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ψ haven't you heard what becomes of curious minds? | OTA

WHO: Finnick Odair
WHERE: The woods, by the fields, and the Inn
WHEN: June 6
OPEN TO: EVERYONE
WARNINGS: None so far but always the chance of Panem-related asshattery

THE WOODS

OTA

He thinks they're dandelions. At least, they look like dandelions. But for all his training, edible-plants was never Finnick's strongest point. Fishing, hunting, improvising nets and ropes out of whatever he could find around him, those were the skills that got him through the arena of the 65th Hunger Games. So when he finds that a spot in the woods near one of his fishing traps has, in the space of a few days, erupted into a carpet of fluffy white balls that burst seeds into the air as he walks through them, Finnick's immediate response is uncertainty.

He crouches down by one of the plants and peers at its leaves. Dandelions, he knows, are safe to eat. He's seen tributes eat them in the arena. But he isn't sure if these are actually dandelions or just some other plant that acts like them, and he can't remember as he studies the leaves whether or not that's what dandelion leaves look like. if they were dandelions, shouldn't there have been flowers? Or at least, flowers for longer than the time it's been since Finnick last walked through this spot?

Maybe someone in the village will know. Maybe Katniss will know, since somehow she seems to know a lot more about how to survive in the wild than any tribute from her District he's ever seen. (There's a story there, somewhere, but it's a story that nobody would expect anyone else to share, at least not someone who's spent as long under the Capitol's surveillance as Finnick.)

So Finnick gathers a collection of leaves from the plants, and tries his best to collect one of the fluffy heads without it bursting into the air, and puts them in one of the woven baskets he and Annie use for transporting fish.

THE FIELDS

OTA

Finnick plans to stop by the fields on his way home, with the vague thought that there might be someone there who's able to help him work out what the plant he's found is. But as he cuts across from the woods towards the fields, Finnick's suddenly overcome by the smell of salt on the breeze, the tangy smell of the sea that means home.

He stops, uncertain, and raises his trident, his body suddenly tense, the alertness that's always running under the surface suddenly springing to the surface. It's impossible that he's smelling the ocean here; surely it can only be some sort of trap.

He waits, only sign of movement the rapid rate at his his gaze goes from one spot to another, scanning trees, shrubs, anything that could act as cover. It's only slowly that he realizes there's no real apparent danger, and heads towards the smell.

THE INN

OTA

The smell of the sea had turned out to be coming from another unexpected spring blossoming, this time an expanse of purple flowers on the boundary of the fields. He doesn't remember seeing wildflowers there before now, and now there are so many of them that they look like a field of their own. Since he already has a sample of uncertain flora in his pack, he'd picked some of these flowers, too, and he heads for the Inn with his samples in his backpack.

He stalks into the main room of the Inn, because it's one of the places it's common to see a lot of the villagers gathered. He has one of the purple flowers in his hand, and he holds it out, his head tilted to one side, as he leans on the never-stocked bar.

"Is it me, or are there more plants around than there should be?"

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Finnick may not know Katniss very well yet, but he does know that she knows enough about what can and can't be eaten in the wild to save her and Peeta from eating the poison berries they'd later used to such effect.

"The fish have been okay to eat," he agrees, after a moment's consideration. "The few plants I know from home have been fine, too." He still doesn't know what he can trust here, and he'd hate it, if he hadn't grown so used to not being able to trust anything he didn't know for certain. This new place with its new plants and animals is unsettling, but he's used to that sort of fear, has been now for a long time.

He glances across at her, curiously. The way Katniss says that little can kill her that hasn't tried sounds suggestive of more of her unknown history -- from the past, or from the things she's seen in the time he's been in this place? It's hard to know for sure, so he doesn't comment, just passes over the basket he's already harvested flowers into.

"I wouldn't know what to do with them anyway."

"You can live off dandelions, you know. I don't know if I ever told you that story back in 13 or not," Katniss says. She's aware that she and Finnick aren't from the same time, which is strange in and of itself, but she cannot help still trusting him. He's one of the few people who understands the panic and the fear that grips her sometimes and helps her find a way to put herself back together.

"They grow in 12 and they can make lean days go a lot further. We never, ever had enough food. I know from my tour that it's the case in other districts too," she says. "But I think it's worst in 12. My family only ate well because I knew the woods."

He offers a small echo of a smile.

"I'm used to people knowing more about me than I do about them, but not like this," he says. He also usually works to address that imbalance, to steal some of the knowledge that's become the only currency he has other than his body.

