"Oh, so I'm good enough for you now?" Icy cold, the voice was nothing like what he remembered Annie's being.
Still, Finnick continued into the room. Much as he wanted to, he couldn't turn back now. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."
For the first time, she turned to look at him. "Didn't mean to hurt my feelings? Finnick, you ignored me for almost five years. No, ignore isn't quite right, because if you ignore someone hard enough, it's almost a compliment. You pretended like I was an acquaintance for five fucking years, and now you're here now that I'm a Victor and I'm finally good enough and urgh." She span away from him, her dark hair shielding her face from him. When he gently tucked a piece behind her ear, he noticed how tense her back and arms were.
"Annie, I'm sorry."
"Cut it out, Finnick. I don't want to talk to you."
"Please, let me exp –"
She pushed his hand away and rose to her feet. "How clear can I be? Leave me alone – I have nothing to say to you, and I don't want to hear anything you have to say. Get out!"
He shouldn't have - looking back, it was one of the worst things he could have done - but Finnick had long ago learned that the easiest way to stop women from being upset with him was to distract them. And the Golden Boy could be quite distracting. Her lips were more chapped than he expected, though he supposed he should've known they'd be like that. The differences between the Capitol women's lip treatments versus Annie's constant chewing on her lower lip since she came out of that goddamn Arena were obvious enough. Finnick was distracted enough by that thought that the sharp pain in his stomach took him by surprise.
He stumbled backwards a step, but already, his fists were coming up, ready to deflect the next blow. His old trainers would be proud of him.
Proud of Annie as well, he reflected later, for he barely managed to stop her from scratching out his eye. Still hurt like hell. He'd have to check on the damage later. For now, he barreled into her with as much force as he could muster, wrestling her to the ground and pinning her limbs down. At that moment, something flashed through her eyes, and Finnick's stomach dropped. Fear. Annie, his childhood friend and sweetheart, should never have to be afraid of him, but now, alone and pinned to the ground in her bedroom by a man who'd kissed her only moments prior… He was making himself sick just thinking about it. "Sorry," he choked out, scrambling to get away from her. "I don't want to hurt you. Stay away from me so I don't have the chance." He was a monster, coldblooded and vicious and ugly, and he'd only end up hurting both of them. She didn't deserve this.
Annie sat up, obviously shaken. "What happened to you? Why are you like this now?"
He shook his head. "I don't know."
"You do, you just don't want to tell me." She edged her way a bit closer to him. No, she shouldn't do that, he wasn't clean, and he'd infect anything that came too close. "Come on, Finn. I want to know what's wrong."
"I don't want to."
A bit closer. "I won't tell anyone. It'll feel good to let it out."
No reason to tear what few shreds of innocence she had left. "You'll find out soon enough." For anyone else, that would have been enough, and he would have felt that he had done his duty as older, wiser Victor and gone off in peace. But she wasn't anyone else. "The thing is, the Games never really end. It just gets harder to tell whether or not people want you to win."
He didn't realize he was crying until she wrapped her arms around his waist. "It's okay." She sounded less than convincing.
"No, it's not. We're animals here. Livestock, that's all any of us are to them. And they use us up and hurt us and break us like we're disposable and send us back to the districts like dirt and –" He should be comforting her right now, not the other way around, but he lets her pull him close and rock him like a child, for right now, that's all he is.