Disclaimer: I dont own the hunger games. Suzanne Collins does. but if i did i can assure you i wouldnt have killed off finnick. or prim. ect.
It started when she was five. As a tot, she loved to move and run and throw things to see how far they would go. She loved to laugh and loved to talk. It was her dad who saw her potential. He was the one who began training her, starting with her first lessons early in childhood, when the skills still have time to develop and the lessons learned have time to seep in.
He taught her to kill. He taught her to enjoy how to kill and how to kill in many different ways. He taught her how to flick her wrist correctly and the acute force needed behind each throw to pierce the heart of a dummy further and further with each attempt. She relished in the feeling of satisfaction she got every time her knife found its mark and despised herself when she missed by so much as a fraction of an inch. She knew that the satisfaction was never complete without the crimson pouring from the mannequin, but she would take what she got.
Her bright-eyed laughter and bubbly speech faded to be replaced with a cold, deadly accuracy and a frozen heart. By the time she was ten some say she didn't even have one.
Her mother was long gone, and in the next couple of years her little brother would be too; fading into nothing but a small splatter of reddish brown next to all the others against her dusty white walls. Most times she couldn't even distinguish his from the rest of the blood. When at age ten she found out that her father made mommy go away for good, she couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sense of pride in her chest at what he had done.
Twelve was the age when her father gave in and sent her to a real academy to be trained for the rest of her Hunger Games career. She loved the feeling of power that she got from sending the steel blade whizzing across the room at the perfect angle, but she knew it wasn't enough. Training was a high and the crashes it brought were sometimes unbearable.
Of course her father wanted nothing more than perfection from his daughter, and he fought hard to achieve it. Every slap or worse she received she took as motivation to show him that she is the best, that his teachings were not in vain.
One day she did show him. He was surprised, awed and amazed at how much she had learned, and was saddened that the knife protruding from his chest would prevent him from seeing more of her progress.
Of course she never told anyone.
Anyone but him, really. Eventually he found out, but not for a long time. And when he did, she was surprised at the flicker of…something, in his eyes before they smoothed over and he congratulated her. Though she remained suspicious, she never asked him what that look was, and she never wanted to know.
But after she met him, everything started to change. Everything started to fall apart. To her, he ruined everything. He barged into her life and deconstructed everything she had so carefully worked to put up about herself. The self-esteem; the pride; the fear others got from her; he destroyed it all. He came into her life like a whirlwind tornado, messing up everything and ripping up her foundations until she was left with nothing but a destroyed base to rebuild from. He made her feel soft and weak and vulnerable. Not that she'd tell him all that.
That's the thing about her; she's a terrific liar. Cool under fire with ice in her glare, she could handle anything. Most say she was half mad; no one dared to bother her. But when she was called for the reaping and he volunteered, something inside her cracked. A dam of some sort was broken and emotions were rushing forward, emotions she hadn't felt in years. In fact the only thing she'd really felt in all this time was bloodlust, satisfaction and pain. Of course she had moments of calm, of smugness or of disappointment, but they weren't as often. Until she met him, that is. While the District seemed to be relieved at the loss of the crazy knife girl, they didn't realize what she was taking with her—him.
He had begun to mean everything to her. He was her rock, her partner in crime, and her friend even. She hated every minute spent by his side, hated the way he made her feel. Soft and gooey and girly and she hated it. But at the same time she craved his attention and loved every second she had to be with him.
Their mentor had said something to her that caught her attention. Though the word was used in a different scenario, it was the only thing she got out of the conversation. She didn't even remember the sentence surrounding the word, just the word itself. Love.
She wondered if love was what she was feeling, but knew it couldn't be. Love was something you needed a heart to feel, and she didn't have one. Hearts would slow you down and damage you, making you stupid and careless and pathetic. She was cold, calculated, mad, and strong. Having a heart would truly destroy everything he didn't when he came into her life. At age sixteen, she officially had no heart. She was not feeling love.
She tried her best to push him aside and out of her life, really, she did. But she couldn't bring herself to commit to the plan of losing him and now that the Games were starting and she knew at least one of them would die, she only wanted to hold on tighter.
Now she's down and dying and he's screaming her name and running to her. She wants to call out to him, tell him she's all right but she can't because she's not. She's gone and there's no bringing her back now. Maybe she knew all along that she was going to die here, maybe she didn't. She can still feel him calling out to her, even though the ringing in her ears makes it difficult to hear.
She knows now that at the end of the day he's Cato and she's Clove and it doesn't matter how many people she killed or how many menacing glares she's sent out because soon she will just be one more victim, no, loser from the past and it wont matter. Maybe he'll join her soon. She doesn't know if she wants that or not. She's not even sure it matters anymore.
What does matter is that she loves him. She knows now that she loves him and she finds herself regretting that she can't tell him. She doesn't know if he loves her, but something in her gut feels right. Love, she knows now, isn't weak or vulnerable or stupid at all. In fact she likes it, not that she would ever tell him, of course.
The dam that had cracked at the Reaping Day has now burst and she feels.
She realizes that she does have a heart. She just wishes she could have felt it beat.