[[Have a prewritten oneshot as yet another apology for not updating Bellona and Mars. I swear another chapter'll be up soon!]]
"Oh, you were mine," he murmurs to her.
(the people in the Capitol point at him then, listening closely, but he says no more, and eventually they decide he must have meant his to kill, for what else could he have meant? Careers know no mercy or pity, after all; the sort of dogs allowed to guard the house but never allowed inside.)
He stands, looks down upon her corpse, and goes hunting.
He finds Thresh all alone in his field of grains, the armor that was in their backpack glinting on his skin. "Well, they neglected to send a face guard," Cato tells Thresh and watches, eyes dark and starless, as the other leaps to his feet at the noise. There's no weapon in the other boy's hands, but that doesn't fool Cato. He saw Thresh kill Clove with nothing more than a rock.
But Cato's strong, too, even with his sword shielding Clove's body. He snapped the neck of some nameless boy earlier, the one Clove had convinced him would be useful in their cause. Clove was so rarely wrong that he'd agreed. That was her first mistake.
Cato's strong, and as he sizes up Thresh, the boy who rejected the Careers, he can see the fear masked by bravado in his eyes. Cato has no limits, no lines. He will kill Thresh and he will win the Games. That much he's certain of.
Thresh lunges at him, hoping to catch him off guard, but Cato catches him and flips him onto the earth. He crouches above Thresh just like Clove had done to the girl from Twelve, but this time there's no one to save him and bash Cato's skull in.
Thresh dies and Cato is empty.
He peels the armor from Thresh's body and again wishes there was a face guard. Lover Boy is useless with a weapon, but he's seen Twelve shoot arrows. It's like Clove's fanatic precision with knives, cold and terrifying.
Cato knows he won't be able to win the Games in a single night, so he takes a few days' rest. He sleeps and eats his last reserves of food, spends the days stretching out his sore muscles until he'd be able to wrestle a bear, if the Gamemakers would provide one. When he dreams, he dreams of green eyes and silver knives and frantic, piercing screams.
Time passes, and Cato turns from the hunter to the hunted.
Cato clings to the metal ribs of the Cornucopia, watching through fatigue-heavy eyes as the girl and her injured lover scramble after him. The eerie mutts congregate at the base before one that bears a striking resemblance to Glimmer leaps up. There's a kind of savage viciousness in its bright green eyes that was lacking in the real Glimmer, but it's gone soon enough, wiped out with one of Twelve's arrows. Then Twelve is screaming and Lover Boy is panicked, only just realizing the truth about the mutts.
(they're human only in their eyes, but it's enough to give Cato pause. he's human everywhere but his eyes.)
While they're distracted, Cato begins to move towards them, his oxygen-starved body screaming in protest, but a mutt cuts him off and sinks its teeth into Mellark's leg. He's nearly off the ledge before he stabs it and Twelve hauls him back up.
Cato pulls Mellark into a chokehold.
"We'll kill the boy first, quickly enough, then really drag it out for the girl," Clove says with relish. Her eyes are glittering and she licks her lips unconsciously, one hand absentmindedly tracing slashes in the air. Cato is captivated by her, unable to tear his eyes away as she smiles into the distance.
"What makes you think you'll be around to kill them both? Maybe I'll have cut you down by then," Cato responds, but there's nothing malicious about his threat. Clove grins at him.
"Because you'd kill her too fast on your own and you know it. The audience deserves a good show for one of the last deaths," she tells him matter-of-factly. Then she leans in, and Cato can't stop himself from mimicking the movement. "Can that be your victory gift to me?" she whispers, a coy smile playing about her lips.
He smirks in response and she smiles again, pleased. Oh, you are mine, he thinks to himself.
He'd planned to let the boy stand there and choke for a while, but some of Clove's cunning must have rubbed off on him. Some primal part of him snarls that he'll die if he leaves the boy alive for much longer. He twists the boy's neck until it snaps.
Twelve shrieks. It's a high-pitched, frantic noise rather like the barks of the mutts, and he wonders for the first time if maybe she did have feelings for the boy after all. Her bow falls out of her hands. He can see it glint in the moonlight as it bounces off the Cornucopia and disappears among the mutts.
(the cannon sounds and he feels like he's just cheated death. maybe there just wasn't enough of him left to die.)
And then she is really and truly destroyed, crumpling onto the Cornucopia even as he tosses the boy's body over the side and stalks over to her. She's crying now and looks for all the world like the younger sister she'd volunteered for. He falters for just an instant before he remembers Clove broken on the ground and the girl's blood splattering the ground as she flees.
