One:
The morning after a storm, the sea is calm, but the air still smells of lightning and froth and fury. It is his Grandda's favorite time to mend nets.
On the morning after a storm, all the other men of his village would pile into their sleek boats, ready to harvest the bounty that floated to the top after the storm, but Finnick is too young and small, and his Grandda is too old and too blind, and so, they mend nets, small fingers mingling with gnarled ones, until the nets are whole again.
Grandda has a rough stool, carven from driftwood, and he would sit upon the stool and face the sea, even though his milky eyes could no longer tell the difference between the water and the land. He would stand Finnick between his knees, and lay the net over his lap, and mend the frayed ropes and knots and strands. And, as they worked, his Grandda would tell stories of the sea.
"Every net is a pattern, mi amo," he would say. "I've known this pattern my whole life. It's in my blood and my bones, and it's in yours, too. I know it like I know my body. I don't need my eyes to see it."
Finnick would nod gravely, knowing that his Grandda did not need his eyes to see Finnick's agreement, either.
"So, mi amo, we start with the edges."
Once, there was a whale. A great, white whale. A boat captain named Ahab dreamed of this whale, and dreaded him, and so he and his men set out to kill it…
"Now, we move towards the middle. Feel that grapevine knot? Feels weak. Can you fix it?"
Once, there was a shark. A great, white shark. It was terrorizing the beaches, so three men set off in boat to capture it…
"Now we soak it, let the fibers tighten, so no fish can escape our net."
Once, there was a witch. A great white witch. She lived in a clamshell at the bottom of the sea, and she granted wishes, to anyone brave enough to find her…
Over the years, Finnick heard the stories of the great white shark and the great white whale dozens of time, but he and Grandda never got to the end of the story of the great white witch; the nets were well kept, and mending them never took very long. As he grew up, he sometimes dreamed that the white witch at the bottom of the sea had rippling red hair and milky skin and sea-green eyes, and that she sometimes came up from her clamshell to grin at him over the counter of her mother's fish-stall.
The first year that Finnick was eligible for the Reaping, his Grandda sliced a line from an old and often-mended net, and tied it around Finnick's wrist in a constrictor's knot- the most effective binding knot. He was still wearing it on the hot spring day when a slender man coated in silver sequins called out "Finnick Odair", as if this was a great honor, as if Finnick should be excited to leave his village by the sea.
Two:
He is twelve years, six months and eleven days old when he falls in love. He is on the beach with his cousins, learning how to thrust and parry with a trident; how to stab and slash and pierce. They have been practicing for hours, and his hands sting and his arms are shaking with weariness, but he refuses to ask his cousins for a respite. He's a full six inches shorter than his next-shortest cousin, and they do not bother to hide their doubts at his abilities to handle a weapon.
He is desperate to prove himself to them; he wants to fish with them, to stand fearlessly on the prow of a boat and bring home dinner to his mother and little sisters. He has been cleaning nets and fish guts and boat hooks for years, and he longs to leave these childhood tasks behind, and to be counted as a man.
The Odair cousins are golden-skinned and broad-shouldered, and very good at trident-work, and soon their demonstration attracts an audience. Most of the watching girls giggle and sigh and simper, but a few snatch up sticks of driftwood, and mimic Finnick's clumsy poses, playing at spear-fishing with their own brothers and cousins.
Finnick shuts out their shouts and the cooing of the girls, but he cannot help but look for a flash of red hair out of the corner of his eye, and gets dumped to the sand when his cousin Graffa hooks him behind the ankle, and yanks.
He is up in an instant, spitting sand, but Graffa is laughing at him, not kindly. "Watch that footwork, little 'Nik," he says, a sardonic smile plastered on his face. He jabs at Finnick's feet, and Finnick leaps backwards, ending up on his ass again.
Furious, flames licking up his cheeks, he scrambles to his feet, ready to charge his much older cousin, already resigned to getting tossed into the sea, when her voice echoes across the beach, clear and pure, like the call of a seabird.
