You and Clove had a relationship that left everyone, including you confused.

It wasn’t easy to define, not in a world designed to strip away comfort, trust, and loyalty. Alliances in the Games were meant to be strategic, cold, calculated. Friends became weapons, trust became a currency too dangerous to spend, and attachments could be fatal. And yet somehow, in the chaos, between the blood and the fear, between the calculated movements and desperate survival, there was Clove.

You weren’t even sure how it had started. Perhaps it began with a nod during a training session. Whatever the spark had been, it had grown into something fragile, something delicate, something that felt too dangerous to fully acknowledge and yet impossible to deny.

Now, at night, when the campfire of your small alliance had burned low and the other tributes were lost to restless sleep, you found yourself lying in her arms. Her body was warm, rigid beneath yours, muscles tense with the habitual alertness of someone always expecting attack. But her arms around you were different, hesitant, careful, protective, almost afraid of how fully she allowed herself to hold you.

Your head rested against her chest, the rhythm of her heartbeat steady and grounding, you allowed yourself to hum softly. The sound was imperceptible, a contented vibration that surprised you with its simplicity. You closed your eyes, letting the world fade.

She mumbled your name in the quiet dark, her voice soft, hesitant, trembling just slightly as if speaking it too clearly could shatter something delicate between you. Her fingertip brushed lightly across your cheek, barely touching your skin, as if she feared the pressure might be too much, as if she feared that caring too deeply could be fatal. The carefulness in her movement made your chest tighten in a way that was both unnerving and comforting. She was afraid to hurt you, or perhaps afraid to love you in a world where love could be used as a weapon.

You could feel it,the tension under her touch, the rigid self-restraint she maintained even while holding you. Her hands, strong and capable when wielding knives, were now tentative, soft, almost reverent, tracing the line of your jaw, lingering over the curve of your cheekbone, brushing your hair back as if she were afraid it might fall out of place. Her closeness was deliberate but cautious, protective but timid. Every movement seemed weighted with fear, as if she carried the memory of every past betrayal, every sharp edge of the Games, and didn’t want to transfer it to you.

You hummed again, this time a little louder, letting the sound act as both anchor and reassurance. And she responded in kind not with long phrases, but with the small, barely audible shift of her body, the way her arms tightened, the way she exhaled slowly and evenly to prove to herself that you were safe, that you were still there.

Your hands moved of their own accord, brushing against her forearm, then resting against the side of her body. You didn’t speak. Words would have felt awkward, clumsy, unnecessary. She kept her gaze lowered, focused not on your eyes, not on your face, but on the space she was holding you in.

It was almost painful, the care she offered you. Fragile, hesitant, almost trembling at the edges but complete in its own way. Every brush of her finger, every subtle shift in her weight, spoke volumes about her struggle: the push and pull between instinctive protection and learned caution, between a world where showing affection could get someone killed and the undeniable reality that she wanted to be near you.

And for you, it was intoxicating. Dangerous in a way that made your chest ache and your mind whirl.

Even as exhaustion threatened to drag you into sleep, you felt the rarest of comforts: that someone, however scared or cautious, had chosen you. That someone had chosen to hold, to protect, to care, even when the rules of the world forbade it.

And Clove, ever wary, ever precise, ever terrified of caring too much, never let go. Not for a second.