you're heaven sent.

"Hey..!"

"Don't 'hey' me! I've been trying to wake you up since seven fucking forty-five, asshole! It's 8 in the fucking morning, get your shit together or we'll be late!" She exclaimed, seething from irritation. "I don't want to hear you whining like a bitch about how I left you again so go, you filthy animal!" She kicked you even if you were still on the floor. You grumbled as you made your way to the bathroom, grumbling on how she's so mean and questioning whether she's on her period today.

The side comment got you a pillow thrown on the back of your head.

The morning chaos was enough to make you forget about the searing burn that the fires that consumed you in your sleep, along with the arms that cradled you as if you were so fragile that you'd crumble from a single touch. You shake the memory off, a past not deserving of any of your thoughts in this life. Any other crumbs of phantom heat left your body as your skin makes contact with freezing water instead of the warm water you were expecting, jumping away instinctively from the water.

"What the fuck!" Your teeth chatter as you check the running water's temperature with your fingertips, trying to make sense of what just hit you.

Your roommate, being the absolute saint that she is, used all the hot water up. "Shoko, you bitch!"

You can hear Shoko's witchy cackles behind the bathroom door.

The building of your department grimly hovers over you as you start to get closer to it, the damp and uneven pavement making squelching sounds with every step you take.

It must have rained yesterday, you thought, as your eyes roamed around your surroundings. The smell of cold morning dew enters your lungs as you inhale the cold air. One of the perks of studying in a university with a big campus is that you get to walk around and take your mind off things temporarily while being idle. You can’t say the same thing when you’re running and tripping just to catch the last bus home or trying to make it to your next class on time, though.

As the opening notes of Gracie Abhram's "Close to You" blasted from your earphones, the crowd within the hallways of your department building seemed a little less stifling than it seemed. Chattering students scattered all over the place, the impending thought of having to get through a tirade of bone-tired college students sat heavy on your temples--you can already feel a migraine coming from the attempt alone. With a deep sigh, you clutched the straps of your backpack and headed towards the hallway’s entrance.

You mumbled exasperated sorry's and excuse me's as you pushed your way through the hallway. With gritted teeth, you could only imagine how worse getting through today if you forgot your earphones— having to constantly touch shoulders and share close proximity with other people already makes you overwhelmed. Peering through the crowd, you internally cheered as you saw the wooden door of the auditorium. Success is getting near— and by success, you meant getting to your class in one piece.

Just as you're a step away from getting out of the hoard, your balance wobbles as your body make contact with someone else. A gasp escaped your lips before you can even think about it as someone's arm met your shoulder, shoving each of your bodies a bit—yours a little more than theirs.

"I'm so sorry—!" Your apologies were cut short as your eyes met blue ones— and all of a sudden, time stopped.

"Don't get complacent, human." Icy blue eyes glared at you with disdain, every word coming out of his mouth a spear piercing through your chest. "You are nothing but a speck of existence to me."

The stranger(?) stared at you with concern, muttering something about feeling sorry and not looking where he was going but you stayed still. Your skin burned, chest aching like it had something to prove and your head ached from the barrage of memories you've been trying to bury for so long, you can't even remember when they started.

Gojo Satoru will not fuck this life up, you thought. Not this time, not when you’ve barely gotten through all of the heartbreak and betrayals he’s put you through in every life you’ve had—never even giving you some time to recover.

Not anymore, the thought grazed your mind as you whispered a half-hearted apology and turned your heels around to enter the auditorium, leaving a bewildered Sato—Gojo— outside with his hand still in the air, brows knitted as if he didn’t break your heart every time you gave it to him.

The halls of District 13 are a slate gray, nothing like the pristine marble and dark oak of the Capitol. Nothing like the cobblestone and white-painted wood you remember from District 4. Your home, which seems like a distant memory now, locked away along with the soft kisses from a green-eyed man you once knew and adored and the stupid giggles of a girl in love. District 4 was a lifetime ago. 

You’re ushered into a hospital room by people you don’t know in dove gray uniforms. An IV gets stuck into your arm to pump you full of morphling. You know what they’re doing, but you can’t fight off their attempts to sedate you as you thrash and attempt to fight off the people tending to you. 

You’re curled on your side half an hour later in your hospital bed. The morphling has taken its affect now, leaving you all spacy, your eyes slightly glazed over as you stare at the blank wall and machinery in the room until the door opens and you’re partially snapped out of your daze. You expect to see another one of the District 13 medics bringing food, but instead see Finnick Odair. The man who mentored you. The man you once loved. The man who left you to be eaten by the wolves.

