I'm sorry that it's been a long time since I've updated, my laptop broke and I've had to wait a while to get a new one. Anyway, I don't own The Hunger Games. :)

"Prep, lift, execution, landing!" Enobaria drilled it into the girls' heads a thousand times, as if they hadn't known it ever since they were cheering in the Pee Wees.

"Jesus." Annie muttered once they were finally done for the day. She'd never been through such an intense session of flying and honestly, she felt a little sick.

"Here." Clove pressed a small plastic box into her hand. "Try these next time."

"What are they?" Annie asked, popping the box open to reveal the small white pills inside.

"Travel sickness tablets." Clove smirked. "You were looking a little green."

"Alright ladies, gather round!" Enobaria called them over to her. The cheerleaders gathered in a circle, panting, to listen to her.

"There's no game for another two weeks. Seeing as you've actually been working hard for the last two months I've decided that you can have a couple of days off. However, that doesn't mean you're allowed to skip out on your cardio!" Enobaria snapped the last part directly at Marvel.

"Sorry." He shrugged.

"Also, as it's only early October, I'd rather you didn't break any bones on your off days." This time, she glared at Johanna.

"I was pushed!" She protested.

"Alright you lumps of lard, you can leave now."

"Annie, Clove, Glimmer, Cassidy, Marvel…A word, please?" Johanna asked the question but it was clearly more of a command.

"What?" Cassidy groaned as they formed a small circle in the centre of the room. "The last time you asked to talk to us like this we ended up in trying to catch some guy that stole your mom's purse in Alaska."

"Pfft." Johanna waved a hand dismissively. "Alaska's old news. No, this time we're going to LA."

"LA? Why? Not that I'm, you know, complaining." Marvel asked, his brow creasing.

"Idiot." Johanna muttered, and slapped her hand against his forehead. "The Capitol Lizards? Enobaria's only been ranting about destroying them for the past three days."

"Why are we going to LA to see them?" Annie asked.

"They think they're better than us. They're not."

"I get it." Clove nodded in approval. "Want me to get out our old book of pranks and tricks?"

"Please tell me that's not actually a thing." Cassidy rolled her eyes at the group.

"Shut up Cassidy. Are you in or not?" Johanna said, narrowing her eyes at the blonde.

"Sure." She shrugged. She shouldered her sports bag and started to walk away. "Text me the details."

"Marv, what about you?" Johanna turned her sharp gaze on him.

"Is this going to get us arrested?" He asked, unsure of her plan.

"No." Johanna rolled her eyes at him in annoyance. "Why do you always presume the worst will happen?"

"Because most of the time the worst does happen. Whatever, I'll do it." Marvel sighed. "For Panem, right?"

"Right." Johanna grinned at him.

"Sorry, Johanna. I'm out. I really need to focus on my cheerleading if I want to make an Allstar squad in the next few years, and I can't do that if I'm in jail." Glimmer apologized.

"Boo you, whore." Johanna scowled as Glimmer walked away.

"I'm obviously in." Clove said, and they all turned to look at Annie.

"Um…Can Parker come? He's going back to Maryland next week and I promised we could hang out this weekend."

"Is he any good at scheming?" Johanna asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Uh…Sure?"

"You don't sound very convinced."

"Well that topic doesn't exactly come up very often."

"Whatever." Johanna clapped her hands together loudly. "He can come. You're all dismissed."

…

"Don't look now." Cassidy hissed into Annie's ear. "But there's a really shady looking guy behind you."

"I said don't look!" Cassidy snapped as Annie slowly turned around.

"Well saying 'don't look' kind of makes me want to look!" Annie hissed back. The guy was stood a few metres away from them, decked out in an oversized hoodie and dark sunglasses.

"That's Finnick, you idiots." Johanna sighed. "I invited him because of the great Patriots prank of '12."

"Oh my God, that was incredible." Marvel laughed.

"What happened?" Parker asked, looking up from his phone. The cheerleaders were lounged across the waiting room seats and Finnick was sat a few rows back in his disguise.

"It was Finnick's idea to put itching powder in their cheerleader's cheer outfits. They were hopping around like crazy in the pre-game show and to this day, everyone remembers it." Johanna explained. She turned around to look at Finnick.

"If you come over here nobody's gonna recognize you." She called to him. Finnick looked around him in all directions before getting up and shuffling over to the others.

"Hey." He nodded his head in greeting and sat down next to Clove.

"How'd you convince your dragon lady girlfriend to let you come down here?" Cassidy asked, raising an eyebrow.

"She thinks I'm visiting my Grandma up in Long Island." Finnick admitted, looking down into his lap as Johanna sniggered.

"There's trust for you."

"Real true love." Clove added.

"Whatever." Finnick huffed, and moved to sit in between Parker and Annie.

