A/N: Important! This is now officially AU! Therefore, bear in mind that medea!Finnick was not pimped out as I began this story before MJ's release. If you don't recall what Finnick was piddling around in the Capitol for, re-read chapters 1&2.
The original chapter 7 is in shambles. Fortunately, the original chapter eight works just as well, if not better this way. So, here it is. Thanks to Ceylon205 for beta! And Geeky for going over each draft with me and providing a creative crutch. We are taking a step back in the timeline - huzzah for flashbacks. I didn't italicize it this time because it's a lot of text and I know I have a hard time reading it that way.
Chapter Seven
The Planets Bend Between Us
The shells crack under our shoes
Like punctuation points
The planets bend between us
A hundred million suns and stars
The sea filled in this silence
Before you sang those words
And now even in the darkness
I can see how happy you are, Snow Patrol
Annie's POV
Abel and I arrived in the Capitol three weeks ago. I have slept through most of it. When I wake up, I am alone unless I have to see Dr. Celsus. On the nights when the medication wears off early, I lie awake in my bed, staring up at the ceiling of my bedroom in the Training Center. The pills force me to relax or fall asleep, but when the drugs leave my system, I am robbed of both. My restless fingers have frayed the silky edge of my pillowcase from hours of rubbing the silky material between them. Pacing makes me dizzy, so I stay curled up in the sheets.
Sometimes I curl up with a pillow and pretend it's Finnick. I imagine that we're together in his bed again, or in Mags's cave. Sometimes I imagine that it's years from now and there's a baby with red-gold curls until it makes me ache with loss for something I never had.
Then there are the memories of home. I spent time by myself there, too. When Mags and Finnick, and later Marina and Finnick, left for the Games or tours, I would visit the waterside. Especially in the beginning when the flashbacks were particularly bothersome and I had no one to help me. The sea filled in the silence of the empty mansions. I conquered the water, so it didn't threaten me anymore. Finnick noticed that first and told me I should spend more time at the beach to remind myself.
Small victories.
I fill my nights with memories of the last five years. If my mind defaults to the past, why not get stuck in a good piece of it for once? Grey pre-dawn light filters in through the windows of my bedroom. My fingers skim over my lips slowly as a memory comes to the surface of a vast pool of images. The night I received my first kiss. I picture it from different angles, prolonging the memory, until the night ends. I try to enjoy the dark moments of clarity before the light brings Dr. Celsus and a haze of pills and words.
The early winter of Year 71...
The waves roll in flat sheets today, barely crawling over the pebbly beach. It's safe enough to climb the natural causeway extending beyond the cove. Shells crack under my boots; I hear them just above the crashing surf. Layers of thick, wool socks pinch my toes within my old, green galoshes, but also hold in the warmth. I slip a little on the slick, uneven rocks piled on each other like a heap of broken teeth.
Sea spray chills my face, I feel the coarse saltiness of it encrusting my cheeks. Three sweaters and my parka help to block the northern wind when the cove walls no longer protect the very edge of the causeway.
Around my feet, little hatches and tidal pools are filled with barnacles, dead seaweed and tiny crabs who missed the tide. Ships pass in the distance, some won't return for months. They'll bear a season's worth of snow crab when they do. I like watching the waves leaping over one another beneath the horizon, and the knife-grey sea beneath the low, cloudy sky promising snowfall. It feels small and safe.
Bells toll in the village. Lights appear in the little windows in the wind-washed clapboard houses, I imagine. Smoke curls through the tops of chimneys. But I'm watching the sky and the sea bruise into a deep, inky blue-black. The waves rise and fall in gruff cadences. I'm happy here. I let the rhythm of the water and the uniformity of the sky provide a pace and direction for the scattered and shattered pathways in my mind. My legs don't feel my weight. My feet don't feel the cold. The wind blows wisps of my soft hair around my throat. I don't mind.
I usher in the enjoyment of this moment and allow my eyes to close on the world. I let the wind whistle in my ears. For once, I let go of fear. I close my eyes and invite the vague shadows in my mind to come forward and dissipate.
