Work Text:
Finnick knows how Capitol people think about District 4, when they bother to think about it at all - the images of pristine beaches they’ve seen broadcast into their homes: sparkling white sand and the contented populace, bronzed by the sun, casting their nets into the sea, snatches of work songs rising up into the hazy summer air above them.
It’s not like that, of course. Fishing on shore with a net is exhausting and inefficient, fishing with a line isn’t much better, and fishing with a trident is just stupid. Generations ago, Finnick’s heard, there were fish as big as him - bluefin, yellowtail, swordfish with swords as big as his trident was. They lived around the reefs, in the wrecks of battleships, under the pilings of the deepwater drilling stations. His great-grandfather used to row out every morning he could and come back as the sun was setting, sunburned, with enough fish for his family to feast on and sell some to the peacekeepers besides. You could pick lobsters off the sand, the shrimp swam into your nets. An abundance, an overabundance of food, the sky stretching to meet the shaded sea, a warm coppery wind to fill the sails. It’s no wonder they rebelled, Finnick thinks. When you live next to the ocean, you forget your own limits and your dreams stretch to the horizon.
The Capitol set the sea on fire, during the rebellion. They blew up their own oil wells so the rebellion couldn’t use them to power themselves. Then, they’d dropped liquid fire onto the slick and let the wind and the waves push it outward, until it seemed that the entire ocean was burning. Finnick’s heard stories about it, how the waves flamed for days and days, the sea breeze blew black and women coughed and sickened, children died. His grandmother had blinding headaches until the day she died, poisoned by the smoke. The beaches were stained black with oil for years, and when the fishermen were forced to return to work, they pulled up nets of dead fish, shrimp with three eyes, sharks with tumors the size of your palm.
When Finnick was five or six, he’d been building a sandcastle one summer morning. His mother had been with him, at the beach, digging for clams so they’d have something for dinner. It had been a bad season, not enough fish, too many storms, ships and fathers lost to the ocean and mothers and children starving on land. Finnick was decorating the edges of his castle with sea shells when he’d found a black ball the size of his fist. He poked it and it stained his fingers.
He showed it to his mother.
“Drop it right now!” she yelled, her voice high pitched. He had, and she’d knelt and rubbed his hands with his skirt, dipped his hands into the surf and scrubbed them with sand until all the traces of black had loosened, risen to the surface of the water. She made him promise never to touch another tarball again.
“What are they?” he asked.
“See out there,” she said, pointing to the horizon, to a little black tower he could barely see. “Under the ocean, there’s oil. The Capitol needs it for all sorts of things, but it’s hard for them to find. So they build these big towers and reach down, down, down, miles, to the bottom of the ocean, and then they reach even deeper and they get the oil. Then they bring it up into the towers and send it away to use it.” Finnick squinted and tried to imagine it - living in a tower out on the sea, where the waves are as high as houses, where the storms fly through before they’ve been weakened by the taste of land.
“Sometimes,” his mother continued, “sometimes an accident happens and some of the oil gets out and it floats on top of the sea. But it can hurt the fish, and when it washes ashore, it can hurt you too.”
What his mother didn’t tell him then, what he knows now, is that there had been an explosion a few weeks before. Maybe it had been sabotage. The Capitol had sent planes and dropped chemicals over the spill, to break it up, they said. Those chemicals had spread over the slick, turned the oil into tiny little particles, just big enough for a fish to eat, but they couldn’t make the oil go away. So the Capitol lit it on fire, a reminder. The fire was smaller, miles from where Finnick lived, but the oil and the fumes had traveled. The next year, and the year after that, Finnick’s father had found as many dead fish as live ones in his nets.
When Finnick was twelve, he left school to fish with his father. His father said it was because he needed another set of hands on the boat, someone to mend nets and haul lines, someone to take the helm so his father could make sure the nets were staying at the right depth. The Capitol had upped the mandatory take again, so it made sense to take Finnick out. His mother had been tight-lipped, unhappy, but there wasn’t much she could do. It wasn’t like school had really mattered for anything, anyway; Finnick knew how to read and he’d been told all the lies he needed to hear.
