𝚑𝚞𝚛𝚝𝚜 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚕 (Finnick Odair)

𝚡𝚡𝚒𝚒𝚒.

𝚑𝚞𝚛𝚝𝚜 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚕

𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚛: 𝚡𝚡𝚒𝚒𝚒.

𝚂𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚕𝚊𝚞𝚐𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐. Cackling, to be exact. A gurgling, blood-filled laugh that echoed in Saffreen's ears.

A spray of foamy blood erupted from his mouth when the coughing began.

Someone grabbed Saffreen's shoulders and herded her inside. "Katniss!" she shouted, the word tearing from her throat. She didn't know what was going to become of her friend, her friend who had just assassinated the nation's brand new president. "Katniss!"

She was held fast by Thirteen guards. "Let me go!" she roared, kicking and squirming and thrashing. She had to get to Katniss. She had to help. They were going to kill Katniss, that was what they would do. Make a spectacle of it, make the whole world see what happened to problems. "Let me go!"

Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was a wild animal caught in a trap, gnashing her teeth at the hands that tried to hold her steady. "I'll kill you!" she screamed as she struggled to wrench herself free. "I'll kill you all!"

Her brand new skin was tearing and bleeding. That didn't matter. She would find a way to fix herself once she got to Katniss.

Where was she? What were they doing to her? Was she already dead?

She didn't even feel the needle being pressed in her arm, sedating her into oblivion, forcing her back to the world of darkness that she had once wanted to return to so badly. 

Finnick called for her in the darkness, begged her to come for him. 

And Katniss was there, too, ignited in glorious fire. 

Gloss from District One, a spear in hand, launching it toward her only for the spear to explode into blinding white light.

A man with purple hair moving in the darkness before his head burst apart, covering her in deep red blood that stung like the acid rain when it touched her skin.

Peeta, his wrists bloodied and raw. "This isn't like you."

 Climbing trees in her first arena, escaping the mudslide the Gamemakers had sent her way. Gale's voice breaking through, urging her, "You have to move! Saffreen, you have to move!"

A young girl with dark hair and dark eyes, a knife in hand, looking at her with confusion filling her face. "Mama?" Deecey.

Another girl running up behind Deecey, a spear aimed at her heart.

And Peeta again. "You hate the games, you hate the idea of it!"

Two days had passed in a drugged haze when she woke again. There was no Delta this time. No Deecey to hold and cry over.

No one there.

She was restrained, wrists and ankles strapped down to the bed, keeping her firmly in place. Whether to stop her from hurting herself or someone else, she didn't know.

After another two days, she was allowed to leave the bed, monitored heavily. 

Katniss's trial was being thought over.

Weeks passed. Her stomach grew larger. Her child, still alive, miraculously, startlingly, alive.

She was allowed to return to District Eight with Delta and Deecey.

Snow was dead, either having been crushed to death by the crowd or choked to death on his blood from his laughing.

An emergency election chose a woman from District Eight, Paylor, as the new President.

Plutarch became the secretary of communications, meaning that he would program the airwaves. Katniss's trial was aired for all to see with Plutarch as the star witness in her defense. Her doctor made the case that she was helpless, insane, that she didn't know what she was doing. A condition of her release included being kept under his care.

Saffreen had begged to serve witness for Katniss, but no one let her. "They won't want someone in your condition aired live," Delta had said. "You'll just make it worse for her."

Things between Saffreen and Delta were rocky. Delta forced her to eat and take medications dutifully provided by the doctors that monitored her health at any given moment. They argued often and loudly about anything and everything.

If left unattended, Saffreen gained scars, crescent moon shapes on the inside of her palms, the indents of her teeth forever imprinted on her lips.

Her baby was a son. Bronze haired and green-eyed, a perfect mixture of Finnick's sea-green and her own hazel. "Eldoris," she declared because someone she couldn't remember the name of anymore had told her once, long ago, that the name was from some language called Greek, that it meant he was of the sea. "Eldoris Odair."

She saw Gale sometimes on the TV. Working in District Two.

She tried calling Katniss but never received an answer. She sent a photo of herself, smiling a weak but real smile while holding Eldoris in her arm, Deecey clutching onto her hand.

Delta left one night without a word.

Saffreen wept for the woman that had vanished the day she left for the Capitol, fighting a war she had no business in continuing. She wept for the world that she had been forced to survive in. A world where children fought to the death as punishment for the sins of their forefathers. A world of pain and suffering.

She wept for the broken girl that had lost everything she had ever loved, everything besides her children, the only thing she could keep fighting for, now, the only thing keeping her alive.

Without them, she would not have stayed in that world. 

Without them, she wouldn't stay alive.