[mockingjay] the world carries on without you

[maredementis]

What Annie thinks--is no, no no no, no, not without, but District 13 has pills for that. There is treatment. There are drugs that will not hurt her baby. Their baby.

Annie has to keep breathing, because they have a baby, but without Finn the world is pale and awful. The world is hideous. Finn isn't in it, so Annie hates the world, and she hates everyone who is in the world, because they are not Finn.

Haymitch tries to comfort her, but Annie nearly bites off his nose, and no one bothers her after that. There are only sedatives safe for her baby and quiet voices and sleep.

Annie wishes the baby would die so she could die too, but she doesn't tell anyone. If the baby dies she'll go after, but if the baby lives so will she. Annie has always been complicated, but in this case it's simple. She'll live for Finn or she'll die with him. (Everyone hopes she stays pregnant, and she does.) Annie only wanted to live for Finn. It's their job to find anything else for her to live for.

It's Johanna, finally, well before she swells, that convinces her.

"Finnick would kill me if I let you die, you nutjob," she says, bluntly, tearing a shard of glass out of Annie's hands. It's Johanna who curses and threatens and abuses Annie into surviving when there's nothing to live for, and Annie really understands why Johanna was his best friend. For Johanna, and for Finnick, and for their baby, Annie struggles up out of the sea and meets air again.

Other people would see irony, after she's collected herself. Annie sees hope.

After they are married, together in front of everyone, Annie has no shame about what she wants. They are decorous for hours, but after--she is pretty sure no one in 13 wants to be their neighbours, and she isn't sorry. Finn will live and so will she, unseen by the propos, nestled in their sweet almost anonymous love. Katniss and Peeta can do what they like. Under that, Finn and Annie meet each other, since she's been saved, and are beautiful. That was real. They had that, it was theirs, and nobody can take that away even if--even if she's alone, now, except for what is in her that makes her throw up in the morning and afternoon and evening. She can barely keep anything down, but with Johanna bullying her--she tries, hard, to make herself eat.

She spends a lot of time with Peeta. They're the same, in a way, and when people tense at the idea of them alone together Annie shrugs it off. Peeta is strong, but Annie is fast, and anyway. He wouldn't hurt her. They've both lost someone to the Capitol, even if Katniss is still alive, cloistered in her chambers until the trial ends. It's supposed to be too dangerous to have her in public. Neither of them buy that for a second.

"Katniss Everdeen actually loves me. Real or not real?"

"Real."

Annie can say this with confidence. She saw how Katniss looked at him, even when Katniss didn't know she was looking at him and saying with her eyes love, love, hurt. They bake bread and cakes together in amazing Capitol kitchens, and Peeta sometimes loses the brokenness in his eyes when he does something like smear icing on her nose. He's only four years younger than her. It's easy to be friends with Peeta, to like him, and between them they don't have to pretend not to think about the Capitol tortures all the time. They don't have to pretend not to hurt, or not to miss someone so fiercely it burns. When the world slips away from one of them the other is always there to gently pull it back. Real or not real?

"Finnick Odair is alive."

"Not real," Peeta says, and Annie can feel his heart breaking in her own chest.

She knew already. But she needed someone else to say it.

It's an ache, every day, but one morning Annie wakes up and doesn't imagine Finn is in bed next to her. So that's something.

(He'll never really go, not as long as she holds on. So Annie holds on.)