75 – After.
Annie isn't sure where she is, except that it is somewhere in the Capitol. She is being walked down a hallway with a Peacekeeper on either side of her and another behind her. Her feet are shackled together. She would laugh at the ridiculous precautions they seem to be taking with her, but she knows it would hurt the still throbbing side of her face. She probes the inside of her cheek with her tongue, tasting her own coppery blood.
They walk down the middle of another hallway, also dimly lit and clinically white, but wide. She sees beds bolted into the walls on either side at even intervals, with a spigot mounted next to each and what looks like a drainage grate underneath it. Every once in a while there are brighter white lines that paint out a square area around the beds, and a person, in the same white cotton shirt and drawstring pants that she is wearing, usually huddled against the wall. They all look as crazy as she feels.
They are walking her almost to the end of the hallway, but out of the corner of her eye, she recognizes the wide set brown eyes in the figure pacing in the middle of one of the squares.
She almost calls out to Johanna, but bites down on the injured side of her mouth to stop herself. She stumbles over her chained feet as the Peacekeepers momentum keeps moving her forward. She sees Johanna stop her pacing as they pass her and open her mouth, but she too stays silent, even as her tense body seems ready to explode. Annie wonders why she doesn't move, why she doesn't follow them down the hall.
The Peacekeepers shove her toward one of the beds a couple down from where she saw Johanna. One of them takes something out of her pocket, some sort of control panel, and types into it. Bright lines show up in a square on the floor around her and the shackle around her feet drops off with a clatter onto the floor. Annie just sits down on the edge of the bed as the Peacekeepers turn around and head back in the direction that they came from, taking the shackle that had been on her feet with them.
She wonders what is going to happen next.
She wants to ask Johanna where they are and what is going to happen to them, but she doesn't want to shout down the hall, even after the echoing tread of the Peacekeepers boots has faded away. She goes to move toward where Johanna is still standing, tense and coiled and furious. She tentatively puts her hand out over where the line on the floor only to find herself shocked and flung back toward the middle of the space.
"Force field..." she whispers to herself, shaking her hand as she picks herself up off the floor. No wonder everyone stays near their beds. It seems too perfect, trapping them in cages that they can't see.
"Invisible cages," she says out loud, facing Johanna.
"I know, right? It is almost too good," Johanna answers, her voice raspy and hard. "They picked you up from Four, huh?"
Annie takes a closer look at Johanna over the distance. The girl is even skinnier than she usually is. There are scabby looking marks on what skin is exposed, and her hair looks like it is falling out. There isn't any evidence of the gash Annie had seen Enobaria give her before the Games blacked out though. They must have gone to the trouble of putting her back together, fixing the holes, just so they could tear her back apart, this time as slowly as possible.
Tears spring to Annie's eyes.
"Finn?" she asks quietly.
"Don't know." Johanna's voice is icy and diamond hard, but Annie knows the pain that is behind it. "Don't know about anyone."
Annie goes to sit on her bed and Johanna does the same. There is nothing for them to talk about, not here.
Annie thinks.
They questioned her before they brought her down here, asking her what she knew about what the other Victors, especially Finnick, were doing in the Arena and what else they had planned, but even her questioners didn't seem to think she had any answers for them.
In the hours after the Games went dark, chaos reigned throughout District 4. The people were ready to fight back against the Peacekeepers in the district, against the injustices they were seeing now that they had a rallying point. And in a Career district, it looked like the rebels were actually making progress. Annie was scared, especially for Finnick, especially for her siblings, but she never fell apart. Even her broken mind seemed to know that this was the fight, and there wasn't time to do anything but help as much as possible. She passed out as much food and as many coins as she could under the cover of darkness, but it didn't seem to be enough. She even had a small stash of deadly sharp knives that she had managed to slip to her family along with what was left of her money.
The empty sheath that the Peacekeepers had found still strapped to her leg had been enough to earn her a belt across the cheek after they picked her up.
She isn't sure how long ago that was now, but that night she could see the sea from her window, lit by the light of burning boats, burning livelihoods, and they still sent ten Peacekeepers to her door to get her. She knows that they couldn't spare the soldiers, not with everything that was happening. She was only one crazy girl living in a house with her parents.
