Chapter Text
The last thing I can remember is the smell of roses, and mentally preparing myself for when I have to tell Annie it might be a while before she can wear her favorite perfume. Because of course, it wasn’t just roses. It was roses and blood, my blood, far too much of my blood, and untreated water. Water.
Days don’t have much meaning. There are moments I’m awake, only to fall asleep a few moments later. I can hear people talking, and machines beeping, but it’s all just background noise like a party still going on in another room. Barely any of it makes sense and I can’t focus on anything, anyway. Not about anything but the pain.
The pain engulfs the entire right side of my body, starting over my eyebrow, into my shoulder, and shooting out like lightning out of the palm of my hand and the bottom of my foot. It claws and tears and burns, burns so bad it must char my bones. Nothing I can do to stop it, no clever rearranging. I can’t even feel my fingers or toes.
That, in retrospect, probably should’ve clued me in.
“Finnick?”
I breathe a sigh of relief. She’s here. “Annie, baby, hi” it comes out strange, garbled, and choked. I open my eyes(why is it so hard to open my eyes?), go to reach for her, and I stop, staring down. My brain can’t put it together. My arm is wrapped in bandages but it’s so… short. And it doesn’t look like my arm. Where’s my hand? I try wiggling my fingers, and I swear I can still feel myself doing it, so then, where are they? “Something wrong.” I choke out. “Something wrong.”
Annie’s eyes are swimming with tears. “They… they had to… there was a lot of damage. Most of it was infected, and they had to. They had to amputate them.”
Them? I run my left hand over myself and find my right leg ends too, about mid-thigh. It still doesn’t really click, my brain is having too much trouble just deleting body parts. I can’t do anything but stare, breathing hard.
Water. Water. Swimming. I’ll never swim again, just flop around in circles like a banged-up sea turtle, never run, never dance, never carry her anymore. God, I’ll never carry her anymore.
“There were a lot of close calls. You almost-“ she cuts herself off, walking over to my other side where I can actually reach her, and then she’s climbing onto the bed, carefully. So she doesn’t hurt me, I think, and it’s not. It’s not supposed to be this way. I’m supposed to be able to hold her, braid her hair when things get too hard. I can just reach her thigh if I stretch a little. It’ll have to be good enough for now. I rub tiny little thumb circles on her pants, feeling the rough canvas. It feels almost like sails.
“I’m sorry.” There’s still some effort in talking, but it’s not as bad. I’m warming up. It still sounds so broken. I slide my tongue over my teeth, biting the tip. I don’t want to cry. I cannot cry right now. She doesn’t need her half of a husband to cry right now. I blink, onetwothreefour. Don’t cry.
She takes my hand in both of hers, kissing it before rubbing the creases of my thumb against her lips. I swipe it across, tracing her Cupid’s bow and she kisses it, taking it into her mouth, sucking lightly, before letting it go. “You’re going to be fine.” She says it less like reassurance and more like a threat. She shakes her head to clear it, like a wave scraping across the sand. “The doctors, I mean. They say you’re going to be fine. There’s just a bit more they can do here, and then we’re going up to the Capitol, and you’ll get prosthetics. And then we get to go home. And then it’s over.”
The Capitol. I do not want to go to the Capitol. I don’t want her back there, either, not when there’s so much I can’t protect her from there. There’s going to be so many memories, so many echoes of everything that happened to both of us there, swarming like-
I squeeze my eyes shut. No. Don’t go there.
“I know. I know, I don’t want to either.” She leans over and kisses my forehead, and I reach with my right hand to sweep her hair back, but no hand comes. I try and flex it. Wait. Right. It’s gone now. This is my own Real or Not Real. How can you feel like some piece of you is there, know it for certain, have it burn, feel your fingers wiggle, and it just not be there? How does that even happen? She brushes her own hair back and I have to tamp down my hurt at that. I wanted to do it, and I can’t. Ever again. “I know”, she continues. “But if we go to Four, you’ll probably be stuck with a hook and a peg leg.” She smiles, giggling softly.
I laugh in spite of myself. “What? Don’t have a thing for pirates?”
That really gets her laughing. “It’s not that. Just… a hook would probably get tangled in my hair. Plus, you know, it’s probably not the best idea to have a hook near a baby.”
I blink, several times. A baby? What baby? Whose baby is she talking about? Is she?
Annie is just smiling knowingly, and I realize that it’s our baby, and she’s either just forgotten to tell me, or she hadn’t known before I left. Both are equally possible.
“I’m gonna- you’re having… a baby. My baby.” I whisper. A baby. Hers and mine.
“Mmm hmm.” She looks down, and I can tell she wants closer, but she doesn’t want to hurt me. Well, I can deal, I decide, and I pull at her jumpsuit.
“It’s okay, baby girl, I’m okay. Come here.”
