Prompt : oh my god if you could somehow fit hayffie into the "AU where people age until they reach 18 and then stop aging until they meet their soul mate so they can grow old together" thing that would be incredible!
I have done a few number of soulmates AU already so I wanted to try something different so this is a complete AU where there are no Hunger Games.
To be honest, I am not too happy with it but… Yeah. I hope you like it!
A Numbered Amount Of Years
Some people live forever.
That's a thing that happened.
Some people see civilizations fall and then others rise in their place only to collapse centuries later. An eternal loop of creation and destruction.
That, too, is a thing.
The world is a vast place. The probability of finding the person that would allow you to age and eventually die…
Some say immortality is a gift and pray to never meet their soulmate. Haymitch thinks it's a curse.
He's been eighteen for a century and a half. He is old and tired but lacks the will to simply off himself. He drinks himself into a slow grave instead but even that doesn't seem to stick. His mother died when he was sixteen. He watched his brother meet his mate and die only too quickly. He watched children being born only to die in a handful of years after having found the one who completed them. And yet he lives. He feels guilty about it. Lonely, too.
He meets Effie Trinket in a bar where she sings for a pitiful salary, pretending it is only a minor setback on her way to stardom. She claims to be twenty-five but he thinks she's lying. There is no way to tell, of course, not when people who have lived for centuries all look eighteen. He hates the city, he prefers to haunt the country, but he sticks around anyway. She's annoying but she's also fiery and she doesn't hesitate to tell it to him straight. It has been too long since anyone has matched him wits for wits.
She would like to be treated like a lady but he takes great pleasure in mocking her. They fight a lot but he still comes back every night to hear her sing. She has a nice voice when she's not nagging at him about something or other. Their first kiss happens about three weeks after they met, their mouths crash together in the middle of a shouting match. They can never agree who kissed who but that particular argument only leads to more kissing so neither of them really complains.
Haymitch has never meant to stay for so long. It's always dangerous to get attached to someone, you can never know if they will be your soulmate or not – not until time has passed anyway – and their soulmate is always susceptible to ride in and steal them away… And then you get to watch them age and die while you remain frozen looking like a eighteen year old. He watched too many people die.
Haymitch has never meant to stay for so long but suddenly two years have passed and he sort of moves in with her without them discussing it and one day he stares at his reflection in the mirror and he feels weird. Old.
He waves it off.
Years pass and then one day he's awaken by a shrill scream.
He tries to convince her to stop freaking out over the line at the corner of her eye but nothing works and in the end he storms out. She's too young, he figures, too naïve, too bright. And he is too old, too worn out and too cynical.
They shouldn't work.
And here they are: soulmates.
She's still hysterical when he comes back home but for different reasons. She thought he had left for good. She makes him promise to never leave again.
He does.
They only have a numbered amount of years to spend together now.
He doesn't want to miss anything.