all_inclusive | You're a little bit damaged, I'm a sucker for that.

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You're a little bit damaged, I'm a sucker for that.

Slowly but surely over the last few months, Annie had been learning to trust the Nexus. Her faith was tentative, fragile, but she could not live the whole of her life inside a hotel room, no matter how lush or large. Not in general, and certainly not when she was only a month from being a mother. Holding Finnick's hand needed to be a comfort but not a crutch.

Still, it was an ongoing process, and she always opened doors with care.

From their windows she could see the sprawling gardens, her feet itching to wander amongst the blooms, but the space out there felt far too large, too open and exposed, and she hadn't quite managed going alone yet. Inside was seldom better, a maze of corridors and dead ends, but the library she liked. Quite a lot, actually.

Annie liked books to begin with, but the balcony was what she really loved, here. Sitting at the top of the spiral staircase, she could see the entire room and still get up easily with the help of the railing. A watchful bird on her perch.

She was there now, stack of books beside her on the top step and another open in her lap as she referenced the little notebook she'd taken to carrying around with her here. Everything was so different, and she was eager to learn as much as she could. The music she'd discovered on her telephone was particularly confusing.

Eyes narrowing at the page, Annie frowned. She glanced to her notes and then back again. "This makes no sense at all," she murmurred, and then jerked her attention up as someone else entered the room.

[THG cast mates, please read this first. <3]

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Katniss had never had a chance to meet Annie before the hotel but she knew about her. She knew Annie was the girl that Mags volunteered for and, later, she discovered that Annie was the girl that Finnick was desperately in love with, the person he would sell his soul to protect. Katniss could understand how he felt in some ways - she had volunteered for Prim, after all - but she had never experienced a romantic love like Finnick and Annie's.

"Hi, Annie," she says gently. The last thing she wants to do is startle her and Annie reminds her of the little deer she saw in the meadow back home. They were shy and startled easy but if you coaxed them out, they'd eat from your hand.

"What doesn't make sense?"

Katniss Everdeen had always been difficult to dislike. The way things had happened back home, Annie doubted that anyone would have blamed her had she been angry with Katniss, least of all Katniss herself, but it would have been a hollow and useless sort of anger. It hadn't been Katniss' revolution, despite how Coin and her fellows had tried to spin things—She'd been pulled in without her knowledge or consent, not entirely like Annie herself, and in the end, it wasn't Katniss who had sent Finnick to his death, but rather Katniss who had nearly died with him.

Even so, and even with the tentative and instinctive friendship they two had struck, Annie sometimes felt as if there were gulf of difference between them that she'd never fully cross. Could this Katniss, with differing experiences, be someone different? Would this Katniss still vote for the murder of children out of revenge?

Annie watched her a moment from the top of the stairs, and then pulled herself from the slide of her thoughts and glanced briefly down at her notes.

"Only the lyrics to a song that was on my phone," she answered with a thin-shouldered shrug. "This place is so different."

"Yeah, it's a lot different than back home," Katniss agrees. The hotel has plenty of food and shelter but, unlike the Capitol, it doesn't seem to come with strings attached. Katniss is a little wary of trusting it but she hasn't had as hard a time with life as Annie has. She couldn't imagine being in the other girl's shoes.

"It's weird having our own tech and not just making it for other people to use. Or...well, I guess fish, from 4. And coal for us. But you know what I mean, right?"

The was a pause which perhaps lingered just a tick too long, while Annie contemplated her answer. From the outside it may have seemed she didn't comprehend what was being asked, but in truth, she found it a more complicated question than it seemed on the surface.

"I think so, yes," she finally settled on, but her eyes had narrowed in thought, and her gaze slipped into the middle distance. "These things here, though, they don't really feel like they're ours, do they? They don't belong to us because we don't know how to have things we didn't bring into the world with our own hands." She ducked her head and then peered back up to Katniss as she tucked her hair behind her ear. "I never really felt comfortable living in Victor's Village."

She'd always expected someone to come along and take it all away, and in the end, she hadn't been wrong.