The mutts below quietly wrestle one another for choice pieces of Mellark, no doubt commanded by their masters to not interrupt what will surely be the most dramatic death of the Games. He intends to make it just as glorious as Clove had wanted. She barely resists as he pushes her flat onto the Cornucopia and takes out Clove's favorite knife.
The Girl on Fire screams interminably as he carves patterns in her skin, designs like the glowing flames she'd had drawn in gold the night of her interview. The mutts are driven mad by the scent of blood, snarling at one another as they rip at the corpse on the ground. He and the mutts, they're one and the same.
(he and the mutts, none were human in the end.)
Cato turns his attention back to the girl. All the careful, artistic details of before are discarded for the kind of swift, brutal slashes he's always favored. He keeps slicing until the cannon vaguely registers in his ears for the third time and the mutts are beginning to clear out.
He looks down to see one, smaller than all the rest, glancing up at him curiously as he tucks the knife away. He can't break its gaze, even though he knows Clove is long-dead. It's too eerily familiar, a facsimile of her intense gaze trapped inside a lean, dark-furred body. The Gamemaker who designed her must have spent hours studying the exact emerald hue of her eyes.
(he doesn't want to look away because if he does, he'll forget.)
Finally not-Clove breaks eye contact and trots away to rejoin her pack, a drop of blood trickling down her muzzle. Then she is gone, and Cato is alone.
He finds some blood-red berries in Twelve's pocket, clearly toxic. He wonders faintly how stupid she could be to carry them around like food. For a brief, horrifying second, Cato contemplates eating the berries.
"What would you do if you won?" Clove asks him as they're lying on her bed in the Capitol, watching old Games and taking notes.
Cato shrugs in response. "Train some kids, throw a bunch of parties, sleep with as many girls as I can without getting tied down." In truth, he doesn't know what he'd do. His whole life has just led to the Games. Two isn't big on making future plans when the majority won't survive.
"That sounds like your life already," she snorts. She's silent for a moment, and Cato scribbles something down when the person on-screen flings an axe at a fleeing foe. "I think I'll become a politician," Clove decides. "I'd have money and fame. I could easily maneuver myself into, say, the mayor, then work on getting promoted to the Capitol." She doesn't continue, but Cato knows there's treason hidden in her words. Clove would love nothing more than to replace President Snow.
But he knows every word they say in the Capitol is carefully recorded and analyzed, so instead he nods as if she's just said something nothing deeper than that her favorite color is red. Oh, you are mine,he thinks as she plasters on an innocent smile and turns back to face the television, a viper with all the poison and he's addicted to its sweetness.
Cato uses the berries like paint on the mostly-untouched canvas of Twelve's face. It was always Clove's art, to transform the face of a person, so he's mostly avoided it up until now. He gives her a crimson smile stretching beyond her lips, then he slides down from the Cornucopia, leaving Twelve's mutilated corpse for all to see. He hopes Clove appreciates it.
Caesar's voice is just a murmur in his ear that he brushes away. He should be ecstatic that he's brought such honor to his District, bringing down some of the trickiest foes, but instead he's detached. Clove should have been here, he thinks bitterly. They would have grinned at one another through the smears of blood from their opponents and then launched into a battle all their own. He would have knocked her down and laughed when she screamed and smiled when she begged in a way that was more forceful than pleading, but she never would have cried.
(water drips from the sky onto his head, washing away every silent promise they'd made. if there's a tear from Cato in there, too, no one in the Capitol suspects.)
The hovercraft arrives to take him to the Capitol. He doesn't resist, not when they sedate him, not when they begin the painful process of healing his marred skin. Brutus comes to visit him, and his mentor claps a rough hand on his shoulder and nods. "Good job," he says as he leaves.
Enobaria grins, catlike, when she walks into his room a minute later. "That was quite a show. We're proud of you." And Cato smirks like he used to and inclines his head to accept the compliment while she delves into his presentation for the recap of the Games.
He doesn't feel anything at all when he watches Clove die again. He watches the sudden inhuman snarl form on his face, but blinding rage is the only emotion he displays on the screen. He's detached and objective as he sees himself win the Games again.
(the crown they place on his head is heavy and cold and whispers of power. he ignores it.)
Cato's blunt and icy in his final interview, and the crowd loves it, goes wild when he smirks and insults the failings of the other tributes. Caesar questions him about everything, the food, his allies, the arena layout, his own perceptions of the tributes and the ways they died. But there's one that Caesar saves for the very end, and he can feel the concealed excitement of the camera crew, the ice in Snow's eyes, the tension in Enobaria's stance. They're all waiting for him to break.
Cato is ice and steel when he tells the world, "She was weak," but he thinks, she was mine.