But here, there are other currencies that matter, and they're more like the everyday concerns of the districts. In Four, the fishery folk don't go hungry, no matter how bad things are. It's forbidden, of course, but there is little the Peacekeepers can ever do to prove that there's been poaching, or fish stolen from the catch, so long as the quotas are made. A family can be fed with a theft that would never be noticed, and the children of the poorest fishers learn early on how to make their own catches. Finnick had been expert with trident and net for a reason that had little to do with his training.

"I wondered," he says, quietly, his head tipping to one side in a nod of concession. "You knew how to handle yourself in the woods better than others from Twelve." He doesn't even remember whether or not there were woods within the boundaries of Twelve; he'd had other things to worry about the only two times he'd ever been there.

"My father taught me the plants you could eat and how to hunt. It took me a while before I was comfortable tying snares or shooting with my bow but the plants? Those were the first things I learned."

Katniss half smiles. "There's a root where I come from called katniss, it grows near ponds. My father always told me if I could find myself, I would never go hungry. I hope that stays true here."

The thing about being a victor is that everybody knows your story, or at least the bits of your story that you reveal or that the media dig out when you make it to the final eight. He knows about Katniss' father, that he'd died in a mining accident like so many people in District Four do in sailing or fishing accidents.

"We never needed to know that," he says, quietly. He leaves the rest of it to her imagination, and to what everyone thinks they know about District Four. They're not all rich, even though they're a Career district, but they do have access to food without needing to go out into the woods. "In Four, we only ever needed to know ww how to survive at sea."

Except for the Careers, of course, but they don't talk about the Careers.

"I think you know how to survive in the arena better in Four," Katniss says. "Most people in Twelve don't even go past the Seam. They're afraid to go into the woods and afraid that the peacekeepers will find them and punish them. Gale and I were the only ones who would go and we'd sell our extras at the Hob so we could trade for other things."

Katniss sighs a bit. "In Twelve, we don't even learn our industry until we're eighteen. You guys know how to make hooks and nets and spear? We don't know anything at all. It's a miracle that there were even three victors."

"We have to," he says, tilting his head to one side as he considers her words. "You run a small crew, that means all hands on deck, including your kids, 'cause that's what it takes to make your quotas. Kids who aren't from fishing families don't know that sort of thing."

He doesn't talk about his childhood -- what there'd been of it before he'd gone to the Careers and then on to the Victors' Village -- with many people. Annie's from his fishery, most of the other victors don't ask, and he's always hated talking about home in the Capitol. Most people there don't care, they just want to revel in the glamor of the poor district boy made rich and famous by his victory, and he's been on the bitterly wrong end of that too many times to want to give them anything real to feed it.

There's a lot he could say about the strategy of the Games. It's not just about knowing how to feed yourself, though that had gone well for Katniss, and often did for the tributes from Four, too, there's knowing how to game the Games, how to make alliances and when to break them, the sort of things the Careers are taught alongside how to fight, but more than that, there's a stubbornness and determination that can never be taught, but that all of the victors have. He still doesn't want to talk about that, though, because it comes too close to open admission of what everyone knows: that he, and Annie, and Four's other younger victors, had that forbidden advantage of training.

"We're all afraid of the peacekeepers," is what he does admit. "It's just easier to poach fish than go somewhere forbidden."

"Easier to take the small ones, cull a few from the catch and still make quota. Our men do it too, in the mines," Katniss explains. "Nobody has power for very long in the Seam. It only works when the Capitol wants us to have it - but we could have heat in our fireplaces from pilfered coal."

It's not very different from Finnick's situation except coal can't feed you. It can keep you warm at night (and it gets very, very cold in 12 during the winter) but it's not going to ease the gnawing of hunger or make sure that you don't die just because you had nothing to keep you going but boiled pine needles.

After so many years of studying the Games, and then of participating in them as a mentor, Finnick's seen the difference that things like food make. The kids from Twelve, the ones that look like Katniss, are usually scrawny, underfed and disadvantaged from the start. But places like Eleven produce occasional tributes like Thresh; big and strong and obviously well fed. Four of course has the double advantage that there's always food to steal and that they had the Careers, who were not only trained but fed and cared for.

"Or the kids could catch some of their own. I used to, after school."

He doesn't talk about his family much; there's little point, now, when they've been dead for so many years and the guilt of their loss still hangs heavily over him.

"But nobody ever gets to hear this stuff from the other districts. None of us know how much of it is the same."

Except the victors, those who dare the conversations that can't really be had in public.

