Ocean Eyes - Finnick Odair

Forty-four

The journey into the Capitol is long and tedious, but Marissa is just glad that they are relatively safe during it. They try and find ways to keep themselves entertained and their minds off of the dangers that await them, but there's only so much you can do in a truck packed full of soldiers.

Eventually, they reach the rebel encampment just outside the train station in the Capitol. It's crawling with rebel soldiers, who have already pushed out Peacekeepers as the Capitol's forces have fallen back and regrouped inside the city. The camp is very open and not disguised in the slightest, but they have been assured that almost all of the Capitol's air fleet has been destroyed, and the rest are most likely being saved for the transportation of President Snow and other elite members of the Capitol.

The Star Squad really don't do much during the first three days. Cressida and her team are members of their squad, who are also in charge of filming the victors, Mira and Gale, as they take shots of them all firing as they are part of a new 'disinformation team'. they have to shoot both real and fake pods so that the Capitol does not figure out that they have Plutarch's holograph, which holds the information about most of the Capitol pods.

The squad are all extremely fed up with these performances, but it gives Marissa time to spend with Finnick and Mira. The three of them sit together behind some cover as other squad members are shooting more videos of them destroying Capitol buildings and pods.

"Did you and Johanna ever make it official?" Finnick asks Mira. Marissa's younger sister's cheeks flush bright red and she smiles, looking down at her feet bashfully.

"Yeah, just before I left actually," Mira admits. "Jo thought that maybe if she were my girlfriend I would try harder to come home. She was being silly though, I don't plan on dying out here."

"That's wonderful," Marissa grins, throwing her arms around her little sister. "About time too, you guys have been in love forever."

"Yeah but we never dated because of what the Capitol did to Johanna's family," Mira tells them. The two of them already know that President Snow killed Johanna's family when Johanna refused to become a prostitute for Snow but Mira never told Marissa why the two of them had never officially dated. "Now that we're attacking the Capitol, we actually have a chance to be a couple."

"Good, you both deserve to be happy," Finnick says. "Imagine how free we'll all be when this all blows over. We won't have just gotten rid of the Hunger Games, we'll be heroes. I bet we could just do whatever we wanted for the rest of our lives."

"That would be nice..." Marissa says, smiling at the idea of complete freedom. "We deserve it."

Unfortunately, Marissa cannot enjoy the idea of freedom for very long as there are startled cries from the group and when Marissa peeks out from behind their cover she sees soldier Leeg 2 with a metal dart buried into her head. It's clear she is dead before the medics rush over and the three of them emerge from where they've been hiding.

"What happened?" Finnick asks Katniss as they approach the scene with horror-stricken faces.

"The pod was supposed to be mutated gnats, not metal darts," Katniss explains with slightly wide eyes. Leeg 2 is the first of their squad to be killed, and while none of them is strangers to death and murder, it has still left the squad shaken. Plutarch promises them that she will be replaced quickly but the squad's motivation is certainly dampened for the time being.

Their new arrival doesn't turn up until the next evening and Marissa's jaw drops in shock when Peeta Mellark strolls out of the train station, a gun hanging over his shoulder and his hands unmanacled. While Marissa has never felt it was right for Peeta to be in handcuffs, she does think having him armed around Katniss, even with all the progress he's made, is not a good idea.