the waves are dancing, the sea is crashing

I strongly urge that you listen to the song "Redemption" by the Strange Familiar while you read.

It was one night.

All it took was one single night.

And they were changed forever.

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Tears filled her eyes. She hurriedly blinked them away, trying to focus on the man in front of her.

"Kat? What is it?" Finnick asked her worriedly.

"I'm pregnant, Finn," she whispered.

His hand froze as it went up to stroke her hair. Katniss watched as it limply fell back to his side.

He started to shut down right before her very eyes.

"Finnick? Finn?" Her voice called out to him, begging him to return to her. But he was gone.

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"What did you do to the Odair boy?"

"What are you talking about?" the Mockingjay snapped as her mentor approached her.

"Do you want to tell me why he is back in the hospital, staring at nothing and playing with that stupid rope again? What did you do to him?"

Katniss sighed, staring at her hands. "Haymitch-"

"Oh, my God. You're pregnant."

"How the hell did you know that?" Katniss couldn't believe her ears.

Haymitch shook his head. "You mean I'm right?"

"You dirty son of a-"

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He found the little duck sitting alone at the edge of one of the tables in the dining hall. She was buried in a book, her fork picking at a bowl of mushy fish and beets.

"What are you thinking, ducky?" Gale asked Prim as he sat down in front of her.

Prim pulled her head out of her book to look at him. Her dark blue eyes focused on nothing in particular before she spoke.

"You don't know, do you?"

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"You're pregnant? By Finnick?"

Katniss threw her book in the air in shock. In an automatic reflex, she reached behind her head for the arrow but of course, there was nothing there.

"Gale!" she snarled, facing him. "What the hell-?" She sat up, staring at him. And then she understood. "Oh, my God. You know."

"You're damn right that I know," he snapped.

Katniss had never seen Gale so angry before in all of her life. He was literally seething, his eyes furrowed with rage and his jaw clenched.

"And what right is it of yours to come barging in here and screaming in my face?" she said, feeling that familiar shoot of defiance.

"Katniss, with Finnick? Finnick?"

"Finnick, yes. You, no. Gale, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." She stepped forward, her hands threading through his shirt. "It was something that happened."

"Catnip..." Gale's voice was shaky. "Why?"

Katniss felt all of the forward bravado and cover start to slip away. She shook her head. "I don't know."

She had never seen so many knots before in her whole entire life. She didn't think he was ever going to stop.

"Finn?" She waved her hands in front of his face. "Finn, can you hear me?"

Tears quickly flooded her vision. This was all her fault.

"He can't hear you, Katniss," said a voice from the doorway. She turned to see Prim. "He's retreated so far into his own world that it's doubtful anything can get through."

"Is this all because of me? Or is it about Annie?" asked Katniss. She felt majorly stupid asking these kind of questions from her fourteen year old sister but in the end, Prim proved to know so much more than she.

Her sister shrugged her dainty shoulders. Her hands were burrowed deep in her pockets. "Could be both," she said. "Annie is stuck at the Capitol. So's Peeta. The two of you took comfort in each other and now you're having a baby. A baby here! Of all places! Annie and Peeta may never make it out of there and so-" Her voice trailed off.

Feeling more vulnerable than she had felt in ages, Katniss sank down into a chair across from Finnick's knot tying form. "I've lost Peeta. I've lost Gale. I can't lose him too."

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The news came less than two days later.

They were dead.

They were all dead.

Oh, God, they were all dead.

Annie was dead. Johanna was dead.

Peeta was dead.

Oh, my God. Peeta's dead.

Dead.

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Sobs broke out of her body. She sank down onto the floor, curling her legs up to her chest.

"No! No, no, no, no! No!"

She was in Finnick's room. Ever since the news had come of the executions, Finnick had retreated farther and farther into his world. He didn't even have the stupid rope in his hands anymore. He would sit on his bed and stare at the opposite wall.

Katniss would come into his room and just sit there. Sometimes she would sit on the end of his bed and hold his hand. Or she would stand in the doorway and watch him. She would just hope that he would somehow know she was there.

He was all she had left.

Today, it was different. All of it was so different. It had finally hit, finally fell into her lap, that Peeta was dead. He was never coming back. She was never going to see his shining face that reminded her so like the sun again. She was never going to see his beautiful blue eyes again. She was never going to feel his strong arms around her at night, coaxing her from the nightmares.

She couldn't even count on Gale to help her. He wouldn't even come near her anymore. He would talk to Prim and she would pass on that he was hurting and couldn't be around her. Katniss tried to see Gale's side of this but she couldn't. All she could think was that he was being selfish.

Because she needed him and he wasn't there.

The rebellion was taking place.

And she was stuck back in this District. District 13 was a place straight from Hell in her book. She couldn't believe that she was going to be giving birth here. She was pretty damn sure she was going to be spending the rest of her life here.

