Caged Nightingale [Hunger Games Fanfic]

Phobias (II)

Androphobia (fear of men):

He knows she's not afraid of him. It's not Seneca. It's...everyone else, though she's never obvious. He just knows from the moment she flinched away from him and was surprised that she had done so, that it wasn't him and it was men in general.

The late night rendezvous President Snow has her going to all the time –and that he can't believe he had been unaware of and had been so blind to (he still has trouble seeing her in this position because it's Katniss, and more than that he just can't) –takes place mostly after her four hour job. In fact, her job, which she had been quietly very proud of, had become something of a place to contract her.

It was Snow twisting yet another thing for Katniss; this time, something she had finally come to love about the Capitol.

He is proud that she doesn't truly fear him and that when she recognizes him immediately she doesn't flinch or tense up. In fact, once she works on it and starts to memorize his presence again so that she instinctually starts to know when it's him, she stops doing that at all when it comes to him (he ignores the fact that when she's really out of it and he kind of surprises her without warning, that she still does this). That he is just that important and that close to her makes his breath catch.

The peacekeepers outside are a different matter. She starts to stare intensely out the windows at them when she gets too antsy, and if she's too anxious, she starts to grip whatever she's holding at the time very tightly. Enough that she draws blood sometimes.

They've come to like her since being assigned as her guards. They let her get away with coming outside when technically she's supposed to stay strictly inside the house, with her front yard and backyard off limits as well (that's been relaxed since the beginning, as she's settled in and Snow starts adjusting rules).

She can't leave this area, and the Capitol was off limits (but they say nothing when Seneca sometimes brings her out, even when he doesn't have permission). When she is allowed to go to the Capitol, she had to have an escort come with her (they play dumb when she gets restless and sneaks out sometimes to anywhere, just to get rid of the monotony). When on one of those trips she gets a job, now she has to have one of the peacekeepers bring her there (this they adhere to, but it's mostly about her safety).

The peacekeepers keep quiet about most information that they can spare about what goes on in the house and of his frequent, late and early, visits. Seneca knows he visits her way too often, at all the available hours he can, and that that is very suspicious and a little obsessive. But he can't help it.

He still doesn't know why Snow doesn't just bug the place.

The information about her liaisons, he finds out mostly from Plutarch and some of his contacts. Anything else is gleaned from her peacekeepers. It bothers him that she won't confide in him in this, but he knew from the time she said his name just to push him away and the moment she pretended nothing was wrong that morning that the two of them would not be confronting each other about it any time soon. So he does what he can in the meantime.

Of this, at least, he wants to try to help her from.

It doesn't help that her peacekeepers are looking and feeling pretty pathetic and miserable that their caged princess doesn't like them anymore.

He calls up Finnick Odair.

Anthropophobia (fear of people or the company of people):

The handsome man is all tan skin and sea-green eyes, eyes he knows help lure in people like sirens. Seneca himself agrees to their beauty, but unfortunately for Finnick, he's never been weakened or infatuated by them –romantically or in simple admiration.