"Ahoy! Last one to the buoy is a dirt-grubbing land-lubber!"
They are coastal children, and cannot resist the challenge. En masse, they all dive for the sea, a whooping Annie Cresta in the lead.
Finnick swims as if the great white shark from his grandfather's stories is gnashing at his heels, and soon outdistances everyone but Annie. Even his oldest cousins are left in his wake, and he sees them turn back to the shore, calling to each other that this is stupid, for babies, and they have more important things to do than cavort in the sea.
She reaches the rusted buoy seconds before he does, and he gasps for air, chest heaving, as she smirks at him, not even out of breath.
They are the only two to make it to the buoy; the oldest children turned back when it was clear they'd be beaten by a ten-year-old girl, and the rest are too little to swim so far. Finnick pushes lazily off the beveled edge of the buoy, and does a flip underwater, coming up right next to Annie, his hands entangled with hers on the lowest rung of the buoy.
His breath back, he grins at her, a little bit awed by her, and a lot grateful for her well-timed swimming challenge, happy to show off something he excels at, after being knocked on his ass all afternoon.
"You're faster than all the boys," he tells her, not exactly sure if this is the right thing to say.
"My mother says I'm half fish," she replies. She glances back towards the shore, her hand shading her eyes. "Maybe, in a fishing village, that's a bad thing."
"I'd never let them hurt you," he says, hurriedly. It's half a joke, because no one would ever hunt Annie, but it rings out across the water in a way that seems important.
Even with his face turned away from her, he can feel the sunny blaze of her smile against his skin.
"I know, Finnick. I know."
Three:
Only family members are permitted into the tribute departure chambers at the train depot in Four, but silly things like official pronouncements and rules have never stopped Annie Cresta.
She climbs the ivy trellises on the outside of the crumbling depot, and taps at the window until he realizes she is there. It takes all of their combined strength to wrench the heavy window open, and his fear for her, perched on a thin scrap of wood 15 feet in the air, is strong enough to drive his fear for himself completely out of his head, until she is safely inside and has wrapped him in a bone-crushing hug.
Then, it all comes flooding back, and he drives his face into the top of her head, trying to force his tears back into his eyes, inhaling the sea-sweet smell of her hair with every breath.
He tried to act brave for his mother and sisters and cousins, but he is terribly afraid, and Annie, who has just escaped another year's Reaping, understands.
The slam! of a door echoes just outside the departure room, and he gently herds her over to the window, whispering that she can't get caught, and that she has to go, now!
She fumbles with his forearm as he lifts her to the window sill, and he flinches when something pulls roughly at the thin skin of his wrist. She has tied a rough hunk of green sea-glass to the worn bracelet of hemp his grandfather fastened to his wrist three years ago, and the charm sparkles dully in the fading light.
"I had to give you this," she mumbles, rubbing the charm between her fingers absently.
"For luck?" he asks, aware down to his bones that he'll need a whole boatload of it if he plans to make it out of the Games alive.
Her eyes flash as she shakes her head. "No. Not for luck. You don't need it." She looks up at him, and he suddenly feels ten feet tall. "You're fast and smart and you're going to win. This is just… to remember me by."
Booted feet echo in the corridor outside his door, and Finnick nearly shoves her out the window, holding her up while her feet scrabble for purchase on the trellis. He leans out after her, and suddenly, she rears up, and kisses him square on the mouth. Their teeth clack together and his stomach is jammed against the splintery sill, but he doesn't care. He could stay like this forever.
She pulls back, grinning. "That, too," she says, and ducks out of sight as the door swings open.
He feels her kiss, burning his mouth like a coal, until the canon sounds, and the Games begin.
