"Odair," Cresta says with a smile, dimples dancing, black fedora tilted askew, "I crept up on you, didn't I?"
She's sweet, is the problem that Finnick never counts on. Annie Cresta is sweet and quiet and fumbling with the cigarette in her hands. She's thirteen and a good girl, the perfect model of a daughter raised right. She says nothing to no one and she waits for him to light the cigarette for her, her body shaking the entire time. Finnick watches her carefully as she inhales too much and coughs, eyes watering like she's made a mistake once and never again.
It's almost disappointing. But then again, he's not surprised.
She's a sweet and quiet thing, a country mouse hiding in a field of corn, and he leaves her there in his memory.
Finnick's twenty when he sees her again, a million miles away from the place he once called home.
She rests on the wooden stairs of a derelict building, legs tucked in beneath her like she's thirteen not seventeen, lighter in hand. The blue scraped sky is torn free of clouds and little Annie Cresta is holding a cigarette steady in her hand and exhaling smoke as if she's summoning a tempest that Finnick has to walk through, and he does, armed with a crooked grin. It's an awful long way from home, don't you know?
"Odair," Cresta says, looking up, her voice quiet and soft. She stands up and reaches for the hat on his head, places it on herself, and rests it on a slant. He'd almost give her a compliment and say it suited her if he wasn't so attached to the hat in question himself. The tips of her ears poke through the thicket of mouse brown hair, and she smiles at him, sweet as honey. "Thanks, I dropped this."
"Nice try, Cresta." He says, returning the smile since its only good manners. Mags taught him that: smile for the prettiest people in sight, and then almost smile for everyone else. He learnt from the best. "What are you doing here?"
"Lazing about." She replies, sunnily, sitting back down again, her legs returning to the perfect good girl who stays still in church, and looks comfortable in the pews, "Hoping I can keep the hat as a souvenir. We're old friends, aren't we?"
"Haven't you heard? Times are changing and I'm a new man." Finnick says, laughing, and returns the hat back to its rightful place, on fall swoop and his weightless crown rests on his head. Here, he thinks to himself, would be the part where boys would be offering her flowers for mussing up her hair. But he has nothing in his pockets, so a roguish smile will have to do, priceless things, and Finnick has plenty priceless things to give. At the very least, it'll be a better parting gift than last time. "Besides, Cresta, if you want it, you're going to have to do better than that."
Cresta tilts her head, considering. "I'll keep that in mind, Odair."
"So, what. She's your childhood sweetheart or something?" Jo asks, riding shotgun, knees pushed to her chest, elbow resting on the window, after he'd parted ways with Cresta and she'd discarded her previous shirt and tossed it to the backseat. Thirty miles down the road and sky is the same endless void of light blue as it has been years ago. Jo turns her attention away from the scenery to him, curious as a cat.
"Cresta? No. Nothing like that," Finnick says, a crooked grin inching its way onto his face. He's got a multitude of smiles: easy smiles, charming smiles, smiles that he keeps in his back pocket that work for quick fixes and a free bottle of whiskey, smiles that work best flecked with blood and bright white teeth. But his best smile, his favourite kind of smile, is the crooked smile he saves for Jo. "Why, are you jealous, doll?"
She snorts, punches him on the shoulder, hard. "In your dreams, asshole." Her punches tend to leave bruises, tend to ache for days. Jo's always liked leaving marks behind. It's going to kill her one day, and Jo bares her teeth when he tells her that the first time, like she can hardly wait. "Now, let's go rob a bank."
Finnick robs banks for a living. It's perfect, you see. No one suspects the handsome man with the heartthrob smile until they're backed into the corner, eyes wide and staring at the barrel of a gun that's an extension of his arm. Before that, there's the pleasantries of the matters at hand, the casual conversation before the storm, and then the storm happens and the money's in a bag, and Finnick runs, never one to look back. The thrill, there's nothing quite like it.
And, well. He's got to eat.
Jo's a different story all together. Sure, she likes the whiplash action, turning from a coy dame to mean bitch in the span of a second, snatching the money and running, but its murder that she prefers. She's got her own loose ends that she'd like to cut, and making her way all over the country in a map as scattered as dandelion spore with no clear path in mind is one way to do it. But who's to say that she can't have a bit of fun in the meantime?
"Stick with me, Jo," Finnick tells her when they shake on their newfound partnership, "and you'll never be bored."
And if an innocent bystander gets caught in the crossfire, then that's hardly her fault now, is it?
He finds Cresta a month later, in a city at midnight. Or is it the other way around and Cresta finds him, stepping out the shadow and looking older than she's meant to be, with lipstick fresh and bright against the paleness of her face? There's no cigarette this time, but there's still smoke, cloying its way down the speckled strip of light, choked in white moonlight. Cresta emerges from darkness like the smoke has stripped her of everything he thought he knew about little Annie Cresta, left to herself in a field lit by the golden sun.
"Small world," Cresta says with upturned lips, wearing a bowler hat and a scarlet red dress. She doesn't look a thing like the slip of a girl from before, formerly pastel and smeared out by the hues of a dusty sunset, but here in the silhouette of the city and flickering lampposts, she is vibrant and alive and alluring, everything that her parents feared she could be. "What are you doing here, Odair?"
Finnick thinks about leaning in a little too close and crowding her in the back of the alley while there's fresh blood on his shirt before he gives her an answer, curious to see if she'll tremble like she did years ago. Instead, he gives her his classic grin; because it's an ode to the days he was a mere boy and stole only secrets and a packet of cigarettes when people weren't looking. Mags had taught him that, laughed as he got better about the tricks of the trade, then rebuked him when he got a little too good, a little too cocky and reckless, and reminded him that it's a party trick, nothing more.
"You know me," Finnick smiles carelessly, straightening his shoulders, because he's nothing if not honest, if not charming, if not a sucker for making dames dressed in scarlet laugh and take his arm for a midnight stroll. "I like to keep an air of mystery around somehow. I can't tell you all my secrets."
