Clove loves knives.
She doesn't just like them, doesn't just prefer them to all other weapons, isn't just astoundingly skilled with them.
She loves them.
She loves the way a knife feels when she grips it so tight that it leaves calluses on her palms. She loves the way a knife chips at her skin just enough to draw a little blood when she gently runs it over her fingers. She loves the way a knife can plunge deep into a target and make a sinisterly satisfying thumping noise; she loves the way a knife can make combat more hands-on, more violent, than any other weapon.
She loves seeing blood on her fingers after she uses a knife to cut or stab or slice an opponent. She loves making her opponents hurt. She loves blood, and she loves violence, and she loves killing.
And she loves knives.
x
Clove does not, however, love Cato.
Upon meeting him, in fact, Clove automatically despises him: he is loud, and arrogant, and lacks common sense, and he walks and talks as though he owns—as though he can control—everything and everyone.
As though he can control Clove.
But she doesn't let him.
During their first fight, she catches him completely offguard, pinning him to the ground in seconds. Clearly he wasn't expecting a girl,and a very small one at that, to be as good as she is, to be able to control him.
So she smirks at Cato as she straddles his chest and holds down his shoulders, once they're finished and she's won and has pinned him down on the practice mat.
And to her great irritation, he smirks right back, as though he's accepting her as some kind of challenge.
She hates it. She hates him.
Dreamily, she trails her knife across Cato's neck, imagining how it would feel to slit it.
It would feel good, she decides.
But she isn't going to kill him. Not yet.
x
But Cato turns out to be better than Clove expects. She hates herself for ever getting cocky.
Over the next weeks, he proves that they are completely of the same caliber. Cato is big, and strong, and brutal, and intimidating, and he always wins when they fight with swords; he can pin her to a wall just as easily as she can pin him, and he can push her to the floor with practically a flick of his wrist.
It's not like Clove isn't just as good, however. She's fast, and smart, and less arrogant, and far easier to underestimate; one time, she nearly tricked him to eat a tin of rat poison, and she still takes him by surprise during fights, when she proves that she's got enough strength to render him unconscious with a punch to the nose, or knock the breath out of him with a kick to the groin.
No, Cato is not better than Clove.
But Clove is not better than Cato.
And they are both brutal, and bloody, and vicious, and cruel; they both love sweat and blood and pain and causing death.
Maybe it isn't exactly natural, but it feels natural to them; it feels wonderfully natural for Clove to hit Cato and bite Cato and punch him until he bleeds, and it feels wonderfully natural for Cato to do all the same things to her.
x
And their fighting eventually extends far beyond the physical. Soon enough, it becomes ritual for Cato to greet Clove every morning with a "Sup, bitch?" or similar derogatory comment, and for Clove to reply with something along the lines of "Go fuck yourself". It's cruel and awful and brutal and vicious, but it feels easy, feels comfortable, feels natural.
And then it continues throughout the day, with Clove and Cato constantly spitting insults at each other and mocking each other and never letting one another live down even the tiniest of mistakes. They shove each other around, and push each other, and laugh spitefully at one another's expense, and although Clove's insults tend to be wittier and sharper than Cato's (which could have come from a five-year old), both Clove and Cato have the same intention: to thoroughly and completely provoke one another.
And provoked Clove does get. Quite often. She hates Cato, hates his voice and his hair and close to everything about him, and usually the first then she wants to do when she sees him is start clawing at his face. She's always trying to prove that she's better than he is, prove that she's more deadly, proves that she's more worthy of winning a future Hunger Games than Cato will ever be.
And—in a deep sort of irony—it's how much Clove despises Cato, how much she wants to beat him, how much she desires to cause him pain, that makes her find him so appealing, has made her become so twistedly infatuated with everything about him.
It's the knowledge that she wants to kill Cato, and that Cato wants to kill her with the same amount of passion, that draws her so close to Cato, makes him the only person who could ever really understand her.
They are the two most brutal, most bloody people she knows, and this brutalness and bloodiness ties them together like nothing else could.
x
And their fighting eventually passes both the physical and verbal, manifests itself in a way that Clove never expected it.
It starts off with kisses, hard and rough and in absolutely no way sweet or cute or lovely. It's teeth clashing into teeth, mouth devouring mouth, tongue tying around tongue, trying to make each other choke. It's Cato ripping the hair out of Clove's head and shoving her into walls and floors; it's Clove wrapping her fingers around Cato's neck, leaving bruises and marks and visible scars in the shape of her hands.
It's passion and fire and brutality, motivated not by love and not by tenderness, but by hatred, and fury, and bloodlust, and maybe just a tiny sliver of actual physical attraction.
And eventually it takes them away from kissing, leads to more; leads to Cato and Clove tearing off each other's clothes and going at each other like animals. They never work together, and never ever let the other take control; they bite and they slap and they scratch and they bleed and they try to get their own way. And when it's over, Clove is covered in more scars and wounds and bruises than she ever has been before.
