Disclaimer: The Hunger Games and its characters are all property of Suzanne Collins. No profit is being made from this piece of work. No copyright infringement is intended.
13
I drop to my knees, feeling utterly defeated.
I try telling myself that I knew this would happen all along. Gale had practically told me when he'd helped me to escape. He'd told me to look after his daughter. He wouldn't bother saying that if he knew there was a chance of survival. But still there had been a part of me that had hoped he would escape somehow; that he would join me in the woods and we'd get to District 12 together.
But even thinking this now I know it would have been impossible. They'd have just taken Madison as hostage until he came back. And he would have come back – for her.
"Come on, Fin," Peeta says gently. "Let's get you to the house so you can get cleaned up."
He helps me up off the floor and I stand frozen to the ground as he closes up shop. Peeta takes my hand and leads me out of the back door.
We are silent on our journey to the house.
Katniss must have seen us coming through the window because she's waiting there at the front door by the time we reach the garden path. She leaves the door open behind her as she runs down the path and jumps into Peeta's arms. He lets go of my hand to catch her and holds her to him as he finishes the walk down the path.
Rosie and Martox come running out the open doorway.
"Fin!" they both cry and in that split second I snap out of any depression I have been dragged into. The pair of them run up to me and hug my legs, grinning up at me. I can't help but smile back when I see them. I remember last time I came here when I referred to both them and me as Innocents. I don't think I belong in the same category as them anymore but the way their faces radiate joy makes me forget about the real world for a bit.
For a moment I am six years old again, just like Rosie. My thoughts are pretty straight forward; if I don't go swimming today the world will end. But Mommy doesn't want to take me swimming yet – she's talking with somebody in the front room. I hear raised voices and Mommy sounds upset but I don't want to go into the room because the other lady scares me. She has her back to me when I peak around the door and I see her long white-blonde hair that reaches down to her waist.
"Fin?" Peeta's concerned voice breaks me out of my memory. I am surprised I remembered something so vivid whilst being awake. I follow the Mellark family inside the house.
Peeta cleans the cuts on my face I only now just notice I have. Rosie helps by handing him the bandages and telling me all what I've missed since I've been away. I try to nod and smile at all the right places but by the way she frowns at me, I assume I have failed.
"Let's leave Fin to rest now, Rosie," Peeta tells her, picking her up and swinging her about. She giggles and waves to me as he carries her out of the room.
Rosie doesn't leave me alone for long. A few minutes later she wonders back into the front room and jumps onto the seat next to me. "Are you sad about Gale?" she asks.
My head snaps towards her. How can she be so young and take it so easily? Then again, I remember not being affected by death so much when I was her age. She probably doesn't even know what happened to him.
"There's no need to be sad," she continues. "He lives on in the book, Mommy said."
I frown at her. "What book?" I ask.
Her eyes widen and she gasps dramatically. "You don't know about the book?" she asks. Before I can answer, she slides off the sofa and makes her way to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in the corner of the room. She pulls out a heavy leather volume and makes her way over to me again. I help her balance the heavy book on both our laps.
Rosie flips to the back of the book and points at an old photograph of Gale. At least I think it's Gale. The young man in the photo is no older than me and his face is clean of any scars.
"Mommy says whenever we miss him, we can just look in the book," she tells me, resting her head against my arm. "You can look too if you want."
A tear escapes my eye and falls down onto the paper, gently smudging a bit of ink from a sentence about Gale's snares when he and Katniss went hunting. Rosie pulls the book away from me.
"Mommy says you can't cry when you look at the book," she says it as though I've done something terribly wrong.
"I'm sorry," I say, blinking furiously. "I didn't mean to ruin the book."
"Oh, it's not that you'll ruin the book," she tells me. "It's just that you're supposed to be happy when you look at the book, not sad."
I smile down at her, realizing how strong this girl is. Katniss chooses that moment to walk in.
"Rosie, what did I say about letting Fin rest?" she asks but then her eyes fall down onto the book and she loses her annoyed stance of hands on hips. "What are you doing with the book, Rosie?"
"I was showing Gale's page to Fin," Rosie says defensively. She reminds me instantly of Katniss.
"We don't show anybody the book, Rosie," Katniss reminds her in a warning tone. "What did I tell you?"
"But Fin isn't a stranger," she protests. "He knew Gale too."
Katniss' eyes flick over to me. I expect her to start shouting but her face softens and she sighs. "Have you seen Finnick's page?"
"No," I say, shocked, my eyes flitting between the book and Katniss' face.
"I'll show him," Rosie sings, proud to help. She flicks furiously through the pages, a blur of faces I don't recognize.
Finally she comes to a stop on a page near the beginning. One side of the double page is dominated by a painting of a man with bronze hair and unusual green eyes. My breathe catches in my throat and all of a sudden Gale and Johanna's comments about me looking like him come to mind. I can't help but stare.