"You never have, Odair." She shrugs, though she smiles as if he's succeeded in charming her for a little while. Her shoulders seem swallowed by the slither of darkness and the silk of her hair. "Only thing I know for sure that you don't look back."
"You make me sound heartless, Cresta." He drawls, eyebrow arching. "I send some real nice postcards from time to time."
"Is that so?" Her voice changes into something low and husky and she takes his arm when he offers it to her, nodding with an appreciative hum, when he asks like a gentleman if he can walk her home, and she grins. "You can tell me all about it."
"It would be my absolute pleasure." Finnick says with a fiendish grin, and flourishes with each half-truth that makes her laugh and laugh, and if she suspects, then she doesn't give anything away. Leaving the countryside has done her some good it seems, he likes this new her.
The first time he meets Jo, there's an axe in her hand. She's someone fierce, alright; jawline set hard, eyes stone cold, shoes long gone. The first time he meets her, he thinks he could travel with someone fierce like her; he thinks he could do well with fierce. Beauty and the beast, and the best part is that they're both.
"What are you looking at?" She snaps and glowers at him, cheeks too thin, her face sharp edges and defiant and daring him to look away while Finnick takes his times sizing her up, replying, "You."
"Tell me," Jo smirks, elbows digging into the mattress, head resting in her hand, three cities away from the fourth time they stumble onto Cresta, and watches him idly put on his suspenders. "Who is Annie Cresta?"
"That's the billion dollar question." Finnick muses, and tries to shift through the acrid smell of smoke and find something more than the sepia coloured memory of a girl he hardly cared to know about even then. He has a collection of rumours about her, sure, but who doesn't? Everyone knew of each other back then, even if they never got to talking, in small towns like theirs. Everyone called each other by their surnames, that's just the way it was, and with Cresta, it's a habit he's never grown out of.
"But you knew her." Jo says, watching him like a city cat toying with a country mouse, and he is running through his mind, running through the corn fields he has spent years trying to forget and locked inside a prison cell. Jo's got her claws in him, and she'll keep that tail dangling between her fingertips as long as it amuses her and she's content to trick him into thinking that he's free. She's lucky he's got a soft spot for her, really. "Didn't you?"
"I gave her a cigarette once." He admits, and remembers that he'd watch her choke and splutter and beat her chest and gave the cigarette back. She wiped her mouth and wrinkled her nose and she'd watched him demonstrate how to it properly because he felt pity for her, and told her it was an art form, an acquired taste. The important thing is to know how it works. He means to tell Jo, I knew her when we were kids. He means to say, I don't know her at all.
Jo looks less than impressed. "That's it?"
"She's a waitress now." He offers, like that's something, free with a winning grin. Cresta had told her that the first time around on the porch. When he saw her again, wrapped in midnight and a sleek red dress, she said that she was still a waitress, working everywhere and anywhere, so long as she could keep on travelling and kissed him sweetly on the cheek because it seemed she was still a good girl, even with midnight hanging over them. "Said she's seeing the world one café at a time."
"Some waitress you got there." Jo deadpans, rolling over so the sheets get more tangled around her, and when she looks at him, her face is turned up, bordering on a catlike grin.
"That's Annie Cresta." The syllables of her name don't seem so pretty and pearl shaped in his mouth any more, like she's waiting to be dissolved in the sea. There's something different and dangerous in the way her name tastes now. She's not the country mouse girl any longer, that's not the image that he dredges up whenever he dreams of home, there's flickers of smoke and fragments of ash, but still little Annie Cresta is wearing a cornflower blue dress. She's always been quiet, oddly muted, then and now, and he can't recall if he's likes that about her, if he's ever liked that about her. "One of a kind." He repeats, and blinks, like he can't shake the words off his mind. Jo pretends that his voice didn't falter.
He doesn't quite believe her when she says those words in the alleyway, but he gives her a goodnight smile and bids her farewell all the same, cheek burning with the warmth of her breath. Cresta watches him go without a word in response, and Finnick feels his eyes on him until he's around the corner and feels spit out by the sewer pipes. He smoothes out his crumpled yellow shirt and calls it a night.
It's surprisingly easy to kill. That more than anything shocks him, money in a bag and sitting beside him, while the music is loud and his heart is racing as he drives out the city. It's not that he's killed someone—
There have been moments before today, dizzy spells that rush his thinking and he feels light-headed because he's still not used to holding a gun comfortably between his fingers, not like a pocketful of marbles. But his fingers have itched before, and he can still talk pretty, like a civilized gentleman with his teeth pulled back, and he's wanted, but no one's been foolish enough to stand up to him, and he hasn't got it in him to be that stupid. Instead they stare petrified, mouths wide open, screams frozen in their throat, as Finnick raises his and demands that they empty their till—
Pulling the trigger is easy, lightning fast, and soon it's going to be a reflex that he can rely on as instinct, he tells himself, hears Mags tell him, even if he's twisting the voice of his conscious into something twisted and bearable. She talks about pickpocketing; he listens as if she's talking about collateral damage, getting caught up in the moment. Point and shoot, he'll barely have to think about it when the next person stands up to fight and argue for their life when he's trying to make a getaway and the rush of adrenaline propels him forward and lightens the weight of the gun.
It's only going to get easier, he thinks light-headedly, and laughs to himself, alone in his car, because he's done it.
He gets arrested sometimes. Finnick's still a work in progress at making himself a self-made man. Sometimes he can talk pretty and charm them to let him go, other times the devil takes his luck. But Finnick learns, wisens up eventually, and when he takes a new suit that he likes the style plenty, figures that it's best to get himself a partner.
"Johanna Mason," She says, the second time Finnick meets her, a week later, knuckles raw and wiped clean of blood. She's still armed with that axe that will become fixed underneath the seat of their car, and even later Finnick will learn that's not the only weapon she keeps with her at all times. There's a knife in her boot and attached to her hip and she uses them as easily as spreading melted butter on toast. There's no hesitation when she fires. "You are?"