But she doesn't care, because these things that she does with Cato are thrilling, and exhilarating, and make her blood rush through her veins faster than anything else could. Maybe it's not natural to enjoy pain, maybe her brain has been corrupted by the Capitol, but she doesn't care, because it makes her feel really good and she wouldn't want it any other way.
And because Cato is exactly the same—loves pain, loves hurting, loves hurting Clove—they continue onward. It's just like it's been all these years, pushing each other and pulling each other and hurting each other, but now it's even more personal, more vicious, more intimate, more passionate.
x
Time passes.
Clove doesn't fall in love with Cato, and Cato doesn't fall in love with Clove.
But Clove is finding that, against her will, Cato has become something like a part of her, become like an extra limb, irremovable and irreplaceable. Because of how well they fit together, like two pieces in a puzzle: because of how brutal, how bloody, how exactly the same they are.
Clove still wants to kill Cato, she really does. She wants to hurt him, wants to cause him pain, like she always has. She even stays up late, planning how she'll do it, what weapon she'll use, how long she'll drag it out.
Yes, Clove wants to kill Cato.
But there's a nagging worry, a tiny voice in the back of her head, telling her than when the time comes, she may not be able to.
Because, as much as it pain her to admit it, she needs Cato—Cato and his arrogance, Cato and his poorly styled hair, Cato and his lack of common sense and the way he's always competing with her—needs him more than nearly everything else.
Maybe even more than she needs her knives.
But she pushes the voice to the back of her head. "Needing" someone is a weakness. And Clove is not weak.
She's going to kill him. That's that.
x
When the day comes for Clove and Cato to volunteer, they volunteer. And when they're standing on the stage with their escort, listening to the cheers of District 12's people below them, they grab each other's hands and raise them into the air. The applause escalates.
But the audience can't see how hard they're gripping, how Clove is digging her nails into Cato's skin and how Cato is using his fingers to break hers.
They grin at each other, expressions mirrored in each other's eyes.
Expressions of malice, and hatred, and resentment.
And something very close to respect.
x
They fuck, the night on the train to the Capitol, quieter than usual but with the same amount of heat and fire and passion as always. Clove hurts Cato and Cato hurts Clove and it's exactly like how their relationship has been for the last several years.
And after it's over, and they're both bloody and sweaty and gasping for breath, Clove pins Cato into the wall, her face about an inch from his.
"I'm still going to kill you," she says, pushing down so hard on his wrists that she can hear a sharp cracking noise.
Cato just grins. "Like hell you are."
Clove fumes and stutters and turns away from him. She hates Cato, hates how he always knows exactly what to say to set her off.
Feeling Cato watching her, she glances back; he's looking at her, smirking, and his eyes are full of something almost like fondness. Clove snaps at him—"stop fucking staring at me"—and he laughs.
She responds by bashing his head into the wall.
But she wonders, in the back of her mind, if maybe he's right.
x
Once Clove and Cato are finally in the arena, it's thrilling and rewarding and completely and totally exhilarating, because here Clove is finally free to kill whenever and whomever she please, to do what she's best at and what she loves most and what she's been training for her entire life.
She keeps track of all her kills, keeps track of each and every detail: the way her knife flew right into the heart of a small blonde girl; the way her hands easily broke the neck of a tall boy older than she is; the way her weapon lodged in between the shoulders of a pale brown-haired boy as he fell forward and choked on his own blood.
And the first night, as she keeps watch while her four allies sleep, she wants to kill them, she really does. She imagines how satisfying it would be to stab the idiotic, over-excited brunette boy from District 1; how wonderful it would feel to break the neck of the pathetic, passive blond boy from District 12; how happy it would make her to claw the eyes out of the cocky, whore-ish blonde girl from District 1.
And then there's Cato. She thinks back to that first day in the training center, when she pinned him to the ground and ran her knife across his neck, when she wanted so badly to kill him right then and there.
But then she thinks to that night a few days ago, in Cato's bed, on the train.
"Like hell you are."
Shaking her head, she removes the thought from her mind.
She wants to kill him. She's going to. She knows it.
But she decides not to do it quite yet.
x
She waits until a few days later.
Clove and Cato have just defeated the two tributes from District 12, and now the mutts are leaving and daylight is returning and Cato is grinning triumphantly.
Clove, however, knows better. She completely expects what the loudspeaker announces next:
That only one tribute can when.
Before the rule change has even had time to register in Cato's mind, he's lying dead on the ground. Killing him had taken Clove about two seconds, quick and easy and just a knife in his heart.
She looks down at him, at the lifeless body and the blood soaking through his shirt and the wide, shocked eyes.
She's won. She's beaten him. After all this time, after all these years, she's proven that she's better.
But it doesn't feel nearly as good as she expected.