My father.
Vaguely I become aware of Rosie leaving the room, of Katniss taking her place in the seat beside me but my eyes stay fixed on this one page. It's hard to imagine that the realistic painting before me was once a real person who lived and breathed – and loved. On the opposite page is sketched a trident. I reach out and trace my fingers along the silver lines. A memory breaks free from the depths of my mind. It's been hidden so deep and for so long because I was so young when it happened.
I'm on our boat. Mother's been having a good day and has taken me out to go fishing with her. She's positioning the net over the side of the boat and I'm toddling up and down the deck, delighted to be spending a full day with my mother.
Something in the boat's cabin catches my eye, the sun glints off a piece of silver. Curious, I make my way over to it whilst Mother is still busy with the net. I look at the long silver trident and squeal at the prettiness of it.
"Mommy, look!" I cry, reaching out to grab it.
All of a sudden her hand appears before me, slapping my own hand away. "Don't touch it," she hisses at me. Confused, I begin to cry. "You never touch this, Fin," she warns me, ignoring my tears as she picks me up and carries me back out onto the deck. "That was your father's."
She holds me until I stop crying, offering no words of comfort. Sometimes she strokes my hair. I think that was the day I learned that – when it came to my mother – crying got me nowhere.
I snap back to the present when I realize Katniss is talking to me.
"Sorry," I say. "What were you saying?"
She smiles sympathetically at me. "I was asking whether you were okay."
"Oh," I say, "Well I think I answered that for you anyway."
We're both silent for a few minutes; me staring at the book, her staring at me. Every now and again we hear a door slam or Rosie talk loudly to either her brother or her father.
"He was a good man you know," Katniss eventually breaks the silence. "He was a hero and he saved my life so many times." She pauses, takes a deep breath, "But I couldn't save him."
"He'd be ashamed of me wouldn't he?" I say, though it's more of a statement than a question. Still, it feels good to voice the feelings I've been keeping inside me for past the year.
Katniss doesn't answer. She just looks at me; I can feel her stare though I keep my eyes trained on the book. Eventually it gets too much, and I tear my gaze away to stare at the corner of the front room.
"I lost my sister in the war you know," Katniss tells me. Her sudden confession makes me snap my head towards her.
Her sister must be Nurse Everdeen's daughter. No wonder she never told me what happened. I think about that time all those months ago on the deck where, under Gale's watchful eyes, I'd asked her what had happened to her daughter. I cringe at how abrupt I must have seemed.
"What was her name?" I ask. The textbooks in History never mentioned anything about the Mockingjay having a sister. Maybe they didn't care, maybe it looked bad the Mockingjay saving the country but losing her sister, or maybe – just maybe – the historians grew a heart and decided that they would show some respect and leave the death as a private family matter.
"Primrose Everdeen," Katniss whispers. She uses the name with a mixture of respect and surprise as though it has been a long time since she mentioned her sister's name out loud. "She was killed in a bomb attack in the Capitol." Her hand moves mechanically as she flicks away from my father's page to the very first set of double pages in the book. A photograph of a young girl stares back at us both. Her face is full of life and she almost reminds me of Rosie.
"She's who you named Rosie after isn't she?" I say suddenly without even realizing I've voiced my opinion.
"Yes she is," Katniss replies, reaching out and touching her sister's photograph, tracing the lines with her fingers as I had done with the sketch of my father's trident.
"Why didn't you just call her Rose then?" I ask without thinking.
Katniss' head snaps up and she glares at me. "Because roses are what he wore," she almost spits. "I would never relate my child to the flower associated with him."
"I'm sorry," I say.
Her face softens then, the burns on her face become more noticeable when she has a kinder expression. I wonder whether this is why she walks around with a scowl on her face all the time. It makes sense.
"It's not your fault," she says. "As it turns out, the Capitol will never be fair. We just found out the hard way."
"You talk like you've given up," I tell her.
"What's there to fight for, Fin?" she asks me. "I'm old and I'm tired. At least the Capitol aren't killing children from the Districts anymore."
"But this is just the start," I remind her. "If they can get away with this then what else are they going to do?"
"Our only chance was to win President Paylor round but she's dead so we've lost," Katniss sighs. "You were too late." I want to defend myself but she continues before I get the chance to utter a word, "Besides, you're on the run now. What can you do when you're on the run? As soon as the Capitol find you they will kill you."
"What have they said about me?" I ask, realizing I've been out of the news loop for two months.
"They've already told the world you're dead," she answers. "And you should be," she frowns, "How did you survive for months in the woods with nothing?"
I tell her about the fish and the stream and about Johanna.
