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1. Tarren Cresta
Drownings are not uncommon in 4. It's true that they are taught to swim almost from the moment they are born, but there are always risks to seaside towns. Every few years, sometimes less, a child too young will swim out too far and get caught up in a riptide, or a boat will sink and the rescue team won't reach them before a few of the crew are unmoving and floating in the water, their backs to the sky. Sometimes, there are even those that drown for seemingly no reason - a pair of lovers once washed up on shore, water in their lungs, and, years ago, the body of a man that lost his family to disease and infection was discovered pressed up against the legs of a dock, his skin blue and a length of seaweed around his neck. There's nothing to be done. If the bodies can be found, they're wrapped in a strip of old sail and given a proper burial in the salty earth on the northeastern shore.
After the nets have been cleaned and untangled, the shellfish shucked, and the fish packed away for the Capitol, Annie's older brother takes her to the beach. It's a special present for her seventh birthday. They don't have a lot of free time for things like this, but Tarren, who's already fourteen and manning the stall where their father sells fish, wanted to make it special for her.
They collect shells and sand dollars, walking up and down the line where the ocean meets the shore. Annie takes her shoes off and feels the soft, wet sand squish between her toes. She traces the dark outline of the damp surf with her eyes, holds on to her brother's hand, and wishes it could be like this every day.
Until the dark outline of a drowning girl comes to their attention.
"What's wrong with her?" Annie asks, confused. She's not used to seeing people flounder in water.
She doesn't even get the sentence out all the way before Tarren is rushing into the ocean.
"Stay right there, Annie!" he commands in a strained voice, and then he dives into a breaststroke.
Annie freezes, wet sand stuck between her toes. She understands, now, what is happening to the girl, and she's petrified and thinking about how their dad makes Tarren man the stall because he never took to water quite like the rest of the family.
Annie wants to move, but Tarren said to stay. The high tide is coming in, but she doesn't move as the water surges up to her calves. The sun is starting to sink into the ocean, but she doesn't move as she loses sight of the two gray silhouettes struggling in the undertow. She's crying and the water is up to her waist, now, but she doesn't move until her father comes to find her, sobbing and horribly relieved that the stiff body crusted with sea salt found on the beach was the only child he lost that day.
They wrap Tarren up in a strip of old sail and bury him in a chunk of the salty earth of the northeastern shore. He never was as strong a swimmer as Annie.
2. Caspian Willow
Annie may not look like much, but she can be resourceful when she needed to. She has eighteen years of fisher's work behind her, and it shows in the scars and callouses on her hands.
The fish that the game makers put in the river were the only food Annie had to keep her alive. It was freshwater, and Annie wasn't used to the way the water moved or smelled, but she knew that she could drink it. But she was cold, and, unwilling to spend too much time exposed on the riverbank, low on food.
At least they had each other.
Caspian and Annie had known each other throughout their schooling. They were friends, and close enough that Annie cried when he volunteered for the 13 year-old stick of a boy unlucky enough to be drawn. She didn't want Caspian to die - and she didn't want to have to kill him.
They'd both agreed to be allies in the games, but Annie remembers watching Caspian and Finnick whisper in corners and Finnick's appraising review of Caspian's broad shoulders and strong fisher's hands. She knew that if someone was going to make it out of here alive, it probably wasn't going to be her.
But she isn't sure if she can kill Caspian, anyways. She knows him. She knows that he has a girlfriend back in 4, and an older brother that takes care of him, and a tendency to whistle during fishing trips. When they were eleven, their class had gone out to one of the big industrial ships out on the southernmost shore. The crew were singing the ropes song as they lifted up the massive loads of shrimp, and Caspian had picked it up right away. Annie could hear him whistling the ropes song down the hall the next morning.
Now, they're waiting in the tree line, near the edge of the dam. The trees on the other side of the river twitch, and Annie and Caspian hold their breath. Annie begins to rub her palms over her knuckles in a circular motion, like she's washing her hands. It's a tick she'd developed recently - ever since the night after the blood bath at the cornucopia.
