Chapter fifty one: let me be enough for you

Finnick's POV 

Freya hadn’t moved in hours. She sat where the boy disappeared, her knees drawn up and cloak draped around her like a second skin, eyes fixed on the sky where a new constellation now pulsed faintly overhead.

The fang-shaped star.

It hadn’t blinked since it opened and neither had she.

I leaned beside her watching her chest rise and fall. Shallow, rhythmic but fragile, like if the wind blew the wrong way, she might just fade out with it.

I’d seen Freya fight off death, darkness, fate itself. But this grief? This quiet loss?

It was breaking her.

I didn’t say anything yet. I just sat with her let the silence fill the cracks neither of us knew how to patch.

Eventually her voice came raw as winter wind.

“He called me mother and then he was gone.”

I swallowed, my throat thick. “He chose you. That was real.”

“But was it enough?” she whispered. “He vanished. I don’t know where or if he’s even...” She cut herself off, pressing her face into her hands. “He was just a child Finnick. Our child.”

I reached out and pulled her close. Her weight collapsed into mine like she hadn’t meant to but needed to.

“You gave him everything you could,” I murmured. “And when the world tried to claim him, you stood in front of it.”

“It still wasn’t enough,” she said against my chest.

I held her tighter. “Then let me be enough for you. Just tonight.”

She didn’t answer with words. Only a slow nod. One I felt more than saw.

Later when the fire was low and the air cooled with night, we found the small ruins of an old shelter—half-buried in moss and root. I lit a quiet flame and cleared the inside while she lay down on a fur blanket I kept from the early days of our traveling.

Freya didn’t speak at first, and neither did I.

I just sat beside her, watching her fingers run over the mark on her chest. It had stopped glowing. But a faint scar remained like a memory etched into skin.

She looked at me then.

Her voice cracked. “What if I can’t protect the next one?”

“Then I will,” I said. “Even if I have to break between you and the gods themselves.”

A tear skipped down her cheek. “Don’t utter things like that except you mean them.”

I leaned in, slow but careful.

“I’ve only ever meant you.”

She didn’t pull away.

Instead, she reached up and ran her fingers along my jaw. Her touch was soft, hesitant but I could feel the weight behind it. Grief, guilt, love.

“I don’t want to be left alone tonight,” she remarked.

“You’re not.”

“I don’t mean just company, I mean… I need to remember I’m alive. That I can still feel something that isn’t breaking.”

I understood instantly.

Not just desire, but connection, healing. That human ache for closeness when everything else has been ripped away.

Still I asked gently, “Are you sure?”

She nodded.

I bent forward, pressing my forehead to hers. “Then let’s go slow. We’ve survived enough storms. We don’t have to rush this one.”

We undressed in silence, not with hunger but reverence.

The kind that comes when two people have faced too many endings and are still here anyway.

When I kissed her, it was soft. Her lips tasted like salt__tears she didn’t try to hide. I kissed them away again and again, until she sighed into me and finally breathed.

Our hands moved like we were memorizing instead of touching. My fingers traced her waist, her scar, her collarbone. She guided mine gently, showing me where it hurt less to be held. Where she still felt whole.

When our bodies met, it wasn’t fire.

It was warmth, steady and deep like curling into safety after a long, brutal winter.

She muttered my name once, just once and that's all it took to anchor me in her, for her and with her.

And when it stopped, we lay together twisted in fur, silence and then sweat. Her head on my bold chest, her fingers lazily following the scars along my ribs.

I thought she had pulled off when she muttered again. Her voice soft and low.

“I don’t want to lose you, please. ” she said. Her voice almost pleading.

“You won’t,” I promised. I felt tensed, soft and  pity, almost pulling myself not to weep.

“You say it but…”

“But I mean it.” I pulled her closer, tighter. “Even if the stars fall freya. Even if that fang in the sky splits open again. I will not leave you, I will never, not even in death.”

She looked up at me, eyes wide but soft. Vulnerable in a way Freya rarely showed.

“I believe you,” she said. “That’s the terrifying part.”

We woke the next morning to a sky still cracked. The fang-star remained.

But it had changed. It's now shimmered with veins of red-like blood trying to leak through a closed wound.

Freya stood in the entrance of the ruin, her bare feet brushing moss. Her hair was tangled and her cloak loose around her shoulders. But gods, she looked stronger again. Tired__ yes. Bruised__ absolutely.

But no longer broken.

“What now?” she asked.

I joined her at the entrance, standing close enough to feel her warmth.

“Now,” I said, “we figure out what that thing in the sky means.”

She gave me a sideways glance. “Together?”

I wrapped an arm around her waist. “Always.”

She rested her head on my shoulder.

Far above us, the fang-shaped star pulsed once.

Then twice.

And in the distance, barely a whisper across the wind came the sound of a second rift beginning to tear.

A voice, not the boy’s, echoed from the sky older, colder, and unfamiliar. “You defied the first path. But there are others still unwritten."