"Finnick Odair," He answers, tipping his hat, a crooked smile at the ready.
"You going to buy me a drink?" Johanna asks, words sharp and sliced thin from the hollow of her throat. Her lip is split, but she still smiles with her teeth washed red, determined to scare him away.
Finnick offers his hand next, waiting for her to take it. "Depends." He says, with hands of a gentlemen thief, picking pockets one sleight of hand a time, and murdering them in cold blood if they've done something special to piss him off. He's charmed by her, really. He'll blame the bluntness of her personality, if she asks, tell her that the sweltering sun made his mind seem drowned in syrup and honey and her voice rings clear through like a coherent thought. His grin widens, slightly more crooked than before. "Are you going to rob a liquor store with me?"
Finnick has a plan, you see. He's the kind of guy who figures it out in finger snapping quick decisions, the intricate details left to chance alone. He doesn't make perfect plans, he's a gambling man, a grafter, a petty thief down to his bones, and he prefers to traipse knife-edge on danger. It's more fun that way, really, and Finnick finds that it's better to figure it out like sand moving down an hourglass, thriving as he works under pressure.
He has a plan. Simply put: he likes to take things that aren't his, and he likes it best at gunpoint and with an effortless heartthrob smile that not even his reflection can resist.
"Sure," Johanna Mason laughs, and takes his hand, squeezes hard enough to make it hurt, and there's something like relief on her face when she realizes that it's not enough to make him back away, a lazy kind of grin that seems a bit like sunlight caught in a razorblade, a kindred spirit for the endless dirt road. "I'll rob a liquor store with you, Finnick Odair."
Nine months down the line, and the seventh time Finnick sees Cresta, she's running for her life with money in one hand and a gun in the other. He watches her get into the car and command the other guy to drive as fast as he can, and he blinks, and smiling before he even realizes it. That's Annie Cresta, sweetest thing alive with a penchant for cigarettes and now she's robbing banks.
Jo elbows him; voice flat, mouth twitching into an affectionate smile, the edges sharp as a dagger. "Some waitress you got there."
They meet for the first time face to face in the middle of summer, when Finnick is sixteen and Annie Cresta is thirteen, and he offers her a cigarette, not expecting her to accept. He doesn't expect to find her hiding in a field of corn either, round apple cheeks red and ruddy, and doesn't have the decency to pretend that he'd caught her fresh from a rainstorm when it's been clear skies all day.
"You're Cresta, aren't you?" Finnick asks without wanting to hear the answer, and little Annie Cresta scrambles to her feet, smoothing out the creases of her cornflower blue dress and stamping the blades of grass off her plain black shoes. "You ever smoked one of these before?" She shakes her head furiously, and he doesn't know why he thought she'd reply any differently. "'Course you haven't." He says, and smiles gently at her. "It's nothing to be ashamed about."
She watches him warily, like she's trying to remember every whisper that's been said about him behind his back. Finnick Odair, the golden child, the boy who believes he's meant for better things. He's a big fish in a small pond, don't you know, and he smiles like an angel and steals your heart twice as fast. Finnick Odair kisses all the pretty girls who look his way. He's heard them all. Finnick Odair will kiss anyone if they're willing to give him a secret in return, but he promises that he won't tell people where.
It's not like little Annie Cresta doesn't have whispers behind her back. Even country mice like her cast shadows against the sun. They're spoken softer, true, but Finnick listens well enough to pick up on them. Some of them, at least. He's heard the rumour about her voice being as sweet as honey, the rumour about how she studies hard in class and reads books only on stairs and the rumour about how she used to love the sea. There was a rumour when she was six-and-three-quarters that she announced in class that she wanted to be a mermaid, a siren's song, a creature of the ocean, something along those lines, and everyone laughed, because little Cresta was sweet. She turned real quiet after that, so the rumours said.
"It's an acquired taste." Finnick says, taking a lighter out of his pocket and flicks it open. It's an old habit of his, to swipe things when his dad's not looking, he'll take it and do more, he'll stuff his pockets full of unwanted things, bury his shoes in secrets and won't say a damn thing about it. "But you get used to it quick enough."
"I want to try." Cresta says, and it's the first thing she speaks, the first thing that makes her interesting to him, tearing herself down from the pedestal that everyone puts her on, outstretching her hands like she's determined to prove them wrong.
But then she coughs, beating her chest and shaking her head like she can't stand the taste, she won't do it again, she's a good girl through and through, and they'll never talk again. Finnick would be disappointed if he had actually cared, if this wasn't something to pass the time and further his own amusement.
He knows all about good girl Annie Cresta, you see, he knows the rumours about her are true. There's not much to her to know that she won't be doing this again.
Still, he cares enough to take the cigarette back, roll it between his fingers and show her how it's done. Why waste a good thing?
After all, even after he leaves her, the little Cresta will smell of smoke and the smoke will cling to her, and that'll be something tarnishing to her good name, at least.
It's amazing how many people don't take him at his words when he admits that he robs banks for a living, when he smiles at them and says that it pays the bills. Men laugh, nodding, agreeing that robbing banks would do just the trick. Broads smile coquettishly, lean in a little closer and ask him to tell them something else, to show them the tricks of their trade, and he does. He does. He takes them outside and shows them how virtue is lost against the grime of the walls, shows them how it never tastes better pressed between his fingers and thumb.
Jo believes him though, she rolls her eyes and tells him to keep on driving, slouching in passenger seat and absentmindedly kicks the bags of money in front of her. She tells him to keep driving, and to shut the hell up, in best possible way.
"How is it that waitress of yours manages to get into the paper before us?" Jo asks him while he fries breakfast, tossing a newspaper towards him and it stays there on the table until the eggs and bacon are done.