And there she is, finally. I pull her as close as I can with my left arm, reaching up just a little so, there. I can kiss her, long and deep, so long it scares the oxygen monitor and it starts beeping, loudly. A nurse runs in as we break away, looking absolutely terrified. I just smile at her, beaming. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to cause a fright! We, uh. We can both hold our breath a pretty long time.” Which gets Annie blushing and giggling profusely. My grin gets wider and the nurse rolls her eyes, though she’s smiling too as she strolls out.
“False alarm!” She shouts. “It’s just Finnick kissing his wife, everything’s fine”
And we’re both laughing, because yes, I’m kissing my wife, my pregnant wife, and no matter what happens next, everything is fine.
I forget things, sometimes. Not big things, not really. It was apparently only a minor concussion, but it’s enough. I forget everything is fine. It’s really hard to remember that everything is fine, when I look and feel so chewed up. It's so, so hard.
I still sleep too deeply, like my body is making up for lost time, stealing back the hundreds of thin, early, after-midnight hours I spent pressed up against strangers, or worse, regulars. Like I’m trying to take my time back, time that had been sold but not paid back to me. Time that only ever took and took and took from me. I try to relish in it, but being asleep now, going to sleep early, taking naps, feeling so fucking exhausted, feels like I’m stealing it from Annie. Each second I spend asleep is one less second I get to spend with her and the baby, and I’ve already missed so much. When I’m awake I force my eyes to stay open, I force myself to keep talking and talking till I drift off in the middle of my sentences. I jolt awake several times a day, feeling like a failure, feeling old, like someone’s grandfather in his favorite recliner. The more I try the worse it gets, till I’m falling asleep while eating, only to be gently nudged awake so I don’t aspirate on the beige slime they call food here. I mean, seriously, they can grow turnips underground but no herbs? No peppers? Had the entire complex run out of spices years back? It tastes like wallpaper paste. I almost wish they’d just stick my feeding tube back in, because god, is it an arduous task to hit weight restoration when the food makes you wish you were eating wet sand.
If it’s a struggle for me, it’s hell for Annie. Her pregnancy cravings are kicking in and she cries, literally cries, at the memory of fried oysters. It nearly destroys me because she should have it, she should have anything that her little heart desires, and what she wants is so basic, so cheap at home, but an unfathomable luxury here, miles from the coast, buried underground. She might as well be craving diamonds for as close as she gets to fresh seafood. Most of these people haven’t even seen an oyster before, let alone tasted one.
The days are endlessly repetitive. It’s all the same. Sit up, eat, stretch, try to cope with the fact half my body is missing, sleep, sit up, eat, cry in pain because my right foot itches and I can’t scratch it, sleep, sit up, eat, try to figure out how to keep my hand busy now that there’s only one of them, and I can’t tie knots with one non-dominant hand. My nights are filled with nightmares, of the mutts tearing me limb from limb, over and over again, in new but not necessarily exciting ways. On the plus side, they do get rid of the killing children and being raped nightmares, so there is that. Small fucking favors, I suppose.
In between everything, Annie and I talk, much like we always have, where it starts out in one place and ends up somewhere else entirely, hours down the line. It doesn’t even matter if I fall asleep during it, she picks right back up, starts talking about everything she’s doing, everything everyone is saying, her dreams or nightmares. We go over baby names, not narrowing many down. I can’t get a feel for them yet, but she assures me we’ll know it when we hear it. That it’ll creep up on us, like she crept up on me.
Katniss comes to visit, after a while. She doesn’t say anything. Can’t say anything, I realize, because she lost her sister, but she comes in here to sit sometimes, tying up my rope for me. I try to untie it myself and manage a touch, but it’s very difficult. I’m slowly getting the hang of it by putting the rope between my thighs when she stops coming. Apparently, she shot Coin, not Snow, committing a war crime, at least in the eyes of Thirteen, though most likely because she was trying to stop other war crimes. Anyway, she’s being shipped back to District Twelve, with Haymitch. He’s the one that comes to tell me about it.
“Isn’t there like, not a District Twelve anymore? I seem to remember that being a very big deal. Like a huge plot point in the rebellion, that they just wiped it off the map.” It comes out a little darker than I mean it to, but it’s Haymitch so he just laughs.
“Yeah, no you’re right. Ain’t nothing left standing, 'cept our pretty little gingerbread houses. But that’s where they put her under house arrest, and I get to go too.”
“Wait, but why?”
Haymitch plasters a smile on his face. “I am officially her legal guardian. Well, till she turns 18, or till Paylor pardons her, whichever comes first.”
I am thoroughly flummoxed. “Now, you’ll forgive me, my memory isn’t the best, being half the man I used to be and all, but like. Isn’t Katniss’s mother still alive?”
Haymitch laughs, sharply. “Yeah, Vi’s still alive.” He’s fiddling with something. He can’t drink or smoke anymore, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
I’m still not getting it. “Then shouldn’t she be the one going home to help her daughter?”
