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I'm going to die.
They're in bed when they get the news. It's one of those wonderfully dull, domestic nights when Finnick is home in Four and Annie has slipped through the hedge that separates his yard from hers, let herself in the back door, and play-acted husband and wife with him for a few quiet hours with no one to watch.
Four's going to hell around them- the whole country's going to hell around them- but for this small stretch of time, he gets to luxuriate in Annie's arms, rub his nose against the crown of her head, breathe in the delicious smell of her hair, and just be hers. Snack on coconut chips and watch TV and make fun of the commercials while lightly bickering about Katniss' dresses and which is better, number three or number five. Like regular couples do. Or at least like regular couples in the Capitol do- district people don't do a whole lot of TV for fun, and he's not even sure they have the word "snack" in Four- but this is a vice of theirs Finnick can get behind. He's experienced plenty to choose from, after all.
They're in the middle of shoving a bowl of roasted coconut crumbs back and forth between them- You ate the last one, you go get more-- It's lucky you're cute, if you're gonna be that bad a liar-- Finnick!-- Okay, okay, but you're going to have to kiss me-- when the music changes and grinds their moment to a halt. Grinds it into dust and spits on it, in fact.
They both know the Games' anthem and seal by heart.
It's too abrupt, too early, not part of normal Games procedure at all. Finnick manages to process the big number seventy-five in the corner, a new and special watermark for the coverage of this year's Game, and the words Quarter Quell, and there's a tiny moment where he feels naked and vulnerable and doesn't know why. Like some part of his brain or body knew it before the rest of him did. The Games are always bad, and Quells are always worse (or so he's heard, the last one was before he was born but Mags has seen them all), but there is no reason that this should make him feel threatened.
But there is and he does and Snow gives it a name.
"On the seventy-fifth anniversary, as a reminder to the rebels that even the strongest among them cannot overcome the power of the Capitol, the male and female tributes will be reaped from their existing pool of victors."
I'm going back.
I'm going to die.
"Finnick?" Annie asks, soft-voiced and whey-faced and as broken as she was when she first left her arena. "Is this happening? Is this real?"
Finnick keeps himself as cool as he can, smooth and unruffled. Stable. "Yeah, hon. I think it is."
No more coconut chips are brought to bed and the TV is shut off the moment the Games broadcast ends. They are not strangers to disaster; it is their past and their present, the foundation of their courtship. Not many couples their age have seen as much.
They hold each other without speaking for at least an hour. There's little to say. Neither of them can be soothed by platitudes. Comforting Annie would involve making promises he knows he'd be forced to break, the first part only soothing to her because he has never done the second. Comforting him was something Annie did more easily with touching than speaking. Words are useless here, at least until the first wave of terror has passed.
Finnick tries to console himself with facts, to get himself to a place where he can fall asleep and say the right things in the morning. There are about sixty victors left. Nearly half of them are from One and Two, but Four's third after them with ten. He and Annie won't necessarily be chosen. The Capitol wouldn't want a forgotten, uncinematic victor like Annie for a statement like this. And Finnick himself surely knows where too many bodies are buried to risk him on what will have to be the most covered Hunger Games of all time.
He cringes into Annie's shoulder. He remembers having thoughts like that the last time he was reaped, too.
(Too young to volunteer, too beautiful to lose- surely someone would take his place?
No one did. Turns out no one thought they'd do better.
Ha.)
When Annie falls asleep, Finnick crawls out from under her, full of nervous energy and nauseating dread. He needs something to do with his mind. He needs something to do with his hands.
He finds a pad of paper in his kitchen and scribbles whorls and blobs of nothing, trying to get his thoughts away from the Quell, but all he can think about are the others and what they must be doing now.
Finnick could go see Mags if he wanted to. He knows she wouldn't kick him out. They could make fishing flies together until he became tired enough to sleep. It wouldn't be the first time.
But thinking of that means thinking of Mags and imagining her name called. No one would volunteer to take Mags' place. Her life is so close to over, most people, even other victors, would consider it a relief to lose her in place of someone still young. Thinking it makes his chest hurt, but he can't even say they'd be wrong. If it were to come down to a choice between Mags and Annie....
The pain in his chest becomes like a drawstring around his stomach, cinching so tight it's a wonder he doesn't vomit all over himself right now.
He tries to think of the other victors from Four, of Ronan and Seersha and Finregan, who almost shared his name, of Maya with the red, red hair. Quinlan and Aiden and Hannabeth. Neighbors. Friends.
