Author's Note: Written for Starvation Forum's monthly prompt. This time, we need to write an "Epilogue Rewrite." This one is sort of standing in with canon, but just shifting the focus ever-so-slightly.
He glances under his ill-fitting glasses, as strange as it sounds, and presses two wires together. The whole room lights with electric force. Every vein, every corner of the room was lined with the wire, charged with that electricity.
He catches his breath as he realizes what his hands have recreated.
It's a trap, the trap, all over again.
And this time he knows he should be glad, he should be grateful, he should rejoice that he has no enemies that he must use it against.
And he is happy. But not wholly. In a more hollow way.
He knows that he is happy. The rebellion succeeded. Not Snow, not even Coin controls him now. He has everything he always ever wanted.
Happy is what happens when everything you always wanted happens, isn't it?
He's not one to concern himself with a definition of happiness, though. He never tries to dwell on anything intangible, something that can't be taken apart and reconstructed. He never knows where to start, always finds himself hanging in midair.
Like Wiress's words, always left hanging for him to tie into tangibility...
Never mind. He is happy. He is content. Panem is free. He is free.
Never mind about feelings, instincts. That was always her domain, not his.
~ooo~
She quickly releases her grip on the ax, letting it fly off, letting it dig itself into the bark of an already-dead tree. The whole forest is dead. Trees lie strewn everywhere, defeated; a few scattered strong ones stand, just a shell but still standing.
She scowls when she thinks that those trees are a symbol of what she has become.
Strong, tough, silent, hollow.
And she knows that she should be glad, she should be grateful, she should rejoice that not all the trees have been knocked down, that she herself has not been defeated and never will be.
And she is happy. Kind of. She doesn't like it, though.
Because it's much more complicated than just "happy." Happy is how she should feel. And it's such a strange emotion to her that she immediately recoils at the thought and comes up with a thousand reasons why she shouldn't be happy.
And the things is, some of those reasons feel completely right.
She knows that happy is more than just a victory, more than just being alive. The Hunger Games taught her that. It's the same situation, only twisted so that she had allies. Again she recoiled at the term "ally," because so many of them turned against her, and so many she had turned against...
She had only survived this, only won this, so she couldn't possibly be happy, could she?
She pulls the ax out of that tree and hurls it with all her might at a hollow, standing sheel of a tree.
She fells it in one stroke.
~ooo~
She rocks back and forth, adjusting her arms around her little child, her little sea angel. Humming a song, she watches as the child opens his eyes.
She catches her breath as she looks at their sea-green eyes and remembers who they belong to.
Those are Finnick's eyes, and this is Finnick's baby. She hugs him tighter.
She should be glad, she should be grateful, she should rejoice for oh, so many reasons. Rejoice that the snake-man and the ice-woman are gone from their lives. Rejoice that she has been deemed "stable" enough to take care of Finnick's little baby. They say it's hers, but it's really Finnick's. He told her so herself. "Annie, you have to take care of my baby Shoal, all right?"
And she was happy. Happy that they could all be together, Finnick, her, and Shoal, and that the horrible visions would go away when they were together.
That's what she said when they asked her what she was so happy about. They had had to explain what happy was to her. "A good feeling," the doctor said.
But she didn't feel a good feeling all the time. It was always there, the fear, always sneaking back. It almost made her drop the baby the last time. But she had a duty to be happy. For Finnick.
"Annie, are you happy? Be happy for me, Annie, please."
How could she say that she wasn't happy when, because of Finnick, she had to be?
She told Finnick one day that she wasn't happy, that she was scared and sad and angry, but that she had to be happy because everything was perfect. She had a good feeling and a bad feeling, was that possible.
Finnick said he didn't know. She didn't see Finnick again for a month.
She asked the nice man who had come to visit her, the one who made inventions, who made thing whir and twist the shirt, what happy was and why she wasn't it. His face had turned sad. He was thinking about it, he told her. Like Finnick, he didn't know.
She asked the woman who had come to visit, the one with the short brown hair and the eyes that were angry and hollow like hers. She didn't understand. She told me what happy wasn't. It wasn't when you win, it wasn't when you live to see another day.
She said that you couldn't be happy if you weren't living, either. And then she walked out.
The next people who came to see her were the girl with the arrows and the boy who made the cake. They said that happy was when you were with someone you loved, doing something you loved. Annie wasn't sure.
She ran down to the water, leaving Shoal with the arrow-girl. She wanted to swim, swim, swim, back to Finnick, back to a time where they could be happy together, whatever happy was. She wanted to swim back to the old District Four and away from this world, which was just another arena, another place to drive her mad.
Madness, she knew, was no happiness.