The last remnant of one of District Four's mild winters is blowing across the bay the morning Finnick throws the match with unnerving precision. The lifeboat, it's name now rather ironic, erupts in flame but keeps floating off into the distance, into the endless ocean. He shivers against the breeze. The small crowd at the edge of the cliff watches the boat disappear into the distance before letting the flowers slip from their fingers and be engulfed by the surf ten feet below.

Twenty minutes later, only two boys are left to stare at the horizon in silence.

"We should go soon," Lucerne says after a while, his voice too quiet. His face betrays any errs of stoicism he's trying to put on. "Since you'll be on stage and all."

"Can we head back to the house first?" Finnick asks. "I need to grab something."

"Okay, but we'll be cutting it close."

Their feet carry them downwards over the sandy earth, past the marina where the anchored house boats sway slightly on the water. The children of those boats will already be in the city square, sorted by age and gender—Finnick knows this because he used to be one of them. Another few blocks and they pass the nicer neighborhoods, with houses on land, whose owners run the fishing industry rather than fish the gulf themselves. They, too, have been herded together in preparation for the games. Finally, the gate to the Victor's Village emerges in the morning sunlight, the wrought iron sparkling over already flowering gardens. A granite fountain bubbles in the center of the circle of mansions, about half of which are lived in.

Orabelle Maddox calls to the brothers the moment they step in range of her yard, which is perfectly groomed, but certainly not by her. Her patience with such matters has worn far too thin.

"Finnick!" she shouts, sprinting toward him quite unnecessarily. But they are used to it, as Orabelle runs everywhere. Even when sitting, she fidgets uncontrollably, with her face, her clothes, any nearby objects. Wait too long and she will have taken apart all pens in reach and peeled off every piece of paper from a notebook, ripping each page into inch by inch pieces. "I've been looking for you. There's been a change of plans—Nixie can't get out of bed and you're next in the rotation."

"What?" Finnick nearly chokes.

"Christ, you're saying he has to mentor?" Lucerne demands. "He's barely home and you've got to send him off?"

"Well, it's not up to me!" she screeches at him, in a matter that is definitely a little unhinged. Her hair's a mess, which isn't all that surprising, and for the Reaping she has dressed in cargo pants and a t-shirt, making her look even thinner than she is. "The Capitol works up the rotation, and you think they give a shit if he's just home?"

"Right," Finnick mutters, wiping all emotion from his brain and giving her a charming smile. "Tell Nixie I hope she feels better."

What he doesn't tell her is the thought that is screaming uncomfortably loud in his head, that he's probably going to be the shittiest mentor that ever lived. He was a child, then, and regardless of his looks he's still a child now.

His games feel like a past life; a blur of fear and exhaustion and blind instinct, punctuated by photographic, crystal clear memories of his eleven kills. Some in self defense, some not. Most thanks to the trident. By four kills, and given his age, Mags had to practically beat back the sponsors with a stick. He was the favorite, and so he won.

Last night, he dreamed of killing Zylia Ramorko. Female, district seven. His final adversary. A split second opening while they fought on a sand dune and suddenly blood was spurting from her lips. The cannon had made his ears ring.

He'd seen her family on the victory tour. Even smiled at them in that way that is so trademark to him.

But his mind is blank. He must remember that.

He and Lucerne head further into the Village, pass some of the semi normal victors, which even in a Career district are hard to come by. Eldoris Wane won the sixty-first Hunger Games, and he married Nami Lark, winner of the fifty-eighth. Their children are wonderfully oblivious. Tallulah Maeda survived the fifty-second, and she's kept herself sane with Mayim Carino, who somehow manages to accept the exacerbated the idiosyncrasies of the occupants of the Village.

Tallulah and Mayim wave to him as they trot down their front steps. He can't quite see the women's faces from his distance, but they look almost sympathetic.

Morgane Shanet is as well put together as ever as she passes Lucerne and Finnick on the cement path around the fountain—her eyes are directed at the ground, as though denying the brothers existence. Her fashionable shoes click on the cold sidewalk and her hands are held deep in the pockets of her coat. Emeron Daytonal walks with her when she reaches his house, but she doesn't bother to look at him either.

"The cheery bunch is on the move, I see," Lucerne nudges Finnick in attempt to lighten his spirits. "I suppose we should be on our way."

"Yeah, lemme get a jacket," he murmurs in response, leaping up the front steps to their own house. Inside, it is the cleanest of the Village, only because in the two years the Odairs have lived in it, they still don't have anywhere near enough stuff to fill it. He takes the stairs slowly, half hoping that if he's really late to the Reaping they'll have to pick someone else to mentor this year. In reality, all he's going to get for tardiness is a scene with the peacekeepers and a Capitol headline.

He pauses at the threshold of his father's room, peeking in at the items they'll have to sort through. But then again, in a house this big, maybe they don't need to ever get rid of anything. They can just close the door and the room can cease to exist.

He's already back downstairs before he realizes that he's forgotten to get a jacket, but he shrugs and decides that he's survived worse.

Outside, Lucerne raises an eyebrow at his lack of outerwear, but is immersed in a conversation with Mags. When she sees Finnick, she lets out a string of syllables that translate approximately to, "I'm sorry about your father. Eddie was a good man."

"Thank you," Finnick manages to reply, before she's hugged him and kissed him on the cheek in her usual motherly fashion, even when he was bloodied and shaking, minutes after crawling out of the arena.

"There are worse ways to go," Lucerne sighs, and because of his blunt nature that Finnick has never doubted, he continues, "Like the Hunger Games, for instance."

He may be right, but the fact remains that Finnick is now an orphan at sixteen. At least Lucerne is an adult, at twenty-four, and at least he still has memories of their mother. And at least he's never had to kill anybody.

But Lucerne smiles comfortingly at him, and Finnick can't even hold on to a shed of the resentment from a moment before. The three of them hobble at Mags' pace toward the Reaping, the day warming as they go. For a second, Finnick can pretend he's years younger, that he's woken up to the sounds of the sea lapping against their boat and is walking to his half day of school. It used to be that the afternoon would be spent fishing with his father and brother and hundreds of other men and women, out on the cerulean waters, breathing in time with the waves. When he turned ten they'd saved up enough money, and Lucerne had just become ineligible for the games, allowing Finnick to head off to Career school each day after standard education.

"It doesn't mean that we expect you to volunteer, Finnick,"his father had explained calmly. "It's just to make sure that if you ever do get reaped, you won't have a disadvantage. It's to give you the best chance of winning."

That had soothed him somewhat at the time. When it happened, he remembers his father nearly weeping, whispering that he was young but he would do just fine. He was a bad liar.

The past is not something he cares to think about anymore, because it is almost entirely unrelated to his life now. No worries about fish quotas, no worries about being Reaped, no father. And still, somehow, the universe has remained spinning. The seventieth Hunger Games are beginning, and Finnick is now caught in their gravitational pull like everyone else.