A/N: Scarlett's POV

Two days had passed since the deaths of Hanna and Catriona. Watching Hanna get literally eaten to death by lizards had been a shocking thing to many, including Finnick, but I found that it took quite a lot to shock me, anymore. Finnick had the luxury I didn't of still being allowed, in some ways, to be a child. The arena didn't shock me. Nothing the Gamemakers came up with would faze me anymore, I knew. Haymitch, too, had been disinterested in the lizards and their actions, but then, he'd seen Titus eating his victims. He'd seen all sorts of things through his haze of booze. He was like me, in a way.

There was something less than comforting in the thought that Haymitch and I were almost kindred spirits, but I'd long since given up on a search for comfort. Blight hadn't tried to comfort me anymore, and Chaff had even given up teasing me. Perhaps that was his own sort of comfort.

Luke and Draven and Charlotte were the obvious choices to bet on for anyone with eyes. Even though there were no kills on days eight and nine, they were the ones capable of hunting, the one with sponsors sending them water, the ones on the offensive rather than hiding behind rocks and praying the lizards didn't catch them.

I watched them over the rim of my cup as I sipped orange juice, no longer making Blight do all of the work with the sponsors for me. It hardly bothered me anymore, to have to see the men who pawed me at night during the day. Wear the bracelet in case I see the bald one. The necklace in just in case of Lagunov. And if they ask, "Oh, yes, it's my favorite gift! I wear it every day!"

I didn't have a favorite gift, but they didn't make my skin crawl and burn with self-disgust and anger as they had when I first started receiving them. They were tools. I knew there had to be better tools, things they could give me of more value, but I had yet to think of what it would be, so I simply used what they did give me to bargain for Charlotte, to gain favor for her, although none of them seemed to care very much about her, and I couldn't really blame them. They were doing it for me, and I was doing it because I had to.

But that hadn't mattered when I was sitting with the other victors in our little Games-watching group around the screen. The sponsors didn't matter. The fact that Finnick and I were technically in competition didn't matter. For a while I could almost see what the people of the Capitol loved so much about watching the Games. It was an escape, a chance to live through someone else's struggles, to feel their emotions without having to internalize their pain, especially as I had enough of my own.

That, and I loved fantasizing about Draven bludgeoning Charlotte to death with her own mace.

Perhaps it was wicked of me, as Blight and Finnick liked to tease as they watched me watching eagerly every time Charlotte set her mace down for any reason, wishing someone else would pick it up, but if they'd known her as I knew her they would have been wishing it too.

She didn't set her mace down very often, and I really didn't blame her. There was no trusting anyone in the arena, and especially not someone like Draven, who had literally abandoned Catriona to fight her way out of lizards as a kindness, deciding not to kill her himself.

It was hard not to sympathize as Charlotte all but slept with one eye open, especially on day eight, after seeing Catriona's face in the sky the night before, probably assuming it was the lizards that got her, not Luke. From what I could tell, Charlotte and Draven didn't really see Luke as a threat, but that was more deduced from their not talking about him than by anything in particular they had said, so I could have been reading it wrong.

"No," Finnick had said one night as we were taking the elevator back down to our own floors. "I think you're right. He's been underestimated by everyone."

But Draven didn't seem to me the type to underestimate someone. He struck me more like Haymitch, completely able to understand everything and everyone around him, fully aware of his surroundings and situation and more than capable of taking advantage of every part of it. Luke couldn't stand up to him, I was sure, if I was right about him, and I thought I was.

I had gotten very good at reading people since I'd become the Capitol's whore.

Day nine had been even less exciting than eight, but Charlotte had relaxed a bit, which I had hoped would have led to her death, but alas, not yet.

At least, it wasn't interesting on the screen, in the arena. It had become so easily to denote my life based on what was happening in the arena (three people died - it was an exciting day; no one died - nothing happened). But that wasn't the extent of my life, of course. I interacted with a lot of people in the course of my day, and in many different capacities: fellow victors, clients, sponsors.

This was really my life, and as easy as it was to try to forget that it happened, it wouldn't do any good to ignore reality. Besides, by the standards of my own real life, the ninth day was entirely too eventful, too interesting, for anyone's tastes, I was sure of it.

Finnick and I had gotten into a habit where he would come down to wake me if when he got up to watch the Games I wasn't already there. Blight didn't like waking me after he'd found me in bed with Haymitch, although he'd never said as much aloud and Finnick certainly didn't know anything about that, nor had it happened again.

It was Finnick's birthday, as it turned out, and he greeted me with a big smile on his face.

