Chapter 26 - Finnick and Annie
Annie
He's dead.
She's dead.
Everyone's dead.
Am I?
Even as a flying robot comes and lifts me into the air after Claudius Templesmith's announcement, I'm still shaken with grief and terror. The water pulled me so hard, I was sure I would go under.
Drowning didn't seem so bad at the time.
It wasn't as bloody as decapitation.
Something goes around my wrists, locking them into place and I feel trapped. I'm swelled with panic and begin shaking – fighting – to be released. Where are they taking me?
"LET ME GO!"
A figure hovers over me, dressed in black and I feel hands restrain me.
"She's the crazy one." I hear a male voice say. "You'll have to sedate her. Who knows what she's capable of…"
"No!" I plead, my eyes still unable to make out the figures, "You can't….i'm not…." I'm rendered speechless by the feeling of a needle in my forearm, and then the world goes black.
I stir awake to the sound of a door shutting.
Where am I?
I try to lift my head but am instantly plagued with nausea. My arms feel heavy and sore, but when I look at them, I see that they're clean. I blink – making sure I'm not hallucinating again – and my sight is satisfactorily confirmed. I'm suddenly proud with myself. Finally, I see things that are really there. Maybe hallucinating was just something I had picked up in the arena. It always had ways of messing up your brain.
I inspect the rest of my body, or as far as I can see by gently craning my neck up off the pillow. My body looks the same way it did after the first day of being in the Capitol; it was perfect. For the first time, I realize what's happened: I won.
I was the victor of the seventieth Hunger Games!
I'm back and soon I'll be reunited with my family and friends back in District Four, erasing this all from my mind. I'll have Finnick to help. I look down at my arms and legs again, both clamped in metal. But then why am I trapped? Why hasn't anybody come to see me yet? Why isn't Finnick here?
I cringe with a pulse-pounding, aching desire to see Finnick again. Where is he? He would make them release me.
Within the hour, after having found nothing else to do but stare at the ceiling in an effort to push down the claustrophobia, a woman in white comes into the room.
"Annie? How are you feeling?" she says in a feeble voice.
She seems scared. I don't know why she should be scared of me. it would make more sense if I were scared of them.
"I want to see my family." I demand with shortening patience, "I want to be released from this." I motion towards the metal.
"I'm afraid you can't see your family yet." She said, plastering on a forced smile. "But I will release you, if you promise to settle down. Can you do that for me, Annie?"
She's looking at me like if I'm a crazed wild animal who can, at any moment, snap her body in two. I wasn't. I'm just a girl. "Yes."
The woman turns around and lets in another figure in white, this one seemingly male.
"Okay." Her voice is cautious as she rears my bed, "I'm going to start over here. Is that okay?"
I nod, deciding not to tell her about the pounding headache in fear that it would delay my release. I listen to the tapping on a keyboard and then my left arm snaps loose. I pull it up to my face to make sure there's nothing else restraining it. Now my right arm is free.
My arms look better than they did before I was enlisted to the Games. the Capitol had a way of making it all look glamorous, as if winning the Games were the highest honor you could bestow upon your District and partly, it was true. Now, I would be back home welcomed a hero with food for everyone. Not to mention, my new house in the Victors Village. A thought hit me and I felt my insides bubble excitedly. Finnick lives in the Victors Village.
"Can I see my mentors?"
"Afraid not." Her voice was slow. "Soon enough, though."
Then they were both out the door, slamming it shut and leaving me back in the seclusion of the room that was too white and the red that kept splattering my vision.
More blood.
Finnick
It's been eleven hours since Annie was brought back to the Capitol and incarcerated to her hospital room, which in fact wasn't a hospital room at all. It was an observation cell in the heart of the Capitol, right under the supervision of President Snow and his misconstructed scientists and doctors. I didn't like it. How could I trust these people with Annie? Mags had been beside me up until a few minutes ago, dutifully supporting me as I took my first steps into the room. Upon my silence, she had left me to be alone.
I thought it would be easier to have Annie closer. That as soon as I'd seen her here, I could feel better in knowing I would nurse her to health. But It's the hardest thing I've ever had to watch – even harder than it was on television – because Annie has gone from a witty and naive teenager to a haunted young woman with death in her eyes and visions of things that aren't really there. I watch as she brings her head in between her arms and tucks it into her chest. Her shoulders shake and I feel nothing more than the overwhelming impulse to rush to her but there's this stupid glass wall and the Doctor carefully watching me from the corner of his steely eyes.
"Is she going to get better?" I ask, my voice cracking.
The doctor is like a rock in a lake of rippling water, unaffected by my grief and the terror in my voice. "Perhaps. If her mind can ever recover from the sights that have so dramatically traumatized her."
"Perhaps?" I snap, utterly bewildered. "Perhaps? Is that all you can tell me? After everything this girl has been through, this is all you can promise of her recovery?" my hand is pointed dangerously towards him as if I could at anytime use it as a trident.
The Doctor takes a step back, rolling his eyes in a way so inconspicuous he didn't think I'd notice. "Mr. Odair, I'm prescribing some medication. There's a chance for recovery but no one knows how long it can take: weeks, months, even years."
An icy hand plows into the recesses of my stomach."Years?"
"The Games have muddled her perception on real and imaginary." He nods, " has taken to sinking into memories or, I'd like to think, happier moments of her life while she was at the arena. It isn't uncommon for some tributes to do it, but she's taken it harder than the others. We believe her witnessing two deaths might have –"
"Might have?" I scowled. And this man called himself a doctor?
He continued. "Both of the male tributes had a relationship with her. Most always suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but after a few sessions with our resident Therapist, it goes away. Her symptoms, though," he frowned, "are most unusual. We've been watching her and she's still re-living her last moments with Lucas and Alec."
"And that means?"
"We've never seen anything like it before."
Never seen anything like it before, meaning that they didn't care to fix it. It was just one girl after all. What did it matter if one mad girl went off to live in District Four and never be heard from again? Even though the doctor didn't say it, I could see it written all over his typical Capitol face. "But you'll do what you can?"
He nods his head before turning his attention to another man with something like a notepad, but nicer, in his hands. I know I'm not supposed to see her. I know it might delay her recovery (they warned me before walking in here). But she looks so helpless. She needs to see her family. She needs to see me, or I need to see her – but if I go one more second without her, I might be the one losing my head. I saunter out of the room, undetected, go down the steps and reach for the doorknob of the room she's enclosed. My heart is going so fast and it's so loud in my ears but I hear the click of the lock opening anyways, and so does she. Her sea-green eyes are out of the confines of her arms and looking straight at me, alert and aware of my presence. Her lips quiver in hesitation.
"Annie, it's –"
"FInnick!" She calls out, jumping off the bed and running directly into my open arms. "Finnick." She says into my chest and I feel the rapid beat of her heart and the broken breathing in her chest. I bring my arms around her tighter, the impact of her absence hitting me harder than it ever had these past five days. She's still repeating my name and I feel something wet seeping through my shirt.
I pull her face up to look at me. "Shh." I tell her, smiling and brining a hand up to her face. "Don't cry."
"I made it." She was telling me, her face desperate and pleading, "I p-promised you."
"And you came through." I said, feeling tears prickling at my eyes, "You made it, Annie. Everything's okay now."
Her fingers clung onto my shirt, "No it's not." She said, examining my face. "It won't ever be okay after this, will it?"
I wanted to argue, I wanted to tell her she was wrong and that everything would be okay. The truth was, however, we were both damaged. We were both scarred. She saw a dear friend decapitated and she accidently killed the other. No matter the counseling, or therapy, Annie would forever have those memories with her – regardless of how much she tried to shove them away.
I pulled her into me, rubbing her back and kissing the top of her head. "I'm here for you now."
"Don't leave me." her voice was small and laced with fear. The idea of being separated from me would drive her mad.
"Never." I said, because this time, it was my turn to make the promise. "I'll never leave you."
My gaze is on her and I see her head turn away. She's whispering something.
"What?" I ask her, pulling apart a little, "Annie?"
Her face is twisted in anguish and she keeps pointing and repeating something I couldn't understand. Suddenly, her hands are on her ears and she's forcing out the sound of the world around her, as if there was something I couldn't hear deafening her.
I fall down in panic beside her, shaking her shoulders and trying to regain her attention. "Annie, look at me." I plead, "Annie, please."
And then the doors slammed open behind me, and there was a person pulling me at the waist and someone pulling her by the arms.
annie
"Annie, it's going to be okay." Finnick is screaming desperately, trying to escape from the hands of the security guards, "Annie, I'm not leaving – I'm right here! Do you hear me?"
A man dressed entirely in white is coming at me, in his hands there's another needle. How many times were they going to sedate me? He holds it up in front of me, pushing the tip so that a clear fluid squirts out of the needle.
"Now, just relax." He instructs, his face covered in a white mask.
The needle comes down steadily, right at my neck and an image flashes. Lucas is running towards me, looking at me with concerned eyes when an axe comes down on his neck, slicing it in half. Blood spills everywhere.
"NO!" I scream frantically, throwing my hand up and knocking the needle out of the man's hand. "SAVE HIM!" I break into sobs, "s-save…s-save him!"
The man's angry and he barks orders to have another syringe prepared for him. He puts a hand over my mouth. "Annie, listen to me –"
"Don't touch her!" Finnick's voice cuts through, "Get your hands off her!" I see him punching one of the security officers and come a few steps closer before there are more men surrounding him, withholding him from helping me.
"Odair." Says the man with a pinch of irritation in his voice, "Can't you see she isn't right? She needs the sedative until we can figure out how to fix her."
Finnick's face goes red in fury. "She doesn't have to be fixed!" he cries out in frustration as one of the men holding him takes his hands and puts them behind his back. "She wouldn't have to be fixed if it wasn't for the fucking Hunger Games! That's what's made her mad!"
The Doctor has the syringe again and before I have a chance to react, the needle is on my neck.
"You really shouldn't have said that, Odair."
And everything goes black.
A/N: Sorry, I know this is kind of a hot mess of jumping POV's! And THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR OVER 200 REVIEWS! I have never had so many reviews in any other of my fic's so it means so much to me! I can't even explain how excited I am :D
As for this chapter, I know it's probably not the romantic reunion you were all expecting, but I figured that Annie would still be out of it after the Games so the next chapters are just going to be her dealing with it. And I was also thinking of fast-forwarding to Catching Fire or Mockingjay and writing a little bit on that. Anyone interested? x