tightly as she blows out the candles. Someone shouts for a speech and the table goes quiet with anticipation, which clearly embarrasses her. Finnick stands up quickly, raising his glass and trying to draw all the attention to himself while Annie sinks awkwardly down into her chair. 

“Um, I just wanted to take a moment to say how happy I know we all are to have Annie here,” he says, stumbling slightly over the words. The wine must have been stronger than he thought, but he’s already talking, so he pushes through it and keeps going. “It’s only been a few months, but somehow I feel like she’s always been here. I mean, I’ve already learned so much from you, and —” he cuts himself off, not sure what he’s trying to say, and starts again. “I guess I just –” He hiccups slightly. Annie is looking up at him, her eyes wide. “Look. We all fought for our lives to be here. Each of us at this table has had a time, at least once in our lives, where we never thought we’d see our eighteenth birthday. But we all beat the odds, and here we are, having cake and telling stories. And Annie — here you are with us. So I guess I just wanted to say that, well, I’m glad you are. So — yeah. Happy birthday, Annie.”

Everyone cheers and clinks their glasses together while Finnick sits back down, his face burning, knowing he sounded like an idiot, but taking comfort in the fact that at least he’d saved Annie from having to say anything when she so clearly didn’t want to. 

Then Mari, who’s seated to his right, leans over and pats the back of his hand. “We’re glad you’re here too Finnick,” she says quietly. “I know it’s hard for you, being away all the time. It’s good to have you back home for once.” 

Suddenly he’s afraid he might cry, and he swallows hard over the lump in his throat, nodding silently while Mari gives his hand another squeeze. Someone hands him a slice of cake, and while he eats, he takes in the scene at the table: their odd, mismatched group of odd, broken people. Nobody in the world understands the things they’ve seen apart from one another. Nobody else could comprehend the horrors of their arenas, the nightmares that never truly leave, the things they’ve all had to do in service of the Capitol. And yet one of the women next to Mags is bouncing a baby on her knee — hopeful despite it all that her child will survive, or at least escape the worst of what she’s seen, that the world still has something good left in it. He watches Mags slip a pile of fishbones beneath the table for one of the dogs to chew on and lets Mari’s words sink into his skin, finding them startlingly true and remarkably calming. He really is home for once: not alone in his huge, empty, unfeeling victor’s house, but here, eating dinner on the lawn while the lanterns flicker lazily in the night air, surrounded by the only people in the world who can see him for who he really is. 

When he looks over at Annie, she’s beaming at him, and he knows without either of them having to say a word that she’s thinking the exact same thing. 

*

“I think she’ll be able to pull it off,” he says. He’s in the garden outside the lighthouse, helping Mags hang laundry out to dry. The mist swirls heavily around them, and privately he wonders if anything ever gets dry here given how thick the fog is, but he picks up another set of white sheets and hangs it for her, the fabric billowing like a ghost in the wind.

“I mean, she still gets lost in her mind sometimes,” he goes on, “but I’m starting to figure out how to get her out of it. Either I tap her elbow twice and she comes back, or I ask her to focus on something in the real world like count how many knots are in a fishing line or list out the colors of each of the squares in a quilt.”

A seagull swoops at Mags’ hair and she frowns, swatting it away. Finnick pins another sheet on the line and tosses his hair out of his eyes.

“Also, she’s actually really funny when she’s not trying to be,” he continues, shaking the wrinkles out of a faded plaid shirt. “Like the other day she made this joke about that stylist from Six — you know, the one who looks like a cow in a top hat — well, I guess you had to be there. But you know who I’m talking about. I mean, he looks ridiculous.” He chuckles, remembering Annie’s face when she’d described meeting the man, how he’d insulted her interview dress and she’d had to feign a coughing fit just to stop herself from saying anything back. “She just has this funny way of seeing the world. If she can show that side of herself on the Tour, everyone will just fall in love with her.”

He looks down and notices the laundry basket is empty. Mags grabs it and hikes it up on her hip, walking back toward the lighthouse, and wiping the dirt from her shoes when she reaches the door.

Finnick follows her inside, still talking. “I know what you’re thinking — she’s too fragile, she’s too shy. And maybe right now, she is. But we still have a couple of months before the Tour starts. And I know I can help her. At least, I can help her enough that she’ll be able to manage a couple of weeks on the road. It can’t be that hard. The thing is, she’s not mad, not really. She’s just a bit odd. But that’s not a crime.”

Mags goes over to stoke the fire while Finnick busies himself with cleaning up the last of the dishes from their lunch. He sweeps the fishbones into the garbage pail and wipes the crumbs from the counter, humming an old sailor’s tune that his father used to sing to him when he was a child. When he finishes, Mags is standing with her back to the fireplace, studying him with a quizzical expression on her face. 

“It’s getting late,” is all she says. 

“Oh,” says Finnick. It really isn’t late at all, but he knows what that means: that Mags is finished with having company for the day, that she’s ready to be alone now and wants him to leave. He folds the dish towel over the oven door while Mags pulls his jacket out of the closet, helping him into the sleeves when he reaches her and giving his shoulders a firm pat. At the door, he rests his hand on the handle and pauses for a moment, searching for something more to say, and Mags lets out a loud huff behind him.

