Chapter Three
Where Annie is practically seen naked.
Annie refused to let go of Finnick's hand when the train pulled into the station. It went without saying that she was terrified of the Capitol, not fascinated and excited by it like Rayne was when he saw the skyline out the train window, and her mentor agreed to keeping by her side until she was safely inside the Remake Center. The reporters and photographers in the Capitol station had the same reaction to the pair holding hands as did the ones in District Four, only this time their accents were so disgustingly thick that Annie couldn't understand a word that they said. This made it easier on her, even though she knew they were positively ogling at her.
Someone nudged her shoulder, causing her to jump and hide half of her face behind Finnick's arm. "Pretty cool, huh?" asked Rayne, grinning. To Annie, it was as if the thoughtful boy on the train that was stressed over leaving his sister behind had been trapped in the mountains they passed through on the way into the city, unable to stick around. "I could get used to the attention."
Beside her, Finnick grunted, as if in disapproval of what he was saying. She had thought he was paying more attention to the cameras than to their conversation and was startled by his stern reaction. He grits his teeth and turns his face in the direction opposite of them, beaming at the cameras. Annie couldn't help but think he enjoyed the spotlight a little too much.
"I don't like it," whimpered the girl. She squinted, defending her eyes from the harsh flashes. "I don't like it at all."
Mags' frail, wrinkled hand dropped onto her shoulder. "You'll be fine," she assured, tongue fumbling over her lips awkwardly. The woman smiled, and for the first time Annie could see how many teeth she was missing. "A couple of training sessions with that boy and you'll be more than ready to face anything!"
She stole a quick glance up at Finnick before looking back over her shoulder at Mags. Annie knew that the woman was just trying to be nothing but nice to her, but she still housed this uneasy feeling in her gut. Training with Finnick. Annie wondered if there was a swimming pool in the Training Center or a knot-tying station or something that she was already good at, which wasn't much, so she didn't look stupid when she was training in front of him – though she doubted the odds of either. Otherwise, that meant her time would surely be spent sword fighting or learning to spear, which made her shiver just thinking about the nightmare. Annie didn't want to be expected to take people out with a trident in the Arena just because she was from District Four like Finnick. "I hope you're right," she said convincingly.
One Capitol reporter shouted notably loud compared to the others, and as if on cue, Finnick dropped Annie's hand. She nearly burst out of her skin in shock as his leanly muscled arm slithered around her waist. "Hands off, she's mine!" he called out playfully. Finnick laughed, smiling brightly. Annie's mouth fell agape; his laugh was melodious and nothing short of beautiful. It was like raindrops sprinkling on the waves, only deeper.
The trip through station to another cab was rather uneventful from then on. The four of them squeezed into the back, while Gossamer slid comfortably into the front passenger seat, where she ranted about the stress of the Games to the driver and the mentors. She insisted that Rayne and Annie shouldn't listen to her, that anything she said was irrelevant to them – which it was – and would only make them worry more. Still, it was difficult for Annie to sit back and pretend not to listen to her when Gossamer was screeching about how they wouldn't get a single sponsor because of the twins in District Eleven.
There were times when she was asked to do the same at home, to not listen. Once, when the Capitol came to dispose of some material in one of its underground chambers kept off of the bay and it kept everyone off of the boats for two whole months, her father had been upset because things were running scarce around the house. He couldn't afford food and wasn't sure how much longer the Capitol's project was going to last, so he called a meeting with their mother and sent all of the kids into the other room while they talked. Seeing as it was only a two room house with extremely thin walls, Annie overheard every word as she sat in silence in her crowd of brothers. The tension and stress of her parents first made her skin crawl, and then absorbed through and seemed to linger in her veins for days. It was the first time the girl ever felt so helplessly miserable and brought on a string of depressions unnatural for an eight-year-old. That had also been the first night she and Vance stole to the porch and he began to spout off at her about the Capitol. She learned the important lesson of keeping her mouth shut that night.
Finnick patted her knee, allowed his hand to rest there for a moment, and then began drumming his fingers over the cap. He was more playful than Annie ever expecting he would be. "I think that we have an effective strategy for you," he said.
