Hard to shake hands with her
AN: This story is something I started thinking about as I read Catching Fire, before I found out about Annie's existence. So it is set in the same world as the real trilogy, just with a completely different story for Finnick and Johanna.
"When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her." Oscar Wilde
First chapter: 74th Hunger Games Part 1
The sun won't be up for another few hours and most Capitol citizens won't be awake for quite some time. The halls of the big building will be empty except for an Avox here or there, but they have never really said a word in all of these years, not that they actually can. Most look another way, one or two have smiled and one, a really brave one, winked once. They have seen him on TV, or in the hallways, always surrounded by multiple ladies, most of them rich or old or both and you can see on their faces that they think she just couldn't resist him. Which suits her just fine. She gets up, puts on her underclothes and then her thin dress, ruffles her hair to make it look more "carefully coiffed to look unkempt" and less "slept until 3 minutes ago".
She keeps it short now. It used to be long, very long, all the way down her back to her waist, but back then, in the games, someone grabbed her by it as she ran, threw her to the floor, cracked a rib or two and nearly killed her. She had looked the boy in the eyes as she stabbed him in the neck with her knife and seen the life go out in them. He was her first kill, in self defense and yet she still sees those eyes; the surprise, then pain and finally death in them and she still feels someone yank her hair in her sleep, even though it is only a few inches long and not yankable anymore.
Her boots are by the door, she puts them on, high heels, very uncomfortable, but this one month a year she knows comfort is secondary and looks are everything. Carefully not to be too loud, she walks back, sits on the bed on his side and leans over. He smells like soap and sleep. And a little bit like saltwater. Or what she imagines saltwater to smell like. His hair, his face, everything about him is gorgeous, glorious, fantastic. No wonder he is so popular. But she can see beyond that, she can see past his gorgeous green eyes and see the pain of having to kill a 13 year old girl to ensure he stays alive, she can see past his glorious smile and see the grimace of horror he has on it when the nightmares hit, she can see past his fantastic body to see the broken boy inside. Tenderly she strokes his hair, lets her fingers wander across his cheek, warm and soft, a tiny bit stubbly and so familiar.
He turns around quickly, looks at her in fear for a second, then relaxes. "Hey" he croaks, sleep in his throat "leaving already?"
She nods, "I don't want to risk it… only few tributes left, they will start to be up earlier these days. And the whole lover thing on top of it, I bet there will be cameras everywhere, getting our "reactions". Interview us so we can say how much we adore them." She rolls her eyes, scowls while he sits up a little, puts one arm around her and encourages her to melt into his chest. She stopped caring about her tributes the minute she saw them, possibly even earlier, she stopped caring about all tributes the first year she was asked to mentor them and they both died on the first day, but losing both in the first 10 minutes of the game still hurt. She never says their names, for years has called them "boy" and "girl" but before going to sleep she thinks their names, all 14 tributes she has mentored and lost, like a little prayer.
He knows her, he understands her sadness and anger and guilt and he doesn't say anything, because there are no words, just presses a kiss to her forehead. She knows he feels the same, or maybe not quite the same because his tributes are always big strong kids, who want to be in the game, volunteers who fight for the spot, and nothing like the skinny, hungry kids that cry for their mothers on the train she gets year in and year out. But they are children nonetheless, children he mentors and then they go and die. And he doesn't have to mentor them every single year like she does, there are plenty of District 4 victors still alive while she is the only District 7 girl to ever win and therefore the girl mentor for life.
But he does understand and she is thankful. She pushes away from his chest, puts a hand on his neck, draws his head closer to hers and gives him a soft kiss on the lips. "I should get going." He shakes his head "Stay… a few more minutes. Please." She considers it, who knows how many more days the games will be. And the end of the games means going back home and then another year of loneliness and waiting starts. She shudders at the thought and he doesn't need words to understand.