"Hurry up!" he cried. "Get dressed! I want to see who dies on my birthday!"

In any other life context, that probably would have sounded like the most horrible, morbid thing ever, but I was too tired from the night I'd spent out with one of my clients to really care much about it.

Besides, we were victors. We were all a bit loopy, just by definition.

"All right," I sighed. "I'll get dressed and be right out."

"I'll wait in your living area," Finnick said excitedly. "Hurry up!"

I did hurry, but not because he asked me to or because I cared that much about getting up to see the Games. There was some sort of urgency I couldn't name or explain driving my haste, and it felt a bit like foreboding, but I hoped against hope that it wasn't.

I should have known better than to hope.

Not even a moment after I'd stepped out into the living area of the seventh floor, ready to go watch the Games, President Snow entered in the flesh and my heart stopped for a moment. Fear crawled through my veins.

"President Snow," Finnick said, kindly but suspicious, and I couldn't blame him.

"Finnick Odair," President Snow replied, smiling a smile that made me want to scream and vomit all at once.

"Should I go, President?" I said in my sugary-sweet Games voice, knowing instinctively that he'd come for Finnick, not for me. I didn't want to be there for it, anyway.

President Snow turned to me and said, "Why bother, Scarlett, when Finnick would tell you everything I say, anyway? Please, by all means, stay."

I knew that was a stab at me, pointing out how I'd not told Finnick when Snow had come to me, but how could I have done? What could I have said? He could never have understood.

My hands trembled as I sat beside Finnick.

Finnick Odair had just turned sixteen, and I was pretty sure I knew what came next. He was about to get the talk I got only days before my Victory Tour. The talk that made my hate myself and everyone else for weeks.

"Finnick, I'm sure you've noticed that the Capitol is quite taken with you."

That was an understatement. It had been clear that the men and women of the Capitol had been waiting to sink claws and teeth into him since he'd had his first interview in the 65th Games.

"There have been a lot of people waiting for you to turn sixteen."

Finnick frowned.

"What do you mean?"

I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. I didn't to be there for this.

"Finnick, have you known a woman?"

"N-no..."

"We'll start you off small, then," Snow said with a serpentine smile. "There have been lots of orders for you already. We can afford to arrange experience before you meet the highest-paying customers."

A look of understanding spread across Finnick's face and he turned to me, horrified. I wanted so badly to be able to tell him that it was not what he thought it was, that everything would be all right. But that would have been a lie, because I knew nothing would ever be all right again.

"What if I say no?" Finnick said in a defiant sort of voice I'd only heard him use when Haymitch was picking on him.

That insipid smile widened. I nearly shivered as President Snow turned to me.

"Scarlett," he said smoothly, "would you like to tell Finnick the penalty of refusing?"

That sick, sick man, delivering his threats with my voice. I wanted to scream at him, to tell him to leave us alone, but he had already killed my family, was willing to kill my former friend, maybe even me. I wasn't ready to die yet, selfish as that was.

Because was it really better to live as the Capitol's pawn and whore than to die? I wasn't sure.

"He'll kill everyone," I whispered. "All my family is dead. My father, my sisters, my brothers, my... my niece."

Finnick winced. He'd been so fond of her, and she'd been barely four years old.

"So you understand now your situation," Snow said. Finnick nodded stiffly. "Good. I'll be in touch. Have a lovely day, the both of you."

As soon as Snow left the room, I could no longer hold in my tears. Finnick wrapped his arms around me, rocking me gently and petting my hair.

I'm glad he didn't try to tell me everything would be okay. We were well past such lies by that point.

"I wanted to be normal again," I whispered into his chest, watching my teardrops cling to his shirt, hating myself all over again. "I wanted to go back to reading with my brothers and playing with my cat and being unhappy but normal. But the Games are just the beginning of our being the playthings of the Capitol. I just want to be a person again."

Finnick put his hand below my chin and lifted it to make me look up at his beautiful sea-green eyes.

"You are a person," he whispered, leaning down to my ear. "You are a wonderful, beautiful person."

No lies, in his eyes. No reassurances he couldn't deliver on.

It was refreshing, in a way, but there were things I couldn't tell Finnick, not yet. Things that would make him hate me, I was sure of it. Things I had been carefully not thinking about to get through the days, but at Finnick's fate, so much like my own, I could no longer pretend that nothing was hurting, no longer block myself from thinking about things that I knew must be thought about, eventually.

Pain must be felt, sooner or later, and sooner hurts less.

