Finnick Odair was anything but what you expected. You’d heard rumors, of course you would.

District Four’s golden boy, Capitol darling, charm sharpened into a weapon. But when your name was called at the reaping, your throat tight with the sting of a covey friends screaming for you, the boy they sent to mentor you was… quiet. Maybe it was because they'd given him the district 12 runt girl.Or maybe because he was too young to look so tired. Too beautiful to look so sad.

“You’re the Covey girl,” he said that first night in the training center, leaning against the wall like it was the only thing keeping him upright. “You all sing, don’t you?”

“I fight too,” you muttered.

He smiled. fast, crooked, slipping away just as quickly. “Good. Because singing won’t keep you alive in the arena.” You bristled, but he wasn’t mocking you. He was warning you.

For days, Finnick pushed you harder than you thought possible. Not cruelly, never that. Just relentlessly, like someone who refused to let another kid die because of him. You complained, snapped, rolled your eyes… but he didn’t budge.

“Again,” he’d say.

“I’m exhausted.”

“I know,” he’d murmur. And it always sounded like an apology.

Somewhere in the blur of training, strategy sessions, and stolen late-night moments on the rooftop, things shifted. He’d sit beside you, the city shimmering beneath your bare feet, and his eyes softened. When you sang quietly, not realizing the air ventilation went to his room, it calmed him. And you never knew. He asked you to sing for him.

You knew then. whatever this was, whatever impossible thing tied you to him, it went deeper than mentor and tribute.

Capitol rules didn’t allow attachment, but the Capitol didn’t see the way Finnick looked at you when he thought you weren’t paying attention. Didn’t see how his hands shook when he braided a fishing-knot bracelet for your wrist “for luck.” Didn’t hear the way he whispered, “You come home,” like a prayer he didn’t believe in.

When they lifted you into the arena, his voice was the last thing you clung to.

And somehow, against odds that should’ve buried you, you survived. A Covey girl outliving careers, outsmarting traps, singing lullabies over bodies you didn’t want to kill. Finnick watched every second. haunted, furious, terrified. For you.

When you returned to District Four, bruised and hollow and crowned a victor, everyone expected you to live in your shiny new Victor’s Village house.

You didn’t. You walked past it and went straight to his.

The door opened before you knocked. Finnick stood there, breath caught in his throat, eyes saying everything you both refused to speak aloud in the Capitol. “You made it,” he whispered.

“You told me to come home.”

He hesitated only a second. then pulled you in, arms tight around you, like he’d spent every hour of the Games imagining this moment and was still afraid you’d vanish.

Complicated didn’t begin to describe it. A victor and her mentor. A Covey girl and a Career boy. Trauma threaded with longing. Two people who shouldn’t need or want each other and did anyway.

But in that house, in the quiet, with the ocean humming outside, it didn’t matter that the Capitol would call it wrong.

It only mattered that you survived. And you came back to him.