"Not my waitress, Jo." Finnick says absentmindedly, paying her no mind. When he skims the paper at last, he's less than impressed. He lifts his eyes to meet hers, while she devours breakfast with a smile. "This could be talking about anyone."
"Who else is it going to be?" Jo huffs, and reads it aloud. "A petite brown haired woman, young, in their twenties, occasionally accompanied by an attractive young man?"
"Are you saying I'm not an attractive young man?" Finnick quips at her, and Jo laughs and laughs and laughs until she gives him a pitying look, won't take any of his crap. "Finn, that's exactly what I'm saying."
Here's the thing about Jo and Finnick and the dirt ridden road they travel on, the dried blood mistaken for mud on their shoes: they don't always travel together as they head towards the sun setting horizon. They travel separately from time to time, committing their various crimes of the heart and meet up sooner or later in the next town, or the town after that. Jo lives for a life of excitement, and while Finnick promised her that, sometimes she just wants to go her own way for a while. She'll spend a week in a city by herself because there's a cute boy that's caught her eye and there's nothing more she wants to do than eat him up and spit him out, slitting his throat with the curve of her axe.
It's easier, Jo tells Finnick, wiping the blade clean, when they think I'm some innocent dame, all by herself, and waiting for some fella to sweep her off her feet.
The tenth time he runs into Cresta, she's wearing one of those cute beret hats and she's eating ice cream out in the sun.
"Odair." She says, lips stretching into a smile, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, and there's something a little whiskey soaked in the way she pronounces his name that reminds him of home. "Fancy seeing you here."
"Don't you know?" He grins humourlessly, perspiring under the sun, "I'm a man on the run."
She takes another bite, weighing her words before speaking again. Finnick sits beside her and wonders what happened to her partner-in-crime, if there's an arrangement similar to his and Jo's. Wonders if he's off on a murder spree, just like Jo is, gone for the week, back soon. He looks at the watch on her wrist, glinting silver, and makes a note to ask where'd she went to take something as nice looking as that.
"Aren't you always?"
He grins again, and it does not feel like a smile, lips taut against his teeth. "Usually I have company."
"So you do." Cresta nods, agreeing, before glancing around. "And where is the lovely Jo?"
"Finding a few patsies downtown. Told me it might take a few days." He shrugs, and takes a seat beside her. "But I could make it worth your while, Annie."
"Cresta." She corrects, and he repeats with a deprecating shrug, head downcast momentarily, and sees her eying his hat with a magpie's gleam.
"I should have known." Finnick grins, placing the fedora from his head to his heart, always out of reach. "Try again."
Some of the rumours stick to Finnick wherever he goes. They stay true no matter where he is. He kisses people in exchange for secrets. He sleeps with them if the secret's good enough for the taking. It's part of the plan, you see, the story that he weaves around himself like a second hand coat, changing it at will when the next secret comes along, his mouth wine red and heady and pleasant, and the pistol in his hand is hot, hot, hot. He's a farmer fresh out of luck, a preacher who can't stop staring at the stars and sleeping in gutters, he's a man who fucks the motel owner's wife because she has brown hair that looks almost red in the sun. He takes their secrets out of town and threads them into the fabric of his well-worn suit. He takes their secrets and changes their truths into lies. He takes their secrets and sets them slightly crooked and they become part of his collection of easy smiles that will make any stranger like him well enough for five minutes. Really, five minutes is all he needs to set the scene.
Cresta, when she decides to run with him, with Jo, Cresta with her sweet face, remains quiet as a mouse and keeps the face of the good girl everyone thinks she is. She wears her best Sunday smile and fixes it on her face as if she's fixing the tie against his neck and pretending it's a noose. She wears her sweetest smile, and throws it away like an angel discarding their halo when the time is right, and polishes her gun and lets it shine silver instead.
"We rob banks for a living." Jo tells Cresta bluntly, the eighth time they meet, and hands her a bottle of beer, wetting her lips before she tips her head back and drinks her own bottle. "Rumour has it, Annie Cresta, so you do."
"I prefer to start fires." Cresta admits, opening a pack of cigarettes and lights one like she's showing them that all she needs is in her hands. She keeps the cigarette burning bright between her fingertips as if she craves the heat of the flame, darkening to ash before she crushes it against the heel of her shoes. She lights another one. "But robbing banks suits me just fine."
"The more the merrier." Finnick grins, and Jo's eyes dart to him like a warning, like that's not an actual invitation, Finn, come on, and its fine, he swears to her later. It'll be fine.
"The problem isn't me, Finn. It's you." Jo snarls, eyes narrowed and angry, as she spits expletives at him, her voice low and harsh, her fist grabbing his shirt. "I'm not the one who's dizzy with a dame, am I?"
"I'm not." Finnick murmurs, slowly placing his hands on her shoulders, saying nothing about how her grip tightens as she pulls on the fabric. "Jo—"
"No fucking about! We shook on it." She says, and it's the first time he hears worry in her voice, hears the sound of broken glass, and the rasp to her voice as she tries to hide it and hits him with her other fist. "You said it's not going to be an issue."
"It's not!" He says, and tries to sound calm. "I can handle it."
"Then don't fuck it up." Jo mutters, and loosens her hold on him, trying to be very still. Finnick doesn't move, not until he finds the right words, and he lets her hit him with a twisted smile afterwards, and he doesn't mind. "Aw baby doll, don't you know you're the best I ever had?"
Annie Cresta, Finnick learns, is the kind of girl who blows kisses in the air when she waves goodbye and swaggers with a gun at her hip and when she's feeling particularly happy, she'll set people on fire. Mostly, though, she'll just shoot them in the gut, in the shoulder, in the head, because it's quicker, and she'll do it with the sweetest smile on her face and watch their blood spread across the floor.
