#spin control

The thing was that the victors who bothered thinking about it had always assumed that Haymitch didn’t drink all that much between the Games and the Victory Tour, that is. It made perfect sense to get drunk at those times, after all. A lot of people did. He was an alcoholic, certainly; nobody but an addict would ever be able to maintain such a high level of blood alcohol for a whole Games. But surely, he had to be drinking less than that when home amongst friends.

Okay so I’d completely forgotten this line but once I get past the instinctual ‘bold of you to assume Haymitch has friends’ (what have you done to me, tumblr?) I’m just struck by how sad Haymitch’s entire life is. He’s completely alone all year round except during Games time, and the few friends (and sort of friends) he has there turn out to be pretty dismissive of him and his home situation when he’s there. I mean, Haymitch definitely doesn’t go around and advertise his predicament, and everyone at Games Central has more than one good reason to be self-focused (there’s only so much crap you can carry at the best of time and they haven’t had a best of time in a while, for the most part) but that doesn’t make Haymitch’s isolation and loneliness any better :/

It was the dawn of the 72nd Hunger Games – an hour after Finnick had hopped the train to the Capitol alongside this year’s tributes and mentors to spend another Games praying that the children would die fast so that he wouldn’t have to spread his legs for all too many people.

See, one thing that I love about this fic is that it shows us something Katniss never had the time to properly learn (also possibly not the inclination) : how as Victors, people are stuck in situations where no matter what happens they will always have cause to have frankly terrible thoughts. Because yes, wishing kids would die fast is terrible, but at the same time who could blame Finnick for wanting to get raped less (and isn’t that sentence terrible, too, in and of itself?).

I mean, this is true for most citizens of Panem because dictatorships are terrible situations in and of themselves and they force people to do inglorious things to survive, but I feel like the position of Victor (essentially : high visibility hostage) makes the horribleness even more obvious and painful :/

Haymitch’s house looked a mess even from the outside, the remains of bright blue paint peeling off the walls, and wildly growing fern covering the lawn. It stood amidst an otherwise perfectly maintained anonymous town, like when a picture was drawn with a different material from the rest. It took Finnick a moment to understand that this was because it was a ghost town, inhabited by Haymitch only.

See what I meant about Katniss just not noticing things? (From both ignorance and a certain amount of denial I think). All of this is already in the books, but Katniss never explicitly thinks of it, or rather she never thinks of what it means that she and Peeta are the only two neighbors Haymitch has had in over twenty years.

And then I read Spin Control and I realized that even if I’d known what Haymitch’s situation was while reading the books, I hadn’t really taken the time to understand until then.

Also:

But the reporters remained blind to what they were exposing, focusing only on the threats of the story they were weaving.

Nice demonstration of privilege and the selective vision that comes with it. Also frankly, I always read this passage wishing someone would barge in and kick the cameras out. It’s going to be painful enough for Haymitch to go through, the images really don’t need to be live on TV, especially when you know people are going to be glued to their screens no matter what.

It could be worse, Finnick tried to tell himself, but he still groaned and rubbed his temple to fight the headache that he felt creeping up. It could be worse. If they’ve decided he’s sick, it could be one hell of a lot worse. If Haymitch was sick, not showing up at the Reaping hadn’t been under his control. It hadn’t been because he didn’t care what the Capitol wanted him to do. That would have meant starvation for the whole district and probably an ‘accidental’ death for Haymitch. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The problem with this scenario was that the reporters were apparently chartering Haymitch off to some Capitol rehab facility right now, and once he left it, he had better stay sober for the cameras forever, or there’d be hell to pay for his district, for his friends.

Except they all knew that there was no chance that Haymitch Abernathy would ever stay sober in a world where there were Hunger Games.

“Fuck,” Caramel said.

You know what, I’d feel guilty for quoting so much of the fic at you guys but on the other hand it’s just...why explain something that does its work perfectly? Because again, the reality of Victor life that’s starkly apparent here is that nothing, nothing can be left alone. In Panem, (in a dictatorship) everything you do is a matter of concern, of PR. You have to look respectful and appreciative or you dying becomes a best case scenario, even more so when you’re a high-visibility citizen (in fact, the more visible you are the more careful you need to be with your image because it has consequences far beyond just you).

