A/N: H︎ello, hello! Not much to say here, just wanted to give a quick update within an update as to the status of this story.

I'll be starting my (hopefully) last year on campus in a lil over a week from now, and juggling two jobs and 6 classes will probably kill me. So with that said, after this chapter one of two things could happen: either a full blown hiatus will take place until winter break relinquishes the hell grip university will have on my suffering soul, or I'll do very sparse updates here and there.

(There's also the possibility I'll kick myself into gear and stick with a consistent upload schedule, so let's hope for that one because why not? Goals are important and all that.)

I WILL NOT give up on this story though - it's my baby and I want to see it to the end. So do with that what you will, I suppose.

Anyway, happy reading!

-Em

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As morning light slingshots through the trees in thick, golden chords, Finnick is still fast asleep.

They were going on day two of Finnick's unconscious state since running into the Fae folk, and Anneyce would be worried if not for the steady rise and fall of his chest, like a reassuring metronome.

She had spent the day prior letting him rest as she prepped their camp for what she would assume to be a somewhat extended stay. They had landed themselves into a biome of towering redwood trees; setting camp up next to a trio of the monstrous conifers, settling in the nook they created, like a natural tent. Directly ahead of them, a small river cuts through the paths of the giants as if parting the forest, and winks under the steady growing morning light.

Anneyce had used the first day of Finnick's slumbering to prep and start a fireplace, and took stock of their remaining food supply, attempting to scour the circumference of the area for more. She was pleased to find a relatively large berry bush not too far from camp, and a peak over the bank of the river showed the darting bodies of medium sized trout, should they need something of more sustenance.

Coming up on day two, sitting beneath the tree-tent with Finnick's steady breathing beside her, Anneyce was still kicking herself over the whole encounter. Even though he appeared to have made it out relatively in-tact, she should have been more thoughtful of her actions.

She had been vigilant of fairy rings while in Izzie's swamp, because the likelihood of one surrounded by those groves of mushrooms was inevitable. But she had let her guard down the further they went, and as they exited the clairvoyant's territory she figured they were in the clear.

And then they had walked right up to one.

Anneyce sits beside his sleeping form, her back propped against the biting bark of one of the trees. His face is peaceful in sleep, but she frowns at the sight of it all the same. He was too vulnerable here. She was supposed to be looking after him, but had failed multiple times; first with the vines, and now this. She had been too focused on finding weakened barriers that she wasn't paying attention to what was right in front of them.

It could have been worse.

In the pressure of the moment, she had tried to navigate the handful of rules that followed when interacting with the Fae folk. She was polite, she made sure they didn't exchange names, they didn't swap clothes, and neither of them received a gift or ate anything of theirs.

But her main goal was to keep Finnick from entering the ring, for once he started dancing there was nothing that would stop him. He would dance until his feet were stumps, or he died from exhaustion.

And she had been fighting her own desire to join as well. Though the call was not as strong as it was for Finnick, she knows if she had stepped foot in the ring herself, she wouldn't have had the power to save both of them.

It really could have been incredibly worse.

But she left them with a song, and had been so dizzy in her exhilaration of it all she made the mistake of thanking them for the dance – a gesture that could lead to more trouble later. Saying "thank you" to Fae folk only meant that you'd owe them for something later down the line. That, piled on top of the fact they had mentioned that they would be keeping an eye out for another song, only reads trouble for Finnick and herself at a distant point.

She can't do anything now but keep a sharper eye out, for the both of them.

Anneyce spends most of the morning sitting with Finnick, stewing in her stupid mistakes, but by the time afternoon rolls around she decides she needs to get up and do something productive. She tries not to wake him as she rises, weary of disturbing him from sleep, not sure what kind of state he'd be in if she interrupted his body's natural way of fending off the remnants of the Fae encounter.

Starting up another fire, she set to work boiling the river water out of a tin can Izzie had given them, to save for drinking later. While the fire crackles and the can begins to heat up, she takes to the river, balancing herself over the large, slick rocks along the bed. The current is gentle against her legs, and she hikes the cuffs of her pants up in frustration, trying to keep them from soaking. She had learned early on that, though already deeply uncomfortable and restricting while dry, wet clothes only amplified the unpleasantness on skin.

Eventually, she gets so frustrated that she strips them off, rolls them into a ball, and tosses them towards the shore, careful to keep them from landing in the water. The long shirt hems just above her knees in a makeshift dress, but it was already miles easier to work with the new arrangement. Balancing on the balls of her feet, she keeps as still as possible, bent at the knees and hovering inches over the water, waiting.

It takes a little while, but she manages to catch a trout and toss it to shore, wincing while she does. She hates taking a life like that, but while she can live off of a relatively vegetarian diet a lot longer than this, she knows as a human, Finnick relies on a lot more protein. Besides, there wasn't much in the way for sustenance in the vegetation of the ever changing forest – it was hard to live strictly off of roots, bark, berries, and whatever meager fruit they stumble across.