Jo takes to Cresta sooner than he thought she would. It took months for Finnick and Jo to settle into a routine, to know each other as well as they do and become accustomed to each other in sickness and healthy, but Annie slips in when neither of them are looking, and it's like she was there all along, more than tumbleweed and a ghost that Finnick had thought he could leave behind, intruding at important points just to integrate well enough to make the transition permanent. When he falls asleep one afternoon, he wakes up and sees them laughing and talking together, Jo wearing his suit and Cresta wearing Jo's dress. He can smell cake in the air. Suffice to say that Finnick wakes up confused.
The cake tastes good, and Jo starts taking pot-shots at Cresta, the same way she does to him. It's home.
The third time he meets Cresta, Cresta with a gun in her purse, Cresta resting under the shade and tucking her legs neat and slanting and sitting like a lady, smoking her cigarette like it's the most elegant and fashionable thing in the world, he introduces Jo.
"I hear those things will kill you." Jo says, callous and brusque, her voice a feral growl. It's her way of saying hello.
"That's what I'm counting on." Cresta replies with a grin, leaning back and letting the sun drench her in light, letting the shadow obscure her once more, and she tilts her head, musing what to say next. "You want to make it a race?" She asks, offering.
Jo laughs, turns back to look at him, and Finnick rolls his eyes and takes a cigarette and puts it in his mouth, then swipes the lighter from her hands, and lights it then and there.
"Nice to see you got yourself a sense of humour, Cresta."
"Annie," Cresta says, and extends her hand, which Jo takes with a fiendish smile. "Call me Annie."
"Alright, Annie." Jo glances at Finnick, irrepressibly smug, and Finnick rolls his eyes in response. "You can call me Jo."
They're an unholy trinity of some kind. Finnick robs banks. Jo kills people. Annie starts fires. They swap roles from time to time, flexible with the crimes they make, just because they can. They smile sweetly at strangers, the man in the neat suit, the woman whose eyes are hidden behind circular black sunglasses and the lady with her ever growing hat collection. It's all part of the plan.
It's Cresta's idea.
"People will be looking for a man and a woman travelling together." She says evenly, and her eyes rest on Finnick's favourite hat for just a second too long. The corners of her mouth twitch when he catches her, silent laughter reflected beneath her eyelashes, and he indulges her with a smile before shaking his head. "So, let's give them something they're not expecting."
He hands her his coat and it clicks suddenly, Jo wearing his clothes, Annie tying her hair up and pinning neatly underneath her bowler hat: it's a performance, something that will give them another thrill, because people will be expecting something else entirely. People won't be looking for someone who wears his clothes. They won't notice how they are entirely too big and slick against her frame, and yet appreciate the edge it gives them.
"We could always do with robbing a clothes shop." Jo agrees, and pulls at the suspenders hanging over her shoulders, wriggles one of them off, and the sight makes her grin, how it hangs loosely over her leg. "Sounds like fun, doesn't it?"
"You're something else, Cresta." Finnick says, and Cresta smiles for real this time, the perfect criminal who plots and schemes and pilfers without anyone's notice, oblivious to the way his heart stutters in the way it's not supposed to, and says, "Didn't I tell you? I'm one of a kind."
Finnick leaves town when he's seventeen, and Cresta's right, he doesn't look back. He's meant for bigger, better things, you see. But there's nothing left for him there, you see, certainly nothing that warrants a postcard. Mags had died long ago.
"So, tell me, Annie," Jo says, a month later, fresh out of the shower, towel clad as she makes her way to the cupboard, "What's your story?"
It's not like her to pry, but Cresta doesn't seem to mind, a rueful smile flickering on her face for a second. It's one of the many secrets that Finnick cannot steal; an unspoken rule between all three of them; glistened in iron and bouncing off sunlight of her gun's best bullet, and her mouth, lush and red, is curving into a parody of smile.
"There's not much to it. I wasn't the good girl everyone thought I was." She shrugs, opening up a window, and pulls out a cigarette, lights it, looks back with a grimace. "Turns out bad things happen when you catch the preacher's daughter smoking." She breathes out smoke, and doesn't move for a long time, staring at nothing. Her chest rises after a moment, remembering how to inhale, and she directs her gaze to Jo, and just like that, Cresta continues. "And then I met a man and wanted his hat."
There's a cruel twist to the way his teeth widen, the way something flickers in his gut whenever Cresta insinuates him in her past to the life of being a criminal that leaves him slightly uneasy. "How's that going for you?"
He can feel Jo's eyes on him, lingering. Then she turns away, changing into her most elegant clothes. He's promised to take her out to dinner tonight.
"I set him on fire, Odair; it's a habit of mine." Cresta laughs, brilliant and twisting in streaks of sunlight, and her hair looks like burnt sienna, sifting across the nape of her neck and slipping into the collar of her oversized shirt. She rests her palms on the windowsill, leaning back as she smirks particularly shark-like in the way she catches him off-guard. "But it's alright," Cresta muses softly, glancing at her shoes, "there are other hats I've yet to collect."
"I'm onto you, Cresta," Finnick says to Cresta in the hallway and she smiles like that's exactly what she's been aiming for all along.
The kiss takes him completely by surprise.
It's sweet and soaked in whisky, tastes of smoke, swift as a dagger, and sweet Annie Cresta, grabs him by his lapels, tugging him towards her and presses against him in the alley until he's certain that she's spun him into a corner and shoved him against the wall. His shoulder blades dig into the wall and he makes a noise without meaning to, some sort of strangled plea scraped from the back of his throat.
She kisses him again, standing on her tiptoes and winding her arms around his back, fingers curling into his neck and getting caught in the tangles of his unruly hair that no hat, no matter how many Finnick takes, can hide.
Cresta feels delicate in his hands, tiny and pistol-sharp and knife-quick, and it takes a second for Finnick to kiss back, pulling her closer, before realizing this is a distraction.
"Hey, Odair, hey," Cresta murmurs, her nose bumping into his, breath is low and warm and close, "don't forget to put on a show, okay?"