“Alright, alright, I’m going,” he laughs, knowing she’s finished with him, that she doesn’t have any more left in her to give. He throws the door open and steps back out into the mist, his shirt flapping loudly at his sides. Mags ruffles his hair and then gives him a shove in the direction of the hill, but she stops him on the step and embraces him for a long time before he goes. 

As the weather gets colder, he and Annie start spending more time outside. It’s the reverse of what most everyone else in Four does – when the summer starts to fade, the Capitol tourists all go back home and the beaches sit empty for the remainder of the year and most of the fishermen move further south for the season. During the autumn and winter months, a quietness settles throughout the district and most people, even if they have nowhere to go, retreat inside until the spring. But for Annie, with the more time that passes since the Games, the less time she needs to spend sitting in her living room and staring at the walls, so she and Finnick start taking walks along the bluff in the mornings, bundling up against the wind when it blows hard and cold off the water.

They play little games on the walks – competing to see who can spot more boats on the horizon or making up stories about old classmates and daring each other to pick out which of the details are real. Sometimes they walk in silence, and Finnick isn’t sure whether Annie knows she’s with him or if she’s lost inside her head, but he finds that he doesn’t mind either way. The silence is comforting and her presence is relaxing in its own way, and it’s on their quieter walks that he finds himself unraveling things in his head, drawing connections between all the seemingly disparate parts of his personality and feeling more like his old self again – the person he was before the Games, before the Capitol, before he even entered the Academy and learned that the way to get what he needed was to be so beautiful and charming that nobody would dare deny him. Around Annie, he doesn’t have to be beautiful. He gets the feeling that his face barely even registers to her; she knows he’s attractive in a detached sort of way, the same way she occasionally alludes to his being famous, but she doesn’t care in any real sense of the word. She’d rather talk to him about how many seagulls she can see on the shoreline, and they get into heated debates about whether or not she’s counting the same bird twice when one flies away and another lands in its place.

Once a week, they go down to the lighthouse and have dinner with Mags, and when they finish eating, Mags plays them music from before the war on her old, dented speaker and Annie closes her eyes and sways for the full length of the songs. Whenever the songs finish, Annie opens her eyes and says something about whatever she thought of the music: if she liked a certain melody or the way the singer said something. After she’s made her judgment, Mags almost always gives her an approving nod and the whole thing makes Finnick want to gather both of them up in his arms and never let go. It’s always dark when they walk home from dinner through the Old Town, and Annie lingers beneath the street lamps, fluttering between the patches of light like a tiny fragile moth. 

One day in early October, they’re coming back from their morning walk when Annie comes to a halt in front of Finnick’s house. 

“Can I see inside your house?” she says quickly like she’s trying to get the words out before she loses her nerve. “I’m just curious. You’ve been in mine so many times and I’ve never seen yours.”

“Of course,” Finnick says. “You only ever have to ask.”

She steps inside when he unlocks the door for her and looks around curiously, studying the walls and the light switches with her usual quiet intensity. He watches her look around the living room, running her fingers along the door frame and the windowsills. When she’s finished, she says, “It looks pretty much the same as mine.”

“They built them all at the same time,” Finnick says. “I’m pretty sure they’re all the same. Mags is the only one of us who got special treatment.”

“I love Mags’ house,” Annie says wistfully. “I wish I lived in a lighthouse. Only it seems to fit her pretty perfectly. I think I’d get lonely down there all alone.”

“You’d manage,” Finnick says mildly. Truthfully, he’s barely listening, far more distracted by how the late morning sunshine is illuminating the colors of Annie’s hair, the sun-bleached ends curling around themselves from the saltwater. 

“Yes. I’d miss you though,” Annie says, making her way into the kitchen. Finnick follows her, the floorboards creaking under their feet. Something about seeing Annie in his house makes it feel more like a real place, and he regrets that he’s never tried to decorate it, or maybe he just regrets not asking her over sooner. He moves to fill a glass of water from the tap and drinks it, and when he turns back around, she’s studying the base of one of his cabinets. He walks over, standing beside her to see what she’s looking at. 

“The handles on the cabinets in my kitchen are perfect circles,” she says, turning to look at him over her shoulder. “But yours are different. These ones are a bit more square.”

He can’t help it. He kisses her. 

She doesn’t push him off or cry out in horror, and when his hands find their way to her face, cradling her soft skin in his hands, she parts her lips and leans up into him, rising just slightly on the tips of her toes. After a moment, he breaks the kiss and steps back, his heart thundering in his ears. She leans back against the counter and looks down at the tiles on the floor, her cheeks flushed. 

“You’re very charming,” she says, refusing to meet his eyes. “But I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.”

Something inside of him snaps in two, a clean break, and he plasters his best fake smile on his face and takes another step back. 

“Of course,” he says. He’s had enough practice at keeping his voice steady when he’s turning to dust on the inside, and he’s almost proud of how calm he manages to make himself sound. “Do you want me to walk you home now?”

“That would be nice,” she says, and he folds up the last of his disappointment and buries it deep inside his chest. They walk back to her house in silence, a light rain just beginning to fall.  

He waits at the end of the path while Annie makes her way up to the porch steps. When she gets the door unlocked, she glances back at him before going inside and he waves at her from the yard, flashing her his most winning smile. She returns the smile with a soft, shy one of her own and disappears inside, and Finnick turns to walk home, the rain falling harder as he goes, feeling strangely giddy and almost manic with pain. There was no hope for him. It was stupid to have ever imagined that there was. He gives himself back over to the hollowness, that old familiar feeling, carving out another hole in his chest and filling it with nothing but thin air. 

