A/N: Finnick's POV

I had already gotten to the point, by the fifteenth day, of hating myself every morning just a bit more as I woke up in my bed.

At least I was able to wake up in my own Capitol bed, I tried to tell myself. At least I didn't have to actually spend the night with the women. Not the full night, anyway.

Lucretia Bluehollow had been my first 'client', as well as the most recent. She wasn't so terribly old, not as old as some of the men Scarlett had pointed out as her clients, like Kenelm Laguov, who was her most regular client.

Lucretia was probably in her early forties, although sometimes it was difficult to tell with these Capitol people and all their vanity procedures, and I certainly knew better than to actually ask her how old she was. She praised my skill as a lover over and over, and I wondered if her husband heard the same things she whispered in my ear both nights or if I was the escape from her husband.

I was guessing the latter.

Really, it was thanks to Scarlett that I'd not been laughed out of the bed on the first night, and I was grateful for it almost as much as I sat around recalling it, her hair tickling my skin, her lips on my lips...

But nothing was supposed to change, Scarlett had said, and so I did my very best not to let things be awkward. I hadn't even properly expressed my thanks that she'd prepared me, because I didn't think the women I had been with would have been forgiving as the men she'd started out with, condescending or no. Women could be nasty like that, and my very persona as far as the Capitol was concerned was doused with charm and oozing sex.

So as far as anyone was concerned, that's who I was, and if I hadn't been able to deliver on that it probably would have been really bad for somebody, possibly me or my family.

As Scarlett had said, I was starting to receive gifts from my clients, trinkets and money and whatnot. Scarlett and I had agreed that there had to be some better way for them to pay us, but we'd not come up with something that made us feel less dirty and more like we were fighting back, so we gathered our trinkets and kept thinking.

There was none of the passion and magic I'd felt with Scarlett with any of the other women. I tried to tell myself that it was just the fact that it was my first time, nothing more than the rush of her being the first woman I'd experienced. I'd heard boys talking about the 'first' like it was some incredibly deep experience.

In a way, maybe it was.

I couldn't really decide, though, until I knew whether or not my lingering longing to taste Scarlett's lips again was because she was my first or because she was Scarlett.

Scarlett didn't come back to my room after that night, so on the morning of the fifteenth I had gone to her room, to wake her up, to try my luck at getting another kiss, even though I knew she'd said that there wasn't anything changed between us. Maybe she didn't feel any sort of change, but I did, every time I looked at her.

Haymitch had noticed, of course. Haymitch noticed everything, and I hadn't missed the way they whispered together the night of the fourteenth, looking over at me, and I just knew they were talking about me.

After that, Scarlett seemed more distant, like she'd been when I didn't know about her being a prostitute for the Capitol and she was trying to keep it from me. I couldn't figure out what she was keeping from me this time, and it made everything else going on just a bit harder to bear.

On the morning of the fifteenth, I snuck into her room as softly as possible, looking down on her peacefully sleeping form.

She looked like the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen, laying there, her sheets bunched around her waist so I could see her cute feet poking out the bottom and her perfect breasts bared at the top. I smiled slightly to myself, wondering if I could get away with running my tongue along the swell of those breasts without suffering her wrath when she woke up. She shifted in her sleep and I decided against it.

Instead, I sat on the end of the bed, tickling the bottom of her feet gently. Her face, which had been so peaceful, scrunched up in an annoyed expression and she turned over, kicking at my hand.

"Go away, Alyson," she groaned.

I frowned slightly, a bit disconcerted to be mistake for her dead niece, but I gathered myself quickly.

She was sleeping. Scarlett didn't really know what was going on or even what she was saying.

"Scarlett, darling," I said softly, shaking her leg a bit. "It's time to wake up."

She groaned thrashing her arms and legs in protest to my words.

With a sigh and no other way to wake her up gently, I took her foot, lifted it slightly, and began placing kisses up the back of her calf, starting at her heel and moving up slowly as she shifted, starting to wake.

"Don't do that, Finnick," she groaned, blinking up at me. "You're likely to get a broken nose. I kick in my sleep."

"I noticed," I teased. "C'mon, Scarlett, we've got to go watch the Games."

"I'll be along," she said, pulling the sheets up to block her perfect breasts from my view, and I assuaged my hurt by saying it was because she was cold, and it was chilly in that room.

But when I nodded and reached the door, she said, "Nothing's changing Finnick. Please don't forget that."

I nodded with a bitter fake smile, but I went up to watch the Games wishing she'd left me wishing.

On the fifteenth day, we sat and watched a variety of things happen.