Four:
On the Victory Train, still jittery with nerves and random starbursts of adrenaline, he cannot sleep. The Capitol's surgeons have healed the wounds he sustained in the Games, but they couldn't fix the triggers in his brain that force alertness upon him at all times. He's just spent the last month crouched in hastily-made piles of camouflage, muscles clenched and ready to spring, and the soft beds of the Victory Train make him feel itchy and weak. So at night, instead, he sneaks into the provisions cars and filches pastries, sprinting away from the chefs who flick their dishtowels at him, laughing at his antics. He revels in his new untouchable status; back in Four, his mother would put him to work scraping barnacles for a week if she caught him stealing desert.
He has the whole run of the train as it passes through the outer districts, and heads toward the Capitol, and is miffed when Peacekeepers chivy him back into his stateroom on the nights the train is parked at the depot in Two.
On their final night in Two, Finnick and Mags and their Capitol handlers have a private dinner with Mayor Praetorius and his family, and Finnick flirts outrageously with the Mayor's beautiful daughters, delighting them (and himself) with his stupid jokes and smiles.
Walking back to the train that night, Mags loops her arm around his shoulders, and snuggles him against her. She curls her fingers in his hair, and he rests his head against her bony shoulder. "You're going to be quite the heartbreaker, child," she tells him, and he cannot understand why she sounds so sad.
Hours later, when he hears his door slide open, he expects Mags or maybe Drizella, his stylist, even as a tiny part of him wonders if Praetorius' red-headed daughter has snuck down to meet him. But, it's not any of his expected -or hoped for- women.
Mags has been forcing politeness into his sunburned brain as fast as she can, but he isn't exactly sure what etiquette calls for when Mayor Praetorius of District Two strolls into your room, leans against the closed door, and just looks at you.
Immediately, Finnick is wary, but maybe the past three weeks of the Victory Tour have softened him too much, because he barely gets his hands up to block the Mayor's lunge for him. He tries to fight, tries to recall the twists and holds and kicks that won him the Games, but he had a trident and the element of surprise and he was fighting hungry children, not this grown man with rough, cruel hands and immovable strength.
Within seconds, Praetorius rips Finnick's sleep shirt over his head and crams it in his mouth, before spinning him around and throwing him onto the bed. The bed is soft against his face and elbows and knees, but it doesn't stop pain from flooding his tightly-clenched body as the Mayor shoves into him.
Praetorius is almost silent as he rapes him, and Finnick can hear his own frightened, horrified whimpers echoing in the plush room. He hates himself for making these pathetic little sounds, hates how small and weak and fucking deserving of this he sounds.
It lasts only a few minutes, and also an eternity, but finally, with a growling shudder, Praetorius is done with him. He pulls away from him, and Finnick shivers at the clink of Praetorius doing up his belt.
But fuck this, he is the youngest victor of the Hunger Games, and who does this piece of shit think he is.
Finnick bolts up in bed, ignoring the pain lancing through his backside. "You rat-faced motherfucker," he snarls at Praetorius. "You've made a huge fucking mistake. You think I won't tell Snow what you just fucking did?"
He is so mad, so furious, angrier than he has ever been in his whole life, that this muscle-bound fucker thought he could lay his hands on a fucking Victor. Snow will string Praetorius up by his thumbs and let him rot in the sun for daring to touch him, Finnick Odair, youngest Victor of the Hunger Games.
Praetorius pauses, and smirks at him over his shoulder, and Finnick nearly vomits, because the Mayor's face is the mirror of his red-headed daughter's, and any sparks of desire he may have had for her have been purged from his brain.
"Snow knows, little Victor," the Mayor croons, and the truth of his statement is written in the soft lines of his confident face. "Snow asked me to. He thought you might need, breaking in, before you reached the Capitol."
Praetorius doesn't bother to ease the door to Finnick's stateroom closed; he lets it slam, because the presence of the Mayor of District Two in the bedroom of an underaged Victor after midnight isn't a surprise to anyone but the Victor, frozen in pain and fear and dread on his too-soft Capitol bed.