"Me neither." It's not something Katniss has ever admitted out loud before because it's too dangerous to do it but she's never felt comfortable in Victor's Village. Her mother and Prim had thrived in a nice house with nice things and plenty of food but it chafed Katniss. Katniss thinks she would rather be poor, starving and free than trapped in a pretty cage.

"It's like I shouldn't get too used to it because the rug is going to be snatched out from under me. It doesn't change what happened there." She guesses talking about the Arena is the last thing anyone wants to do but the only people who get it are other victors. Nobody else can possibly understand what it does to a person.

"It doesn't go away," Annie admitted, her eyes soft with sympathy. "Not even after we won. At least, it didn't for me."

Then again, she'd been different, hadn't she? Finnick's widow, one half of Panem's second most beloved couple, pregnant and supposedly mad. The way she'd been watched over hadn't felt much different from when Snow had been in power, even after Coin was dead.

"We never really change, do we?" she asked, watching Katniss. "People, I mean."

"I think some can," Katniss says. She has changed a lot since volunteering the first and and she has blossomed under Peeta's attention here in the Nexus. Still, her relationship with Peeta, whatever it actually is, is something she wants to keep a secret for now.

"I just think it depends on what the world has to offer them. We haven't been offered the best of everything. None of the victors have."

What they'd been offered had been scant indeed, when held against what they'd each paid. Even as she'd sat at that table with the few victors left, she'd understood the impulse that drove nearly all of them to vote the way they had. It had made her impossibly sad, but she'd understood.

And even while she could see the ways in which she herself had changed, that last meeting still lingered in her mind and made it difficult for her to agree with Katniss. First hand, she'd seen how little people really change.

"I hope this place helps some of us change," she replied, which was true, even if she didn't have much faith in it. Without hope, they truly had nothing.

"It's a good place for it. Have you tried any of the doors yet?" Katniss likes to explore them when she has the time but it's always with a healthy caution for how quickly a situation can go downhill. The last thing she wants is to get caught unaware and end up dead or worse.

Annie's posture stiffened, and she shook her head as she swallowed down a flash of anxiety. "No," she said, fingers tightening over the edge of her notebook. "Finnick has."

And therein lay the true worry. Since her arrival, Annie had been meticulous to the point of obsession when it came to stepping through any door in the hotel, so afraid was she that she might accidentally find herself back in Panem and unable to return. Finnick had been more conscientious about it, as well, but still it worried her, that someday his restlessness would get the better of him.

Katniss instantly regrets asking. She knows that Annie, more than anyone, has reason to be wary of accidentally stepping through the wrong door. She gives her best attempt at a reassuring smile.

"Well, you know what? Maybe I can test them all before Finnick goes through. Then he's safe, right?"

Annie laughed at that; a warm, if sudden sound, rather than one of her manic giggles. She shook her head, briefly lifting a hand to try and impart that she wasn't laughing at Katniss, but rather just the continued implausibility of their new situation.

"You're such a good person, Katniss. You would take care of everyone if they let you, I think." Her smile was faint but genuine. "If I agreed to that and anything happened to you, I'd never ever forgive myself."

"You have to admit, I'm pretty hard to take out," Katniss says, trying to ease her mind. "I have pretty good luck with the doors. I have found a lot of really good ones that don't seem to be dangerous at all."

The few Katniss has found that are dangerous, she has immediately turned around and never went back through them. It's a luxury this place gives her that the Districts never did.

"Did you expect it to?" Chase asks, rounding on Annie while still giving her some distance. There are moments when he's reminded of his kid sister around her, but the moments where she reminds him of his mother are more frequent. There's a strength behind the fragility and Chase knows well enough what happens when people with that kind of strength lash out or lose control. So he keeps his distance. "Because I wander through a bathroom door to get here. Not sure that books have to make sense, here."

An instinctive hand had clasped over her belly as she'd startled, but Dr. Chase's voice in and of itself was a comfort now, one of the few Annie had found herself collecting since her arrival. Her fingers splayed, rubbed briefly against the swell of her stomach, and then fell away again.

