#mocking jay

The soft blue lace of her lingerie seemed almost ghostly in the dim light filtering through the windows—the city’s perpetual glow, cold and indifferent, casting long shadows across her bare shoulders. Her hair, once styled into elegant waves, had begun to loosen, strands of pale gold falling across her face like whispered secrets. Her hands rested on her thighs, palms up, fingers slightly curled, the posture of someone who had been trained to wait and had learned, through repetition and punishment, that waiting was all she was permitted to do. Beside her, untouched, unlifted, unbuckled, lay the collar Finnick had dropped there before walking out the door. The soft blue leather gleamed dully in the half-darkness, the silver tag catching the light and throwing it back in small, sharp flashes.

Property of F. Odair.

The words seemed to mock him from where they lay.

Finnick closed the door behind him, the heavy mahogany clicking shut with a soft finality that echoed through the quiet apartment. He stood in the entryway for a moment, his hand still resting on the cool metal of the doorknob, his eyes adjusting to the dimness. The lights he had left on earlier, now seemed too bright, too harsh, their edges blurring and pulsing in a way that made his temples throb. He had drunk too much. He hadn’t drunk enough. Somewhere between the fourth glass and the fifth, the world had gone soft at the edges, losing its sharpness, its clarity, becoming something, he could almost pretend wasn’t real.

He crossed to the wall panel and began switching off the unnecessary lights, one by one, until only the faint glow from the windows remained and the single distant lamp in the hallway that he had forgotten to turn off. The darkness settled around them like a blanket, soft and forgiving, hiding the corners of the room, blurring the lines between what was real and what was merely possible. In the near-darkness, the golden cage seemed less imposing. The briefcases seemed less threatening. And Y/n, still kneeling on the floor, seemed smaller somehow. More fragile. More like a girl and less like a symbol of everything he had learned to hate.

Finnick walked toward her. His footsteps were slow, deliberate, the soft pad of his bare feet against the carpet the only sound in the room besides the distant hum of the city and the whisper of his own breathing. She did not look up as he approached. Her gaze remained fixed on the floor, on a point approximately three feet in front of her, just as the rules had prescribed. Her posture remained perfect—back straight, shoulders back, hands resting lightly on her thighs. She had been waiting for hours and yet she showed no sign of discomfort, no indication that her knees ached or her back protested or her mind had begun to wander through the dark corridors of fear.

Finnick stopped in front of her. Looked down at the crown of her head, at the pale gold hair falling across her face, at the curve of her neck where the collar would soon rest. Then, slowly, he lowered himself into a squat, bringing himself to her level, his sea-green eyes level with her bowed head. He could see the fine tremor running through her body now—the way her shoulders shook almost imperceptibly, the way her fingers twitched against her thighs, the way her breath came in shallow, controlled sips. She was terrified. Of course she was terrified. Anyone in her position would be terrified.

He reached out and picked up the collar. The leather was cool and smooth against his palm, supple from whatever treatment the stylist had applied to make it soft against the skin. He turned it over in his hands, his fingers tracing the edge of the silver tag, reading the words engraved there even though he already knew them by heart. Property of F. Odair. His name. His claim. His responsibility. The weight of it settled into his chest, heavy and cold, like a stone dropped into deep water.

He unbuckled the collar. The leather strap parted with a soft click, the buckle swinging open, the silver catch gleaming in the dim light. He lifted the collar, brought it toward her throat and paused with his hands hovering on either side of her neck. He could feel the heat radiating from her skin, could see the pulse fluttering in the hollow of her throat, rapid and shallow like a bird’s heartbeat.

Finnick slid the collar around her throat. The leather settled against her skin like a second layer, cool at first, then warming rapidly to match her temperature. He pulled the strap through the buckle, adjusted it to fit—not too tight, not too loose, just enough to be felt, just enough to remind her it was there—and pressed the clasp closed. The soft click of the lock engaging seemed to echo through the silent room. The leash, still attached to the collar’s front ring, slid between his fingers like a silver serpent, its fine links cool and smooth against his skin.