She can't think about the sound of the sound of her mother's scream as the Peacekeepers dragged her from their house, but she remembers the flash of determination in the eyes of her sister when their eyes met, before whatever drugs they shot into her knocked her out, and is comforted by her strength.
Someone must have really wanted her here in the Capitol to bring that kind of man power to her house in the middle of the night, and she can only think that it means that it is for Finnick's benefit. That means wherever he is, he is alive.
She buries her face in her hands, wanting to feel relief at knowing that Finnick must be alive, but all she can think about is what she is almost certain is going to be the last time she saw her family.
She comes to on the floor in the middle of her square, gasping for breath, and feeling a sharp, electric current running all the way from one side of her face to her foot. She sits up and hangs her head between her knees, trying to force air back into her lungs.
"You are going to have to stop running from whatever it is you see."
Annie turns her head to see Johanna's body framed by one of her legs.
"Although it did get you to stop screaming, which was nice." Johanna sits down so that Annie can see her face. "So never mind, keep running."
"I'm never going to see my family again," Annie just says sadly to her. Johanna's shoulders slump, but she doesn't say anything in response. Down the hallway, they hear the gurgling scream of someone who has been turned into an Avox.
They both turn to face the wall in front of them, trying to will away the horrors they both know are real and not saying anything else.
The hallway is always kept lit at the same dim level and Annie is starting to have trouble differentiating which nightmare is real and which is in her head. She can't tell how much time has passed before she hears the clip of people walking briskly down the hall wheeling something between them.
They had brought Peeta down to the same prison that she and Johanna are in at some point, and Annie sees him now, standing up to brace himself for whatever is coming down the hallway. She doesn't know much about the boy she sees in his own invisible cage across the hall, only what little she saw of him on television, and even that she paid as little attention to as possible. He looks so young, but there is something in the way that he has planted his feet as he looks down the hallway that makes her like him.
She sees them once they stop at Johanna's square, and she finally starts to understand the brilliance of the force fields. They expand hers to fit the additional people and equipment, and she can still see and hear everything. They strap her into what looks like a clear, shallow box, which they fill with water. For someone who looks more like a half starved animal than anything else, Johanna puts up a solid fight being put into the contraption. They all seem ready for her, but she still manages to solidly kick one of the orderlies right between the legs.
Annie can almost see Johanna's familiar mocking grin in her mind.
The man holding a screen in his hand starts to ask Johanna questions, the rote way he is asking them indicating that they have all been through this before. When Johanna stays silent, Annie sees that the contraption is actually connected to the force field around them, magnifying it, and with a press of a button, electricity is sent coursing through Johanna's soaked body. Johanna arches up, a horrible scream tearing out of her. The acrid smell of singed hair reaches Annie.
She can't stop herself in that instant, her hands reach up and she moves towards Johanna to help her. She immediately feels the now familiar course of electricity pulse through her and push her back toward the middle of her square and hears the familiar zapping noise of something hitting a force field. The sound is almost instantly echoed slightly farther down the hall, and she sees Peeta, stumbling back, hands in front of him, still reaching toward Johanna as the electric force pushes him backward.
"The rats learned faster," the woman also holding a screen comments, glancing up from what looks like Johanna's vital signs in front of her toward Peeta. Annie can't tell if it is surprise or scorn in her voice.
Annie turns to throw herself against her bed, stuffing everything she can over her ears to drown out the screams that they continue to pull out of Johanna.
The force fields are brilliant. Torture one, torture them all.
Annie listens to Johanna's screams, tears streaming out of her eyes, until they mix with the familiar screams of 23 children, and she is once again back in her forested arena. She knows she has to fight, but she is so tired and scared and so tired of being scared that she just lays down to go to sleep on the cold forest floor.
When she wakes up, she is still there, and the screams start again, even though they shouldn't have been able to last the night. She wonders why, why they always come back when all she is going to do is kill them again and again, the life ebbing out of their faces right in front of her.
She is in a familiar fight, and she sees Dover's head by her feet and blood covering her hands and her knife. She runs through the forest, finally getting clear of the decapitated body that had been following her, but she keeps running until she is in a white hallway.
She sees a boy across the way from her, surround by people in long white coats, and he is screaming too, but she can't understand his words. She isn't sure if she knows who he is, his face is covered, the area where his eyes should be a dark, blank space.
