Chapter 2: Weather
He is early. He is early every single day for three weeks, which is how you know something is wrong with him, because the Finnick you used to know arrived at things exactly when the room was full enough to notice.
You come down the dock in the blue half-dark with your lamp swinging, and he's already sitting on the step outside the sheds with his knees up and his chin on them, watching the boats go out. The first morning you thought he'd come early to impress you. By the fifth you'd worked out that he simply hadn't been to bed.
He's good. That's the annoying part. You'd wanted him to be bad at it, a little, so you could feel superior for a week or two, but his hands know nets the way your hands know nets, from the inside. He works fast and neat on the fourth bench with the drip from the roof plinking into a bucket beside him, and he talks the whole time. He talks to the net, to the gulls, to Pell, to the Darrow girl, whom you hired after all and who talks about her feet. He talks to you most of all, a running commentary on the state of your knots, your singing, the fish market, the price of tar, President Paylor's haircut, which he has opinions about.
He never once talks about the Capitol.
The district handles it the way the district handles everything, by pretending to be calm and then losing its mind in private. On the first day, three women came in with nets that didn't need mending. On the second day it was eleven. By the end of the first week, Pell had to put a sign on the door that said NO NETS WITHOUT HOLES, and Finnick sat on his bench and grinned at it like it was the funniest thing he'd ever read.
"You're enjoying this," you said.
"I've had people throw underwear at me," he said. "This is a nice change. These are very good nets."
"They're perfect nets. Hanna Bright brought in her late husband's net. He's been dead since the Dark Days, practically."
"It had a hole."
"She made the hole. With scissors. I watched her do it on the dock."
He leaned back on his bench with his hands behind his head and laughed until the bucket overflowed.
The camera crew arrives on a Tuesday.
You know they're from the Capitol before they open their mouths. It's the shoes. Nobody in District Four wears shoes like that on a dock, pale and soft and spotless, shoes that have never been near a fish. There are three of them, a woman with a clipboard and two men with cameras on their shoulders, and they walk into the sheds like it's a set someone built for them.
"Finnick!" The woman spreads her arms. "Darling. Plutarch sends his love. You look marvelous. The scar is very rugged."
Finnick's hands stop moving.
It's the only thing that changes. His face stays pleasant and his posture stays loose, and anybody watching would think he'd been interrupted mid-joke. But you've spent three weeks across a shed from those hands, and in three weeks they haven't stopped once, not for a second, not even while he eats. They're still now. Flat on the net. Like an animal playing dead.
"Cressida's off doing something brave in the mountains," the woman goes on, "so you've got me. It's a little series. The victors at home. Healing, rebuilding, the simple life. You're the centerpiece, obviously. Fishing, mending, a sunset or two, perhaps a little swim?" She looks around at the sheds and her nose wrinkles, very slightly. "We'll want to dress it, of course."
"This is a working shed," you say.
She turns and sees you for the first time. Her eyes do a quick professional pass over you, your stained apron, your tar-black fingers, your hair tied up in a scrap of old net, and file you under scenery.
"How sweet. Would you mind awfully moving? Just a little to the left. You're in his light."
You look at Finnick. Finnick is looking at the net.
So you put down your needle, and you walk over to the gutting trough by the door where the Darrow girl has been cleaning yesterday's mackerel for Pell's lunch, and you pick up the bucket of heads and tails and guts that's been sitting in the sun since noon.
"Last warning," you say pleasantly. "You're in my light."
The camera crew leaves very quickly after that. One of the men leaves a shoe.
When you turn around, Finnick is staring at you with his mouth open. Then his whole face crumples and he folds forward over the net and laughs, really laughs, so hard he has to hold onto the bench, so hard Pell wakes up and the Darrow girl drops a mackerel. You stand there with your empty bucket and your heart pounding, watching him, and you think: oh. Oh, no.
You did not notice the second camera, the small one, still running on the windowsill where the clipboard woman set it down.
The storm comes in that night, from the south, fast and green.