Five:
The instant the stupid fucking silver-sequined handler croons "Annie Cresta" from the steps of the Justice Building in District Four, Finnick is gone. Gone from the Reaping-Watch party, gone from the arms of the violet-haired wife of general, gone from the lazy, debauched persona he wears like a second skin in the Capitol. Snow hadn't permitted him to go home to Four for the Reaping, and for the first time in three years he is ecstatic to be trapped in the Capitol.
It takes him but a few moments to reach Snow's private office in the Palace, and he paces outside the solid oak doors, listening to the President record his message to the tributes and the rest of Panem.
He rips the doors open when he hears the recorder click off, and Snow takes one look at him, and sends his staff away. Finnick walks forward, pulling the tail of his shirt from his trousers, the gold embroidery and crystals sharp under his shaking fingers.
He has nothing to offer Snow, except the one thing he has always denied him, and he will give it up gladly, without question, if Snow will save Annie.
He yanks his shirt over his head, and drops it gently to the floor, moving slowly towards Snow, who has leaned back in his chair, a predatory sneer curling his mouth.
Finnick stops, just out of Snow's reach. He stares into the man's eyes, dilated by lust, and ignores the way his empty stomach retches at the bitter, bloody smell coming off Snow.
"Annie Cresta," he whispers. "The red-head tribute from Four." He hates to give her name to Snow, but it cannot be helped.
"Whatever it takes. Do whatever it takes. Save her."
Snow's perfectly-manicured eyebrows furrow in surprise. He licks his lips, and the reek of blood increases.
"And in return?"
Finnick shrugs his bare shoulders, aware this movement emphasized the ripple of his abdomen, and hating himself for knowing that.
"Whatever you want, Snow," he murmurs, absently surprised at how easy this is, when he's trying to preserve Annie, rather than just his pride. "Anything. Everything. I'll..submit, I'll beg, I'll… do whatever you want. Whatever you want me to do." He exhales, because there is nothing left to say. "Just..just, keep her safe."
Finnick burns through every favor he's accrued, sending gifts and water and medicine to Annie. She outlasts half a dozen other tributes, hiding in a cave and subsisting on Finnick's gifts. He cannot spell it out in the notes, but he just wants her to stay hidden in her cave, tucked away in her clamshell at the bottom of the sea.
He, naked, on his hands and knees, composing a love poem to a pair of sisters, when the explosion rocks the Arena, and he nearly claws himself bloody when the canon blasts eleven times in quick succession, until he sees Annie's red head bobbing in the water. Only she, and the boy from Two and the girl from One can really swim; the other four tributes are hopeless and drown within minutes.
She spends the night swimming steadily away from them; when she is far enough away, she flips onto her back and floats, kicking every once and a while to keep her head above water. The whole of Panem is riveted by the specters of these three bedraggled, struggling children, and the rich nearly bankrupt themselves betting on who will last. And when the sun rises, Annie Cresta is the only one left alive.
In the end, all of Finnick's pain and protestation and begging was for naught; Annie Cresta saved herself.
Six:
Annie knows, of course, about the shit they do to him in the Capitol. She knows, not everything of course, but he's given away a few things, and Mags has told her other things, and he cannot always hide the bruises and marks on his body.
When the helicopter pulls her from the water, she is limp and docile, and Finnick struggles to breathe for the two weeks of her healing and polishing, because there are already so many savage fuckers lining up to bid for her.
Snow loves milk-pale skin and red hair, and so does the Capitol, but at the first post-Games interview with Caesar Flickerman, Annie pisses herself and giggles as she does it, chattering away to the couch cushions in a made-up language.
The best psychologists in Panem gather to evaluate her, and their diagnoses are identical: Due to the stress of the competition, Ms. Cresta has suffered a mental breakdown. Treatment: Quietly ship her back to Four, to familiar, comfortable surroundings, and check on her in a few years.
Finnick Odair hasn't dealt in anything as pedestrian as money in years; his provenance is secrets. And here is one he will never, ever tell: Annie Cresta is maybe less mad than she appears.