The police are coming, and if necking in open daylight like a pair of crazy kids won't make people look away, then Finnick doesn't know what will.
The damndest thing about it is that it works.
"You're a stupid fucking idiot, Finn." Jo scowls, striking a match. "You know that, right?"
"It's not like that." He insists, and she laughs, like she's hollowed out and tired of this bullshit, of watching him watch Annie Cresta and then doing nothing about it while something ugly twists in his gut. "Jo."
She lights a cigarette and stubs it onto the ground. She's carrying a pair of high heels in her other hand. Her face twists into something like disgust, because who is he trying to fool. "You used to be a better liar."
There are cupcakes on the counter. Cresta's present to them.
"It's not going to be a problem." Finnick says, sounding a little rough, and Jo takes a good look at him, looks at him long and hard and says nothing until she wets her lips and shoves his shoulder and hopes to god that she's left a mark against his stubborn self and that which he calls a heart, a muscle that meant to pump blood and watch it spill onto Jo's reckless axe.
"Yeah, keep telling yourself that." Jo spits, completely unconvinced.
He gets careless. He gets shot. Cresta is screaming in his ear, tugging him forward by strength Finnick didn't know she had, fisting the front of his shirt and dragging him towards the car, murmuring to him softly that there's a few more steps to go, and Finnick has enough willpower not to wince as he feels the pain increase, Finnick has enough willpower to grit his teeth and launch himself into the car, while Jo drives as fast as she can the second Cresta slams the door shut.
"You're going to be alright, Odair." Cresta tells him, and she's tearing strips of her dress and messily handing it to him, like that will do the trick, like that will do stop death itself. "You're not going to die today."
"That a promise, Cresta?" Finnick replies, the words out before he realizes and it makes him giggle. He's shot and he's bickering and driving off again, and this is what happens to crooks when the innocent folk get tired of being afraid, they start to fight back. He giggles hysterically and pushes harder on the fabric, and no one cares that the dull grey is turning red, red, red. "Going to swear on it?"
"Cross my heart and everything." Cresta replies, flatly, pressing her lips into a thin line, and she thinks, looking at him, staring at the wound, the blood on his shirt, she watches how it spreads. "That guy couldn't shoot his way out of a paper bag."
"He shot me, Cresta." He mutters, and part of him is desperate for booze, part of him is shaking and clenching his ribs and not sure how he's going to endure through the pain. "I got shot."
"At least it wasn't your face." Jo snarls, eyes harsh in the mirror, while she stares determinedly at the road in front of them, "that would have been a real tragedy."
"Fuck you, Jo!" He shouts, and then his vision goes dark.
There are fingers snapping next to his ear, loud and clear and ringing pressure between his eyes and Cresta watches him, expressionless and still, stopping only when he looks at her and can't find it in himself to say a word.
She says very quietly. "You're not going to die, Odair."
There are scars all over his body. This will not be the first, nor will it be the last. Turning to crime mars both soul and body, so they say, and while Finnick can't speak for the soul, he can speak for his body and say to anyone who cares to strip of him of his clothes that he's had scars before. He's broken his bones before too. It's not injuries were unexpected. He's gotten hurt many times, but this will be the first with a bullet. The last time he killed a man he broke his nose because the man couldn't stop scrabbling about and when there was a sickening punch, Finnick grinned and tasted blood in his mouth, straightened his tie and cracked a joke about nosebleeds in autumn as he left the bathroom emptying the dead man's wallet. Jo leaves plenty enough bruises and most of them, he's pretty sure is just her version of telling him he's an idiot in Morse code. He's had strangers in bars absentmindedly pick at scabs on his wrist and press into the wound with their painted nails because he likes the way it reminds him that this can only be a fleeting moment.
Cresta takes the bullet out, and it hurts to breathe, each time he's wheezing slightly and they're all pretending that they can't hear it, the catch to his breath, but he'll live, is the thing. He'll sleep for a week and pretend its rest that he needs, and he'll live. He'll live.
"I was right, though," Cresta murmurs to Jo, as Finnick drowses off to sleep, and only catches the beginning of the conversation, "he was a terrible shot. If it was you or me, we wouldn't have missed."
"You're not completely useless, Finnick." Jo tells him, after. She sits on the bed, wet hair sticking out at odd angles, and if he's not mistaken, he'd almost take her for grinning. "At least you've got a story this time around when someone asks you how you got that scar."
"Is that the plan?" Cresta says, entering through the open doorway, suitcase packed, blue hairband sitting pretty above brushed hair. The tap's still running, Finnick can hear the water dripping every once in a while.
Jo straightens her shoulders, pushes her body off the bed with her palms flat against the mattress, and looks at Cresta wickedly, eyes bright. "Depends if you're the one asking."
"Ah." Cresta's lips shine, plush and ruby red. "Well then. I'm asking."
He smiles roguishly, and unbuttons the first few at the top of his shirt, stopping midway and waits for their encouragement, waits for them to ogle at the finest specimen they've ever seen. Who else but him wears such a lascivious grin, and is shameless for more attention?
Jo rolls her eyes, but Cresta's gaze never strays.
His finger stills on the next button, and with a playful grin, says, "You'd have to buy me a drink first, if you want to hear it that badly, Cresta."
Turnabout, Finnick figures, is fair play, and kisses Cresta in the middle of a daylight robbery. He's recovered enough to live recklessly again.
He takes her hand while they run, while they are giggling and giggling, adrenaline rushing through his veins, and then he twists and moulds his body around her frame. Their teeth clack together, sounding like silver cuffs, and Cresta—Annie, Annie—opens her mouth, and pulls him closer, pulls on his suspender and lets it go. The pain barely registers, but it's sharp enough to alert him to the fact that they should be running instead.
Cresta's grinning though, a good sign at least, tapping his shoulder with the tip of her pistol, mouthing a later and reaffirms the bowler hat on her head.
Finnick nods, starts running. Cresta follows.
