The 70th Hunger Games
Part One
The Tributes
Part One's Summary: Annie Cresta is seventeen years old and has no wish to be District's Four next girl tribute. She had two more years before she would have been safe from entering the Games, but the Capital has other ideas for her.
Now she is the female tribute of District Four for the 70th Hunger Games and she can't think how things can possibly get worse. She thought that her worse problem would be her inability to fight, but she is about to discover that things are far more complicated and dangerous than she ever originally thought.
She is about to discover just how much control the Capital has over the Districts Victors and how dangerous President Snow really is. Especially since he's taken a special interest in her. If Annie thought the Hunger Games would be the death of her, she might just discover that her life is in danger before she's even entered the Arena.
Author's Note: Greeting All. This is my first ever Hunger Games Fanfic, so please be kind.
This fanfic is obviously about Annie's Games, it is from her point of view. Like Hunger Games this fic will be broken up into three parts; this is obviously Part One: Tributes and is aboutour Twelve chapters long. I know this type of fic, Annie's Games, has been done a number of times, but hopefully mine will be quite different from all the others that are out there. That's the plan for this fic, anyway.
Anyway, enough of my chatter, please enjoy my story and let me know what you think. If you have any ideas I would love to hear your thoughts.
Disclaimer: Obviously I am not Suzanne Collins. If I was Finnick would not be dead and Peeta would not have been put through hell and back, but still I love her books and I'm simply borrowing some of her characters and themes from her books, but otherwise I am not her, so don't sue me.
Chapter One
I wake with a start, though I don't know what exactly has startled me out of sleep. The sun wasn't even up yet and only a few sea birds were starting to call to one another, welcoming the coming morning.
I could hear the ocean, her waves gently crashing into the shore of District Four, splashing around the docks and boats anchored in the bay. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening to wake me from my sleep, and it had been such a good sleep too.
I try to move, stretch me limbs only to find that I can't, that I'm trapped beneath a weight - a comfortable, warm weight mind you - and that I am mere millimetres from falling off the bed.
Instead of panicky from this trapped feeling, I simply wiggled within the arms that have encased me so protectively to his chest, so that I am now facing him.
I frown when I look up into his face. He is grimacing as if he is suffering; pain, grief, guilt. All these feelings he suffers though he tries to hide them from the rest of the world with his fast smile and quick mouth.
I reach up and gently touch his face, with the vain hope that I might be able to simply swipe the grimace and all the pain that comes with it away from him, out of him.
His arms tighten around me in response and I can't help but wince a little from the strength that he is now using to hold me against him. His dreams must be bad this morning.
I keep running my fingers over his face, gently saying his name over and over again, like a mantra.
"Finnick, it's ok. It's just a dream. You're not really back there. It's just a dream, Finn." I watched his face twitch as my voice starts to break threw his dream, nightmare rather, pulling him back, back to the present, back to me.
"Annie?" he whispered as his brilliant sea green eyes start to blink awake.
"Uh huh, I'm here." I whisper and his arms loosen some from their death grip around me. I know that I'll probably have a bruise or two from him, but the relief that is now written all over his face makes the pain worthwhile.
He closes his eyes again, burying his face into my neck, pressing warm kisses against my collarbone.
"Finnick." I giggled once more trying to squirm away from him, "that tickles."
He lifts himself on to his elbows, looking down at me seriously, before suddenly rolling me completely under him. It's now that I remember just how completely undressed we both are, with me only in an old, over-sized button up shirt and him with absolutely nothing on at all.
I'm taken aback by how serious he still looks. How much pain and grief, as well as guilt of a survivor and killer who never wished to kill and only did so, so that he could live, is still written all over his face.
"Finnick?" I whisper as I once again press my fingers to his face, running them down his jaw line and against his lips. He kissed each of my fingers as they trailed against his mouth, but the pain and seriousness remained.
Why? Why was he…
Ah.
Reaping Day. Today is Reaping Day.
I feel my stomach plummet a little as I remember this little detail about today.
I kiss him and he kisses me back and after only a few moments our bodies are moving in their familiar rhythm with each other when Finnick's house phone rang.
"Ignore it." Finnick growled into my neck.
I tried.
I really did, but the rings were persisted, so with a heavy sigh, I shoved him off me and started to roll out of bed before remembering that this wasn't in fact my house, so my answering Finnick's phone would not be the wisest of ideas, especially this early in the morning.
I stood in the middle of his room, trying to straighten the shirt that I was wearing as a nightgown, his shirt, listening to the persisted rings of his phone, while he simply remained in bed, looking gorgeous and all things that really should be made illegal.
"Ignore it." Finnick said again, beckoning for me to come back to bed.
I hesitated still, looking out the window at the lightening sky as dawn started to approach. I would have to leave soon, so as to not arise questions or suspicion from anyone about my relationship with the famous Finnick Odair.
