Author's Note: I don't own ANY of these characters, and no matter how much I wish that I did, it doesn't change that I don't. I don't own Hunger Games, or Catching Fire either. Also, very slight spoilers for both of the aforementioned books, and an alternate ending to Hunger Games.
Rated M for suicide and related themes.
Small, Tiny, and Frail
I am dust. I am nothing more than a whisper. I am smoke, insubstantial in the grand scheme of things. It won't be long until I am gone, until I am less than I already am.
I feel like this only when I am dwarfed by someone who is more than me. He is over six feet tall, whilst I am of an average height. I am tiny. He can bench press two hundred pounds, if not more, while I struggle to complete a simple push-up. My muscles are non-existent, and when he grasps my forearm to steady me after attempting to take me jogging with him, his fingers overlap his thumb. My flesh bruises under his firm but gentle grasp. I am frail. I tell him, through sobs one night, that I feel so small. He reminds me that I have a big voice, and this makes me laugh—this is what he tells me when he catches me singing, which is often. I told him to warn me before he comes over to visit, but of course, he doesn't listen. So I yell at him when he makes the same comment each time, scolding him and saying that he should call first. He always quirks an eyebrow at me. "See? I told you that you had a big voice." Therefore, I am not tiny, because part of me is big. This is the same argument that we always have. It is our tradition, and although I know it is one built on embarrassment and disregard for said embarrassment, it feels safe. It is familiar, and it is something that is shared only between us. This time, he says "you have a big laugh, too."
Says? He says nothing. He said those things, but he no longer sees these parts of me. So I stop seeing them, and I wonder, were they ever really there to begin with?
"Cato." I remember the way we would talk in school, sitting in the back of the room, and the way I would eventually dissolve into nervous chuckles as our teacher glared back at us. Cato was always more confident than me, always, and he would simply stare back expressionlessly. Now, as he gets off the train, as I say his name, knowing better than to expect him to hear me over the screams of adoring women, knowing better than to hope for a reply, I am looking at a boy very different from those days.
A boy. He would say he is not a boy, that he is a man. I am certain that he would, that that insistence in his voice as he said it would be the same as any other time we disagreed. But now that he is a man, my certainty turns to doubt. I start to wonder if even this tiny piece of him, that prideful insistent shard of his personality, is intact. Had he heard my slip of tongue, he probably wouldn't say anything. I can see him looking at me in my mind's eye, a slight tightening of the corners of his eyes, but otherwise expressionless. "Man," corrects mental me. The only problem is that I would not mean it in the same way that he did. My mental image of him does not relax, does not change from his slightly stern expression. Then the image fades, and I wonder if I even have his reactions correct, since this new Cato is so alien to me. He went into the Games as a child playing as a soldier, but now he can no longer be called innocent. He knew what he was doing when he volunteered, so was he ever innocent to begin with?
Now he is a man. He has the muscles of a man, and has for a long time. He has the hands of a man, coarse and large, and I remember them grasping my fine-boned elbow as he led me down the streets. I don't like crowds. I never have, and I never will. He had the set jaw of a man as he tensely told a homeless man, drinking whiskey from a bottle that is already mostly empty, to sober up before taking the bottle, emptying it into the gutter, and sending me into the nearest restaurant with a 20 dollar bill to buy the man some food. When I came out, I saw Cato glaring at the man while the man glared back. For a moment, I thought I saw the fully-grown version of Cato, one that finally grew into the bear-like stature and the powerful aura. But after I delivered the food, and we left, I saw the self-satisfied boy in him resurfacing, and I was so thankful. I would be thankful to see that part of him again, but I am certain it is gone. His eyes were so full of sparks then.
But now his gaze holds no light. The Capitol took away the wounds on his body, but they could not wash away the ones that exist inside him. Cato-the-boy is gone. That gaze lacking life and happiness is found only in men, with their hearts hardened and their minds preoccupied.
"Cato," I say again, louder. He cannot hear me over the roar of the crowd, I know this, but I have to say it, I need to. Maybe I will call him later—in our district, phones are not so uncommon, and I know he will have one in his new home in Victor's Village.
I am tiny, I am frail. I am not next to him, but I no longer have to be to feel insignificant. I could not protect him, I could not save the blonde-haired blue-eyed beautiful boy who took me to his home after finding me measuring rope in my garage, who guessed what it would be used for, a noose, and who covered me in a blanket when I laid on his bed and begged him to hold me. He did. I had been afraid I was going to fall apart, and my fears became real. I felt as if my soul was dissolving, flowing out of my body through the tears streaming down my face. I wanted to believe that he would hold me together. He couldn't keep me from breaking, but he held me while I did. He had saved me, but I could do nothing for him, and I had always known that I could do nothing for him. His parents had enrolled him in training for the Hunger Games, had raised him to be a volunteer, a Victor, a sacrifice. I am tiny, I am frail, I could not save him.
His eyes scan the crowd, and when they find me, they fix on me. He does not smile. His eyes do not widen and sparkle. His expression does not change. He nods to me slightly, a confirmation that he wants to speak to me. So I sneak out of the crowd and go to hide in his room at his old home. I know he will go there to pack his things before he moves. I encounter no one in the streets, since they are gathered in the square to watch as he returns. I find the key that he has hidden in the bushes for me, and I enter his house, ascending the stairway in silence. I walk the familiar path to his room, going down the hallway and stopping at the last door to the left. I go in and lay on his bed, breathing in the nearly-gone scent of him from his pillow.