She realizes then that he is wearing a helmet, and that she recognizes the helmet from when she was in the Capitol. They used it on her when they were trying to alter her memories, the space in front of her eyes filled with scenes from her Games. She wonders how the arena was connected to the same hospital and she never knew it.
She wants to keep running, but no matter which direction she goes, she ends up back in the same place, across from the boy.
The other figures finally leave, taking the helmet and other equipment with them, and she sees that she does know the boy that was under there, that it is Peeta. She finally understands what he is saying as he paces around in a tight circle.
"She killed them. She killed them all. She killed them. She killed them all." He says it in time with his pacing. She has to get out of here.
"If you believe that, you really are as stupid as you look."
Annie turns and sees Johanna staring at Peeta scornfully, arms crossed over her chest. This nightmare must be reality, and it is happening right in front of her.
He stops pacing to look at Johanna.
"But... But..." He crumples to the ground, holding his arms tightly around himself, and rocks back and forth on the ground.
"What are you, an idiot? You think anything that they are showing you is real? I didn't realize baking was the profession of the epically brainless."
He doesn't get up, but he stops rocking and looks pleadingly at her. He wants to believe her.
Johanna picks up the bowl that is on the ground and takes it over to the bed, where she quickly gulps it down.
"And eat," she shoots at him before she lies down, turning away from him. "You have to be stronger than that."
He doesn't move for awhile, but eventually Annie sees him slowly pull himself up and go over to his own bed, bowl in hand.
Time is telescoping in on itself and stretching out to interminable lengths, and the only thing worse than the anxiety stricken boredom of sitting in her small square waiting is when the horrible tortures start up again.
One day? One night? They are all quiet, even the other prisoners stuck in this hallway with them, until Peeta starts to talk.
Annie can see him lying on his bed, his arm dangling down, his fingers tracing patterns on the cold cement floor.
"I am the youngest," he starts, slowly, in a voice hoarse from being used only for screaming, "so I always got stuck doing the bad jobs, the ones that my brothers didn't want to do."
She sees Johanna, lying flat on the ground to try to ease the pain in her back, turn her head towards him. Annie thinks for a second that Johanna is going to say something, but she stays silent. Johanna has been quieter, has been moving around less and getting skinnier, and Annie is worried that when all the fight and fire drains out of her, there is going to be nothing left.
"So I always had to wake up first, hours before sunrise, to help my father proof the dough for the day's bread before school," Peeta continues, his voice getting stronger.
"We all hated getting up a second before we had to, but whatever method we chose to determine who had to do it, I always lost."
"I never told them, but I also kind of loved being in the bakery with my father without anyone else, while the whole town was still asleep. Just the two of us. We didn't usually talk or anything, just worked side by side to get the job done as quickly as possible. But I never felt closer to him than those mornings."
"And I would always go outside to get the wood to start up the ovens right when the first hints of the rising sun started to burn off the mist that collected in the bowl of the town center at night. It would look like the entire town was materializing from nothing to start the day. Like it disappeared every night when everyone went to sleep and reappeared every morning just before they woke up. But I was one of the special people who was allowed to see it happen. The sun would hit the clock face on the Justice Building first, which would glint pink and orange in the soft purple stone of the building, before it would start hitting the windows of all the buildings lining the town square. Each one would glow as the last traces of the mist burnt off in the light, and the town would actually look beautiful for a moment, all the coal dust and peeling paint hidden in the purple shadows."
Annie had closed her eyes when he started speaking and now sees the way the sun would shine off the water in the morning when they spent days out on the family boat. She can almost feel the soft breeze that would come off the water and the rough wood of the deck splintering under her fingers. That girl is who she really is, she has to remind herself. Not this dirty shell of a person. Just like that boy is who Peeta really is.
Johanna makes a noise, and Annie turns to her, thinking that she might say something, but she still stays silent. In the dim light, Annie thinks she can just make out a tear streaking down her temple and onto the cold floor.
There is nothing else in the timeless wasteland of pain and boredom that they are locked in with no hope of getting out. Nothing else to keep them from giving up completely. So they keep talking, the three of them, telling each other the stories that they need to tell themselves to remember who they really are.
That once they loved and were loved.
That once they were sane.