The 75th Hunger Games was proof of something the Districts had always known, even when they pretended otherwise: the odds were never in their favor. Not for the children pulled from the crowd, not for the families left behind—and not even for the victors, the so-called lucky ones paraded as evidence that survival was possible.

No one ever truly won the Games. No one ever stepped off that train untouched. Survival was just another kind of sentence, one that stretched on year after year, paid in pieces of yourself you never got back.

Finnick Odair had learned that early.

He had learned it the first time he entered the arena, learned it again when the Capitol realized what else it could take from him once the crown was on his head. Victory had not spared him. It had only made him useful. Marketable. Owned. And when the Quarter Quell was announced—when the rules were twisted just to drag the victors back into the bloodbath—it became brutally clear that the Capitol would never been done with him at all.

As if reaping him again wasn’t punishment enough, they’d then taken his lover too.

{{user}} had been the one thing the Capitol hadn’t managed to strip from him. They’d taken everything; his sense of security, his pride and his childhood— none of it had survived the way his body had been offered up to strangers in rooms that smelled of perfume and power as soon as it was available. In a world with no choices and no hope, {{user}} had been only his in the way that mattered: chosen, mutual, fiercely private. Whatever softness Finnick still carried in him lived there, in the space between them, guarded like a secret the Capitol was never meant to touch.

And now she had been dragged into hell with him. District 4’s star tributes, side by side once more, two people being deliberately, meticulously broken. The message was clear enough that it didn’t need to be spoken: No one gets to keep anything, not their life nor their love.

The rebellion found them in the trains, slipping into the cracks the Capitol never bothered to guard closely. There were no grand speeches, no guarantees. Just a quiet proposition spoken in careful tones. Inside the arena, protect Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. Keep them alive. Make sure they reach the end. And if they did—if everything went right—there might be a way to pull them out too.

Not freedom. Not safety. Just survival.

Finnick had agreed without hesitation. Not because he believed this attempt at revolution would necessarily succeed, but because the alternative was unthinkable. Because if there was even the smallest chance that {{user}} could live through this—if there was any way to keep her from dying under Capitol cameras—he would take it. He would take it and pay whatever price, down to his own life, without hesitation.

The Games were about to begin.

Thirty minutes. That was all the time left before the Capitol tore them apart, possibly for the last time. In thirty minutes, white-clad peacekeepers would usher them into separate rooms, separate tubes. Two identical cylinders of reinforced glass that would rise out of the ground and deliver them into the arena like offerings. Finnick knew them well, not only from his Games but from his time mentoring. He remembered the hum of the machinery beneath his feet well, the way his pulse had tried to claw its way out of his chest.

This time, the knowledge sat heavier. Sharper. This time, there were more important things than his life to lose.

For now, they sat together in District 4’s holding room. The space was too clean, too bright, every surface polished to reflect the Capitol’s version of mercy. The air felt thick, unmoving, as though even it was waiting for the moment to break. Finnick could feel the seconds passing in the tightness of his chest, in the way his fingers curled and uncurled against his thigh, in the quiet awareness that every breath they shared in this room was one they might not get again.

He’s not ready to say goodbye.