A/N: Torture
It hurts. It? You're finally catching onto it. "No, no, please be quiet." The human body has a point beyond which where it hurts no longer matters, and you've found it. Is there a level beyond that? Would you like to find out? Where it doesn't matter any longer that it's you and not the air around you or the chair you sit on? You may consider yourself an expert on pain, Annie Cresta, but I assure you, there is still much left to learn.
And perhaps eventually you'll become the chair, and the air, and that man over there. What was once Annie Cresta will dissolve away into nothingness, disappear like dewdrops, and it will still hurt. In the corner, the man hunches over a desk, preparing needles that stab and burn and you feel them even when they're gone. She has tried every, and thing she can to escape her bonds, but her hands are still tied well above her head. Annie wonders if she'll ever have feeling in her fingertips again. The more of you there is, the more of you they can hurt. Stupid girl. Why did you listen when Mama told you not to put your fingers in the cages?
Perhaps she is melting away, because Annie isn't certain where the scream comes from. She hurts it always hurts and it's never going to go away, but the noise is too screechy, too animal are you anything else? to be hers. But her throat is raw and bleeding, the blood's running down your throat, drowning you from the inside out and the rest of her is on fire, and if this doesn't stop soon, she's going to go mad.
Mad, mad, mad. That word echoes in her head until only it and the pain exist. And is there anything else for her? Perhaps this is all there is for anyone. The other people, the ones who bring the needles and keep the flashing lights and eardrum-bursting music on all night, they never ask questions. They have only pain to give the modern magi's finest gift.
The boom shakes her very bones, and Annie's head pounds with a thousand pickaxes, miners buried in the explosion desperately trying to dig their way out. But in the Capitol, there is never an escape. The needle – the yellow this time, the one that makes everything too large and her so very small – increases the miners' number to a million. And still she hangs, her shoulders so torn and sore and impossibly stretched that she's amazed they haven't fallen off yet. Not that that would be such a bad thing.
Her body slams against the floor, and weeks of bruises scream in perfect agony against the cold metal. She writhes on the ground, naked, the cold and antiseptic that hang in the air a burning salve against her wounds. All around her, the room grows you're mad, Annie Cresta, or perhaps she shrinks, but in a world of only her and hurt, does it make any difference? She screams again, and there is no one to answer her. The man is gone, and it's getting bigger, and she's far too small and the room's a jaw, and it's stretching to swallow you whole.
And it does, overwhelming her, assaulting all of her senses in a constant barrage of hurt. And she's slipping, down and down and further still, until eventually, the entity that once was Annie Cresta and the universe that once was called Pain can no longer be separated from one another. You're mad, you're mad, you'll never escape.
A/N: The prompt for this chapter was sent to me by an anonymous user on Tumblr. "Could you write something about Annie's torture (and possible rape) at the time she was taken by the Capitol?"