Chapter 1: The Offer
You have three rules about Finnick Odair, and you made them the week he came home.
One: you do not stare. Everyone in District 4 stared at first, the whole fish market going quiet when he walked through it with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. You did not. You were gutting mackerel and you kept gutting mackerel, and when he passed your stall you said, "Morning," the way you'd say it to anyone, and went on with your knife.
Two: you do not talk about the screens. Not the Games, not the Capitol parties, not the Quarter Quell, not the interview where he told the whole of Panem every secret Snow ever bought from him. Other people want to. You've watched them try, at the bar by the harbor, leaning in with that bright hungry look. You've watched him smile and say something charming and leave as soon as he politely can.
Three, and this is the one that matters: you do not want him. Not like that. Not like they did.
It has been four years. You've kept all three rules without much trouble, mostly because he lives up in the Victors' Village and you live on the Petrel, and the two places don't have much to say to each other.
Then, at dawn on a gray-gold Tuesday, your propeller wraps itself in old net on the north reef, and the engine coughs, and dies, and the tide starts walking your boat toward the rocks.
"Come on," you tell the Petrel, which was your brother's before it was yours and has never once listened to either of you. "Come on, come on, come on."
It does not come on. You kill the fuel, strip to your undershirt and shorts, take your knife in your teeth like an idiot in a story, and go over the stern.
The water this early is cold enough to punch the breath out of you. You surface, gasp, dive. The prop is a mess: a whole ghost net, the old nylon kind the Capitol used to sell the district before the war, wound around the shaft so tight it looks woven. You saw at it until your lungs burn, come up, breathe, go back down. The Petrel drifts. The reef gets closer. You can see the yellow fingers of coral through the green, and you think, quite calmly, I am going to lose this boat, and then I am going to have to tell my mother.
On your fourth dive, someone else is already down there.
You nearly drop the knife. He's on the other side of the shaft, long body angled in the water, hair floating up in a bronze cloud, and he's working at the net with his bare hands. Not tearing. Unpicking. His fingers move over the snarl like he's reading it, finding the one strand that matters, pulling it free, and suddenly a whole loop gives.
He looks at you across the propeller. Bubbles slide up past his face. He points at a knot near your hand and mimes a cut.
You cut. He pulls. The net comes away from the shaft in one long gray rope, and you both kick for the surface.
You come up coughing. He comes up laughing, shaking water out of his eyes, and you think you will never forget the sound of it, because it's not the laugh from the interviews. It's rough and surprised, like he forgot he could do it.
"That," says Finnick Odair, treading water next to your boat, "was the worst knot I have ever seen. Who taught that net to tie itself?"
"The Capitol," you say.
"Ah. Explains a lot."
The engine starts on the second try. You pull him aboard because he's ten meters from shore and swam out here from the beach, which is apparently a thing he does every morning, and because it would be rude not to. He sits on the gunwale dripping and looks around the deck with interest. You try not to look at the scars. You fail, a bit. They go from his left shoulder blade down around his ribs in a pale, raised lace, and they make the rest of him look less like a statue and more like a man who has been bitten by something and lived.
"Mutts," he says, without looking at you. He's watching the gulls.
"I didn't ask."
"You were about to."
"I was about to tell you to get off my nets. You're sitting on them."
He looks down. He is, in fact, sitting on a coil of your best line. He shifts with an exaggerated care that makes you want to throw him back in the sea.
You run the Petrel into the cove below the Village and nose her up to the old jetty. You have no reason to tie off. You tie off anyway. He jumps down onto the planks, then turns back, and digs in the pocket of his wet canvas trousers, and you know what he's going to do a full second before he does it, because everyone in Panem knows.
He holds out his palm. On it, slightly soggy, is a sugar cube.
"Want a sugar cube?" he says.
There's a beat where it could go either way. You watched the Games in the square like everyone else. You watched the tributes' parade and the man in the golden net offer a sugar cube to the girl on fire, and you remember thinking, even then, that it looked like the loneliest thing you'd ever seen, a man handing out sweetness he wasn't allowed to taste.
He knows what you're thinking. You see it land on his face, the old reflex to turn the moment into a joke, and you see him decide not to.
"They're for my coffee," he says, more quietly. "I don't know why I keep them in my pocket. Habit. They used to be for the horses."
"There are no horses in District 4."
"There were horses in the Capitol."
You look at the cube. You look at him. Then you take it off his palm with your fingertips, and put it in your mouth, and it dissolves, salty from the sea and sweet underneath, gone in a second.
"Thank you," you say, "for my boat."
Something in his shoulders loosens.
"I want a job," he says.
You stare at him. Rule one. You stare anyway.
"I'm serious. I've been home four years. I swim, I walk, I tie knots, and I sit in a house with eleven rooms I don't use. I can't hold a trident properly anymore." He rolls his left shoulder, and you hear something click. "But I can haul. I can mend. I can read a net. I need to be useful to someone who isn't going to film it."
"You're a Victor. You get a pension. You don't need to work."
"I didn't say I needed money." He looks at the Petrel, at the rust on her rails and the patch you put in her hull last winter and her name painted over your brother's careful lettering in your own worse hand. "You run her alone. I've watched you go out. You shouldn't."
"You watch me?"
He has the grace to look embarrassed, which is not something you thought his face did. "From the beach. I swim. You go out. It's the same time every day. It's not, I'm not..." He stops, presses his lips together. "It's not like that."
You think about the rules. You think about the way he unpicked that net like it was nothing, like his fingers knew a language you don't.
"Four in the morning," you say. "Every day except Sundays. You'll get a share of the catch like any deckhand, and you'll be sick over the side for a week, and you'll do what I say on my boat."
He grins. It is, unfortunately, devastating.
"Aye, Captain."
"Don't call me that."
"Aye," he says, softer, "Skipper," and that's worse.
He's not sick over the side. He's annoyingly good. On the fourth day out a swell catches you off balance while you're leaning over the stern to bring the net in, and before you go over he's there, one hand fisted in the back of your shirt and the other spread warm on your hip, hauling you back against him so hard your shoulders hit his chest.
You stay there a second longer than you have to.
His breath is uneven on the back of your neck. His hand is still on your hip, thumb resting on the bare strip of skin where your shirt has ridden up, and he doesn't move it, and you don't move away. You can feel his heart going hard against your spine. The boat rocks. The gulls scream. Neither of you says anything.
You turn your head. His mouth is right there, close enough that you can see the salt drying in the corner of it.
"Skipper," he says. Barely a word.
He doesn't lean in. You realize, slowly, that he's not going to. He's waiting, perfectly still, with his hand on your hip and his eyes on your mouth, as if whatever happens next is entirely, completely up to you.
You step out of his arms.
"Net," you say, too loud. "The net's going over."
It is. He lets you go at once, and you both grab for it, and you don't look at each other for the rest of the morning.
That night, when you come back to the Petrel after the market, there's a length of fine cord tied around the mast in a complicated, beautiful knot you don't recognize. There's a note pinned under it in neat, slanted handwriting.
It says: If you ever want to learn this one, I'm in the net shed after dark. No pressure. No cameras. Bring your own sugar.