Anneyce missed the community garden back home. She missed tomatoes, and cucumbers, and squash, digging up golden potatoes, and bell peppers so big they tumbled from her arms while she carried them to the grocer's space, the large "market" the nymphs would use to shop for their produce. She missed morning tea with Johanna, and honey, and the peaches picked from the tree behind Johanna's house.

She missed home.

But at the same time, with a backward glance at the sleeping human yards away, she didn't. She didn't want to go back yet, not if it meant Finnick wasn't safe. And mulling that fact over, something settles the homesickness in her heart. The pang isn't as strong.

She gets into the rhythm of fishing, trying to remember the best way of going about hand fishing from the handful of times she's done it in the Colony. They rarely ate meat, but for special occasions and ceremonies they liked to fish and find birds for a big feast. They always thanked the animals for their meat, and it felt less like raw hunting, and more like appreciating the Great Gardens for the provisions. They would have done something similar for Finnick's arrival, had it not been so abrupt and secret until the very last minute.

She misses more trout than she catches them, but she does make it to three more catches after the initial one, tossing the fourth to shore without much thought, her mind already honing in on the next glistening body beneath the tinted water.

"Watch where you're throwing those things." A hoarse voice cut through her concentration, and she almost falls over into the water with the momentum of her quick turn towards the source of the sound. Finnick sits upright against the tree, his eyes sleepy and his hair mussed, but very much awake. Just before his foot, her last trout flops haphazardly; she had thrown it far and straight towards him without really noticing.

"You're up!" Anneyce splashes through the bed and tumbles to shore, looking for the water canteen. "How do you feel?" She asks, sinking down beside him to hand him the water.

"Like a boulder rolled over me in my sleep." He takes a long, long swig with slow movements. He almost tips the canteen over when he drops his arm, hanging almost limply by his side. She takes the container from him, recaps it, and sets it to the side. "But incredibly well-rested."

She reaches up, feels his forehead and cheeks with the back of her hands for a fever, but finds nothing. "You were out for a day and a half."

"Felt like five minutes." His entranced eyes linger on her mouth, his expression somewhat ghosted into the one he had carried moments after they escaped the Fae encounter. Whatever spell her voice had over him appears to linger still. It makes her stomach flop nervously. She hopes it wears off soon.

"Can you move okay?" She says quietly, sitting back on her heels.

He tests his feet, clenches and unclenches his fists, and rolls his head. With a shrug, he smiles. "Yeah. I'm just really drowsy."

"Well, take it easy, but try to keep moving." She advises, and then scoots their canvas bag close to him. "And try to eat something."

"Aye-aye, captain." He murmurs groggily, and then leans over to dig through the bag.

"Eat the rest of the stew, if you can." She says, rising to her feet to scoop up the now dead fish at his feet.

Walking over to the fire, she tentatively scoots the boiling water to the side to cool, and set to work skinning the trout with one of the small knives Johanna had thought to pack away for them, while he works on the last of the stew, sipping it down from the can. Anneyce has to stop herself more than once from humming, a default action for her when she's doing busywork. She's afraid what something as small as humming a tune would do to Finnick at the moment.

"That was clever, what you did." He says, after a moment of content silence.

"It didn't feel very clever." She mumbles over her shoulder, half to him, half to herself. "Look at you now."

"I'm not dancing with deranged pixies." He shrugs, setting down the empty stew can. She looks fully at him, and his eyes still glisten in that taken way, narrowing in on her lips. He stays steady, though; doesn't sway like the night before. "That counts for something, right?"

"I suppose." She relents, but she still privately ferments in her own regrets. If she had been even a touch more vigilant, it wouldn't have happened at all, and no words of reassurance could change her mind on that front.

Eventually, he rises to his feet, swinging out his arms and stretching on his toes. Shucking off his shirt, he works his way to the river, splashing water over his face, and squatting over the embankment to rinse his arms and chest.

And then he starts fishing.

What she had just been struggling to do moments earlier seems to come to him with ease. Aside from one or two shaky starts as he battles the drowsiness in his movements, he doesn't miss a single fish that brushes by him; Anneyce would be convinced they all but swim right into his waiting hands if she hadn't just been struggling to fish for them moments before.

They settle into a rhythm of it; as they flop to shore, she works to skin and debone them. She's slow, though, not used to so much hunting and skinning, and after his 6th catch he settles down next to her to help prepare the meat. She's enraptured, forgetting her actions and just watches his steady movements as he quickly descales the fish with swift, precise movements.

Eventually, he notices her staring, and smiles. "You need something, Annie?"

She flushes, embarrassed by her gawking, but the statement flits passed her lips without much thought. "You're very good at all of this."