The next morning, he meets her for their walk at the same time as always, coat buttoned up to his chin and a scarf wrapped around his throat. It’s not raining anymore, but the sky is a dreary shade of gray. When Annie comes outside in a bright red hat he smiles despite himself. 

Over the course of the previous sleepless night, he’d made up his mind to never again acknowledge what happened in his kitchen. He’s still her mentor, and he’s still responsible for getting her ready for the Tour, and the worst thing he could do now is let his own bruised ego get in the way of that job. 

They set off along the bluff, following their now familiar path, and she falls into step beside him, only pausing occasionally to adjust her hat, which keeps slipping off her head on account of its being at least two sizes too big for her. 

They walk in silence for a long while, and while he desperately wants to say something to ease the tension, he can’t be sure Annie is even feeling the same awkwardness as he is. For all he knows, she’s simply retreated into her fantasy world and hasn’t thought about their kiss since it happened, happily disappearing into herself instead of agonizing over him and what he might be thinking. 

Their walking path spirals down onto one of the rockier stretches of the shoreline. The waves are huge and harsh today, crashing down beside them on the rocks and leaving tufts of seafoam in their wake. Even the birds are quieter today, with only the occasional gull swooping for a fish above the whitecaps, and Finnick is counting them out of habit when Annie stops to pick up a stone. 

Finnick keeps walking for a bit, but Annie doesn’t follow, so he loops back around and finds her examining the stone in her palm, her eyebrows furrowed and her mouth twisted into a frown.

“Everything alright?” he asks, keeping his tone light. 

“Yesterday, you kissed me in your kitchen,” she says, “and I told you I didn’t want to give you the wrong idea.” She turns the stone over in her hand, studying it intently.

“Right,” Finnick says tightly, not wanting to relive the moment but forcing himself to remain steady on his feet. This is what a good mentor would do, he tells himself, not shy away from the difficult conversations. 

He’s formulating his apology in his mind when she continues, “I think you took it to mean that I don’t want you. But I said it all wrong.” Annie holds the stone up to the light. It’s then that he notices it’s not a stone at all but a piece of sea glass, a soft blue-green thing, glowing slightly when the gauzy light from the cloudy day reflects through it. “I only meant that yesterday's kiss was perfect as it was. I didn’t want anything more from you right then.”

Finnick doesn’t answer. Yesterday’s kiss had been perfect, to him, but it seems unfathomable that she had felt the same way about it. He feels light-headed and dizzy, confused, only really able to focus on the tiny piece of sea glass and the call of the gulls in the background. How many birds had he counted on the waves earlier? Nine? Nineteen?

Annie reaches for his hand and places the sea glass in his palm, closing his fingers around the cool stone. Then, she puts her hands on his shoulders and presses her lips to his, leaning up into him as she had yesterday in the kitchen, her too-big hat falling off her head completely onto the rocks. 

Finnick’s heart swells like a wave, rising to a peak greater than anything he’s ever felt before until it breaks, crashing against the land and bursting into a thousand tiny bubbles of air and foam. He’s everywhere and everything at the same time. He’s the ocean and the sky and the seabirds and the place where the ocean meets the shore. Then the water recedes and Annie steps back, leaning down to retrieve her hat. 

“There,” she says, resuming the walk and pulling the hat down firmly over her ears. “Now today is perfect too.” 

Chapter Text

After their kiss on the rocks, Finnick suggests that they continue with the walks even as the weather gets colder, hoping something will happen again. But they don’t share another kiss on the beach after the first day. Instead, they spend hours combing the beaches for sea glass, and over the next few weeks, little piles of blue and gray stones start to collect on Finnick’s windowsills. On sunny days, they glitter in the faint autumn sunlight and make his huge, sterile house look more like a real place where somebody might actually live: an obsessive artist, perhaps, or an eccentric old fisherman. Not Finnick Odair, celebrity, but a district oddity who spends far too much time down by the water picking up useless pieces of glass, bits of trash that are worth even less than the cheap bottles they came from.

If the kiss on the beach was the start of something, he finds himself in the middle of it before he even realizes what’s happening. Somehow, without him really noticing or having to try, the days so start to slowly fill with kisses, little moments scattered at odd intervals during the hours they spend together in their big houses or on the Victor’s Village beach. At first, the kisses are as chaste and innocent as the one on the rocks: a quick brush of their lips in the morning or a peck on the cheek after lunch. But as the weeks go on, the pull between them grows stronger, and by the time the foggy days of early autumn have begun, most of his nights are spent with hours upon hours of doing nothing but kissing, his hands roaming all over Annie’s body, bringing soft sounds out of her that make him want to dive head first into the ocean and never resurface. 

There’s none of the awkward formality of any of his lovers in the Capitol with Annie. The first time he brings her upstairs to his bedroom, she lies down on his bed like she’s always belonged there, and the novelty of her comfort around it makes him feel as if he’s experiencing all these sensations for the very first time. When she reaches under his shirt and her palm goes flat against his lower back, he finally understands what everyone has wanted from him for all these years, the easy reality of what people have spent thousands on trying to recreate. One night, he sucks on Annie’s collarbone for long enough to leave a mark, and the next morning, he finds her in the bathroom, her shirt pulled down over her shoulder, pressing her fingertips curiously on the shape of the darkening bruise. 

