What Annie likes to do more than anything else is float, lie perfectly still in the water with only her nose poking up and unthink as hard as she can about nothing-not-anything. Dead man's float.
But as Medea, their goldfish-skinned escort, says scornfully, "If that's a talent, I'm a cat."
"You'd make an excellent cat," Annie replies. She ducks under a wave. "Haughty, yet aerodynamic, with evaluating green eyes-"
"Now, now, Annie."
Finnick and Mags try her out on the piano, but all chords except the softest feel discordiant and loud, like cannon fire- so sudden, all these deaths at her hands-
She ends up crouched under the instrument's bench, hands pressed firmly over her ears.
Annie attempts the flute.
She can stay underwater for fifteen minutes at a stretch, but this feels like a different type of breath control entirely. One she can't stand.
"It's like a starfish grew legs, turned into a boulder, clambered up the beach, and decided to sit on my chest," Annie tells Mags, who's come over to wash the girl's dishes. Annie almost wishes that she was allowed to help. The last time she washed her own dishes, though, she dropped a plate. It crashed against the tiles, like bones splintering- too loud, too loud- driving rationality from her mind. Apparently, she broke all the dishes after that. Went through the cabinets, slid out each scallop-edged plate, regarding each one for a moment, its weight on her fingers, before hurling it against the wall. (and if they heard it in the Capitol, would they let her go home?)
She doesn't remember the incident, though. Just Finnick's hands bandaging her lacerated thumbs, Finnick's arm around her shoulders as they sat on the back porch (they never used the front.)
As if rubbing her fingers together, Mags dabs at an already-clean plate. Finally she says, "What about poetry?"
This time, the suggestion sticks.
Annie fills three repurpoused logbooks in less than a week. She writes dark, morbid freeverse, knife-wielding octopi and seaweed tangling in the depths. For a brief period, she is-horrors!- almost fashionable. After her first collection's unexpected success, Annie shies away from anything as permanent as paper. She traces her poems in the sand with a fingertip, or in suntan lotion on Finnick's already-bronzed back. Once or twice she tries to interest Finnick in writing as well, but he always laughs and prods the proffered writing implement away, saying that he wouldn't want his opinions to be pinned down like that.
She never once dreamed that, someday, he would craft a poem for her.