“Oh yeah, she should. She most certainly should be going back to take care of her only living family.” He drawls, leaning back in the little chair by my bed. “She ain’t though. In fact, she’s going to Four. Wants to build a hospital or something.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would she leave her daughter, alone, with you? No offense”
He huffs another laugh. “None taken, till you said no offense.” He sighs, scrubbing his face in his hands. “Katniss’s relationship with her mother is… complicated, to say the least. I don’t have the whole story. Even Peeta don’t. Maybe someday it’ll be time for us all to go around in a circle and talk about our mommy issues, but we haven’t been able to schedule it yet. You know, with the civil war and all. It’s been a bit busy” His lips twist with the ghost of a smile, saved for someone far away, like this inside joke isn’t exactly for me, but he’s happy enough to let me hear it.
“When you’re handing out invitations, can I come? Mine aren’t organic, not about my actual mother, but.” I missed Mags so much it hurt to breathe, but to be honest, this wasn’t about her either. It was about shallow, stupid, handsy 50-year-olds, with disgusting amounts of money, and revolting ideas of how to spend it.
Haymitch licks his lips, swallows hard, grey eyes going overcast. “Yeah, kid, always. You know, if you don’t have homemade, Capitol provided’s fine too.”
Sometimes, it bothers the shit out of me that Haymitch cannot, or will not, ever be serious. That it’s all a joke. But here, here it helps because if he had started getting sincere on me, I probably would’ve cried. Or thrown up. Or both. I’m not used to all this coddling, and I’m not handling it well. I just wish I was my old self again. I wish people weren’t looking at me differently. Hell, I’d take everyone believing in the Persona over this right now. Everyone’s treating me like a wounded animal. No, like a broken cup, too shattered to be of use, too precious to toss, too damaged to even begin the repairs, so I’m stuck in here till they decide what they can do with me. They’ll probably end up just tossing me.
Haymitch must recognize the look. “Hey, kid. Nuh-uh, don’t…don’t do that. Remember, it takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”
Well, shit. Proves you can’t rely on Haymitch for anything, including, apparently, him being Haymitch. “What stupid prick said that? Sounds arrogant as hell.”
Haymitch scoffs. “Yeah, he’s a total preener. But he’s fucking right. Bout time you remembered that, Kid. He was right.”
I’m blinking, onetwothreefourfive, don’t cry, don’t cry. Water, sand, water, swimming, NO, don’t crydontcrydontcry
“Look,” he continues, scrubbing at his face again. “Peeta’s gotta go to the Capitol too, finish the head shrinking. I think you two should be in together, maybe not in the same room but in the same hall or something.”
That sentence is supposed to mean something, but I can’t figure out what. “Why?”
He looks at me like I’m stupid. “Y’all are part of the same club now, dumbass. He probably knows a thing or two about learning to walk again.”
Oh, right. Duh. I’d honestly forgotten. I wonder if anyone would forget about mine? Not likely, because I’ll have a metal hand, too. Kind of conspicuous. Or I could always wear gloves, which is more conspicuous. “Did they tell you how long I’d be there?”
“Long as it takes, kid. Long as it fucking takes.”
It’s decided, not by me or her, that Annie can’t go. With her delicate condition, any extra stress could cause her to. Well. It’s best if she isn’t in the Capitol. I hold onto her the best I can, for days, leading up to it, and it isn’t enough. “It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, you’re going to be okay, it’s alright” She’s rocking me, even though she’s in my lap, comforting me, soothing me, and I can’t help but think how wrong it is. I’m the one that’s supposed to be doing this for her, it’s not fair, I went to fix this, and I came back fucking mangled, too broken to do the job I’m supposed to do, and what kind of husband does that make me? What the hell kind of father am I going to be? I’m supposed to protect them, and. I’m falling apart again and I cannot stop.
She grabs my face in her hands. Sometimes I swear she knows things she has no way of possibly knowing. “Finnick. Look at me. Stop that. I made the same vow you did. In sickness and in health, right? You remember that? I can’t blame you for being unwell.” she quirks a smile, hoping I remember a conversation from years ago, except it was the other way around, it was her being too afraid to let me in.
“didn’t want my demons to bite you too.”
“let em bite. I don’t care.”
“but”
“no. I love you. all of you. and I can’t blame you for being unwell, so let them bite.”
All I can do is nod, tears spilling over my eyelashes. “Yeah, sweet baby. I remember” Of course I do. “But”
“No! No buts. Let me take care of you back. It’s going to be okay.” Her eyes are burning into mine. She’s challenging me. She’s pulling me back, to here and now, and she’s saying she’s got this. It might be unfair, but I let myself do what I’ve needed to do for months. I cry in her arms. I tell her how unfair it is, I tell her how broken I feel, how worthless, how I’ve failed her, and then she’s cutting me off with kisses. Wet, salty kisses, because she’s crying too. “Every time. Every time, right? Well me too. I’ll choose you every time.”
“Every time. You’re right, Annie, baby. You’re always right” She is, she always is, and it’s about time I start believing her again. I can do this. It’s going to be okay, and when it’s done, I’m going home, with her. With both of them.