Still, they never do more than kiss. He’s confident in the fact that neither of them wants to push things further, and with how delirious he feels from just kissing her, he doesn’t see the point in even trying anything more. He feels like a teenager — he supposes he technically still is one, at nineteen — only he feels like the kind of teenager he never got to be: innocent and nervous, all awkward laughter and breathless, fumbling movements. 

Before long, their nights start to last long into the early hours of the morning, and Annie starts sleeping at his house most nights. Eventually, after a full week where she only goes back to her house one time, they give up on the pretense of her still returning to her own bed at all and she moves a few sets of clothes into the bottom drawer of his dresser. He clears a space for her in the bathroom cabinet, and in the morning, when he sees their toothbrushes sitting next to each other on the shelf, a pang of tenderness so palpable runs through him that he has to put his hands against the sink, smiling at his own reflection in the mirror, shaking his head in disbelief that this is all happening.

He’s not unaware of the danger the situation poses. Despite how young and foolish he feels when Annie is in his arms, there are still moments when he sinks into unbridled terror at the thought of Snow finding out about them, of what he might do to her if Finnick steps out of line. He doesn’t want to frighten Annie with stories about the president and his threats, so he just tells her they’re better off keeping things secret for her sake, so she can avoid the circus that would come along with dating Finnick Odair. She doesn’t argue or question it, though he feels an unpleasant knot in his throat for lying to her.

They’re at dinner with Mags when he makes his first mistake. Annie is washing up the last of their dishes and as Finnick passes behind her, he puts his fingertips on the small of her back to alert her to his presence. When he turns around, he finds Mags looking between the two of them suspiciously, her mouth set in a thin, hard line.  

Later, when they’re all settled in the living room for tea and more of Mags’ old music tapes, Annie excuses herself to the bathroom and Mags shifts suddenly and wraps her hand around Finnick’s wrist with an iron grip. 

“Are you being safe?”

“Mags!” He wishes he could dissolve into the couch cushions. “It’s not like — of course we — you know I would never —“

“No,” Mags cuts him off, shaking her head dismissively and squeezing his wrist even harder, almost to the point of pain. “Are you being safe —“ she reaches over and places a hand over his heart, tapping on it twice, “— in here?”

“Oh,” he says, deflating, beginning to understand her meaning. “Yes. I mean — no. Of course not.” He exhales sharply. “How could I be? I don’t even want to think about what they would do to her if they found out —” Finnick cuts himself off. He knows Mags is right, that having any sort of feelings for Annie is the worst thing he could do to himself and the most dangerous thing he could do to her. But there’s no going back now; he’s already in too deep. Mags must sense this because she doesn’t press it or try to talk him out of it, just shakes her head again sadly and releases his wrist. 

“Nobody can know,” is all she says. Just then, Annie reappears in the doorway, a small green book clutched to her chest. 

“Mags, you have a copy of the Sailor’s Fairy Tales,” she says, holding it out so they can see. “This was my favorite book when I was a little girl. I used to be able to sit and do nothing but look at the pictures for hours.”

“It’s yours,” Mags says with a shrug and Annie positively glows, curling back up in her chair by the fire and tenderly setting the book in her lap, running her fingers over the engraving on the front cover. Mags meets Finnick’s eyes one final time and presses her lips together, her expression unreadable. He can only guess what she must be thinking: that he’s the world’s biggest fool, that nothing good can come of his doing this to himself. Only as Annie flips through the pages of Mags’ book, her breath catching at certain illustrations, reading the familiar stories as if they’re brand new, Finnick has to believe that Mags understands it, too. She must understand at least part of it, because who couldn’t have fallen for this girl? Who could have resisted her? It was inevitable, he thinks, the whole thing, from the moment she raised her hand at the reaping. Everything was set in motion right then, some unwritten plan marching toward his own undoing, and there was no chance of stopping it once it had begun. 

Later, on their walk home, Finnick kisses Annie in the dark between the streetlights. It’s late enough that nobody is still out save for a few drunk fishermen stumbling their way home, and she drags him into one of the darkened alleyways and lets him kiss her up against the stone wall. When she laughs quietly against his lips and knots her fingers in the hair at the base of his neck, he almost undresses her right there, but instead, he stops himself, pulling her back into the light, and threads his fingers through hers while they climb the steps back up to the house. When they reach his bedroom, he closes the space between them the instant the door is shut behind them. Something inside of him has come loose after seeing Mags. The realization that he’s already doomed no matter what he chooses has released the last of his fears and he lays Annie down across the bed, her dark hair fanning out beneath her on the sheets and tickling at his chin.

When she pulls her dress over her head and reveals herself to him in the dim light, he has to pull back for a moment to take it all in, moving off the bed so he can truly appreciate the shape of her, all her soft lines and smooth ridges. He’s seen so many bodies by now — old, young, fat, thin, dyed strange shades of green or pink, with jewels and feathers implanted into the skin — but he’s only ever thought of them as bodies. Never a person, just a pile of disparate parts: arms, legs, hands, the scrape of someone's teeth against his skin. He understood that the parts  were meant to come together in a certain way. Before, it was simply a mechanical task, something to be completed by a series of predetermined steps and then disposed of afterward. With Annie, it’s different. He has no idea what to do next, and he closes his eyes and takes a long, shuddering breath, unsure what to do with the feeling, overwhelmed with the thought of her.

