notes: Though I've read The Hunger Games about fifty times and love this pairing to death, I've never written anything for this fandom. Pay attention to the setting, because if ignored, this fic will be confusing.

There's a slight recurring theme of clocks and numbers and counting (hence the title), but it isn't based off of time as my original plan was.

setting: Set in Panem for the seventy-second annual Hunger Games. The tributes are Annie Cresta and Finnick Odair. She is already insane, and they grew a connection before they were sent to the Hunger Games—this is explained in the fic, but I cannot stress enough that this is au, and does not follow the plot of the cannon novels.

dedication: ReillyJade at the '14 Gift Giving Extravaganza. This is my first fic for THG, so I apologize if anything is out of character, and I hope that you (and anyone else) enjoys reading!

disclaimer: I do not own "The Hunger Games"

i.

Annie Cresta had always liked to make things with her hands.

Something about the moldable objects beneath her fingertips made her feel like she was in control of some aspect in her life, and she loved the feeling of control—she was not a sort of control freak. She loved the feeling of safety and changelessness that creation brought, and she found the stability to be a form of ecstasy.

So often in her life, she felt as though she was falling down, and the feeling of being able to stand without caution was something of a thrill to her. For more than half of the time, her world was tilted, and everything around her whipped past her and clattered to the floor in an ocean of instability. For the other half of the time, she was fighting hard for control.

She enjoyed molding clay with trembling fingertips that looked to be made of breakable porcelain—the clay, no matter how twisted the results were, was something that she could change with simply a twist of her hands. She could press her thumb down and change something around her—the change was small, essentially meaningless, but it was still a change that she had control over.

When she walked, she found stability over looking at the ground beneath her feet. When she looked to the ground and thought about the mechanics of her steps—her foot exerted a force on the ground, and the ground reciprocated with a force that kept her standing—and the control she could bring. She could crush a bug, and therefore was responsible for any lives she would cause of the bugs crawling on the grounds.

But no one could be in control all of the time.

She tried to eliminate the moments, but there were times where she would wake up in the middle of the night screaming and clawing at her own arms with short fingernails. The dreams were always different, but the terror stayed the same, and she was never in control of her own body.

The dreams were enough to make her want to die (hence the clawing at her arms), and when she woke up, she was still scared for her life. The dreams blurred the lines that reality defined so well, and she could not help but wonder if all of her life was a dream, or perhaps someone else's dream.

The dream must have been a hell for the person on the other side—or, perhaps, it was a comfort to know that somewhere, a little redheaded girl was going mad.

ii.

Her parents assumed that she would grow better as she aged, but by her sixteenth birthday, her parents wondered if she truly had grip on reality, or if their only child had truly lost her mind.

They were whispering about her when she shrieked in the middle of the night, but when they threw the doors open to reach Annie, it was obvious that she was not waking up from a nightmare.

She was perfectly awake, staring at the clock with wide green eyes and stammering in some language of her own creation. Her hands were as white as paper—she spent the main of her days inside—and trembling so badly that she could hardly hold them up, but she managed to point at the clock and stutter out another slurred phrase of her strange language.

To her parents, the clock was in perfect shape, but the clock was wrong. It was fine at a glance, but when the redheaded girl looked more closely at the circular device, she saw the numbers melting off of the clock and clattering to the ground. It span off of the walls, and the hands were coming towards her, looking to cut her throat and choke the breath from her.

Annie shrieked and shut her eyes, crossing her arms over her chest and wrapping her fingers around her arms. Her short nails managed to break through her fragile skin, and her parents screamed and tore her arms away from her, ignoring Annie's desperate screams for them to let her go.

"Annie, you're hurting yourself. Annie, stop. Annie, let go. Annie, calm down." Her parents spoke as though she was a bomb about to detonate. Their voices were calm and unchanging to keep her steady, and they were acting as though they were not holding back a shrieking girl who was losing her grip on reality.

"I'm not a child! STOP!" Annie shrieked, shoving them away in an outburst that was almost violent, but wasn't that all she was? She was dangerous, and she was unstable, much like a bomb with twisted wires.

Her parents let go of her and she ran past them, ran out the door, and ran away from possibly the only people who would ever love her with no intention of turning back.

iii.