Again, this is one of the thing Katniss was lucky enough not to live too long with but the truth is that her whole charade with Peeta (the romance, the fake marriage, the baby) lasted two years. Two horrible years, beyond contest, but two years. At this point in the fic Finnick, who won the 65th Hunger Games, has been doing this for seven years, to say nothing of Victors like Mags who make Haymitch look young!

The trigger warnings start arriving right away, by the way : Finnick’s pov in the middle of a Capitol night isn’t pretty but it is realistic and rings true. Spin Control is in many (most?) respect a trauma fic and if you don’t get that during the opening you’ve missed an important detail.

Anyway, I do like that the first thing we see of the two main characters is in contrast with what we are presented with in the books. Finnick is vulnerable as fuck, in the middle of a breakdown, and Haymitch is still drunk but almost explicitly kind which, well. Katniss almost only sees the more abrasive side of him.

(Not to say that Haymitch is a nice person, per se. He’s capable of being kind, we see that mostly from his Hunger Games tape in Catching Fire and in a few moments where he tries being supportive of Katniss in Mockingjay (though even there you have to look for it, imo) but he doesn’t ever appear like the nice and smiling type to me, even if you somehow took the Games and everything else away)

“I hate going back every time. I wish I didn’t have to,” he heard himself say abruptly, as if the unexpected touch had made something come loose. He opened his eyes to stare at the wall. When he heard Haymitch starting to reply, he continued vehemently. “Not back in there.” He nodded at the club. “Back home. District Four.” His eyes were still burning from the tears that were threatening to spill over, from the bile in his throat. It was one of those days when everything hurt. “I hate that they – Mags, my parents, everybody – that they have to see me like that, like I’m...” But he ran out of words at that point. Collaborator. Slut. Killer. Saying it aloud would make it even more real, so he just bit his lip. It still felt swollen, from the kissing.

“Aw, kid, listen…” Haymitch said in a strained voice as if he was suddenly finding himself wildly out of his depth, his hand still on Finnick’s shoulder, as if he had decided that he would try and hold him upright physically for lack of better options.

I really like this bit, because we’re very much Haymitch there, in a way. We read ‘I hate going back every time’ and assume Finnick means the club, the clients, the whole mess of it and it makes sense because it’s horrible—and then he says it’s Four, and suddenly there’s this sense of ‘but shouldn’t it be a break for you’? Like Haymitch, who either doesn’t care about what people (who, it’s worth keeping in mind, are not close to him because everyone he loved has been dead for twenty-one years at this point) think of him in 12 or is firmly in the process of training himself out of it, we’re left a little at a loss, trying to readjust the image we had of Finnick and to figure out how to deal with it.

(Interestingly, having left my parents’ home since I last read Spin Control, I find myself understanding the sentiment a lot better, though. Obviously Finnick and I have very different circumstances but I do get what it’s like to go back to a place where you should be free and comfortable and to find yourself faced instead with a version of you you literally can’t stand, whether that’s really what your family thinks of you or what you’re projecting on them (or both). This tidbit used to make sense in an abstract way for me, it’s less abstract now x))

And then, of course, Haymitch breaks out the booze. Which sounds kind of like a joke when you say it like that but then again, it’s not like he’s got anything else to offer at that moment and he knows it. Haymitch doesn’t have experience with Finnick’s problem, doesn’t have a solution for it or a way to get Finnick out of his shitty situation because they live in a dictatorship and no one really gets an out...so he shares the only thing he’s found to deal (or pretend to deal?) with this whole mess : the alcohol. It makes for a humorous moment on surface (I like the image of Finnick trying not to cough himself to death, ngl) but it’s actually really sad.

When he would go back in to serve his client, the spot on his shoulder where Haymitch’s hand had been would feel oddly empty all night; he just wasn’t used to that kind of support anymore, not when his family didn’t know how to give it and he’d rather die than talk to Mags about sex.

