Searing pain. That's all she felt for a long time. It bit at her lungs for hours after she got the call: "We have lost Finnick Odair."
She wanted to scream - no, she wanted to cry- no, she wanted to kill everybody involved. They were supposed to keep him safe and they didn't keep him safe and it wasn't fair and, on the inside, she had already broken apart into a million pieces of sorrow. When they all returned, she only looked at them with disappointment. They looked upon each other with disappointment.
Katniss was the first to comfort her. She held her tight and told her through both of their tears that it would be okay, even though they both knew it was a lie. It was not okay. Nothing could change that. Annie held Katniss tighter, squeezed her hands until they were purple, cried for a long, long time.
She remembered their first kiss, back when she was seventeen, back when she had only just won. She remembered when his grandfather had died and she held him in her arms for hours. She remembered how he told her she wasn't insane, wasn't any of those things the Capitol said she was.
She remembered how they had spent the night before the Quell reaping, when they didn't think he was coming back: curled up together, crying together, taking turns drinking from a little bottle of liquor from the official, Peacekeeper-regulated market.
She cried when she heard he had come out alive. She was strapped to a chair, then, scared and vulnerable, half-submerged in frigid water, and she overheard the man trying to get information she didn't have: "Johanna Mason, Katniss Everdeen, and Finnick Odair have all managed to escape alive." Tears ran down her face, replacing the expression of pain they had left there. He was okay. He would be okay forever, safe. . .somewhere. Somewhere far, far away from all of this. She had heard of the bombings. It wasn't safe to put him back in Four.
And now, all of that was for naught. All of the little victories that they had had as a couple, as Thirteen, meant nothing to her now that Finnick didn't really make it after all. Thirteen would fall without him.
When the pain stopped, it was replaced with an intense feeling of nothingness. She sat at a table for a long while, watching the hustle and bustle of District Thirteen go on in front of her. And then she paced the same corridor aimlessly for a long time after that. And she was lying down when she decided life was no longer worth living, not really, not without him.
He had told her she was sane. He made her feel sane. And now he was gone and she didn't feel anything anymore. The Capitol propaganda was right - Annie Cresta was, indeed, insane.
She sort of got better. She ate on her own, got dressed herself, like a "normal" person. It took her a while to talk, to smile, to laugh. Soon enough, the nothingness was replaced with pain again, then sorrow, and finally, she had a revelation that she would live forever in loneliness.
Annie Cresta took a hairpin from her dresser in the middle of the night and slipped from her room. She walked down the hall, straight ahead - not aimlessly as she had for so many days.
As she walked, all of her memories with him flashed through her mind.
"Why did you volunteer?" he said, and she looked at him through teary eyes.
She wasn't looking at him, but through him. He embraced her when she didn't answer for a long moment. "I wanted to be like you." He kissed her, on the lips. He'd never done that before. A tingle rushed through her body.
She stuck the bobby pin in the lock. She looked up at the sign but no words came to her mind. She knew what was in there.
"I'm not going to let you go," he told her, clutching her hand in both of his. She dangled over the cliff, staring down at the bright-blue ocean of Four's shores.
"I trust you," she reassured him, clawing at the craggy rock in front of her.
She pushed the door open, stumbling forward. She looked around her, taking in all of the bright colors, the faraway circles of bright orange. They whirled in her mind, an endless sea. She saw what she wanted and reached for it.
He slowly unbuttoned his nicest shirt. She slowly unzipped her prettiest dress. When she had let it fall to the floor, she kissed him. Passionate and slow and warm. He wrapped his arms around her waist.
"Don't go," she said, her tone desperate
"There are other victors. It might not be me," he said, even though they both knew. Finnick wouldn't let a frail old victor die in his place.
She wrapped her hand around it. Pointed it. She was too afraid.
But life wasn't worth living without Finnick. She hadn't felt like herself since he was gone.
"I love you," he said for the first time. They were sitting by the seaside, fingers interlaced.
"I love you, too," she said, and she meant it.
There were tears on her face. Annie Cresta didn't feel emptiness anymore but she didn't feel happiness, only desolation and fear and anger.
It had been two weeks. Finnick Odair was not coming back, not if she waited a million years.
She slammed the Weapons Room door behind her, pointed the simple handgun. The cold steel barrel rested on her temple and the sweat on her face mixed with tears. Finnick wasn't coming back. There was no reason without him. Nobody else made her feel okay. No one else made her feel sane.
In a fit of rage over this thought, she squeezed the trigger.
She expected to scream.
Bang.
Silence.
District Thirteen mourned them together for a long, long time. Annie was buried alongside the empty coffin of her lover, the one who made her feel oh-so-sane.
The one who drove her insane.
At least they were gone together.