The first was that Draven, Charlotte, and Maggie went their separate ways. They were all short on food and water, to the point that they had none left. Draven had sponsors, but the girls were truly going to be on their own once they walked away from him, or rather, Charlotte and Draven walked away from Maggie, who was too weak to move.

The most disturbing bit about their alliance was that Charlotte and Draven, who held all the power, had made a deal that Charlotte would kill them if Draven didn't give them the food the pair of them needed to protect themselves and the others.

It made logical sense until you thought about the fact that Charlotte was still slowly killing her allies, by starving them to death instead of bludgeoning them with her mace.

So the three of them split from each other, Maggie lying in the sand, gasping for air, and desperately clinging to life.

Much like Daisy and Anselm had been, at the end.

"This is just depressing," Haymitch muttered.

Several of the other victors nodded, myself included.

We all knew that Maggie was going to die, but it was just a matter of when and how. I suspected it would be hunger, if something didn't eat her first.

The big flaw had been in Draven's inability to lasso any of the lizards. Unlike humans, they were too small and quick to be caught by even Draven's skill with the loop of rope. So his sponsors had had to provide not only water, but also food.

Charlotte had been able to help at first, but even with Scarlett flirting her best, people became disenchanted with her brutality very quickly and the sponsors dried up the coffers quickly.

Apparently, the image of a young woman bludgeoning other people to death with a mace wasn't a particularly attractive thing for the greasy men Scarlett had to work with in hopes to keep Charlotte alive.

Draven's almost-mercy, on the other hand, had seemed to have gained him even more sponsors, especially on the fifteenth day, when he finally was on his own and the gifts wouldn't have to be shared amongst his allies. Because nobody wanted Charlotte to win, and Maggie had no prayer.

It was sometime after lunch when I sat between Beetee and Jonas to watch the rest of the day, having secured enough sponsor support for the day to send Luke his daily allotment of water and fruit.

It was some five minutes after I sat down when a lizard came over to the immobile but living body of Maggie, laying in the sand. I'm not sure if lizards sniff, but the mutt certainly considered her for a moment before scrambling over to her legs.

"No," I thought I heard her say, and she was as aware as the people at home were as to what was about to happen.

"Oh, not again," Callie groaned from the other side of Jonas, covering her face with her hands, but peeking very obviously through the space between her fingers.

She, like the rest of us, didn't want to miss the action, no matter how disgusting we knew it was going to be.

The lizard opened its jaws and took a large bite out of Maggie's leg, removing a large chunk of the remaining flesh that was already wasting off her. She screamed in pain and there was a moderate trickle of blood coming from the wound as the lizard chewed and swallowed.

It took a few more bites over the course of the next twenty minutes, although we didn't spend all twenty minutes watching the lizard bite and chew. It was intermittent with watching Draven walking around, muttering to himself about how much he hated Charlotte.

None of us could really blame him for that. She'd made his life in the arena particularly hard with her bad attitude and shows of strength that were more childish than intimidating at times.

But we still had to watch the lizard eating several bites of Maggie's leg. She was crying out in pain, but the other tributes either couldn't hear her or were choosing to ignore it. I probably would have ignored it if I'd been one of the tributes. Or tried to, anyway. Screams like that would have been difficult to ignore.

We'd gotten to the point where we had to talk to Caesar and Claudius about all of the major events, so we sat there talking about how we were going to have to talk about that lizard taking a chunk or two out of her leg.

"I would rather not have to talk about that," Scarlett sighed. "Trust me, that has to be agony. Do you think she's going to die of blood loss or infection or...?"

"For someone who doesn't want to talk about it," Haymitch drawled from the other side of her, "you're still yammering on about it."

"I would say she's going to die of hunger," Jonas said quietly. "If you guys don't want to talk about it, it's okay. Callie and I have to. Just tell them that they should ask us."

I felt a rush of sympathy for Jonas and Callie, who finally had a year where their tributes were doing well and then something like this had to happen.

It wasn't comfortable, watching someone die of hunger. Thirst, either, for that matter. Beetee's boy had died of thirst. My own Games were so short that hunger didn't even play into the picture, and water was in large supply, although not without its own risks. I'd heard Chaff talking about people starving in District Eleven of all places, but in District Four the very idea that someone would die of hunger or thirst was just absurd. We might not have been as extravagantly over-fed as the Capitol, but we were certainly not starving.

On the morning of the sixteenth day, I thought about waking up Scarlett again, maybe getting another look at her looking like a sleeping angel, but I didn't think she'd let it happen again so soon after I'd surprised her. So instead, I showered, ate a quick breakfast, and went up to the twelfth floor to watch the Games.