Annie pulls herself up onto her elbows, noticing his hesitation, and whispers, “We don’t have to do this. Not if you don’t want to.”

“No,” he tells her, leaning down to kiss her again. “I do want to. So badly, I do.” He runs a hand through her hair again, untangling the knots at the ends, wrapping an arm around her waist, and cradling her head in his other hand. “You’re beautiful.”

She takes the lead then, undressing him slowly and carefully, as if every movement is something precious to be savored, a stark contrast to the wild, frantic kisses they’d shared in the alley. Her hands are cold against his skin, and he shivers despite the heat that’s pooling deep inside his stomach. 

“Can I?” Annie breathes, and he nods wildly, unable to formulate a coherent thought, needing nothing but the feeling of her hands on his body, the heat rising to a fever pitch when she presses herself against him, making soft sounds of pleasure and mouthing gently at his ear. He falls into her as easily as an oar dipping into a calm sea, the push and pull of a practiced hand sweeping across a smooth surface, buoyant and weightless, anchored to nothing.

They shower together afterward, and he kneels down to let her wash his hair, pressing kisses to her stomach and laughing when the soap gets in his eyes. Later, still damp from the shower, the smell of soap still lingering on their skin, he traces patterns with his fingers up and down her sides, just wanting to touch her, feeling the softness of her skin, sinking deeper into the sheets until all it takes is the sound of her soft breathing to lull him into a dreamless sleep. 

A few hours later, she wakes up screaming from a nightmare and he jolts awake, reaching out for her while she thrashes against the sheets. 

“No, no,” she keeps saying, trying to move away from him, crawling back against the headboard and breathing wildly. “I can’t go with him. Please. I don’t want them to take me.”

“It was only a dream,” Finnick murmurs, maneuvering himself behind her and getting her in his arms, sweeping her into his lap. She lets out a choked sob and the sound that breaks his heart into a thousand tiny pieces, and he holds her even tighter. “Shh, Annie, it’s alright. It wasn’t real. You’re here now, with me. This is the real world. I promise. We can count something in it.”

“No,” Annie sobs, still half in the dream. “No, it’s too dark. There’s nothing to see, we can’t count.”

“Then we’ll count something we can’t see,” Finnick says, holding her against his chest, feeling for anything he can think of to count. She moves against him, all sharp edges and tension now, none of the softness of before, and it comes to him when her elbow digs into his ribs. “We’ll count the bones in your spine,” he says and sweeps her hair over her shoulder, pressing his lips against the base of her neck. “One,” he whispers, and Annie stills, her body going stiff with anticipation. Finnick presses another kiss to the next ridge along her neck, and he can feel her still trembling slightly, though she doesn’t try to move away from him, so he continues. “Two.” Annie shivers, and he moves down further, to the space between her shoulder blades. “Three.”

By the time he’s pressing the last kiss against her tailbone, Annie’s breathing has calmed back down to something resembling normal, and he moves to lie down, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her in close against him, feeling the whole of her back pressing into his chest. She wiggles around to face him, hiding her face in his neck, and lets out one final, broken sob. Then her whole body goes limp, and he leans down to place one final kiss to the top of her head. After that, everything else falls away, and he slips back into sleep as easily as water sliding down a drain. 

*

The next few weeks pass in a blissful haze, filled with the kinds of days Finnick knows while they’re happening will someday become his happiest memories. It tinges them with a melancholy sort of desperation at times, since he’s terrified to waste even a single second of whatever time they have left, though most of the time, he tries to forget about the rest of the world completely and just bury himself inside of her, letting the touch of Annie’s fingertips be the only thing tethering him to the planet. 

As the weather continues to cool, they hole up inside his house, clinging to each other through the nights and placing kisses on every surface of the other’s body during the days, learning all the different sounds they can draw out of one another with their mouths. When it begins to rain in earnest, they even give up on going for their morning walks, and once or twice, they don’t leave his bed for an entire day and Finnick maps every inch of Annie’s skin with his palms while the rain batters against the window like television static. 

Sometimes, Annie still retreats into her mind in the bath or wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, but now, she seems to stay with him for much longer stretches — several days can go by without her getting lost in a single fantasy, and both of them can manage the nightmares better together. The deep shadows under Finnick’s eyes finally start to fade for the first time in years, and even Mags makes a point to tell him that he looks healthy. There’s a voice in the back of his mind that occasionally reminds him in that a matter of weeks he’ll be back in the Capitol, fighting off the dreams alone or with a stranger beside him, but he shoves it down and tries to memorize the feeling of Annie’s waist between his hands and the exact pitch of her soft sighs while she stretches on the mornings when she wakes up after him.

The phone call comes on a dark, stormy day when the rain is lashing at the windowpanes and the ocean is so loud that it sounds as if it’s in their backyard. They’re curled up on the couch beneath a pile of old blankets, watching a strange, old film that Mags had lent them when the phone rings loudly in the study and Finnick extracts himself from their nest to take the call.

“Mr. Odair,” the voice on the other end purrs when he answers. “I trust your time in Four has been sufficiently — relaxing.”