Seven:
Mags lives in small suite of rooms in the Capitol, in a old, crumbling building overlooking her favorite park. This is something of a new development; even though Mags has been a Victor for almost 70 years, she has always lived in Four, in a snug little houseboat bought with her winnings. But now, -now that he is stuck here, whoring for the Capitol- she lives there too. She tells him that her health is failing, and she needs the superior medical treatment available there, but he knows she does it to offer him one small space of comfort.
On nights when he isn't fucking or fondling or stumbling through a party, he sleeps on her sofa, swaddled in the rough blankets she makes out of barely-treated wool, shutting out the world. He never has nightmares, because that certainly wouldn't do, but if he did, he knows her blankets and the fresh small of her apartment would drive them away.
In the mornings, she makes him omelets with red onions and chorizo and tells him stories of her childhood in Four. He massages her arthritic fingers with aloe, and marvels that alone among the Capitol citizens, Mag's touch doesn't repulse him.
He stays with her until the last possible second, and sometimes has to sprint to his stylist appointments and interviews and…other obligations.
He bathes twice a day in the luxurious lap pool in his grand suite, scrubs his skin with the harshest exfoliants, and perfumes his body with the latest scents and unguents, but on the sofa in Mags' apartment is the only place he ever feels clean.
Eight:
It's worse when it's a woman. Women want songs, and dancing. They want to be fed strawberries dipped in chocolate and for him to lick champagne from their navels. They want him to make them feel as if they are the most beautiful creature he's ever laid eyes on, even when their body modifications make them look like plants or birds or monsters. They want him to write poems to their clavicles and their fingernails and their breasts, and to whisper his poetry to them as he undresses them. They want him to come from going down on them alone, and to thank them for the luxury of doing it. They want compliments and pet names and terms of endearment, and they want ones that are tailored specifically for them, and Poseidon help him if they compare notes. Women want to play games with his head; they want to tease and torment and make him jealous, as if he cared one iota for the myriad of vapid bitches who bragged that they had conquered the heart of of Finnick Odair. Women want to be made love to, as if love could be forced or coerced or bought.
It's so much fucking effort to be with a woman; to pretend along with them that he wants nothing more than to be in their beds.
Men have no such foolish illusions.
Nine:
The marble of the tile in the corridor is hard and cold under his bare feet as he exits Aurelius' room and slides the delicate paper-screen door shut, careful to do it as quietly as possible. It certainly isn't for his patron's sake; Aurelius is sleeping the sleep of the well-drugged -and the well-fucked- he reminds himself, because in the Capitol, he lies to everyone but himself, but for the sake of the Avoxes, who are catching swift blinks of sleep standing at their posts, and he would not wake them for the world.
Sometimes he envies the Avoxes; even with their flaming red hair they are almost invisible to the rest of the Capitol population. As long as everyone's tea is hot and liquor is chilled, no one even notices the swift, silent servants moving amongst them. No one forces them to dress up-or undress-up - and no one parades them through decadent parties dressed in nothing but freshwater pearls, basking in their secondhand glory. And best of all, even though they are pretty and subservient and literally unable to say no, no one touches them.
Of course, there is no such consideration for Finnick Odair, Victor of the 65th Hunger Games.
He'd thought a life as a Victor would be glorious, and he was already composing the songs they would sing in his honor in his head, as he approached the tribute from Seven, spinning the trident in his strong fingers, on his last day in the Games.
Now, almost ten years later, he hates the smug, stupid 14-year-old boy that beat his chest in glorious victory after slashing the final tribute with the trident gifted to him by a cabal of Capitol donors. He pities this boy, too, but mostly he hates him, and sometimes he giggles to himself, gleeful at the moments of pain and humiliation that await that cocky, stupid, little shit.
He tried, in the first months after his victory in the Games, to make some cutting remark that would force them to rip his tongue out. He figured a life without a tongue would be better than the life he was living now, so he whispered stinging barbs and rude bits of gossip and tried to play his besotted buyers off each other, hoping it would trickle up to Snow.
Of course, he'd fucked that up, too.