This is the first time in this story where I really want to hug both of these men and put them in blanket burritos like they aren’t grown adults and fully capable of killing me one handed, but rest assured it certainly isn’t the last. I wonder how long it’s been since Finnick was on the receiving end of that kind of platonic touching tbh (I’m not sure how much his family knows exactly, or how much of a damper the knowledge puts on their physical interactions, but i feel like it’s probably a reasonable question to ask) and of course Haymitch has probably been touch starved for the past twenty years or so which, ouch. Makes me wonder if he was overly conscious of his hand afterwards, too.

There was another world, somewhere, in which the victors of Panem made contact with District Thirteen in that year, during those Games, and everything changed when the rebellion began. Haymitch sobered up somewhat, just for a little while but long enough for everything to turn out differently. Finnick gained new hope and went to make new friends back home; he went to meet Annie Cresta and became a happier man.

This was not that world.

See, this chapter starts on the evening of Haymitch’s very public overdose, as Finnick gets ‘invited’ to participate in a talk show where Haymitch and his alcoholism are very obviously going to be the center of attention. Finnick is kind of confused as to why he’d be invited except for looking pretty ‘while other people [use] the big words’. It took me until the end of the chapter to realize it but actually, yeah, I’m pretty sure being pretty is exactly what Finnick was called for.

Because the other guests on that talk show?

Mags, an eighty-ish years old woman whose refusal to upgrade her prosthetics is already making it harder for people to understand her.

Chaff, a nearing-fifty alcoholic with a stump and a rather caustic attitude

Terence from District 6 who looks closer to Mag’s age than his actual sixty years and has a morphling addiction problem.

In other words, Caesar Flickerman now has to host a program with three walking reminders that life doesn’t stay pretty forever or for everyone (after all, you can make an argument that Mags is just old, but there’s no way you can pretend like Chaff and Terence’s lack of compliance with Capitol beauty standards aren’t linked to their games, even if most of your population is eager to pretend it is). That’s already three reminders too many for a government trying to normalize and glamourize the Hunger Games until its victims have to say thanks for being sent to the slaughterhouse and punished for it afterward. So what do you do? You throw your local sex-on-legs eye-candy in there so people have something nice to look at while other people discuss the utter mess that is Haymitch’s life. It’s brutal packaging is what it is, down to Finnick’s clothes actually:

After a remake session with Cherry, his stylist, and her team, [Finnick] was trying to get comfortable in his chair despite the excuse for a pair of pants he wore, while the studio lights burned down on him and Flickerman discussed Haymitch Abernathy’s alcoholism, which was still a disease.

Also I have to say I like that this sentence starts with Finnick’s discomfort with an outfit clearly meant for the audience more than for him, and ends with a reminder to himself that Haymitch isn’t completely lost yet. It’s like he glances at his own predicament and trauma then subconsciously steers himself back to the more pressing issue. It’s both a touching sow of solidarity and care toward Haymitch and a heartbreaking dismissal of himself...which, in turn, is an excellent and subtle reminder that it isn’t like Finnick lives in a world that will ever allow him to heal anyway.

Oh, and:

Finnick tried to avoid looking at Terence’s long sleeves, such an uncommon styling choice in a boiling hot television studio, covering up puncture wounds of Morphling needles. Before the show, Finnick had walked in on him shooting himself up in the men’s room. As far as he knew, Terence had never once sobered up since he’d won the 26th Games with a knife and a garrote.

Just in case there was any doubt left that the Capitol (specifically president Snow, but also many people who do not use their brains so they don’t have to come to accurate conclusions) cares more about the Victors’ use as narrative devices than as persons. Not that the people reading SC would have any doubt about that (or at least, they wouldn’t survive very long) but it’s still a good reminder to get. And boy do we get some more.

Chaff took control of the conversation without prompting and did what needed doing on the victors’ end to keep Haymitch alive, swiftly building on the news coverage by weaving a story of loneliness and fame and social responsibility, a term Finnick hadn’t been aware the Capitol actually ever used for anything.

