"Do you have any water?" Terra can't help from asking as soon as they make it back to the beach, Finnick moving to rinse himself of in the water, and she has to turn her face away from the waves that were gently lapping against him.

There are a few motions among them and Peeta is the one that gets up and does something to a tree across from her, tapping away at something, and the soft noise of trickling water makes a phantom pain of being thrown around burst across her skin. She blinks it away and reaches forward to greedily drink as deeply as she can before Katniss is there gently prying her away with the warning of making herself sick.

Nodding, Terra smies thankfully at the younger girl and catches a look at the thing stuck in the tree. "I have one of those thing," she says in utter disbelief, taking off her bag and tossing it in the middle of the small circle that had formed around her.

"I have some tape, an empty canister and some kind of medicine in their too," she tells them, and Katniss digs through the bag, pulling out the metal pipe and the canister as Johanna reaches for the tube of medicine.

"This what they send you for your leg?" Her friend asks and Terra nods.

"What actually happened to your leg, Land Pearl?" Finnick teases as he returns, dropping down as close to her as he could, but she could see the concern in his gaze.

"What happened to Lux?" Katniss questions over him, eyes burning a hole through her face, and Terra gets the distinct feeling from when she had first met the girl, a girl playing at pretend and struggling to navigate something that was far more overwhelming than she was able to handle.

Truly, Terra felt very much the same, though she liked to believe she was a little bit more put together than Katniss was.

"He, um, didn't make it," she muttered, leaning her head to rest against Finnick's shoulder and closed her eyes tightly. "It was after the projection so you wouldn't have known."

"Was it the Careers?" Peeta asks her.

"It was this. . . thing that reached up out of the ground, and just sorta pulled him under," Terra tells him, squeezing her eyes shut tightly at the memory of him that flashes in her mind. "The ground just sort of wobbled under our feet like it was filled with water and they had these tentacle things. I've been calling them sand crawlers."

"Was that the first scream?" Finnick stage whispers.

"It was more of a shriek than anything else."

"If you don't mind me asking, Terra, where exactly was this?" Beetee asks her, and as she looks over to him, she could tell by his signature thoughtful expression and the concerned ones of the others that she was missing out on something important.

"On the other side of the Cornucopia, why?"

"It's a clock, T, the arena. Each section has it's own hour and something different," Finnick tells her. "That giant tree with the lightning strike is 12."

Terra looks over, spotting the tree easily and her eyes immediately fall to the sectors she was personally acquainted with. "Uh, you saw where the tsunami came from? Well, the sand crawlers were next to that but theres a space between the wave and the lightning tree."

Beetee nods. "Do you know what came before?"

"Me and Lux spent the full first day camped out in the sand crawler section until around nightfall when we decided to track down the Careers. He was sucked into the ground and I ended up in the wave zone," Terra explains, sighing heavily despite the way her ribs burned at the action and placed a hand on Finnick's thigh in search of comfort.

She wanted to hide, to crawl her way inside of some place small and dark and pretend she didn't exist. She wanted to go back to the times when it was normal enough for him to be teaching her how to swim or simply sitting around drinking tea.

His fingers intertwined with hers and Terra felt her chest fill with butterflies, as though trapped in her ribcage, bagging around blindly each time he drew a circle onto the back of her hand - slow, and smooth, and so familiar.

"Apparently you all heard me scream before the wave, so you can imagine what happened there," she grazes over the rest of the general details, not caring for their obvious wish for more information bit having provided all that was truly necessary for them to know, she didn't say much else and only took water and a bit of something to eat before falling asleep restlessly against Finnick.

Water crashing her into invisible walls and creatures that reached out for her from the shadows with blood dripping from her hands filled her dreams, and when a sharp cry cuts through the scene and she jolts awake, face dropping with a smack against the ground and hand reaching automatically for her hammer.

Looking around in the dark, she squints at the couple across from her and looks up to the flashing of the sky, the lightning flickering intensely bright - enough to illuminate the waves that were still moving tauntingly, as though trying to remind her of the way it had thrown her around.

Finnick was sitting up beside her, rubbing at his face.

"I can't sleep anymore," he says. "One of you should rest." And he looks at them both, realising the position they're in, and seems to change his mind. "Or both of you. I can watch alone."

Peeta shakes his head. "It's too dangerous. I'll stay up with you -" he turns to Katniss and touches her thigh gently - "I'm not tired. You get some sleep Katniss."

"It won't do you any good staying up all night, Peeta," Terra speaks up, sitting up with a stretch and a crack of the back. "I've gotten enough sleep."

Finnick was instantly leaning in and she was wrapping herself around him as best she could with her legs twinning over his and her head falling to his shoulder, half in his lap. His arms brought her close, holding her to him like she was a fragile thing threatening to disappear.

"Get some sleep, Peeta, we have this," she reassures him and he nods, moving to rest next to Katniss with a heavy sigh.

They waited for their breathing to even out, Terra having pulled her hammer closer was picking at the dried blood with shaking hands and Finnick watched her with a worried interest - concern evident as he took her in - though both were incredibly aware of each sound made around them, over every sign of life.

