Work Text:
it is two months after the end of the rebellion that annie cresta returns home to district four.
the train station is empty, the district is dead. she walks back to the victor's wharf alone and the grey sky reminds her that this place that was once filled with so much life is no longer her home. she doesn't have one anymore.
her physical home, she realizes, has not changed since she was ripped from it — still cold and strange and foreign, even after all these years.
at first, she busies herself with small tasks. annie cooks and cleans and organizes her books, her mugs, her shell collection. she wastes days rearranging her untouched furniture, then switches it back the second she's finished. she throws out every piece of rope she owns and burns them with a match and an old votive candle, nearly takes her house down with them. she almost wishes it had.
she avoids leaving unless it is absolutely necessary, she avoids what few friends she has left, she avoids the beach and the market, she avoids the rest of the victor's wharf. it's not as if anyone would be home anyway. it is a one person cul-de-sac now.
when she finally becomes restless and can no longer handle the confining walls of her ghostly home, annie ventures out. she goes to the beach first, spends days by the water, pretends things are different. she lives with one foot in the past, one in the present. she thinks it's better this way.
next she tries the market. the smell of fish now makes her sick and the people stare at her sadly, but the pitiful looks are more comforting than the images she sees in the picture frames and photo albums at home.
eventually, once she finds a state of calm numbness, she pays a visit to the house three doors down. she climbs in through the kitchen window — unlocked just like she knew it'd be. it takes her the better half of an hour to leave the kitchen's threshold. it takes even longer to make it past the staircase. it takes her nearly a night of nervous pacing and sitting outside before she can enter his bedroom.
when she finally musters the courage to push the door open, she is washed over with a sickening nostalgia. her fingertips glide over his messy bed, across the tabletop of his nightstand. already dust has begun to settle and there is still a small trail of sand that leads to a blue t-shirt laying on the floor, and annie sees a pair of shorts she's fairly certain belong to her peeking out from under the bed. to anyone else, it is the normal bedroom of a twenty-something. to annie cresta, it is a tomb.
the room scares her. it is a place stopped in time, undisturbed by the changing world around it. She leaves without her shorts, returns home. she weaves more, cleans more, reads when she can concentrate — does whatever she can to forget it all.
but it is hard to forget. the sickness she wakes with each morning, rising from the new swell of her stomach, is a constant reminder that she cannot simply forget her corazón.
she tries slowly to pick up the pieces of her old life, but they are small and cracked and the shards cut her hands like sharp glass. each memory draws blood and reminds her of him — reminds her that finnick odair was alive, once, and now is not.