Hunger Games: Finnick; Finnick/Annie

Snippets of a life.

Warnings: Crazy timeline. Pre-mockingjay but possible spoilers.

It's been four years since the Hunger Games and it doesn't get any better, any easier. Even with him by her side, on the sheets, Annie still wakes up screaming, her body thinking it's drowning. Lungs choking on the ghost of water. Hands desperately clutching at his as though they were a lifeline.

On these nights, Finnick – charismatic, deadly, silver-tongued Finnick – despairingly finds himself at a loss.

~.~

Before he'd set on the Career path, Finnick Odair had been one of endless children braving the bitterly-cold, sea-salted winds to watch boats preparing to sail off before the dawn. Under a star-strewn sky, he watched nets and boxes of silver hooks, and cages for shellfish – and the occassional harpoon – being loaded under the stern watch of Peacekeepers distinguishable by lit cigarettes in their shivering hands, relief against the cold. Rope and anchors reeled in. Sails going up like white flags. Simple motors running. Fishermen saying goodbye to their lantern-lit wives as the breeze whispered gray-blue tales of long-dead sailors and men lost at sea, all of them vessels vying for a harbor, for their route home.

~.~

Annie Cresta will never be completely his for the piece of her that the Hunger Games stole away. He knew her only a short while before that, and saw her for the first time through the eyes of someone who loves her.

During the reaping for the 70th Games, her name was called, loud and sudden as a death knell, and he had thought Annie Cresta to be the girl who fell back on the hot sand, white-faced.

Muscular forearms. A deftness in the way she stood back up. Annie Cresta was not a Career, her sister was. And this year Ariel Cresta was ineligible for the Games she'd wrapped her life around, for her sister's sake; no one volunteered for Annie. Sun-kissed Annie, daughter of a boatbuilder. Face dusted with freckles. Dark hair bleached by the sun. Loved, loved, loved, loved.

(Innocence, his mind decided without his consulting, a habit born of years as a mentor. That's what they'll nurture for the cameras.)

~.~

Finnick, at nineteen, knew of the power of projected strength, of the insidious cloy of finely-strung words, of beguiling sexuality. Growing up in the Districts,.where everything was to be scrambled for, and his meteoric rise in the Capitol, where mistakes ushered in swift bloody retribution, taught him to be aware of his strengths. He knew too of his pitfalls as Mags had teased them out five years before: the cold-bloodedness of a lone predator (you need allies, Finnick), the sharp irrepressible longing carried by all men of the sea, mistrust, impatience, depression.

He learned how to spot them, flay them from his bones, lest he fall to ruin so he knew, within only a few days of meeting and mentoring that Annie Cresta, that there was no removing this blight, that he was finished.

~.~

The first time he'd been allowed on the boats, a lad of barely seven, a dense fog had rolled into port, claiming every inch of shoreline, swirling about in a smoky white dance.

When they'd cast off, he'd watched from the stern as the lights from the shore dimmed, then vanished completely, swallowed by the vast mist.

Despite the pale filterings of sunrise light, Finnick could barely see five feet in front of him as everything seemed to still. Without a point of reference, the world appeared to hang suspended in space, with the sea and sky made of the same fabric, the same shade of cobalt shimmering with crystal prisms of light.

And then the boat lurched.

~.~

They'd fished him out quickly, but not quick enough that young Finnick didn't catch a glimpse of the ocean's depth, the chilling spread of it, the deception of it's mirror surface, and harness of it's power.

~.~

He doesn't know how it happened really, only that she got on the Hovercraft wearing the token he'd worn himself – silver, star-shaped, winking like a distant star – he'd felt as gutted as any fish he'd ever hooked.

He doesn't know how it happened. She'd crept up on him.

~.~

Careers of District Four, who knew a mere inkling of the truth and perhaps should've known better, ask him, genuinely confused, how can you love someone inferior?

Inferior. A victim. Mad girl. That's what they call her. Unsinkable Annie Cresta, who'd faced more than they can hope to understand until they've stepped into the arena themselves.

But Finnick explains it – or tries to – in a way they could understand, gives reasons most theatrical and least incriminating and still true: You know how it goes, the capitol might know my name and cry it out in their sleep, but they won't ever know who I am, won't ever understand me. They're not District Four. But Annie – genius or fame or blistering good looks don't mean a thing to her. Annie sees the real me and understands. She's my home. And she's my redemption for all the killing I did in my Games. She's the first I brought back alive, you remember?