Jo knows instantly, taking it from the goofy look on his face, while she waits in the car and watches them approach. She tells them with a wry grin on her face that it means that it's high time for her to leave. Permanently, it seems. It'll throw the police off their case, buy them a little more time, and she's thought about laying low for a while now.
"I've gotta make my own way somehow," Jo says, flashing Finn a particularly nasty grin, and she's just as fierce and vibrant as the first time Finnick met her, broken glass and blood drying on her dress. "You can keep the axe, Annie. Call it a wedding present."
"Never would have taken you for a semantic." Cresta murmurs, reclining against the back seat, head downcast while she takes an unlit cigarette out of her coat and places it in her mouth. Jo snorts. "I'm not, I thought it was obvious that you two need as much help as you can get."
Jo leaves when they reach the next city, half of their cash packet in a suitcase, and bares her teeth into a menacing sneer, when she says that they should look up someone called Haymitch, vaguely familiar. "I'll keep an eye on you two in the paper."
"If you miss us too much, you can always rob a bank or two, set a house on fire, the standard things." Finnick smirks, as close as he'll get to saying goodbye.
It earns him an extra hard punch, and the last crooked grin he gives her doesn't waver for a second.
"Aw, baby doll," Jo kisses his cheek, and her nails dig into the back of his neck one final time as she embraces him, and laughingly tells him, "don't you know I'm the best you've ever had?"
It's easier to pretend that they're husband and wife that night when they book themselves into the motel. He kisses her cheek, and lets Cresta take the keys, smiling serenely as she gaze catalogues the rest of the room, when she blushes and looks away and the metal owner mistakes her as shy. Finnick places his arm around her waist, and she leans into him, and no one could doubt them of their class act of looking like a pair of freshly turned newlyweds.
"What's the plan?" Cresta murmurs, crawling into the bed beside him, shifting as her hair falls over her face. "What's going to happen next?"
And, well. Isn't that the billion dollar question?
"I'll figure it out in the morning, Cresta." He murmurs, and yawns, sliding his arm under the pillow. He's used to this, sleeping on the same bed with someone beside him. Just because it's Cresta doesn't make him nervous, mostly because he's tired.
"Annie." She says, sleepily, and he almost doesn't hear her.
Finnick nods, drowsy, heavy eyelids drooping, repeating, sleep-slurred, "Annie."
He's used to taking secrets. It's a natural progression from there to taking kisses to taking money to taking lives. When he thinks about it, there wasn't enough to take and he's been greedy all his life, eager to take more. There wasn't enough in a town where everyone knew his name; there wasn't enough for him to make him stay in one place. No wonder he ended up a criminal.
Annie Cresta, though, he muses as he looks at her, sleeping beside him in the bed, her story is still a mystery.
The day after, he takes her to the sea.
"Thought we could lay low for a while, Cresta." He grins, steadying the fedora on his head, while flyaway strands of mouse brown hair are snatched away by the breeze, and Cresta is too busy staring at the glitter of blue and green waves to pay him any attention. "How does that sound?"
"I could do with some sun," She agrees, wry, hands buried in her pockets of her coat. "And you calling me Annie."
"If all it took was a kiss, I should have done it sooner." Finnick comments lightly, and keeps his eyes fixed on the glittering night lit sea. All the sea needs now is smoke, the light of the moon, and the decay of a cigarette burning at his fingertips. Annie Cresta is by his side.
"I gave you a hint." Annie Cresta says, mildly, eyes smiling, as she looks up at him, "I did kiss you first."
"Cresta," Finnick says, twisting his body towards her while she stands within reach, "You told me that was a distraction."
She shrugs, slips her hands out of her pockets, and looks at him with an impish expression. "So I did. It's not my fault you weren't paying attention. After all, didn't you say that you were onto me?"
"I might've said that," Finnick agrees, thumb tracing the shape of her jaw, and raises her head slightly, meets her mouth and kisses her, once, twice, again and again, and sighs happily when he runs his hands through her hair. "Might've been lying."
"Careful, now." Cresta says, but she's smiling, while the horizon is the darkest shade of blue, and the breeze is salty and sweet. "You know what they say about crooks, Finnick."
"What do they say?" Finnick asks, and Annie smiles and pulls at the folds of his coat, tugging him down, and the answer is there, Finnick is sure, in the sweep of laughter that begins at her throat.
He books their stay at the motel for a week, and considers a day later that maybe they should stay there a while longer. Take a break; enjoy the sea for what it's worth. He spends most of his time buying new clothes, pretty new dresses for Annie, finds her a floppy yellow hat that she gleefully places on her head, and she grins, a cat that's got the cream, knee-deep in the sparkling ocean.
There's salt on her skin, and sugar on his, and Finnick bites down at the curve of her shoulder, licks a long stripe up her neck, and Cresta squeaks, trembling as his hand turns flat on her stomach, trying to map the curve of her ribs and capture the rising push of her stomach, and she squirms, pulling his head down so that their lips touch, and she wipes the sugar off his mouth with her tongue.
"Look at you," Finnick murmurs; slipping his fingers in one smooth motion, "what would everyone say if they saw you now?"
Her eyelashes flutter, arching her spine as she lifts off the bed, and Finnick attends to holding down her hip with his left hand, and watches her bite her lip.
"I—I'd put a bullet through their head." Annie hums, rutting against his leg, and he kisses the inside of her bony wrist and she gasps: a broken hitch of air that sends the blood rushing down his chest, lower—"tell 'em that I'm a little busy at the moment."
"And after?" He murmurs, and gods, he just needs to listen to her talk, just hear the sound of her voice a little longer before he sees nothing but white. "If you miss."
"I don't miss, Odair." She mutters, and her entire body shudders towards him as he crooks his fingers. "But if I did—oh."
"Like that?" Finnick smiles, just as Annie stills, slack and leaning against him.
