Fannie-ish chapter! Woo-hoo!
Disclaimer: I wish I owned the Hunger Games.
I glance sideways at finnick. He's still staring into space. He looks sort of like Annie does everyday.
"How do you do it?" the words are out of mouth before I can even think about saying them. His head snaps to the side, and his gaze settles on my face.
"Do what, princess?" He sounds like there's a frog partially blocking his windpipe.
"How do you stay sane on your nights?"
"I booze myself up pretty good. Usually so much I'm completely incoherent the entire night. Then I think about Annie's face to get me through the night."
"I felt so bad after that one time. I can't even imagine how you must feel about it. How many times has he sold you?"
He lays his arms on the table, putting his head between them. when he finally answers me, I have to lean closer so I can hear his muffled voice. "At least... at least four hundred times." My breath catches in my throat as tears well up in my eyes. Four hundred? It's a miracle he hasn't killed himself or put himself out of commission already.
"And it doesn't feel like anything anymore. I lost my capacity for feeling for pain a long, long time ago, when I won my games. It would have been better if i had died and let someone who deserved it win. Maybe an outer district. One of these day, they're all going to show the Capitol up and give us a spark we can turn into an inferno.." He sighs audibly and turns his head so his eyes star eout the window.
"Hey, it wouldn't have been better if you had died. Who would have avenged my sister if you had died? Her killer would have been the victor. Who else but you could have brought me home for Marlin? Who else but you could have brought Marlin home for me? Who would take care of Annie if you had died in your games?"
"Annie wouldn't be the way she is if I had died." I freeze. I know Marlin had told me that President Snow could have the reaping rigged if he wanted a certain somebody to be reaped, but Finnick didn't even know Annie until she became a tribute. Right?
"What?" My voice is high-pitched, almost a sqeak. Annie has been my best friend since we were four years old, when her family moved into the house across from my own. when my house caught on fire and burned to the ground, we moved in to the house right next to her. She was my neighbor from almost the beginning of my life until she moved into Victor's Village after coming home a victor. An now Finnick's saying that she wouldn't be that way if it weren't for him?
"Do you even know how I met Annie?"
"Um... she got reaped?"
He smiles, and the lines that made him look older suddenly make him look much younger and brighter. "She crept up on me. Literally."
"Spill the beans, FiFi."
"Shut up and let me tell you my tragic love story without interruption, princess. I was on the beach one day, when I was maybe fifteen and a half. I had been fishing with my trident, but I just didn't have the motivation. I lost the drive I needed to feed my family when I won. Anyway, she had been there, playing a game on the sand with her friends. So I had walked over and asked if I could play, because I didn't have anything else to do.
"All her friends had started screaming, because I'm just amazing like that, so I hadjust turned around and walked away. But when I bent down to pick up my net, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Annie was a little older than fourteen, beautiful as can be, and she was the only one without a red face.
"And she had said, "You wanted to play the game with us, right?" I had been astounded that she talked to me like she would talk to a regular person, not screaming at me like everone else did, and I guess I had been kind of staring at her, because her face started to turn red then. And then I did the natural thing."
"Which is?"
"I had asked her why she wasn't embarrassed to talk to me. Then she had said, and I quote, "Well, that playboy thing you do for everyone else is obviously just an act. I can see right through it. I know you're just like everyone else on the inside." She had put a finger right over my heart, and that's when I had turned red. She had laughed and withdrawn her finger, saying, and again I quote, "See, now you're just like anyone else. And seriously, you're cute and all, but it's not like I expect to marry you, right? It's all right if you play the game with us. And don't mind my friends. The only one who wouldn't scream when they saw you is at home, sick in bed." So I had played the game with them, and I actually managed to drown out the other girls' giggling and whispers by listening acutely for her words and her laugh. By that friend that was sick in bed, I'm guessing she meant you."
"Yeah, that was me. I had Marlin even back then. But she never told me that she had met you. She had visited me the day after she met you, I guess, and all she told was that she had met a boy on the beach that she really liked. I didn't know that she had meant you."
"She told you she liked me?" I roll my eyes. He looks like an excited puppy with a slightly pink face. "Yes, she did. Didn't I just say that? And here you are, the infamouse Finnick Odair, asking me if a poor, mad girl back home like you. I can only imagine what Capitol citizens would think of you if they could hear this conversation."
"She is not a poor, mad girl. She's rich, and she's only a little unstable. When I left this time, she hadn't talked to David in almost three weeks."
