what the hell is love if you're in complete control?
"I'm going to kill you," he says one day, the same way he would state his favorite color—casual, easy. They're in his bed, naked and glowing and tangled all up in the cotton sheets. His fingers trace featherlight patterns on her shoulder as she lies against his arm.
Clove turns to look up at him, stoic. "How?" is all she says.
Cato shrugs. "Not sure yet. But I'm going to." He looks down at her, his eyes swirling with something unreadable. "You deserve the best."
She smiles, cryptic and catlike. "And who's to say I won't kill you first?"
They volunteer for the Games two days later, as they've known they would. She's cold and confident and he's proud and powerful, and the district loves them. They turn to each other with sharp smiles and when they shake hands, they linger for a heartbeat too long.
"You and your district partner are cute."
"What?"
Glimmer shrugs, running a delicate finger along the blade of her practice knife. "I don't know. You guys have a connection or something. It runs deeper than just allies or district partners, you know?"
Clove doesn't know how to respond to that. While she thinks, she absentmindedly throws her own knife at a target twenty feet away. Dead center.
"What makes you say that?" she finally asks.
Another shrug. "Just a feeling, I guess."
Clove doesn't dislike Glimmer. At first she was afraid she would, because the other girl is just so... well, perfect. But Glimmer is a lot smarter than she looks, and her ability to read people and situations is impeccable. She'll make a good ally.
"We're in the Hunger Games, Glimmer," Clove says in an attempt to divert the attention. "There's no time for anything like that."
The blonde thankfully drops the subject, instead bidding Clove a friendly farewell and trotting over to a new weapons station.
When Clove turns, her gaze meets Cato's. His eyes are still that burning shade of blue, shining under the fluorescent lights of the training center. She has the feeling that he can see right through her, and she fights a shiver before turning back to her knives.
They meet in her room the following night, after the interviews are over. She slips out of her dress and he discards his suit, and they're falling onto her bed in a mess of limbs and lips and lust. His touch is scalding, hotter than any flame the Girl on Fire could ever dream of, bright and burning and blue.
Glimmer is dead and so is Marvel and so are sixteen other kids whose names Clove never bothered to learn other than Thresh, and she only knows his name because he blatantly refused their offer at an alliance. His loss. He's alive, anyway, though she can't imagine how.
She and Cato split up yesterday. They were the only two left of their alliance, so there was no point in sticking together anymore. They agreed that they would kill the remaining tributes between the two of them, and then meet again when they're the last ones left. Then he would kill her, or she would kill him.
Right as she's lining up to throw a knife at a particularly fat-looking rabbit, the voice of Claudius Templesmith reverberates through the arena.
Attention tributes. Two victors. Same district. She fumbles, and her knife lands harmlessly to the left of the rabbit, which scurries away in fear. She doesn't care.
She's up and running in record time.
They find each other somewhere in the middle, crashing into each other like waves to a shore. His arms engulf her completely and she presses her face into his chest and he's laughing. She doesn't bother stopping him when he leans down and unabashedly presses his lips to hers. "Looks like I won't have to kill you, after all," he breathes.
She has the Girl on Fire, and everything has fallen perfectly into place. Clove lets herself get lost in her own little monologue, because she loathes the girl below her and wants to watch her suffer, and she promised Cato a show. It was the only way he'd let her go.
Her knife brushes the corner of the other girl's mouth, but just as she's about to make that first cut she finds herself in the air with a large hand bunching the fabric in the front of her shirt. It's Thresh, he's here, and he's so much larger than she remembers and he's demanding to know if she killed Rue.
She didn't. He doesn't believe her.
And suddenly she sees the rock in his hand and she's screaming. "Cato! Cato!"
She barely has time to feel ashamed before something comes down hard against the side of her head and now everything hurts.
The world is blurry to the point where she can barely make out the figure that leans over her. With great effort she orients her vision and sees that it's Cato. He's screaming something, but she feels like she's underwater—his words are garbled and muffled and his features swim in and out of focus. His eyes, for the first time since she's known him, hold sadness. Despair.
He's grasping her hand and she feels guilty for hurting him like this. She didn't mean to hurt him.
"Looks like I won't have to kill you after all."
He was wrong. The look on his face right now, it does the trick. The emotion in his eyes, the wetness on his cheeks, the desperation in his voice, that's what kills her. It overwhelms her even more than the pain from Thresh's attack, and strangely enough, she's okay with it.
She wouldn't want to die at anybody's hand but his.
fighting it is hopeless, sinking in your ocean.