She opens her eyes to a whole new world.
.
C-c-catatonic, they whisper while she coughs up a feeding tube. Capitol accents all of them and she can't smell sea air, no sand or rain or wind, no nets at her ankles and Finnick yelling at her across the water, come on, Annie, come on. Come on.
Everyone is dressed in white and it burns her eyes even worse than the neon of the rich districts. Hands are everywhere, prodding her and pulling oh God needles out of her, how did you wake up, Annie, you've been off in your head for so long? It turns into mindless noise, a vacuum, she's lying down somewhere but when she tilts her head she can see sun streaming through a window, rich and yellow and she feels—
"Finnick," she gasps the second she can draw a breath. No one says anything, they're writing on clipboards and then she remembers, doctors, like a slam of lightning in her brain. Her voice hurts, catches, like she hasn't used it in years, like she hadn't just been talking to Katniss however— whenever— "The baby."
She's sick, she's ill, and she curls in on herself, acheacheache, there's only one reason for doctors and it's that something is wrong with the baby.
All the men look down at her.
(—and all the king's horses and all the king's men—)
"Annie," one of them says slowly. "What are you talking about?"
.
She screams so hard and so long that someone slams another needle into her arm, bad choice, she knows, don't upset the Capitol be a good girl be a good little doll, but then came fire and pain and now— now there is no more Capitol. She should be safe. She should be alright.
Hovering in-and-out of consciousness she hears, "Dose her up again."
Her hands find her stomach before everything is eaten up by shades of black.
.
"Annie."
I'm so sorry.
"Annie."
He didn't suffer.
"Annie?"
He's a hero.
"Annie, please—"
You'll make him proud.
"What did you do to her?"
It's all my fault, Annie.
"She's crying. She's crying. Annie, please. Annie."
Annie.
He's gone.
.
Boom goes the dynamite.
.
She rolls over and nearly falls onto the floor. That's how she knows she's awake; that's how she knows things are real. There's no sun this time, everything drenched in darkness so thick she's half-sure that when she swings her legs over the edge of the bed there's going to be nothing but a gaping chasm waiting for her. Her heart drags in her chest, slow beats through sludge.
She stands and immediately collapses. Her knees are weak; she cannot support herself at all. When she cries out there's a faint shuffle and then she's being blinded by light.
"Hey now," someone says. Their voice is colored by something like awe. "Don't go getting ahead of yourself."
"I c-c—" Her throat is rough and dry. Suddenly she's shaking. "Can't w-walk."
The person laughs. A woman. She relaxes the tiniest bit. All that time chained up in the Capitol, men's voices still make danger blink across her vision. "You can walk, honey. Just haven't in awhile."
Her brain trips on the last word. There are warm hands clasping her arms, pushing her gently back into bed. Where she's been. Been. Finnick, her inner voice demands, like it's singing a centuries old song.
"How long?" she breathes, because whispering hurts her voice less.
The woman hesitates. She cannot see her face beyond a round, blurred shape; this could be anyone, anyone at all.
"A couple of years," the woman whispers back, and shoots her world all to hell.
.
The woman gets yelled at, Annie knows, even though she can hardly hear it over her own panicked breaths. Inoutinoutinout someone says in her ear but she shoves them away, I know how to fucking breathe! Her arms wrap around her legs, cocooning herself, clinging, holding, and the doctors fight with other doctors, supposed to take it slow, and Annie thinks, Oh God, how old am I?
Here is the terrifying part: she summons Finnick's face to her mind and discovers that it's soft at the edges, like paint dripping and dulling. It's like a poem from her long-ago English class, sing-song, mockingjay-bright: but a dream within a dream—
Aced that class, Mom—
—District 4 schools had never taught poetry.
.
The second one of the doctors asks her what year it is, she bursts out laughing. It hurts her cheeks, stings her eardrums more than her screams ever did, and it just keeps going. She keeps going, on and on and on, until she knows she sounds maniacal, unfixable, still wrapped up in on herself in her starch white bed. Panem, she laughs, the word bitter on her tongue. All hail the Capitol.
Hands stroke her hair away from her face and she lashes out, slapping them away. No one can touch her now, not with Finnick gone. She remembers (she remembers, she remembers) their faces when they'd told her, dream within a dream, he wasn't coming back, not ever, and it feels infinitely more real now than it ever did then, when she could stare out the window, hand on her belly, imagining him bursting out the waves and running home.
Annie, he would whisper, breath hot on her cheek and holding her close, fingers in her hair because he loved playing with it, stroking it. Annie, Annie, Annie.