There, he thought. It’s done. She’s yours now. Officially. Legally. Inscribed in silver and sealed in leather.

It made him sick.

“You know I have to hurt you, right?”

The words came out before he could stop them—low, rough by the whiskey and the weight of everything he wasn’t saying. He hadn’t meant to ask. He hadn’t meant to give her the opportunity to respond, to acknowledge, to participate in her own destruction. But the question had escaped anyway, rising up from some place deep inside him that still believed in choices, still believed in consent, still believed that the person on the receiving end of pain deserved to know it was coming.

Y/n stilled.

Her whole body went rigid, frozen, as though someone had poured ice water into her veins. The fine tremor that had been running through her shoulders stopped abruptly, replaced by a stillness so complete it seemed almost unnatural. She didn’t look up. She didn’t speak. But after a long moment—a breath, a heartbeat, an eternity—she nodded. Slowly. Once. A small, jerky motion that seemed to cost her more than it should have.

She knew her place. She had always known her place, even before the parliament had voted, even before the collar had closed around her throat. She was a Snow and Snows paid for their crimes in blood and silence and the slow erosion of everything that made them human. She knew exactly what was going to happen to her—had known since the moment she stood up in that chamber and offered herself in exchange for Lucia’s safety. The stylist had explained it to her, in clinical, euphemistic terms, during the preparations. The rules had been read aloud to her, line by line, while she knelt on a cold floor and tried not to cry. She knew what Finnick was supposed to do. She knew what the parliament expected. She knew that her body was no longer her own, that her pain was no longer private, that every mark, every bruise, every tear would be documented and submitted and judged.

And she would let it. She would let it all happen, would open herself to whatever they chose to do to her, because this was the only way she could atone for the sins of her family. This was the only way she could ensure Lucia’s safety. Tigris had come to see her before the stylist took her away for preparations—had slipped into her holding cell in the middle of the night, her spotted face creased with worry, her golden eyes soft with something that might have been pity or regret or love. Tigris had taken her hands, had squeezed them tight, had promised that Lucia would now be her ward. That Lucia would be granted mercy. That Lucia would grow up in a world without collars and cages and the slow, systematic destruction of everything that made a person whole.

This is a small price to pay, Y/n had told herself, over and over, as the stylist measured her for lingerie that left nothing to the imagination. This is a small price to pay, she had repeated, as they painted her face and styled her hair and taught her to kneel without trembling. This is a small price to pay, she had whispered, as the collar locked around her throat for the first time and explained that she would never remove it, never touch it, never question it.

She repeated it now, silently, as Finnick squatted before her with something dark and troubled in his sea-green eyes. A small price. A small price. A small price.

Don’t think about it too much, Finnick told himself, the words forming in his head like a mantra, a prayer, a spell meant to ward off the creeping horror that threatened to overwhelm him. She’s a Snow. She’s that man’s granddaughter. She’s the enemy. She’s not a person. She’s a symbol. She’s a punishment. She’s a responsibility. She’s not a person.

He tried to believe it. He tried to let the words sink into his bones, to harden his heart, to turn her from a trembling girl into an abstraction, a problem to be solved, a task to be completed. Perhaps it would be easier if he stopped thinking of her as a person. Perhaps it would ease the repulsion he felt—the revulsion at what he was about to do, at what the parliament expected him to do, at the role he had been assigned in this grotesque theatre of vengeance. Perhaps if he could look at her and see only a Snow, only a symbol, only a vessel for the pain of a nation, then his hand would not shake. Then his stomach would not turn. Then he could do what needed to be done without losing the last fragments of himself that still felt like something other than a monster.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about her. Don’t think about any of it. Just do what they expect. Just give them what they want. Just survive.

