Sugarcubes // Finnick Odair - Hunger Games Fanfic

XXIV.

It took a long time to convince me to sleep.

I don't do well sleeping with people around me. I suppose it's what the hunger games does to people. But eventually, my body wins, and I fall asleep on the sand, my face on a large enough leaf to prevent sand to enter my open mouth and to catch my drool. Finnick sits right beside me, my hand, with my axe clutched tight in it, rests on his lap. He has two belts strapped to his waist because he wouldn't let me sleep with knives around my waist.

The sign that I'm well and truly out of it is that I don't notice when Finnick leaves my side.

I wake up with a start though, as soon as Finnick's hands touch my shoulder. I spin around in the sand, flinging it everywhere, and grip my axe with both hands. It takes a second for my eyes to register that It's Finnick standing above me, and not Enorbia or Brutus.

"Hi!" He says, laughing at my reaction to being woken up.

"Hi," I tell him, brushing the sand off myself and getting up.

"Something interesting is going on, I thought you'd want to hear." He tells me, and I grab my weapons and we walk to join the group, all of us crowding around Beetee. He shoos us back and starts to draw in the sand. I notice the stark difference between his drawing and Peeta's. Hasty strokes, with zero precision – just so we know what he's talking about.

"If you were Brutus and Enorbia, knowing what you do now about the jungle, where would you feel the safest?" He asks, as though we're a bunch of preschoolers, and he's explaining the ABC's to us. Although, I suppose that in comparison to his level of intellect, we are like toddlers.

"Where we are now. On the beach," says Peeta, "It's the safest place."

"So why aren't they on the beach?" Beetee questions, and I feel pulled to answer. Like a small child who is eager to earn the respect of her teacher, I jump to answer his question.

"Because we're here." I say.

"Exactly," Beetee acknowledges, and I try not to feel satisfied that my answer has been accepted. "We're here, claiming the beach. Now where would you go?"

Katniss voices my thoughts, "I'd stay at the edge of the jungle. So I could escape if there was an attack, and so I could spy on us."

"And to eat," Finnick says, "The jungles full of strange creatures, but by watching us, I'd know the seafood is safe."

Beetee gives us a proud smile, exactly the kind of smile that used to cross his face when talking to me about Danny and continues. "Yes. Good. You do see. Now here is what I propose: A twelve o'clock strike. What happens exactly at noon and midnight?"

The lightning bolt hits the tree. Katniss says so.

"Yes. So what I'm suggesting is that after the bolt hits at noon, but before it hits at midnight, we run my wire from that tree all the way down into the saltwater, which is, of course, highly conductive. When the bolt strikes, the electricity will travel down the wire and into not only the water but also the surrounding beach, which will still be damp from the ten o'clock wave. Anyone in contact with those surfaces at that moment will be electrocuted," says Beetee.

Woah. There's a silence that surrounds us, as everybody tries to process the plan. It seems like a very idealistic plan to me. There's a thousand what-ifs. What if the wire burns up? What if we don't get out of the wet area in time? What if they aren't on the wet area? What if they attack while we're setting the plan?

"Will that wire really be able to conduct that much power, Beetee? It looks so fragile, like it would just burn up," Peeta asks hesitantly, as though not willing to question Beetee's plan very much.