"Hey. I'm Finnick." He offered his hand for Parker to shake.

"Parker. I'm a friend of Annie's." Parker explained.

"Hey." Finnick turned to Annie. "How's the ankle holding up?"

"It's been good, thanks for asking. I've been doing my normal routines for about a week now." Annie cheeks flushed light pink from the attention from Finnick and how close he was to her.

"I can't believe you bailed on us during the halftime show." Marvel frowned at Annie. "I won't forget about it."

"Ease up, Marv. She sprained her ankle." Finnick said, leaning back in his chair.

"Or she was just down in the infirmary milking the attention from America's hottest quarterback." Cassidy smirked. Annie shot her a glare as she felt her face go pinker.

"That's not how it happened." She protested.

"It's not, but c'mon. Who doesn't love me?" Finnick joked, winking at Annie.

"People who don't like cocky guys?" Annie suggested, followed by a chorus of 'Oohs!' and "Ouch, Finnick!' from the other girls.

"Annie's head's in the right place." Parker grinned, leaning across Finnick to squeeze her hand.

"Are you two, like, together?" Finnick asked.

"No way." Annie dropped Parker's hand. "That could never happen. He's like my annoying brother."

Annie thought she saw a look of disappointment flash across Parker's face before disappearing, but she put it down to a lack of energy.

"Right. So he won't get annoyed if I sit next to you on the plane?"

"She's with me, asshole." Johanna rolled her eyes at Finnick. "Clove and I have stuff to teach her."

"Fine. I'll just have to settle for the row in front." Finnick flashed Annie a gleaming white smile that made her heart flutter before slouching off to get his third coffee of that morning.

…

"We'd thought we'd teach you some stuff, seeing as it's your first non-business trip with us and all." Johanna said as she slid into the plane seat on Annie's right. Clove sat to her left, and Cassidy sat in the window seat in front of them with Marvel and Finnick. Parker was in the row to their right on his own, texting again before take-off.

"They're in and out jobs. If you get caught we're not coming back for you." Clove explained.

"It's every man for themselves." Johanna said, looking serious.

"We'll develop a plan once we've confronted them, and we'll establish a meeting point, but if you're not there by our agreed time then we'll have no choice but to leave you." Clove said.

"That…Sounds illegal." Annie said unsurely.

"Don't worry about it." Finnick said, pressing his face into the gap between the seats. "If anything happens, you can call me and I'll come bail you out. Or, you could just blame Johanna."

Johanna reached around the seat and thumped him on the back of the head.

"This is serious." She scolded him.

"Alright, alright." Finnick held up his hands in mock surrender.

"So what exactly are we going to do when we get there?" Marvel asked.

"We intimidate them. Well, Clove, Cassidy and I will do all the talking. The rest of you can just try and look scary." Johanna said, shrugging.

"Then what?" Cassidy asked. She was looking into her pocket mirror, reapplying her make-up.

"Then we put the plan that we will use this flight to think up into action." Johanna said, as if it were simple.

"This doesn't sound safe." Parker said from behind them.

"Nothing in this world is safe." Clove snapped. "You pick your battles, and we've picked this one."

"Someone needs to show these Capitol losers what's hot and what's not." Cassidy smirked.

"Yeah, okay, but don't phrase it like that." Finnick said, raising an eyebrow at her. "You sound like a Mean Girls extra."

"Whatever." She grumbled, leaning over Marvel to give Finnick a shove.

"So what kind of plan do we want?" Annie asked. Understandably, she was feeling some-what anxious about whatever tasks awaited her.

Johanna grinned, and she looked like an evil mastermind.

"I think I have a few ideas."

…

In the end, coming face to face with the Capitol cheerleaders was the best part of the trip and even that turned out terribly.

"Whores." Johanna coughed loudly when they walked out on the training field. As one, the squad turned to glare at the Panem cheerleaders.

"I'm sorry, who are you?" One of the girls stepped forward. Annie decided that she was wearing contacts, because she had never seen someone with purple eyes before. On top of that she was ghostly pale with aqua blue tipped black hair and a black tattoo that curled across her right cheek and half of her forehead. She couldn't have been older than twenty. Glancing around, Annie noticed that the whole squad looked rather young and abnormal, from luminous hair colours to zebra print eyes and golden tattoos.

"The people that are going to flip circles around you in three weeks time." Johanna sneered, stepping forward to go eye-to-eye with the girl.

"Hm." The girl tapped her chin thoughtfully, showing off a fingernail the same colour as her hair tips. "Panem, right? Tell Finnick I said 'hey'."

"And why would do that, freakshow?" Cassidy asked, her upper lip curling in disgust.

"Because we have a…History." The girl smirked.

"What sort of history?" Johanna asked suspiciously.

"Don't worry your little head off over it, captain."

