a/n: I absolutely love Odesta and they're (slowly) creeping up on my list of ever-changing THG OTPs but they're such a tragic pairing that I can't help but ship them. This is a veeery belated birthday gift for Isha, aka my Chord!twinny (if we still belong) and I would have written you a Fabrevans but idk this wrote itself.
disclaimer: If I owned THG, Peeta would have never been hijacked and Haysilee would be on and Finnick would be alive, yup.
a dark world aches for a splash of the sun
annie/finnick
sometimes i walk alone at night / when everybody else is sleeping / i think of him and then i'm happy / with the company i'm keeping / the city goes to bed / and i can live inside my head / on my own / pretending he's beside me / all alone / i walk with him till morning / without him / i feel his arms around me / and when i lose my way i close my eyes / and he has found me
— on my own, les miserables
.
She breathes in, breathes out, and pretends that her world isn't falling apart. She almost fools herself.
.
"Did you love Annie right away, Finnick?"
"No, she crept up on me."
.
"What will you name him?" the doctors ask, their voices oozing with that fake sincerity that she is used to.
She pauses, thinking. "His name . . . is Noah," she decides with certainty, surprising herself and the doctors who'd assumed that she'd name him after Finnick, "Noah Finnick Odair."
Because she'd read in a book a long time ago that there was a man named Noah and a boat and a flood that wiped out almost the whole earth, and she doesn't exactly know whether it's true or not, but this baby — her baby — can be her Noah; he can be her salvation.
Something to keep her going in this mad, cruel world.
.
"It's a boy!" the doctors exclaim like this is the best news that she could have ever been given.
The first time she feels whole again is when the baby — her baby, his baby, their baby — is placed in her arms. She can hear her heart pounding against her chest, so loud that these doctors in their shiny coats and covered faces must be able to hear her heart thumping and —
"Do you want to hold him?" they ask.
She nods, because there really is nothing else she can do. Holding him would make him real. Holding him would remind her that perhaps Finnick isn't completely gone; that there's a part of him that had stayed, maybe to watch over her.
They hand him to her, and the gaping hole that she's felt since Finnick left — since Finnick died — feels, for once, like it could almost (almost) be filled. "You look just like him," she whispers to her son, and it's true; they have the same sea-green eyes — the eyes that would coax her out of the darkness and into the light; into her reality. "You look just like him."
And she hopes that it is a blessing, not a curse.
.
Johanna and Katniss come and see her a few days after she's had the baby. "Hi, Annie!" they say and she winces because their voices have the same false cheer that the doctors have — like she's fragile, breakable, and she frowns at that. "How are you?"
"How's the baby?" Katniss ask unnecessarily but she gives Annie one of her rare smiles, the kind that she'd only use with her sister, Prim, or her one true love, Peeta.
"He's good," Annie finds herself babbling, "I'm good. Everything is good." She sounds like a lunatic, she knows, judging from the looks that Johanna and Katniss are exchanging, except she can't bring herself to care.
After all, maybe if she pretends like everything is fine, it will actually become so.
"What's the baby's name?" Johanna asks, her usually stern face melting into a softer expression.
They expect her to say Finnick — she knows that, and she definitely surprises them when she says, "Noah."
"Why?" the surprise in Katniss' voice is unmistakable, and she tries to hide it after Johanna gives her a dirty look, but her eyes — they're still burning with questions that Annie doesn't want to answer.
"Because he's my saviour," she says and she leaves it at that.
She doesn't say anything for the rest of their visit and when they finally leave an hour later, Annie tries to wipe their visit from her mind.
.
When Annie sleeps, Annie dreams.
Sometimes, it's about her games; sometimes, it's about the ocean; today, it is about Finnick.
The dream is nothing out of the ordinary — she and Finnick are out on the ocean, where they'd go whenever they wanted to escape the prying eyes and ears of their district, and he says something — she doesn't remember what — and she kisses him.
He tastes like saltwater taffy and warm summer days.
The feeling of kissing him is something that she will never get out of her mind — palms sweating, heart racing, blood pumping through her veins, electricity tingling on her lips.
"I love you," the dream Finnick says, "Take care of Noah."
And he disappears right before her eyes. She screams, and she screams, and she screams, but there is no one — no Finnick, no Noah, to save her from this hellhole.
"Finnick, please, come back, I love you!"
.
When they discharge her, she moves back into her Victor's village house but she can barely stand to look at it. He is everywhere — his clothes are on the couch; his books are in the study; pictures of him are on the walls, and it takes all she has not to scream and tear them down.
She's in the bathroom, in the middle of her first panic attack, when the door opens and in comes Johanna Mason, bags in her arms and her usual scowl on her face — but there is something under there, something deeper. "I'm moving in," Johanna says in her usual authoritative tone.
"Thank you," Annie says, because if she'd have to spend another minute in this house alone with just Noah, she would have hurled herself off the roof.
"It's what Finnick would want," Johanna says.
Annie smiles at the girl, her first real smile in forever, and she almost swears that Johanna gives her one back.
.
Some nights, she holds Noah tight to her chest and breathes. He smells like his father — like saltwater and the ocean and purity, and it's the one thing she has of Finnick that can't be taken away from her.
And so she holds her son to her and she can pretend that she isn't going mad, that half of herself didn't die when Finnick died.
It is those nights that she doesn't wake up screaming.
.
Katniss Everdeen sends her a letter that simply says: You're stronger than I am, and for once, Annie believes it.
She goes to the sea and she breathes in the smell of the sea-spray and Finnick is here, in the wind, she can feel it.
"I miss you," she says and it's liberating.
She writes a note to Finnick and puts it in a bottle; the next time she goes to the ocean, she throws it in: she knows that Finnick will find it.
.
"It takes ten times as long to put yourself together as it does to fall apart."
And she will put herself together, and she will take care of Noah — if not for herself, then for Finnick; because that's how she lives now: judging on what Finnick would want to do.
She hopes that he'd be impressed by her.
.
fin.
a/n: Please don't favourite or alert without reviewing.