He closed his eyes. The darkness behind his lids was soft and forgiving, a temporary refuge from the sight of her kneeling before him, the collar gleaming at her throat, the leash trailing across his fingers. He focused on his breathing—in through the nose, out through the mouth—and tried to empty his mind of everything but the simple, mechanical motions of what came next.

Then he opened his eyes.

And she was looking at him.

Her pale blue eyes—those strange, light eyes that had haunted him since the parliament chamber—were fixed on his face with an expression he couldn’t quite name. There was fear there, yes, and resignation, and a kind of weary acceptance that made his chest ache. Her gaze held his, unwavering, and in that moment, she was not an abstraction. She was not a symbol. She was not a Snow.

She was a person. A person with pale blue eyes so similar to his eyes—to the eyes of the monster who had destroyed so many lives, who had turned Finnick into something broken and reshaped and sold. Those eyes had watched him from across the room during Capitol parties, had followed him with cold curiosity, had lingered on his body in ways that made his skin crawl. Those eyes had belonged to Cornelius Snow too, the man who had taken Johanna apart piece by piece, the man who had designed arenas specifically to prolong suffering, the man who had looked at innocent women and seen nothing but meat to be consumed. Eyes of a monster and eyes of a wolf.

And now those same eyes—or eyes so like them that it hardly mattered—were looking at him with something that might have been trust.

Something inside Finnick snapped.

His hand moved without realizing it—a flash of motion, too fast to track, too sudden to stop. His palm connected with her cheek with a sharp, sickening crack that seemed to echo through the silent apartment. The impact jarred his wrist, sent a shock of sensation up his arm and left behind a burning sting in his palm that he knew would linger for hours.

Y/n let out a sound—a wet, startled hiccup, more surprise than pain at first—as she fell sideways, her body crumpling beneath the force of the blow. Her hands shot out to catch herself, her palms slapping against the carpet, her hair falling across her face in a pale gold curtain. She didn’t cry out. She didn’t scream. She simply lay there, half-curled on the floor, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps, her whole body shaking now with a tremor he couldn’t stop.

Finnick stared at his hand. At his palm, already reddening from the impact. At his fingers, still curled slightly, still ready to strike again. Something dark had glazed over his eyes—a film, a veil, a dissociation that separated him from what his body was doing. He could feel himself pulling back, retreating into some distant corner of his mind where the sounds were muffled and the images were blurred and nothing could touch him. It was a familiar place, this inner fortress. He had built it during his years as Snow’s plaything, had reinforced it during the war, had retreated to it countless times when reality became too heavy to bear.

But even from that distant watchtower, he could see what was happening. He could see his hand raising again. He could see it coming down on her skin—her shoulder, her arm, the side of her ribs—each impact producing a soft, wet sound that seemed to come from somewhere far away. He could see her body jerking with each blow, could see her trying to curl into herself, to protect her vital organs, to make herself as small and unappealing a target as possible.

Instinctively, her hands came up to cover her face—a primal response, the body’s desperate attempt to shield what was most precious, most vulnerable, most easily broken. Her fingers splayed across her cheeks, her palms pressing against her forehead, her arms forming a protective cage around her head. She made herself small, made herself compact, made herself into something that might survive if only the blows would stop.

Finnick’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. His fingers curled around the delicate bones, feeling the rapid flutter of her pulse beneath his thumb, the warmth of her skin, the slight resistance as she tried instinctively to pull away. His grip tightened. Squeezed. He could feel the bones shifting under his fingers, could feel the soft tissues compressing, could feel the fine tremors running through her arm as she tried not to fight back.

She whimpered. A small, soft sound, barely audible, more breath than voice. Tears formed in her eyes—pale blue eyes, so like his eyes—and began to spill down her cheeks, tracing silver paths through the soft makeup the stylist had applied. She didn’t sob. She didn’t beg. She simply cried, silently, her body shaking, her breath hitching, her wrist still trapped in his grip.