I'm lost in some other world when unexpected arms find me and pull me back to the waterside. My body stiffens while his body wraps around me from behind.
"It's only me," he murmurs. I feel his lips on my hair. It fills me with an unexpected warmth that has nothing to do with my three sweaters or thermal underwear.
"Finn?" I ask, though it's unmistakably him. If I paid any sort of attention this morning, I would have known that today is Sunday, marking the end of the victory celebrations in the Capitol. He's free to come home.
I expect Finnick to let go of me now, like he always does. Over the last year since my Games, contact between us has been short and polite. Sometimes even affectionate, as in the moments when he unexpectedly takes my hand or brushes pieces of my hair behind my ears. He says it's so he can see me better. Otherwise, he's always maintained a respectful distance, like he believes I'm too fragile.
But Finnick doesn't let go yet. I feel emboldened to press the boundary, too. I lean back against his chest and finally feel the dull ache in my legs from standing rigidly for so long. Finnick has never held me this way before. Never touches me without asking permission, or giving full warning first. I don't mind him sneaking up on me. It's just different. He lets me turn around to face him, but his arms don't break the tight circle they form around me. The wind blows my hair over my shoulders, into his face. I look for answers in his eyes, a sparkle of mischief, a creased eyebrow, anything that will tell me what has changed since he left a week ago.
In the dying light his eyes look smoky rather than green. He wears his long, navy blue coat with the collar drawn up in a cavalier fashion. A thick, striped scarf that Mags and I gave him for his birthday hangs around his neck. Long strands of his bronze hair escape from his wool cap.
"You surprised me," I tell him finally, when it seems like something should be said.
"You looked cold standing on the causeway by yourself," Finnick replies with a lazy smile.
I shiver against him. "I didn't know I felt cold until now."
His smile broadens and his cold-red nose momentarily brushes mine. I startle. "Oh!"
"I missed you," he quips. A thread of amusement colors his voice.
"Me?" I gasp, taken aback by the confession. A rush of blood heats my cheeks. After all, he only left for a week.
"Yes, you." Finnick laughs and I can hear him thinking, Don't be silly, Annie. Of course I mean you. Please try to keep up. "Did you miss me?"
His nose seems to have developed an affinity for mine. It makes it difficult for me to reply with him so near, completely ignoring conventions of personal space. I swallow thickly.
"Well? did you?" he urges, leaving my nose alone long enough to look me in the eyes.
"Y-yes, I missed you," I stammer at his scarf. I have the feeling that he's cornering me somehow, and...and it's sort of thrilling. And confusing. "But then, Blue Boy isn't much of a conversationalist," I babble.
Finnick's head falls back and his laughter rings out in the evening air. It's gratifying to hear. But then he pulls away from me and I fear I've done something wrong. The wind feels sharper now, coming off the water with wet needles of sea spray. He takes my hand in his and leads the way back down the causeway.
"Are we going home now?" This makes me feel sad. I am enjoying this strange, new side of Finnick. For some reason, I don't think it will be quite the same around Mags.
Finnick looks over his shoulder at me and smiles. "Not just yet," he says. "Let's get out of the wind, though."
It's difficult to navigate the rocks and pools in the dark. Halfway back, I slip on an icy patch, into his arms. I try to correct myself and almost take him down with me. Finnick tweaks my hair and teases me, then we press on.
It's easy going once we gain the beach and we can talk now that we're not concentrating on our feet.
"Something's different about you, Finnick," I tell him when he tucks my arm through his. Our boots crunch along the pebbles while we slowly walk along the water's edge.
"What do you think it is?" he teases. A grin spreads across his face, making his white teeth stand out in the gloom. He's using that voice again, the affected accent he reverts to when he talks to Lavinia or when he's on television.
I blush because this side of him makes me feel clumsy. "I don't know."
"You don't like it?" Finnick's face tenses, and his voice loses the exaggerated drawl. Now he's worried about boundaries?
"No, it's not that," I assure him. "I just want to know what I'm missing." It's usually a lot. I rely on Finnick and Mags to point things out to me.
