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In his three years of being a victor, Finnick’s not sure that he’s ever been so uncomfortable.
He’s had to do a number of uncomfortable things. He’s had to watch the recap of his Games with Caesar Flickerman and the rest of Panem looking on. He’s slept with people two, three, four times his age. He’s looked his older brother in the eye and lied through his teeth that everything was fine and there was no need to worry and he really, really liked being in the Capitol.
For some reason, none of that has unsettled him more than looking in the mirror to see himself, seventeen years old, dressed in his tribute uniform.
It’s the busiest time of day in the Remake Center. He’s not the only victor getting ready for the night, but right now Finnick feels like the only person in the room. His stomach lurches a bit, and he absentmindedly brings a shaky hand to his mouth.
“Are you sick?” asks his stylist Cassia.
Yes. So sick. Too sick to make it to this appointment, so they really ought to cancel and let Victor Affairs refund the exorbitant amount of money that Lucretia Dovecote spent to be with him tonight. “I’m fine,” he says. “Just tired.”
“Well, you won’t be doing much tonight,” Cassia assures him. “You’ll just be walking her around the arena, answering her questions, giving fun behind the scenes info. I doubt you’ll even take your clothes off.”
For once, Finnick wants nothing more than to take these clothes off.
Lucretia Dovecote bought his time tonight for one simple reason. She is a Hunger Games fanatic. Most people in the Capitol are fans of the Games, to some extent. Some people are interested enough to visit old arenas that have been made into tourist destinations. There’s only a small percentage of the Capitol population enthusiastic enough and rich enough to actually purchase the victor corresponding to that arena and experience both at the same time.
Finnick’s not sure how much time passes. Cassia does something to his hair so it looks windswept and messy without looking sloppy. He fiddles with the zipper on his arena jacket just like he used to when he was fourteen. It’s not the actual clothes he wore in the arena—those are preserved forever in the Hunger Games museum, and would be way too small anyway. The outfit is a very impressive replica, though. The only thing missing is the rope bracelet that he wore as his token, given to him by his little sister Celeste. Cassia never mentioned it, and Finnick wasn’t about to bring it up. At least if he leaves the bracelet behind, a part of him, however small, is safe from the arena.
“Rough night?”
Finnick startles. It’s Cashmere, the victor from the 63rd. She’s clearly going out tonight, too. Her dress is so sheer that she may as well be wearing nothing. Her blonde hair spills down her back in shiny ringlets. Cashmere usually has a way of looking unbothered, but tonight her lips are pressed into a small, concerned frown.
He blinks, remembering that she asked him a question and generally it’s polite to answer. “I guess.”
“Come with me,” she says decisively. “Let’s go somewhere quiet.”
Finnick follows mindlessly as she leads him out of Remake and down the hall to a small storage closet. In the dim lighting, he can’t even see his tribute outfit anymore.
Cashmere sighs. “Let me guess. Lucretia Dovecote?”
Something akin to relief blooms in his chest. “How’d you know?”
“We’ve all been there,” she answers. “I guess she’s trying to collect all the victors or something. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is how you’re feeling.”
“I’m feeling…” Finnick begins. His mouth is impossibly dry. “I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Look,” says Cashmere, gently putting her hands on his shoulders as if to steady him. It works, in a weird way. He feels a little less like he’s going to float away. “I know it’s tempting to just check out and leave your body. But you have to come back. You have to wake up.”
“Why?”
“When you get back into your arena, your instincts will kick in,” she warns. “The same instincts that made you a victor in the first place. It’s very, very important that you don’t listen to them.”
Finnick shakes his head. Mags always told him to trust his instincts. His lips form soundless words before he eventually says, “I don’t understand.”
“You can’t fight, Finnick.” Cashmere’s voice cracks on the word fight, and for some reason that’s what brings him back into his body. The apathy clouding his brain starts to clear, and the terror crashes into him like a tidal wave. “You might want to. She might say something terrible or even ask you to recreate a certain moment with the dumb fake weapons they have in there. But you have to be alert the whole time and not let your instincts or your training take over.”
“I know,” he says, trying to project strength into his voice. It comes out a little shaky anyway.
Cashmere runs a hand through her hair. She looks like she’s not sure whether to laugh or cry. “I know you do. You want some advice?”
“Please,” he replies, because he could use all the help he can get.
“Try to view it all as objectively as you can,” she begins. “List the things you can see, hear, smell. Say it out loud to her if you have to. Like, ‘there’s the river’ or something. I know it sounds stupid, but it’ll keep you in the moment. It worked for me.”
