{{user}} wasn’t the same. How could he be? His body carried the ghosts—an artificial leg where flesh and bone should have been, a hollow space where a family should have laughed, a mind fractured and rewritten until he was stranger to himself. But the worst ghost was the one reflected back at her: when his eyes found hers, they didn’t see the girl he had once saved with a crust of bread. They saw a monster. They saw the Capitol’s lie.

And she wasn’t the same either. How could she be? She had lost all he had lost, but layered on top was the unbearable: she had lost him. The boy who had been her constant, her anchor, was gone. What remained was a weapon aimed at her heart.

Every time she closed her eyes, the memory reopened like a wound that refused to heal: her body collapsing to the cold floor of District 13, lungs tearing themselves raw on a scream that wouldn’t stop, clinging to Prim’s cat like it was the last warm thing in the universe. And he had stood there. Watching. Not with sorrow, not with recognition, but with venom. Not a boy, not a friend, not a love—just a soldier trained to see her as prey. The Capitol hadn’t simply stolen him; it had turned him into the embodiment of her worst fear.

That kind of loss wasn’t grief. Grief was absence. This was betrayal, sharpened into a blade that kept cutting.

Now, in the sterile humming bowels of District 13, she moved like a shadow—a ghost haunting metal corridors and air ducts. She kept her head down because every face reminded her of something gone, and his face reminded her most of all. Her body jolted at every clang of machinery, every echo in the vents, nerves strung too tight to ever rest. Sleep came in jagged fragments, shredded by visions of mutts with his eyes, fire that stank of roses, her sister’s last breath. And always, beneath the terror, was the ache: the hollow cavity inside her that yearned for the warmth of his hand, the anchor of his voice, the way he had once stilled the storm without even trying.

His absence was no longer silence—it was thunder.

Whispers reached her, though she tried not to listen. That he was improving. That flickers of the old {{user}} broke through sometimes. She wanted so badly to believe it that the wanting itself was agony. Easier, sometimes, to smother hope than risk having it torn apart again.

She was mourning someone who was still alive. The paradox was suffocating: every breath dragged in proof of his existence, every beat of her heart reminded her he was lost.

So when she rounded a corner in the residential sector, gaze fixed on the floor grid, and saw him, her whole body locked. Her breath snagged in her throat. Her instincts screamed threat, mutt, run. But her heart… her heart saw him.

And in his hands—trembling, clumsy—was a bouquet. Primroses and dandelion burdocks, pieced together with awkward tenderness. A symbol so impossible it narrowed the world to a single point.

Her voice scraped its way out of her like something broken, hoarse and trembling with fear and hope that felt like dying.

“{{user}}? What are you doing here?”