A shock runs straight through his gut and his whole body goes numb for a moment, thinking someone has told on him and Annie. But the voice continues without pausing, “I’m calling to inform you that the crew for Miss Cresta’s Victory Tour will be arriving next Thursday. We trust you’ll have her prepared by then, but the president thought it best to check in now to make sure she’s fit for the Tour.”

“She’s ready” he replies, the terror from before pouring out of his body, pooling out onto the rug under his feet. “We’ll be waiting for you on Thursday. Thanks for the call.”

He puts the receiver down without saying goodbye and sits heavily on the edge of the desk, his hands still shaking, feeling foolish for jumping to conclusions. Of course they don’t know about him and Annie — if they had, the president himself likely would’ve called and threatened him weeks ago, or would have simply brought him back to the Capitol already and barred him from ever coming home again. It was only one of the Capitol people calling to make arrangements for the Tour. 

The Tour! The thought of it sends another shockwave through him. The Victory Tour starts next week, and with it, the end of everything, since it was the whole reason he was sent home in the first place. The realization sinks in his stomach like a stone, coloring the rest of the afternoon with dread.

When he walks back into the living room, Annie is still buried in the blankets, her face poking up from behind an old patchwork quilt.

“Who was that?” she asks.

“Just Haymitch,” he lies easily. “Asking me to send him another bottle of that wine I sent him after the Games.” He knows he needs to tell her about the Tour, to prepare her for what comes next, but he can’t, not yet. He wants to live in this perfect little daydream for just a few hours longer, not ready to shatter the illusion of happiness they've created. He tells himself he’s protecting her, though he knows it’s really more for his benefit than anything else. 

“You should send him that berry liquor Sal gave me for my birthday,” Annie says, smoothing the quilt over Finnick’s lap when he sits back down beside her on the couch. “I’m never going to drink it.”

“Perfect — I’ll do just that. And I’ll make sure he knows it’s a gift from you,” Finnick says, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Then you can start making friends with the other district’s mentors too.”

“Why do I need any more friends? I have you,” Annie says, resting her chin on his shoulder and gazing up at him.

“You do have me,” he replies, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her in close, holding her so tightly that she starts to squirm. Finnick doesn’t let go, moving her into his lap and sneaking a hand beneath the edge of her shirt, resting it on her hip. Yes, she has him completely. The feeling wraps around his heart and squeezes hard, the pleasure and the pain of it all wrapped up together in one.

She bumps her nose against his and presses play on the film, settling back against him and tucking her knees into her chest. Finnick doesn’t bother trying to follow the rest of what happens on the screen. Annie laughs at all the jokes and gasps when characters reveal themselves to be villains, but Finnick just tries to preserve this moment forever in his memory, the sound of the rain on the window and the television droning on in the background while he counts the number of freckles on Annie’s left cheek.

*

When he wakes up the next morning, the bed is empty beside him. He can already hear Annie moving around below and he pads downstairs and finds her making coffee wrapped in nothing but a sheet.

The storm appears to have passed overnight and early winter sunlight is streaming in through the window, sending sparkles through the sea glass that’s piled on the edge of the sink. Annie turns to him with a smile, her hair still mussed from sleep, the bedsheet falling low across her back.

“Good morning,” she says while he presses a kiss to her forehead. “Coffee?”

“Coffee would be lovely,” he replies, and she pulls down one of the mugs, pouring him a cup and dropping three sugar cubes in it.

“Last night, I dreamed we were on a ship,” she tells him, handing him the mug and sitting down at the breakfast table with her own, warming her hands on the sides of the cup. “It was an enormous ship, one of those old-fashioned wooden ones that they give tours of down at the harbor, only we were the only two people on it. And we were going somewhere — you kept pointing at the maps and saying we were reading them upside down and I kept telling you you were wrong. I never found out where we were going, only that we were miles from land and I wasn’t sure we would ever find it again.” She takes a sip of her drink. “But I didn’t care, because all that mattered was that we were together.”

Finnick leans against the cabinets, feeling the warmth from the coffee start to spread slowly from his stomach to his fingertips, the sweetness from the sugar coating his tongue. He tries not to linger on Annie’s dream; it’s too innocent and pure, it makes him sad. 

“The cameras are coming at the end of next week,” he says slowly, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Your Victory Tour officially starts next Friday, but they’ll be here a day early for prep and wardrobe fittings.”

Annie says nothing, and when he opens his eyes again, she looks thoughtful, though not anxious or angry like he’d expected. She glances up and meets his eyes for a moment, nodding, then stares into her empty cup and breathes a long breath out. 

He expects all the tenderness of the morning to vanish after that, but Annie just stands after a moment or two, giving him a wet kiss on the cheek and saying, “I’m going to take a shower.” 

As she disappears up the stairs, Finnick drains the rest of his coffee cup and rinses it in the sink, studying the little stacks of sea glass glinting in the sunlight, thinking how much like him they are; something that used to be sharp and broken, only a piece of something that was supposed to be whole, worn down by the ocean into something beautiful again, softened and worthy of something again. He wants to tell Annie that, to make her understand what the last few months have meant to him, only he doesn’t think he could explain it in a way that she’d understand. She’d only tell him he was always soft, always beautiful, always whole. He picks up one of the stones and rubs it against his palm, letting the cool surface settle his nerves, and slips it into his pocket before he turns to go back upstairs.