They left every morning as the sun was rising. Their boat was small for a fishing ship, thirty five feet long, oil and electric powered. Below decks wasn’t much more than the engine room and a the generator. The wheel house was small, barely room for Finnick, his father, the wheel and the navigation equipment. They had paper charts, inked carefully with red lines so they knew how far to stay from the rigs, how deep they could go. Supposedly, the water after the fishing boundaries was filled with underwater bombs, in case anyone tried to sail away to somewhere else. They had a little radar screen, old, the cracks in the screen fixed with tape, the broken wires re-soldered by Finnick’s father. Finnick watched that, looking for the little green patches on the black screen that were the right shape, size and depth to be schools of tuna. And sitting next to the wheel was their Capitol-issued radiotracker, beeping calmly away, warning them occasionally, in its automated voice, that they were two nautical miles from the fishing boundaries, five nautical miles from Oil Drill Restricted Area Seven.
Sometimes they saw other fishing ships, sometimes they saw Capitol patrol ships, but mostly there were alone. And Finnick knows that was the real reason his father took his out to sea - not for the help, though his father needed it; not to make Finnick stronger, to test him against the elements, to make him ready in case his name was called, in case what Finnick’s parents feared most came to pass, though the sea did prepare Finnick for the Games as nothing else could. Finnick went to sea to learn how to wish for freedom.
The Capitol required that each boat brought in a certain number of pounds of fish a season. Finnick’s father went after tuna, chasing them further and further into deep water as the years passed and their numbers depleted.
“We’re hunting the fish to death,” his father told him, after a week of their nets only bringing up trash and seaweed, a few dead fish, nothing useful. Finnick had nodded, trying to seem wise, only partially understanding.
Once, they caught a sea turtle. It was beautiful, even trapped in their nets, its shell polished by the sea. It had wrinkled skin, like Finnick’s grandmother, and small eyes. It looked old and wise.
Finnick’s father grinned. “I haven’t seen one of these in my nets in years! She’s worth ten nets of tuna.”
“Why?”
“They’re a delicacy in the Capitol, apparently.” His father rolled his eyes. In Finnick’s family they ate the same chowder every night - white fish, clams, sea weed, whatever their nets found that was too small or too worthless to sell, whatever Finnick’s mother could dig from the sand. “But they’re almost gone now, so they’re worth even more than they used to be.” They left the turtle on deck in the biggest bin they could find so it wouldn’t crawl away. It looked like it was drying up in the sun, its mouth open, panting out its last breath. Finnick hated to watch it die like that, but his father yelled when he caught Finnick pouring some of their water on its shell.
“Get back to work!”
And Finnick did. That night, he didn’t go into town with his father to sell the catch, like usual.
Finnick’s favorite time was when they were chasing a school of fish on their radar screen, the engine humming, the sun beating down on them. Ahead of them and behind them and all around them, the water was deep and sparkling blue, each wave cut like obsidian. They were far enough out that the waves would be half as long as the boat, and the spray from the bow falling into each trough would fall onto Finnick and soak his shirt, make him laugh. His father would sing the old work songs and Finnick would join in on the choruses. Sometimes, a pod of dolphins would come up beside them, playing in the bow wave. They’d jump up and dive into the heart of an upcoming wave, dancing among themselves, falling back under the boat only to appear on the other side.
Finnick’s father said they were good luck. Sometimes, in wrecks, dolphins would lead rescuers to sailors who were alone in the empty sea. Sometimes they led fisherman to good fishing spots. Whenever Finnick’s father had a really good catch, he’d throw some back to the dolphins.
They pulled up dead dolphins in their nets sometimes. Underwater, where they should have been free, they’d get trapped and be unable to surface. So they’d drown. Finnick wondered about that - if they fought against the net, if they understood what was happening, if their friends and their families swam alongside calling to them until the end or if they abandoned them and swam away.
When they found a dolphin in their nets, Finnick’s father would take off his broad brimmed hat and stop singing, rest his hand gently on the dolphin’s side.
“I’m sorry,” he would say, always, and then together they would roll the body back overboard, where it would slip into their wake, bobbing a few times, and then disappear.
