Disclaimer: I don't own a bit of this. I'm just borrowing.

Note: I know there are a lot of Finnick and Annie "canon" stories, or stories giving them their backstory, but I wanted to write my own. For whatever its worth, this is it. I really hope you like what I did here! Tell me so, won't you? Whether you did or you didn't?

AWARE

a Japanese word meaning "the bittersweetness of a brief and fading moment of transcendent beauty"

there is no English word for that definition

I can still smell the sex on my face when I get back to the Training Center. It's making me sick. Katrina's certain her husband will know if she has actual sex and restricts herself to oral sex. I'm sure he's paying for my time so I don't know what difference it makes. I don't care either. I just want to wash it off and go back to preparing my tribute to die. Or win. That's what I'm supposed to tell her.

It's a half hour before dawn, just about the time Chaff Thornton and Haymitch Abernathy usually go to sleep after a hard night's drinking, but they're both standing in the lobby of the Training Center when I walk in. They're not drinking and they don't look drunk. Something is wrong. I know this as they walk toward me.

Chaff calls me by my name and I start to shake because they always, without fail, call me Pretty Boy and only that. "It's Mags," he says bluntly.

I lean against the back of the closest chair, willing him not to say the two words I expect him to say - she's dead.

"She's not dead," he says, answering my prayers. "She had a stroke, Finnick. They took her to the hospital. Your district chaperone was going to tell you but we thought you'd rather hear it from us."

"If you want to hear it at all," Haymitch adds. "But it's true, so you have to. Your chaperone ran off before she said much else but Effie Trinket told me the protocol is for them to bring another victor to take her place. You got a preference? I'll tell Effie to get ahold of yours and pass the message."

Who do I want in the Capitol while Mags is in the hospital and kids are dying?

I don't know.

I want to go home.

The only time Mags has stayed home in the four years since I won and started mentoring, she asked Muscida to take her place. So I tell him Muscida should come, if she's willing.

Haymitch squeezes my shoulder. "I'll tell Effie. She'll take care of it."

"Your chaperone will get your kids to training," Chaff says, squeezing my other shoulder. "Haymitch's got to take his kids and Seeder'll take mine. Want me to come to the hospital with you? See her?"

I want to go home, that's what I want.

Or cry.

I could cry.

Mags wouldn't approve of either of those wishes, though, so I try and force myself to think of what she would say if she were here and telling me what to do. The very last thing she would allow me to do would be to abandon the tributes. I can see her later. My date for the night has to be cancelled, given that I'll be the only mentor until Muscida arrives. I have to be a mentor.

Chaff and Haymitch both nod in understanding when I say that, then they both offer to go see her with me later. Haymitch promises to have his district chaperone keep me posted on Mags' condition too. I never thought the two drunks from the outermost districts would be the only real friends I'd find in the ranks of the victors but they are.

We get on the elevator together and they both offer me sad looks and words of encouragement when I get off on the fourth floor.

I have time to shower but if I allow myself time to be alone, I'll fall apart. Mags always says if I let myself fall apart, it'll take ten times as long to put myself back together. So I wash my face with soap scented to smell like saltwater and stand by the windows in the common room, making sure Avoxes and attendants can see me while I wait for the tributes.

The boy, a seventeen year old volunteer named Reef Falkirk, comes out of his room and heads for the breakfast buffet right away. Mags was supposed to mentor him but I don't think he was happy with that arrangement, not knowing she was better for him than I would have been.

"Reef," I say, repeating his name again so my voice sounds stronger. "Mags had a stroke last night. She's not going to be able to mentor you. I've requested the Muscida come from back home and take her place. It's what Mags would have wanted."

He shoves half a pastry in his mouth and shrugs. "That's fine. I never thought mentors did much in this anyway. You still going to mentor the weeping willow?"

His stylist told me after the parade that he'd called her that but I didn't believe the blue-haired Capitol fool. Apparently I should have. Hitting him would be the best thing I could do, but I can't. "Don't be an ass," I mutter instead. "You never know when you might need her help."

He shrugs again and finishes off the pastry before turning back to the table.

"Did you see her, Reef?" I ask, because she should be out here eating something.

"I knocked on her door. She was weeping, so I'm not an ass, and she said she's not hungry but she'll come out in time to go to training."

I leave him to his food and go in search of my tribute.

Annie Cresta shouldn't be here. She's a Career and well-trained, but she's not cut out for this. She got top marks for her year in weapons back home. She can throw knives and spears and tridents better than anyone I've seen. She knows her plants and she knows how to hunt for food and water. What she can't do is the most important thing. She came in close to last in hand-to-hand combat and any type of weapons that involved being close enough to hit or be hit. She's not going to make it.

Maybe I should just let her weep.

That'd be letting her give up, though, and I could never face Mags again if I did that.

"Annie?" I call out, pushing her door open - because I don't want her to have the chance to say I can't come in. "Annie, don't you want breakfast?"

She curls against the headboard of her bed and shakes her head at me. "It'd look weak if I threw it up in front of the Gamemakers and other tributes, wouldn't it?"

I sit on the end of the bed, as far from her as possible, and nod once. "Yeah, it would. Then again, that'd be a strategy for some people."

She laughs hollowly. "I don't even have a strategy."

"Sure you do," I say with well-practiced confidence. "You'll get whatever weapons you can and you'll protect yourself with them. If you get knives and a spear, you just have to be willing to throw them at something besides the dummies back home. If you can do that, you'll get all the way."

"And if I can't do that?"

She's seventeen. She's never been naïve about this. I can't lie to her. "If you can't do that, you won't get to come home."

"I'm not even sure that'd be so bad," she sighs, "do you think?"

I bite the inside of my lip to keep myself together. "I don't know, Annie, I've only ever tried the one way. I should tell you, anyway, that Mags had a stroke last night. She's not going to be able to mentor Reef so Muscida is coming. I'll still be your mentor, so don't worry about that."

I didn't feel her move across the bed and I wasn't look at her so I don't see it. But she's beside me in the blink of an eye and she touches my shoulder. "I'm so sorry, Finnick," she murmurs.

She's comforting me?

We discuss that she's probably not coming home and she's comforting me because an old woman who got to live a pampered life, by District standards, as a victor for sixty years is going to survive a stroke?

I don't understand this girl.

She links her fingers through mine when I tell her I don't understand. "Anyone back home who takes the time to look can see how much you care for Mags," she says gently, "and how much she cares for you. That's why I'm sorry, because someone you care about is sick and you're suffering for it."

A mentor crying, sobbing, on a tribute is probably frowned on in the written and unwritten rulebooks. I can't help it though. No one, besides Mags, has ever understood me that way before. So I cry out of self-pity, I cry for the old woman who is my family, and I cry for the girl who probably won't be alive in another two weeks.

Annie's stronger in those moments than she's been since her name was pulled from the glass bowl in the sunbaked square in District Four.