"Hey, the district 12 girl looks tough, and District 2 is not giving up, this could go on for another week. Or longer" he whispers and she bites the inside of her cheek. Physical pain is always preferable. Then she sits up and says "I really need to go before it gets even later. See you at the viewing platform." And rushes to the door, puts on her usual bitch-face before opening the door, in case she meets anyone. A good defense is the best offense. As her hand grabs the handle he says the goodbye he has used every day since they started this, the sentence that ends each of his letters "No matter what you see and no matter what happens today, I love you, Johanna."
The viewing platform is an odd place, full of strange characters, crazy people and downright the least likable human beings you could ever meet. The people taking bets seem to have lost all humanity and calling them human beings doesn't even feel right, Finnick thinks, and then smirks when it occurs to him what Johanna would say. "Who died and made you the moral compass of the world?" And she is right of course. The bet takers are despicable but unlike the first four rows of the viewing platform they are not the ones who killed child after child and now live off the fame of having done that.
He nods to the other victors, the brutal but sane looking ones, the drunk at 8 am ones, the old and deluded ones, the broken and not going to be fixed ones, as he walks to his seat. There are several letters on it and a couple of gifts. They each have a fixed seat here. He has sat in this very seat for the past 9 years watching the games on the giant screen surrounded by smaller screens in which they get to see different angles and what other tributes are doing. His seat is in the first row because he is more likely to have a victor and they can film his face a lot better there than if he was buried in the fourth row. And maybe they also enjoy showing him every now and then, with the capitol ladies that buy their way in and then whisper sweet capitol secrets in his ear in exchange for him spending some time with them. These secrets will come handy one day, the revolution will come at some point and he will use them, of that he is sure.
He opens the letters but doesn't read them, hands the liquor filled chocolates over to the drunks in row three and stares at the screen. He can't eat while he watches that poor blond boy die from an oozing wound in his leg, but the drunks have no problem with it. They even ate through the day several tributes, amongst them the girl from his district, practically exploded from the inside out from tracker jacker stings. He feels his coffee making its way back up his throat as he thinks back to that girl, who only days earlier had blushed beet-red and blown him a kiss, with her face distorted and one of her eyes pressed out of its socket from the sting on her eyelid. He swallows hard and tries to see if Johanna has made it into the room out of the corner of his eyes. He doesn't say anything, but he is always afraid she will be caught when she sneaks out in the morning. Victors may talk on the viewing platform, but are not to be amicable otherwise. Districts shan't mix. That is the whole point of the hunger games. You are not to be friends, you shall kill each other for our pleasure. And too much communication is dangerous.
They knew they were going against all sorts of rules when he first met her at the 66th games and was impressed by her strange sweetness, something she lost forever that year at the games. She was playing the wide eyed innocent sweetheart nobody thought capable of killing a fly, but she was in fact sweet, if in a less innocent way. She was also funny, with a wicked dark humor and incredibly quick thinking, a great actress. When he lured her into his room, secretly, before the games, hoping to get her into bed, she played right along and then somehow managed to get some secrets out of him, went into the games knowing the district 4 Achilles heels. And he secretly admired her for this. She could cry on command and looked like the most scared little girl ever, with her flowing mane of ridiculously long locks and the way she looked at knives as if she had never cut a piece of bread in her life. Then she used her small size and her quickness to spear people in the neck with the knife, cut throats left, right and center. He found himself hoping she would make it out of there more and more each day and he ached when she was wounded but when she finally won, he sneaked into the hospital wing, sat by her side and held her hand. The girl who came out of the Arena was not the same one going in and she was scared and scarred and he knew how that felt; in that hospital wing night after night they talked and he fell in love.
Finally she walks in, lips pursed as usual, ready to complain and to ridicule. She sees him and nods in his direction, then lets herself fall into her chair and rolls her eyes as she starts to list the things that annoy her to her neighbor, Woof from district 8, who could not care less. Finnick lets out a little sigh of relief and his attention is back on the screen. The district 12 lovers are hogging the attention and he finds himself pulled in a little bit. If they win, if they even really let two people win, what will their lives be like? Will they let them be happy?