When he was 13, he learned how to use a trident to fight sharks - it’s the kind of story people in the Capitol love for how dramatic it sounds, how terrifying, how primitive. Sometimes, when the water was too rough to fish, his father would take their boat to a reef on a barrier island, water protected just enough. At first, Finnick would try to dive for lobsters and his father would stay at the surface, treading water lazily, trident in one hand, scanning for fins. But Finnick couldn’t hold his breath long enough to get to the bottom of the reef, find a rock where a lobster might be hiding, get the lobster and swim back up. He’d try, but his lungs were too small and his head would go light, black dots blasting across his vision. It scared him, and he pushed himself desperately upwards, towards the shadow of his father’s body against the uneven surface, running out of air, running out of time, a dolphin in a net and then he was gasping and his father was holding him against his chest.
“You keep watch instead, okay?” his father told him. “I trust you.”
So Finnick did, scanning above and under water. His father would make trip after trip, sometimes coming up empty-handed, other times with a lobster, waving its claws, to throw on deck.
He saw sharks sometimes, mostly nurse sharks, big but oblivious. You had to be careful was all: don’t pee in the water, don’t make any sudden movements, don’t cut yourself on your diving knife. Easy rules. One afternoon though, his father was deep down. Finnick dipped his head under ever so often to check he was still there, indistinct against the reef, avoiding the poisonous anemones, bubbles still rising from his mouth, when he saw a shadow approaching. He resurfaced, blinked his eyes against the salt water, got a better grip on the trident. It was swimming down towards his father, sleek and longer than Finnick, only barely. A hammerhead, mean but dumb, hungry or territorial enough to be a threat.
Finnick took a breath of air and went under again, taking large frog kicks to push himself under the surface, letting out all his air slowing so he wouldn’t float upwards. He knew he only had one shot - he knew, from practicing, how water slowed the trident, how it would sink, the arc of its movement. He knew that he could not warn his father. He threw.
His aim was good, but his throw wasn’t strong enough. It hit the shark, digging in to its neck, drawing blood but not killing it. It turned toward Finnick now with a lash of its tail, and Finnick reached for his diving knife, short and sharp, designed to cut himself free of seaweed if he got caught and save himself from drowning. He kicked back to the surface, took a fast breath, and dove back under. The shark was almost at him now, coming face on, so Finnick dodged sideways, slashing out with his knife and hitting the shark in the gills as it turned. It bit his left arm, and his own blood blurred his vision worse than the salt water did, the pain of the bite making him lose the air in his lungs. He slashed out again and hit the shark’s tail as it spun away from him to prepare for another strike. He was bleeding badly, losing his oxygenated blood, light-headed again from blood loss and air loss. He pushed for the surface on instinct. The shark came back at him, slowed by its own blood loss, and he dived again, his knife ready.
His father hit the shark side on like a missile, his own diving knife in his hand. The shark shook with the impact, its neck cracking back, and then fell slowly towards the reef below.
Finnick doesn’t remember much after that - flashes of lying on the deck of the boat, his father trying to stop his bleeding, calling for help desperately over the radio. He remembers soft wood of the deck underneath his cheek, and the pain, the shadow over the deck as the rescue hovercraft floated down, the stab of a needle.
His family sold the boat to pay for his treatment, and his father went out to work on a rig, trapped in place on the vast and moving ocean. Finnick went back to school. His father came back only once, for the Reaping, when all non-essential personnel were brought ashore to watch. That was the year Finnick’s name was called, the year he walked on stage gasping for breath and wishing he could cut himself loose from what was trapping him, float free back up to the surface and the warm, dry, safe deck of the boat, to his father’s laugh.
When he came home, his father was dead. Somewhere out on the wide blue sea, a little black tower had blown up, spreading slick over the water and killing the fish, the men trapped inside gone now, the fire or the water claiming them. Finnick found a chart in his new house in the Village, ran his finger across Oil Drill Restricted Area Four. He looked at the depth soundings around it, the reefs nearby, the neat topography of the underwater canyon it was located over. From his study, he had a view of a quiet beach and then the harbour, calm that day, like you’d see on a screen in the Capitol. There were two children playing, their mother watching them indulgently, shielding herself from the sun with an elaborate parasol: a family enjoying their vacation.
Beyond that the harbour, hemmed in and kept docile by a stone breakwater. Finnick imagined that he could see the waves crashing against it, could see the deeper blue water out past it, the waves the size of houses just waiting for a storm large enough to invite them ashore. He watched until the fishing fleet came back to port, until the sun set.