When she ran away in the middle of the night without plans of turning back, she did not expect to find any obstacles, and certainly did not expect to find a roadblock in the form of a man with sea-green eyes and a charming smile.

She looked at him, wondering if he too was a figment of her imagination—she thought it impossible for someone so perfect to be real, and if he was real, there wasn't any reason for him to be hanging around an old playground past midnight.

"Easy there, beautiful." The angel spoke with a voice made of rough velvet, and she could not see why he called her beautiful. She was nothing more than a beautiful disaster with porcelain skin, tangled hair of flames, and arms covered in scars from her own fingernails. Her left hand began to shake violently, and his clear eyes followed the trembling movement, "Are you okay?"

Annie blinked at him, both startled and curious as to whether or not he was real. "Okay? Okay. Okay. No. I'm not okay." His question was a simple one at that, but she had no clue whether or not she was all right. How could she say that she was okay when her hand was trembling so badly that it hurt and she had to question the reality of what was in front of her.

"Okay." He said simply, not offering her some false apology for something that was out of his control, but Annie didn't mind. How could he be sorry for something he had nothing to do with? He was not a man haunting her dreams and making her insane—he was nothing more than a beautiful stranger, and possibly a figment of her imagination.

"I'm not okay." She repeated, her voice shaking. "I'm not okay. I—I can't tell time. The clock looks like it's melting. I can't read. The words fall off of the page. I can't count how many fingers I have on my hands. And when I saw you, when I look at you—this very moment—I'm having trouble determining whether or not you're real. I—I don't know if there's an actual human being standing in front of me, or if you're just a figment of my imagination and I'm just speaking to a tree. Or maybe, I never ran away. Or maybe I'm just talking to a complete stranger who thinks that I'm insane—rest assure, I am fully insane. In fact, my parents are thinking about sending me away."

"Oh, are we exchanging secrets now?" The man said, and his lips upturned in a devilish smile that made her knees feel weak. He walked a few paces closer to her, then paused, gesturing towards a low swing set. Her body trembled as she walked, but she managed to sit in the plastic seat, and he placed himself in the seat next to her. "Shh. Calm down, Beautiful. Listen to my voice."

Her wide green eyes fixated on him—oddly enough, his rough velvet was like some sort of a lullaby. "My name is Finnick Odair. I was born and raised in District Four, but I suppose that isn't anything interesting—I'll bet that you were, too, and just about everyone else in this town was born here. I'm doubting that anyone really leaves their district for a new one. Why would you leave one hell for another?"

She nodded, and her porcelain hands seemed to tremble less violently. Her green eyes flickered downwards to her hands as he continued to voice his story, and she counted the fingers. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five. There were supposed to be five fingers on a hand—she knew this from what logic she had before she was seized by insanity—and a smile brought itself onto her lips for a moment.

iv.

People liked to talk about Annie when she walked by—she was something of an oddity in District Four. She was the girl who would smile one moment and fall to the ground sobbing the next, fragile as a rose petal and breakable as glass.

Everyone believed that Finnick Odair would only break her heart, but perhaps that was a lie that his admirers spread to throw Annie even farther off the edge of security. It seemed easy enough to believe—how could someone as free and brave as Finnick fall for someone who was just about to fall off the deep edge?

But to Finnick, nothing mattered. Nothing, that is, but Annie Cresta.

He would spend his days thinking about her, how to help her, how to make her smile, how to see her again. He loved her, and though he didn't know if she loved him back, he didn't give a damn.

Every night, he went to her to help her fall asleep, and held her until morning. Before she fell asleep, he let his voice blend with hers to count the hours on the clock, and trace the steady hands orbiting the center of the clockwork. Then, he slipped into bed next to her.

There was nothing romantic about the gestures (not on her end, at least). He watched her arms while she fell into the light stages of slumber to make sure she did not madly claw at herself, and held her tightly when the inevitable shrieks rang from her throat. He wrapped his sinewy arms around her to calm her, and whispered random comforts in her ears—he knew that his voice settled her when she was falling off of the edge.

He was the only thing in her life that was steady, and without him, she was falling.

v.

He was called in the reaping for the seventy-second Hunger Games when he was nearly nineteen and she thought that she could not become any more broken.

