Chapter 2: The Journey Home
Timothy
The man next to my mother breaks the silence.
"Hey." His voice is weary, but has a familiar tone. I wonder where I recognize it from until I realize that it's my voice.
Katniss's eyes are red and angry when she bursts out, "Nineteen years, and that's all you can say?! Hey?"
"It's good to see you too..." he mutters, and turns back to the woman on the floor. Peeta stops staring at him long enough to choke out a sentence.
"Finnick... is it really... you?"
"Yeah," he replied, "I know, it's been a while." Haymitch, without any inhibitions, says plainly:
"Weren't you dead?"
Yes, he was! I think, This man can't be my father, can't be Finnick Odair..."
Finnick, or at least the man who claims to be him, eyes Haymitch almost with amusement. "Obviously not," he said, "or else I'm very confused." A pause. "Peeta, Katniss, people, please, don't just stand there. You aren't the only ones who've been grieving!" He stops ranting and glances around the room at every awe-struck statue.
I still stand, frozen, staring a this man who has my build, my voice, my hair...
And I come to realize his glances have led him to me.
"Timothy?" he says quietly, so quiet that I can barely hear, "No, it couldn't be..."
"Yeah."
It slips out before I think.
"Yeah, hey...how..."
"How did I know?" I refuse to believe this stranger is my father, even though he read my thoughts.
"That's easy," he says, "your eyes. They have the ocean in them, like your mother's."
I am silent and cold. And he notices.
"It's been so long, I'm sorry..." He falters and gives a nervous laugh.
"I've never been good with apologies."
Katniss regains movement and composes herself, something I have noticed she is extremely skilled at. The composing herself, that is, not the moving. "Finnick," she says, "How are you..."
There's silence while she whispers the last word.
"...alive?"
Finnick
I sit and prepare to tell my story. They are all staring at me so hard, so intently, it's almost like being a mentor again, with pressure and cameras and guilt trained on you. But I swallow hard and remain calm, like I attempted to when mentoring Annie. While watching her slip...
I wish I had some rope.
"So," I begin, "uh... I didn't die."
They all look at me like I'm stupid.
"I mean, I know it looked like it but... what I'm trying to say is... the sewer."
Man, I just realized how bad that sounded.
"I jumped in the sewer before the Holo. But after the bite."
Peeta regards me with a critical stare before responding, "That's brilliant. But... the bite? And nineteen years? Where were you?"
And there, I plunge into the story.
"It bit me, you all saw it. And Katniss, you threw the Holo down the hatch, I knew. But I always thought of one last resort way to cheat death... the moment your life flashes before your eyes. All those lights, awake in the arenas, they gave me time to think. If your life passes in one moment before you die, it means you have an extra moment to live. So, while I saw a lighthouse, Mags, my trident..."
"...Annie in her wedding dress..." Katniss whispers.
"Yes," I say, unwilling to ask how she knew, "that's what I saw. But while all those images were flashing by, I took that moment to jump into the sewer and swim down.
"A moment, though, is such a short time. So much shorter than a second. And so you see, I had no time to avoid the bite of that air-freshening mutt. As I swam in that putrid water, the greenish brown around me turned red in a cloud around my head and I felt, then I was going to die. I knew it. Unfortunately, you only get the life-flashing experience once, I guess. So I had no extra moment to swim further downstream when the Holo blew up. I was knocked deeper into the water, but managed to keep swimming, clawing my way toward light. When I reached the surface, I took one breath and..."
The way they're all staring at me is almost scary.
"...and I passed out."