You know, I said in my prologue post that Haymitch’s friends didn’t fully realize what situation he was in and I stand by that, but just because they didn’t realize doesn’t mean they didn’t care. Chaff is putting himself on the line here, subtle as it may be. Also the fic may be in Finnick’s pov, which means one of the more perceptive Victors is our guide here, but that doesn’t take away from the others’ ability to observe and/or toe the line when needed I mean:

“Well yeah, all the signs were there for me to see though and I didn’t, right?” Chaff replied. “All the signs were there, but I didn’t want to see. I didn’t realize how hard it must be for Haymitch, only victor of Twelve and all and always the only mentor for the two tributes, too. He never gets to sleep properly during the Games until they’re both out, did you know that? Probably used the alcohol to stay awake.”

After delivering that last statement with a sorrowful face as if it actually had made any sense, he paused.

Of course Chaff’s statement doesn’t make any sense: it starts with the truth and ends with a Capitol-PR-ready, ‘but of course he was only trying to serve you’ when Haymitch’s entire life at this point is basically the most long-term suicide attempt ever seen. It’s lucky Chaff isn’t the only one who cares and the others pick up the thread before it can start to unravel:

“The public often underestimates how stressful the life of a victor can become,” [Mags] said […]. “It is especially hard for victors if they are supposed to be performing as mentor but failing. It is a great honor to be a mentor, victors are always anxious to succeed. It can be too much, honestly. I have seen this playing out many times. We put ourselves under pressure. One can get overwhelmed.”

“That’s what it was like for me, too,” Terence agreed with his grainy old voice, having aged prematurely. He could as well have been Mags’ age instead of only sixty. “The responsibility was weighing down on me. Not just to the Capitol, who I owed so much, but also to my tributes.”

“We all want to be at our best during the Games,” Chaff concluded.

“What do you think, Finnick?” Flickerman addressed him with a face of rapt interest. He usually adopted that same expression when he told Finnick to get on his knees and suck him off in his dressing room, as if it was a great adventure they were undertaking together.

Okay, sorry to ruin the beautiful moment of solidarity (because even with their limited means, everyone on this side of the talk show is doing what they can to help Haymitch out) with Flickerman being a creepy douche, but considering it’s been established that the topic of Finnick using drugs was supposed to be off-limits (implicitly, but still) I can’t help but wonder if this is Flickerman deciding to toe the line just so he can have Finnick under his thumb again, and that only make him even more gross.

“I am worried about Mr. Abernathy, I am. This is going to be a difficult case,” the doctor told the camera. “As therapists, we see this every day. Yes, we can help this patient to detoxify and send him on his way. Will he have lost his attitude problem? No. He will drink again, and we cannot blame him for that. It will be almost impossible for him to not drink without undergoing extensive therapy first. It would even be so if he was a Capitol citizen, held to our higher standards of restraint. In my professional opinion, Mr. Abernathy is not fit to fulfill his duties by himself and he will not be for a long time to come. You cannot expect this man to act as the sole mentor for his district any longer.”

Okay, first of all, this doctor may have understandable reasons somewhere but he’s still participating in the vile hostage-holding of Haymitch by helping to lay out the bricks for a Capitol-issued miracle narrative, but also the sheer hypocrisy in the bolded part is astounding, even though I knew it was coming. The levels of willful blindness you have to maintain for this sentence to be even remotely acceptable are staggering, even higher than Effie’s disdain of the District Twelve tributes who didn’t know how to eat with forks and knives. It’s even worse to read after having seen the actual canon party where people puke just so they can eat again. And then they have the gall to talk about the Capitol’s higher standards of restraint. Ugh.

“So there is the pressing matter of District Twelve’s participation in this 72nd Hunger Games,” Flickerman continued when the feed was cut off […]. “There are two young tributes at the Training Center now, anxiously waiting for a mentor to prepare them for the Games as we speak. It doesn’t seem like it will be Haymitch. Furthermore, there is the matter of Haymitch handling mentorship in the future. Mags.”