“I’ve brought you food,” he says, holding a tray with a bowl of some sort of soup and a smaller bowl of mixed fruit. “It’s not much but it’s edible. The fruit is the only sweet thing we really get here, so I tried to get extra for you.”

“What do you want?” is all you ask as he sets the tray down on your lap.

“To make sure you’re alright. I haven’t gotten to see you since you got here,” he says.

“I didn’t think you’d want to see me. Not since you left me,” you spit.

“I didn’t leave you—”

“You did,” you say. “You left me in the arena to die while you get to go off and save the country with the Mockingjay.”

“I wanted to go back for you,” he tries to insist. “They—Plutarch, I mean, Coin and Haymitch and everyone—they told me we couldn’t. I tried to convince them otherwise but they wouldn’t budge.”

“Liar,” you say bitterly, looking down at the tray of food in your lap.

“Why would you think I’m lying?” Finnick asks, sounding almost hurt at your accusation.

“Because that’s all you’ve ever done.”

It’s late in the evening, after the tribute parade for your Hunger Games. Everyone should already be asleep. You should already be asleep. But you miss home, and you’re in desperate search for the comfort of food.

“You can’t possibly think she’ll win?” You overhear a voice say as you linger in the hallway of your tributes’ apartment. Your mentor’s voice, Finnick.

“I think she has as much of a chance as I do,” you hear your District partner, Minnow, say. 

“She’s nothing. Not charismatic enough for sponsors, not strong or fast or skilled in any sense,” Finnick says in response. “Mags can deal with her for all I care. My focus is on you. You can actually win this. You can make it out alive. She’s been dead since her name was called at the Reaping.”

You cry that night. Alone in your bedroom, tears staining the plush pillow beneath your head. You remember someone coming into your room that night, bringing you a mug of tea and holding you, comforting you. You think it’s Mags, or maybe it was Minnow. You’re not quite sure.

Days later,  right after your interviews, you’re curled on the couch in the apartment, still in your dress and makeup. Finnick is sat beside you; quiet, just watching.

“Do you think I can win?” you ask, breaking the silence. “Do you think I’ll at least make it out of the Bloodbath?”

Finnick doesn’t answer for a second, as if searching for what to say. Eventually, he says “Yes. I think you can.”

He doesn’t meet your eyes. Nor does he specify if he thinks you can win the Games or only survive the Bloodbath. He doesn’t have to. You know his answer from the conversation you overheard nights ago.

Finnick can’t sleep. He thought that when you were brought back from the Capitol, back to him, he would finally be able to rest. He had spent days in District 13 waiting, knotting rope and staring at the small photo of you he always kept on him. Now you’re here and he could visit you at any time, yet he still resorts to the photograph in the middle of his sleepless nights, rather than to your arms that he missed so dearly.

Where are you? Where’s that girl he met eight years ago who trusted him to help her win the Games? The girl who helped him train new tributes every year? The girl who would comfort him after a rough night in the Capitol, treating him like a person after he’s been treated like a toy all day? The girl who didn’t hesitate for a second to volunteer for Mags at the Reaping for the third Quarter Quell? Where did you go? What did they do to you?

How could he get you back?

“I’m Finnick Odair.”

“I know who you are,” you say, curled up in your seat on the train ride to the Capitol. “I think all of Panem knows who you are.”

“I thought it’d be polite to introduce myself anyway,” he says.

“What’s the point? I’m living on borrowed time anyway, why waste it on niceties?”

“Don’t say that. I think you have a chance to win this.” He then cockily adds, “With me as your mentor, I’m positive you do.” His poor attempt at bringing some lighthearted humor to the situation fails miserably. 

“You’re my age. How could you possibly help me?” you ask. “I get that you won at fourteen with your dashing good looks or whatever, but I’m not you.”

“I know that,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have your own strengths. I’ll help you figure out what they are, and I’ll show you how to use them to make it out of there alive.”

“Promise me,” you plead softly. “Promise that I’ll get to go home. Alive and breathing, not in a wooden box.”

He knows he should tell you he can’t. That there’s no guarantee. That he could do everything in his power and there would be no guarantee you could live. But you seem so hopeful, and he can’t crush that. “I promise.”

That same evening, after the tributes’ parade, Finnick stays up late to talk with your District partner, to convince him to form an alliance with you. You’d work better as a unit, there would be more of a chance for either of you to survive. Not just to bring home a victory for District 4, but to bring home a beating heart and breathing lungs.

“You can’t possibly think she’ll win?” Minnow says over a mug of coffee.

“I think she has as much of a chance as you do,” Finnick objects. “And if you team up with her, your chances will both increase a lot.”

“She’s nothing. Not charismatic enough for sponsors, not strong or fast or skilled in any sense,” Minnow argues. “If you focus on me, let the old lady deal with her—”

“Mags.”

“—Right, yes, Mags. If you just let Mags deal with her, you can show me how to win. I can win this for us. For District 4. We both know she’s been dead since her name was called at the Reaping anyway.”

“I’m training both of you, whether you like it or not. My goal is to see at least one of you come out of this alive. Either one of you,” Finnick says. “Goodnight, Minnow. Think on the alliance.”

As he returns to his room, he hears quiet sniffling coming from your door. He returns to the kitchen, brews you a mug of tea just how you like it, and comes in without knocking. He holds you close throughout the night, pressing the mug to your lips and coaxing you to drink, to take deep breaths. He stays until your tears have been drained onto his shirt and your exhaustion takes over, tucking the covers over you before leaving to his room again.

Finnick remembers the night after your interviews, right before the Games officially begin. You’re all glitter and blue chiffon draped to mimic ocean waves and strings of pearls along your throat and arms and throughout your hair. You’re a vision. You’re a drowned maiden. You’re a dead girl walking. That’s what you were to everyone else tonight. To Caesar Flickermen. To the Capitolites in the audience. To the rest of the tributes and their friends and families watching from home. 

But not to him. In his eyes, you’ll be the one to stay afloat. The one to swim to shore without a drop of water in her lungs. You’re the hope for another day.

He’s snapped out of his train of thought when he hears you ask “Do you think I can win?” 

Finnick doesn’t respond for a moment, still slightly disoriented by your sudden question. 

“Do you think I’ll at least make it out of the Bloodbath?” you continue, doubt lacing each word you say. 

“Yes,” he answers honestly, eyes still drifting over the pearls adorning your skin rather than meeting your gaze. “I think you can.” He doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t think he needs to. You’ll win this. You both know it.

You don’t remember much from the Capitol. You remember being swathed in white, some toxic-smelling substance being forced onto your head to lighten your hair to the perfect golden yellow color before being forced in front of cameras to film propaganda for Snow alongside Peeta and Johanna. 

You remember being strapped down on a bed in a sterile-white room, a needle forced into your arm, pumping you full of something. Some sort of drug or medication. It would make you all disoriented, warm and feverish. They—the Avoxes forced to perform on you—would show you videos as the drug distorted and warped the images.

Some were standard: recordings from your original Games, clips from the 75th. Many, you didn’t know existed. Bits from your tributes’ apartment, from both Games. Recordings of you in your home in District 4’s Victors’ Village, recordings of Finnick’s home, from when you would visit. Videos taking place in Capitol hotel rooms you vaguely remember; it’s hard to know what is from when, as all of the glass and marble blur together after years of doing the same things over and over again. 

You thought you had finally escaped it. But you were back there again, being held down while needles get plunged into your arm, something heavy injected into your bloodstream. Instead of the pristine and cold white walls from the Capitol buildings, it’s a suffocating gray and a cream-colored tile that tries too hard to be cozy, and it ends up making you feel like it’s closing in on you instead. 

Rather than the drug getting pumped into your bloodstream making you all floaty and loopy it instead dampens your senses. The Capitol drugs were like bubbles filling your brain, this just makes you tired. Sluggish, fuzzy. Cotton balls rather than bubbles.

Instead of videos of Finnick Odair, he’s there in the flesh.

“What do you want now?” you ask. You’re not abrasive, not passive aggressive. Just tired. Betrayed. 

“I want to know why you hate me so much,” he says simply; easily, almost. As if your messed up state doesn’t affect him at all. You’re not sure why you expected it to. Foolish hope, maybe, that he still cared for you. That it wasn’t all just a lie to get you to trust him. 

“You can’t seriously be asking me that,” you say. “You left me in the arena, Finnick. You left me to be taken by the Capitol. To be tortured and hurt and starved. You left me to die.”