Finnick looked at her. At the tears on her cheeks. At the reddening marks on her skin. At the collar still gleaming at her throat, the silver tag catching the light, the words Property of F. Odair seeming to glow in the darkness.

He thought of the counsellor’s words. If they decide you’re not making good use of her, they’ll remove her from your custody.

She thought of Tigris’s promise. Lucia will be my ward. She will be safe.

He thought of his own hands, and all the things they had done, and all the things they were doing now. And he kept squeezing.

“Stop crying.”

The words came out sharper than he intended—edged with irritation, with frustration, with something that sounded almost like contempt. Finnick heard himself speak and didn’t recognize his own voice. It belonged to someone else, someone harder, someone who had been hollowed out and filled with something cold and unfeeling. He stared down at Y/n, still half-curled on the floor, tears streaming silently down her cheeks, and felt a surge of something hot and ugly rise in his chest.

Why was she crying? It was barely anything. A few open-handed strikes. A wrist squeezed a little too tightly. Nothing compared to what he had endured in the arena, in the Capitol, in the dark rooms where Snow’s associates had paid for the privilege of putting their hands on him. Most people—most survivors—had been forced to endure pain infinitely worse than this. What he had given her would barely leave a bruise. By tomorrow, the redness would have faded to a faint yellow and within a few days, it would be gone entirely, leaving no trace behind. And yet she was crying as if he had broken her bones, as if he had torn her apart and left her bleeding on the floor.

But that was it, wasn’t it? That was the heart of it. Her privilege. Her soft, sheltered life in the Snow mansion, where the worst pain she had ever known was probably a stubbed toe or a paper cut. She had never been forced to build endurance the way district children had. She had never learned to bite down on a leather strap while someone carved into her flesh. She had never been taught to dissociate, to float above her body, to become someone else entirely while her physical form was being used and discarded. She had never had to develop calluses on her soul.

The thought should have brought him satisfaction. Instead, it only made him angrier.

Y/n nodded at his command—a quick, jerky motion, her chin dipping toward her chest—but she couldn’t make herself stop crying. The tears kept coming, welling up from some deep, overflowing reservoir inside her, spilling down her cheeks and dripping onto the carpet. She tried to blink them back, tried to swallow the sobs that kept catching in her throat, tried to compose her face into something neutral, something obedient, something that wouldn’t provoke him further. Her breath came in short, hitching gasps, each inhale a battle, each exhale a surrender. She pressed her lips together until they went white, until the taste of copper filled her mouth, but still the tears fell.

Stop. Stop. Stop, she told herself fiercely. You’re making it worse. You’re making him angry. Stop crying. Stop being weak. Stop—

Finnick’s hands shot out and curled around her throat.

The contact was sudden, unexpected—his fingers wrapping around the column of her neck, his thumbs pressing against her jaw, his palms warm and slightly damp against her skin. He didn’t squeeze, not yet. He simply held her, his grip firm enough to keep her in place, to force her to look at him. The collar shifted against her skin, the leather creaking softly, the silver tag tapping against his knuckles.

Y/n’s eyes flew to his face. She looked at him through a veil of tears, her pale blue gaze meeting his sea-green one, her expression a mixture of fear and confusion and something else—something that might have been understanding. Her throat moved beneath his hands as she swallowed, the muscles working against his palms, her pulse fluttering rapid and fragile against his fingertips.

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to feel. The certainty that had propelled him through the past few minutes—the dark, dissociated certainty that had allowed him to raise his hand and bring it down, over and over—had evaporated, leaving behind nothing but confusion and dread and a sick, spiraling sense of unreality. Should he have stopped? Should he have continued? Should he hit her again, harder this time, to make up for the hesitation? Should he let her go and walk away and pretend none of this had ever happened?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything anymore. The ground beneath him seemed to shift and crack, threatening to open up and swallow him whole.