Finnick nods. “It’s not stupid.”
She smiles. Then the pager in her pocket beeps and her smile falls. “My car’s here. I have to go. Good luck, Finnick.”
Then Cashmere opens the door, flooding the closet with light, and disappears into the night. Finnick shivers. His arena outfit is warm and insulated, but he feels cold all over. It’s a numbness that starts at his fingertips and spreads up through his hands and wrists, eventually reaching his chest.
He takes a few deep breaths to ground himself. Cashmere is right, he needs to stay focused.
“There you are,” says Cassia, looking frazzled. He feels a little bad for just leaving without telling her where he went. “Do you need help getting to the car?”
“No,” he says, forcing his shoulders to relax. “I’m fine.”
“Oh, this is so exciting,” says Lucretia Dovecote. She’s a short woman with long, silky hair. The first thing Finnick notices is that she’s wearing high heels, golden strappy sandals that snake up her legs. He thinks it’s a poor choice of footwear for any occasion, but especially for his arena. “I’ve been saving up for months to afford this.”
“I hope it will be worth it,” he tells her.
They’re getting to the arena by hovercraft. It’s a much nicer hovercraft than the ones tributes are brought in on, but Finnick still reflexively runs his fingers over his arm, feeling for the lump of the tracker. He doesn’t feel anything, but it’s there all the same; a silent, invisible weight.
“How does this work, exactly?” he asks conversationally. “You’re the only person I’ve ever done an arena tour with.”
Lucretia beams, grateful for the chance to explain something to him and to feel special. “The hovercraft will drop us right off at the Cornucopia. We don’t enter via the tribute tubes, of course. The Cornucopia will have replicas of the real weapons that tributes used, and information about the arena and the tributes. And of course the victor. Then there’s the gift shop…”
This is fine, Finnick reasons. He doesn’t mind sitting here listening to Lucretia talk. As long as he’s on this hovercraft, he’s in some weird liminal space between the Capitol and the arena, and nothing can really hurt him.
Eventually the hovercraft descends, landing on the ground near the Cornucopia. He lets Lucretia step out first, accepting her hand as he climbs down the steps.
It’s not as cold as he remembers. That had been the first thing that Finnick noticed the first time he entered the arena; the biting, blistering cold. There’s a chill in the air, sure, but it’s nothing like what it was. The sky is still cloudy, with small hints of daylight peeking through even though it’s nighttime in the real world.
Lucretia takes a deep breath. “I just love the fresh air.”
It’s fake air, he wants to say. It’s all fake. Instead he just smiles. “Would you like to see the Cornucopia?”
The Cornucopia was the site of his final fight with Sigrid of District Two. It’s so easy to get lost in the memory as he stands here, but he forces himself to stay present. “These weapons are amazing,” he says, picking up a knife. It can’t be real. It’s way too light. But it looks like it could genuinely be part of the arena, although Finnick can’t remember now who it belonged to.
“Oh, they have replicas of everything,” Lucretia explains. “I haven’t been to your arena before, but my friend Elysia has, and she said they even left your traps up. Remember how you killed the girl from One?”
The image floods his mind before he can stop it. Aurora from One tangled in his net, the prongs of his trident piercing through her stomach. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he says jokingly. “That was near the end, wasn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” Lucretia agrees. “But you were so clever all the way through. Everyone focuses on how beautiful you were, especially so young. But it wasn’t your beauty that tricked that boy from Two into drinking that poisonous water.”
His muscles clench in an involuntary shudder. The boy from Two was named Cyrus, and Lucretia is right. He did trick him. When Beckett from One had been swallowed by the depths of the lake, leaving his stuff behind, Finnick filled his water bottle with poisonous water from the numerous hot springs scattered around the arena. Cyrus, having come looking for his ally, assumed that Beckett was dead and his belongings were fair game. So he drank Beckett’s water, and it was the last thing he ever did.
Finnick schools his expression into something he hopes is nonchalant. “I don’t know about clever,” he says, with just the right amount of self-deprecation. There’s nothing attractive about insecurity. But the last thing he needs is the Capitol thinking he’s some sort of threat.
Lucretia laughs. Her hand comes up and brushes a strand of hair from his forehead. “Don’t worry, Finnick. I happen to think you’re beautiful, too.”
She wants him to lead the way, which is both a relief and very worrying. The Cornucopia is fine; he’s seen it enough on the replays that it’s not like he’ll dissolve into a sobbing mess at the mere sight of it. There’s a marked path on the ground that hadn’t been there originally. It’s intended to retrace his steps so visitors can follow along.
