"I've always loved the ocean." Finnick's eyes are a deep green, as deep as the waves beneath them, and she knows that she could drown in them almost as easily.

"It's beautiful." The words feel thick and dry on her tongue, as though she swallowed a handful of sand from the shore.

"It really is." Every word he speaks is warm in her heart, a little fire that gives her comfort now but could someday burn her to a crisp. "When I was a kid, I used to come down here with my parents all the time."

"Me too." Since the Games, everything has been difficult, but sometimes, things feel easy with him, like taking the stairs into the shallow end of the pool as a child. With floaties around her thin, almost twig-like arms and her mother never far from her side, those dinky ten-by-fifteen Motel 8 pools had offered a universe to explore in safety. She remembered splashing around in circles on her kickboard for what must have been hours, the slight burn of overzealously-applied chlorine doing nothing to diminish her smiles and laughter. Looking down into the water with her goggles, she felt like a cosmonaut, abandoning the safety and security of the everyday world for something hereunto known to man.

"Have you ever been out to the island?" His lips were plush, pillowlike, like the tomato-shaped pin cushion her grandmother had before they put her in the home. Annalisettina fondly remembered those afternoons spent by the old woman's side, threading needles when Grandma needed it. She had watched entire gardens of embroidered flowers bloom beneath Grandma's nimble fingers, rainbows of pinks and reds and violets bubbling forth from the cloth like an unplugged volcano. The embroidery would have been enough for any child, but her grandmother had such an incredible gift for storytelling as well. Whether it was the adventures of a princess locked in a castle, rescuing herself before the prince could arrive, or tales of her own childhood in the Old Country, Grandma had always made Annalisettina feel a thread's width away from the action. Storytelling was a gift in her family, passed down through generations of strong women, from mother to daughter, sister to sister, one long, spindly ladder that snaked its way through history.

"No." Who knew that a single word could taste so strongly of acid? It burns in her throat, pure bile, a rejection of everything she once believed they shared. So much pulls them together: their experiences in the Games, the nightmares that she can see crackling in Finnick's eyes just as they claw at her mind through every waking moment only to rip her to shreds the instant she falls asleep. Reasonably, she knows this is nothing. Goddess willing, they have a lifetime of memories to make together, and if she could swim her way to victory, she can swim to an island. But now, the island may as well be a pile of despair in a sea of loneliness, for it seems that Annalisettina is Peter Pan, doomed to never grow up, to never don the stifling robes of adulthood which will allow her to understand where these emotions that govern her reside, to leave Neverland and fly off to Sometimesland, a world of murky grays between the pitch blacks and stark whites that make up Neverland and Alwaysland respectively. For now, she merely is.


A/N: Written for the Worst Contest on Caesar's Palace, so at least half of the awfulness is intentional.