*

The cameras arrive in a flurry of activity. It’s as if a cloud of insects has descended on the Victor’s Village, and the place is crawling with men in black carrying cameras and high-heeled women with clipboards, all shouting at each other and sighing heavily at the difficulty of organizing the start of a Tour. Finnick hangs back, hovering in the corners of the rooms and directing people to the bathrooms, occasionally feeding them quotes and soundbites for the upcoming broadcast.

Annie is calm and motionless during most of it, letting the swarm of Capitol people poke and prod at her without complaining. They apply some treatment to her hair that makes it fall in soft, shiny ringlets down her back, rinsing out any last traces of salt water, and erase the freckles from her cheeks with powder and thick makeup. Finnick keeps the sea glass in his pocket, closing his fist around it when the house feels too crowded, and tries to avoid Annie’s gaze, sure that he’ll accidentally reveal their secret if he looks at her for even a second too long.

His nerves are already frayed by the time they’re all ushered onto the train, and Mags has to pull him aside in the hallway before dinner and tell him to calm down after he snaps at one of the attendants. The dinner is short and tense, and Annie barely touches her food. Mikal, their escort, won’t stop sending her concerned glances as he reads out the schedule of events for the next few weeks.

That night, Finnick waits in the lounge car until he’s sure everyone has gone to bed, then slips silently into Annie’s room, gently shaking her awake. She lets out a muffled groan, then opens her arms and pulls him inside of her, his lips against her neck, their legs knotting together like the rope that still sits beside Finnick's bed.

Nothing else happens that night. They just hold each other in the dark, and Finnick wakes before dawn to creep back into his bedroom. He repeats the same dance the next night, knowing how risky they’re being but unable to muster the courage to sleep alone. At the breakfast table, Mags sends him pointed glares that he pretends not to notice, stuffing himself with hot buttered rolls and making eyes at the serving staff, remembering his reputation, falling back into his role as the Capitol’s pet.

On stage, Annie is dazzling, dressed in thin, gauzy dresses that make her look haunted and fragile, her makeup highlighting the hollows under her cheekbones as if she’s merely a ghost drifting through the districts. Their stylist is clearly leaning into the mad girl narrative that’s been spreading about her, and Finnick is oddly grateful for it, knowing that it will protect her from a fate like his. 

Her speeches are soft and understated, and the crowds are subdued. There’s none of the hysterical screaming that he’d heard on his Victor Tour, but there’s a quiet respect in the audiences, and he and Mags stand at Annie’s shoulders, stepping in to finish her sentences when she falters or drifts into a dream. At dinners, Finnick takes the lead, telling jokes and riling up the district elites, batting his eyelashes and slipping innuendos into all his jokes. When he notices Annie slipping away, he taps her elbow twice and she brings herself back, laughing awkwardly at nothing, and Finnick shovels another plate of tasteless food into his mouth.

At night, he climbs into bed with her, and when she tells him that there were seventeen buttons on the mayor of District One’s jacket, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world to say, “I love you.”

“I know,” she says when he does it, twisting her fingers in his hair. “I’ve known that for a long time now.”

He kisses her sloppily, still a little drunk from the wine at dinner, and she opens for him easily, making sounds that send him spiraling over the edge, not caring if they’re being too loud or too obvious, daring the world to take notice. He’ll regret it in the morning, but not tonight; tonight they might as well be in her world under the waves. Not here, not on a train barrelling straight for the Capitol but somewhere else where everything is perfect, where they live out the rest of their days needing no one but each other, deep beneath the water, mystical creatures of the sea.

“I love you, too,” Annie whispers to him in the dark later when he's a breath away from sleep, placing a string of kisses along his jawbone. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I start counting all the reasons why.”

“How many are there?” he asks, pulling her head down to rest against his collarbone.

“I don’t know,” she replies, yawning and nuzzling her nose against his neck. “I always fall asleep before I can finish.”

On the final night of the Tour, during the wild, crowded party in the Capitol, Snow finds him at the dessert table and shakes his hand, congratulating him on a successful Tour. Finnick can smell blood on the president’s breath, and he shudders despite himself, the smell snaking down his throat and making him want to vomit.

“A truly impressive feat, turning that girl into something resembling a victor,” Snow says, not releasing Finnick’s hand, leaning in conspiratorially as if he truly believes them to be allies. “I’ll admit I didn’t think it was possible. But I should’ve known better than to doubt you, Mr. Odair. You’ve always understood what it takes to make it here in the Capitol.”

Snow disgusts him, but Finnick only nods, reaching out to clap the president on the shoulder and releasing his grip from the handshake. “She wasn’t easy. But I did what I could.”

Both of them turn to watch Annie, spinning in the middle of the dance floor, her deep blue dress glittering in the multicolored lights. 

“You know, with a bit more of your help, she could do well in the Capitol,” Snow muses, tilting his head and furrowing his brow as if he’s already envisioning Annie in her own apartment in the City Center, planning out the list of demons he’d start sending into her bed. 

“No,” Finnick says quickly, too quickly, and the president looks over at him in surprise, his eyes narrowing, his expression darkening with suspicion, and Finnick backpedals quickly, stammering out an explanation. “I just mean, she’s not all there — mentally, you know. She’d never be able to manage it.”

This seems to satisfy Snow, and he shakes his head, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “Pity. She could be quite beautiful with a bit more work done. But you’re right — she is mad. Better to keep her away from it all. Everyone already thinks she’s a lost cause anyway.” Snow sighs, pulling out a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbing at the sides of his mouth. Finnick has the sudden urge to strangle him, and he has to clasp his hands behind his back, forcing his face to remain neutral. 