You know it's coming because your knees know it, and because the gulls all went inland at once after supper like someone had called them home. By the time you've tied down your shutters the rain is sideways. By the time you've decided you can't sleep, the harbor bell is going. Not complaining now. Clanging. Somebody's out there hauling on the rope to warn the boats.
You think about the sheds. You think about the roof, and the seine you left on the frame, and the bone needles in their box. You think about Fitch's place, whose roof also leaks.
You put on your oilskin.
The sheds are dark when you get there, the wind screaming through the gaps in the planks, but there's a lamp burning low at the back, and Finnick is sitting on the floor under it with his back against the fourth bench and a rope in his hands.
He's tying a knot. Then he's untying it. Then he's tying it again, the same one, a plain overhand, so fast the rope blurs. His face is grey. His shirt is soaked through, and you can't tell if it's the rain or the other thing.
"Finnick."
He doesn't look up. "Fitch's roof," he says. "It's not so much leaking now as just. Not there."
"Okay."
"I thought I'd come here. It's dry back here. Mostly." Tie, untie. "And it doesn't sound like anything. Fitch's room, when it rains on the gutter, it sounds like. It sounds like something hissing."
You don't know a lot about what happened in the sewers under the Capitol. Nobody does, really. The broadcasts said there were mutts. The broadcasts said there were lizards that walked like men and hissed a name over and over in the dark, and that some of the rebels went down into the tunnels and didn't come up. Finnick came up. Barely. That's the scar.
You put your lamp down. You take off your oilskin and drop it in a heap. Then you go to the cupboard where the bone needles live, and you take out your grandmother's box, and you sit down on the floor next to him, close enough that your shoulder is against his wet arm, and you pull the seine down off the frame and into both your laps.
"Here," you say. "I need a hand."
"It's the middle of the night."
"There's a hole in it the size of a dog."
"You fixed that."
"I fixed most of it. You can do the edge." You hold out one of the bone needles. "Don't drop it. It was my grandmother's."
He looks at the needle. Then at you. You watch him understand that you're giving him something you've never given anyone, and you watch him decide not to say anything about it, and that, more than anything, is how you know he's been listening for the last three weeks.
He takes it.
You mend. The wind tears at the roof and the rain hammers the planks and the bell keeps clanging out in the harbor, and you work the net between you, mesh by mesh, his hands on one edge and yours on the other, meeting in the middle. After a while his shoulder stops shaking against yours. After a longer while, he starts to talk.
Not about the sewers. About Mags. About how she used to cheat at cards and pretend she couldn't hold them properly. About the sugar cubes he carried in the arena for the horses. About Annie singing in the hospital to the other patients, all of them, even the ones who didn't want it. About a girl from the coal district who wouldn't share a cup of water with him, and how much he'd liked her for it.
You tell him about your father's boat, the Gull, which went out in a squall like this one when you were nineteen and didn't come back. You tell him you still go to the end of the breakwater on the anniversary and throw a shell in the water, and that you know it's stupid. He doesn't say it's not stupid. He says, "What kind of shell?" and you love him a little for that before you can stop yourself, which is terrible, and which you put away in the cupboard with the needles for later.
"Why didn't you come?" he asks, near dawn. The storm's blowing itself out. The lamp has gone down to a blue bead. "To the hospital. Everyone came. Half the district sent flowers. Annie brought a sea turtle shell. The Bright sisters sent a cake shaped like me. You didn't come."
You keep your eyes on the net.
"I didn't think you'd want a net-mender at your bedside," you say. "I thought you'd have enough people."
He's quiet for so long you think he's fallen asleep. When you look over, he's watching you, his head tipped back against the bench, his eyes very green in the last of the light.
"I had a lot of people," he says. "I didn't have enough of the right one."
You don't get to answer. The door bangs open and the Darrow girl is standing there in her nightdress and her father's oilskin, soaked to the knees, breathless, waving something in her fist. It's a newspaper, a thin Capitol print sheet of the kind they drop off the supply hovercraft once a week. There's a picture on the front of it.
It's you. With a bucket. And Finnick behind you, folded over the net, laughing.
The headline, in letters as tall as your thumb, reads: WHO IS FINNICK'S MYSTERY WOMAN?