70.

Annie is 18, tall, and her dark brown hair cascades in waves down her back as she takes the stage next to the District 4 escort.

District 4 is a career district but only because its children are trained from a young age for a career on the sea. Its wilderness is not bounded by fences. Livelihoods depend on skills with nets, spears, hooks, knives, and beneath the surface of the water lurk dangers that every person is aware of.

Annie is one of the best divers in the district, has been for years, and everyone knows it. No one will volunteer for her, she is not weak. In the districts, where labor is cheap and machines are expensive, people pick crops by hand, mine coal with picks, free dive for oysters and sponges, and Annie has been diving, knife strapped to her leg, since she was 14.

She is good with her knives, can cleanly filet a fish in minutes, has fought off sharks and strange large squid in deep, murky water.

So she stands tall on the stage, the sea breeze lightly ruffling her hair and twisting the hem of the dress that mother had laid out for her "one last time" around her legs, and looks out above the crowd with her mouth set in a grim line. Her façade only breaks slightly when she sees the boy that is called as her district partner. He looks so young, so delicate, his dark hair only making his face, blanched white the second his name was called, look even paler. She waits for someone to volunteer for him - he is too young – but she realizes that that is what 16 looks like, and that 16 is old enough.

The rest of the day is a blur, and she feels like she is outside of her own body, watching as she says goodbye to her parents, her younger brother and sister, her best friend, her cousin. Her parents are as practical as always, giving her advice on spear techniques and knots, but it is all things they know she already knows, and she sees her own fear reflected in the eyes of her family, the same green eyes as her own. When they say I love you it sounds like goodbye.

Her cousin presses a bracelet of mother of pearl around her wrist before she goes, and Annie is soothed by the shimmering piece of the sea that she is bringing with her, the last piece of the sea she will see.

Finnick and Mags are mentoring them. They always mentor together, the others switching off in the other years. Finnick always seems to be going to the Capitol anyway, so it must make more sense to have him mentor while he is there.

They ask if they can mentor Annie and Dover together, and she agrees quickly, she had seen them as a team from the second his name was called. Annie thinks that it is as much for Finnick to translate Mags' stroke garbled speech as any strategy on their part and doesn't question it.

Annie expects Finnick to be the cocky lothario that everyone knows from television, but she realizes quickly that that isn't who he actually is. He is... a real person, she realizes, more to herself than anything else, not a collection of muscles and quips and saucy winks. She starts to understand just how powerful television and perception really are, since even she, another possible Career tribute from District 4, had started to see Finnick as something other, a celebrity certainly, but something else, as someone so unlike herself as to be subject to different rules in her mind.

She realizes with a start that that is how people in the Capitol watch the games, and it terrifies her.

She goes through the prep work, the parade, the training, the interviews, and she does well. She is beautiful, and she is strong, and she quickly becomes a part of the Career pack, making them take Dover with her. But when she looks around the training room from her place at the end of the Career table, she realizes that while she is scared for herself, she is scared for all the other children in the room too. She is one of four 18 year olds, everyone else is the room is younger than she is, and it is all that she can do not to give every one of them an encouraging smile, a pat on the arm, a hand with their knots. She knows that they are her enemies now and that her only focus should be on the best way to kill them to get back to her family, but she can't.

She knows that she won't win these games.

Finnick had started a little when he saw her in her dress for the parade of tributes, one deep blue sleeve exactly matching Dover's suit fading in one curling swoop of feathered fabric across her body until it pooled frothy white at her feet, the two of them together one cresting wave. She looked beautiful, but frightening, unlike herself, like a Tribute, she thought when she looked at her reflection. But when she laughed "Havan and her team did okay this year, right?" up at Finnick, he just nodded, quiet for once, and she felt like he saw her as something other than a tribute for the first time.

Annie knows she needs to sleep, they are getting their training scores tomorrow and she should be rested, but she can't. She taps softly on Dover's door, since they had spent the nights on the train talking, but he doesn't answer. She is glad. She worries about him even though she knows it is ridiculous, they are all doomed. Plus, he is just as good with a spear as she is, and even better, he is clever and resourceful. She can't help herself though, he is the same age as her brother.

She is about to turn back to her room when she notices softly flickering light illuminating the hallway, and finds Finnick sitting in the viewing room, not watching the muted television.