"Poor Johanna," Katniss mutters. "She's the last person I would have thought to lose her mind."
"Maybe living on her own for so long hasn't done her any good," I say, remembering her words to me. I didn't want to assassinate people.
"I saw you when you were a baby too," Katniss says suddenly.
I look up surprised. I've grown up thinking I had the smallest family in my District yet by the sounds of it, there were a lot more people around me than I'd been aware of.
"You were very little," Katniss continues. "It'd only been a few days since you'd come out of hospital yet Annie showed up at my door with no warning at all." She smiles as though the memory of it all is absurd. "You know, I remember thinking how glad I was to have company outside of the District and then I saw there was something in the blanket that she was holding." I smile now because of the comedic way she tells the story. "I remember feeling guilty at first," she goes on, her smile vanishing, "That I couldn't save…" She trails off.
Without thinking, I reach across the book and take her hand in mine. Her skin is jagged due to her burns but I ignore it. She looks at me in surprise. "It wasn't your fault," I tell her, slowly and surely. In that moment it feels as though Katniss and I have truly connected. She could hate me for 'supporting' the Hunger Games and I could hate her for not saving my father but we don't. For the first time, I feel we are on the same page.
"That's what Annie told me," she says. "Would you like to add a page for her?"
Her offer surprises me and I look down at the large book over our laps. Hundreds and hundreds of pages already filled with so many left to go. Would I be in that book one day? Would I die a death to deserve such a…honor? The thought of both my parents being in this book upsets me but there's nothing I can do now but to honor my mother's memory and place her in the same book as her husband.
I flip my way through the book to the blank pages, pausing on the page before Gale's to prepare myself.
"Haymitch," Katniss mutters slowly, stopping my hand before I can turn over.
I blink at her. "Who?" I ask before cringing. Obviously the man on this page meant a lot to her and I was being rude.
She doesn't seem to mind though as she traces his name along the top of the page: Haymitch Abernathy. His name doesn't ring any bell and I wait patiently for her to explain.
"He was my mentor," she tells me. I automatically think of Madison mentoring the young girl from Tribe 2. "Nobody remembers him," she says as though she can read my mind from before. "He died of liver disease three years ago. If it wasn't for him I'd probably be dead." When it looks like she isn't going to say anything more, I turn over to the blank pages. Katniss' mention of Haymitch makes me think of all the other people in this book I have never heard of.
At school, we sometimes did pop quizzes on the victors of the Hunger Games but I could never remember enough to get a pass. Now I realize how important it is to remember those people.
"Peeta can draw her for you if you like," Katniss offers. She must see the blank look on my face as I stare down at the two white pages, at a loss of where to begin. I know for certain, though, that I didn't want Peeta to draw my mother.
"I want to do it," I say. "If that's alright," I add hurriedly remembering this is not my book.
Katniss looks surprised at first but assures me it's fine, leaving the room and returning with a box.
"These are Peeta's art supplies," she tells me. "Don't mess them up." Her warning is only half-joking.
She leaves me then. I am all alone with the task to imprint my mother's memory onto the double page. I start with her eyes. I'd always known I'd gotten my mother's eyes even before I saw the picture of my father. His eyes were too light a green – both mine and my mother's were as deep as the green reeds found on the surface of the ocean in District 4.
I've never been any good at painting but I try my best to do her long dark hair justice. It's only when I see a drop of water form on the page, smudging her eyebrow slightly that I realize I am crying. Remembering Rosie's warning, I pushed the book away and take deep breaths to calm myself. I couldn't do this if I was going to be a blubbering wreck.
It feels like I am eight years old and losing her all over again. My chest aches with the same lost and confused feeling I'd had that day on the beach where I'd wondered round until it got dark; until Nurse Everdeen had found me.
It takes me until the middle of the night, when the full moon beams light into the dark front room, for me to finish. The others have gone to bed long ago with Rosie and Martox giving me goodnight hugs. Now that I'm alone, I allow myself to miss my mother and I think of Gale.
It's only now that he's dead, that I realize he had been the closest thing to a father-figure I had had despite only knowing him for a short period of time. Hidden by the darkness of the room, I allow myself to mourn him.
(*)
I spend the next week with the Mellark family, trying to convince myself that I belong with them and I've never done a bad thing in my life. People from District 12 come to the house, asking Peeta and Katniss if Fin Odair is really in their home. After all, didn't the new President Plutarch announce his death just last week? Taken an overdose in his apartment because he couldn't deal with fame apparently.
The way I see it, the fame was the least reason I'd use to overdose.
Behind the Mellark home is a large field where Rosie and Martox usually play. It's raining the day I look out of my room and onto that field. But even the sheets of icy rain cannot disguise the threatening figure that descends from the sky. A Capitol hovercraft.
They've found me.