She can't remember the exact color of his eyes.
.
She's numb the next time a doctor visits. Hasn't moved all day.
(I killed people, she'd told an old, wrinkled man who'd taken her pulse. I was a Career. Better watch out.)
"Hello, Annie."
She's been running her hands through her own hair, now that there's no one to do it for her. This doctor isn't in all white, isn't as frightening at the others. Still, she doesn't look at him. He sits down at her beside anyway, fingers flipping through endless stacks of papers. Her mind is wrapped in fog, in gauze. Panem, she repeats to herself. Pan-em. It sounds sticky, gluing her lips together. It sounds ancient. It sounds like a word called from far away.
The doctor tells her his name and she forgets it in a second. He talks for hours, she thinks. He tells her things about herself that she has no way of knowing are true at all: that this was a place she knew well, that she had been forced here, locked in. That she had hurt herself, had tried to hurt others. That, eventually, she had stopped speaking at all.
In the dull silence after he finishes talking at her, she rolls over in bed. "Liar," she rasps, the first word she's said today. The only one she needs.
.
The few times she'd managed to actually sleep during her Games, she'd dreamt of Finnick. The coiled muscles in his arms, the sun of his smile. Of coming home to him, of winning for him.
And is all—
"Shh," he'd said, all that he needed to when she was soaking wet and trembling and a victor. "Shh, Annie, Annie, Annie."
—that we see—
"I do," he'd said, clinging to her, barely giving her time to repeat it before kissing her so hard the breath was knocked out of her. "Annie," he's said into her mouth, like he was praying. "Annie."
—or seem—
"Annie, I..."
What had he said?
"Annie..."
—but a dream—
"Annie, Annie, Annie," his voice tucked into her ear like a secret, "remember, Annie."
Remember, he'd said, but she can't grab onto the memory. It swirls, ripples, fades, and Finnick, Finnick,
Finnick—
—within a dream?
.
She has parents because she hears people whispering about them. Off, somewhere, and flying home. Left their poor mad daughter in a pretty pristine jailhouse.
This is how she knows she insane: her mother and father's faces fill her mind instantly, clear like she was staring through the blue of the ocean in the middle of summer. Compared to Finnick's, they shimmer. Compared to Finnick's, they shine.
I need you, she mouths into her pillow, tasting the salt of her tears and thinking of him lifting her into his arms, of being full of him, of their foreheads pressed together and seagulls crowing in the distance and love, love, love, love.
I need you, she mouths to Finnick.
I need you, she mouths to someone who was never really there at all.
.
The next time someone walks into her room, she falls apart. "I lived in Panem," she sobs, and realizes that she is terrified of getting up and looking out the window because she knows, now: she will not see
the Capitol outside. "I'm a victor, I won the Games."
Whoever it is drops the bucket they're holding— a cleaner, for God's sake, but by then she is crying too hard to care. There is no Finnick and there is no baby inside her to keep her tied to this world. There is nothing left for her to do but break. She's dreamt her life away, imagined it away, into the fucking Hunger Games.
"I watched people die," she spits, and the person tries their best to comfort, clumsily touching her arm, and she wants to hiss because it's not Finnick. It can never be Finnick. Finnick is a wisp inside her head. Finnick is a dream within a dream within a nightmare.
It takes more tears than she thinks she has in her to get her talking, but she finally opens her mouth. The more she tries to paint her world— the real world, she almost thinks, then wants to vomit the little food she's gotten down this past week —the more faded and dented it gets inside her mind. It's all feelings and emotions and the soft gleam of the moon as she treaded water for a day straight, the last time Finnick had kissed her before. Before.
"Fake," she screams, feeling tears streak down her jaw again. How dare he? she demands. How could he make me believe in him?
"I'm sorry," the person beside her says faintly, testing the waters. It's a boy, older than her, dark hair and dark skin like he's from Katniss's district. "Do you... do you need a doctor?"
No. She needs her whole world righted.
"Leave me alone," she says, and closes her eyes until she hears that he's gone.
.
Annie Cresta, she monotones at the doctors asking for her name. District 4.
They can't get a grip on her districts and she doesn't care enough to let them in on it. It isn't that she misses Panem; it isn't that she wants the Hunger Games. It's that she had lived a lifetime inside her own mind. It's that someone had loved her, wholly and completely, and she cannot possibly find a way back
to that.
Ding-dong, the witch is dead, she sings. I think I made you up inside my head.
.