The arena is dark, you can hardly see three feet ahead of you. You know you need to focus, to keep an eye on Johanna and Peeta and make sure they don’t get hurt. You need to watch out for Enobaria or Brutus so you don’t get hurt. Yet you can’t stop replaying Finnick’s words from earlier, over and over again. 

“She’ll be better off if Brutus or Enobaria kill her,” he had said to Beetee. “She’ll never make it.”

You’re certain you were never meant to hear them. It doesn’t change the fact that you did. That you heard Finnick say you’d be better off dead. 

You wanted to go with him and Beetee and Katniss. To stay close to them, to help in some way. Finnick had convinced you that your part was to help Johanna and Peeta distract the other victors. You realize now that you were never meant to be a distraction. You’re supposed to be bait. 

You’re forcefully jolted back to reality as an arm wraps around your throat, forcing you into a headlock as you struggle to call out for Johanna and Peeta. You see Johanna locked in a fight with Chaff, unable to help you. You attempt to get Brutus off of you before he’s wrenched away in a blur, and you refocus just in time to see Peeta kill Brutus, and you rush to get Chaff off of Johanna. 

Just as you manage to dig a stiletto knife into his clavicle, lightning strikes the tree in the twelve o’clock sector of the arena, and everything collapses around you. The last words you hear replaying in your mind are Finnick’s. 

“She’ll never make it.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe you are better off dead. Maybe this will be the end of you, and you’ll all be better off for it in the end.

Finnick doesn’t know what to do. You have some warped version of the past clouding your memories, and he’s certain he can’t make you listen to reason, no matter what he does. He wants to grab you by the shoulders, shake you and kiss you until you snap out of it and remember him again.

“That’s not true. Whatever you believe, whatever Snow told you, it’s not true,” he tries to argue. “I wanted to go back, I’ve told you so already. I couldn’t sleep without you. I still can barely sleep now.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit, Finnick. I’m done believing your lies,” you say. “Say whatever you want. I don’t care anymore.”

“I do,” he says. “I care. I care about you. I care about us. I don’t want to leave you here, with the idea that I would ever lie to you. That I would ever purposefully abandon you. I love you.”

“Don’t fucking say that. You don’t get to tell me you love me after you left me.”

“I didn’t leave you!” he says, getting irritated at your insistence that he left you to die, though making attempts to not show it. “I didn’t even want to be apart from you for once second in that arena. It was torture—”

“You don’t get to talk to me about torture, Finnick,” you interupt sharply. “Not when I was tortured because you left me. You left me to be taken by the Capitol. You don’t fucking know what torture is. Torture is being given the same rations you’d give to a fucking dog each day. Torture is ice baths and electric shocks and being strapped down and injected with who knows what.”

“You don’t need to believe me,” he says. “You don’t need to believe a single word that I say. I just want you to listen.”

You scoff, the noise is bitter, full of resentment. “Do I have a choice?”

“I don’t want you going off on your own,” Finnick says as the two of you sit on the beach, staring at the Cornucopia. 

It’s a shameful facsimile of home. Of the way the two of you would sit on the beach back in District 4, watching the waves as they come and go while the sun sinks below the horizon. Sometimes his hands would be working on a length of rope. Sometimes you would be sorting through whatever seashells you had collected that day. Sometimes you’d talk, other times, you’d simply stay quiet and just exist with each other, blocking out the rest of the world one sunset at a time. 

“I won’t be on my own,” you tell him. “I’ll have Johanna and Peeta with me. We’ll be okay. You need to stick with Katniss, make sure Beetee’s plan works. You know I’ll only slow you down.”

“Don’t say that—”

“I’ll say what I want, Finnick,” you huff, nudging him with your shoulder. “I’ll be okay, don’t worry about me.”

“Just stay alive. Promise me that,” he says, hand finding yours, holding onto it as if he never wants to let go. 

“You know I can’t, Finnick,” you say, eyes closing, attempting to block out the world. It doesn’t work this time. Not here, not in the situation you’re in.

“Why not? I promised you I’d get you out of your first Games alive. Now promise me you’ll stay alive. That I didn’t do all of that just to lose you in the end,” he says. He’s not asking, he’s begging.

“No one else thinks I’ll make it,” you tell him. “We both know that. I’m a liability. I’m not tough like Johanna or smart like Beetee or Katniss’ lifeline like Peeta is. I’ll be better off if Brutus or Enobaria kill me. They don’t need me.”