“Well, there is precedence, of course,” Mags said. While she answered promptly, Finnick could see that a guarded expression had crossed her face. She wasn’t clear on what angle on this topic would most likely help the victors and Haymitch. Haymitch, who would have to step in front of a camera once the hospital released him, working with what they delivered right now and telling the public whatever Snow expected. Haymitch, who wouldn’t retire because none of them were allowed to retire. “District Twelve is special even now, it’s the only district with only one mentor. I remember a time when there would always be a district or two that would not be able to provide their own mentors at all. District Twelve was the most recent district without a district victor as mentor, actually, before Haymitch himself won the second Quarter Quell. Four years before, Twelve’s first victor, Swagger – he had died in a terrible accident, I remember…”

Oh my, I remember reading that part and taking so long to process the actual meaning of it with regards to Haymitch’s situation because I was too busy thinking ‘OKAY THIS IS IT FINNICK IS MOVING’. Which is entirely not supposed to be the only point of the scene (and it definitely isn’t as soon as you spare even a second to remove the shipping goggles) but well. It’s be untruthful to pretend like that didn’t happen ^^’

“Oh, of course.” Flickerman shook his head sadly. “He fell and broke his neck, I believe…”

“Yes,” Mags agreed with a nod of gratitude, although the way Finnick had been told the story, Shane “Swagger” March had fallen and broken his neck only insofar that he had kicked away the chair he had been standing on, a noose wrapped around said neck. “Swagger had died, so Lyra Ingram from District Two moved to Twelve as substitute…”

Okay I’d quote the entire exchange about past Victors who mentored for Twelve in a more or less temporary fashion but that would make for waaaay too big a quote-block. That being said, having Finnick’s fact-checking commentary to rely on is both painful and invaluable. It’s a much more knowledgeable pov than Katniss’ because contrary to her, Finnick has insider knowledge. He’s been doing this long enough to have learned the truth, a bullet which Katniss dodged in canon. It also works to make the reader dislike (ha) the Capitol on a much wider level than Katniss’ pov initially does. A lot of the deaths she acknowledges (or speculates about, though with very little risk of error) are abstracts at first. In her first game, Rue is the only kid Katniss really cares about aside from Peeta. Later, we start with Seneca Crane, then the old man from Eleven, and then the deaths get progressively closer to home.

But here with Finnick, they already are hitting home. Not just because every Victor who died knew Mags and/or him directly, but because every instance of this is a reminder that Finnick is only one displeased president away from being the next on the list of suicides and/or suspicious accidents.

“So was there a call for mentors and they volunteered?” It took Finnick a second to recognize his own voice, because he hadn’t known he would open his mouth before he heard himself say the words. This wasn’t really supposed to be his show. Uneasily, he sat up in his chair, the cameras all on him now, while he spoke on, the words still just tumbling out of his mouth. “How did it work? Were they just chosen?” In the corner of his eye, he could see the other victors’ eyes turning towards him briefly when they wondered about his angle.

“Now Finnick, that would be quite cruel,” Flickerman laughed. “Forcing a victor to move to another district and leave their loved ones behind just like that.”

Finnick forced an unconcerned smile on his face, shrugging it off. “Seems to me like it would be a great honor,” he replied, half automatically, following the victors’ cardinal rule – when in doubt, call it an honor. “I’m sure a lot of victors would be greedy for the opportunity.”

Look at the gears already turning in Finnick’s head! Of course he’s good at split second decisions and rapid thinking under pressure. Even Annie, who Katniss describes as having only won her games through luck (which is only true insofar as any Victor only gets there thanks to a number of favorable conditions) wouldn’t have survived the flooding of her arena if she hadn’t been able to make good decisions while swimming, and Finnick made a lot of these good decisions at fourteen, there’s no reason to think he’d have lost the ability now at twenty-one.

It hurt Finnick to see, knowing [Mags] was trying to help him out before he could do something stupid. But he didn’t want to be stopped. He suddenly really didn’t want to be stopped.

