Disclaimer: I do not own ANY of these lovable, endearing characters. Suzanne Collins is the genius who created them (with her wonderful books The Hungers Games, Catching Fire, and the forthcoming Mockingjay), and I am merely an interloper in her wonderful creation of a world. Finnick, Katniss, Annie, and all the rest appear at different times and different forms in this story, and everything I write here is done out of love for the original characters and story (and also for the craft of writing itself).

Please enjoy this piece of fiction lighting on Finnick's thoughts and past, and many of the events within are my own interpretations of what could have happened to Finnick Odair before we met him as the flamboyant playboy turned rebel in the book Catching Fire. Believe me, it's going to be a thrill ride -- with some maybe some sugar cubes thrown in there for good measure. ;)

Prologue:

Secrets in the Dark

Less than a week has passed since the Seventy-fifth Hunger Games, the third Quarter Quell, ended with a bang by means of an explosion, yet I sit by her bedside where she still lies, still sits, staring straight ahead at nothing, her eyes and ears closed to all the world around her as if everything else but the cage of her own mind has ceased to exist. Somehow, I envy her for being able to tear away from reality when it is the most dire time of all for everyone in Panem.

Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire, now seems only a hollow shell of the girl she once was.

Haymitch was too hasty, I think, cursing that wily fox for being so rash with his secret-telling. I had seen the way she had attacked him, fingernails raking skin like the claws of a feral wildcat, when she realized that she had been only a pawn of the rebellion -- and that Peeta had been too.

Peeta Mellark . . . I know their full story now, of course, though I had always had my suspicions. For a young couple in love, they had been awfully careful with one another -- almost as if they kept their passions cooled purposely, especially in regard of Peeta to Katniss; more than once, I had seen the temptation in his eyes to simply envelop her in his arms, swallow her with his eyes and with his lips, yet somehow always resist to go too far and too soon. Vainly, I hope that the Capitol will not taint him now that he is in their clutches. Such a man should not die such a needless death . . .

Especially when the person who loves him most sits before me, forever lost until she hears the simple words: He lives, and he's coming back to you.

Even I, once a dreamer and a romantic, find it hard to believe that such news will ever come.

Yet I'm willing to spin such a tale -- just so that she can come back to a glimmer of herself. Life goes on, she will find; that was a lesson I had to learn early when my own love story shattered like a glass orb imploding from the inside out.

"Katniss," I start slowly, running a hand through my bronze hair, "you can't continue doing this to yourself."

You're slowly dying from the inside out. Can't you see it?

Her grey eyes, today dark like a storm cloud looming over the horizon, flash to mine for an instant, a spark of awareness awakening in her gaze -- but then, just as quickly, the fire sputters out, and I am looking at a shell again.

"Shut up," she mutters. Her hands are clenched so tightly together in her lap that the fingers have run white.

"Beating yourself up doesn't accomplish anything," I say smoothly, the well-rehearsed words flowing easily out of my mouth. I don't know how many times I have spoken them in the last few days, but my lips shape easily around the familiar words that mean nothing to me personally. I am a masochist of my emotions, and I fully embrace it as I always have. What a hypocrite I am since I have never even followed the advice I am trying to give her.

Katniss mumbles something under her breath, and I think I hear a few curse words mixed in with the senseless jabber.

"What?" I ask, certain I have missed something either terribly funny or incredibly sad.

"I'm sure you beat yourself up all the time over Annie," she says, surprising me -- and sending my heart pounding and my mind reeling.

Annie.

I grit my teeth, my hand clenching into a tight balled fist on my thigh. Somehow, with Katniss being nearly catatonic ever since coming from the remnants of the Quell's Arena, I had managed to avoid thinking of the girl whose fate I did not yet know. Sleeping pills always helped at night when nightmares stalked, of course, and I was using them constantly to drown myself in a stupor.

Narrowing my eyes at Katniss, I fight the urge to hit her for dredging up the best possible weapon against me. "You don't know anything," I hiss, surprising myself with the venom in my voice.

My tone surprises her too. She actually looks at me, almost curious. "What are you so afraid of?" she asks quietly.

"I could ask you the same thing," I throw back angrily. This won't be about me, I won't allow it; this is about her and her emotional problems. Not mine.

"I'm not afraid," she says softly -- but even I hear the tremble in her voice and the quake to her eyelids as more tears are left unshed.

"All right," I sigh after a moment. I'll play her game. "Everything's peachy, we're both totally invincible, and fear is something only lesser mortals feel."

A smile flickers across her face. It is the first time her lips have shaped into anything but a flat, dead line in many days. "I didn't say that."

"Yeah, but you were trying to think it, weren't you?" I try to think those things all the time. Too bad I can never seem to fool myself.

Now she looks at me, and I know the interrogation is ready to be turned on me once again. I anticipate it, ready to dodge any bullets and resist any surrender.

Yet the girl surprises me when she speaks. "I miss Peeta," she whispers, her voice breaking when she reaches his name. She doesn't cry, but I know both our hearts -- our sad, fragile hearts -- are crying for her.

Crying for hope. Crying for absolution. Crying for vengeance. Crying for sanity.

Sanity is what I wish for most of all -- for myself and others.

"I know," I manage to say quietly. Now I dread the unforgivably weak words I am about to say. "I . . . I miss . . . I miss Annie too."

Katniss looks at me now, her gaze open and aware, and I know that -- for the first time -- we share an accord in some way.

"Tell me about her." The words are not a request -- but a demand.

"No." The word is as much a denial as it is an escape.

Her eyes scrutinize me, and I glare her down. My temper is rising steadily, and even I don't know half the reason why.

"What do you fight so hard to hide?" she asks now. "You lived in District 4. Your life can't have been so bad before the Games interfered."

That's where you're wrong.

My reaction surprises even myself.

"What do you think, Katniss?" My voice is taunting and rising in a blazing tempo of barely constrained fury; my face sneers as if yelling actually makes me feel good inside. I know it is useless and cruel, to yell at a girl who has already lost so much, but it is the not the first time I had hurt someone far more fragile than myself. I have too much experience on that front. "That I haven't had my own share of heartaches? That I had some glamorous life back in District 4? Stop fooling yourself. You aren't the only one to have suffered."

My verbal attack doesn't faze her, however, and I am left to cool my own tempers instead of indulging in more word lashes and clipped sentence parries.

Too bad. I was expecting a fight. You let me down, Katniss.

"All right," she says after a few minutes' time -- time she gave me to calm my temper before she spoke again and gave me any reason to shout and rant and rave. "I don't know much about District 4. It's not as if the Capitol ever really tried to get the districts to know about each other beyond the Games. That was too much of a possible threat."

Slowly, I nod. We both know that the Capitol actually relished the type of control that made the districts strangers to each other for so many decades. That lack of knowledge was what had kept the Capitol from the threat of rebellion for so long.

Until we got smart again.

I cannot stall with my own thoughts for long, however, because Katniss is looking at me again, waiting . . . waiting for me to tear down the walls myself. In this room, silence is a burden -- yet it is also a motivation -- a motivation to give me yet more reason to let loose the flood of words that hammer at my heart each day.

I have hid behind lies for so long that, for a moment, I have to wonder if I even know what truth is anymore.

Now I know that, irrevocably, the time for secrets is over. Now it is time for the telling of truth, whether I like it or not. I sigh and fold my hands loosely together until I am looking again at the still-fragile girl sitting before me. If she has managed to start coming back from the fire, then so can I.

I don't know how I will feel once I am past the flames that have been licking at my insides for so long.

"Let me tell you a story, Katniss . . ."

Okay, that was straightforward, wasn't it? Well, there's more where that came from . . .

Anyway, please read and comment! I love hearing from other Hunger Games fans, so feel free to comment on anything you see fit.

I promise the first chapter of this saga will be up as soon as I finish it. :)