She cocked her head as she turned to him, eyes questioning what he meant before her words did. "And what would that be?" asked Annie.
"What are you talking about, Finnick!" gasped Gossamer exaggeratedly, turning around in her seat to look at them. Her glittery eyes were wide with curiosity, much like a child's, and her penciled-on eyebrows were sharply raised.
"One of the reporters thought that I had wooed her," chuckled Annie's mentor lightly, playing off the intensity of what he had said. Finnick seemed so genuine with his words. "And, they might be right, maybe I have!"
"I swear, Finnick–" Gossamer drew out her words exasperatedly, inviting herself to be cut short. Yet, she acted surprise when Finnick spoke up.
"Really, Gossamer, what more can you ask for?" Finnick smiled.
Annie couldn't help but think of the girls in the Capitol that would be having a field day over that smile. It was quite incredible.
She seemed to consider this for a moment, spinning around to face forward slowly. "Yes." Gossamer paused. "Yes. Yes. Yes!" She grew more excited with every exclamation. "Finnick, that is positively brilliant! I can see it now, the two of you posing for the cameras, training together, and such. Do you know how cute it would be to show the press pictures of you teaching her to fight? The two of you sweaty, pressed together, madly in love…"
"What?" Annie shrieked. Her heart was sick with embarrassment. What was this woman thinking? What would people think of her for doing that? Her brothers? Her parents? "Mentors and tributes don't train together, anyway! It's against the rules!" She didn't really know, she was just babbling and that was the only rebuttal that came out coherent.
Finnick's careful fingers ran up and down her thigh, trying to calm her down as best he could. "Shhh," he hushed her reassuringly, though his voice was lost before it reached her. Her roaring heartbeat had created a throbbing wall in Annie's inner ear and blocked out all other sound. She was worked up beyond repair, he knew this by the heated look on her face, and she needed to come down from this herself. "I agree with you, Gossamer," said Finnick over Annie's meltdown. "But I don't think we have to take it that far."
"Oh, please, Finnick," sighed the woman, Capitol accent coating her words rather thickly so it sounded like she was drooling molasses. "If you want her to make it out of the Arena, we're going to do anything that we can. And it isn't like you have such a problem with–"
"Gossamer!" It was Mags' who sliced the woman's words short. The old woman's bony fingers gripped her cane tightly as it rested against her knee. "The poor girl is having an anxiety attack! We can talk about this later."
Annie's chest and shoulders rose and fell with every desperate breath she sucked in, lungs swelling to the point where it was painful. Her head was swirling with a mix of swimming thoughts and listening to her own heart racing. The girl was struggling to calm herself, and to make matters worse, she could hear her parents scolding her for being in such a relationship with Finnick. Logic was absent and unable to remind her that she would be dead before they would even think of how inappropriate it was for her to be treating her mentor in such a way. She clamped down on her bottom lip and stopped breathing, allowing her face to darken even redder and time to blot her tears away.
"I've seen her freak out like this before," said Rayne. One would immediately assume he was talking about the Reaping. "When our fathers' boat busted a few propellers on the rocks outside of the bay and they had to row themselves in. I suppose it came on over time, but she was throwing a fuss down on the docks waiting for them to get back."
Annie remembered that, but it was news to her that their fathers worked together. She had been so worried, so terrified that the boat would catch a drift and not make it back to the marina by morning. It had taken a straight hour of her mother brushing her hair to calm her down, when she was worried sick herself, before she was stable enough to wait out the three and a half more hours it would take before the boat docked. She looked to Rayne, who was too bulky to fit between Mags and Finnick but somehow fit anyway, whose bright eyes were lowered away from her.
She wiped her eyes, scolding herself for the meltdown. Annie knew she shouldn't have acted like that, but she couldn't contain it. The weight of the Games was settling on her shoulders and was now more real than ever, though she would never approve of pairing herself with Finnick anyway. "I'm sorry," she said.
Finnick shook his head. "No." His hand now rested again on her kneecap. "Gossamer is out of line."
