Still Standing {Annie/Oliver}

"Can't undo the scars
All up and down our hearts
Can't forget how it felt when it all fell apart."

Limping around the District with a crutch to aid my still-busted knee that never healed quite right after the enormous sloth muttation broke it in the Games wasn't my favorite thing. People would stare at me, either because they wondered if I was in pain, or because they knew who I was; Oliver Wren. Sometimes it was for both reasons. To answer the question of if I was in pain anymore, I'd say, not physically, usually. My knee would act up now and again, but not constantly. As for the emotional pain of it all; that wouldn't be going away any time soon, I could be sure.

It was difficult, coming home. My father had passed away shortly before the end of the Games and the reveal of the Vault's existence. He never knew that I was alive, and now, he never would. I was a mess when I first found out about his death. The Games gave me an illusion of loss, such as when I saw Faux 'die' in front of me, but then I saw him again, still alive. This, the loss of my father, was no illusion. He was gone, and this was reality.

It made me wonder how the other tributes were coping; especially my friends from the arena. Many would call them my allies, but at this point, I just think of them as my friends. Faux, Fiona and Carmen had all 'died' in the arena, and then been sent home to live out their lives after the Capitol pieced them back together, which is the same thing that I'd gone through, but we'd all experienced it in different ways. All of us died in that arena, aside from Annie, the Capitol's newest treasure.

I wondered how it all felt to her. Honestly, we'd never interacted with one another in the arena, so I didn't even know her. I'd seen replays of the fights I'd missed of hers because I had still been fighting in the arena when they'd happened, and I watched her other fights live as they happened, seeing her 'kill' other tributes. At the time, she truly must have thought she was killing them.

Then it was all revealed.

Did she live with the same guilt as other victors did, even though her kills came back to life in the end? It made me truly wonder how she felt after all of this. The trauma of the arena, the bloodbath, my fight with the sloth mutt, my fight with other tributes and the guilt of putting Faux in a life-threatening situation still stuck with me, even though no one was truly dead from the Eightieth Games.

The conflict and chaos of it all would never truly be gone from my mind's memories.

I didn't expect to see any of the other tributes from the arena aside from my District partner ever again, but today proved me wrong when Anatalia Morrisen was in my view. I wasn't sure it was her at first, but then I recognized her, the brief images that had stuck in my mind of her from the bloodbath and the training center resurfacing.

I wasn't sure what prompted me to do so, but I used my crutch and limped my way over to her, speaking up.

"I'm glad to see you're still standing. I hope you're doing well," I said to Annie with a kind smile.

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560 words