He'd spent the six-month anniversary of his Victory on his knees in Snow's luxurious office, using his tongue for something other than talking. And when Snow was finished, he'd grabbed Finnick's jaw, forcing him to open his raw and aching mouth. Delicately, Snow slipped his forefinger past Finnick's lips, and ran it down the length of his tongue, nearly choking him.
"You've such a pretty mouth, my dear boy," Snow had murmured, his gently avuncular tone belying him flinty and furious eyes.
"I do quite like your pretty little mouth, and your pretty little tongue, and what they can do together."
Snow had smirked at him, and still, still, he blushed, hating that his shame was written so clearly on his face.
"But make no mistake, Finnick," Snow had murmured, releasing his jaw and turning away, the dismissal clear. "You'll still have a pretty little mouth, even without your pretty little tongue."
He moves slowly down the high-ceilinged corridors leading from Aurelius' suite to his own, still too tired, sore and drugged-out to truly appreciate the danger he would face tomorrow morning. Instead, it felt like the knowledge that he would be returning to the 75th Annual Hunger Games was a malevolent island lurking at the edge of his consciousness, toward which the battered boat of his mind was slowly drifting.
Shuffling out of the elevator at his floor, he keeps his eyes on the floor, avoiding the leering grins of the Peacekeepers stationed every 50 feet.
"Odair." Finnick flinches, even as his brain registered the drawling vowels of District Twelve, and the bitter miasma of fermentation that constantly clung to Haymitch Abernathy.
He slips past Haymitch and ducks into his rooms, leaving the door ajar.
The lights in his room were blindingly bright, and his eyes slam closed, hating that the whole length of his body was on display. His hands twitched, instinct telling him to pull his sheer trousers higher on his hips, but he didn't move, letting Haymitch look at his bare chest, speckled with finger-shaped bruises and bite marks.
Haymitch's mouth was drawn and grim, and Finnick took a perverse pleasure in shocking the old drunk, who'd won his Games by slaughtering children with his bare hands.
"Pretty, isn't it?" he asks, sardonically, lifting his arms to include his body, and the tribute's chambers, and maybe the whole of the golden and glowing Capital, stretched out neatly at their feet.
"Self-pity isn't very pretty, boy," Haymitch answers.
Finnick smirks. "Well, we all have our vices."
Haymitch nods sharply, and grabs his wrist. "Speaking of pretty, Odair," he murmurs, reaching for his pocket.
Finnick's stomach clenches. Haymitch reeks of whiskey, but his hands are strong, and Finnick is so fucking tired of fighting.
"Not you too, Haymitch," he says, putting a twirl of flirtation behind it, suddenly, desperately afraid.
"Hmph." Haymitch snorts, but neither of them find it particularly funny.
He slides a tight manacle onto Finnick's wrist, and Finnick's skin crawls, wanting to rip it off, hating the pressure on his muscles, the trap.
But suddenly, Haymitch steps back, and the pressure on his hand eases, and Finnick looks down, shocked to find a gold, glinting bangle on his wrist.
The gold is warm on his bruised skin, and he clutches at it, vaguely remembering Effie Trinket babbling about gold, and Katniss, and some kind of talisman.
He looks up, and Haymitch's eyes are clear and calm, and steady on his face.
"She's the real thing, Finnick," he said, quietly, and for the first time, Finnick believes him.
He nods at Haymitch, and straightens himself up, ignoring the pain in his back and shoulders, and the tension and fury and fear that has crooked his body for the past decade. "Well, someone has to be."
They clasp hands, Haymitch's fingers curling over the bangle on Finnick's wrist, as if he wanted to rub as much good fortune into it as he could.
"Good luck."
"Good luck."
Ten:
In Thirteen, he is worse than useless. Both he and Katniss are crippled by the nightmares crawling through their brains, but she at least has some worth to the rebels. So they coax her out of heating ducts and secretly feed her anti-anxiety medications and try to massage her fighting spirit back to life. As for him, well, when the orderly assigned to his wing of the Infirmary noticed that Finnick had bled all over the rough length of rope he'd spent hours twisting around his raw fingers, nobody gently removed it from his hands and gave him a pep talk about the healing process, and his importance to the cause. They just brought him some new rope.