“Oh, this is beautiful,” says Lucretia as they approach the hot springs that Finnick and his allies had found on the very first day. The blue water is shockingly bright against the gray of the sky or the dull brown of the grass. There is a gentle, wispy layer of steam rising from the spring. Lucretia lets her hand hover over it, laughing delightedly. “You can feel the heat from here!”
“They’re very blue,” says Finnick astutely, because he needs to say something or he may lose any ability to communicate. Being here, further into the arena, is harder. The Cornucopia is a symbol of the Games that he has seen a thousand times, but he only visits this place in his nightmares.
Lucretia laughs. She stumbles a little in her heels and reaches for Finnick’s shoulder to steady herself. The pain of her long nails digging into his shoulder is an anchor to reality. “How did you feel when you finally found water?”
“Relieved,” he answers vaguely. Then, because he knows she wants more, “If I can be honest with you, Lucretia, I was just glad to be useful. Not every group of volunteers would have even let a fourteen-year-old join.”
“Well, they’d have been stupid not to,” she answers, like that’s supposed to make him feel better. Finnick smiles like it does.
Although they had walked to the hot springs, there’s a shuttle that takes them from the Cornucopia to the lake and black sand beach further away. It had taken Finnick hours to walk there initially, but they reach the site of Cyrus and Beckett’s death in a matter of minutes.
“I would have thought there’d be more people here,” Finnick says easily as he helps Lucretia descend the stairs of the shuttle. “Don’t tell me my popularity’s drying up already.”
“Never!” she gasps, smiling widely. “I rented the place out for the night. I didn’t want anyone to disturb us. You have many fans, you know. If they saw you here, we never would have gotten a moment of peace all night.”
Peace is the last thing he feels. “That’s very considerate.”
The next site on the list, after the black sand beach and bubbling lake, is his cave. He can’t remember now how many days he spent in that cave, watching through the opening as people passed by. But of course Lucretia wants to see it, and of course she wants Finnick to tell her everything.
“This was where you met the girl from Three, wasn’t it?” asks Lucretia.
Finnick’s heart pangs. Ada had been his ally and his friend. He had only known her for a few days, but it’s impossible to forget her. She’s never shown on the replays unless they’re revisiting the trap they made together to kill Aurora. But the moments that Finnick remembers—laughing in this cave over some dumb, adrenaline fueled joke; Ada stitching his wound left by Sigrid’s knife—exist only in his memory now.
He can’t talk about her. He doesn’t want to repeat the things they said when the cameras were focused on someone else. Some things are meant to stay secret.
Instead, Finnick puts on his most winning smile. “Why are we still here when we could be admiring my trident by now?”
The moment he received his trident is inexorably connected to Ada, too. It had been at her camp near a glacier where the sponsor parachute dropped the parcel. But at least Ada’s memory could be left alone while Finnick kept the attention on himself and the very gift that made him a victor.
It becomes increasingly obvious as they approach the site of the gift that this is what Lucretia is really here to see. It’s not just the prestige of a night with Finnick Odair that she wants. She wants him here, on this land cultivated by the Gamemakers, wearing his tribute uniform, iconic weapon in hand. She doesn’t just enjoy watching the Games; she wants to reach through the screen separating the Games from the real world, break that barrier completely, and touch him. What drives a person to want something like that? Is she sick in the head? Is she just terribly lonely, and the Games are some sort of twisted connection for her?
Finnick inhales sharply. There’s no point in speculating on why the Capitol thinks the way they do. Mags says it’ll drive him crazy. He’s probably crazy enough as it is.
There’s a plaque stuck in the ground, marking the exact spot that the parachute dropped. And then there’s the trident. Like the weapons at the Cornucopia, it’s not the real thing, just a convincing replica.
“Why don’t you pick it up?” asks Lucretia. “That’s what it’s there for.”
Finnick reaches for it. He’s struck by how light it is. It’s easy to swing around, but difficult to do any real damage because the prongs are too dull to pierce anything. Lucretia wants to see a few poses, so he lets her guide his motions. He’s pretty sure he says a few things, some ridiculous canned lines that have been burned into his brain after years of being a victor. Finnick only comes back to himself when his grip tightens around the hilt and he realizes that he wants nothing more than to drive this trident straight through her chest.
He stops the thought as soon as it comes. Cashmere did warn him about this. It seems impossible to reconcile the two versions of himself; the tribute turned victor who caught and speared children like fish, and the Capitol’s favorite celebrity who obeys without a fight.