Honestly it kind of hurts to picture what could be going through Mags’ head at this moment, too. She’s got a wife and children with her in Four. She managed to build herself a family that, presumably, helped her to keep going. Most likely, several other Victors have found similar solace in their families. It makes sense for them to think Finnick’s family would have the same sort of positive impact on him, but that’s not where Finnick is coming from. And since he never told people about his problems with being in Four (and can’t very well explain it now) it makes sense that they’d be scared shitless for him when the previous victors’ moving could only have been punishments.

(Because of course it is. No one moves out of their district unless specifically instructed to, and Snow simply doesn’t do gifts, let alone gifts that would potentially allow people to form unmonitored inter-districts connections when his whole system relies heavily on keeping each district in the dark as to what its neighbors do.)

Oh course, Finnick plays the audience like a fiddle. Even in canon, if you think about it, his particularly infamous reputation as a heartthrob is already evidence that he knows how to maintain his image, and the later revelation that he ‘gets paid’ in secrets is also indicative of his knowing exactly how important presentation is...so really, it’s not that surprising, even if it takes him a couple minutes to get the audience around to his point of view.

What I am a little more surprised by is this:

Because any victor, given the chance, would have taken the opportunity to run away.

I don’t know if this is me misreading things but it sounds to me like that isn’t quite as absolutely true as Finnick makes it sound. Certainly he would take any opportunity to run away that didn’t get his family killed, but I’m not sure everyone else would, not when there’s already of history of what happens if you fail as a guest mentor—as well as what happens if you succeed too much, as well.

It was only in moments like this anymore that he felt like his body was his own, starkly aware of how it still was such a powerful weapon, how he could still use it to kill if need be even seven years after he’d won.

Very consciously, he drew a breath and released it again like he would before he attacked.

Chaff was throwing him a sharp look, his face guarded now – the expression of a tribute suspecting that his alliance was falling apart.

Oh yeah. You know how Katniss and Finnick took one look at the Capitol streets in Mockingjay and declared the 76th Hunger Games open? Yeah. This is an extension of that, in that the games never really end for anyone (in some ways, they never really start, either, you just go from a nameless pawn in Snow’s machinery to a named, visible and important piece).

It’s also the first hint we get of Finnick, in some respect, regretting his days in the arena, which doesn’t make sense until you realize Finnick (or Victors in general) never had as much control on his own fate as he did during the Games. Back then, it was up to him to figure out how to survive, to be quick enough to kill before he got killed. It’s tragic and horrible to think, but Finnick was empowered in the arena in a way that he isn’t here, because he can’t do anything without having to worry about a heap of very literally life-or-death problems.

Like I said, this is the first hint of that, and I didn’t pick up on it until later but honestly when I did it made so much sense to me, and it’s a pleasure to see the seeds of that particular thread sowed this early in the story.

“Finnick,” Mags said softly, reaching up to take his face into both of her hands. “Finnick, lad, what did you just do?”

Instead of replying, Finnick closed his eyes and turned his head away.

Never again, he thought. Mags, his parents, Keanu and Perri – his older brothers who both looked at him as if he’d gone Capitol – Coral, his kid sister who was of Reaping age now and slowly figuring out what exactly it meant when he was shown with all those movie stars and politicians on the television. All these people who meant so much to him that it hurt to think about. Soon, he would never have to look at any of them ever again. So he had become … he’d become that man, so what… at least his family wouldn’t have to see it.

They’d never learn his secrets, how fucked up he’d become. The things he thought about when he was alone at night, waking up from those dreams he’d never told anybody about.

Oh, Finnick. He’s so ashamed of his own trauma and the way it presents itself, and I mean it’s not like it’s all that surprising because trauma is an ugly beast at the best of time, filled to the brim with things that don’t make sense and illogical reactions all around...having to live with it under scrutiny, surrounded by people who don’t get it (at best) or judge you for it (at worst, though I don’t remember Finnick’s family being confirmed to go one way or the other) and don’t really have the means to help even if they want to, honestly just makes tings worse. I suppose it’s time I brought my ‘blanket burrito’ moments count up to two.

“No,” Mags replied sadly behind him. “I wish you had been allowed to be, though.”

Thanks for breaking my heart, Mags. And then, of course: