Written for the Starvation Forum Prompt: envy.
Finnick Odair. Pre-mockingkay.
If there should be a word for it, Finnick would choose envy. Hate would be too strong, and rightfully reserved for special occasions and certain people, Anger was too blunt, Hurt too laughably incompetent.
Envy would just about be the right word to describe the strange creature that coils in his gut - which, when compared to other things he'd seen and done and lived through, doesn't even register enough to hurt - whenever he visits Capitol. Buildings seem to sprout from the ground higher and higher as the train pulls in deeper into the heart of the city, Capitol citizens frolic back and worth, swathed in candied wigs and scribbles on their skin, pointing and waving to the Visitor.
It's not hard to admit that he envies them their fierce lack of burdens, their security, their food. Everyone in the Districts envy them that. It's a fact.
But sometimes, sometimes Finnick feels the thread of a darker form of envy, a jealousy that was angry and visceral and unforgiving. It glowed redder than the sun setting over the District Four sea, and was bleak as a moonless night in the open ocean.
It manifests itself at the worst of times: in front of the cameras that loved him so, transmitting the sharpness of his profile and wickedness of his grin to every sponsor in Panem until they cracked their purses open and sent him a trident; during a party, where he harried to attend to some woman's entertainment and smiled and quipped to their tinkling amusement and tried not to kill the conversation; in bed, when he acts the generous lover he's most assuredly not, despite the blood freezing in his veins; in the streets, shopping with Capitol girls, acting their golden trophy escort, when they insists taking hologram pictures with him, and he wraps them up in his tanned arms and winks a lie at the camera. At schoolyards, watching well-fed children with grass-green hair. At weddings.
It's not their fault, really, that, as a man desperately in love, he can't help but think: Annie will never be any of those things.
Annie Cresta will never fall in love with his charm as she will with the comfort he offers, will never go to a party without stilting the good humor around her, will never be this, will never be that, her future crushed brutal and quick. There will never be a photo of them together. There will never be a wedding. Children.
Yeah, he's envious.