His grip loosened on her throat. His fingers slackened, his palms pulled back and then his hands dropped away entirely, falling to his sides like dead weights. He released her as though her skin had burned him, as though touching her had been a mistake he couldn’t take back.

Finnick turned away. His gaze drifted to the windows—the floor-to-ceiling glass that dominated the far wall of the living room, offering an uninterrupted view of the Capitol skyline. The city sprawled before him, a glittering expanse of lights and shadows, beautiful and rotten, indifferent and eternal. He stared at his reflection in the dark glass—a pale, hollow-eyed stranger with copper hair and sea-green eyes that seemed to belong to someone else. He didn’t recognize himself. He didn’t know who this man was, standing in this luxury apartment, putting a collar around the throat of a woman who had been given to him like a gift.

This isn’t me, he thought. This isn’t who I am. This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t—

Behind him, he heard Y/n gasping for breath. The sound was wet and ragged, her lungs struggling to pull in air after the pressure on her throat had been released. She was lying on the floor a few feet away from where he stood, her body still half-curled, her hands still trembling, her chest heaving with the effort of breathing. The soft blue lace of her lingerie seemed obscene in the dim light, a mockery of beauty, a costume for a role she had never auditioned for.

Finnick looked down at his hands. They were shaking. Fine, rapid tremors travelled through his fingers, his palms, his wrists, as though his body was trying to shake off something that had latched onto him from the inside. The skin of his right palm was still flushed from the impact of her cheek, a faint pinkness that would fade by morning. His fingernails were clean, his knuckles unbroken. There was no blood on him. No evidence of what he had done except the memory, already beginning to blur at the edges and the marks already blooming on her skin.

Then the images came.

They flashed through his mind without warning—not memories, not quite, but fragments, shards, pieces of a life he had tried so hard to bury. The parties, first: chandeliers and champagne and silk-draped rooms where the air smelled of perfume and sweat and something darker. The hands that had touched him, countless hands, grabbing and groping and claiming. The faces that had hovered above him, their features blurred together into a single, monstrous mask of hunger and satisfaction. Then the arena: blood-soaked sand, the screams of dying children, the weight of a trident in his hands, the knowledge that he would have to kill again and again and again just to see another sunrise. Then Snow’s mansion: the cold, sterile rooms where he had been taken after the parties, where he had been made to kneel on hard floors, where a collar had been locked around his throat and he had been told to smile for the cameras.

The images came faster now, overlapping, bleeding into one another, until he couldn’t tell where one memory ended and another began. The laughter of Capitol guests mingled with the screams of tributes. The taste of champagne mixed with the copper tang of blood. The quiet of his apartment—the silence he had always treasured, the silence that meant he was safe, he was alone, he was no one’s property—filled with noise, with voices, with the terrible symphony of his past.

He could hear them. All of them. Snow’s cold, measured tones. The counsellor’s ugly laugh. The stylist’s honeyed voice. The hands that had held him down, the mouths that had whispered filthy promises, the eyes that had watched him and seen nothing but a body to be used.

Stop, he thought. Stop. Please. Make it stop.

But the voices only grew louder.

Finnick curled into himself. His shoulders hunched forward, his head dropped, his arms wrapped around his torso as though he could hold himself together through sheer pressure. His breath came in short gasps, each inhale a battle, each exhale a surrender. Tears formed in his own eyes now—hot and sudden, blurring his vision, spilling down his cheeks in a way that felt foreign and wrong. He hadn’t cried in years. He had forgotten how. And yet here he was, sobbing silently in his own living room, a few feet away from a woman he had just hurt, a woman who bore the marks of his hands on her skin.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. The words were barely audible, more breath than sound, spoken to no one and everyone. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I don’t want—”

He didn’t know what he was apologizing for. For hurting her? For losing control? For being exactly the kind of person he had spent his whole life trying not to become? The words tumbled out of him in a broken stream, each one dissolving into the next, until they became nothing more than a string of syllables, meaningless and desperate.