“But I need you,” he says. “If you want to go with Johanna and Peeta, I won’t stop you. But you can’t leave me. They can’t take you away from me.”

“I love you, Finnick,” is all you say. “But I won’t make promises I can’t keep.”

You spent the next few weeks replaying Finnick’s story in your head. Trying to envision what his version of everything could’ve possibly looked like. What it could be from his perspective, what it could be from yours. You’d stay up late into the night, stuck on a singular memory for hours as you quietly act them out to yourself, acting as each person as you repeat their words like lines in a play. 

You’d ask questions whenever someone would come by to deliver another dosage of morphling or bring you food. You never believed the answers, never quite trusted them, but they were important to keep track of. You’d ask the same questions to different people, compare their answers with each other, then with your own beliefs. 

It’s not until you’re staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night—when you really should be asleep—that you realize your memories have a faint sheen over them. Wobbly and iridescent, like they’re trapped inside of a bubble that you can’t quite pop. 

Some of the memories don’t have that same shimmer, that dream-like quality. Not the ones deep inside. Not the memory of Finnick holding you close and letting you soak his shirt in tears after you won your Games. Not the one of you and Finnick taking quiet walks along the beach of District 4, after you finished your Victory Tour. 

Not any of the happy ones. Those were real. Tangible. They stayed and they made sense. The bad ones—the ones where you’re left hurt and broken and confused—they shimmer and wobble and pop if you prod at them enough, if you try to look too closely at the details and realize something’s not quite right. You finally figured it out, and you had to tell him. 

You wait until morning, when a medic brings a bowl of beige slop that is barely passable as oatmeal and dried fruits for breakfast. 

“Can you get Finnick for me?” you ask, poking at the oatmeal with your spoon rather than eating it.

“Did he not tell you? He’s off on a mission with the Mockingjay and a few others,” she informs you. “We’re not sure when they’ll be back. I’m sorry.”

You don’t say anything else to her. You just stare into your oatmeal and silently hope that he’ll come back to you soon.

The days continue to pass. You’re weaned off of morphling gradually, allowed outside of your hospital room to stretch your legs every once in a while. As you walk around the industrial halls of District 13, you catch a glimpse of bronze hair through a hospital room window. You rush into the room, fighting past a few officers attempting to stop you, elated to finally see Finnick. 

You rush to his beside, grabbing onto his shoulders eagerly. “I’ve figured it out!” you say, ignoring the medics trying to pry you away from him. 

“Figured what out?” he asks, slightly disoriented at your sudden appearance and the way you practically pounce on him.

“The memories. My memories. The fake ones—all the ones where you lied to me and hurt me—they’re shiny,” you attempt to explain. 

“Shiny?”

“Shiny. Iridescent. Like they’re trapped inside of a large bubble and I can’t see or hear them properly. The real ones, the ones you told me of, they’re not shiny like that,” you say. “Finnick, I know what’s real now. At least, I can differentiate what’s real and what’s fake, if I think about it hard enough. And—” you pause to take a breath, having winded yourself with your rambling explanation “—and now I know that you’re real. That we’re real.”

“What are you saying?” he asks, a tinge of hope in his voice.

“I’m saying I can love you again,” you say in a rush, shaking him slightly, not noticing as he winces in pain. “Not yet. But some day; some day soon maybe. Once I pop all the bubbles.

“Once you pop all the bubbles,” he repeats. Finnick breathes out, almost as if in relief. “Tell me a real memory. One that’s not shiny.”

“Won’t you already know it?”

“I want to hear it anyway. It’ll distract me.”

“Distract you? From what?” You take a pause, his words making you realize where you are now. You’re looking down at a very bruised and battered Finnick, barely conscious on a hospital bed as you spew a torrent of discoveries onto him. “You’re hurt.”

“I am,” he laughs, the sound strained. “But I’ll be okay. Just tell me about a memory, so I can stop thinking about the pain.”

“How are you so sure you’ll be okay?” you ask, ignoring his request for a memory, instead checking to see if you jostled any of his injuries upon your eager bound into the room. 

Finnick grabs onto your hands, stopping your frantic movements as you see if he’s okay. “Because I’ve got my girl back,” he says, pressing a kiss to your knuckles. “And I won’t let them take you away from me again.”

a/n: happy birthday eza i was never going to kill finnick i just wanted to throw u off-course mwah ily