Annie didn't like this part. Annie Odair knew that she would never have wanted to be on the squads with the other victors. That she couldn't do what they could do. She knew that she wouldn't have wanted to have been there when Finnick had died. In a way, she had been there. She felt every second of his pain. And perhaps it was because she wasn't entirely right in the head, but before the television could say, before word had come through the communicators, Annie had let out a cry so loud and long that no one within earshot could be unsure about what had happened.
Johanna had been there with her, evergreen. It was Johanna who held her when the world disappeared, when Finnick died and took Annie's bright, flitting, multicolored other self with him. In her desperation and grief, she could not keep Johanna's pain out. The colors of their pain washed together as Johanna held her close, purred into her ear, all green grief and dark thoughts. Annie attempted to vacate her physical body as Finnick had. But mere will could not stop her heart, beating on and on. Later, Johanna was with her again.
I gotta go finish the job, Annie. I gotta help them clean it up so we can start over.
Annie stared at the same spot on the wall, unmoving, unfocused. But she understood why Johanna was going, respected it. The doctors didn't bother much with her. Annie watched the wall. She had to. Every awful thing she had ever seen played out on the flat surface as though in a television show. Annie watched, as she had since she became a victor, her district partner get decapitated over and over. The blood. His bones. The shame, the guilt, the terror of absolute helplessness. She couldn't save him. Could barely save herself in that endless, horrible saltless sea. When the images of her arena faded, they were only followed by new horrors. She listened to the screams of Johanna and Peeta and of avoxes. Caesar Flickerman was in her hospital room, or so it seemed, announcing the death and pain of every person she knew to be dead. The waves crashed and crashed. She had no way of knowing how long she had been sitting at the hospital, being moved meaninglessly from the bed to a chair, to the bath and back again. Only that Johanna's darkness faded and brightened each time she came.
At some point, Johanna had Annie moved back to district four, to another hospital. The wall was blue here, but provided the same backdrop for the awful pantheon of suffering Annie watched hour after hour. In dreaming, there was only blackness.
Annie saw her parents, her siblings, all of them utterly unreachable. The unspeakable things that had passed before her eyes in her young life. Without Finnick to block it out, or even the colors and brightness of her own other self, there was no escape. So, Annie was still. It was easier if she was still. She allowed doctors to medicate her, nurses to bathe her, as she felt more than watched her husband dying over and over again. This was better and worse than the more realistic images. Since she had no knowledge of his actual death, how it had happened, she saw it in a different way. Annie was plagued by visions of the bodily form of Finnick, golden and beautiful and scarred overshadowed again and again by the blinding bright bluegreen power of his soul, ripping free from its earthly vessel, escaping away into the ocean, the sky, the mountains, into forever. The part of Finnick that Annie had clung to and known so well no longer tethered to one person, but dispersed into the dark reality of the world. When Finnick was alive, that bright power was what kept Annie safe and sane, knowing that he carried it with him. Now, Annie knew, Finnick was with her, around her, always, but like everything else, he was untouchable, unreachable.
She moved only to hold Johanna's hand when she returned occasionally. She did it reflexively, tapping into the other woman's growing brightness. Johanna would talk to her, telling her over and over about how things were getting better, how they were going to keep getting better. Johanna was Annie's only anchor, the only person who came near her to hold even a little of Finnick's brightness and power. Annie knew in her heart that Johanna was struggling with Finnick's death, though she carried him with her. That Johanna blamed herself for not being there. That now Johanna felt that she needed to care for Annie.
But Annie did not want to be cared for. She was content to stare at the wall for the rest of her life. Someone had to watch over them. Until something different happened. For years, Annie had been an empty vessel, coming alive only for Finnick, whose heart could fill her and make her real again. How could she explain that without someone to fill her, she would be empty forever? Annie had not been listening to anyone's words but Johanna's, and she knew she had missed something important going on in the real world.
Something inside of her stirred. It happened again and again. At first Annie ignored it. But after several months of the stirring, it was getting difficult to ignore. It had grown. Eventually, it began to occur to Annie that perhaps her physical form was not simply sick. Gradually, Annie's eyes came to focus on the wall rather than the images of colors, auras and golden ghosts. She had to wait. She had to ask Johanna. In the days between this realization and Johanna's next visit, Annie had a hard time sitting still. She saw the pictures that had been put up for her in her room, she saw the carefully knit sea green blanket that had been keeping her warm, and for the first time, she saw herself. It was difficult to place exactly what was different. She saw herself as she always did, all floating hair and empty ocean eyes. Johanna would know.
