Finnick and Annie

Immunity

Days passed, I don’t know how many. The nurses began to ease me off my medication, my body was fine, but my mind wasn’t, which was probably why they kept me there. I hadn’t seen Katniss, or any other familiar face in days and it was driving me crazy.

            Ever since I was a child, I’d liked tying knots. My father, one of the greatest sailors and fishermen in the district, knew more knots than anybody else, except maybe Annie’s father, who made nets for a living. I started learning the basic knots when I was merely a toddler, and as I grew, I became very interested in learning the more complicated types.

            The period after my games was a dark one for me, and when I turned sixteen and Snow first sold my body… then killed my parents. I remembered tying knots until my fingers bled, to keep my mind off my misery.

            In the hospital wing, nobody really took me seriously. Maybe it was because my voice was low and broken, or because I had no energy to enunciate, so nurses usually dismissed my attempts at speaking as the ramblings of a lunatic. I begged for a piece of rope that nobody gave me, so I began using the cables of my heart monitor. It really pissed them off.

            “Stop it, Finnick, you’re going to damage it!” one of them snapped. She took the cables and untangled them “Am I going to have to restrain you to the bed?”

            I took a deep breath and sighed, my annoyance evident. “Just give me, a damned rope!”

            “So you can fashion a noose and get me fired? No thanks.”

            “It doesn’t have to be long,” I said, my eyes and voice pleading. I don’t know if it was the desperation in my voice, or the fact that she just wanted me to shut up, but she finally returned a few minutes later with a piece of rope, not a foot long.

            “Now, you’ll be good of I’ll take it away,” she said condescendingly. My old self would have snapped, but I had no energy left to fight. “Why do you even need that anyway?” she asked, mostly to herself.

            “It’ll help keep me sane…” She sighed and walked away without another word, but my mind and my eyes were too focused on the knot I was tying to either notice or care that she had left.   

            Not much changed after I got the rope, except the state of my hands. My fingers were red and swollen on the first day, but I could barely feel any pain, and when the pain did begin to bother me, I welcomed it. I’d always preferred physical to emotional pain…

            The sores turned into blisters, which soon enough became bloody. The nurses desperately tried to bandage my hands and protect my fingers, but the white fabric restricted the motions of my hands so I discarded them. They tried to take the rope from me several times, but I thrashed and screamed until I got it back, until they finally gave up.

           

            I recognized Katniss’ prep team lying in the beds next to and across from mine, but they were only there for a night. They looked awful. They recognized me and told me what had happened. They had been taken the Capitol for Katniss but one of them had broken the rules and gotten all of them captured and punished. The part of me that wasn’t too busy wallowing in self-pity pitied them as well.

            The day the prep team left the hospital was the same day everyone in the hospital who was capable of moving was ushered out, and led to a large, open room in one of the bottom floors. As always, I obeyed without questions because though I was slightly annoyed about having to get out of bed, I wasn’t interested in the reason why. So I followed the rest of the sick and injured, all of who looked worse than I did. That was the first time in days (or weeks) I saw Katniss.

            She spotted me across the room and hurried towards me, though I didn’t acknowledge her presence until she nudged me with her elbow. “Finnick! How are you doing?”

            “Katniss,” I said, relieved to see a familiar face. I gripped her hands tightly and looked around, finally realizing how strange it was that most of the population of District 13 was in one room at once. “Why are we meeting here?”

            “I told Coin I’d be her Mockingjay. But I made her promise to give the other tributes immunity if the rebels won. In public, so there are plenty of witnesses.”

            The news was wonderful. The times I didn’t spend worrying about whether or not she was alive, I worried that Coin would want to punish Annie for something she was completely innocent of. “Oh. Good. Because I worry about that with Annie. That she’ll say something that could be constructed as traitorous without knowing it.”

            “Don’t worry, I took care of it,” she said and gave my hand a squeeze before heading straight to the podium at the front of the room. I watched her as she talked to Coin, who I completely distrusted for some reason. I turned my attention back to my knots and ignored my surroundings, but Katniss was back soon after.

            Coin addressed the crowd and explained that Katniss had agreed to be the Mockingjay, which I believe we all assumed was a given… with the condition that all the victors in the Capitol be granted immunity, which was met with dissent from the crowd, but Katniss didn’t seem to care. After the rumbling had died down, Coin spoke once again.

“But in return for this unprecedented request, Soldier Everdeen has promised to devote herself to our cause. It follows that any deviance from her mission, in either motive or deed, will be viewed as a break in this agreement. The immunity would be terminated and the fate of the four victors determined by the law of District Thirteen. As would her own. Thank you.”

            In other words, if Katniss stepped a foot out of line, which was more than likely to happen considering her rashness, stubbornness and her amazing ability to screw things up without intending to… Katniss, Peeta, Johanna, Enobaria and Annie would all die.