“I’m so glad to have you back in the Capitol now,” Snow says, nodding at Finnick when he says nothing in reply to his earlier statement. “We must arrange for a party or something for your return. You’ve been missed.”

“I’ve missed it here,” Finnick purrs in his most practiced voice, the one he slips into when he’s back here like it’s a silk robe, the one that might as well be coming from somewhere else entirely for all that it feels like his own, “and you know how I love parties.”

He and Snow laugh as if they’re old friends, though it’s undercut with an unspoken tension that Finnick knows both of them can feel but are determined not to acknowledge. Snow disappears with the promise of an invitation to the presidential mansion sometime in the next few weeks and Finnick grabs two glasses of champagne from a passing attendant and downs one of them in one gulp, wishing the night was ending already and yet dreading what will happen when it does. 

A few moments later, Annie materializes at his elbow. He hands her the second glass of champagne he’s holding as it’s still full, brushing some invisible dust off her shoulder just for an excuse to touch her in public. 

“What were you talking to the president about?” she asks innocently, twirling the stem of the glass between her fingers. 

“This and that,” Finnick says lightly. He’d be dead before admitting to Annie what they had really been discussing. “He came to congratulate me on the Tour. And you, by extension, I suppose.”

“Yes, he spoke to me earlier,” Annie says. “He shook my hand three times.” 

Finnick places his empty champagne glass on one of the nearby tables, shoving his hands in his pockets and searching around for his sea glass, squeezing it in his fist while he grasps for the right words to say. 

“Annie,” he says haltingly, “you know I’m not coming back with you after this. To Four, I mean.”

“Yes, I know,” she answers. “Mags told me. She’s taking me home alone tomorrow. It’s a shame you have to miss the celebrations back home.”

“Right,” Finnick says, dropping the stone in his pocket and turning away from the rest of the party to face her completely. This isn’t the right place to have this conversation, but he has to say something now, has to make sure she knows how much he wishes he could stay with her, how little anything in the Capitol means to him. He’s suddenly afraid she’s going to think it was all an act on his part, that he was just using her as a distraction during his time at home, and he flails, trying to explain himself to her without revealing anything too obvious in public. “It’s just — I don’t want you to think —“

“I don’t.” She looks up at him, those huge green eyes boring into his, as open and raw as ever. He knows then that she understands him completely, that she believes without question what he’d said to her last night on the train. “Don’t worry, Finnick. I know what’s real and what isn’t.”

Really, it should be funny, coming from her, only instead of laughing it makes him want to cry, or maybe just kiss her senseless right there in the middle of the Capitol ballroom. But he can’t do either of those things, so instead he just buries the feeling and keeps his voice light and airy, bumping his shoulder against hers and nodding at the dance floor.

“You should go dance. Enjoy the rest of your party.”

She doesn’t argue or protest, just hands him back the champagne glass, having only taken a few tiny sips, and throws him one final look over her shoulder as she walks away. She gives him a soft smile that would indicate nothing out of the ordinary to a passing observer, but that to him holds all the meaning in the world. He loves her. And she loves him. And what else really matters?

He watches as she begins to twirl in the center of the party, her skirt splaying out, her thin legs moving faster and faster beneath her until he can’t focus on one thing any longer, until she’s nothing but a blur. When he can’t take another second, he turns and collects his things, calling a car to take him back to the Training Center, up to his room, and buries himself in the sheets to cry. 

There’s no telling how much time has passed when she climbs into bed beside him, only that it’s pitch black outside and she still smells like sweat and unfamiliar perfume, and he clings to her like a man thrown from a shipwreck, moving too fast when she pulls him inside of her, trying to have as much of this as he can before she’s gone. He says her name over and over, tasting the shape of it in his mouth, terrified of the sunrise, wishing the darkness could go on forever. By this time tomorrow, she’ll be on the train back to Four, and he’ll be back in his apartment in the Capitol with some other body in his bed, and the only sign that any of of the last six months even happened will be the piece of sea glass that he’ll hide in the bottom of his dresser drawer, his own secret memory, proof that there’s a world where things are real. 

When Annie falls asleep, Finnick fights to stay awake, not wanting to lose a second, knowing he won’t sleep through another night until the next time he has her in his arms. As he watches her breathing settle into the gentle cadence of sleep, his mind drifts back to that night on the beach, the one where she’d opened up to him for the first time, told him all her stories and led him into the corners of her mind, the loneliness of her past. He thinks again of the sailors jumping overboard for the women below the sea, the ones he had thought back then he could almost understand, and realizes he’s already done it — he knows this is going to kill him, drag him under, ruin whatever is left of his short, meaningless life. But he jumps anyway. He welcomes it, desperate to let her wreck him, happy to follow her down into the deep until there’s nothing left for anyone to find.

Annie sighs in her sleep and shifts closer to him, her smooth skin sliding against his. The moon is high, and the world outside is still dark, not yet broken by the first glimmers of sunlight. There’s still a few hours left before tomorrow begins, before this all ends and the rest of his life comes crashing back down around him. Right now, they’re still together, suspended in a glass bottle, not yet broken, still perfect in their world beneath the waves. He buries his nose in Annie’s hair, takes a deep breath, and feels the water rush in.