Prompt: I looooveee the idea of soulmates and your fics about them so if you have time can you do one for hads about your world turning black and white when your soulmate dies
No I have no inspiration for titles lately, bear with me XD
It's A Dull World After All
Soulmates were a thing but nobody really cared until your soulmate died.
Why would you have cared when there was no way to determine for certain who was your soulmate except for losing them? Then, of course, they stopped breathing and your whole world turned black and white regardless of if you had ever met them or not. There was no medical remedy to get you your sight back once it was gone.
Soulmates were more of a burden than a blessing.
Or at least that was what Haymitch had always thought…
On the rare times he had let himself consider the concept, he had resented the implication of fate – because fate was a bitch – and the idea that there was someone out there tailor-made for him… He didn't want anyone tailor-made or fated to be his perfect match. He didn't need it. And he had never felt the need to revisit his opinion on it, not even when Peeta's heart stopped beating during the Quell and Katniss' world remained full of color to the boy's great dismay.
Then, of course, Primrose died and Katniss' world did turn black and white because soulmates weren't always romantic and that got him thinking because it was perhaps even crueler.
But his own soulmate…
He had never really spared a thought for them outside of the abstract concept that he must have one too and that, one day, when he inevitably keeled over for good, their world would become colorless.
He had never spared them a thought until his own sight flickered to monochrome.
Just as Effie Trinket coded in front of his eyes…
The prison had been taken easily enough but the prisoners inside were in bad shape and Effie was worse than others. Old wounds were infected, she was running a fever, she was clearly dehydrated and starved… She seemed stable though, right until she wasn't.
Her heart stopped and Haymitch's missed a beat in his chest.
He thought it was an aneurism or a heart attack or something medical at first, that it was shock or that all the stress was finally becoming too much… But her heart remained unresponsive to the doctors' ministrations and his sight remained sadly monochromic. Not black and white exactly, nothing that definite, but a declination of hundreds of shades of grey.
He might have thought it was a coincidence but the exact moment they shocked her for the third time and the monitor started beeping with the steady rhythm of her pulse again, colors flooded back into his life.
The timing was too perfect.
And it was too fucking fitting that she would be the colors to his grey because she had already put them back into his life once when everything had been sad and pathetically depressing and she had barged in with her energy and her cheer and her fucking irritating optimism.
No, Haymitch had never spared a thought for his soulmate before because it was too huge and too reductive at once and, right then, as he watched the doctors rush her into surgery, he waited for the panic to slam into him but it never came.
It felt… right.
As if he had known before he had found out and just never realized it.
And it was secondary to the relief that she was still breathing anyway. He could deal with her being his soulmate, he couldn't deal with her being dead.
Effie wasn't entirely alright in the end but who was in this new Panem?
She had reparative surgery for her shoulder, multiple treatments for her wounds, drips and painkillers… When they finally took her off the sedatives, she was completely out of it, screaming her head off every time anyone tried to touch her or come too close…
She didn't show any sign of recognition. She didn't answer questions, didn't seem lucid enough to understand the questions… One time out of three, she would bolt out of bed and curl up in a corner, covering in fear.
Haymitch was good at coaxing her back in bed but it didn't always work and it always left him a little bit more heartbroken.
Doctors were murmuring the word "insane" behind his back but he refused to hear it, refused to accept she might never come back to a sound mind again. He insisted she just needed time and he was proven right. Because she might be even more stubborn than he was.
The first time she said his name, he broke down.
It wasn't just about her or the soulmate discovery that he didn't really know what to do with. It was everything. The stress of the last few months. Chaff. Finnick. Prim. All the dead kids at the City Circle he couldn't help but feel he could have saved. Coin breathing down his neck – down her neck because she was talking about putting Effie in front of a court of law. Katniss burned to a crisp. Peeta. The lack of liquor in his system. And, yes, Effie.
It wasn't just that he had missed her – because he was sort of used to missing her for months on ends. It was that he had realized just how vital she was to him right when he had lost her and having that sort of realization in Thirteen, when she had been on the other side of the country, presumed captured, hadn't been a great time. He had thought she was gone, that he would never get to tell her…
And on top of that, she had died on him. She had died. And his sight had turned fucking colorless.
It was a lot.
Too much for an old drunk craving his next dose.
Fortunately, she was too out of it to do much more than pet his hair while he pressed his face and his tears against her stomach, mindful of cracked ribs, repeating his name again and again and sounding extremely confused by his behavior.
The confusion slowly ebbed away in the following days until she opened her eyes and they weren't cloudy or vacant any longer.
"Haymitch…" she mumbled, frowning a little.
And it was like he could finally breathe again, like a huge weight had been lifted from his chest.
"Are you back with me, sweetheart?" he half-teased, slipping his hand in hers.
She blinked slowly, watching him. "I think so… I… I have been here for a while, haven't I?"
He filled in the blanks as much as he could but eluded a lot of stuff that would overwhelm her. He told her what she wanted to know about the kids, told her about Finnick and Prim because there was no way around it, but he kept the City Circle bombings and the bloodbath in the streets to himself.
Once he was done summing up all she had missed, they were silent for a long time. They were still holding hands and she was clinging hard to his. There were also tears rolling down her cheeks but they were few and far in between.
Either she was still to dehydrated to truly cry or she had exhausted her tears in her cell.
He was a bit afraid to ask which one it was.
"Your heart stopped." he said suddenly, not quite daring to meet her eyes. "And… Something weird happened to me."
He wasn't sure he should tell her, wasn't sure how to tell her.
As it turned out, he didn't really have to.
"Oh." she whispered, not quite surprised.
Of course he didn't have to, he mused, because…
"You knew." he remarked. It wasn't even accusative. He didn't have it in him to accuse her of anything when he had spent weeks waiting for her to properly wake up and weeks before that worrying himself sick that he would only find her corpse. "Of course you knew…" He snorted. "Since my Games?"
He had died after his Games. Nobody had told him in those terms but he could decipher what touch and go meant and the doctors had been very clear he shouldn't overdo it when they had released him in Chaff's care at the time. The injury had been a deadly one. It was a miracle he had survived at all.
"I… suspected but I wasn't sure. You were off camera by the time it… started." she confessed. "I lost colors for a few times that day. Then… it all went away, they washed back in. And I was so enamored with you… Its seemed to fit but it might have been wishing on my part. Lyssa said it was unlikely and… with time I believed her." She shook her head. "I did not know but I had a gut feeling, I suppose. It happened again recently."
It was half a question, she looked disoriented for a second and he forced a smirk. "I kicked the bucket when they were drying me out. Too much stress on my heart or whatever. I'm fine now."
She stared at him and licked her lips. "It still could be a coincidence. Are you sure…"
"Trust me, princess, you dying and my world turning dark ain't something I'm gonna easily forget." he scoffed. "It was you. It is you. You're my…" The word seemed so huge, so oppressing. He forced himself to swallow the panic. "My soulmate."
A slow smile stretched her lips and she squeezed his hand but she looked a bit uncertain. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
"Well…" He snorted. "It means I'm doubly invested in keeping you alive, doesn't it?"
Because if she died, his world would turn grey in every aspect.
And he could compose without seeing in colors…
But he sure as hell wouldn't be able to bear living in a dull world where she wouldn't be.