a/n [The sections and time frames aren't separated or specified on purpose to emphasize the illness being depicted. The title might be a bit deceptive; this story has nothing to do with romantic love but rather familial and platonic love. Technically this takes place during the Great Depression in Britain, but I apologize for any historical inaccuracies. Based off The Little Match Girl. For the monthly oneshot contest and the dozens challenge at Caesar's Palace.]
Snowflakes flutter down like ash. Hands outspread, a little girl catches them, and only recedes once droplets form on her palms and her fingers hint at white. Hastily shoving gloves on and retiring numb hands to coat pockets, she retreats back against the wall, shivering underneath the overhang.
"Dinner?" asks Finnick. Socked feet poke through the snow. "Or, how did you say?"
"Dîner," Annie answers. She shuffles in closer, gazes up at the barely there overhang. Across the street, lampposts flicker on. A shaking hand closes around her calf, leaching the heat from her dry stockings.
"Not different then," he observes. The shakiness to his voice is not hard to spot at all.
"Dîner," she repeats, stressing her accent. Exaggerating. Finnick laughs brightly; she shivers. "What do we have?"
He rolls a snowball from the exceptionally high pile of snow over his thighs. Tosses it to her. "A whole apple, too."
She licks at her snow. "Oh."
"Apple half?" he offers.
Limbs numb from cold, the process of sitting down is slow. Annie slides briefly, feet tucking under the snow drift as she lets herself fall slowly, then without warning the friction fails her and she's on the ground tangled up in herself and her faults. Finnick hands her more than her fair share of apple as she straightens her legs next to his, and he piles on snow as easily as sharing a blanket.
The cold hits her strongly, more intensely than before. As her teeth chatter without her control, she tucks herself into her friend's side, burying her face in the crook of his neck, her nose tucked into the collar of his fraying coat.
"Chaleur, chaleur," she whispers to herself. J'ai chaud.
As the feeling in her legs fades, warmth rushes in. Her teeth cease chattering, and she sneaks in a nibble or two of her apple. Finnick's head falls against hers. Once her apple half is resting uneasily at the bottom of her stomach, she shifts a heavy arm around his neck, takes a frozen breath, and slowly prods at his skin until she finds a light pulse. Too tired to move back, she keeps her arms around him, allows her eyes to drift shut.
A glint in his eyes, Finnick scoops up a small ball of snow and launches it at her in one sweep. With a shriek and a hoot, from opposite parties of course, Annie dives under the threat and is rewarded with a mouthful of the first snow of the season.
She flips over fast, eyes leveling on his. A betraying smile sneaks up on her as her hands clench around the snow, forming uneven snowballs that seem useless next to the one Finnick's forming meticulously, lazily biting his lip in concentration. The second he glances down, Annie sits up and releases both of hers in succession, scrambling away from the line of fire before witnessing the result of her attack.
Not quick enough, a blow to the stomach has her knocked off balance and into the snow bank once more.
Laughter—uncontrolled—the best kind—surrounds her. With his head thrown back towards the sky and palms outstretched, smiling big enough to pose threat to the sky, Finnick looks otherworldly. Stealing a moment just to watch him, Annie stills and her hands slow to a stop around a forming snowball. Then, before she gets carries away, she returns to war and watches as her friend's lips fall to form a protest. She tosses handfuls of snow at him likes splashes from the sea to prolong his retaliation.
Snowflakes seem more dangerous under microscopes, don't you know, because when they're up close and kissing noses the sharp edges fade into something a little more bright, and Annie thinks, more clearly now, that life is kind of like snowflakes, too.
And when she's shivering and sopping from the snowflake's pricks, she'll barrel into her friend and together they'll fall to the ground.
"Does that mean I've won?" he asks once they've settled down, creating lazy angels in the drifts.
"Gagnons," she whispers. Then louder, "We win."
"Who've lost?"
She pauses, softly, like the breath at the end of a measure, to think. "Everyone else." She decides at last.