Green washes over me. Johanna is whistling down the hall. She has gone into the world and gathered the small pieces of Finnick, small pieces of others, and brought them back, glowing in her heart. Johanna is evergreen, ever ever ever, but with patches of seafoam where she has met up with Finnick's soul. She knows why there is stirring in me.
"Annie, Annie, Annie, Annie, what can we do today?" Johanna murmurs, she doesn't think I am really hearing her. This is how she would speak to her other self if she were alone. If she knows she has a verdant other self. I do not have an other self. Johanna is letting the light from the real world into the room, I can feel my eyes adjusting. "I brought you some of the ocean," she says, digging in her bag.
"Thank you," I say, "I miss the ocean." Then, I hear glass hitting the floor. So many real things are happening today. I do not like to talk. I do not like to be in this world, but the stirring has become so distracting from the emptiness that I must find out where it has come from.
Johanna is kneeling before me now, her earthy eyes reflecting that inner self she is so unaware of. The ocean rests on her eyelids, threatening to spill down, and she says my name in a question several times. It has been so long since I felt anything but emptiness and pain that watching Johanna and feeling her greenness reaching for me so desperately makes the stirring larger, harsher. I have to speak again.
"Hi Jo," I force myself to say, trying to remember how it is people have a conversation. If I had my other self, I could reach for her and let her know I am here, reaching out from the darkness. I cannot do that, and, I realize, most people would not notice if I did. Perhaps Johanna would. So I reach for her with my hand instead, and touch her soft, dark hair. She is crying now, holding my hand carefully against her face. I know that Johanna believes she is full of darkness, and of course she is wrong. In this moment, she is so bright and hopeful as she just says my name again and smiles. All of the emotions she is emitting are so strong, I am already wishing I could withdraw again. Let her lace her fingers through mine and tell me stories about all of the new people and places she has seen while I have been in my shell. So I speak again, before the darkness decides it is not my right to retreat, and pulls me back in against my will.
"Jo, can I ask you a question?" She looks bewildered for a moment and sits back to the floor in front of my chair. She shakes her head, perhaps to clear out the wonderment floating around her. I realize it has been a long time since I have spoken, been into this world. Maybe Johanna did not believe I could come out.
"Anything," she assures, "What do you want to know?"
"What is the stirring?"
"Oh, Annie," Johanna breathes, her face contorting in concern, her whole being changing, she feels I have uttered nonsense words, "what stirring?" My disappointment is fresh and acute. Now I will have to reach for my physical self, try to feel out the stirring. It makes slow movements, rocks through me, reaches out, startles me, moves within me, a strange, somersaulting fish in the emptiness of me.
"Inside. I stir. There's stirring." I cannot give her better words for the strangeness.
I am relieved when she makes a face like she understands, and she gathers my hands, then places them on my stomach, I realize this is where the stirring has been located all along, though I couldn't place it before. It is here, where something has pushed out the middle of me, rounded it, filled it where there was only emptiness before. I think of my body as only a hard shell, but this part of me is soft.
"Didn't you know?" She asks, moving my hands over the swell. "You're going to have a baby."
Then, in a brutal crash, I am here. I am Annie Odair again. Johanna does not lie. That the stirring was a new life had never occurred to me. I am surprised and not that the darkness has kept this from me. I reach out for it, the tiny being within me. When I finally reach for it, stop holding everything that is me in a tight bind, it comes flowing over me, so beautiful, blue and green and every beautiful color I have ever experienced. It is strong. Beating. Stirring. Alive. Silent and bright in the world before birth. I am enveloped in Finnick's light once more, glowing, strong and powerful like a wave, and something else, like the stillness of a tidepool, belying the incredible life teeming beneath. I realize that a part of my other self that I believed was lost forever is in this new life. I can see her there, my other self and Finnick' we are together, Finnick and I, in this light.
I focus on Johanna again, seeing both parts of her fully, her other self and her body, watching me so carefully, the care and love and concern. Then, I take the step I know I will have to take in order to care for this new life. I shut out Johanna's other self. When I look around the room, I see it as it is. The wall is blank.
"When?" I ask simply, unable to remove my hands from where Johanna had placed them.
Johanna raises her eyebrows, "Not long, now. Any day, really. Maybe a few more weeks."
A new life and a newborn child are very different things, I am thinking. I do not know if I can do this myself. Horribly, real fear covers me and threatens to bring the darkness back on. But I know I cannot go back to the shell again in this moment.
Real tears begin to fall from my eyes. Johanna holds me while I cry, and I finally have to ask her, "How am I going to raise a child?"
"With love," Johanna answers so quickly and surely, "And I'm not leaving again. The clean-ups are done. I'm staying here with you. I can help you with the baby."
She is so steady that I believe her. Johanna will not leave me again, perhaps ever.