A/N: I have a lot of unresolved feelings about Finnick. (Just thinking about Mockingjay still upsets me.) For Caesar's Palace's Monthly Oneshot Challenge.
Prompt: "You see her when you close your eyes
Maybe one day you'll understand why
everything you touch surely dies"
[From Let Her Go by Passenger]
After.
Finnick stares at his ceiling for a very long time. A dull part at the back of his mind vaguely wonders if it's his birthday yet. He stares at the ceiling for so long that the shadows morph into flowers and faces and clouds, and he can't help but count the cracks to try and pass the time.
There are only three. In his old home, where he left his family and childhood, there were dozens of cracks in the generation-old ceiling that sloped gently and wore thin in some places. But this is a new Victor's house, and he's pretty sure the ceilings are made from blood and bones, and probably has excellent architectural integrity.
He looks out his window and sees the moon raised high, busy on its trek crossing the night sky. Finnick is static and stuck in bed, and he's worried that he'll either never move again, or if he puts his feet on the floor, he'll never stop running.
Finnick sighs deeply, wondering how many hours there are until morning. He's exhausted, but he can't bring himself to sleep just yet. There's blood on his ceiling and pumping in his heart, and both make him feel so guilty. He's alive and twenty three children are not, and it's his fault, isn't it?
When he finally rolls over, his neck is stiff. There's now a pink patch of light beginning at top of the ceiling, and it's definitely his birthday now. He wonders if he should bother celebrating or not. He's a murderer, and murderers probably shouldn't get presents. The Capitol doesn't know that, obviously, but maybe District Four has a bit more sense.
o
He does get presents. Boxes come in from the Capitol, laden with the most useless gifts he could imagine. What could he do with a gold watch, rancid perfume or a glass-blown paperweight? Was the trident necklace really necessary? He doesn't need sea-green jewels or little cards signed with ridiculous, strange-sounding names of people he's never met, loving him for being pretty and graceful while he speared children.
o
He was born in the late afternoon, so technically he's only turning fifteen round about now. He's resigned himself to walk around the marketplace, buying goods from people who look like they could do with a bit of extra money. Curious eyes settle on him a bit longer than they should, and some people shrink back when he gets too close.
He did spend lunch with his family in his old house, but death hung thick in the air like a bloody mist and everyone knew that Finnick's mind was on the Games. They all eventually gave up pretending that everything was perfectly fine. He decided it would probably be better for him if he wandered outside for a while.
The air is baking hot and dry; he can feel dampness under his hair and collecting on the back of his shirt. The whole square seems to pause every time the salty breeze murmurs through, but then the sun clubs down again and it feels even worse than before.
Everyone knows everyone in District Four, so when he sees the girl her name jumps to his mind instinctively. Annie Cresta. She's known for being kind and just a little bit strange, but no-one has ever called her stupid. She is selling crafts and curios to those with enough wealth to afford something pretty. Her target market is pretty small, and Finnick's heard that she tends to give away items for free.
Without really thinking, he approaches her table almost timidly, looking at the assortment goods scattered across her table with no real order. "Do you make these yourself?" he asks, eyeing a seashell necklace and a broken-glass wind chime.
She smiles. "Only the pretty ones. I made that." She indicates to the chime.
"I'll take it."
Money exchanges hands (he pays three times the price and tells her to keep the change) and she hands him the chime.
"Happy birthday," she adds as he turns to leave.
It's only when he's out of sight does he realise that she slipped in a small flat seashell ashtray underneath the chime.
o
Over the course of a few weeks, his room begins to pile up with all sorts of unnecessary items made from useless washed-up beach junk. He'd never in his life need a goddamned paper weight made of shells, but here it is on his windowsill, pink in the morning light.
o
Sometimes they sit side-by-side on the beach. They usually talk about the District, about their families and childhoods, and she never asks about the Games. Sometimes he wonders if she even knows he's a Victor.
Eventually, he talks.
"I'd try and give myself a reason to kill the next person, you know? Just something small to keep myself going. One step closer to seeing my mom again. If I win, I'll swim in the sea again. This asshole tried strangling me two minutes ago."
"What was your reason for the very last one?" she asks.
