Reunited // Finnick Odair

Chapter 41

I automatically squeeze Finnick's hand without meaning to and shut my eyes. I can hear the screams, all of them echoing around in that dungeon type place. I fell asleep every day listening to someone screaming. Eventually they all blended into one noise. I open my eyes and Finnick is staring at me intently. I send him a reassuring smile and go back to the conversation. Finnick shoots Johanna and angry look.

"What? My head doctor says I'm not supposed to censor my thoughts. It's part of my therapy," replies Johanna. The life has gone out of our little party. There's a long silence while people pretend to eat.

"Peeta," I address him. "Finnick and I want to thank you for our wedding cake. It was perfect!"

Finnick nods. "Yes, thank you, Peeta. It was beautiful."

"My pleasure, Anna," says Peeta, and I hear that old note of gentleness in his voice that I thought would be gone forever, and I watch Katniss's reaction.

"If we're going to fit in that walk, we better go," Finnick tells me, nudging me and I nod. Finnick and I had made it a routine to walk for a while after eating, just to have a routine again, something to do besides lose our minds. "Good seeing you, Peeta."

I smile at him, too. "We'll see you soon," I say.

"You be nice to her, Finnick. Or I might try and take her away from you." It could be a joke, if the tone wasn't so cold. Everything it conveys is wrong. The open distrust of Finnick, the implication that Peeta has his eye on me (however unlikely), that I could desert Finnick, that Katniss does not even exist.

"Oh, Peeta," says Finnick lightly. "Don't make me sorry Irestarted your heart." He leads me away after I give Katniss a concerned glance.

When we're a few feet away, Finnick pulls me aside, down an empty corridor. "What was that all about?" he asks, confused. It wasn't an accusation; an assumption that there is something going on between Peeta and I, because that's impossible. Still, perhaps some people might have taken in that way, thought we'd grown close during our time in the Capitol, despite being in separate cells and only seeing each other during that interview when we tried to warn 13 of the attack.

I wasn't aware I was biting my lip until Finnick touches my chin and pulls me into him. "I don't know," I say honestly.

He sighs and we lean against the wall together. Alone. Always alone - even when you're with the people you love. That's just the way life is here. I hope for a day where everyone can live together in some form of peace instead of constant anger and bitterness and paranoia. Maybe one day. We have a long way to go.

"It's going to happen soon," Finnick says, breaking the silence with a grim statement. "This war, or whatever you want to call it. It's going to happen very soon. And who knows who is going to win, how many people - good, innocent people - we're going to lose."

"That is war, though," I reply. "The never knowing, the constant fear. You think one side is winning and the next second you know, you're one up on the enemy. It's like the sea back home, ever changing, always moving, switching sides. You just need to know when to ride the waves."

Finnick lets out a quiet laugh and kisses my forehead. "We better prepare for it, then,"

~

The following days, I throw myself into training with a vengeance. Eat, live, and breathe the workouts, drills, weapons practice, lectures on tactics. A handful of us are moved into an additional class. The soldiers simply call it the Block, but the tattoo on my arm lists it as S.S.C., short for Simulated Street Combat. Deep in 13, they've built an artificial Capitol city block. The instructor breaks us into squads of eight and we attempt to carry out missions - gaining a position, destroying a target, searching a home - as if we were really fighting our way through the Capitol. The thing's rigged so that everything that can go wrong for you does. A false step triggers a land mine, a sniper appears on a rooftop, your gun jams, a crying child leads you into an ambush, your squadron leader - who's just a voice on the program - gets hit by a mortar and you have to figure out what to do without orders. Part of you knows it's fake and that they're not going to kill you. If you set off a land mine, you hear the explosion and have to pretend to fall over dead. But in other ways, it feels pretty real in there - the enemy soldiers dressed in Peacekeepers' uniforms, the confusion of a smoke bomb. They even gas us. Johanna, Katniss and I are the only ones who get our masks on in time. The rest of our squad gets knocked out for ten minutes. And the supposedly harmless gas I took a few lungfuls of gives me a pounding headache for the rest of the day.