I really hope you feel better soon! *offers flowers and hugs* Being sick is no fun at all. I come bearing a prompt: Annie finds out that President Snow forces Finnick to sell his body. I'm writing about that myself right now and I'd love to hear your take when you feel up to it! :)
This is kind of an extension of a scene in Chapter 13 of Treading Water. If you want to read that scene, too, I can cut it out for you and post it here.
They sit side by side as the sun sinks below the horizon, leaving behind streaks of deep gold and orange and blue that slowly fade into purple. The breeze coming in from the sea picks up, dragging Annie’s hair across her face, tickling her skin wherever it touches; she catches up as much of it as she can and holds it against her neck so the wind can’t play with it anymore. As the colors in the sky fade and darken and the stars begin their dance, the silence between them grows.
The words she hadn’t understood before, when Finnick first said them, rattle around in her head, growing in importance, becoming heavier and darker as their meaning begins to sink in.
Hoping he doesn’t notice, she glances at Finnick where he stares, seemingly unseeing, at the disappearing horizon. He still hasn’t told her who sells him, but really, who could it be but President Snow? Finnick is a victor and even she, a girl who barely qualifies as a victor herself, at least if she pays attention to the tabloids, to the voices and pens of the Capitol, even she knows that the only person in all of Panem who has that kind of control over a victor is the president. But she doesn’t know why and she isn’t sure she’s comfortable asking.
There had been such pain in him when he said it. He’d been so agitated, like he was forcing the words out past some kind of barrier. She hadn’t noticed it at the time, more focused on what he’d said before, that he loved her, that he wanted to be with her and only her, but replaying it all now, she hears it so clearly. Guilt washes over her like the incoming tide that laps at her toes. No, not like that at all. More like the wave that washed over her in the arena, doing its best to drown her.
How could I be so selfish? She bites her lower lip to keep from blurting the words out loud, thinking back over all the times over the past few months he’s gone to the Capitol and how different he was, how remote and even sometimes a little cruel when he came back. She thinks about how he sometimes flinches at an accidental touch, how he’s always so careful to keep some distance between them. Even about how, just a couple of days ago, when he’d kissed her, how he’d slammed away from her as though scalded.
She doesn’t want to bring it all up now, doesn’t want to break the silence, but she can’t hold it in any longer. The stars shimmer in the deep purple-blue velvet of the sky when Annie reaches out and takes Finnick’s hand in hers. Her grip is tentative at first as she half expects him to flinch away from her, but when he doesn’t, when he just looks over at her in the darkness, his eyes glittering like the stars above, she tightens her grip.
He flips their hands around until he can weave his fingers with hers. “What do you have to be sorry about?” There’s no pain in his voice now, just the warmth of the smile she hears there instead. His lips brushing the back of her hand momentarily short circuits what she was going to say.
"When you told me what… what he does to you, I was only thinking of myself. And I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry that all I really heard was that…" Still not believing he’d actually said the words, she stops, but he fills them in for her, and she still hears the smile in his voice.
"All you heard is that I love you." He pulls her in closer to him and she shifts to keep her shorts from scooping up sand. "Annie, I’d much rather you heard only that and not the rest." He kisses her hair and whispers, "I wish the rest didn’t exist."
"When you’re here, when you’re with me, the rest doesn’t exist. There’s nothing but you and me."
His voice is rough when he finally says, “And that is just part of why I love you, Annie Cresta.” When he kisses her again, it’s not on the back of her hand nor a brush of his lips over her hair and Annie gives herself over to it with abandon.