"Finnick?" she asks. Her muscles are weighted, and her head hangs under the pressure of the sky, but Annie doesn't fail in her attempts at shaking him. "Finnick, wake up."
Instead, she shifts his weight until he's leaning further onto her, her heart fights against its cage to grant her the strength, but soon enough she's gasping, winter air rushing inside and freezing her from the inside out. Forfeiting and folding under his weight, she recognizes warmth. But no, no. He needs that. It can't be hers.
Once, she dreamed she could turn rivers into stone. Upon waking up, she was strong, powerful. Such a dangerous thing to give a child invincibility, though, for you never know what will come of it. The ice crusting around her eyes feels punishment enough.
When the ship docks, Annie is asleep. She'd been picturing it for weeks to come: the mystical spell over the land, the messiness of the language, the ease in which she'd blend in as if she'd always belonged, the brighter colors, the different sky.
"It not is a different world," her brother teased when boarding the ship behind her. Her eyes had been sorrowful, her bottom lip quivering, as she bid farewell to France.
"It is not," she'd corrected.
But her first view of Britain is not the alluring coastline, no; it's the cracked ceiling in their new apartment. With that, everything changes. Her plans turn to dust.
"How is your day at school?"
"Was," she corrects. "Not good."
"The school is not good?"
"I am not!" Annie cries. She falls to the floor in her shared room, tracing word after word in her children's book even after her marks become smeared.
"Trois petits chats," she sings. Too quiet to be carried away by the wind to the birds, her only audience is Finnick. Her fingers wiggle in their gloves (first finger, second finger, third finger, fourth?) in anticipation of the rhythmic beat to be played along, but without the strength and a partner to clap with, they are useless. "Trois petits chats. Trois petits chats, chats, chats."
Useless. She let gravity bring her teeth to her glove. Bite, shift, shift, pull. Bite, shift. The glove lifted up enough for the air to tear at her wrist.
"Chapeau de paille," she continued. "Chapeau de paille. Chapeau de paille, paille, paille."
Her hand shook against the snow, and as its motion started to bury itself, Annie pulled back. Sitting, shaking. Her chest heaved once, twice, then slowed again. "Paillasson. Paillasson. Paillason, son, son."
She's repeating the word laugh under her breath when rain erupts from the sky. Looking down, she watches puddles form around her flats, and hesitantly pokes at one once it's big enough to make a splash. In two jumps and a twirl, a smile graces her face. She's continuing on her walk home when a rainbow pokes out around the corner of a building. Like it's proud of her. She thinks she's proud of herself, too.
"We finished the book today," she announced, coming home. "I understood it. I can tell you what it is about. And it rain—rains—rained. Today. Now. There is a rainbow. I can show you. Oh. And the book is about a boy and his dog..."
And no one is home.
No one ever comes home.
"Lettres d'amour. Lettres d'amour. Lettres d'amour, -mour, -mour."
"You look lost," he says.
To be honest, when she ducked behind the corner, she had never expected to run into someone who would change her life.
"Or perhaps you're trying to get lost," he continues.
"Who are you?" she asks.
"Your savior."
She briefly looks up at him, then behind her, then back again. He was smiling, his eyes sparkling like he and Annie were long time friends.
"Pardon?"
"I just happen to know the perfect places to get lost."
"I know where I am going."
"To the orphanage?"
Annie looks sharply away, studying the opposite corner and the cars between her and it. Calculating her escape route.
He stops her with a warm hand on her shoulder. "They're overcrowded. Messy. Loud. You're better off sticking with me."
Her vision is white. Or perhaps that's merely the landscape. She nods her head, rolls her neck, shifts to the left. The movement does little to clear her eyesight. The world seems blurry, and is it not? Her feet cease to exist when she can no longer feel them, the snowflakes crowning her head are pulling her down, her fingers are too thick to feel for pulses. She can't remember if she's supposed to have one or not.
"Open your eyes," Finnick exclaims, snatching a thermos from a man engrossed in his newspaper. "You can manipulate the world once you find all the cracks."
"Close your eyes," he whispers. "And sleep."