Finn releases a long, cloudy breath. His eyes dip down in a rare moment of self-consciousness, but as I'm rather shorter, I can still see his eyes perfectly. The amused expression he's worn since finding me falls from his face like a mask, revealing a serious intensity underneath. It's unnerving. "I had a moment of clarity while I was gone, Annie."
"Oh." That sounds nice. He'll have to tell me how he managed it. "What was it?"
He stops walking and reaches for my other arm. "It's you."
"Me?" My eyes feel impossibly wide.
A grimaces pinches his face. "You say that like I'm...," he says, scratching his head through his cap. "Oh, I don't know. Like you're surprised that I think about you at all."
"I am surprised," I'm startled into admitting.
"Why?" he asks, rounding on me with a hint of exasperation. "Aren't we friends?"
"Of course." I squeeze his hand, so he knows.
"Well, friends think of their friends," Finnick declares, walking again. "And I think about you all the time, just like you think of me all the time."
I trip a little, taken aback. "How do you know that I do?"
He shrugs his shoulders. "It is the way of things," he says superiorly. That peculiar voice of his resurfaces.
"Well...," I have to swallow some embarrassment and try to take the attention off of how much I really do think of him. "How did thinking of me give you a moment of clarity?" That is not a state of being that I am usually connected with.
He says after a pause, "Something went wrong."
"What went wrong?" I murmur.
"I'll tell you."
But he doesn't. He leaves me dangling while he thinks. Finnick's thumb strokes the back of my hand through our mittens while he considers his words. I listen to the sound of pebbles and shells crunching under our boots. The cold settles in. He picks up three of the flat stones by our feet and throws them, one by one, into the waves. Each of them skips in three or four arcs before plopping into the water.
I stoop to pick up another smooth stone and pass it to him as a token of friendship. He accepts it, quietly studying the grey and red lines, then puts it away in his pocket.
"Finnick, I think you'd better tell me before my imagination runs wild." I nudge his arm.
"Sorry, Annie," he apologizes, ruffling the hair on the back of his neck. "Suddenly I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say." He winks at me. "There's a first for everything, eh?"
"You're stalling," I gently scold, folding my arms over my chest as best as I can with all clothing I have on. "You can tell me anything, you know."
"I know. But where to begin?" Finnick pauses again, this time to pull my collar higher on my neck, somehow knowing that the wind's been blowing down the back of my coat. "I've been back and forth in the Capitol for six or seven years, visiting, mentoring and whatnot."
"Yes," I reply. "I know. Six years is a long time for all that attention."
"The attention isn't so bad most of the time. A little invasive. The company can be strange, but as long as I'm entertaining enough, they treat me like one of their own," he says. That might sound pompous from anyone else - and sometimes Finnick likes to sound pompous - but I can' tell that he's not confessing to me, so much as trying to convince himself that he doesn't care. "But last week, out of the blue, I felt cheap."
"Why?" I ask.
"Because people in the Capitol think they know me. Love me, even." He shares a smirk with me, like we're both in on the same joke. The smile doesn't reach his eyes, though, and I wonder why he puts himself through this with the Capitol year after year. Why not let Abel mentor? Can he refuse the invitations he receives?
"If they seem to like you so much, how could that make you feel cheap?" I ask. The question that follows comes of its own volition. "Why would you keep doing whatever it is you're doing if you don't like it?"
"I have my reasons, Annie," he evades, though he doesn't break eye contact with me. "I wish I could take you into my confidences, but it would risk everything. Do you think you could trust me?"
It's impossible to refuse him when he's turned the full force of his dark, earnest eyes on me. "I do trust you," I promise. He hasn't given me a reason not to.
"Thank you," Finnick says solemnly. He takes a deep breath. "The women I meet don't know me. Their affection, or whatever you want to call it, has the attention span of a pile of sand caught in a gale. It's there. It's gone."
"Did you want their affection," I ask uncomfortably, hoping the cringe on my face isn't too noticeable. It makes me feel queasy to think of him wanting a woman like our escort, Lavinia.