The whole district knows that we're friends, best friends in fact, even though some do find it strange that the famous, gorgeous Finnick Odair spends all of his time with a skinny girl, two years his junior with nothing exceptionally special about her except for having a grandmother who was a Victor and has won several medals for swimming at school. But besides from that, I'm particularly unique from any of the other girls in the district, most of whom glare daggers at me for simply being friends with Finnick.
I can only image what they'd do if they knew that I slept with him. Or that he actually loved me with all his heart.
I felt myself blush darkly at the thought, not noticing that he had risen from bed, startling me out of my thoughts when his arms wrapped themselves around my waist and he kissed my neck with open mouth kisses that make my knees go weak.
"Finnick."
"See, it's stopped. Now come back to bed." He whispers. Not in the seductive tone that he uses in the Capital when he's forced to "entertain" ladies (and men), but the tone that he only uses when he is around me, and only me, and only when he knows that we are completely alone, away from the prying ears of the Capital.
If President Snow ever found out about me, or rather that our relationship was anything more than platonic, I can only dread to think what he would do to Finnick.
He has just swung me into his arms, causing me to squeal softly, just about to dump me on to the bed when…
"FINNICK ODAIR!" I am dumped on to his bed with a lot less grace than I would have been if not for the yelling voice of my grandmother.
I watched in amusement from the bed as Finnick started to panic, before sticking his head out the open window of his room – he always leaves it open, he feels suffocated and trapped if its closed – and called down, to where I suspect my grandmother is standing, right beneath his window.
Oh… I felt my cheeks grow warm.
"Morning Mags." I heard Finnick call down to her.
"Finnick what is it with you and answering your phone?" my grandmother called back up to him, surprisingly loud for a seventy-five year old woman, though not loudly enough to wake the whole Victor's Village, thank god!
"It's not even dawn yet." He whined back at her, sounding more like a fourteen year old than he's soon to be twenty years.
"But clearly you are wide awake and up to no good." Came my grandmother's sharp reply and I could see his ears and cheeks turn a reddish tone under his naturally bronze skin in the dim light of coming dawn.
"Ah."
"Get yourselves dressed, I'm coming in." I winced, knowing that she knew that I was here. Not that it was a hard guess as to where I might be if I'm not at home, but still, it's embarrassing to know that your grandmother knows exactly what you've been up to during the night.
Finnick groaned as he pulled his head back into the room, us both hearing my grandmother open his front door with the key that he had given her a few years back, as a gift when he moved back here when he was sixteen, after he brought his family a large boat to live on.
Finnick isn't close to his family. Not anymore.
"We should probably go down, unless you want her to come up and find us like this." I say as I start pulling on my underwear and my pants. The shirt I was wearing was decent enough, so I simply left it on. I would have to change anyway for the Reaping, so I didn't see the point of getting completely dressed now.
Finnick grumbled something along the lines of "like she hasn't found me in worse situations."
"Not with me, she hasn't." I replied as I threw some clothes at him.
"Oh, but like she doesn't know." He smirks that cocky smirk that I'm sure is the cause for all the girls and women (and men) here and in the Capital and all over Panem to swoon over him.
I return his cocky smile with a very dead-pan expression, causing him to pout ever so slightly.
"Why does that never work?" he asks as he pulls on the clothes that I threw at him.
"What, your charm?" I asked as I started running a brush threw my hair.
"Yup."
"Maybe it isn't as impressive as everyone has led you to believe," his pout deepens, "or maybe," I added as I walk over to him and stood on my tippy toes to kiss his month gently, "you need at least one person to not fall for them and that person is the person that truly loves you, the good and the bad, they don't need to be charmed to love you, they just do."
"Well, when you put it like that…" he said starting to smile, pulling me to his chest and leading down to kiss me properly, but I pull away with a wicked grin before bouncing out of his room.
"You little…" I hear him swear after me, causing me to laugh as I near run down the stairs, down to the kitchen where my grandmother was making herself a cup of tea.
She looked up at me with tired eyes and a gentle smile and I immediately felt my own smile slip, as guilt start to gnaw at my insides.
"Bad night?" I asked, moving to her side, wrapping my arm around her waist as I walked her to one of Finnick's mismatched kitchen chairs. I don't know how or when they became so mismatched, each chair being different to the next, but Finnick likes it this way. Actually most of the things in his house don't match with each other.
"Hmmm, it was and I panicked when I didn't find you in your room." Grandma said softly as she gently touched my face with her hand.
"I'm sorry." I whisper, placing my hand over hers.
She shook her head with a shaky laugh.
"It was silly of me to overreact like I did, but when I couldn't get through to Finnick via the phone; I guess I lost my mind for a moment there."
