Finnick Odair - The Games of Annie
I gave her up long before the end of these Games. It was hard enough to see her go, to see her struggle for survival, but it was even harder to see her lose her mind.
The moment she witnessed the decapitation of her district partner, the boy that was even younger than she was, even more innocent, in that moment I could see it in her eyes: emptiness, with a touch of crazy. In that moment, she had lost her true self and the Games had taken not only me, not only the boy laying bloody between the trees, not only all the hundreds of other tributes that were here before us, they had taken her as well, my Annie.
I lost my last piece of dignity together with her last piece of mind. I was only young back then, my Games were not that long ago, and being a mentor was getting too hard already, almost unbearable. I screamed and kicked and hit and destroyed fancy Capitol computers and scoffed on even fancier Capitol employees. It was too hard, inhuman, to see all those people I just befriended die in the most horrible ways you could imagine, but it was even harder to see my one and only love lose her mind.
President Snow came to personally warn me, I had to be the person I always was, the person everybody liked and everybody was used to. A slave to the Capitol. There was nothing more I could do than listen to him, because else it would have meant the end of Annie and probably every other tribute from my district. So I listened. And I watched.
I watched Annie die, little by little, until she could do nothing more than sit in a tree to wait for her physical end. I suffered with her. I could scream, I could almost jump through that screen to get to her, but I wanted her to die on her own terms, not that of President Snow.
Sponsors were scarce, but she did not eat anyway.
Other tributes never came looking for her. She had had a meltdown and somehow, everybody seemed to know and nobody could bring up the power to search her and kill her. To finish her suffering.
She had nightmares in her sleep and often woke up kicking and screaming and sweating. Sometimes she said my name, but then it was never more than barely a whisper. Seeing her slowly die was worse than dreaming of all the faces of tributes I had killed. Her dying was so slow, so agonizing.
Then the flood came and tributes started to drown.
The flood was not that strong, but it was high and there was no place to stay in touch with the ground. The districts left in these Games, were districts without a lot of water around. No seas or rivers, never an opportunity to swim.
But Annie, she swam.
A little of the life left in her came back in that water. And she swam. She swam for such a long time that everybody else drowned. And she survived. Poor, little Annie survived.
At first I was euphoric. She had won, I could have her back and we could start building our lives back up in district four.
Soon, I found out things would never be the same.
She was mentally broken. Her eyes kept seeing things from the past, dying tributes and decapitated bodies, but they never saw the present. Sometimes she would sit on the beach for hours, sometimes perfectly still, sometimes sobbing like a baby. Sometimes she wouldn't eat and sometimes she wouldn't shower, because the water reminded her of things I did not see.
My Annie never came back, she was still in that arena, still locked up in her Games and it would take her a long time to return, if she would return at all.
So I watched Annie die again, little by little, until only her physical remains were left.
It was then I realized it would have been better for her to die in the Games, so that she would never had to return to replay the scenes over and over again in her head.
I realized President Snow could have let her die back then.
I realized keeping her alive was only a way for President Snow to keep me in place. So that there would always be a way to suffer. So that there would always be a way to be reminded that it is not me who is in charge of my own life. Always a way to be reminded the Capitol is there.
Annie.
Poor, little Annie.