The rebellion was taking place.

And she wasn't in it.

The rebellion was taking place.

And Gale had left without a goodbye.

The war was taking place.

And she had nothing to live for.

Except this baby.

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For a while, she was thinking that it was just a ploy. She knew that they would try to do something like that, faking their deaths.

Now she was starting to doubt it.

They couldn't be dead. They just couldn't. No way. Absolutely no freaking way.

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They were dead.

All of them were dead.

Oh, God, they were dead.

And she was all alone.

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"You have to wake up, Finnick! You need to come back to me! Come back, do you hear me?"

Her tears were boiling hot on her face. They blurred her eyes as she shook Finnick's shoulders, looking for any kind of movement. Any kind of sign that he was still there with her.

He remained lifeless. If it wasn't for that steady beep-beep of the heart monitor, she would have thought he was dead.

"Finn, you are all I have left," she breathed, tears choking her throat. "Ow!"

A sharp pain hit her side. For a second, she thought she was going into labor. But then she realized it was something else.

The baby was kicking for the first time.

She reached around and grabbed Finnick's hand, placing it on her protruding belly.

"Do you feel that, Finnick? Do you feel it? That is our creation. Our own little life, growing and moving and kicking. Do you feel it?" The tears clouded her eyes again. "You have to understand that. You have to come back because I don't want to raise this baby by myself. I want us to be a family."

Even as the words came out of her mouth, she doubted them. She knew that having a family of her own wasn't something that she ever wanted because she didn't want them thrust into this crazy world. The last thing that she ever wanted was for her child to have to go into the Hunger Games.

But now, it was too late to stop anything like that. Now, she was facing the music. She didn't have anyone that she loved. She didn't have either man that she had thought she would be spending the rest of her life with.

She had Finnick.

And she was having Finnick's child.

Lifeline.

That was all she could concentrate on. He was her lifeline.

"Finnick, please..." her voice was broken. "Please..."

Still nothing.

She finally replaced Finnick's hands in his lap and stepped away. She quickly brushed the tears away from her face and turned to leave. She hit the button on the side of the doorjamb to alert the guard to let her out. The door opened and just as she began to exit, she heard a voice.

"Kat?"

He felt like a ghost that was still walking among the living.

He didn't feel real.

He felt like some inanimate object that had been dropped and forgotten. Forever stepped around and brushed aside, unworthy of attention or affection.

"What kind of an idiot are you?"

"What?"

She was standing in the doorway of his compartment, watching him intently with her large grey eyes.

"Stop sitting here. We need to do something. Anything."

"The thing I would like to do is bury my trident in Snow's chest," whispered Finnick, his dark eyes full of malice. "How about that?"

Katniss winced slightly before her expression grew hard. "Believe it or not, Finnick Odair, I agree with you."

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She had no idea how she got there. It was all too unclear and crazy.

Her mind traveled back to that last conversation she had had with the father of her child. A conversation agreeing on the imminent death of this man that had ruined their lives. It was time for him to die. It was time for him to perish in such a way that their loved ones had gone.

"I propose another Hunger Games. But this time, with the Capitol's children."

She wanted to vomit when she heard those words come out of Coin's mouth.

"No!"

She looked around in her fog and saw that it had been Finnick who had burst out.

"No! It's wrong, it's filthy, it's disgusting! No!"

Katniss continued to watch Finnick's face. She could feel herself starting to slip away into her alternate reality. It was fading fast and she wanted to hold on.

"I vote yes," she found herself murmuring. "For Peeta."

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"How could you?"

"I don't know."

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"My dear President Coin, we have a wonderful announcement for you," purred Coin. "The Capitol's children will now take part in their own Hunger Games. And there will be no Reaping. We shall take a vote on which child will be competing. And so—"

The horror was evident on the old man's face as he registered exactly what Coin was talking about. Katniss relished seeing that horror. That fear…

"The lovely Mari Snow will be representing your family in these new Hunger Games," said Coin.

"No-!"

Then the air rippled. The world stood still.

The arrow struck Coin's skull at such an angle that she knew what had happened before she slid down the pavement. Blood poured from the hole and soaked her iron grey hair, trickling onto the concrete.

Then the laughter…laughter was all she could hear.

It came from the bleeding man, still handcuffed to the post. He was bent over, hoarse laughs breaking from his chest and causing even more blood to spit out onto the ground. Joy was all that was there in his laughs.

Joy.

She doubted that was something she would ever feel again.

The air rippled again. From a totally different direction.

The scream was haunting.

Snow's body slid down, the end of the trident still sticking out of his chest.

Her eyes raked the crowd, trying desperately to find him.

And she finally did, just the back of a bronze haired head, disappearing in to the mass of people.