He'd give any one of them up to save himself and Annie and probably Mags, old as she is, young as they are. No one who survives the Games really deserves to live, they've all said it a thousand times and thought it a million more. But if anyone deserves to, it's Mags.
It's Annie.
The only two people in this sordid Snow-sponsored shitfest that he can't volunteer to save.
He writes down all ten names and then draws a line through every one but Annie's and Mags'. Thinks about Annie and Mags in an arena, then swallows hatred and anger and agony and crosses out Mags, too.
He can't remember the thirty combined names from One and Two. In fact, he manages about eight before he gives up and scratches out them all. Enobaria is the only one he ever connected with out of the whole cursed lot, and that connection isn't one he particularly relishes: recognizing her, masked and bound, at a Capitol party where he was similarly trussed before a bunch of Snow's flunkies and lap dogs fell on them like wolves. One silent look of I hate this, Me too. Not worth Finnick's life, or Annie's. It hurts to be so ruthless, but still, he lets her go.
He doesn't even remember most of Three. They never go to the Capitol. He screws up his forehead, sorts through his brain, trying to remember anyone but Wiress, who Johanna calls Nuts. Who reminds him sometimes of Annie.
He scribbles her out, too.
He can remember no names from Five or Six at all.
That can't be right, because he remembers a night when he was fifteen and drunk and wept and vomited. He remembers that a woman from Six cleaned him up and helped him hide it. He remembers how she silently injected morphling beside him when he woke up still sick, and how she told him he had pretty hair. He remembers the way the clear white fluid oozed back out of her arm when he grabbed it to try to say thank you. She never told anyone and neither did he, and every time he drank or was offered a drug, he remembered the morphling oozing out of her arm.
He wonders if he ever knew her name at all.
He writes down Six instead and crosses that out.
Seven is next and that's the first batch of victors since his own to hurt enough to take his breath away. There have been no other women victors left from Seven but Johanna since Hildy killed herself three years ago. Johanna will be going. She'll have to.
If anyone in the Capitol heard Finnick was in love with another victor, he knows Johanna would be seen as the surest bet in the pool. They have been paired in the media practically since Jo's victory tour, because they were so close in age and both were seen as such long shots in their Games at first. Even the other victors think of them as a unit- they call them "the kids." A thing he would normally mind, but doesn't with Jo, because she makes herself fun to be paired with, gives him joy in being one of the kids. She is wry and wicked and doesn't care what anyone thinks of her.
And she is funny and tender and brave, and cares very much what people say about people when she loves them. Brutus used to call Finnick "lover boy." He did it in front of Jo just once.
He doesn't anymore.
Finnick rubs at his eyes and imagines an arena where Ronan and Maya are the victor tributes from Four. He thinks he would want Johanna to win.
He's less sure of that in an arena with him in it, too. He refuses to think of an arena with Johanna and Annie both inside.
He writes down nothing for Seven and hopes its absence counts as a prayer.
Eight is Cecilia. Finnick remembers that each time she got pregnant, she always told the other victors first, even before whoever the dad was this time. The first one had left her for that alone- that it was Mags and Woof that Cecilia cried on when she didn't know what to do, that Finnick had thrown a party just for the victors to cover it when she "drank too much" (took one of the little pills you could only get in the Capitol, bought by one of her fans and sneaked to her by Effie Trinket of all people), that Annie had made her one and only trip to the Capitol since her own victory tour so she could hold Cecilia's hand in the bathroom while she bled. Seeder held the other. Jo had guarded the door and loudly joked about and pretended to narrate all the puking for the benefit of any bugs.
When the next time came and she chose to keep it (as much as she could choose- this particular service was famously done with knitting needles in Eight, and the Hunger Games were not in season to put her in the Capitol at the time), she named the baby Nicky, after him.
His eyes tear and he bites his lip so hard it bleeds when he crosses her name out, but he does it anyway. She has a one in three chance of not going. It is the most he is willing to ask when he has already hoped for the lives of three others.
Nine and Ten can be written off wholesale. He does not know them. He cannot care.
Eleven and Twelve combined give him a little pause. Chaff. Seeder. Haymitch. Katniss. Peeta. He knows the names.