Sure enough, Scarlett and Haymitch were sitting together, her drinking orange juice and him drinking some sort of alcohol, not even paying attention to the food. Haymitch must have gotten her up on her request, because Blight was nowhere to be seen.

"Hey, Finnick," she sighed. "Sleep okay?"

I hadn't really slept much, but I nodded. She would have done the same if I'd asked, even though I knew she'd probably been kept up at least as long as I was by clients.

The opportunity to observe Scarlett and Haymitch without a bunch of people around wasn't lost on me, although between the time I came in and the time Callie and Jonas wandered in about half an hour later, nothing at all strange happened, so I still didn't know what the inside joke was all about.

"You've not turned on the Games yet?" Callie said anxiously, and I realized she was probably nervous about Maggie. She would have been told if Maggie had died, but she something could have happened on the elevator ride. "I spent all night trying to get her sponsors," Callie admitted to me wearily. "Nobody wanted to. They all figured she was as good as dead and not worth their money when there's winners like Draven and Luke and Charlotte still running around. Jonas is even having a hard time getting supporters for Alexander, but at least he's not on death's door."

"Maybe she won't die today," I said supportively, sitting down beside her as Jonas turned the Games on.

"No, she'll die today," Callie sighed, shaking her head. "If not from something else, the hunger will surely get her today. I've seen enough Games to know when it's coming."

"The question is when," Jonas muttered, nodding in agreement.

I frowned at the screen, wondering if I would know when Luke was going to die. Or maybe he wouldn't die. Maybe he would win it all.

But even I hadn't thought he would make it as far as he had.

The other mentors trickled in, grabbed some food if they hadn't done so before heading up to meet us, and then gathered on the couch. By the time we'd all settled, they'd just finished the playing the interviews we'd recorded the evening before about how the tributes were doing.

"Have they said anything about Maggie yet?" Beetee asked.

Several of us shook our heads in response as the screen showed Draven getting up for the day, making himself breakfast and drinking some of the water his sponsors had bought for him. Scarlett was the only person who seemed interested at all in Draven's breakfast. The rest of us wanted to see how Maggie was doing.

It was early afternoon before we saw Maggie again. Her leg had bled a bit, obviously, and her lips were so cracked that they, too, were bleeding.

"Hunger," Haymitch said with a nod. "Any minute now."

The tension in the room was so thick it was almost choking as we watched for two minutes of Maggie rasping uncomfortably on the screen, the camera angles changing every few moments because Maggie herself wasn't moving at all.

"Are sure she isn't already-?"

But Scarlett's question was punctuated mid-sentence by the blow of a cannon.

We watched in silence as the hovercraft picked up the finally-dead Maggie, showing her hauntingly gaunt face one more time as she was pulled out of the arena, leaving only four tributes left in the Games.

Nearly there.

The three of us with tributes still in the race then stood and made our way to the elevator.

"Do you think she suffered terribly?" Scarlett asked Jonas as we stood in the elevator, waiting to land on the main floor to work toward getting gifts for our tributes.

"She suffered," Jonas said with a shrug. "How terribly, though, I can't say."

When we stepped out of the elevator and made our way toward the large lobby the sponsors were waiting in, I turned to Scarlett.

"Do you think Alexander's got a prayer?" I asked.

Really, I was asking about Luke, but I didn't want to say his name for fear of him losing if I did for whatever silly superstitious reason. Scarlett knew what I was really asking, though, and she shrugged.

"Charlotte doesn't," she muttered, "if I can't get someone to finally send her water. Even my most loyal customers don't want to put too much toward her, and everything's getting really pricey this late in the Games."

I hadn't realized that Charlotte wasn't getting water. I'd been so wrapped up in supplying Luke, trying to decide if the 'non-contenders' were about to die, and how to survive the night without making a dangerous mistake. I hadn't noticed the struggles Scarlett was having, and I realized that the money they weren't giving to Charlotte was probably going to nights spent with her, which probably compounded Scarlett's guilt, but what was she supposed to do? She couldn't just tell them to spend their money on Charlotte instead.

It was a sick sort of cycle we were caught in, and the whole rest of the day I kept seeing Maggie's gaunt face: on the face of a sponsor; in the reflective surface of a plugged, filled sink; on the inside of my eyelids as I closed my eyes.

It wasn't even my fault she was dead. She wasn't my responsibility, and yet, I knew her face was going to haunt my nightmares from that night on, just like the ones I'd killed, the ones I'd let down... Lila, Stella, Alana, Aiden, people I'd forgotten the names of but their faces were unforgettable...

And now Maggie.