The woman gaped at him, and then glared. She must feel awful being put in her place by a handful of teenagers. Annie had entirely forgotten Finnick was still a teenager until after that thought; his age just didn't fit his face. "Great," she hid her face away from them, "now I'm that bad guy."
Annie was glad that the cab pulled into the Remake Center garage before anyone had a chance to respond to that comment – because it was clear everyone was going to agree with that. Finnick dropped Annie's hand to help Mags hobble into the Center, so she hung towards the back of the group to wait for Rayne. It was still early in the morning, so throughout the city and even there, things were sluggish. She seemed to be the only one entirely awake.
"Excited for the parade?" asked Rayne with a grin. Every year, the tributes from each district have to parade around the Capitol and attend a repetitive speech given by President Snow under the premise that they are now Capitol celebrities. Annie's eyes dulled. "Guess not…"
"What happen to the boy worried sick about his little sister?" she asked curiously.
"I figure that I am going to have to start thinking like a Career if I am going to make it back to her alive," he answered. It dawned on Annie that they weren't teammates, despite how the Capitol painted that picture. She and Rayne were enemies, and he could very well be planning to kill her off himself. "Focusing on training is my best bet right now."
Annie was disappointed that he was going to turn into the typically heartless Career everyone already thought he was. Thought she was, too. The Games made innocent kids murderers, so her new predicament was figuring a way around that. She decided then and there not to make a single ally.
The five of them stepped into the polished elevator tucked into the cement wall of the garage. It was a first for Annie, who had never been in an elevator before – she didn't even think they had one in District four, where all of the buildings were hardly ever taller than one story. She noted that the elevator was bigger than her family's bedroom at home, something she would tell Vance if she ever got the chance. Annie had seen a lot of things driving through the Capitol that her brother would take an interest in. She watched Gossamer punch the number 4 button and immediately the elevator began whizzing upward. Her stomach did summersaults.
When the elevator doors slid open again, Annie's eyes feasted upon six smiling, plastically altered faces and an open floor with just windows for walls. She blinked several times, eyes adjusting to the excessive amounts of light pouring into the room. There were small vanities set up around in stations, a table here, another there. A fire on a bed of stone and enclosed with gleaming glass was the center of the floor. The simplicity was beautiful.
"Annie," said Gossamer, stepping to the front of the group. Her face was plastered with a smile. "This is your prep team, Ophelia, Faye, and Charmant. They're going to spruce you up before you meet with your designer for later."
Annie stammered. The elevator had already closed behind her and Finnick had bid her a hurried goodbye just as the doors closed. Rayne was being taken across the floor by his prep team and Gossamer had disappeared altogether. She stood there, frozen, staring into the plastic faces of her prep team. Her initial thoughts were not to like or trust them.
"Oh, look at this hair!" exclaimed Faye with bright eyes, a woman who wore her unnaturally golden hair tied on the top of her head, as she bounced over to Annie. Her pudgy fingers pawed at the ends, as if she was scared to touch it. "I can actually do something with this!"
And so hell commenced. Annie was instructed lie on one of the tables, where she would remain for the next several irritatingly still hours. The three had to first wax, pluck, and strip her of every unneeded hair on her on her body – which was everything from her eyebrows down. It was nice, to a point, because it also took off the layer of skin wrecked by her reaction at the Reaping, but left her feeling raw. While she was good at staying still for long amounts of time, it was a helpful skill the times when the cramped boat was crowded; it soon came time where she was fidgeting around, anxious to be able to get on her feet again. By the time that the prep team was done with her, Annie didn't recognize herself. Her hair had been trimmed, her eyebrows reshaped, and her skin cleared of nearly all blemishes. The only one that remained was a birthmark that was hidden in her hairline.
"I think Rea will be pleased with this," said Charmant, standing back to look at Annie. She just wanted to laugh at him. At home, he would never even pass as a human being with his blue hair spiked back and pink tattoos swirling up his throat. The quizzical expression that crossed his face only made it funnier.
"Yeah," agreed Ophelia. She was the one who looked most normal, her hair appeared to be its natural shade of blonde and her eyes as well, but she was still covered head-to-toe in a lacey pattern of tattoos. "But we had something to work with this year. Remember that monstrous girl last year? The one we could hardly tell was a girl at all?"
