A/N: This chapter is a huge turning point in the story for more than one reason.
Thank you to everyone who has stuck with this story, especially my faithful reviewers who, chapter after chapter, have let me know what they love about this story and what I've brought to these characters. KRK the JRK, Adrenaline Write, Steff Malfoy1, caisha702, and The Other Perspective, your honest and insightful feedback has made this story what it is. I trust that you'll let me know what you think of the decisions I made in this chapter.
Characters. Places. Not mine. Blah blah blah.
CHAPTER TEN
My dad was nineteen when I was born. He had my mom, who was twenty-one. A small but good-sized house. A tiny fishing boat that probably wasn't worth anything to anyone but him. They didn't have a lot, but they had it all.
I have everything, and I have nothing. At nineteen, I'm nothing like my father was at this age. I'm nothing like myself, either.
Slender fingers wrap themselves like serpents around my shoulder. Their owner brushes her lips against my cheek. Tickles my ear with her tongue. I'm a whore, bought and sold to the highest bidder. I don't do this for the money or the fame. Like my fellow victors, I do this to survive.
The Capitol assigns the roles. The friendly drunk. The raging alcoholic. The nurturers like Mags, the distant ones whose own children were reaped and killed. Young, handsome, wanted me. Skeletons dripped in wax who sell themselves for drugs. And when we're young and naïve, we suffer and feel sorry for ourselves. There are those like District 4's own Pisces, who won the Games only to gauge out his own eyes as a way of hiding from the horrors that come with winning. Sounds smart in theory. Until you realize his whole family was executed for his decision.
But we all have choices. Even me. I can do this because the president will personally kill my father and Mags and anyone else he thinks I could love if I don't. Or I can let this thing I hate, this thing I'm forced to do, become a game of my own.
"You want to get out of here?" I ask the purple-eyed mannequin of a woman who's got her hand on my shoulder. With all twelve chariots on their way, no one will pay much notice to our absence.
"I know a place," she breathes into my ear.
I walk with my hand on her ass as she leads the way. We're all such great pretenders.
Accepting this role left me with no control. Embracing it has given some of that control back. I don't wait for the queue outside my room. I seek them out, pretend I'm the one who wants this. I feign interest in their grotesque bodies and nonexistent personalities. I get to them before they can get to me.
The cameras will assume I was looking for a little spontaneity. Or maybe that I just couldn't contain myself. But as long as I let them catch me walking away with this shell of a woman, no one will ask questions.
At first, I took a hint from the morphling addicts and tried for things like jewelry and medicine and anything I could bring home. A feathered hairclip for Mags's collection of useless things. Painkillers that our healers can't afford. But those things didn't do much to help me or my cause. Which is still to get back at Snow.
This isn't the type of agenda that can be easily advertised. "Secrets for sex with Finnick Odair." It doesn't matter how much they adore me. I'd be shot on the spot. But as it turns out, the meetings that left me damaged weren't entirely futile. I know things. And knowing things is the kind of thing that will get you ahead in the Capitol.
We're pressed for time. She knows it. I know it. So she pushes me onto the floor as soon as we're inside her apartment just outside the City Circle. We remain, for the most part, dressed.
She rolls over next to me, needing to catch her breath when we're done. It's time to make my move.
"That was fantastic," I say into her ear. This voice I reserve for them, it comes out like a hiss. My own velvety homage of their affected accents. I ask her what's the most shocking thing she's ever heard. She giggles stupidly and tells me things I've experienced first-hand.
I laugh it off. Fiddle with her bracelet. She slides it off her wrist and onto mine. "That's not so crazy," I tell her. "Come on. Something real." I touch her cheek at the last word and hope it's enough.
She gets up and leaves the room. I pull my pants over my hips, buckle my belt. Run a hand through my hair. Examine the bracelet in the lamplight. It sparkles with green and purple gems whose names I know are amethyst and peridot. This is what spending so much time here does to a person.
When she comes back, she presses a slip of paper against my chest, her lips against my mouth. Her hand trails downward. I take the paper before it can reach its destination and I leave.
The last of the tributes, mentors, stylists and escorts are already getting into the elevators when I make my way inside the Training Center. I'm late.
The girl tribute from District 4, Annie, smiles and shakes her head as I put my hand between the closing doors and step in to join her for the brief ride to our floor. Not a smile that says she can't believe her good fortune at having me to herself. She's not embarrassed at knowing where I've been or the fact that she's dressed in a ridiculous mermaid costume either. Instead, it's like she finds something ironic in the terrible stroke of luck that landed her here with me.
"Can I help you?" I ask. Not in the velvety hiss, but as though I'm genuinely offended. She starts undoing the intricate plait holding her hair in place and actually rolls her eyes at me.
