Hello my dear readers! I do promise you that Finnick will make an appearance soon, as will some other member of the Hunger Games. However this is not the chapter where he appears. That being said, please still read and review if you can.

Thank you doraviolet1, tennischica12683 and guest for your reviews. I love the mother and children reunion idea...I may have to change the draft I have right now.

Enjoy :)

Annie set out right to finish her task right away. She wandered through the woods, trying to find a patch of nettles so she could sew the shirts.

After a few days, she heard a bird singing a beautiful song and followed it a little ways. She then found a cave, partially hidden from view right next to a patch of stinging nettles.

It wasn't a huge cave, but it was snug and free of any other living creature.

With a place to stay for now, Annie began to try to break the mutt curse.

First of all, she made a loom out of branches, using tree sap and braid reeds to tie the pieces together.

Then, she began the hard task of making the nettles into cloth.

She had to pull the nettles out, and her bare hands were stung the moment she grabbed the plant.

She pulled back with a soundless gasp of pain and fright. One touch and her hands already throbbed.

Annie looked at her hands and then up at the sky. She imagined her brothers flying somewhere among the clouds, counting on her to save them.

She closed her eyes, and placed a hand on her heart, gathering her strength.

When she opened her eyes, the fear was gone, and determination took its place.

She then began pulling bunches of nettles despite the pain that screamed out at her, for all her voice was silent, her nerves would have shattered glass with their cries. Soon, her hands started to bleed, being unused to so much hard work and from the sharp nettles.

When she had gather a big enough pile (she guessed), she started stomping on them, to separate the stem and pith from the fibers.

Her feet felt like a thousand needles pierced them with every step she took.

As she continuing to stomp, the feeling of needles changed to nails and then to spears.
Soon, her ankles began to bleed from the numerous scratches.

But Annie gritted her teeth and clenched her hands, reopening her scabs. She could not let her brothers down, for they would never let her down.

She kept at this process for many hours until she could bear it no longer. She went to the ocean and while the salt stung her cuts at first, it also eased her pain with the coolness of the water and softened the irritated skin.

Once the ocean had soothed her hands and feet, she made a supper of soup over a fire, thankful that Mags had given her a pot before she set out on her journey.

She went to sleep on her bed of leaves, exhausted from the day and her pain.

She repeated this process for many days, each day more painful than one before, since her skin grew more sensitive without the time to heal.

In time, Annie's memories of being a princess were slowly fading away until she felt she had lived her entire life alone, by the ocean.

However, Annie thought she had finally collected enough nettle fibers to get started making the cloth for the shirts.

She used a distaff Mags had given her (long vertical pole to hang the fibers on) to spin and twist the fibers into a yarn that she wrapped around a bobbin.

This process took several days to complete and her sleep was filled with nightmares of the King and what she had seen under the influence of the venom from the tracker jackers.

When she awoke, gasping in fright, she still made no sound.

Annie would walk down to the ocean from her cave and let the waves soothe her until she felt she could go back to sleep.

Some nights, she'd stay by the ocean until the sun rose.

She started using her loom to weave the nettle yarn into a sheet of fabric. It was very difficult at first, as Annie had never woven anything before.

Her first attempts were clumsy and the cloth fell apart. She was so discouraged that she cried for an hour the first time until she heard some seagulls calling out to each other.

Upon hearing their bird calls, she sat upright and dried her eyes.

"I can do this, I have to to do this, for my brothers" Annie thought.

She slowly improved and soon she created enough cloth the piece together the first shirt.

Before she had fully finished one shirt, one year had passed. Though Annie knew that building the loom and the other components and figuring out how to turn the nettle into thread would take a long time, she was a bit discouraged to only have the cloth ready.

However, she smiled for the first time in months because her brothers came to see her once more, for their one night when they could be human again.

It was a quiet meeting, but full of encouragement from her brothers. Poor Rory was almost in tears at seeing the scars on her palms and feet.

Though he tried to hide it, Gale was upset that she hadn't yet finished one shirt. His eyes betrayed his fear and anger that he would never be free.

Beetee, however, calmly reassured her that it would go more quickly now that she knew how to carry out the entire process.

Still, Annie vowed to do better as she hugged each one of them.

Just before the sun rose, Haymitch gave her a recorder.

"I know you used to love to sing, and now you can't anymore on account of us being cursed and all." Haymitch shuffled his feet and cleared his throat.

"This will let you make music when you feel like it."

Annie kissed his cheek and smiled at him before he flew off with the rest of her brothers.

I thought I would put in how hard it was to make the shirts since in the original tale, I always wondering why it took such a long time. But if you consider her making the shirts entirely from scratch, it does seem more likely that it would take a long time...but I digress.