They shook their heads in agreement, remembrance. Annie was silent, unsure of how to respond. Of course she felt awful for what happened, the girl had been sliced open by a couple of mutts and eaten from the inside out, but she also remembered how she was mocked in the district for being so manly. Charmant pressed a bright orange button on the side of the table and they fell back into an awkward silence.
The doors burst open. Annie expected someone old trying desperately to look young, or so plastically altered that they were grotesque, but Rea met none of those pictures. Rea strut over to them in her metallic high-heels, lips pursed in a manor Annie could only call frustration. Her hair was flaming pink and eyeliner rimmed her brown eyes with the same hue. Her eyes were sunken in the way only growing up in the districts would leave them; even the Capitol's surgeons couldn't remove the trace from her eyes. As soon as she was standing over Annie, her lips spread into a smile.
"Hello, Annie," she greeted in a tone that was nothing but nice. Even her voice was lacking the Capitol accent, making Annie wonder. She also appreciated that the woman didn't automatically treat her like a corpse. "I'm Rea, your stylist."
"Hi," Annie returned, voice sounding stronger than ever since the Reaping. Even Finnick hadn't brought her voice back so well. She shifted uncomfortably under the woman's gaze but fought the urge to cross her arms over her bare chest.
The pink haired woman ducked for a moment, only to reach under the table and pull out a plush robe from the shelf below. She tossed it onto Annie. "Put this on," she said. "I want to talk with you."
Annie did as she was told and wrapped the robe around her shoulders, keeping her arms wrapped around her. She sat upright, eyes spinning for a moment as colors flashed before her. Even for living in District Four, she was exceptionally hungry. Annie didn't even feel hungry anymore, her stomach had stopped growling at her hours ago, and she knew she should have eaten more when they were on the train but no one blamed her for being so nervous. She slid off of the table and followed Rea to the farthest corner away from anyone on the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, Annie could see that Rayne was already meeting his stylist opposite of her.
"It's easy to see why you've caught Finnick Odair's eye," she breathed mischievously, eyes twinkling. Rea turned to stare out the window over the gleaming city, across the skyscrapers that still looked like something of fiction to Annie until the mountains shot out of the ground and created a wall around the Capitol. The innocent girl blushed intensely. "I saw pictures of your family when I was researching you and brushing up on district four, and I must say how striking the resemblance between you and your mother is."
"Thank you," murmured Annie absentmindedly. She was caught up in the whirling streets below, the swarming reporters crowding at the base of the Remake Center where tributes were still arriving. She wondered if they would be the one to kill her in the Arena.
Rea glanced at Annie, only to do a double take. The girl's eyes were so fixated on an unfocused point that the pink haired woman had to wonder if Annie was analyzing the particles swirling in the air. The designer was accustomed to dealing with the Careers that are nothing but excited to be in the Capitol, whereas this girl was taking it so much harder than anyone she had ever seen before. "So," she said, clapping her sculpted hands together, quick to change the subject. "My partner, Rayne's stylist Sinead, and I had this original idea of the traditional fish-scale dress but seeing as the way the cameras have been capturing you, we decided to take a different approach."
Annie couldn't help but feel slightly disappointed at hearing this. If she had one thing to look forward to about the Games, it would be the dresses the female tributes wore at all of the interviews and ceremonies – each one being expensive enough that if anyone came across that kind of money in District Four, they could afford to feed their families for a year and pay off a house several times over. Each was adorned with jewels, the size of which varying every year from flower petals to a newborn's fingernails, designed to look like she was covered with fish scales. The girl from two years ago was most memorable, being decorated in her slim-fitting dress covered in gold plates that flowed with the graceful movement of her body. Even if she agreed with Vance when it came to the importance of fashion in the Games, she could never bring herself to hate those dresses.
"What do you mean?" asked Annie, tearing herself away from the window. By the amount of photographers gathering around the pair of tributes, she assumed it was the twins from District Eleven. Her heart sickened for them.