Finnick remembers the finale to his Games, his trident about to take its last. "If I don't win, then I'll die a virgin."
She giggles. "Well, maybe we can change that sometime."
He smiles and doesn't have the heart to tell her about how he was just a scared boy in a Capitol bedroom, closing his eyes and hoping salty tears wouldn't leak.
o
He throws that ugly Capitol paperweight against the ceiling, making a loud crunch and leaving a satisfactory crack arching above his bed.
He stares at it at night, dividing his life along that crack. Before the Games, left. After the Games, right. (It's only been six months but the after feels wider than the sky and deeper than the sea, looming over the past fourteen years of his life like a massive storm cloud ready to destroy everything.)
And there's the deep chasm running between, the knife-edge, the balancing rope. The spear through his life.
The funny thing is that the sun continues to rise every day, and the District carries on its business as usual. It's easy to forget that the Games doesn't change everything. It just changes you.
o
She seems to know all the stories of old gods and heroes and titans, and Finnick asks about them just so he can hear her speak. Her voice has a soft, faraway quality to it when she tells stories, as if she's murmuring to him underwater. It feels ridiculously personal when she uses that tone. It's like she's whispering directly into his brain, and it gives him goosebumps.
"So Cronus knew that one of his children would be his downfall, so he ate all his children—"
"—all of them?"
"He tried to. His wife, Rhea, knowing that she couldn't bear to see another one of her children eaten, decided to swap her newborn with a stone, and Cronus swallowed that whole instead. The baby survived, and his name was Zeus."
"What happened then?"
Annie clucks impatiently. "I was getting to that part. The Titans fell, then the Olympians came into power. Zeus became the god of the sky and thunder."
The late afternoon breeze coming off the water runs through the pair gently, and Finnick closes his eyes just for a moment, wondering if he's Zeus or the stone, sitting quietly in the belly of Cronus.
o
Finnick still swims almost every day, going out further and further than he ever dared before, or staying close to the sandy shores where the waves hit hard.
Sometimes he pushes his whole body underwater, pressing himself down to the sandy bottom so that the waves are just gentle currents rolling above him. He waits until the carbon dioxide filling his lungs get so much that he can scream and scream out everything in his lungs, until he's so empty that he feels a bit better. Then he waits a few more moments at the bottom of the ocean, telling himself that he needs to go up for air.
Each time it takes him a little bit longer to convince himself that he should swim to the surface.
o
They're sitting on the beach as the sun goes down, and he loves how the gold pink light catches her eyelashes and gives a flush to her cheeks.
"Do you hate me for being a murderer?" he asks. He hates the vulnerability in his own voice, like a child asking if there are really monsters under the bed.
"You're not evil. I see how some of the tributes are. They loved killing. You don't."
"I still did it."
"Yes, and if you didn't, you wouldn't be here with me now." Her expression softens, and she lightly touches his shoulder. "Don't blame yourself for what the Capitol does, Finnick."
"I killed five children. I speared them like they were fish." He almost wants her to hate him, to be repulsed, so that he would know he's right in hating himself. "How can I be okay with myself when twenty-three children died for me to live?"
She thinks for a while, chewing her lip. "Twenty-three people died so that you could come out alive. It's your job to live your life right, or their deaths really would mean nothing at all."
Finnick doesn't answer. There are a few beats of silence as they listen to the waves crash onto shore.
"What did you come back for?" she finally asks.
More waves. "I didn't want to die. I wanted to come back here; to you."
She smiles, and Finnick feels a little shock through him at the sight of it. "You didn't even know me back then," she points out.
"We spoke once or twice. There was one night in the Games I thought about you, actually. I wondered if you'd be proud of what I was doing. You always seemed like the kindest person in the District."
"I'm proud of you now," she says. "You're a good person, Finnick."
"With stunning cheekbones," he adds, smiling for the first time in a while.
It's that night when he lies on his back that he realises that he's started dividing his life into before Annie and after Annie. She's brighter than pink morning light and bigger than Panem, and her smile is burnt onto the back of his eyelids.
o
Then she is Reaped and he finally knows what after is. It is wretched and oh, Finnick's love is a poison—it must be—and the Capitol is not interested in a cure.