The voice that called out Finnick's name was a delicate one, laced with happiness and an ironic happiness over what she was speaking of. Annie didn't know the woman's name, but she knew that her delicate fingers were the keys to the names called, and possibly the cause of the death of someone close to her.

The ritual was the same: a "may the odds be ever in your favor," a small speech, a few words about the history of the Hunger Games, and a short reach into the jar of names that held the future. Annie wasn't able to pay attention, but she was able to hear the male named pulled, the name of the only man she trusted.

"FINNICK!" Annie shrieked, reaching out to grab him moments after the name was called—it took a short time for it to register that Finnick, her Finnick, was being sent into a land of death and torture. For a moment, she wondered if she was hallucinating, but the pain was much too real for even her most wicked nightmares to create.

She stumbled, barely held upright by her parents who were giving looks of sympathy. The looks were useless—they didn't know, didn't know how it felt to have the stability in their life ripped away from them and tossed in an arena of death and despair.

She looked up to the face of the woman from the Capitol (a woman she would later identify as Effie Trinket) and searched for her love, a love that she had never confessed the nature of her heart to, and her green eyes met with eyes made of the sea. The woman with the pale skin said Annie's name, and Annie hadn't a clue why she had mentioned her, why she was being pushed up to the stage by Peacekeepers, or why her parents were crying.

Then, Annie was pushed up the stairs and onto the stage, and she was happy. She was close to Finnick. The only thing that separated her from Finnick was the woman from the Capitol. Was this a goodbye to Finnick—did the woman know the nature of Annie's love for Finnick, and decided to invite her on the stage to touch him one last time?

"Our tributes from District Four," The high voice trilled, and Annie looked to Finnick—this was wrong. She wasn't in the Hunger Games, and certainly not with Finnick. She could not die. He could not die. One or both of them would die. They couldn't die.

Annie thought she was about to fall to the ground—she was too confused, and she was trying to convince herself that the Capitol was playing some sick joke on her because they knew, they knew that Annie needed Finnick. And then Finnick was touching her, but only her hand. He grasped her hand and shook it once—why was he shaking her hand? Why was he not holding her, not whispering in her ear that everything would be okay?

"May the odds be ever in your favor."

And then she knew: he was not telling her that it was okay because he knew that it was never going to be okay again.

vi.

The arena looked to be something of a desert, no water in sight—how delightful was that? Annie's only skill was lacking from the arena, and the sight of the flat lands only made her sure that the arena was set to both kill her and break her heart.

She could not swim for there was no water, and was never the fastest person—her insanity had slowed her train of thought, and she could not do any one thing perfectly unless her mind was completely focused.

So, she focused on Finnick.

He was standing on one of the platforms opposite hers, and he was staring at her. She was sure that he had been watching her for a while, and there was some urgency in his sea-toned eyes. He gestured behind her with a movement of his shoulder, and she looked over to see a group of trees in the shape of a thin forest behind her head. She blinked at him for a moment, a question in her eyes, and he nodded his head yes.

The cannon fired, and the redheaded girl went running for the woods.

She was not attacked for the rest of the tributes were racing for weapons, but she could not run far—she knew that Finnick was back there, and there was a chance that he was hurt. She turned her head while sprinting to look at him, and she saw sunlight glinting off of a copper trident that her love was currently driving into someone's abdomen.

He screamed at her to go, narrowly missing a Career tribute trying to slash away at his back, and Annie sprinted for the trees.

vii.

It was seven days into the Hunger Games—or possibly one, or nineteen, or forty-eight—and she was losing the ability again to count.

For however many days the games had been going on, she had been hiding in a group of bushes that Finnick had dragged rocks by to camouflage, and he had protected her in that hiding place for countless days. She stayed hidden while he killed, avoided being killed, and found enough food to sustain both himself and Annie.

Once, at about two in the morning (Finnick had whispered an estimate of what time he believed it to be to her) she was curled in Finnick's strong arms and heard echoing footsteps. Annie cringed, and Finnick placed a hand over her mouth before she could whimper in fear. Voices came, asking someone if they saw anyone, and someone else replied that no one was there.

Later, the footsteps left, but Annie stayed awake silently for hours. She watched Finnick sleep, and whispered to him that she loved him, but he did not hear her declaration of her love for him.

He would die the next day, never knowing that she confessed her love for him.

viii.

And suddenly, the ground was falling, but not in the way that Annie's hallucinations played out a breaking ground to be.