I told Finnick to go watch without me, that I felt the sudden urge to take a shower, which was true. I wanted to drown in the shower. But instead I turned on the cold water, stepped into the freezing waterfall, and closed my eyes tightly, trying to pretend that I wasn't as despicable as I'd felt.

There was the sound of someone coming into my room, and I assumed it was an Avox to change my sheets and take my nightclothes to be cleaned. Perhaps they were straightening things out. Perhaps Blight had come looking for me. Did it matter?

I stayed in the shower for probably an hour before my whole body was numb from the cold and I couldn't stand it any longer. I turned off the water with a shaking hand and stumbled out, grabbing a towel but not bothering to dry off as I headed back into my room.

There, sitting on my bed, waiting for me, was a half-sober Haymitch, watching me with knowing eyes.

"Does it feel any better now?" he asked. "Or do you still wish you'd told him the truth before today?"

Perhaps he ought to have known what was coming, just as I had wished that someone would have told me, but I had done it for the same reasons no one had warned me.

"He deserved a few extra weeks of childhood," I whispered, still not bothering to cover or dry myself, standing there dripping in the middle of my bedroom as Haymitch watched me with half-glazed eyes. "I couldn't be the one to take that from him."

Haymitch nodded and didn't blame me for my decision, didn't point out how much I'd hated it when it had been done to me, because he knew it wouldn't have been helpful.

"Here," he finally sighed, getting up and taking the towel, drying me off. "You'll catch something."

"In the sterile walls of the training facilities?" I snorted. "Haymitch, the only thing I could possibly catch is some sort of venereal disease, and they'd cure me so I could go on being their little money-making whore."

He smiled ironically and wrapped the towel around my shoulders like a cape once I was more or less dry.

"Blight says you've figured out how to talk with sponsors now. I take it you've resigned yourself to life?"

"It's not life!" I cried, throwing the towel down angrily. "It's not living, Haymitch! I hate myself every day, but I just tried not to think about it. Now I have to think about it! Finnick's going to need someone to talk to, and he's more comfortable with me than with you or Mags about something like this, I know it. I can't keep pretending that it's a nightmare, some other life that I'm living that doesn't matter. It matters and it hurts!"

"Good," he said softly, pulling me in to hug me, whispering softly in my ear. "Hold onto that hurt, Scarlett. Don't let it kill you, but don't let it go. This probably doesn't need saying, but I will, just in case. You need to do for Finnick what I did for you."

"But-"

"No," he said, cutting me off, whispering urgently in my ear. "He needs you, Scarlett. It will be better for both of you if you have someone to lean on in this, and you can't lean on me forever. You can't really even lean on me properly now. I'll still be here for you, but this needs to be something you two struggle through together, all right?"

"You make it sound as though there's a chance it will be over someday," I muttered, leaning my head on his chest, letting him hold me there like a child needing shelter. It was how I felt, so why not?

"Maybe it will be, someday," he said carefully.

What did he mean by that, I wondered. Were those words meant as words of comfort? Did he mean that when we got older no one would want us anymore and we would be free? Was he talking about death? Was he speaking treasonously about Panem and the Capitol?

Part of me wished it were the last one, but I didn't want anything to happen to him. Still, it was nice to think that maybe there was a chance that the next generation would only know about the Hunger Games because of stories they'd read in history books, not because of the Games they watched every summer and the reaping lines they stood in and the grain on their tables bought by extra slips in the reaping balls.

At least my brothers wouldn't be in the Games, I thought bitterly. And my niece. At least they'd died without knowing the horrors of the arena, without fully understanding my own nightmares.

"I hope you're right," I whispered, clutching at his shirt, wrinkling it into the balls of my fists as I shivered slightly in his strong, warm arms.

Maybe I'd just spoken treasonously too. After all, I was hoping he'd meant the end of the Games, the end of Capitol rule as we knew it. But we'd been so ambiguous that it would have been hard for anyone watching on the cameras I knew must have been on us to know for sure what we meant. Maybe I was hoping that people would lose interest in me, for all they knew.

But that wouldn't be happening for a very long time.

"Go on," Haymitch finally said. "Get dressed. Blight's handling the sponsors today, but you'll want to watch the Games, to keep an eye on Finnick. Right?"

"Right," I muttered in reluctant agreement. I didn't want any of those things. I wanted to stay wrapped up in the safety of Haymitch's arms where I didn't feel like such a failure.

"Good," he said, moving toward the door, but pausing to look back at me with his hand on the knob. "Chin up, sweetheart."

And then he left me alone to dress and cry.