Seeder always asks after Annie, every time he sees her. She pushes gently on Chaff and Haymitch and probably the woman from Six, too, about drugs and drinking. She is the only person Enobaria is ever nice to, the only person Jo has never threatened to kill for annoying her. When Finnick had been fourteen and afraid in the Capitol, Caesar Flickerman had told him that if Mags was the Queen Mother of the victors, Seeder was their princess. The loving sister-mother who will take her place in the world where Mags dies quietly at home and Seeder lives on. The world Finnick had thought he lived in as recently as yesterday.
Chaff and Haymitch drift somewhere between indulgent fathers and bad influence brothers, depending on their level of sobriety at any given time. Haymitch could always be depended upon to humiliate himself to draw attention away from another victor or one of his tributes, if it was needed.
All of them, he realizes, not for the first time, try to give the victors after them space to be children, after their childhoods have been so brutally ripped away.
He considers Katniss and Peeta, who are the new "kids" now.
This would not be happening if it weren't for them. He knows this. Even if Haymitch had not told him during their victory tour, it wasn't exactly hard to figure out. Last year's Games had an extra victor. This year's Games would get rid of all extraneous victors.
Peeta was extraneous, he thinks. Katniss had no reason to go to such lengths to save him. Had she left him to die, that would be the normal order of things. If she had wanted to be noble, she had the choice of just eating the berries and letting Peeta live. They would have taken care of him. Peeta would have fallen in line.
He looks at Mags' name, and Cecilia's. At Annie's. At the absence of Jo's.
None of them are extraneous to Finnick. No more than Peeta had been to Katniss, the day she made her choice and made every victor alive feel ashamed for never trying it themselves. They all know, have always known, that the only way to win is not to play. Katniss Everdeen is the only victor who extended that thought past the Reaping.
Finnick suddenly bursts into sickening, insane laughter and bites his hand to cut the sound off and trap it inside him. That's it. That's the trick, that's the point of the punishment.
They are all being given the choice Katniss made writ large. Yourself, or your fellow tributes?
Will you fall in line, or will you sacrifice yourself for the extraneous?
Finnick knows who is and isn't extraneous to him. Hell, entire districts disappear when he thinks he's being asked who he loves enough to hope is spared.
Maybe the real question, the better question, is who does Snow think is extraneous? Who would Snow wipe off the map, or the list on his kitchen table, when their lives were once again offered up to him and his judgment?
And Finnick already knows the answer. All of them but one. One to hold up for the rest of time as an example to the kids who come next.
Finnick can't win Snow's game. He knows he can't. He couldn't the second there was even one name going into the arena that he couldn't bear to sacrifice.
He looks at Katniss' name on the paper. Is it possible to win hers?
Haymitch says she doesn't know she's playing a game. That she doesn't even realize how much of all this- the riots, the crackdowns, the revolts, the reprisals, and probably even this damned Quell- is about her. For her.
That is how she won. Why she could.
Finnick laughs again, a little more like himself and less like a crazy person this time. He wishes he could call Jo and share this thought with her and listen to her laugh, too:
Wouldn't it serve Snow right if Katniss Everdeen won this year? If he set out to kill her and every victor who had ever tweaked his nose (Jo in particular loved to tweak him)... and then he ended up with only Katniss Everdeen the doubly triumphant and a pile of dead victors to show for it?
Would that not be worth everything, even dying?
He sobers. Not if dying happens to Annie, or Mags, or Johanna.
But he thinks that could maybe be something that carried him through, if dying happened to him.
He does not know what happens to people when they die. The entire culture of Panem is built around avoiding thinking about it at all costs, because most of them have to live with it so much and so often that holding onto living as hard as they can is the only sensible choice.
But he does know more than enough about the moment it happens. About lying there, blood in your eyes and your nose and choking down your throat while you slip away. He has seen it. He has caused it.
He never asked what they were thinking about, but he thinks he knows what he would. What he will, when. If.
I can do this for her.
He doesn't know which her he means. He's managed to run into more than he thought.
Mags and Seeder and Cecilia. Annie and Jo. Six and her morphling and a promise to himself to learn her name.. Enobaria and a shared look once. Katniss Everdeen and her refusal to declare another tribute extraneous.
He realizes with equal happiness and despair that it doesn't matter.
All of them. Any of them. Take a fistful of berries and say no. No, I will not fall in line. I will not kill them to please you.
You do not own me.
Someday, maybe even soon, the rebels will realize that victors other than Katniss may have value to them. He doesn't know if they would think so about him. But he hopes so.
Finnick is tired of the Capitol.
He throws the list in the trash and climbs back into bed with Annie. She takes him in her arms without waking up and he settles in close.
I can do this for her.