He can't do anything to help the war effort. He certainly can't be the Mockingly; he's never been anything more than a popinjay, and he symbolizes nothing but hedonism and the worst excesses of the Capitol.
It's been six hard years since he stood balanced on the splintery prow of his grandfather's boat, rolling his body in time with the white-capped waves, trident gripped firmly in sun-burned fingers, ready to strike with deadly precision. And anyway, tridents aren't much use against machine guns.
Nobody in Thirteen needs any clove-hitch knots tied or any nets mended, and there doesn't appear to be any use for any of the…extracurricular abilities he picked up in various beds (and other places, but that doesn't bear thinking about) scattered about the Capitol.
He's on their side, and they clearly believe this, because they keep feeding him and the door to his hospital room doesn't lock from the outside, but he knows what they think of him. It's evident in every disdainful grimace and disgusted smirk. Water is carefully rationed in Thirteen, but he showers as often as he can, trying to scrub himself clean, always afraid they can smell it on him. What he was. What he is. What he always will be.
So he plays a game with himself - the only game he has left. Every day, he counts how many times Katniss' cousin, Gale, looks at her with his big, shiny heart, in his big, shiny eyes. The total always equals the total number of times she simply fails to see it. But he's not actually sure if that game has any clear winners.
But that's not really the game. Actually, the game is this: Finnick awards himself a point every time he keeps his pretty mouth shut around his screaming desire to tell Gale: "she doesn't love you, she doesn't love you, she doesn't love YOU." He always wins that game.
Eleven:
On their wedding night, it is Finnick who is nervous. Annie, tipsy on the bitter beer brewed in the bowels of Thirteen, dances around their room, still humming, joy blazing in her eyes. Finnick has not been anything like a virgin for a decade, but he cannot remember ever having sex purely and only because he wanted to; cannot remember a time when anyone condescended to care about his wants once he was naked and on his knees.
He hesitates, unsure, wanting to make this perfect for her, but afraid, always, that she'll suddenly recognize him for the whore that he is, and be done with him.
But as ever, his madcap Annie knows what to do. She spins to face him, her eyes sparkling in the dim light, and slides the zipper of her dress down, letting it slip from her shoulders to puddle at her feet. She stands before him, dressed only in delicate lace panties, baring miles of pearlescent skin and perfect, pink-tipped breasts. His hands tremble with desire, and he wants to taste every inch of her, but cannot fathom how to start, how to ask, how to show her how much he loves her.
"Ahoy! Last one to the bed is a dirty land-lubber."
He is a coastal child, and he has loved this girl for most of his life, and he cannot resist her challenge. He dives after her.
Twelve:
He wakes before her, inhaling and choking suddenly -and silently- on a mouthful of her hair, trying to suppress his body-shaking coughs.
But she has been a captive for weeks, and a Victor for years, and immediately opens her eyes when she feels him move against her.
She grins at him lazily, and drags her fingers down his neck and sternum, past his belly to the red-gold curls at the base of his stomach. He hardens in her hand, and she curls her free hand around his neck to pull him on top of her.
He hesitates, and she moans and wraps her legs around his ass, and urges him forward.
"Annie," he whispers, cradling her head in his hands, and looking down into her sea green eyes. "Do you want to? Do you want me?"
"Of course," she gasps, "of course, Finnick, please."
He needs no further permission, and gently, slowly, inexorably, slides inside her, inch by delicate inch, until she arches up against him, and begs him to move, to move, to fuck her, please.
She babbles his name as he thrusts into her, and it is perfect. They are safe, and quiet and alone in their tiny bunker room, and there is nothing between them: no poetry, no demands, no chocolate-covered strawberries, no stupid songs, and no fucking games.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it! I'd love to hear what you think!