"Gossamer has also insisted on the idea, as well," Rea noted. "Since it is your decided angle to play up your relationship with Finnick, Sinead and I think it might be a good idea to revisit the avant garde worn during that year."
She tried to remember what she was talking about, but Annie's memories of that particular Hunger Games was a jumble of Finnick spearing people through the chest with his trident and the smile that brightened his face every night when the pictures of the tributes he killed were broadcast in the sky above him. The brunette looked at Rea quizzically, asking for more of an explanation.
"Don't worry!" she exclaimed. "We are sure you'll love what we had in mind."
Rea took her measurements again, just to double check she assured, before rushing out of the room. A few hours later – hours spent wandering around the floor with nothing to do, unable to bring herself to talk to Rayne, and then made over again by her prep team. The more time Charmant, Ophelia, and Faye spent redesigning her, the less and less she saw her mother in her reflection. Her body is left bare before they begin the "real work". Annie's skin was dusted with shimmering paints from her torso and back to her mid-thighs, giving off the illusion of the waves in the bay. Her eyelids were stenciled with a careful design that looked like more scales. From there, Rea dressed her in an ill-fitting fishing net. The knots were tied tightly to cover her back, not showing any flesh at all. However, in the front, it was only fully covering her crotch and her breasts, showing off the shimmer.
Annie stared at the mirror in horror. The girl standing in the reflection hardly resembled her at all, there was nothing left of the girl clinging to District Four. Although, she could clearly remember now what Finnick wore. Nothing but knotted fishing net around his crotch. She shivered, blushing innocently at the thought.
She crowded into the elevator cautiously with nine other people – the prep teams, Sinead, Rea, and Rayne, who wore almost the same skimpy costume that Finnick had five years ago – anxiously twitching as she fought from covering herself up. Annie wanted nothing more than to be comforted by Finnick, who she now recognized as her only source of reassurance. She then dismissed that last thought. She didn't want to be seen by anyone wearing something as dreadfully risqué as this.
The elevator doors opened to the garage, which is now a giant stable. The tributes will be pulled in chariots by teams of four horses so well trained they don't need coaches at their sides, just as they are every year. Her heart burst when she saw who was standing eagerly in the garage waiting for them. Gossamer first, glittery eyes wide with anticipation, but it was Finnick that Annie was paying attention to.
The bronze haired, golden skinned, athletic mentor stood off to the side. His sea green eyes fell when he laid eyes on Annie, but she couldn't read his expression. Her heart was racing nervously and her cheeks were so hot, she didn't even want to know how red they were. She couldn't help it any longer; Annie folded her arms over her chest.
"Don't do that!" scolded Ophelia, who had decorated the teenager's body with the paint. "You'll smudge!"
Annie nearly broke down into a sob. She didn't look away from Finnick, however, who was popping a sugar cube into his mouth. She stepped out from the elevator just as the doors were closing. Her mentor was still inscrutable.
The prep teams and designers rushed off with Rayne, Mags, and Gossamer to instruct him on how to act on the chariot through the Capitol. Finnick and Annie lingered behind, simply staring at each other. The girl held her breath, hoping that his eyes wouldn't dare flicker away from her eyes.
Finnick glanced at his hand. "Do you want a sugar cube?" he offered, smiling, as he extended a sugar cube to her.
A smile tugged at the corners of her lips. "No, thanks," she managed to choke out, grinning.
Annie took careful strides to the chariot and climbed up beside Rayne with help from Ophelia. Gossamer gave them instructions to hold their heads high and smile at the crowds in the Capitol streets. She had no desire to smile without Finnick being there, especially if these people were planning to steal her future by having her killed off for entertainment. The chariots for the first three districts were lined into place and then began to parade out onto the streets. Annie was sure that she would pass out before they reached the City Circle.
"I wouldn't worry if I were you," Rayne said, a false smile already plastered on his mouth. "They already love you out there."
Annie raised an eyebrow. "What are you talking about? Why?"
"Because he does."
She knew who he meant. Finnick Odair.
I feel that the chapter was kind of slow... I'm so sorry.
Constructive criticism is always welcome. Thank you so much for reading and please review!