Annie had nightmares for the entirety of her pregnancy. Different nightmares, it should be said. Annie had had nightmares since she was seventeen, but these were different. Sometimes she was still in the arena, sometimes she held Arik's head in her hands, fingernails caught in the muscle of his neck, while his body lay, uncaring, at Two Boy's feet, but more often she dreamt of childbirth, of birthing a mutt like the stories—whispered behind hands—of girls from Five, or a dead child, beheaded like Arik, or body ripped to shreds like Finnick's, or, just once, birthing Snow, and repeating the same misery over again.
She didn't tell anyone about the dreams—who was there to tell, anyway? She was Mad Annie Cresta, who would be surprised by her nightmares?
Finnick's name was an accident, and one that Annie always regretted. Exhausted and bloody and filthy, someone—some doctor, as if she cared who, as if these doctors were any different to those who had treated her before, who had treated Finnick, who had watched them with contempt or indifference or, worst of all, compassion—had handed her the baby, and she'd asked, out of her mind on the drugs she'd insisted they give her, for her husband, instead of this creature, this wrinkled, ugly, bawling thing, and someone had mistaken it for her naming her child in some grand gesture of remembrance, as if she would do that to her son. No child should have to carry the weight of the dead. But Annie had just given birth, and Annie was tired, and Annie, secretly, guiltily, wanted the remembrance, so she didn't protest it, and Finnick Odair was born. Again.
District Four—although they weren't to be districts much longer, it was said, too military, too regimented—had always been good at telling stories, right from Mags' day, when she'd swam naked in the river, red hair fanning out behind her, and convinced the audience that she should live. The death of the Games hadn't changed that.
District Four had never been a Career District, they said. Mags, loving, protective, fiery Mags had never fought tooth and nail—fought the Capitol, fought the Elders, fought her own people—to train the children of Four to fight with spears and knives and fishing nets. She had never fought to give the children of Four a chance. No, she just a helpless old woman, who had watched children die and mourned it, and done nothing to prevent it. The rest of them—Tyde, Caramel, Deirdre, Shania, Rory, Esther, Theo, Finnick and Annie herself—had just been victims: hadn't trained for years; hadn't broken ribs and femurs and toes in practice fights; hadn't spent hours learning how to smile and look pretty, even when they were exhausted, and in pain, and wanted nothing more than to scream, or lie down and sleep. As if they hadn't volunteered. As if that—as if their sacrifice—meant nothing.
They set up a museum exhibit about the Victors (victims) of Four, about how they'd suffered. Finnick had a section. It said that he'd loved her (true) and how he'd been used by the Capitol (true again, although how they could pin it to the walls of a museum and not expect her to scream…) and that he'd been willing to die in the Quarter Quell to save the Mockingjay (true). But it didn't say that he'd cracked Two Girl's ribs open when he ripped his trident out of her chest, and it didn't say that he had slit One Boy's throat, breaking the Career Pack—didn't, in fact, say that he'd been in the Career Pack at all—and then used his hair to stitch up his wounds, and it didn't say that he'd caught the thirteen year old girl from Eleven—a tiny, starving, little thing—and smiled his angelic smile for the cameras as he'd gutted her like a fish.
And Annie had looked at the display—at these truths painting a lie—and she'd ripped it and ripped it. Tore it off the walls, and stamped on the remains. And when none of it was left, and it was no longer legible, and no-one who hadn't known otherwise would have guessed that it had been a display on Finnick Odair, Annie walked out of the museum, and out of the remnant of Four, without a second glance.
Annie's son was thirteen months old before he crawled, seventeen before he stood, nineteen before he took his first, wobbling baby steps. Other mothers, neighbours, women at the playgroup loneliness had persuaded her to take Finnick to, had looked at him with concern, had asked her if she wasn't worried in tones of mock-sympathy, shared anecdotes about how early their precious Coral or Aidan or Layla had walked and jumped and ran, and Annie had lowered her eyelids demurely, agreed that she was concerned, but what could she do. And then, when they left, she smiled at her son in a way the boy from Three, who thought he could overpower herm would have recognised. Because their children might be stronger, faster, but all that meant was that her son would never be picked for the front line, would never be in the arena.
After all, Annie might have voted for the new system, but she had no faith in it, and she had been carefully, quietly, shunted off to one side, as had happened after her Games. She hadn't been jealous then, and wasn't now. But no matter what happened, she wouldn't give up her son.
Finnick Odair came home from school, age seven, with his face blotchy with tears, asking Annie why she had given him a murderer's name, and Annie, as seemed to happen so often with her son, didn't know what to say. That his father hadn't been a murderer? That she'd given it because it was the name of the man she'd loved? That she hadn't meant to name him so at all, although not for these reasons? She wondered how other people managed to communicate with their children when Finnick threw his cup at her in a temper. Annie put her hands over her ears and screamed, dropping into a crouch on the kitchen floor, for nearly half an hour, until her throat was raw, and she was making gasping, choking noises when she came back to herself, and Finnick was staring at her, and crying.
'Maybe we could call you Nick?' she suggested. And that, for a while, was that.