“May I hold it?” asks Lucretia after a few minutes, like Finnick even has a choice in the matter.
Finnick almost has to pry his fingers off the handle. Holding the trident had felt wrong and almost dangerous, but somehow giving it up feels even worse. Lucretia swings it around with a delighted laugh. “You know, Finnick,” she begins, still smiling, “after tonight, I feel like I could have won the Hunger Games.”
Strangely enough, he gets that a lot. His arena hadn’t been particularly brutal, as far as the Games go. The main attraction of Finnick’s arena had been Finnick himself, and he’s certainly no threat to the Capitol now. No wonder they all think they’d make it out. He doesn’t have it in him to be offended by Lucretia’s insinuation that the Games are somehow easy to endure. All he feels is a grim sort of resignation, and underneath that is emptiness. So it’s almost easy to smile at her and lie through his teeth and say, “I believe you could have. I knew it as soon as I saw you.”
Finnick’s skin is red and raw when he finally gets out of the shower.
There is no shower long enough or hot enough to erase the memory of the arena from his skin. He knew before he started that it was pointless to try. If anything, he feels worse now than he did before. He’s exhausted but restless, and his hands won’t stop shaking, and every unexpected noise has him on high alert.
When he emerges from the bathroom on District Four’s floor of the Training Center, Mags and Nerissa are waiting for him. Neither of them say anything as Finnick walks in and joins them on the couch, drawing his knees to his chest. Then, once he’s recovered the ability to speak, “Did you know?”
“Violet from One called us,” says Nerissa. “Apparently her victor Cashmere told her. She thought we should know.”
Finnick nods. There’s nothing private about his life, and he doesn’t care that his fellow victors know where he was tonight.
“You should try to eat something,” says Mags. She slides a plate in his direction across the coffee table. “We saved you some dinner.”
He does try, because he knows it’ll make him feel better, but eventually the paranoia and the shaking of his hands gets too difficult to ignore. Mags and Nerissa are exchanging worried glances over his head; he can feel it even if he doesn't bother to look up and see it for himself.
“Finnick,” says Nerissa eventually. “Come with me.”
He stands up without question and follows her to the basement of the Training Center to the victors-only gym. Usually there’s someone in there at any given hour; victors have weird sleep schedules. But right now, it’s empty and dark.
“Why are we here?”
Nerissa leads him to an empty space on the mat. “What you were asked to do tonight is unnatural and wrong. I want you to know that.”
He blinks, unsure what that has to do with anything. “Okay?”
“You were asked to suppress your very valid instincts in favor of making that woman more comfortable,” she explains. “But those instincts are there for a reason.”
Finnick nods slowly. “Yeah, to get me through the Games.”
“Yes,” Nerissa begins, “but they don’t just go away once you’ve left the arena, and you shouldn’t be made to repress them.”
“Is that why I feel like this?” he asks after a bit of silence. He doesn’t know how to articulate the way he feels; he’s angry, but he’s not. He’s tired, but there’s an energy buzzing under his skin that won’t go away. Luckily, Nerissa seems to understand even without further explanation.
“I think so,” she answers. Then she changes her stance on the mat, clenching her hands into fists. At his questioning look, she says, “Talking about it won’t make you feel better. I want you to fight me.”
Finnick looks down at his hands, clean and smooth and pristine. Then he looks back up at her. “Fight you?”
Nerissa nods. A few loose strands of hair have escaped her ponytail, gray at the roots. “We’ll spar for as long as you want.”
Finnick’s movements are slow and uncertain at first. He works out every day at the request of his stylist and prep team, but it’s been a long time since he’s actually fought anyone. Nerissa may be approaching her sixties but she’s still in great shape. He ends up flat on the ground several times, blinking up at the fluorescent lights and trying to coax the air back into his lungs. Chest heaving, he stands back up and tries again.
It’s impossible to say how much time passes. His hits get faster and more deliberate. Finnick’s fist catches Nerissa in the nose and something cracks.
“It’s fine,” she says, wiping away a small drip of blood. “Keep going.”
By the time Finnick collapses onto the mat, too tired to move, he’s drenched in sweat. But he feels better, like he’s righted himself somehow. “Thanks,” he tells Nerissa breathlessly.
“Of course,” she says. Then, so quiet he has to strain to hear, “You don’t need to repress your fight. You need to channel it.”
His voice comes out in a whisper. “Channel it where?”
“You’ll see.”
In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving", but the fighter still remains
—Simon & Garfunkel, “The Boxer”