"Tell 'em, Candy." A girl with spiky green hair and a black smirk laughed. "Tell it to them straight."

"Fine." The girl, Candy, laughed. "Back in junior year we used to have some fun of our own."

"That's disgusting." Clove spat. "Finnick and a bitch like you?"

"She's lying. She must be." Marvel added.

"Why would I waste my breath lying to you wannabes? I get my kicks elsewhere, thank you very much." Candy said, rolling her eyes.

"The only wannabes here are you hipsters." Annie said, earning herself an impressed look from Cassidy. She wasn't one to insult people, but these girls were really baking her bean. Plus, she was stupidly thin and when she thought about she realized that Izabelle

"You listen to me, bonbon." Johanna took another step forward to get in the girl's face. "Panem owns America. So unless you sugarpuffs want me to double sideflip kick you in in the face, you'll drop your dreams now. You were right, we are your biggest rivals now and forever. That bowl is ours, and it will be super."

The Panem squad turned and walked away from the Capitol girls, listening to Candy's laughs as they went.

"See you in three weeks, captain hothead! If you even last that long."

An hour later, Annie was being shoved through a small window that would have looked into the Capitol cheerleaders' changing room had the glass not been frosted. The window was so small that only Clove or Annie could fit. Clove claimed that Annie had to be initiated, so after meeting up with Finnick and Parker again they had crouched down to give her a boost up.

"God this is hard work." Finnick grunted. Annie's foot was digging into his hand as she reached her arm through the small opening to fiddle with the latch.

"What do you mean by that?" Annie snapped, blushing. She didn't think she was that heavy, but apparently she was wrong.

"Nothing!" Finnick protested.

"Don't worry about him, he just hates hard work." Clove said, dismissing the comment.

"Honestly, you're no trouble." Parker added encouragingly.

"Whatever." Annie muttered. She finally pushed the rusty latch back a few notches and awkwardly wriggled through.

"Remember!" Johanna called to her. Annie's head was still outside the window, the rest of body hanging off the small ledge. "You won't be able to get back out this way! Good luck!"

Annie dropped to the changing room floor painfully and a small gym bag was pushed through the window after her. A cheer outfit was hung on each peg around the room, in preparation for Capitol's game over the weekend. Annie opened the small bag and pulled out the silly string and scissors, followed by the note Johanna had written from newspaper letters reading 'Sucks to be a lizard! :P'. Quickly, she got to work cutting huge gashes in each white and silver cheer uniform until she reached the final one that had a gold band around the shorts instead of silver. It was the captain's uniform, Candy's. Annie checked the size and her heart sunk when she saw that it was three sizes smaller than her own. She plunged the scissors through the material, making the gashes extra big this time. Then she got to work with silly string, spraying it all over the changing room before packing up her stuff, pulling her hood over her head, and heading for the door. A quick jiggle of the lock with the end of the scissors got it open and she checked both ends of the corridor before darting away.

The training facilities for the Capitol Lizards were impressive, almost as impressive as Panem's own facility. As she walked casually down the hallway, trying to hide her shaking legs, she came across the gym. The Lizards were training, so she snapped a quick picture on her phone and went on her way. It wasn't cheating, she decided, because she hadn't figured out any of their plays or anything. It was just an assessment of the body types the Allstars would be facing in three weeks at their home ground.

"What do you think you're doing?"

Annie jumped out of her skin and turned around slowly, coming face to face with a largely built dark-skinned man in gym wear. A full bottle of water dangled from his hand, and he looked to be in his mid-twenties.

"I-I'm sorry." She stuttered. "It's just that, I-"

"Fans." He rolled his eyes. "They're all the same. How did you even get in here?"

Annie started to answer, but he cut her off. "You know what? I don't care. I'll sign your gym bag and then you can get going."

"Thanks!" She smiled sunnily and thrust the bug at him.

"I know the real autograph you want." He said as pulled a pen from his pocket and scrawled his name across the bag. "You want Tyler's autograph, right? All the girls love him."

"Oh, he's just the best." Annie gushed, fluttering her eyelashes. She had no idea who he was, but he wanted to escape from that place with her skin intact.

"Don't bother, girl. He only dates skinny girls." The man grunted, shoving the bag back at it. His scrawl read 'Bryson Hayes', and Annie recognized the name as belonging to the Lizards' defensive end.

"I'm not fat!" She protested, snatching the bag back.

"No, you're not. But you're not skinny and most of the guys on this team, hell, on any team, want supermodel thin."

"I'm leaving." Annie said bluntly. She turned on her heel and walked away, disgusted at the man's comments. She could not stop herself thinking that maybe that was why she hadn't had a boyfriend in years, why boys were always her friends and nothing more, or why her name was the last to be called out at the Academy's leaving ceremony. Maybe she just wasn't thin enough.