That day, she had clawed her short fingernails through a boy's face - the tribute from District 8 was only fourteen, the same age as Finnick when he was in the games. He had tried to stab her with a long spear, the same spear that Annie had used for the past nine days to catch fish. Annie had never felt blood on her hands like that - so red and so surprisingly warm, like it was burning her skin. She can still almost feel it, as if it's tattooed into her hands, though she had washed the blood down the river at the base of the dam. She can't wash the screams away from her ears, though, and they echo like water dripping in a small cave.
Caspian had had it worse, though. He had ended up with blood all over his face and chest, some of it his own. Maybe he can feel it, too, because his entire body is shaking ever so slightly. The boy standing next to her is more afraid and haunted than she thought Caspian could be. Annie wonders if Finnick thinks that she's the better option for a victor, now.
The tribute from 3 steps through the trees, holding something like a giant machete. He seems to be alone, but Annie knows that he's part of the Careers alliance, so she doesn't trust it. Her eyes jump to the tree line, watching for the movement of the branches, but she can't see anything other than the small shifting of the wind through the leaves.
The boy holds out his machete in a defensive position. His eyes skate right over where Caspian and Annie are hiding.
"Alone?" Caspian whispers to Annie, his voice low and shaking and angry.
Annie's eyes strain into the trees, trying to make out shapes and movements in the darkness. But the boy from 3 is starting to make his way down the far side of the bank. They don't have time.
"Yes," she whispers back.
They wait for 3 to get slightly farther away, just far enough that the river will cover the sound as they dash across on the edge of the dam. Annie doesn't like looking down. She's used to falling into water, but the long concrete slide on her right is warm and foreboding and solid.
As they get closer, Caspian starts shaking more. His hands are trembling so hard that he can't steady the spear on the target. So, Annie takes it from him and pretends she is spear-fishing with her brother at home. She has always been good at spear-fishing, except that the boy turns around at the last second, after it's too late, after the spear is already hitting his chest, and he looks at her with his angry brown eyes.
They are not fish's eyes, but he dies all the same, limbs flailing and body desperate for air to breathe.
That's when Annie begins to panic. She knows it's foolish. She knows they don't have time to hover out here in the open, and that sponsors don't want to help tributes that snivel and cry after killing. She imagines Finnick behind the scenes, watching her, his stoic expression hiding a wave of annoyance. I can't work miracles, he'd say. You're destroying all your working angles, Annie. Even I had to have more than a pretty face.
And then she imagines Finnick, fourteen-years-old, trying to stay alive in the arena. He could have died like this - just like they spear fish in shallow waters.
She turns away from the river and throws up the fish they'd caught that morning using the same spear lodged in the boy's ribcage. In her head, it tastes like blood coming up, like she had eaten human flesh.
"Annie, Annie," Caspian says. He holds the few loose strands of her hair not in the ponytail back and Annie wishes she had let her design team hack it all off. "It's alright, Annie. He's gone."
Annie shakes her head, doubting that it would be alright, ever again.
It takes too long to pull herself together. Caspian waits, his shoulders shaking. "Annie, Annie."
"Spear," she manages to get out, and while Caspian goes to pull it from the dead body, she crawls to the shore and submerges her entire head in the water. She feels Caspian return in the next moment, his hand on her shoulder. The light is softer under water. Annie considers waiting there, but it turns out she still does want to live, because after a minute, she pulls her head out to breathe.
She turns just in time to see it.
Annie was wrong. There was someone else with the boy, after all. Annie sees her as she's still wiping the water from her eyes, just over Caspian's shoulder. She's one of the Careers, but Annie can't remember which district. She is holding the machete she must have picked up from the boy's body.