"I'd tell them to put their hands up." She says, breathless, and she looks at him, heavy-lidded and voice huskier than it normally is, and. "Tell 'em to empty their pockets, shout this is a holdup." She hoists her body up and bumps noses, then lips with him, her aim a little off-centre. Her hands curl around him, and he grunts, her thumb circling until there is nothing left to do but fall apart. "Something like that."
"What happened to you?" Finnick asks, and maybe it's the question he should have asked at the beginning, when he saw her on that front porch on that hot spring day, before he could have predicted any of this, and thought her still the quietest country mouse in the town that he left behind.
Beneath the strands of soft brown hair, he sees a rueful grin, sharp teeth glinting across a streak of murder red.
"I found the right kind of spark."
There's a lot that Finnick doesn't ask Annie. He doesn't ask who taught her to fire a gun, he doesn't ask how she became this person, he doesn't ask how she learnt to love the brightness of fires and kiss so sinfully sweet. He showers her neck in kisses instead, sinking to his knees and slips between her thighs, and falls deeper in love with her.
He buys her a derringer as a birthday gift, and it's delightfully romantic, watching her hook her favourite kind of gun to her garter, and she fucks him, her legs wrapped around his waist.
Annie straddles him, his shirt unbuttoned on her, the gun hanging lazily in her garter belt, and her expression curves into something like mischief as she dips her hand under the waistband of his pants. He makes a desperate noise then, heat flushing through his cheeks, but he's too heady to care as he comes, spilling over her hand.
They're the kind to go out with a bang. There's no getting away from in their kind of life style, and someone is bound to recognise them someday, living in the shadows, happy and in love be damned. But then again, that's part of the plan. That's the cross on the treasure map, and the destination is scattered in unchartered regions, but death is coming, soon but sweet, Finnick is certain of that.
Annie sleeps, curls of hair splayed over the pillow, soft dying sunlight falling over her face, and Finnick wonders how this can end—if it can possibly end with him and her and sunset of wildfire.
When he wakes, there's a beauty and cruelty visible in sharp angles of her face that he's never noticed before, there's a coldness and callousness in the way she looks at him, and grins. She wears his favourite black hat on her head, and he'd take it back, were the derringer in her hand pressed under his chin: a cold leaded kiss.
"Looking good, Cresta." He murmurs, and stares at her, defiant as it presses deeper into his skin; teeth marks yet to fade away under the bruise of her kiss. He laughs slightly, impressed. She's a better crook than he thought. Turns out he's underestimated her, yet again. "Was this your plan all along?"
"Might've been once." Cresta answers with a crooked smile. He recognises it as his own. That's his smile on her face, and it suits her well, the sharp angles lit by dawn. He shouldn't be charmed by the sweetness of her voice, his smile on her face, but he is. He's seen her set fire to corn fields and haystacks and pieces of paper that contain scribbled out words. He's seen her flick a lighter so many times that he knows it is part of her boredom routine, things she won't say out loud, but he's picked up on all the same. "I've done worse things."
She uncocks the safety of her gun.
Finnick holds his breath. Keeps his eyes on her, and feels the air rush out of his lungs when he hears her finger pulls the trigger.
It's empty.
"I changed my mind, though." She murmurs, the muzzle of her gun tracing the curve of his throat, sweeping downwards like a butterfly's kiss, and it stops, resting upon his collarbone. The cold spark of metal leaves it's trace, and he can feel the path on his skin until Annie presses her mouth against his, dimples dancing, and Finnick loses himself in the sweetest kiss, heart hammering so fast. "I have to keep you on your toes, somehow."
"Just for that, Annie, you can keep the hat." He says, cupping her face in his hands, and she dissolves into laughter, the derringer in her hand still pushed into his chest. The quiet country mouse surprised them all, surpassed anything he could have imagined for her, and she's never been more beautiful in the dawn streaked morning, wielding his life in her hands. The realization leaves him breathless, though he could not say why.
"Just for that, Finn, I think I'll stick around for a while longer." Annie hums, tilting her hat up with her gun until it reaches the perfect angle. Her eyes meet his, smirking as her heated gaze leaves his mouth dry, and his body betraying him at the best time, insistent against her thigh.
"The beach is nice." He says casually, doesn't say that he's thinking up a plan as they speak, doesn't state that he misses the thrill of a heist and unclean getaways, or the wads of cash stuffed deep in his pocket. When Annie agrees, she understands. There are more important matters at hand.
"I start fires." Cresta says, wearing Finnick's best clothes, a red shirt tucked neatly beneath a black waistcoat and plaid trousers. They are clothes that are much too big on her, but she always smirks when he comments about it, never a complaint, if he's being honest. He likes her clothes on her, and likes taking them off even better.
"I start fires," Annie says, and tells it to a stranger like she's telling a joke, her ruby mouth waxy and bright and cheerful. It's something to do, dancing on the edge of danger while they're waiting for the right person to walk through the door with a confident swagger. Saying it a second time makes her sound drunker than she really is, and there's much less of a chance having people take her seriously.
"I see." The bartender says, pouring himself another drink, unable to see the secret etched deep in her shadow, or the blood in Finnick's mouth, flecked across his face like a bad shaving accident. He directs his attention to Finnick, watches him in a careful, measured way, the way that crooks and criminals recognize one another and remains unacknowledged between them. There's something familiar about him, though Finnick can't place a name to the face, just yet. He sounds weary, none-too-impressed, expecting a better answer from him. "And what do you do?"
"Me?" Finnick beams, and it's beatific, one of his best smiles yet, serving only to incense. "I rob banks."
"I see." He nods, frowning, voice low and grumbling. Then he sighs, like he's heard it before: the ramblings of two drunkards, but he's got no choice to indulge them and listen to what they have to say, like it or not. At least until Jo arrives with her manic grin and sharp edged wit. "You're quite the pair, aren't you?"
Haymitch, it turns out, is the bartender, and he hates them all.