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"Why did you do it?"

"I don't know. I just couldn't let him live while Annie was dead."

They were both silent.

"Why did you do it?" he finally asked her. He already knew what she was going to say.

"I just couldn't let her live in a world that she had helped take Peeta out of."

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Prim was the first to recognize the signs of labor.

Katniss let out a sound that was a mix between a grunt and a cry. She wraps her arms around her large belly and looks wildly at her sister.

"What's happening to me?" she begs tearfully, her eyes filling to the brim with water.

"You're having the baby, Katniss."

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Her screams of agony were all that the expectant father could hear. They were so like what he imagined had come out of his lost love's mouth before they had blotted out her light from this world.

He almost missed the sound of the newborn's cry.

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"It's a girl, Katniss."

She stared at the screaming child in her mother's arms. She was long, maybe twenty inches, lots of thick dark brown hair coating her skull and a nose that juts out just so.

"Let me see her," she finds herself whispering.

Her mother carefully shifts the now wrapped up newborn into her arms. She stares down at her daughter, her index finger resting on her tiny little nose.

This precious modest little life…she created it.

She had never wanted to have children. She had never wanted to bring another life that could be tortured or eventually blotted out by a Capitol member into this world. She just couldn't.

But now she was here.

Her inexplicable joy.

"Hi, Joy," she found herself whispering.

Joy shifted in her arms and finally blearily opened her eyes, focusing on her mother for the first time.

Amazing sea green eyes.

"Do you want to hold her?" she murmured, the presence of the father undeniable. She brought her own eyes up to meet Finnick's. "She's yours too."

She turned her gaze back onto the small child, her ears taking in the sounds of Finnick entering the room slowly and her mother and sister slipping out. Finnick lowered himself down onto the bed, his eyes on the woman and baby. She leaned forward and carefully placed the baby in his arms.

His eyes bored into the baby, unable to look away.

"Her name is Joy."

Joy.

For the longest time, he had doubted he would ever feel that simple emotion again. That simple little piece of life.

But maybe…just maybe…

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The war is over.

It has been won.

Everything is finished.

Katniss Odair watches the waves as they dance onto the shore. The sight of them is so calming…mesmerizing…something that has come to adore in the past four years.

The late afternoon sunlight glitters down onto the white sand. It shines like diamonds and almost makes her eyes cross. She sighs in contentment, it's warmth filling her bones.

"I told you it was nice."

She smiles at the sound of the voice that she has come to love. She keeps her eyes out on the blue green waves and reaches a hand out. She feels warm fingers slip through hers and a tiny hand press down on the top of her head. She reaches her other hand up and takes those little fingers in hers, kissing them gently.

"It's a beautiful day, mama," came that precious voice, causing her to smile again, this time more widely. That voice, the voice of her child, was her saving grace.

The man beside her, he was a different story. He wasn't just her saving grace, he was her whole life.

In the real world, Finnick Odair had been the person that she couldn't survive without. The person that she needed more than anything in this whole entire screwed up world.

"And I bow to your knowledge," she answered quietly, looking over her shoulder.

His cocky half smile has finally come back. That little smile and that attitude that she had come to count on for so long, it has returned into her world.

She looked up at their daughter, perched delicately on his shoulders, her tiny arms wrapped around the top of his head. Even from her place on land, Katniss could see the amazing sea green of her eyes. Out of everything, she was so glad that Joy Odair had inherited her eyes from her daddy.

She had never imagined that her life would turn out this way. She had never even let the though pass through her mind that she would wind up like this, blessedly happy and content.

There was one thing that Katniss Odair was aware of. One thing that blazed through her mind every single moment she laid eyes on her husband.

She loved him.

He wasn't just her survival, her connection to peace because he was just as battered and bruised as she was.

He was her love. The love of her life.

She was afraid to think those actual thoughts but she knew deep down that even if Peeta and Annie were still alive, they would have found their way to each other.

Sighing, she leaned her head on her husband's shoulder, feeling that salty sweet aroma starting to take her over. She glanced up once more, her fingers linking through the tiny little ones above his head, her eyes finding that sea green.

"Love you," he murmured, pressing his lips to her forehead.

"Love you too."

And that was that. That was all they needed.

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All righty now! Man, this took me a long time to get finished.

I love Finnick/Katniss so much. And whenever I write them, I keep picturing Grant Gustin (Sebastian, Glee) as Finnick. I do hope he gets the role but I doubt it's going to be him.

Anyway, I can't wait to hear what you thought. I know it's a little similar to my last one "if love is an ocean wide" but I wanted to delve deeper into those experiences, experiences of pregnancy and the execution of Snow and Coin, etc. it's something that has always bugged my Hunger Games addled mind. So this came out of it.

Reviews are thoroughly enjoyed. They make my day.