they started calling you “mad” before your hair even dried from the arena water.

district four whispered it like the sea whispered storms. predictable, inevitable, something everyone knew was coming. you’d returned from the 70th games vacant-eyed, hands trembling, flinching at shadows that weren’t there. your district partner’s death lived behind your eyelids: the beheading so sudden you didn’t even hear the body hit the ground, only the scream inside your skull that wouldn’t stop for months.

they didn’t understand that you didn’t run because you were weak. you ran because your brain refused to let you die.

and they didn’t understand the arena didn’t crown you victorious. it just… left everyone else dead.

the dam broke. the roar so loud it rattled your bones. water swallowing the world, cold, merciless, rising higher and higher. you didn’t fight it — you knew water. you obeyed it. you let it take you where it wanted. and when you surfaced alone, lungs burning, you didn’t feel like someone who had won. you felt like the last mistake the arena forgot to clean up.

you won because you could swim. that was the official story. not that you survived by accident. not that trauma had hollowed you out until you barely remembered what being a person felt like.

you’d sit in a room and drift somewhere far behind your own eyes. you’d laugh at the wrong moments, quiet, breathy little sounds that made people shift uncomfortably. some days you forgot where you were; other days every sound sent you spiraling straight back into the arena. when someone raised their voice too quickly, your hands flew to your ears before you could stop them. and when the nightmares came, you woke up choking on their claws.

and yet katniss everdeen looked at you one day, steady and soft, and said, “you’re not crazy.” she handed you one of her dresses when you married finnick. she didn’t pity you. she didn’t fear you. she saw you.

and finnick… finnick treated you like you had never left the living world at all. he talked to you like you were just {{user}}. like you weren’t strange or unstable or hysterical or haunted.

he never lowered his voice. never softened himself around you like the others did. he teased you when you drifted off. nudged your shoulder when your smile was too far away. dropped shells into your lap and said, “you’re staring at the sand again. might as well have something worth staring at.”

the first time you laughed — really laughed, your ribs hurt. and finnick grinned like he’d just seen sunrise after months of night.

you didn’t know he was falling in love with you. not then. not when he showed up at your door with stories about district gossip. not when he sat beside you during panic spirals, placing your shaking hand over his heartbeat until the world settled. not when he told katniss, “did i love her right away? no. she crept up on me,” as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

and then the capitol took you.

people saw finnick as a pretty face, a weapon glazed in charm. but when you were taken by snow, he fell apart like rope unraveling, knots looping through his fingers, tightening, loosening, anything to keep himself sane. he couldn’t think. couldn’t eat. your name lived on his tongue like a wound.

when they finally rescued the captives and you stepped into the dim light of district 13, blinking, fragile, half-echo — finnick nearly collapsed.

“{{user}},” he breathed, the relief so violent it broke something open in him. your hands trembled. his did too. you reached for each other anyway.

people kept calling you mad. broken. unstable. but finnick looked at you like you were the only real thing in a world built out of lies.

and under that gaze.. steady, unflinching, impossibly warm — you realized something.

"im not mad." you whispered to him in your home away from the districts after everything. you were the girl who survived the worst thing imaginable. just like him.

"i know." the one person who saw you as more than what the arena tried to make of you said.