This isn’t who I am, he told himself, but the voice in his head sounded less certain now. I’m not like them. I’m not a monster. I’m not—

But he had hurt her. He had raised his hand and brought it down on her skin, had felt the impact travel up his arm, had watched her crumple and cry and beg without words. He had done exactly what the counsellor had wanted him to do. Exactly what the parliament had expected. Exactly what Snow had done to him, over and over, until the memory of it had become a second skin he could never shed.

The spiral worsened. The abyss beneath him yawned wider, darker, hungrier. Nothing seemed able to drag him out of it—no rational thought, no comforting memory, no flicker of hope. He was falling, and falling and falling, and there was no bottom to catch him, no ground to break his descent. Just the endless dark, and the voices, and the knowledge that he had become the very thing he had once sworn to destroy.

And then he heard a soft voice call out to him.

“Master?”

The word was tentative, almost questioning, as though she wasn’t sure she was allowed to speak. It cut through the noise in his head like a blade through fog—not silencing the voices, not banishing the images, but creating a small, clear space in the centre of the chaos. A space where something other than horror could exist.

Finnick felt a soft touch on his hand. Light, barely there, the brush of fingertips against his knuckles. He looked down and saw Y/n’s hand resting on his—pale and slender, the fingers slightly curled, the nails bare and clean. She wasn’t gripping him, wasn’t holding on, wasn’t trying to restrain him. She was simply touching him, making contact, letting him know that she was there.

He looked up. Met her eyes.

Y/n was crawling closer, her movements slow and careful, her body still trembling from the aftermath of his hands. The bruises were already beginning to form on her skin—faint shadows on her cheek, darker marks on her arm where he had grabbed her, a hint of purple blooming at her collarbone. Her cheeks were tear-streaked, her makeup smeared, her hair a tangled mess of pale gold. She looked broken. She looked ruined. She looked like someone who had been hurt and was choosing to approach her abuser anyway.

“I know you have to do what you have to do,” she said, her voice soft and hoarse from crying. She paused, swallowing, wincing slightly as her throat moved. “I—I don’t blame you for it.”

She crawled closer still, until she was kneeling beside him, her shoulder almost touching his, her breath warm against his arm. Her hand remained on his, not squeezing, not pulling, just resting there like a small, fragile anchor.

“You’re not them,” she whispered, as though she could hear the thoughts screaming in his head. “You’re not like them. I know you’re not.”

Finnick stared at her. At the bruises already beginning to bloom across her skin—purple and blue shadows that marred the soft, pale perfection of her body. At the tears still clinging to her lashes, trembling there like dew on a spider’s web. At the collar around her throat, gleaming softly in the darkness, the silver tag catching the glow from the windows and throwing it back in small, sharp flashes. Property of F. Odair. The words seemed to burn in the air between them, an accusation and a confession all at once.

She reached up and took his hand. Her fingers were warm and slightly damp from her tears, her grip gentle but insistent as she guided his palm toward her face. He let her, too shocked to resist, too exhausted to pull away. His hand moved through the air as though guided by strings, weightless and disconnected from the rest of his body, until his fingers made contact with her cheek.

The skin there was soft. Warmer than he expected. And slightly swollen beneath his palm, already tender from where he had struck her.

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, each word a small, fragile thing that seemed to cost her more than it should. Her pale blue eyes held his, unblinking, unwavering. “You can hurt me. You can use me. I deserve it.” It’s a small price to pay.

Finnick’s features twisted in pain. His brow furrowed, his lips pressed together, his jaw tightened until the muscles stood out in sharp relief against his skin. Something cracked open inside his chest—a fissure, a fault line, a wound that had never fully healed and was now bleeding fresh. He stared at her as though seeing her for the first time, as though she were a riddle he couldn’t solve, a language he couldn’t speak.