"Whatever you say, FiFi. Anyway, she was my best friend before her games ruined her mind. What do you mean by 'she wouldn't be this way if I had died'?"
"What I mean is that by the time I was eighteen, Snow had already killed my entire family, and the only person I loved was her. As a friend, of course. For a year, I hadn't been sold even once, because they had no one to use against me. But Snow... he found out about her. He threatened me with her life if I didn't come to the Capitol immediately. I told him he was wrong, that I didn't even know her, but he still threatened me with her. But Mags was having some troubles with her hearing and her sight, so instead of going to the Capitol, I stayed home and helped her. And he... he told me I would pay for it.
"Annie had already given up the hope of ever loving me, even though I had prayed for it to happen every single day, and when some boy had asked her to go out with him, she'd said yes without the slightest hesitation. So for a year, I watched her be happy with him, and I realized that it wan't surprising that Snow could tell that I loved her. It was written all over my face.
"So I went to the Capitol over and over again that year to keep him from having her killed, and she noticed my absence, and she was angry about it. On the reaping day of the 70th Hunger Games, she confronted me and demanded that I tell her where I was going. And when I couldn't bring myself to tell her out of an irrational fear that she would hate me for what I did, she told me she never wanted to see me again. Then she threatened to marry her boyfriend the second she was free from that infernal reaping bowl.
"And then..." He put his head in his hands. "And then she got reaped. Do you remember what she had screamed?" Of course I do. I had been holding her hand during the reaping. We held hands every year, to calm each other down, except my year, bacause she had to be on stage. She had screamed, "No, not him, please, anyone but him! You can't make me! He'll get me killed! He hates me! He hates me after what I did to him! He'll enjoy watching me get killed! Please, not him, it can't be him!"
I had wondered what she was screaming about. An outsider who didn't know her story might think she was screaming that horrible stuff about her brother, but Annie had been reaped first. Nobody knew that her brother would volunteer beside her. So that meant she was screaming about...
"She was screaming about me," Finnick says tiredly. "She was afraid I would abandon her once she reached the arena, that I would let her die. That's why she made Marlin her mentor instead of me. That, and because he was your boyfriend, and you were her best friend. She trusted him much more than she trusted me.
"But she had chosen wrong. David was Marlin's best friend back then. Why let his best friend die while her sister lived, even if the sister was his girlfriend's best friend? So the second they were in the arena, we switched. He was still her official mentor, but I was the one in control of her sponsors, and vice-versa, with David.
"Then David got killed. She went insane. Snow had her boyfriend killed. Snow threatened me again with her life, so I gave in again. When they said she had to live with either Marlin or I, I volunteered immediately, because I wanted her to realize that she could trust me. And I have treated her with utmost respect. But it wouldn't have happened if I was dead. And so I regret being alive."
"If I hadn't married Marlin, would that have happened to me?"
He nods and starts ticking off reasons why people would want to buy me on his fingers. "You know Finnick Odair, you're pretty, you're smart, you're pretty dangerous, you're a victor. Did I mention you know Finnick Odair?" I laugh and stand up.
"Well goodnight, princess!"
"Don't let the bedbugs bite your pretty face, FiFi! Heaven knows you would have a mental breakdown about it."
"Whatever, princess."
As I walk to my room, I notice Azula's bedroom has light curling underneath it. I turn the knob and push it open, only to find Aula sitting at the small table that's in every room. Tears are slowly dripping from her cheeks onto the plate of seemingly untouched food in front of her.
"ViVi? ViVi, is that you?" I sit down in the chair next to her and wrap my arm around her.
"Do you thini winning is worth it?"
"Do you want the stone-cold truth or the sugar-coated version?"
"Um, I guess the sugar-coated version."
"Azula, there is no way in hell it's worht it. Without Marlin, I would've already killed myself a hundred times over. If I was put in the arena again, I would jump off my plate before I would give myself another chance to become a murderer and have as many nightmares as I already have."
"Then I'll help Julian win."
"Julian's not going to win, kiddo. You are."
"But you said-"
"My little sister is not going to die while I'm her mentor. Period. Now, got to sleep. Tomorrow's a big day."
She lays down on her bed and I pull the covers up over. Then I stroke her hair and hum her to sleep, before falling asleep in the chair beside her bed, lulled into unconciousness by the gentle rocking of the moving train.
R&R, please!