"I think they do it on purpose. I didn't know anything about other Districts until the Games and really not until I did my tour after I won. By the time you're a Victor, they already have so much over you that you'd be a fool to try and rebel."

And yet, they had. Katniss had with the berries, even if she didn't know exactly what it meant at the time. Peeta did, when he gave away his winnings to Rue and Thresh's families. Finnick did, refusing to give Annie up. Mags did, volunteering to throw a wrench in what was probably a Reaping as rigged as 12's.

They all had everything to lose and did it anyway.

"There would have been a rebellion a long time ago if people just knew. The whole thing only works because we're all afraid."

"It takes a lot to rebel when you've seen what it costs."

He doesn't know what's happened between the two of them in the time between when he arrived here and when Katniss did. But he knows enough to know that Katniss is probably aware of where his sympathies really are. He hates Snow, hates him with everything he has, but open defiance had been impossible.

All he'd had left to lose was Annie and Mags, because he'd lost everyone else already.

"I think it's harder for us. Everyone's afraid, but for the victors, it's personal. They're not just watching, they're watching us." Watching them, getting reports from their patrons if they're unlucky enough to be wanted.

The victors knew exactly what would happen if they crossed the line, because they'd been told. It was why Finnick gathered his secrets, why Annie played up her insanity until the Capitol left her alone: those were the only ways they had to protect themselves.

"They want us to fall. They can make examples of us and show that even if you win, even if you beat them at their own game, there are other games."

Katniss sighs a little, scuffs the toe of her boot in the dirt. She's angry but being angry here, so far removed from where she can do anything? It only leads to frustration.

"It's like Haymitch says. You're always playing even if you aren't in the arena."

"Not us. We're too popular to make public examples of."

But there are other examples to be made. Examples to the other victors, and examples to themselves. But the games that Finnick's been forced to play have always been ones with private losses: his parents, killed after the first and last time he'd lost control and let his instincts take over his sense with one of his patrons, and the rest of his family, killed in retribution for breaking the rules when he'd mentored Annie. But that's known only to him and Annie, and those of the victors who could put it together.

In public, they were just tragic fishing accidents, common enough in Four to be believable. He doesn't expect Katniss to know it, to know the depths of the games that he's entangled in, the fact that the person he is in the Capitol is nothing more than another game, and another, and another, so many that sometimes it's easy to forget where the games end.

Annie reminds him, when she can. When she's there, not home in Four while he's stuck in the Capitol's nets.

"We play the games that are just for us, the ones nobody knows the rules to until it's too late."

He says it quietly, almost to the flowers he's picked, and he can feel his neck burning.

"We hardly ever win them," Katniss says softly. She doesn't know the extent of Finnick's private pain, only the bit he'd revealed to her in 13, but it's enough to know why he puts on a facade. It's enough to know why he acts one way in public and another in private.

"I'm always going to be on your team, Finnick, and I'm going to keep playing until we win."

He'd sworn to be Katniss Everdeen's ally in the arena if it killed him, because she was more important than he was. Not that Finnick is without value: he's popular, even beloved, across much of Panem, and he knows things that even the revolution's planners seemed not to know, because his patrons think talking to him is harmless. But he's trapped, and he's tainted in a way Katniss isn't. He can persuade and inspire people, but he can't show the sort of open, honest defiance Katniss had. He can't make people ask themselves what if? in the way she does. He's loyal to her, but he's loyal to her because of what she stands for.

It's startling to hear an honest expression of personal loyalty from Katniss, who he hadn't known before she came here the first time. For a moment, he looks at her with the facade fallen, open honesty and confusion showing in his eyes.

"A lot happened between us in Panem before you got here." It's not a question; he's known for a long time that Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch, and Johanna when she'd been here, all knew things he and Annie didn't. But it's never before been so obvious to him that somehow, he'd earned the trust of Katniss, someone he'd been observing for the past year, someone he'd seen didn't trust easily. "Most victors wouldn't trust me enough to say that."

"When you've seen someone screaming and paralyzed in fear, it doesn't really make sense to keep the walls up," Katniss says quietly. She and Finnick have that bond and know that about one another. He's known about her fear, the overwhelming sense of anxiety that drifts over her from time to time. She knows about his too - he carries all the weight and fear of what's happening to Annie when he's not with her to shield her.

There's no sense in pretending you don't know a person when you're stripped down that way. She knows Finnick and trusts him with her secrets same as he'd trusted her with some of his own.

"We've been through a lot together, Finnick. I trust you. I have to trust you."

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ψ haven't you heard what becomes of curious minds? | OTA

THE WOODS

THE FIELDS

THE INN

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