o3. Tides
"You're an idiot."
"I'm aware."
"That was stupid — that was really stupid."
"I'm often very stupid."
"That was stupid."
"You're going to hurt my feelings if you keep this up, Everdeen."
If she's right about what she hears in his voice, neither of them are in danger of hurting each other. Not yet, and not with words at least.
There's no heat in her own — she's not trying for it. If it weren't so hot here and the sound of the tide going in and out wasn't so constant, she might have been back in the Meadow, or out beyond Twelve's gate, sitting in the summer sun, trading barbs with Gale that neither of them ever mean. (Until they do.) Now that Finnick isn't submerged in the saltwater, breaking the surface at odd intervals and staying down below the surface far, far too long each time, the rhythm is almost lulling. As if they are here just to talk, and not to die.
Katniss catches a glance at her arm, still a little surprised that the scabs and discolored spots are as visible as they are. It itches, occasionally, but the mix of saltwater and ointment has proved to be a potent one; she almost feels as if her body is her own again, except the moments when she truly stops paying attention and panics, suddenly sure that the fog has come back to wrap its phantom tendrils around her, fill her lungs, and drag her back into the heart of the jungle.
But in the reality that matters, they are fine.
There is no fog, and likely won't be outside its prescribed boundaries, and the saltwater has claimed the vestiges of their injuries, healing what it can and stealing away the pain of the rest, enough for them to still move. Her muscles are still tight, but she is sitting upright and no longer crawling desperately, blindly away from her would-be grave. This is enough.
Finnick is sprawled out in the sand beside her; though there is no anger in his face, no offense at her toothless insults. But it might be worse, the way his whole expression is still slack, eyes glassy, lips parted as if he doesn't have the energy to close his mouth. And that is probably accurate — for more reasons than one. His responses are light and in a better world, they'd be playful. But they live in this world, and here they are perfunctory.
Katniss had ventured to guess that the distraction, any distraction, might help him. The problem, of course, is that she's never been good at distractions.
"Human lungs aren't made to hold their breath that long."
"My unique qualities add to my many charms."
"You won't hear me yelling about the Careers if you're underwater."
"Don't doubt yourself so, Everdeen."
"Or I could have drowned you myself."
"Darling." He rolls the word around his mouth the way he had luxuriated with the sugar cube only — days ago? A week, at most? "I would not have put my life in your hands if I didn't think them extremely capable."
She laughs for him, brittle and aged. In the pauses he takes and the places where her voice doesn't work the way she wants it to, she feels the way his arms must feel empty without Mags' weight in them, and she sees the wild, reaching, helpless look in his lives when her plan had taken form between them and then, in the next breath, she was gone.
And then Katniss remembers, like some fist landing in her gut, her brief thought — that Finnick, Capitol and odds-on favorite, would likely see Mags as nothing but dead weight.
It makes the only kind of sense that the Games can make: morbid, and best viewed from a distance. But she can still understand that this jungle, with its constant dangers beyond the twenty four proven killers dumped into it at the start, had always been a death trap for someone like Mags. Someone older and slower — someone kinder, quicker to smile than to hurt by now.
But even if that is true (and it is — Katniss cannot pretend to be a good person now, a person who doesn't think about the practical applications of death in an Arena), Finnick does not look pleased about it. He does not look relieved — or even resolved. Determined to win, determined to dedicate his victory to a fellow Victor or as a mentor or as someone he might have even cared about more deeply.
He just looks empty.
Katniss has a hard time feeling the sting of his words from the other night — a safe bet to hedge. Now, hearing the hollowness of his voice, the memory of his flippant response sounds the same.
Allowing Mags to die but only so that Peeta may live; she would have made it otherwise, and that's important in a way Katniss can't figure out. Finnick diving deep into the depths of the oceanwater around them as if Katniss will not eventually be another enemy. Lying here, not putting on the face that the Capitol loves. Calling her a safe bet and reminding her that they are in an alliance.
She can't unsee the things that don't fit together the right way anymore. It doesn't feel believable anymore.
"... You look awful," she says bluntly, and the laugh he replies with glasses over a breath, a hint, a faint glimmer of the indulgent playboy that had tried to charm her before the parade. Katniss smiles.
"What can I say? Your bridal style over there is trendsetting."