He cringes too. "Not theirs. I didn't know I wanted it at all. It's all part of the act, Annie. Trust me. What you see, and what those women think, doesn't match up with reality. So, I keep up the ruse that I'm as enamored with them, as they are with me. But for once I want it to be real." If the admission cost him, he doesn't show it. In fact, it doesn't seem to bother him at all. His eyes shine. It's confusing for me. His emotions seem to spark out in a dozen different directions tonight.
"I was so stupid." He laughs. "It took me all week to figure out what had changed...when I stepped on the train for home, suddenly I knew."
Finnick may have found a moment of clarity, but I'm completely befuddled. My nose wrinkles while I try to puzzle it together. "What do these Capitol women have to do with me?" I ask him. Then a horrible idea blooms in my mind. "Do I make you feel cheap?"
"Gad, no," he exclaims."It's the opposite. I'm never better than when I'm with you."
That's a happy thought. I feel it tugging on the corners of my mouth. "I feel that way about you."
The skin around his eyes crinkles just a little when he smiles. He tucks the windswept strands of my hair behind my ear. "Then be with me, Annie," he murmurs, his forehead resting against mine. My eyes have to cross in order to look at him properly. I give up and let them close. "Please. I need you."
It takes longer than it should for his meaning to seep in. He wants me. How is that possible? I'm a burden, not a help. I've admired him for years, what girl hasn't? And in the last year, while he's been so patient and attentive to me, it's been especially tempting to want him. But for him to look at me with anything more than sympathy couldn't be real, could it? I won't say I haven't imagined it, or mistakenly thought there were moments when he looked at me in a special way. But I know it wasn't real, just my mind playing tricks on me. Just Finnick using the same faces he wears in the Capitol. The beach feels like it's spinning. I grip his arm.
"Why would you need me, Finnick?" I choke on the improbability of it all. "I'm a wreck."
Finnick's fingers skim downward on a strand of my hair until his hand covers my heart "Because of what's in here," he says. We can handle what's in your head. We've been doing that all along. You're good, Annie." His voice breaks a little. The sound makes the back of my eyes prickle painfully. "I need that. There are so few good people in the world. When I'm with you, I feel like maybe there's something worth sticking around for."
I've never considered that Finnick feels as desperate as I do. He's poised. Always has his ready smirk and something jaunty to say. I should have known. I've seen the way he seems to shrink before the Games and how dried up he is when he comes home without two more tributes. He doesn't tell me anything about the tours and invitations he is forced to accept, but when he comes home he's drained to the core. He's barely hanging on too, sometimes.
"Of course there is," I urge, wanting to rid the uncertainty from his eyes. Without thinking, my hands cup his cheeks and he leans into the caress, welcoming it. I hate that his life makes him feel that empty, even if he didn't know he felt that way until now. I can think of a few things that would make me feel that way, besides the Games. And I know that somehow within the space of a year, he's made it impossible for the world to feel anything but empty without him. "You make me feel the same way."
The uncertainty in his eyes dissipates. He looks at me with something like hope.
"Do you think you could love me, Annie?" he asks. "I'm not nearly good enough for you, but I'll try."
This coming from the man who taught me how to walk through a room with confidence. Who makes sure I'm treated with dignity in the streets and found a way to keep me from having to attend the Games as a mentor because he knew how sick it would make me.
"You are good, Finnick Odair." I mean it. His face pinches with emotion. Somehow the most sought-after man in Panem doesn't think he deserves the most ridiculed, shambled woman in victor history. And somehow the only words that spill from my lips are, "I love you."
And somehow I'm telling the truth, though I didn't know it ten minutes before. It's also true that we're both utterly mad. And helpless. We shiver together like one shadow on the beach until our hands are stiff with cold and we can't feel our lips.
One by one, the lights go out in the windows in the village. The smoke curling in the chimneys thins. Wind whistles a lonely tune through the cove. Waves rock against the pebble beach, a reminder of my past triumph and the promise of a new one with Finnick.
TBC
Thanks for reading!