A few weeks before the games, I told him that I loved him. I told him so that he wouldn't volunteer, and so that if he did regardless, he would at least know the truth before he died. I knew he would die, it was an inescapable gut feeling, and I consider him to be dead now. He cannot honestly be called alive. I told him that I loved him, and he told me not to love monsters. It was the first time I saw his eyes darken, the first time I glimpsed what he was now. In the present day, I wonder if he had died before he even entered the arena. He called himself a monster. I wanted to cry, but I laughed instead, informing him that emotions weren't exactly controllable and that he was no monster. He put his bear paw hand on my shoulder then, boring his blue eyes into my brown ones, reaching up to tuck my dark hair behind my ears, and it is a gesture I continually replay in my head. I thought he was going to kiss me. I had hoped he would kiss me, I had hoped he would tell me he would stay. I should have known better. Instead, he smiled a slow, lopsided smile at me. He told me he'd be fine, but that he didn't want me to cry if he wasn't. Then he went into his bathroom and didn't come back for nearly 15 minutes. I thought I heard a low sob, but Cato didn't cry, it wasn't in his nature. That's what I told myself. I wanted to believe he was okay, that he would be okay. When he came back, I pretended to have dozed off.
I am not sure we were ever friends. I am not sure that either of us was capable of having friends to begin with, but we had something close to them in each other. We were both so broken, in our own ways. I had a chemical imbalance, a small flaw in my brain's chemistry that made me 'happiness-impaired', as he called it in the last few days before his Reaping, before his proud 'I volunteer'. I explained that that's not what depression means, that it means more than just sadness. He told me that he didn't care if I was irritable, if I was tired, if I ached. He told me that he didn't mind all of that, that he just wanted me to be happy. It was a misguided sentiment, but he meant it with the best of intentions. It meant the world to me, and even more so because we were both working to ignore my previous love confession. It spoke volumes to me that he would still feel comfortable showing me his gentle side, despite the awkwardness of the situation I had caused.
Those were my broken pieces. If my breaks were hairline fractures, his were compound. After I confided that I had been 'feeling down' again, he had told me that he knew how I felt. I began to scream at him, "no, you don't, you don't know anything about how I feel—"
Then he told me that he didn't want to win the Games. I remember telling him that that was good, that no one ever 'wins' them, that they only survive. He smiled that lopsided smile again, but it is unnatural on him. It looks practiced, and it doesn't spread with the same ease that it did before now. It spreads like syrup instead of water. He told me that that's 'not what he meant.'
The world thinks that Cato is a monster, now. They see what he did in the arena, they see the way he acted before that. They never saw the real Cato because the real Cato died long before the games even began.
Hours pass, and he finally returns home to pack.
"Cato," I murmur again. This time, of course, he can hear me. So he walks over, and he kisses me. It is not slow, or chaste, or even loving. It is rough, it is meant to hurt, it is hateful. I pull away before he wants it to finish, but long after I want it to.
"I tried to save her." It takes me a minute to realize what he meant. Katniss. The girl on fire. He acted like he hated her, and maybe he did. But Cato was always honorable, and he knew why she had volunteered. I knew that he had volunteered to die. I stare up at him. "You look lifeless," he notes.
"Then that makes both of us." I reply. He does not smile his lopsided smile.
I would like to say that we had a happy ending.
"Do you still love me?" He finally asks, and he does not seem enthusiastic. I debate whether it would hurt him more to lie or to tell the truth. I don't want to hurt him, and I figure it will hurt him more if he finds out later that I deceived him. I have to nod because my throat is closing into a tight knot. "I told you not to." But before I can begin to cry, I look away. So he takes my chin between his thumb and index finger, tilting it up so he can lower his lips to mine. This time, it is perfect, and I don't want it to end, but it does, and all I can think is that maybe some part of the old him is still alive.
As I said before, I would like to say that we had a happy ending. We dated, for a time, and our lives were filled with our version of happiness. The day before the conditions of the Quarter Quell were announced, he told me he loved me for the first time. After the unique situation of this years games was revealed the next evening, we eloped. He said 'said I love you' far more often, almost obsessively, like a mantra. One night I came home from grocery shopping and found him bellowing at a TV screen. The only part of his breakdown that I could make sense of was 'don't take her from me.' I wondered if I had heard right, if that was how he saw our situation- as me being taken from him, instead of the other way around. I tried not to think about the possibility of him re-entering the games. I took his wish to stay here with me as a sign that he was healing. How cruel that he would never be given opportunity to form a scar over the broken parts of his soul.
His name was picked on that fateful Reaping day, and I watched him walk onto the stage. By the end of the first night, he was dead. And he knew he was dead even before Enobaria's blade pierced his heart. He had ducked behind a tree, having lost his sword after running from poisoned fog and speeding straight into her camping ground. He looked up to the false sky as Enobaria searched wildly for him. There were cameras and microphones everywhere in the arena, and he knew this fact well. "Forgive me." He mouthed. A small twig snapped, and the feral woman hunting for my husband grinned.
"I love you," I sobbed out. He couldn't hear me, and I had not deluded myself into thinking that he could. But he smiled up at me through the screen, and the only plausible explanation for what he did next is that he knew me well enough to predict what I would say in that small span of time.
"I love you, too." He said it aloud, only a moment before Enobaria found him and threw the knife straight into the center of his chest.
It is amazing, really, how quickly joy and hope can be extinguished, how fleeting life is.
This is not a love story. It is not my story, it is not Cato's story, it is not the Capitol's story. It is a story for all people, and it does not belong solely to one person or one group of people. It is simply an account of how cruel our lives can be.
I hope Cato can forgive me for ending mine to rejoin him.