Well, he's not wrong. She's not hollowed out by — whatever it is that has its hold on Finnick, but between the lingering marks and streaks of ointment, she knows that she's distinctly unappealing. And after all the work that Peeta has done to make her likable, too.
Perhaps, if they were allowed to stop for more than a handful of moments at a time, she might be able to do something about it. Now, all she can do is laugh.
"I've done it! I've finally cracked open the stone that is Katniss Everdeen."
"Congratulations on your victory," she replies, trying not to grin at that showy, ostentatious way he's raising his brows at her.
"You're too kind — but c'mon, I always knew the odds were in my favor."
And may the odds, Gale said, throwing a rock to startle a huddle of pheasants.
Be ever in your favor, Katniss finished, neatly getting two of the birds with the same arrow.
The smell of pine and old, heavy leather; the cold of winter yielding slowly and grumpily to spring; the sharp clarity of the freshwater lake, glittering under the pale sunlight. Gale and his steady presence, tangled up as part of her by then — finishing each other's sentences with a kind of humor and rhythm that could never be explained or replicated, instinctually and intrinsically theirs when so little ever belonged to either of them, alone.
What am I doing? She imagines Gale's face now, pinched and hard looking to mask the hurt and confusion underneath; she looks back at Peeta, who should be awake already but hasn't yet found the strength to rise. These Games have taken such a toll on his much abused body that she doesn't blame him — she can't, she can't find the thing that would have been frustrated at his difficulties at surviving. It's preferable — that he should be able to spend any time not suffering, away from this arena in way he can manage. Even if it's in sleep.
These things, Gale and Prim at home and Peeta here, are infinitely more important than whatever game Finnick Odair is trying to drag her into.
Or, worse: the one she'd chosen to play with him.
What are you thinking, Odair? Katniss watches him from the corner of her eye — the distance in his gaze, the way his chest rises and falls almost out of struggle or spite. Does anyone win the Games? Were these Victors content in their lives before the Quell — had they found some way to live? She feels the degradation of herself like a living thing in her bones, how it strips her identity and safety from her, curls up in her nightmares. She knows Peeta has nightmares, too. She knows that Haymitch drinks. She knows that at the Tribute Parade, even the strongest among them had, somehow, looked stranger and sadder than the young children reaped last year.
Johanna Mason is angry. Chaff has forgotten what boundaries are. Wiress sings to herself. Even Enobaria had her teeth sharpened after her Games were over, after she wouldn't have had to use them ever again — couldn't, in the soft and danger free world of the Capitol or under the weight of the Peacekeepers' gaze in the districts.
There must be a reason Finnick is like this — that he is so good at smiling for the cameras and so stripped down underneath it. That he allowed Mags to die so that Peeta may live. That he took in the poison of the fog until he couldn't move, carrying Peeta out of the jungle, saving him for the third time in as many days. That he's joking now, even though he is sprawled out on the sand like he is already dead.
But after relying on her tunnel vision and her anger for the past year, does she have the right to question his choices now?
The push and pull in her heart does not relent but her voice is light and even when she speaks. "You should get some rest, Odair."
He doesn't listen to her. Apparently, no one listens to her. It's not surprising at this point, but she would still prefer if he did — even now, when they have found a moment of temporary reprieve, she can still feel him seizing under fingers, too weak to even pull himself into the water that must be like a first and second home to him. The weight of his body as she and Peeta dragged him to safety is one more tally on the things she'll never forget, and worry still has its claws in her.
Katniss reaches out when she sees that he is trying to sit upright, and when she makes contact with his shoulder she is struck by how normal it feels. There was no monumental shift or sting of imagined electricity, no worry at what this means in the grander scheme of the Games — just the weight that she makes sure to take until she is sure that he can sit on his own.
Finnick flashes her a grin that is rife with emptiness and gratitude in equal parts. Katniss is sure that she will be sick.
"I think I'll be fine." No teasing comment on her caring, no flash of false bravado; just a gentle statement of what he wants to be fact.
No, you won't.
She sets her jaw when she looks at his face, realizing that if Peeta was to win this, then Finnick Odair would not be fine. That the person who'd claimed his heart so strongly he'd written poetry for them wouldn't be fine. No one is fine in this world — suffering and trials are so universal that she is beginning to wonder if even Snow himself can escape that inevitability.