It happens so quickly. Five inches from Annie's face, the machete slices through Caspian's neck, and the warm red spray covers Annie's face and fills her open mouth, choking off her warning scream.
Caspian's head hesitates there for a moment, as inanimate and unmoving as a paperweight on a desk. His expression is frozen into surprise and panic.
Then, his head falls forward, detached from his shoulders, and lands in Annie's lap.
Annie starts screaming, scrambling away from the severed head and the tall Career girl with the bloody machete in her hands. She falls back into the river water and, for a moment, is submerged to the top of her scalp, and she wonders if Caspian's head fell into the river with her, and if it will sink to the bottom or float on the top like a warning buoy.
She's always been such a strong swimmer.
3. Annie Cresta
If you had asked Annie when she was ten, she would tell you that there was nothing worse than losing her brother. There was nothing else that could hurt her like that.
But she was wrong. This one is worse. She is losing herself.
In her dream, she is still swimming. Always swimming, even though her muscles burn and she is so hungry, and the water is turning all warm and red and burning, and the seaweed is gripping at her ankles and legs with human hands. She is still swimming, still keeping her head above water.
It's getting harder to remember why. While he drowns, a boy is screaming to the melody of the ropes song.
Annie wakes in the middle of an earthquake. Her face is wet and the wet tastes like salt, and she panics. She can hear the dam breaking, see the debris about to slam into the bodies of a dozen children. They took me again, she thinks. They took me again to re-enact my famous victory, to see if I can really survive.
She clamps her hands over her ears to tune it out, but she can't escape the feeling of the ground shifting underneath her.
"Annie," Finnick's voice calls from the other side of the door.
Annie opens her eyes, then has to blink, disoriented by her surroundings. It's not the earth moving beneath her - it's the train. The water on her face is her own hysterical tears.
Annie takes her hands from her ears and tries to breathe deeply. She reminds herself what is real. The Hunger Games is over. She survived. She swam her way back home. She is on a Capitol train on the way to District 8 to meet the family of the boy whose face she clawed until she couldn't recognize him through the blood.
Finnick calls her name again.
She wonders why he doesn't just walk in. Yes, she had taken to locking doors and windows, but Finnick had to have some sort of override even on inner locks. Annie didn't used to like walls, but she does now. They keep back floods. Solid and unmoving and safe.
Maybe that's why Finnick waits for Annie to unlock the door herself.
Walking unsteady like a new sailor in the middle of a hurricane, Annie lurches to the door and opens it up, something in her shoulders tightening as if bracing for the tidal wave.
But it really is just Finnick. Her mentor. Her friend.
She can't quite meet his eye. She just stumbles back to sit on the edge of her bed, wishing her head would stop swinging like a boat on rocky waters. So much water, cresting over the tops of trees and hills. It will never dry out, she doesn't think. She imagines a little fish bowl of an arena, still full of swimming fish feeding on the parts of bodies even the Capitol couldn't find. Bodies crusting with salt water, ocean tide swimming up to her thighs.
Annie closes her ears to the idea, then washes her hands in the air.
She jolts when something touches her arm, but it is just Finnick. Finnick. Mentor. Friend. He is holding on to the backs of both of her arms and kneeling on the ground, looking up at her. She shakes her head. Her hair is sticking to her forehead in sweaty little strands.
"I drowned, didn't I?" she asks him, and then gags as the taste of blood fills her mouth. She had bitten a hole into her cheek.
"No, Annie." Finnick sweeps the hair away from Annie's face. "You survived. You won the games. You're here with me."
Caspian's head is so heavy. Annie has to work hard to lift her hands to Finnick's shoulders.
"No." She mumbles to herself. "No no no." She has got to stop pretending. She has to leave these nice fantasies. She has to face the music.
"It's real. I'm real."
Annie shakes her head again, but she's not sure, now. Finnick seems very certain. He always knows what's going on. She slumps forward, and she's pressing her forehead to his. They're sharing the same breath. He must hate the way her mouth smells like blood, but he doesn't pull away.