"Doesn't poetry usually make some kind of sense?" she asked him, peering down between the spindly railing of the stairs.

He takes a deep breath to say something comforting or agree, but he manages a shrug. "I'm a doctor," he says. "I sort of abandoned poetry and stories and pretty words when I figured out they don't really help you memorize parts of the body or complicated pharmaceuticals," he admits. "I always thought it sounded nice, though," he offers, a bit lamely after. "Is it romantic poetry or...?"

"It's music," Annie answered, and looked back to her notes, thumbnail absently flicking the edge of the pages. "But it's nothing like the sort of music we had back home." Music which had been in short supply to begin with, folk songs which had been whittled down over the years as people had forgotten the verses, only able to sing in the most private places and in the most hushed of whispers. The Capitol hadn't been fond of anything joyful.

He hadn't exactly stopped to think that music might vary. True, it might be different, but music is music. Notes and vocals and music, which is what he's heard of, but he's really only ever known his own world and now this place, so who is he to presume? He keeps some space beside them because he thinks Annie could use the breathing room. "What's it sound like? Where you come from?"

"Simple," Annie replied with a cant of her head. "For a long time, most people weren't allowed to make music or sing, so we had nothing like this," she added with a motion to her iPod. "When we sang, it was usually in private. Just little songs that told stories, or lullabies."

It sounds as if she's from a time centuries back, from before things became modern and music expanded to various styles. It's not like he's ever been that much of a fan, but he can see how someone could take solace and respite in music. "Is it something that keeps you calm?" he asks, still trying to navigate his way around Annie and her specific issues.

He feels like a proper session would help, but he's not sure that she's ready for that sort of official thing yet.

The question was loaded; she could see that. Chase had been doing all he could to gently draw her from her shell since they'd met. A year ago, it might have sent her into a daydream or a fit of inappropriate giggles, her mind's broken way of trying to protect her. That day, though, she felt safer than she had for a long time.

"Sometimes," she allowed, glancing back up to Chase. "The old songs, some of them…" She drifted a moment, her expression going pinched as she marshaled herself. "It isn't that it bothers me being reminded of home, it's that so many of the songs from home are sad."

They weren't simply emotional, but rather upsetting in a way Annie couldn't quite quantify, the remnants of a very real pain.

"There are some songs on here that remind me of home, and some that are sad, but it's not the same," she clarified. "Sometimes I don't mind it when those songs make me cry. It feels like…" She sighed, casting for words. "I don't know. Like letting go of something, but in a good way."

"Catharsis, maybe," Chase admits, shifting his weight forward and perching his forearms on his knees, thinking about the music he'd heard as a child in church, which had always seemed sad to him. He'd always preferred silence, but maybe it's because he grew up with it.

Easy to like the familiar. "I hope, one day, you'll tell me about your home. Not just the surface bits, not only the little things, but really tell me about it." He feels like he'll understand a lot more when she does.

"Not here," Annie replied, bouncing a brief glance around the room. Today might have been a good day for it but for the location. By now, she was intimately familiar with how her anxiety worked, and talking about home and everything that happened… A public space would be a bad idea. There was no place for her to hide here, and so very little to help her stay anchored.

"I don't mind talking about it, but not here," she clarified, eyes more brightly alert when they returned to Chase, like a wary bird on a branch.

He nods, because he knows all too well about not wanting to talk about your past. "Whenever and wherever you want," he says, thinking that he wouldn't want to press because the last thing he would want in his own life is someone prying and prodding and poking.

And yet, he'd worked with House for how many years before he'd finally broken? Maybe there are exceptions to every rule. "How about we talk about music, then," he says. "Ever think of singing? Writing it for yourself?"

The idea of making any kind of music was so far removed from the conditioned march of Annie's thoughts that the mere suggestion startled her a little. It seemed like such an outlandish suggestion.

"I—" she began, and faltered with the surprise of the thought, eyes rounding. "No. I never have. We weren't allowed back home."

After another moment's hesitation, she peered back down at Chase. "Do you think I really could?"