They were still in the Jabberjay section and now that they knew they had some time to avoid the horrible birds safe from the other sectors.

"I spent last night in the Cornucopia," she told him. "I hid behind a few boxes and wasn't sure if I was going to actually wake up."

"It was safer than running around the jungle," he tells, speaking to himself more than him as he tried to reason her choices.

"I didn't have much of a choice actually, I got caught in the giant wave, remember?" She breathes, looking out to the water. "I was drowning, the water came in faster than I could run, and I was spinning around blind until I was thrown out and went flying to the other side of the Cornucopia."

"What do you mean you went flying?" He asks in a deep voice, full of emotion.

"It was like those lines that cut off each section," she explains, drawing her finger down a line on her hammer. "The wave couldn't pass through, but I could, right? And it sent me flying. I was lucky I landed in the water on the other side."

"Are you alright?" Finnick questions as he looks her over, a hand feathering over each part he could reach.

"Just a little sore, Fin. However, I did stab myself when I was spinning, but I received medicine for it."

"Did you swallow the water?"

"More than I should have, but it's fine, really." She didn't mention how her ribs were aching and how each time he pulled her close they burned, she couldn't stand the thought of him wanting to keep his distance - not now. "Drowning really is awful, love."

He doesn't say anything and she doesn't expect him to. He knew what it was like, the feeling of hopelessness. It was a certainty that everyone from 4 had experienced it at one point or another to learn to survive at work - just as everyone in 10 needed to know how to handle the possible rampage from any of the animals or how to deal with a sharp cut that might occur at work. Terra didn't need to tell him that the pain she felt was something that could be handled thanks to years of being thrown from horses or getting headbutt by an angry bull - she knew how to take it and knew when she couldn't.

"I killed the girl from 5, Heller," she suddenly decides to tell him, to unburden herself from what she had done. "She went crazy and was coming at me, begging for me to kill her and I could just see so clearly how utterly serious she was. I hit her once, broke her neck first swing."

Finnick reaches up and gently touches her face, turning her chin so she faced him fully. "She asked you to. She wanted it."

"I shouldn't have done it, it's not right," she says, wishing her voice wasn't quivering as it was.

"You didn't make her lose herself. It was the Games, T. Remember who the real enemy is."

"You're right. Why do I feel like you're always right?"

He grins, a cheeky, dimpled thing, and her stomach flips at the sight.  He opens his mouth to say something clever or teasing but she doesn't let him and instead reaches up and pulls his mouth down to meet hers, smiling into the kiss as he reciprocates eagerly, tenderly, pushing away the hammer so that she could fit in his lap and she has a distant thought to the others and how this might look to them if they woke up, or the citizens of the Capitol that were so very much in love with him. The way he tilted his head against her mouth made it very easy for her to forget about everything else.

The twinkling tune that all Victors knew sounded from above them and Terra drew away slowly to look over at the sky and the giant parachute that they was so exceptionally rare in the arena, the sign of something expensive and she jumped up as quickly as she could, shuffling to the gift and reaching up to snatch it from the air.

Finnick was beside her in an instant, Johanna and Katniss were both lifting their heads to look over, and as Terra openned the top of the box she couldn't help the excited laugh at what lay inside for her.

Long and coiled perfectly with a leather handle placed ontop the silver. She lifted it from the box reverently, testing the length of the handle and the whip and finding it to be exactly like the one she was gifted from the Capitol what felt like years ago, something that seemed specially measured for her height and build.

She stepped away from the others and flicked her wrist, delighting herself with the snapping sound that came with hitting nothing but air.

"Someone must have liked something that you did," Johanna comments dryly but there was no malice in her tone, simply teasing and she looks over her shoulder to grin at her friend.

"Definitely," she agrees, looking back to see Finnick's smug grin and him pointing up to another gift making it's way down.

It lands in front of him and he picks up a fresh roll for the others to see and covers it back up for the morning as the others settle back down again. Terra moves back in closer, sitting on the cold sand with her back pressed to Finnick's side as he hums and begins to thread some vines together.

"You're doing well," he comments quietly, not looking up from his project. "If it comes down to anything they would probably let you live out of all of us."

"They won't let any of us live even if we are well liked," she tells him, shrugging softly.

He drops the vines and moves his knees so she falls back with her head in his lap. "You could get out of this safe and alive," he breaths, leaning down to hover his mouth over hers. "If you stayed away from us and played the game like you wanted you could be a Victor twice, T."

"I don't care how well I do, I don't care if I get hurt or worse because I simply want you to be safe and alive. I would do so much to make sure that you stay safe," Terra vowed, placing a hand against his cheek.

She felt his muscles tense and then he kissed her hard, squeezing her shoulders.

"Don't say things like that," Finnick begged. "Never say anything like that."

"Oh, Fin. You don't understand the things I would do for you," she repeated. "As long as you're safe I'll never care what happens to me."

°°°

Vote,
Comment,
& follow me on wattpad.

p l e a s e  l e a v e  c o m m e n t s :)

Unedited

2019-02-12