He thinks of his own life after the games, basically a male prostitute for the entire Capitol spinster community, something he did not chose but was forced into and he knows better not to change, for his own security. Johanna did not bend to their wishes and his respect for her grew a million fold when he found out. But she paid bitterly for it and she understands that he cannot do the same. When her entire family died in a tragic accident in the woods, her parents, older brother, sister in law and baby niece, another part of her got lost for good and when she found out the awful truth guilt washed over her and she tried to kill herself. It was in the first year after her games and he received a clandestine goodbye letter and cried over her death. But she was there at the next games, thin pink lines on her forearms and the complete lack of emotion in her eyes the only reminder of what happened and he had sneaked her into his room and told her he loved her and that she had a reason to keep going.
Would they make the district 12 lovers do things they despised? Have children against their wishes? Possibly reap those children as soon as they were 12? They are capable of everything.
At lunchtime she bumps into him "Hey Finnick Odair, you masterpiece of the human race, you, some of your fan-mail did not stay contained to your row." She says with the meanest of grins on her face, rolling her eyes so violently he is afraid they might roll out of her head and hands him an envelope, then turns on the spot and doesn't even give him another look as she walks to a table at the end of the viewing cafeteria and starts eating even though on the several screens of the cafeteria a close up of the feverish district 12 boy is shown as he vomits up some bile. He looks at the envelope, recognizes her handwriting and stuffs the letter in his pocket, then attempts to eat in the company of old Mags, who has grown more unintelligible as she lost all of her teeth, but he enjoys her quiet company and she knows him like a grandmother in a way, she even knows about Johanna. And so after forcing down a few bites, he takes the letter out and reads it, even allows himself to smile a little. She has just dotted down a few very dark jokes about the remaining tributes. He looks around the cafeteria and thinks, some people use drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of watching this, some make it all a big joke.
She was never one to write big sweeping statements of love, she rarely even says she loves him, ends the letters that keep them in contact through the 11 months of the year they can't see each other in "you know, J.". And he does know. He knows she is afraid of saying it or writing it down because sometimes it just sounds too much like a permanent goodbye.
In the afternoon there is an announcement in the Arena, there will be a feast. No wonder, the boy from district 12 looks two inches from death and the red-haired girl from 5 is starting to look like a corpse so much that he keeps wondering why the canon doesn't fire whenever they show her lying in some little hole she dug for herself. For the mentors and old victors this means no sleep, as they are expected to stay in the viewing platform for this. He watches how the district 12 girl drugs the dying boy into a comatose sleep and remembers just in time that he had an appointment with an old lady who used to be a favorite of president Snow's 30 years ago. He leaves and meets her in the room he uses for the lady-dates. He never takes them to the room where he sleeps with Johanna. She is strangely dressed with lots of feathers but not much fabric, surgically altered to resemble someone half her age, and already somewhat drunk when she arrives. He massages her dough-like body, tells her she is beautiful and locks every single sentence she says in the safe of his mind, for use at a later point. When he finally leaves, luckily she can't miss the games for too long and therefore hurries off after just a few hours, he rushes up to his room to shower before going back to the viewing platform and finds a surprise in his room.
She grins at him and at his questioning face says "shower first, you smell like Capitol lady" and then halfway through his shower joins him. "It is daytime. You are crazy!" he half-protests. "Everybody is glued to their seats watching the games, nobody cares" she replies. "And I was sent here to give you a message from Heavensbee… he says the games are going well, better than planned. And that the lady you spent time with today, she could be crucial. You know, he says to keep her happy." Heavensbee is the double agent in the capitol, their biggest hope for change. "Tell him, she is very happy. And so are we." he mutters as he bends down to kiss her.
They lie on the bed for a few minutes, allowing themselves a little breather from everything. Hands joined, fingers intertwined, eyes closed. The feast means a few more deaths, a few more memories back, more vividly than ever; there was a feast in each of their games.
She jumps up, gets dressed quickly, kisses him softly, gently, then goes to the door under his watch. "Don't worry, official mission from a Games judge… nobody will say anything." She leaves, before she fully closes the door she sticks her head back in. A rare smile reaching her eyes: "You know, Finnick!"