a fun fact about In Your Echo is that originally it contained why Annie and Johanna’s relationship ended. I think it’s deeply important and I think I will not post it in a fic so I’ll share it now. something also very important to understand this is that for me, the behemoth diverges from canon when the fic’s first chapter starts and Katniss goes to Four to tell Annie Finnick’s alive. everything else that happens before that is how I see postcanon events unfolding.
which is to say that I think that they threatened and coerced Annie into being medicated and submitting to mental health treatment and invasive check ins she did not want in order to keep her son. and she wants her baby, so she went along with it. but in both the behemoth and in my more canon timeline, she reaches her breaking point and stops cooperating and taking the medication when her son is about four. she recognizes she can’t live like that and she hates it, and it’s making her parenting worse.
in both cases, they then immediately try to take her son. in a canon timeline, I think they in some sense succeed. they take him out of the house and place him in his cousin’s home, and Annie (and Johanna) then spend a week going around and around with CPS and the doctors trying to get him back. the doctors do not relent. Johanna is the one who’s like look. there’s one last way you can get through to them, because the corruption in Panem is not going to vanish in five years and people are still financially struggling. whatever it takes to get him back is worth it.
and Annie agrees. they take all the money that was Finnick’s victor’s winnings, that she received as a lump sum after the war, and they use it to pay everyone off so that they will leave Annie and her son alone. it works! but the horrible process of them going through that together, of losing her son even briefly and having to do something that drastic to get him back, ruins their relationship. neither of them are sad about it really because him being with his mom is far more important than their relationship, but something that traumatic and stressful does ruin relationships and I think it made them both realize that their priorities and visions about life, as well as their moral codes, don’t fully align and they’re better off going separate ways. it stays fun and weird between them forever though don’t worry