Why was she doing this? Why was she encouraging her own abuse? Why was she offering herself up like a sacrifice, pressing his hand to her bruised cheek, whispering words of absolution he hadn’t asked for and didn’t deserve? She should have been hateful. She should have been resentful. She should have been spitting venom, clawing at his eyes, screaming for help that would never come. That was what he expected. That was what he understood. That was the language of survivors—the language he spoke fluently, the language of anger and resistance and the desperate, clawing fight to remain whole.

But she wasn’t giving him that. She was giving him softness. She was giving him forgiveness. She was giving him permission to hurt her and somehow that was worse than any accusation she could have levelled.

Y/n was close to him now. Too close. He could feel the warmth radiating from her skin, could smell the faint, floral scent of whatever products the stylist had used on her hair and body—something sweet and delicate, like night-blooming jasmine, utterly at odds with the violence that had just passed between them. Her breath fanned across his lips, soft and warm, carrying the faintest hint of mint. Her body was curled beside his, her shoulder pressed against his arm, her hip brushing against his thigh. She was a source of heat in the cool darkness of the apartment, a small, living flame that seemed to draw him toward her despite every instinct screaming at him to pull away.

Finnick’s body buzzed with the warmth of the alcohol still swimming through his veins. The whiskey had dulled the sharpest edges of his thoughts, had smoothed the jagged fragments of his memories into something almost bearable. But it had also lowered his defenses, had loosened the tight hold he kept on his impulses, had blurred the line between what he should do and what he wanted to do. His head felt thick and heavy, his limbs loose and uncoordinated, his judgment clouded by the pleasant, numbing fog that had settled over his brain.

His eyes traveled down her body.

He didn’t mean to look. He told himself he didn’t mean to look. But his gaze slipped from her face—from those pale blue eyes, from the bruises—and began to drift downward. Down the milky column of her neck, where the collar rested against her throat. Down the curve of her shoulder, bare and smooth in the dim light. Down the swell of her breasts, barely contained by the soft blue lace of the lingerie, rising and falling with each shallow breath. Down the narrow span of her waist, the flare of her hips, the long, elegant lines of her legs, bare from mid-thigh to ankle.

She looked so beautiful in this light. Almost ethereal. The soft glow from the windows caught the pale gold of her hair, turning it into something that seemed to glow from within. The shadows played across her skin, accentuating the curves and hollows of her body, the subtle architecture of bone and muscle and soft, yielding flesh. Her bruises stood out in stark relief against marble of her skin—dark flowers blooming on a field of snow, evidence of what he had done, what he was capable of.

Johanna had been right. She did look like an angel. A fallen one, perhaps. A broken one. An angel with bruised wings and tear-stained cheeks and the collar of a slave around her throat.

Finnick’s hand rose to her cheek. The same hand that had struck her. The same hand that had wrapped around her throat. Now it cupped her face with something approaching tenderness, his palm moulding to the curve of her jaw, his fingers threading into the soft hair at her temple. The warmth of her skin against his palm was almost shocking—a reminder that she was real, that she was here, that this was happening. He almost flinched at the contact, almost pulled away, almost retreated back into the cold, safe distance he had maintained between them.

But he didn’t.

The voices in his head didn’t quiet. They were still there, a low, constant murmur at the edge of his consciousness, whispering fragments of memory and fear and self-loathing. But they didn’t grow louder either. For the first time in hours—perhaps for the first time in years—they seemed to recede, to retreat, to give him a moment of blessed, fragile silence.

Finnick was too tired. Too tired of pretending. Too tired of being civilized, of holding back, of burying his feelings beneath layers of charm and politeness and carefully constructed composure. Too tired of smiling when he wanted to scream, of nodding when he wanted to argue, of taking the high road when every fibre of his being wanted to burn it all down. Too tired of being the survivor, the victor, the senator, the man who had overcome unimaginable horrors and emerged whole on the other side. He wasn’t whole. He had never been whole. He was a patchwork of scars and coping mechanisms and desperate, fragile strategies for making it through one more day.

And in this moment, in the dim light of his apartment, with a woman kneeling beside him and offering herself up like a sacrifice, he simply let go.

He cupped her face with both hands now—his palms warm against her cheeks, his fingers threading into her hair, his thumbs brushing across her cheekbones. He could feel the tears still wet on her skin, could taste the salt of them in the air between them. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t flinch. She simply looked up at him with those pale blue eyes, waiting, accepting, surrendering to whatever came next.

Then he smashed his lips onto hers.

It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t tender. It was raw and desperate and almost animalistic—a collision of mouths, a clash of teeth, a hunger that had been building for longer than he wanted to admit. He kissed her like a drowning man gasping for air, like a starving man reaching for bread, like someone who had been touched without his permission so many times that the only way he knew how to touch was to take.

There was something in him that wanted to consume instead of be consumed. To touch instead of being touched. To be the one holding someone down instead of the one being held. For years, he had been on the other side of this equation—had been the object, the target, the body to be used and discarded. He had learned to dissociate, to float above himself, to become someone else entirely while his physical form was being violated. But he had never learned to want it. He had never learned to enjoy it. He had simply learned to survive it.

But this—this was different. This was his choice. His desire. His hunger. And for once, he didn’t want to hold it back.

He pushed her down to the carpeted floor. The motion was sudden, almost rough and she let out a small, surprised sound against his mouth as her back hit the soft fibres. He followed her down, his body pressing against hers, his weight pinning her to the ground. The carpet was thick and soft beneath them, muffling the sounds of their movement, cushioning the impact of his knees and elbows as he settled over her.

He hovered above her, his body a cage around hers, his chest against her breasts, his hips pressed against her stomach. She was so small beneath him—fragile and warm and impossibly soft. He could feel her heartbeat through the thin lace of her lingerie, could feel the rapid flutter of her pulse against his chest, could feel the way her breath hitched and stuttered with every movement he made.

One of his hands caught both of hers, his fingers wrapping around her wrists, pinning them above her head. She didn’t struggle. She didn’t resist. Her arms stayed where he put them, her hands open and palm-up, her fingers slightly curled. She looked up at him through the tangled fall of her pale gold hair, her eyes wide and luminous, her lips parted and slightly swollen from his kiss.

His other hand began to trail down her body.

Slowly. Deliberately. He let his fingers trace the line of her jaw, the curve of her throat, the hollow at the base of her neck where her pulse beat rapid and fragile. He let them drift lower, across the soft blue lace covering her breasts, feeling the warmth of her skin through the thin fabric, feeling the way her body arched slightly toward his touch even as she made herself small and still. He let them trace the outline of her ribs, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hip, until his hand rested on the bare skin of her thigh, just below the hem of the lingerie.

She trembled beneath him. Her whole body shook like a plucked string still vibrating after the note had faded. But she didn’t pull away. She didn’t close her eyes. She kept them fixed on his face, watching him, waiting for him, accepting whatever he chose to give her.

Finnick looked down at her and felt something crack open inside him. Something he had kept locked away for a very long time. Something that might have been hope, or might have been despair, or might have been something else entirely, something he didn’t have a name for.

He wanted to consume her. He wanted to devour her. He wanted to lose himself in the warmth of her body, the softness of her skin, the surrender in her eyes. He wanted to forget—forget the arena, forget the parties, forget Snow’s cold smile and the counsellor’s ugly laugh and the stylist’s honeyed voice. He wanted to be someone else, if only for a few minutes. Someone who took instead of being taken. Someone who chose instead of being chosen for.

So he stopped thinking. Stopped questioning. Stopped trying to be good.

He lowered his mouth to hers again and let himself fall.

╰ ┈➤ A/n: Both y/n and Finnick deserve a hug so bad 😔😔 they’re like wet kicked stray kittens at the side of the road and someone please put them in a lake house away from the capitol’s bs 🙏🙏

╰ ┈➤ Masterlist

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