A/N: This story is set two months after the 74th Hunger Games finished/two months after Cato died. It's also In Cato's POV. Hope you enjoy!
-TheGreenFire
My eyes open and a strange sight appears in front of me; a white crystal chandelier. Why am I seeing a chandelier? Aren't I dead? I turn my head and see a strange machine with pipes full of different coloured liquids coming out of it. I trace the pipes with my eyes and realise they're attached to my arm. I'm slightly tempted to rip them out, but if they're jabbed in me I guess they're there for a good purpose. I turn my gaze to my arm, which is extremely pale. I touch it and realise that the skin colours are different, and that my skin is cold and slightly rubbery. I retract my hand. It must just be my imagination, I think. This whole thing must be my imagination. I hear a noise to my other side and quickly look over, flinching at the sudden pain which stabs my shoulder. I ignore it the pain, and stare at what I see; a bed with a girl lying on it. She's staring at a piece of paper, and looks about 15. She's got long dark hair, a few freckles on her cheeks and eyes that send a shiver through my body. I ignore her eyes, and stare at the rest of her face. It's so familiar, and suddenly I remember her name.
"Clove?" I say. Her head turns away from the piece of paper and an expression of delight appears on her face.
"Cato!" she shrieks, tossing the paper on a table next to her bed. She smiles at me. "You're awake! Finally! I thought you wouldn't make it; Dr Z said that you probably wouldn't, but I told her that you would. And you did! Do you know how lonely it's been all by myself? It's been really lonely. All I've had to do is stare at that piece of paper" she points to the paper on the table "which is so boring since that's all I've had for, like, the past two months!"
She sped through everything, and I hardly understood what she was saying, but a few things I caught. Like, I thought you wouldn't make it, lonely and two months.
"Two months?" I ask, confused. Clove nods her head.
"Mmhmm," she says. "You've been asleep for a very long time." I frown, even more confused. I'm supposed to be dead! Katniss shot my hand with an arrow, and the mutts devoured my body. I must've passed out pretty early on; because I can't remember what happened after a mutt with deep brown eyes started ripping the flesh off of my arm. Then I realised why Clove's eyes made me shiver. Those were her eyes. Those eyes that I saw before biting my arm were hers. She was a mutt. Clove was a mutt who killed me. She was my ally who died and came back to kill me. I stare at her eyes, which are filled with happiness and seem too innocent. Those eyes can't have been the eyes that ripped me apart, that looked at me with such violence and anger and power. But they were. I cast my gaze elsewhere.
"Clove, where are we?" She looks down at her hands.
"I don't know," she says.
"Am I dead?" I ask, looking at her face again but trying not to look in her eyes.
"No," Clove says, getting up and sitting on the edge of my bed. "You're alive."
"How?" I ask. "The last thing I remember was pain as I felt my arm being ripped out of its socket, and the eyes of people I thought were dead. Those mutts destroyed me! They tore at my skin and made me a pile of bloody limbs. There's no way I survived that."
"But you did," Clove says reassuringly. "Dr Z saved you! She saved me, too. She's wonderful. Cato, she's giving us a second chance at life."
I stare at her. A second chance at life. . . It seems too good to be true. I start thinking about how great it would be to go home and see my family after thinking that either I would never see them again, or that I would see them after winning the Hunger Games, when Clove suddenly gasps and rushes out of the room, muttering about how she should've done this ages ago. I stare at the place where Clove was sitting and realised that Clove would never sit next to me, unless she was taking something from me without saying it beforehand. Clove would never shriek in delight when she saw I was awake, nor would she start saying people were wonderful. Seeing the nice in people isn't what Clove does. She sees the evil in people so she knows who's the enemy and who to eliminate first. That's why she knew who to kill first in the bloodbath. That's why she turned her back on the kid from 10 and ran towards Katniss so she could kill her. Maybe if she had, we would've won. The girl from 11 wouldn't have allied with her, and then Thresh wouldn't have killed in her when she started taunting Katniss about Rue.
Clove has changed. How, I'm not sure. But she isn't the Clove I know and . . . maybe love.