"I think if you were to stand up here and now and sing the national anthem, no one would come out of the wings to tackle you," is Chase's opinion on the subject, thinking (not for the first time) that wherever she came from sounded like it was a real piece of work. "Annie, I know that I don't know a lot about your world, but what I do know? I know that you aren't there anymore," he says, trying to impart how big of a step that is.

"I think you can do whatever you want, screw everyone else."

He'd gone to the library to look for some new recipe books. He wanted to try something from some of the different worlds and he figured the library was as good a place to start as any. He heard Annie upon entering and paused, smiling a little. It took him a moment to find her perch, but when he did, he wound his way up the staircase.

"What doesn't make sense? In this place, I can imagine it's quite a lot."

Even now, seeing Peeta in this place was always just a little bittersweet, a tiny tug on a conflicted heart. Annie was immensely grateful he hadn't endured the Capitol's torture, but still found herself sorry that their quietly shared bond was gone. Of course, she then always ended up feeling a bit sick with herself for missing something like that, and had wondered at first whether she might ever feel entirely comfortable around him again even after they'd established he wasn't a threat.

A silly worry, as it turned out, as his smile was infectious even when it was faint, and she found herself glad to see him despite it all. Annie flashed him a tentative smile in return as she watched him ascend the stairs.

"Only a song," she answered, and chewed against her bottom lip as she looked again to her notes. "Was there music on your telephone?"

Peeta wished he knew Annie better, wished he had that history with her even if he didn't want the torture that had come with it. Of course, he didn't know what lay ahead of him. He simply knew that something happened and that he and Annie were closer in her time. He liked that tentative smile. It felt as if he'd accomplished something, getting her to use it. Once he reached the landing, he sat down a couple of steps from her.

He hesitated at her question. "Yes, but I have to admit, I haven't used mine much. " He'd rarely used the phone in his victor house back in 12 either.

"It's very different from the songs we had in Four," Annie admitted, knowing that the handful of folk songs that had survived in Twelve probably hadn't been so different. Lost loves, family. Toiling in the mines instead of at sea.

"I like most of them, though," she admitted after a pause. "They're very…" She faltered, screwing her nose up as she cast for a suitable description. "Full. They're like a book, almost, and every instrument, and the singing, they're each a page, all layered on top of one another."

Said like that, it didn't sound like a very pleasant experience, Annie realized, but somehow it worked. It was almost like music out of the Capitol, but much better. There was heart in these songs, and they still had all of the same common themes. Lost loves, family. There was even a particularly sad one she'd found about a fishing boat captain who was struggling to bring in a big enough catch.

He nodded, listening to her. They were different from the songs in Twelve as well, but he figured that she knew that.

His brow furrowed as he listened to her description. It was a perfect description. "They are. I don't think I like them though. It's too complicated, too much to pick through." He preferred simple things. He always had, but then that probably had a lot to do with growing up in Twelve.

"No?" Annie wasn't certain why she was surprised, as it made sense. "They scared me at first," she admitted with a soft huff of laughter. "All that sound all at once." It had taken her a couple of weeks before curiosity and the desire to fit in had gotten the best of her, and even then she'd had to work up to listening to more than one song at a time.

"I might have a few that you'd like, though," she said. "No singing, just instruments. There's a pretty one that makes me think of the beach, and the old sailors' tales about girls who lived under the sea."

He nodded a little because while they didn't scare him so much as just overwhelm him, it was the same sort of thing. "They gave me a headache."

His brows went up. "Yeah? I'd like to hear them."

A smile broke across Annie's face, and she nodded once decisively. "I've got it here, just…" Setting aside her notebook and text, she fumbled in the pocket of her well-worn cardigan and pulled out a pair of earbud headphones.

"Here," she murmured, holding out the headphones once they were unwound and plugged into her phone. Cycling through her collection of favorite songs, she selected 'Any Other Name' and then sat back, watching Peeta with wide, expectant eyes.

He put the headphones in and listened, expectantly at first. As the song played, a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Once the song was over, he nodded and slipped the earbuds out of his ears, handing them over to Annie. "I like that."

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You're a little bit damaged, I'm a sucker for that.

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