"Where I'm from, fishing is a heavy commodity." He explains with a shrug, his eyes flitting back down to the trout in his hands. "I grew up doing this." He flexes his hands, eyeing their greatly uneven meat piles, and then her, mischievously. "It's been a while, though. I'm kind of rusty, don't you think?"

She laughs, and his pupils dilate a moment. He's quiet for a beat, just watching her lips again in that dazed, spellbound way. She watches wearily as he clears it out with a small shake of his head, and continues working on the fish in his hands.

"So, there are a lot of rivers where you're from?" She asks, pointedly ignoring the last sequence of events.

"It's all ocean." He says and her confusion is so loud he looks up to meet her quizzical expression. "You know, saltwater?"

"You don't know what the ocean is?" He prods, at her continued silence.

"I know it's like a large pond." She says, cheeks heating up with more embarrassment. "We don't have the ocean here, though. At least, not around the Great Gardens."

She'd heard bits and pieces of the different environments from his world. Large, thousand foot tall rocks called mountains, so tall their peaks are painted in snow. Rolling hills interrupted by flat plateaus, and areas where the land borders miles of water.

Her world is so invested in forest, in which large plots of cleared out land are scarce, and she's never really heard of anything close to resembling the ocean.

He chews his cheek, mulling that over. "Well, you're in for something new when we get to District 4."

A twinge of excitement flits through her belly and she smiles at him. "I look forward to it."

And she was. Anneyce was incredibly curious to see his world. She had never given much thought to viewing the human world until now that she was about to dive headfirst into it. She never had much reason to – it wasn't a big topic in the Colony, and she was too busy living and flourishing in the Great Gardens to really care about the world outside of her own.

But now that she was about to enter the human world, her mind was buzzing with all new questions. What does it look like? Smell like? Could it be much more different than this place, where she's lived her whole life?

But there were things about Finnick's world that were still mysterious; elements of his day to day life he was keeping under lock and key. She's seen snippets of it in his mannerisms, his confusion about the mechanics of the Great Forest, and in his desperation to stay.

"I have no where else to go." That's what he said to her. Before he wound up here, he was on the run from his world. It was something that circled her mind for the past few days, but she never found the courage to ask what he meant by it. What could he be running from?

And all the same, there was another detail about him that remained equally perplexing. Izzie had kept calling him the winner: the "65th Winner." Anneyce tried to figure out what that meant, again too nervous to ask him outright about it. His reaction to be called that was always tense, elastic held taut. So she never pressed him on it, figuring it was something he'd share in due time.

But now she's thinking maybe before they even cross over, they needed to clear the air. At least, in order to prepare her for what was to come.

What were they about to walk into?

It eats at her as they finish their fishing. It digs under her skin as she watches Finnick prep the fire and cook the fish, leaving a few trout aside to dry out for travel under the smoke of the burning fire as the sun dips away behind the trees.

They eat in silence as she stews in her own head. She's trying to find the best way to bring it up, not wanting to upset him. There are moments where she thinks she's found a window, but then he yawns or starts chattering about the trout and Izzie's house and the ever changing forest scenery, and she can't stomach puncturing his good mood. Not after going through the Fae encounter ordeal.

Anneyce finds footing to do it when they've decided to call it a night, laying under the redwood trees. It's arguably not the best time. She can hear him starting to doze away next to her, but it sets her into a quick panic, and she starts talking before she can stop herself.

"Hey, Finnick?" She says, and he's quiet and she's afraid he's already asleep. But after a moment he rolls over to look at her quizzically.

"Did you say something, Annie?" His voice is hazy with sleep, and guilt pinches her gut as whatever bravado she had seconds ago dissipates into smoke.

"Sorry." She whispers. "I didn't mean to wake you. It can wait."

He rolls onto his back, splaying one hand across his chest and tucking the under his head, like a pillow. He yawns a heady yawn. "Eh, I figured I probably slept enough anyway."

"I don't want to pry." She says, and that piques his curiosity. One of his eyebrows lift, a comma on his face goading her to continue talking.

"I just...I wanted to know more about your world. About Panem." She whispers, feeling self-conscious and guilty. She wasn't sure what she was guilty about at this point, though.

He's quiet a moment, and when he finally does speak, there's the smallest hint of a strain to his voice. "There's not much to it."

She nods, fully prepared to leave it at that. Go back to bed. Try to forget the nagging in her head. It'd be easier for both of them. He obviously didn't want to talk about it, so why force him?

But something in her was whispering for her to goad him on, get some kind of answers. She knew she'd feel restless if she didn't, even though she currently felt like she was toeing the edge of a cliff.

"If that's the case," she says slowly, softly, "why did you run away?"

He closes his eyes, takes a smooth, deep breath. She watches his chest rise and fall with the action, the white of his shirt a beacon, a cloud. Above them, a cacophony of forest sounds. Small birds and insect noises bounce off the trees, rustling the leaves and bending branches.

"I didn't exactly come from a happy community." He lies in the bed of pine needles and Anneyce rolls to her side, listening with rapt curiosity. He looks up at her movement, regarding her with a serious expression, before closing his eyes. "It was dangerous where I came from. My decisions weren't my own. I ran because I had no choice."

"No choice?" She echoes.

Finnick opens his eyes to study her for a moment, before turns to face her, propping his head up with his arm. "It was either run away, or be killed."

Anneyce sucks in a breath in surprise, her eyes wide in horror and sadness. She knew it was bad, but she didn't think it was that bad. She almost reaches out, to touch his face, horrified that anyone would ever want to harm him. She feels the sensation of protectiveness for him – a sudden flash of white-hot anger at those he had been running from.

"Why would they kill you?" She hopes the anger she feels doesn't seep into her tone, but her voice is tight when she speaks.

Finnick smiles softly, sadly. "Annie, where we are going it's, well, things are bad." He frowns. "I don't want to frighten you but..." He stops, as if his mouth were plugged.

"Tell me," she whispers, reaching out to hold his free hand into hers.

And so he does.

With a dissociated voice, he tells her of the Capitol, and how they work the twelve Districts to near starvation. He tells her of the yearly reapings, and the Hunger Games, and his own bittersweet victory, at the tender age of only 14.

Izzie's voice shuffles through her head at that part. 65th Victor.

He tells her about President Snow's intentions of his Victors – how Finnick, with his sun-strung hair and beautiful green eyes, had fallen victim once again to the Capitol's greed.

He tells her of his many long years in prostitution; of his downfall in agreeing in the beginning costing him the lives of his entire family, of how Snow was determined to engulf every piece of him: innocence, mind, and now body. He tells her of all his secrets, whispered to him in the throws of tryst and passions, and of the Quarter Quell, and how he had no choice but to go; to leave the woman who had all but raised him after his family's murder, destined to find an unknown place in an unknown destination.

It takes a long time to talk through it all. Hours. But he tells her every grimy, gritty detail, and by the end of it all she can feel nothing but the tremors in her body and the tears spilling through her eyes.

Oh, Finnick.

"There was no chance of my name not being called that day." His voice is stone, as he references the Quarter Quell. "Snow knew all about the secrets I had harbored against him over the years. He was going to throw me into the arena, no doubt about it. And he was going to make sure I never made it out."

She does not speak, unsure how to answer past the quiver of her body and her own despair. She feels nothing but sorrow and guilt.

Immense, crushing guilt, threatening to stomp her away and burry her in the very dirt she lay in. The Colony was no better than the man – this Snow – who held him hostage all these years, who took away his choice for his own selfish greed.

Her people were no better.

Greedy, greedy lips...

"Oh, Finnick," the tears bleed down her lips, and she hiccups against the negative space in her chest. All those hands on him...those lips...against his will...

Her fault, all her fault...

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." She repeats it over and over, a mantra, until he shushes her gently.

"No, no." He murmurs. "Not your fault, never your fault. You've helped so much, Annie. So much. You're not like them."

Her heart breaks even more at his last statement.

Not like them.

Who are "them," at this point in the road? Does it matter?

She thinks of the Colony and all she sees is home, friends, warmth. A community – her family. But are they no better than the Capitol? Are they no less bloodthirsty? No reasoning can undo the pain they've inflicted. All of them. All of her.

And then, amidst all of it, a selfish, horrifying thought occurs to Anneyce.

She'd rather they all died than give this human man another night in shackles. She wished the Great Gardens sucked them dry, if only it meant that Finnick wouldn't have had to endure a single night in their damaging company. That no human would have had to, ever again.

Anneyce doesn't even realize she's crying loud, horrendous sobs until the sound of her own voice scares her.

Through the blurs of her tears, Finnick's face is panicked, unsure of how to help or what to make of it, but she doesn't know how to explain it to him; this sudden, hallowing sadness she feels. All at once, in a floodgate of emotion, she's mourning the Colony that she thought she knew. Mourning him and his pain. Mourning the citizens of his world – of Panem. Mourning herself and her mother.

Mourning her father.

God, they were monsters. All of them.

All of her.

Strong arms snake around her shoulders, pulling, pulling her close until her head tucks against his shoulder. She clings to him then, like a life vest, and rips the sobs in her chest onto the thin fabric of his shirt. Finnick doesn't speak, only occasionally shushes her when the crying reaches higher crescendos. He starts rubbing circles on her back, and when that seems to curb some of the crying noises from her, he continues the motion relentlessly.

And then, with the tears still flowing the worn down tracks of her cheeks, she falls asleep in the cocoon of his arms and washed away in her mourning.