Something tangible pulls her away from her thoughts. Katniss flinches even though it doesn't take her any time at all to realize that Finnick has worked his hand around hers, fingers sliding around her palm. Her eyes trail down and then, in a daze, up to his face.
It hits her like a spear to the chest, the pain that he is masking. His lips are tight and his smile doesn't even look like a smile. The corners of his eyes are wrinkled even more than they had been when they'd started, and his glassy pupils look more than just distant and distracted. The scabs are ashen grey and such a departure from the healthy radiant glow that his dark, golden always sports.
Finnick looks like he's not here, at all — like some clever gamemaker has projected just enough of his likeness for the entire image to do nothing more than remind her of how not here he is.
"Finnick," She says quietly, moving her fingers to grip his hand in return. "... I'm sorry."
You don't say that in the arena. But you also don't cry over a twelve year old girl from District Eleven and cover her in flowers after she dies. You don't tell her family that she deserved better; you don't hold another nameless tribute in your arms in the warm ocean water so that she passes more peacefully than you're allowed to in the arena. You don't threaten to take both Victors away with a handful of berries. You don't fight for someone else to win.
It shouldn't have been said and they both know it. But Finnick stays sitting straight as he can, and to his credit he is still grinning. Even if he cannot fool anyone with it — probably not even himself.
"Hey, it's okay. I — she — she meant a lot to me. But I always knew that she knew that she wouldn't make it. And so she gave me everything she had left. I can't... dishonor her memory with tears. That would be ungrateful."
It's an honor, Victors always say. I want to honor my district, I want to honor my mentor, I want to honor the Capitol. That's what they want to hear — the sponsors. Snow.
"Finnick." There is more to what he is saying, something darker and deeper and fuller under the surface, and she shouldn't say this either but she starts to. "Why did she —"
He'd known exactly what Katniss was going to ask, and he cuts her off accordingly. Without warning, his face is suddenly an inch from hers, close enough that she can feel the heat of his lips and almost taste the salty brine of sea water clinging to his skin. Their breath and an insistent silence bridges the gap that remains physically untouched between their mouths, their cheeks, their eyelashes.
There is no room for thought. Katniss' buzzing mind is tacit — so quiet that she doesn't even question the quietness itself. Her eyelids drop and her entire world narrows into the spot on his jaw that still looks itchy and painful, his lips cracked with salt, the patches on his forehead made rough and dry from the healing process.
He is not very pretty and he is not particularly present, but Katniss understands now, far more than she had at the Parade, how Finnick Odair keeps an audience captive and a gaggle of lovers firmly rooted in his orbit.
"You saved him."
The words come without her consent; they tumble from her lips because they have to. Because she is more than sure that even if this is some ploy to keep her from asking the hard questions, there is still a precipice forming between them now.
She will not fall over it.
"Yes."
It takes a long while for him to pull back, so she does first. Katniss refuses to tremble or let her expression fall, and she refuses to let his gaze go either. Even if that means watching the hardness of his features soften.
Katniss forces her heavy tongue to move. "Thank you." I love him. There is a part of her that knows that's true — that she has only ever tried to protect one other person as fiercely in her whole life, and that person is Prim. That she still doesn't know what she had been thinking last year, forcing berries into their hands, but she cannot fathom a world in which Peeta Mellark does not exist.
But she also knows that he looks at her with more on his mind — with thoughts of a future, with thoughts of her lips meeting his, with thoughts of doing and being and dying for her in a way that is both entirely selfless and still fundamentally wanting.
Calling what she feels for him love when it pales in comparison to his feels irredeemably selfish.
Her chest aches for clarity.
He chuckles. It is dry and cracked and frayed, but he forces brightness into it. "Anything for you, Girl on Fire."
Letting go of his hand forcibly reminds her of scaling the metal shell of the cornucopia.
"You shouldn't say that."
"I'm a big boy, my dear. I can choose my own words."
He laughs, and his voice fades out like the receding tide.
• • •
note. & that's a wrap on updating chapter three in 2020! Chapters 4 - 14 remain as they were in 2013, though that is soon to change. it's as true now as it was then: i am so unbelievably and deeply grateful for the engagement & lovely, thoughtful reviews!