"It's fine. I know that today isn't a good day for you, any of you." I soothed, "we should have all stayed at yours, then you would not have had to have worried about us." She smiles at me warmly.
"You are such a sweet girl Annie. Such a sweet girl. Finnick is very lucky to have you."
"That I am." I jumped while my grandmother simply looked over my head and smiled as Finnick strolled into the kitchen, heading straight for the coffee. The man is addicted to his coffee.
"Morning Mags," he greeted my grandmother once he had poured himself a cup of the strong smelling brew.
I wrinkled my noise at the smell. He knows that I won't allow him to kiss me again until he's brushed his teeth clean of the wicked stuff. He grins when he's sees my expression.
"Morning to you too, Finnick." Grandma said with an amused expression as she watched Finnick and I pull faces at one another.
Their eyes meet and I can see the pain and understanding pass between. As close as I am to these two wonderful, fragile, broken creatures, I still don't understand them, not in the way that they understand each other.
In moments like these, I feel like I'm intruding in on something private, something so intimate and heartbreaking, that I want to cry. Not because I want to be a part of it, oh no, but because in these moments I remember and see just how broken these two people are and it breaks my heart.
So I let them have their moment, their silence to remember the grief, the fear, to remember all the horror that they have been put through. I let them remember it together, while I go about making our breakfast.
There isn't much to be have, not after the last storm made it near impossible for the boats to go out into the ocean to fish, and even with the preserves that we have, food is still scarce, even for us, here in Victor's Village. But I ignore that, just like I know every other family in the district will be when they wake, they'll all be making themselves a decent breakfast this morning, instead of eating simply gruel which fills the belly but is disgusting.
I've just finished cooking up some eggs and bread and am just moving on to cook some fish before the two come back to me from their moments of remembering.
"Hey, smells good." Finnick's voice is cheerful and is overly delighted in the fact that I'm not serving up gruel for once.
I started grin over my shoulder at him when I felt a sudden wave of nausea hit me in the gut causing me to immediately stop what I'm doing and bolt down the hall for the downstairs bathroom, with Grandma and Finnick calling after me in surprise.
I empty the contents of my gut down the toilet, flushed it, before sliding to the bathroom floor miserably.
"Annie?" Grandma walks into the bathroom, coming to crouch down beside me, her hand gently placing itself against my forehead.
"I don't know." I say simply, wiping a hand against my mouth. "I just felt sick all of a sudden."
I notice a strange, almost unreadable look cross my grandmother's face, but before I could ask her about it, Finnick's head was sticky itself in threw the bathroom doorway, his expression worried, though he did look relieved when he saw I wasn't being sick.
"I'm ok." I reassured them both, though they didn't look convinced. "It was probably just nerves." I added and this seems to sit with them better, though neither of them look happy.
But then, they're never happy about Reaping Day, and why should they be? Two children going off to their death.
Yes, as a Career's district as we as are so charmingly called, but then I can't really fault the other districts for begrudging us some, we do have a better chance of survival than most other districts, for example District Twelve. Going on seventy years that the Hunger Games have been held and District Twelve has only two Victors to boast.
One who died before I was born and the other, Haymitch, well, in some ways, he might as well be dead, for all the good he has done for his tributes, who usually die in the first couple of days in the arena.
I know that they're worried about me. I'm seventeen years old; I have this year and next before I am completely safe from becoming a tribute for our district.
"I'm fine now. Really. It was just nerves." I said as I pulled myself to my feet before helping Finnick do the same with my grandmother. They both looked sceptical, but didn't push me any further which I was grateful for.
"Breakfast is probably getting cold." I reminded them and just as I said that, Finnick's stomach grumbled.
I grinned as his cheeks turned red underneath his bronze skin and he ran a sheepish hand through his messy bronze coloured hair.
We all headed back for the kitchen, my fingers entwined with Finnicks's as we walked back. I could feel my grandmother's eyes on my back, but when I looked back at her, she simply smiled warmly back at me, but I could see the worry in her eyes, but as much as I wanted to ask what was wrong, I knew that today was simply a bad day, and at times it was best to simply leave Victors with their own thoughts.
Breakfast was cold, but I heated it all back up again easily and we had a good meal as the sun rose over the District Four, shining a warm welcome for Reaping Day.
Author's Note: Yes, yes I've put Finnick and Annie together already and I've made Mags Annie's Grandmother. Why? To put it simply, I just did because I felt like it. I like Mags and I wanted to write her as being a main character, so in this she is Annie's grandmother. And she's not the only thing that I've added or changed from the original books, but you'll read about all that later on.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this first chapter. I'll try to update again soon, but I've got exams this week which I have to study for, so while I'll be editing Chapter 2 & 3 shortly and finishing this part of the fic tonight, my next update might not be until Friday, but that just depends on how I'm feeling and how many reviews this first chapter recieves.