Fool Plunders
a/n: for alex and emmy! happy uber-belated birthday, and i hope you like this!
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Annie likes the peach shells notched into the foam, perched on the pinnacle of the lapping waves as the saline sea clings to her skin like ivy.
Finnick watches her pry them from the soggy crust and sink them into the pockets of her blue tartan dress.
"Annie. Annie, stop." Her fingers, wet and wizened with sand, blight her pretty clothes. "Annie, they're just shells."
The next day she has them strung around her neck on twine, and the peachy husks rattle when she moves.
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On reaping day, Finnick wakes scrambled in his sheets. It's early— too early for anyone —so he lies there for three hours, bowed in the mattress.
Finnick chews on his dream, wherein blood dribbled like molasses onto his pale blue feet, and somebody screamed. Dreams of a victor.
Later, he peels himself from the bed and abstractedly slips into the paper-thin clothes they insist he wear today, ogling himself in the mirror. A bad man sits in the glass— a murderer, clinching a three-pronged twig and staring back at him with eyes of chartreuse.
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Annie is wearing the bluest blouse he's ever seen, one with fat round buttons, and a reticent skirt. Her fingernails are in her mouth, between her teeth. Finnick waves half-heartedly from where he sits with Mags, and Annie sort of smiles back tersely. He grinds his teeth together and stares at the bowl on the right. He knows that several Annie Cresta squares are pleated inside.
Sitting next to Mags, Finnick feels a bit like he's drowning— she sits there with her achievements and faculties and her spiky edges…he is nothing compared to Mags. The drowning sensation is so strange; this is District Four, he is Finnick Odair, and he can swim.
But when the exceedingly flaxen escort dramatically swirls his fingers around in the bowl, Finnick's nose slips past sloshing water and he chokes.
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His eyelashes are wet— he can't be crying, he thinks. Finnick touches his finger to a bead, vigilantly, disbelievingly, and puts it to his lips. Finnick tastes salt and bitterness.
Finnick decides that he hates this world, with its perpetual need to spin, and the Capitol, with its perpetual need to rule. He hates life, because it grabbed him by the skin and drove a wire through his head.
He hates Snow, with his hellish aroma— Snow, who has no one, who is alone; who cannot even bond with time, or space, or the universe. He cannot see people, but he can see the blood surging through their veins, and he cannot see cups, but he can see the juice inside— that is Snow, and he is mad.
Annie though, is not mad, and Annie cannot die. He finds her encircled by Peacemakers, pasty white and frozen.
"Annie," he chokes in an undertone. Finnick clinches her in his arms. "Annie, it's okay," he says, but he thinks he's probably reassuring himself more than anyone.
She responds by pressing the string of shells into his fist.
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They are so hard and cold against his fingers, the shells. Nothing like Annie, who is soft and warm like the sun-baked surface of the ocean.
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He's so angry. Finnick masks this with enticing winks and bare-chests and fervent unruliness that Annie would have hated. With grins that carve grottos across his cheeks and reverberating hoots of sham jollity. He does stupid, silly things. He pulls the wings off butterflies and leaves them to die in the rain with Snow, as if they are friends. That is what pain has brought out of him— pain, which derived from love and glee.
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A little man with a web of pale blue veins beneath pale blue eyes pulls up a chair beside Finnick and crosses his legs. Finnick is lost in the screen, which for a moment transmits Annie with her dark hair in her face and her eyes closed, chest rising delicately, coiled against a branch. Then it flicks to the burly Careers, and Finnick looks away.
The man has a dour scowl, mauve hair, and swears to know Annie. He scrutinizes Finnick, who is disheveled, with circles under his eyes and foul-smelling clothes. He scrapes in a clipped voice, "She never wanted you like this."
She never wanted to be reaped, is what Finnick thinks to himself. He smiles, though, and nods.
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Another day into the Games, Finnick finally sinks into a bathtub. It's the Capitol kind— fiercely luminous ceramic, studded with bizarre charms, and enormous. He hasn't washed himself in ages, but he can't bring himself to care.
Finnick scours his arms with a washcloth until they blaze red, and kneads soap into his skin and hair. He runs a blade blindly, carelessly across his jaw and watches a million course hairs plunge into the water.
The wisps drown, sort of like him.
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The moment the boy's head rolls off his shoulders, time stands still.
On the screen, Annie's expression is distorted. She is so perceptibly mystified that she brushes soiled fingernails over his fouled head.
She is waiting for him to pick it up and stick it on but he never does, and Annie's eyes become progressively vacant. She is water, slipping through fingers and cracks, and then she is gone.
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Annie wins.
Elated, Finnick shaves into a mirror for the first time. He even has his hair cut. He waits impatiently for her to brush past the doors, his eyelids thrown open, his posture tense.
How will she walk towards him? Will she have wet eyelashes and her fingers balled? Or will she press herself into his shirt, his skin, smelling like District 4 and dribbling seawater? Will she walk with a limp from tripping in the arena? He imagines her in sailor's blue, a trim skirt worn at the creases, and relieved. So relieved.
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She'd left with her fingers fixed to the doorknob. It's still there— the doorknob —but not Annie. It's in her eyes: vacuity and nothingness.
From his pocket he takes the string of shells, which now are so like him— weathered and gray. Wordlessly, he knots them around her neck, pinching the ends between his fingers before letting go. He can smell her at this propinquity, and Annie doesn't smell like Annie, but rather a synthetic facsimile of lipstick and flowers.
She turns around, so slowly, gyrating on the balls of her shiny Capitol shoes with her fingers feeling their way across the necklace.
Finnick clears his throat. "Hi…Annie." It's a disjointed smother of letters that are foreign on his tongue. He reaches out a hand like he's going to touch her cheek before changing his mind and dropping it to his side. "You look well. You…uh, congratulations."
Does he hug her know? Kiss her? He wants to.
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That evening everyone is there— Snow, the gamemaker with orange eyebrows, the impish escort, Mags, and one hundred other faceless inhabitants.
Annie is quiet, aloof, twitching intermittently as if someone is whispering in her ears. All Finnick can hear are the spoons against fine china bowls, and the slight suction of clear juices when lips wrap around oysters.
Just as Finnick inclines into his chair to caress his swollen front, Annie produces the most horrible moan he has ever heard and aggressively slaps her hands over her ears. She is a blur of violently tremulous lips and flying brown hair as she tears out of the room, barefoot, soup spattered across her blouse.
Alarmed, everyone stirs. They stir beneath the tranquil ambiance, and they stir beneath the serenity that had painted smiles onto their strange dyed faces. However, Snow looks bored, almost crudely unimpressed as he pinches fuzz from his white lapel.
"I always knew she was crazy," he hears people mutter. Fire erupts deep within, and yet Finnick smothers it— no, you don't care. Instead, he smoothly pushes away from the table, drops his fork, and chases after her.
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"I hate them all!" It pours out of her mouth like poison as she shoves herself against the wall. Frozen, she is like a sculpture, but warm and soft and scared. After a few moments— after scraping her fingernails down the wall, after scrabbling her way out of her little sweater —Annie sweeps her dark hair off her freckled back and emanates a strangled 'hold me, please.'
He wraps his long arms around her and presses his lips, chiseled with sweet luster, to her temple.
The hug she returns is full of her own self-anguish. Finnick understands. She stands, tangled in his limbs, inhaling his smell, and weeping— weeping and bursting with gags like she is drowning in her head. Finnick understands. They will choke together.
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i finished this at two o'clock in the morning, so if it stunk (or had typos galore), that might be why. thank you for reading!
-han