The Living Raft
I fucking hate water.
It brings back memories of torture, which means pain. It brings back memories of Finnick, which means even worse pain.
It doesn't care at all.
Sunlight twinkles on the eye-green waves, forever moving, forever flowing, forever alive.
How dare they, when he's forever DEAD?
I thought I'd lost him when Annie fished herself out of her arena. I thought I'd lost him twice over when she huddled under their traditional net with him, and they sealed their wedding wows with a saltwater kiss.
But that's all nothing compared to now. Now that we've both lost him, now that the whole damn world has lost him.
In some filthy foul sewer, while the Mockingjay and her feather-assed bunch supposedly couldn't have helped.
Bullshit.
I should have been there, to help him, to save him, to die with him. But I wasn't, because of fucking water.
On impulse, I lift my ax over my head and bring it down to where the frothy surf meets the sand. My yell of frustration goes unnoticed in the eternal crashing of the waves.
Wet drops splash on my legs, and I cringe away as if burned.
The water doesn't give a damn.
The axwound disappears as if it's never been there – after all, it hasn't, I can't wound the damn ocean. The slight indent in the sand takes a moment to heal, one two three waves and it's gone.
No scar, no nothing.
A bark of laughter escapes me, but no tears, no, that would be just more gross salty water.
Not even a scar. Unless I threw myself in, what am I but a scar?
Better not dwell on that.
I shoulder the ax and the bit of driftwood I'd managed to find - not that I ever found enough to need the ax for, but an excuse is an excuse, right? - and make my way back to Annie.
She goes looking for him to the ocean too, I know that and she knows I do the same, but we never go together.
When she'd announced she wanted to return home, widowed and pregnant and broken and all, I've gone with her. I hardly had anything to pack, just the bag of bones I've become, and she seemed more than okay with me dragging along.
Is she something I have left from Finn? Do I mean the same for her?
Sometimes I wonder which one of us is crazier. As if it mattered.
I need somebody who'd need me.
Or do I need a living reminder, just to torture myself?
A part of Finn lives inside Annie, swimming, swimming. I can already feel him move in there whenever she quietly hugs me and I just as quietly let her do it. Her protruding stomach seems to fit right into the hollow under my own ribcage, and Finn is there between us.
Dividing us? Uniting us? Both?
He'd been inside me countless times, damn, probably more times than inside her if we counted, but he'd never left anything tangible and alive there.
We couldn't have afforded that, and he and Annie couldn't either, not until he'd hauled his pretty ass home from the war, alive. But they did anyway, the idiots, and now he's dead and alive too.
Alive in Annie. Not in me.
Then why the hell I keep feeling like there was a piece of him stuck inside me, kicking hard?
The phantom memory hurts like a splinter embedded too deep, but I'm afraid to leave and cut it out. So I stay.
For a tiny kick in the ribs, from another body?
Perhaps.
Brainless as always, Jo, I tell myself.
Stubborn too.
I thought I'd never panic again, ever, after all, why the hell would I?
But when Annie goes into slightly premature labor, I do.
Her water breaks like a dam, and I damn nearly get both of us killed when I drive us to the hospital, with the screeching of wheels and a steady stream of curses on my breath.
She's stronger than she looks, always has been, I guess.
The bones in my hand nearly crack under the pressure of her pain. (I'm there holding her hand, of-fucking-course, after all, who else do we have left?)
I'm choking under my ridiculous surgical mask, my breath almost as heavy as hers. I'm too used to the screams and pain of death, and I thought I'd seen and felt every torture, but the new life emerging in its gory glory still somehow manages to freak the hell outta me.
Annie is swimming in sweat, our hands glued slickly together for hours hours hours until the Little Fishy slides out in a fountain of blood.
Draws breath and screams.
Not fishlike, that, but the nickname shall stick, no doubt.
Pale as a ghost, but glowing, Annie holds her healthy little Finn-eyed bundle of life.
Delivered by Mommy Mockingjay herself. Who'd have thought?
Soon we go back to the waves; those fuckers are still as alive as I am dead inside.
Annie doesn't go to look at them alone anymore, she's no longer trying to see someone beyond them. She has their salty lookalikes in baby Finn's eyes, the water that keeps her from drowning.
When she smiles at me over the top of his tiny head, I do my best to bare my teeth in response.
She doesn't need me to hold her up anymore.
The baby does that alright, even though he can't stand on his own legs yet. But he can wriggle them in the sunlight and salty spray, laughing, laughing.
After all, he bears no scars he knows of yet, and the waves twinkle in his own eyes, not in a haunting gaze from memory.
To him, the ocean sings, it doesn't buzz with electric pain.
He's new to the world we'd grown old beyond our years to salvage.
Living.
And I'm still threading carefully not to get my feet wet. Salvaging, driftwood, as always.
Maybe, when it's time for the Little Fishy to learn how to swim, I'll go with him.
And maybe, he'd hold me up as well.