He doesn't seem surprised to see her, wandering the halls alone in socked feet, just shifts to make room for her on the couch. She sits in the corner of it, making herself small, tucking her legs in and resting her chin on top of her knees. She looks at the beautiful man in front of her and sees how tired he looks, how sad, and has to remind herself that he is barely older than she is.

"Couldn't sleep?" He asks her with a wry smile.

She just smiles back at him. She wants to pull his head to her shoulder, run her hands through his hair, take away some of the pain and weariness that has settled around him like a blanket. They sit in silence a while longer, watching the play of light across the walls.

"Not everyone gets to say goodbye, you know?" She starts quietly into the silence, not looking at him. "Our world is dangerous. You lost your father in a freak storm just a couple of years ago, right?"

He is looking down, and she doesn't wait for him to answer. "I'm glad I got to say goodbye. It's just... hard. To... sleep," she ends lamely.

He looks up at her, his eyes soft, a look she has never seen in them before, "You could win, you know."

She smiles sadly at him and shakes her head, then reaches out to him. She has fleeting time left in this world and nothing to lose, so she does what she wants, draws his head to her shoulder and runs her fingers through his hair. She feels his body relax against hers, sees his eyes close and his face soften, and she feels better, looking over his head at the wall, lost in her own thoughts.

The arena is forested, cut through with one fast running stream fed by a narrow waterfall from a giant dammed reservoir that is so far away from the Cornucopia, Annie thinks it must be the edge of the arena. The sheer sides of the dam rise imposingly out from the forest, so high that none of the tributes even think to try to get to the top. When the 60 seconds are up, and they are let loose in the arena, Annie finds that her focus narrows the same way it does when she is diving. She sees Dover across the circle and focuses solely on getting to him, grabbing knives on her way. She doesn't see so much as feel the threats on either side of her, quickly dodging a flying knife, throwing one of her own in the direction that an axe swipe came from, not looking at anything other than the goal in front of her. She knows that if she sees a child's face looking at her, she won't be able to do anything, and Dover will be alone with a Career pack that doesn't want him. By the time she gets to him, she has a deep cut in her left arm and a superficial cut across her cheek and no idea if any of her own knives hit their marks. As she catches her breath, back to back with Dover, she looks out across the devastation of the Cornucopia. She doesn't know if it any of the children on the ground are there because of – she retches violently but nothing comes up.

"We have to get out of here," she says urgently to Dover.

He looks at her questioningly, seems to do a quick calculation in his mind, then picks up a pack and heads off into the forest, Annie following close behind, armed to the teeth and with a pack of her own.

They do okay, the two of them, going deep into the forest, fighting off the muttations that populate the trees, getting food and water and just enough from their mentors to survive. Every night they see the faces in the sky, and it is all Annie can do not to cry, but she knows that what it mostly means is that there is enough other action to keep the Capitol audience entertained. They are safe.

But on the fourth day, she knows that there are only 8 of them left, and there hasn't been a cannon blast in hours. Something is going to happen, the Gamesmakers will engineer something. She tries to prepare herself as she goes to the stream to fill their water bottles while Dover cleans up their camp. She turns to head back and suddenly knows that something is horribly, horribly wrong; the forest is too quiet.

She slips back as quickly and quietly as she can, but when she gets back to the little clearing they had made, she knows it's too late. She makes eye contact with Dover for one horribly charged moment. He starts to scream 'No' at her, telling her to stay back, but it is silenced in his throat as Glint's sword takes his head off in one swoop. The other three from Districts 1 and 2 are around him, but she can't stop herself from moving toward him because in that moment, something inside of her breaks completely, and she is gone.

Annie is screaming, and the sound is haunted and inhuman, and the four pairs of eyes that had snapped to her with bloodlust are suddenly filled with fear and confusion instead. It is just when they are about to shake off that fear and regrip their weapons, that the ground begins to move.

The earthquake is epic, unnaturally long, violently rending the ground, throwing down trees, and the other four start to panic and run as best they can. Annie stays rooted to the ground, unmoving, unseeing as trees fall around her, miraculously not touching her, because the world has already been destroyed, and she doesn't know if this destruction is happening inside of her or outside.