"I killed that boy," Annie tells him. "I did."
She doesn't know which boy she's talking about. There are so many options.
"Yes."
"Real?"
"Real."
Annie nods. Then, her brain starts swirling, the thoughts melting together. She thinks of something, and she can't tell if it was a dream. The memory makes her gag again. She can't help the panicked, torn edge in her voice.
"I ate him, blood in my mouth. I did."
"No, Annie. No, you didn't. Not real."
"My teeth are all red, the - the water under my skin - "
"No, no. Not real,” Finnick insists fervently. “Look at me, Annie."
Annie didn't realize her eyes had closed. She forces them open. Finnick looks at her, an inch away, blue-green eyes blazing even in the darkness. Those eyes, the same color as home. Her hands find their way up his neck to the sides of his head. Her shaking, bruised, stained hands brush through his curly hair. For a moment, there's a new warmth, one that doesn't burn. Annie feels her mind calming with each breath, like the air is clearing away the fog.
Then, Finnick looks down, and Annie understands.
"You love me. Real?"
There has never been anything said between them. There has never been anything to make Annie sure. Yet, somehow, she feels more certain about this than she did about any of the others.
"Oh, Annie," Finnick breathes. He hesitates, then he presses the broad palm of his hand to her cheek. He sweeps more of her hair behind her ear to clear her face and runs the back of his knuckles down the side of her jaw. For a moment, Annie can only see his hair, because he hangs his head in something like guilt and defeat.
After a long moment, he leans forward and kisses away a line of tears streaming just beside her mouth. His lips are cool.
"Real," Annie says.
Maybe she's not completely lost, after all.
4. Mags Flanagan
Annie has been here before.
The weather is different, which is confusing. She remembers her reaping five years ago. The sun had been bright overhead, a little burning circle like a pale polka dot in the fabric of the blue sky. Today, though, the sun is hiding behind a thick cloud cover. She wants to ask Finnick if she’s mistaking her nightmares for her past, if there’s only one that’s real, but he’s sequestered on the other side of the stage with the two other living male victors from District 4.
Annie pulls anxiously at the ends of her hair. It had grown a lot since her games. Now, it falls past her waist in thick auburn waves. She pretends she is hiding in it, not out in the open, so many cameras pointed at her face.
Ronnie, the woman from the Capitol that always wore bright, geometric dresses, walks across the stage. Annie flinches as her heels click.
She was in the audience five years ago, that pale circle beating down on the top of her head. Ronnie’s heels had made the exact same sound. Annie waited during the opening ceremonies, not really hearing the video that explained the slaughter of almost two dozen teenagers every year.
Annie waits, now, hearing more of the video than she wants. She doesn’t like the way the words echo in the open air. She doesn’t like the way she can mouth every word. She wants to cover her ears but she’s keeping her hands busy, washing them in the air.
During her first reaping, Ronnie piped up in her Capitol accent, “Ladies first,” like she had since Annie’s first reaping at 12. Annie held her breath. She thought about her nineteenth birthday, only a few months away. It would be her last reaping. After it, her name would not be added to the broad glass bowls that killed children.
Annie laughs a little, a breathless, terrible laugh. She had been wrong in so many ways that day. She had not guessed that her name would be called, and she never would have seen that there was one more reaping in her future.
“Ladies first,” Ronnie says. She lifts her perfectly manicured hand and reaches into the bowl. There are only four slips of paper.
Yet, just like that day five years ago, Ronnie reads from the paper, “Annie Cresta.”
Annie nods a little, shaking, but expecting this. Yes, Ronnie is following the same script in Annie’s head. Annie takes robotic steps up the stage, but it’s hard to see through the tears burning down her cheeks, and her feet waver and slip. There would be so much blood, so warm, such a bad taste. She blinks and she sees Caspian’s head fall cleanly from his shoulders, except it’s not Caspian’s head - it’s Finnick’s.