"Do you even care about Gannet?" Her voice is shaky. Whatever she's pretending, she's not as confident as she'd like to be.
I'm frustrated enough to tell her, "Why don't you worry about yourself? Training starts tomorrow and, seeing as I haven't seen you in training at all back home, I'm sure you need it."
The doors open and Annie shakes out the rest of her hair, which springs back in unruly curls, as she stomps down the hall to her room. And I remember that I have seen her in training. At fourteen, she was already making every effort to avoid me. So much so that it took me until the day she was reaped to learn her name. And even then, I couldn't place it to my single memory of her. Until now. Annie.
She has been training. And she and Gannet score nines. High, but not dangerously so, at least not with some of their competition scoring above them. And when Mags and I send the tributes to bed so we can talk strategy with their stylists, it suddenly bothers me that they're planning on playing up Annie's natural beauty at tomorrow night's interview.
"No," I say. Everyone turns around because my voice is never this angry.
It takes some doing, especially since the outfits are pretty much done and everyone's reminding me how well the sex appeal thing worked out for me, but in the end, Mags gives in. And she even agrees to let me coach Annie while she coaches Gannet.
I make Annie hate me more when other obligations cause me to be late for our coaching session. Matters are made worse when I inform her of her change in strategy. "But I thought we were going for sexy? Wasn't that the point of the mermaid outfit? Isn't that how you won?" Annie asks me, half teasing, half serious.
"When you win and they make you look half as good as me, we'll see." As I say it, I try to ignore the fact that she actually is kind of beautiful. And, even more painful, that she's not going to win. "For now, I need to see what else I can do with you."
She's smart. Really smart. Because about halfway through my trying to turn her into funny, she stops and looks at me in a way that makes me, Finnick Odair, uncomfortable.
"You know, you're not as disgusting as they make you out to be." She quickly adds, "But you're not as charming as you think you are either." Then she circles me, taking me in as though our roles are reversed. "There's something," she says, wrinkling her brow, "only I'm not sure what it is." She looks at me a while longer and I wonder if she suspects that I'm paid to be this person they've made me, because then she drops the subject and, with it, her hostility.
So Annie does smart which really isn't a stretch at all, and Gannett, who couldn't be sexy if he had surgery for it, does brutal, which turns out well. I'm annoyed at first but relieved later when lingering too long in another stranger's apartment makes me late again, this time to say goodbye to the tributes before hovercraft deliver them to this year's arena. Four years of doing this have taught me that it's better not to get attached.
They team up, without the other careers. Brains and muscle. Both get sponsors. And for the first time since I became a mentor, I allow myself to think District 4 might get another victor.
Until Gannett gets his head sliced off with one clean swing of an ax.
I don't know how Annie escapes, but she does. That night, I send her everything I was saving for Gannett. Food. Water. A decent jacket. Mags doesn't protest. It's the last year she's planning on being here with me, even though she really should have stopped mentoring the year I won. Win or lose, I'll be doing this with Isla next time around. So Mags lets me do what I want.
What does it matter anyway? There's no way this sniveling child is making it home.
For days, Annie just hides. Lets the bread I sent rot. Barely drinks. Shakes. I'm about to give up and leave Headquarters when the Gamemakers decide to make things interesting with an earthquake. But something goes wrong. That much is obvious. Because when the dam breaks, the ensuing flood takes out the ground cameras that were ill-prepared for the pressure of the crashing water. It's a while before they manage to get decent coverage from the air, and even the mentors are panicking because none of them can find their kids in the chaos.
On a normal day, Annie would have this in the bag. But she hasn't eaten. I tell myself this over and over, because my heart is still racing with the thought that she might win. Everyone's monitors turnover to a screen of flotation devices no one will be able to afford. By the time enough money is pooled for even one, most of these kids will have drowned.
No one bothers to even try to send anything. We just wait. Cannon after cannon after cannon. Each one brings new meaning. The slip of paper I promised myself I wouldn't read until I was outside the Capitol, and how soon I won't have to wonder what it says. Cannon. After this, I'll be free of this place for several months. Cannon. If Annie wins, that won't matter; I'll become part of the traveling circus. Cannon. I don't care.
Finally the trumpets blare, and it takes Mags throwing herself into my arms for me to realize that it's over. And nothing else matters but the fact that we're finally bringing a kid home.
Defintely channeling the Finnick Katniss meets in Catching Fire in the beginning of this one. Hope you all liked Annie in this one. She'll be a main character from this point forward, so look forward to even more of her in the chapters to come.
And as always, please review. Hearing from you guys makes my life, and I always write back.
P.S. I'm posting this from my kindle from in the car. (Don't worry... I'm not driving!) So apologies if it's not my best editing job, but I wanted to post it fairly early in the day..