When she's filled to bursting with the drugs they've decided she still needs, ones her parents have apparently signed off on (Win, Annie, we know you can—), that's when they start parading in people she's supposed to remember. A couple of people she went to school with who swim into her memory and promptly flit away again, fading faster than the ones in her head. Doctors who'd performed tests on her. Other patients, more insane than her, that early on she's told she had been forced to interact with before her State Worsened. Catatonic, she wants to scream at them, scream like she did when they told her about Finnick, holding her face underwater and screaming until she couldn't breathe. Ca-ta-ton-ic.
They bring in the nurse who helped her when she fell, the doctor with the papers, the cleaning person. "You were here the whole time, Annie," one woman doctor tells her, carefully controlled frustration bleeding into her voice. "We know it."
She wonders if Katniss will ever give in and have a baby with Peeta. She wonders where her baby went.
"You don't have to answer us," soothes the nurse, round face a strangely comforting constant from that one horrific night. The doctor with the papers is long gone, but the cleaner nods.
"I used to talk to you," he offers quietly, both of them halfway to leaving. "When it was my turn in this— in your room. Maybe you heard."
Girl on fire, the mockingjay, down with the Capitol, poor mad girl.
She isn't going to reply and the nurse knows it. Sighs. "Maybe she did, Finn," comes the voice from the doorway, and by the time she jerks her head up they've already walked into the hall.
.
It's a nice day today, I guess.
.
I do. I do. Forever. I do.
.
I think this girl at school likes me. Hard to tell, though.
.
How could they do this to you? Oh, Annie.
.
Do you want some sun? I can raise the blinds. A— Annie? I hope you don't have a nickname or anything.
.
I'll hurt them, I'll kill them, I'll burn down the whole goddamned Capitol—
.
Things will be better when you wake up. Trust me.
.
Annie. Trust me.
.
The next day, she crawls out of bed so early that the light reaching her room is weak and watery, and she walks. She walks down winding hallways and forgets the way back. She walks and inspects the place she's been trapped inside for far, far too long. She walks and touches each door she comes across, every window, every escape. She walks and realizes that scares her more than anything is how quickly the threat of Panem is fading from her mind. It's like waking up from a nightmare and being rocked back to sleep; it's like hearing a voice through a dozen layers of fog and creating a savior from it.
Finally, she has to ask someone for help. It grates on her, but even after a lecture about wandering around that she tunes out (she'd gotten good at that when they held her in the Capitol, no screams are good screams, didn't you know), the man at the desk still points her in the right direction. She walks in and out of three crisp, clean-smelling empty rooms, and is ready to sit down and close her eyes and dream FinnickFinnickFinnick when she sees him.
"Wait," she calls. "Wait!"
He looks nothing like Finnick. He isn't dangerously handsome; she cannot imagine him wrapped in nothing but ropes from the sea. He's dressed in old clothes that the Capitol would mock, a rag thrown over his shoulder. He shifts from foot to foot, standing there in the middle of the hallway, staring at her like he's seeing a vision.
"You're up," he says.
She doesn't answer. He doesn't need a response.
They will probably never get married; they will probably never swim together in the ocean, fingertips touching like the edges of starfish. He will probably never hold her when she has a nightmare. She will probably never hold him when he has one. But once, she had almost lost herself in the dregs of her own mind. Once, nothing but his voice had managed to dull the hurt.
"I think I need you," she blurts out, suddenly aware of her flimsy hospital gown, the tangles in her hair. She's gripped with a painful need for him to brush them out for her. His eyebrows rise. She wonders briefly if he's ever heard that before.
"Sure," he says, just like that, taking a step towards her.
Annie, my Annie.
"I heard you," she finds herself admitting. Her feet lead her closer. "All that time. I heard you." She breathes in slow. His eyes are not green as the sea; just deep, dark brown. "You were in my head."
His face flickers between happiness, worry, elation. It jolts her down to her bones, because she can still read him, every time. "Oh. Wow. Did it— did it help?" he asks, quiet, so still that a butterfly could have landed on his shoulder.
Finally, she laughs. She laughs so hard and so long that it's like he can't help it: he falls in with her. "Oh God," she gasps, holding her aching ribs. "I think you saved me."
Just like that, it's quiet.
His eyes are narrowed. Confusion, not malice. She's proud that she can tell the difference. "How?" he asks, voice catching like cotton on thorns.
Her head swims.
"Let me tell you about it."
.
fin.
.
(author's note: gah. this was written for a prompt on lj. it's... pretty weird. i tried to make it clear that she "woke up" when finnick died, but i don't think i managed that part too well. anyway, reviews/concrit are appreciated!)