(Sometimes, when he answers in a variation of this, he expects Ceasar Flickerman to be there, jovially gesturing, Finnick Odair, ladies and gentlemen! Finnick, take a bow!)

~.~

What he does not tell them is that he would have brought Annie Cresta back alive even if he had to go on his knees to do it. Plead. Beg. Suck cock. Whatever it takes.

That Annie didn't need to be his home or his redemption and he'd still would've loved her for existing, would've saved her, time and time again.

That love is terrible like that, pure flame and pure siren call, the worst thing to ever happen to a victor. Like an alliance gone awry where his own survival didn't even compare, where his own happiness doesn't even factor in, not when she exists and he knows her face can light up again and there's clarity there, sea-green eyes free of cobwebs.

(That love, without even being reciprocrated entirely, is terrible like that. Implosive, visceral, uncontrollatable. And it feels like flying, like fighting, like dreaming, like hating, like coming home. Like drowning. Like a sweeter, more pestilent form of madness.)

~.~

Finnick's arena had been a rainforest. It had a different kind of deception from the ocean – all the wet heat and the mix of sweet, heady gases played on the mind, charming it to sluggishness – and, for its stark unfamiliarity, dangerous. Near-impenetrable foliage and clusters of vines. Leaves and moss everywhere. Poisonous plants. Insects.

Mags had agreed to an alliance with the other Career districts; her insight had allowed him to survive the initial slaughter at the Cornucopia, the ambushes that followed after when more clever tributes discovered the mystical camouflage of the sparse, wet sunlight and dripping trees.

But alliance was a shallow word and, with the grim respect he held for deceiving potence of nature, it bred in Finnick a mistrust of everything. The day he received the trident on a silver parachute, he'd trapped the entire pack in the sturdy mesh of vines he'd woven and pierce them all where he knows the major arteries run.

Femoral. Carotid. Brachial.

Blood had puddled on the damp ground in viscous wash.

~.~

"It's easier for me if I didn't care about you," The boy on the screen says, with Finnick's face and his most winning smile, before he sinks the prong into a throat.

The Capitol adores that spiel. They rerun it too many times, often quoting it back to him admiringly, these people without a respect for pain.

~.~

It must be karma: the pack doesn't want Annie.

The 70th Games are held in a rocky crevasse, steep unforgiving cliffs on three sides, a dam on the fourth. Tunnels built into the cliffs lead to intertwining caves. Tribute appear greenish onscreen as they navigate the labyrinthine darkness a hundred feet below the earth, ripe with pods harboring anything from a bomb to a landslide to a mutt. There is barely any food. Water from the underground rivers make her sick.

But, down to eight tributes and a full Career pack dominating above ground, the tunnels are best chance Annie has.

Until the dam breaks and every screen in Panem fills with the rush of whitewater.

~.~

Having survived a jungle, Finnick remembers hunger and thirst, hate and unrelenting suspicion, twin plagues in his blood, twining over his spirit. With nothing left to lose but Mags, more than anyone, he had been prepared to cut the strings and be the Mockingjay.

Then Annie broke surface.

The black void that threatened to consume him whole recedes.

~.~

The world goes on, flowing and ebbing with the tide, changing. Miles away, a girl with a braid drops in to pick up her sister before they see to an accident in the coal mines. In another District, a child mimicks the lullabies of a mockingjay. In the heart of the Capitol, a student of design asks his models to twirl for him while several blocks away, two men drop dead before a president spitting rosettes of blood in his hands.

Back in District Four, Mags, Annie and himself. They forge out a family as best as they can under the weight of their respective burdens: age, insanity, secrets. They eat, they smile, they remember, they love. From the balconies of Victor's Village, they watch the ocean as the sun dips in, illuminating golden patterns in the water.

They fight their demons. They survive. They live.

Annie dreams where she wakes up crying. If he's there, if he's not at the Capitol living only to protect the only home he ever knew, he kisses her and her tears taste like the ocean.

They still watch the boats sailing off before dawn. Arms wrapped around each other against the cold. Occassionally, Annie turns to him, fresh from the world inside her mind.

~.~

You there, Finnick?

Yes, Annie, I'm not going anywhere.

I confess, I do not care that it has no semblance of plot. I do it all for the nautical imagery. And a sweet Finnick/Annie before I rip it to shreds with realistic!fic.