By the time Annie makes it to Ronnie’s side, she’s releasing loud, ugly sobs, and such a tremor grips her spine that she thinks she might collapse. A dead fish out of water, flipping to death on the shore.
She hears Ronnie ask for volunteers, and she knows how it will go. Just like it did that sunny day; there will be silence. Annie will watch Caspian volunteer for a boy. They will shake hands and Annie will watch him die. But, this time, it will be Finnick. She will already know the shape of his hand, the callouses across his palm. It will hurt so much more.
There is silence, but that is because it takes Mags a moment to verbalize the protest indicated in her outstretched hand. Mags comes to take Annie’s place, and Annie hates herself for the relief that muffles the ringing in her ears. After that moment of shock, Annie’s stomach churns and tumbles, and she begins to cry harder.
Mags squeezes her hand once, then lets go. The Peacekeepers escort Annie off the stage, and they have to drag her when her legs give way. Annie clears the hair from her face so she can watch Mags. Annie knows that Mags has just killed herself; she is as good as lost.
Two weeks later, Annie watches as Mags dies.
On the broadcast, Finnick picks up the boy from District 12. Mags crawls onto the girl's back, but Annie knows they're too slow. She shakes her head round and round and rocks a little in her chair. The tears stream in hot rivers down her cheeks. How terrible, how awful, that Finnick would breathe to death. It's its own kind of drowning, she supposes. Maybe it's his birthright.
But he doesn't. Annie watches as the girl stumbles, and as Mags falls to the ground. She watches as the helpless pain and grief festers in Finnick's eyes. She watches as Mags gives him a kiss goodbye.
She watches as Mags walks into the fog, then as it eats her up.
The camera doesn't stay on her for long, but Annie sees the way her limbs twitch even after the cannon goes off. The cameras change back to the living group, to Finnick with the District 12 boy slung across his back, but Annie can't focus on him for a moment. She's too busy saying goodbye.
She remembers a moment she had with Mags, but without Finnick here, it’s hard to say if it’s real or not real.
It was during training for her Games. Annie was practicing her aim earlier that day, and she had landed a spear right in the center of the dummy’s chest. She imagined the dummy as an actual person, and, in her mind, it took the form of her brother, Tarren, his skin all bloated from the seawater.
That night, she had barely been able to eat the feast the Capitol laid out for her and Caspian. Mags pulled her to the side before they’d gone to bed.
“I don’t think I can,” Annie confessed in a whisper to her. “I can’t kill them. I can’t do it. I’m too weak.”
Mags’s hands were wrinkled and knotted, but surprisingly strong. She pressed her hand to Annie’s cheek. Annie was taller than her - Mags had to stretch to reach.
“No,” Mags insisted in her warped speech. “Not weak. Strength is not in killing.”
Annie curls up on her sofa, watching the love of her life flee for from the fog, and cries for the woman that was wise enough to be truly strong. Not in killing - in sacrifice.
Mags, who trained Finnick and Annie and kept them both alive in the Games. Mags, who was sweet and old and kind and weaved waterproof baskets out of seastraw. Mags, who was brave enough to go into the Games again when Annie was not.
It should have been me, Annie thinks in a haze. I should be dead in the arena. Blood in my mouth.
Then, at least, Finnick could come home to Mags. She was always able to help Finnick remember who he is and take care of him when there was no one else. She's as good as a mother to him.
And all Annie can ever be to him is a girl that lost her mind in grief.
5. Finnick Odair
They tell her with soft voices and pitying eyes. She clamps her hands over her ears and begins to hum the ropes song.
There is no body, of course. The mutts took all of him. There is nothing to bury, but Annie wishes there was a grave. She wants something to visit - some physical manifestation of him, something that shows that, at least once upon a time, Finnick Odair was real.
Months later, she finds what she’s looking for. And he has Finnick’s blue-green eyes, just like home.