There is a horrible cracking noise above everything else, but it is only the distant sound of rushing water that snaps Annie back to reality. If she knows nothing else, she knows water, so she starts running to the highest point she can see, not knowing if there is anyone else around her. She looks back in the direction of the dam but can only see a fast moving wall of water, 20 feet high at least, and she starts climbing the biggest tree she can find as quickly as she can. The water is on her before she knows it, ripping past her, pinning her to the tree, trying to knock the breath out of her as she starts to lose her grip. But then it is over, the water has nowhere else to go, and it quiets even as it continues to fill the arena. They are trapped in a giant bubble filled with brackish water, so choked with trees and dirt, drowned animals and muttations, that it seems thick. But swimming is something she can do, something she is good at, so she swims.

She doesn't know how long she spends in the water, but she hears the cannon blasts go off one after the other, until it is Claudius Templesmith's voice that she hears announcing her as the winner of the 70th Hunger Games, and she is pulled onto the hovercraft, dripping and achingly skinny and broken.

She doesn't know how much time passes. She doesn't know anything. There are flashes, and she sees Mags, Finnick, unnamed doctors in long white coats, that break up the darkness for a couple of seconds before she lets herself fall back into it. For a strange second she thinks she sees President Snow, but she knows that can't be true.

There are times when she is awake enough that they think they can get her out of bed, dressed, back out into the world. They tell her that everyone is so excited that she won, to hear her interview, watch her recap, go to her feast, as if these things would fill her with anything but terrible fear. But every time she starts to walk, the floor turns dark and liquid, filled with the bodies of the 23 children that she decapitated with her own hands, and she comes to back in her hospital bed.

She feels him before she opens her eyes, the warmth of his hands around hers and the depression his body makes where he is sitting on her hospital bed. She wants to stay in the floating in between, where nothing can hurt her and warm hands hold her back from being flung into the empty void, but she forces herself to open her eyes.

Finnick is there, in front of her, as golden and beautiful as ever, and the sight of him, of anything so perfect, when the world is so twisted and dark makes her eyes fill with tears.

"You shouldn't exist," she croaks, her voice raspy with disuse.

He starts and looks at her in surprise. "You're up."

"Oh good," he breathes, lowering his head onto their clasped hands, "Good. Thank goodness."

He looks slightly relieved but mostly worried and so, so tired. Is he worried about her? Is she making him look so tired? She is concerned about him, feels guilty, and that she can't handle. The world is going dark around him, and he is changing, morphing into Dover, and his head is on the ground, and he is Finnick, and Dover, and her brother at once. She wants to scream - she is screaming - but her voice is gone.

She has to get it back. If she can just put the head back on, put him back together, then everything will be fine. She is trying to get out of the bed, but there are a thousand tiny strings holding her back, keeping her from fixing him. And she is thrashing against them, trying to rip through them with her fingers, but she can't manage to grasp them. They are everywhere but where her hands are and then she can't even move those anymore, and she is helpless. She can't even find his head, and he is never going to be fixed, and the world is always going to be dark.

She hears him, from far away, telling her to come back.

There is something so plaintive in his voice that she finds that she wants to, for him. So she moves toward his voice, not back, to where things are light, and then she is back in the hospital room, his green eyes bright with tears looking into hers, his weight holding her arms down.

Finnick's head sags in relief, and he lets her arms go, moves onto the bed next to her, and pulls her towards him. He holds her head against his shoulder and runs his fingers through the tangles in her hair, just like she did to him a lifetime ago. She lets herself sink into the comfort of it, breathes in the clean scent of his shirt, the sweet, musky smell of his skin, and cries.

"Why?" She asks into his chest after her tears slow.

"Why?" He repeats and pauses. "You're my responsibility, my mentee."

She nods once, eyes closed, and takes a deep, shuddering breath in.

"You know that night?" He says into the silence because he knows he owes her more, "You held me. Like this. You knew exactly what I needed even though I didn't know it myself. And you didn't want anything from me. I couldn't remember the last time-" He pauses. "I had forgotten that it was possible to be held and feel... safe." He says these last words into her hair.

She lies there, absorbing his words, eyes closed. She is still so tired. She feels okay here in his arms, safe, and her breathing evens out, slows, and she thinks she can sleep. Real sleep. She doesn't know how she is going to survive, isn't even sure she wants to, doesn't know if she is ever going to make it out of this room or if she will ever stop seeing horrors that she isn't even sure actually happened, but right now she feels safe.

When he slowly disentangles himself from her and rests her head on a pillow, she is asleep. He presses a kiss onto her forehead, thinks he sees a glimmer of a look of peace pass over her face, and walks out of the room, something warm and unexpected suffusing his body.