It started before the sunrise, and began with tremors that could simply be marked off as a simple earthquake. Annie wished to sleep, but Finnick was more cautious than that—he knew that there was nothing natural in the arena, and that he, Annie, and two Careers were the only people left in the arena.

The Capitol needed a way to provide a bloody fight to the death of all but one, but none of the tributes could have imagined that it would come by the Gamemakers taking the ground and shattering it.

In moments, flakes of the ground were falling away, and Finnick was screaming in hysterics that Annie could not understand—or perhaps the hysterics were in Annie's mind, fueled by her thoughts that were too rapid for her to understand herself. She felt Finnick's hand take hers and pull her into a run towards the Cornucopia, and she followed him.

Many times, the both of them nearly fell into the blackness that the ground was disintegrating into, but Finnick always managed to pull her back up and help her keep running on the half-solid ground.

In the distance, a cannon popped in the air, and she heard a sadistic laugh that was not necessarily happy from her love. He only ran faster at the noise, and together they whipped through the falling trees and crumbling grounds, and she pretended that the shattered floor and instability was not like a vision painted from her nightmares.

But this was not a nightmare.

Her mind was filling with images of gore and hellish creatures and falling floors, and suddenly, she felt her weight being lifted. Was she falling, or flying? Or perhaps a strange combination of the two?

No, she was being suspended by only her hand. Her green eyes popped open, and her eyes clashed with the grey of the Cornucopia before they met with the sea of Finnick's eyes, and a second cannon fired.

One, two. Two are dead. Two are alive. Annie nearly fell off of the Cornucopia and into the blackness that now surrounded the arena upon the realization that two tributes were alive, but she managed to steady herself with a single look into his eyes. I am the first. He is the second.

Annie wanted to hug him, wanted to tell him that they made it, but his beautiful eyes were nothing but heartbroken. There was a pain inside of him—it was shown through his eyes—and Annie ached to heal the pain that was consuming her love. The clockwork of his mind was turning in a way that hers was not, and he stood from where he had been sitting on the floor.

"There can only be one victor, Annie." Finnick whispered harshly, and a drop of water that looked to be opalescent dripped from his light eyelashes. "I'm sorry, Annie. I'm so, so sorry." His voice cracked on the last word of his apology.

Annie wanted to ask him what he was sorry for, but she was stopped by his lips meeting hers for the first time. His lips were chapped from dehydration, and his lips tasted of the bitter berries they had eaten earlier, but she wanted to hold the moment for as long as she lived. His lips moved from hers and landed on her forehead, and he mumbled a second apology to her.

"I'm sorry, Annie."

The beautiful boy gave her a disorienting look—the last he would look at her in that beautiful way—and allowed a peal of tears to fall freely from his eyes. Annie did not understand why he was crying, but she wanted to comfort him in some way. A part of her told her that she could not comfort him, and though she did not understand why she could not, she didn't question what her mind commanded her.

"I love you, Annie." He took a step backwards, then another. Another movement of his feet brought him to the edge of the platform and the only solid land for miles, and soon Annie realized that falling off the edge of the Cornucopia would kill him. She wanted to scream, wanted to hold him back, wanted to tell him that she loved him, but she could do nothing but watch.

She was silent as he spread his arms and fell backwards to his death—she could not speak, could not breathe, could not tell him that she loved him. She could never tell him that she loved him in a way that he would hear for she knew that he was gone, gone forever.

The sound of a cannon rang through her ears, and Annie knew that she would never be okay again.

secondary notes: Thank you to anyone who bore with me through that angsty mess of odesta c: I'm sorry for killing Finnick, and I hate writing or reading about his death (and will undoubtably lose it in Mockingjay: Part Two when I watch it) but it made sense in my mind.

The recurring themes of "I'm not okay," were taken from The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.

question of the day:

What is your pet peeve of fanfiction authors? My main one is spelling and grammar errors in a fic—simple ones are fine, but ones that are hard to read through are annoying, or constant repetition of the same misspelling. And A/N's in the middle of fics. And threatening to delete a story if it doesn't receive [blank] reviews by the next chapter or update. (why am I ranting so much my gosh I'm bitter. I should go live alone with my cats and die because I'm allergic.)

leave a review in the box c: