Finnick raised his eyebrows. "Oh dear," he admonished, though she could hear humor in his voice. "That was very clumsy of you."
"I know," she confessed. She had to clamp her hand over her mouth to stifle a hysterical giggle. "I can't believe I did that."
"Well you did…Now what?"
She floundered back to him, feeling as drunk as he had been when she sat back down across from him. Her heart was pounding and her blood felt thick in her veins.
Finnick leaned back and studied her, bringing his half empty glass to his lips and sipping slowly.
It was dark enough now that she could see their reflections through the glass. "You never answered my question...?" She said, breaking the silence some time later.
He looked at her blankly.
"When do you think we'll get home?"
Taking another long draft of his drink he said, "Tomorrow, mid-morning. They'll slow the train soon so we can keep to the victory tour schedule. People will need to be assembled, crowds cajoled, camera's rolling."
She could see his personality darken by the second. "Are you sad that you had to leave Virgilia behind?"
He choked on the gulp he had just taken. "No!" He said with finality.
"I'm excited to get home," she confessed. "I want to see my sister again. I'm even excited to see the orphanage again."
Finnick looked at her warily. "You realize you'll have a house in the victor's village now, everyone—the capital—expects you to live there." Annie lowered her head, she hadn't been expecting that. In a way she had hoped that things would go back to the way they were before. "I knew your parents were dead, forgive me if I never offered my condolences before now, but I don't recall it ever being mentioned that you have a sister…"
"She's not my real sister," Annie confessed dejectedly. "Not by blood, anyway. Her name's Myrna, we grew up together, shared a room at the orphanage. People have been calling us 'the sisters' for as long as I can remember and it just stuck."
"I see." His glass was empty now, but he studied its emptiness like it could reveal a thousand secrets to him.
Annie thought of going home, a notion that had thrilled her, and kept her going since she woke up back in the capital bedroom, suddenly, strangely branded a winner. She thought of Ril, though she kept the images of his final moments at bay. Instead she concentrated on memories of him after the reaping; his excitement about training, his skill at swimming and knife throwing, and the alliance they had formed.
"Does it ever get…?"
"…Better?" He finished for her.
"I still can't believe it. I feel like this," she gestured to the train car, and all the opulence around them, "all of this, is just as much of a nightmare as the games were."
He spoke very softly. "I want to be here for you, Annie. I want to help you. But you need to understand…" he didn't finish.
She pitched her voice into a whisper, feeling like a million ears were listening to them now. "Understand what?"
Finnick's look spared her nothing. "You're a winner now." He spoke with absolute finality. "But soon, eventually, you'll be a survivor. Just a survivor."
"A survivor?" she echoed. "What does that mean? What's the difference?"
He gave her a simple, lopsided grin, and in that look she could see the child he must have been once. All she knew of him was the mentor she had meet on reaping day. The boy winner who had defeated so many and had gone on to capture the hearts of everyone in the capital. Even though he was only a few years older than her, she couldn't remember a time when she didn't feel proud to be from the same district as Finnick Odair. "I don't know, Annie. I'm still trying to figure it out myself."
He stood, the empty glass hanging limply in his hand. His voice was drained. "Try to sleep… You should sleep now. Tomorrow—" he sighed deeply, "—tomorrow will be a big day."
She tried, but sleep wouldn't come. After Finnick left and she found herself alone in the train car, she found it hard to get up and face her room. The artificial room that held nothing that was hers—even the clothes had been supplied by the capital. Even the deep forest green gown she'd worn all day wasn't her own. Fingering the hemlines of the ribbed bodice and the flared skirt she thought that the dress itself, however slight and inconsequential, was like a prison of some kind. She imagined what Ril would have been doing now, had he lived, or even still, what his family would be doing when it was she, and not their son who stepped off the train. A victor; although now crownless.
Like Finnick himself, Annie didn't know much about Ril, other than the fact that he was older than she was. She knew this would have been his last year to be reaped, and that he had a family. Although she had never stopped to ask if he had a large family—many brothers and sister? Maybe only one or two? Were both of his parents still alive?
A parent was something that Annie herself had never known. She had no memories of any family other than then the ward sisters at the orphanage and Myrna, her best friend. The only details she had were a set of names: Margaret Cresta and Jeremy Cresta on a birth certificate, that they had both worked aboard a fishing vessel, and that both had died of drowning.
With a shock, she realized that the knowledge of their deaths hadn't affected her when she had nearly drowned. Their faces, or the gruesome knowledge of their own demise hadn't been among her last thoughts. At the time, she only wanted it to end. The pain, the games, even her life. Annie wondered now, if they had seen images of her, their infant daughter, before their own deaths, or if it had been too quick for any other that.
By the time dawn broke, pink and warm blue in the sky, she was still awake in the train car. She watched in silent relevance as they crossed the barrier from district 2 and finally pass into her home district. The train did slow, as Finnick had told her it would, and she felt them veer west toward the coast.
When the train car door swished open behind her, she didn't turn around, but she knew it was Finnick. She heard him saunter to the bar and pour himself another tumbler filled with whatever strong liquid he had partaken in the night before and he approached her with a skeptical smirk. "I had a feeling you wouldn't get any sleep."
Annie squinted up at him. He looked refreshed and clean. Better than he had the night before when he had left her with haggard eyes and a slack jaw. She wondered if he had taken one of the capital supplied sobering tablets.
"We'll be home in less than an hour." His tone was soft, but professional, lacking the warmth and comradely she had seen the night before. "Are you going to change? If not you should at least pour a bit of water on your face. I'm going to go check on Mags, she always has a hard time with things like this."
Annie looked up. "Things like what?"
"Coming home without someone, though usually we're coming back to face the families alone. This is the first time in a long time that we're bringing anyone back home with us."
"Oh." She didn't know what else to say.
"This is the fifth games that I've acted as mentor with Mags… it never gets easier… and as for Mags, before me, she had to do this all by herself too many times."
He patted and squeezed her shoulder, than left her.
They pulled into the station with a screech of metal wheels and the roar of the crowds that had been forced into the square by peace keepers.
As winner, Annie exited the car first, with Finnick and Mags closely behind her. Annie noticed that Mags had let her hair stay wild and uncombed as it had the night before when she removed the ornate hairstyle. She smiled at the tiny rebellion, and hoped that the cameras saw only gratitude at her homecoming.
Finnick pulled at her arm. "First you have to give a speech, than a quick satellite interview for the capital, than we can go home."
Home, she wondered. But her old home at the orphanage, or her new mansion in the victor's village?
A panicked moan made Annie look up. "Finnick!" The crowd parted ever so slightly for a thin woman to maneuver to the front of the crowd. "Please, Finnick! Please…!" The woman was crying, her face was hard and weather-beaten behind the track marks of her own desperation. Her sweater was threadbare and faded to a dull red. She had blond curls that were tied back behind her head, but several wild stands had escaped to twirl around her shoulders. "Finnick!" she yelled again.
"Who is that?" Annie asked. At first she assumed it was just another of his adoring female admirers. She remembered Virgilia at the train station, and wondered if Finnick kept an older woman in love with him wherever he went, but then she noticed the resemblance. The blond curls, and something in the eyes, and the set of their jaws.
"Is that your mother?"
Finnick tightened his hold on her arm and guided her farther down the crowd line. "She's no one."
Annie could hear the woman's strangled weeping as Finnick dragged her away.