clove is two when she gets her first knife. it is a christmas gift from cato's mom. clove's mom says they used to sleep in the same crib. cato's mom says they'll be in the games together one day. clove coos and drops the knife on the ground in favor of a set of wooden blocks her father crafted.
clove is four when she learns how to run for cover. her mother grips her shoulders with a pallid face, her voice filled with urgency.
"if anyone comes through that door— any bad man, any man who isn't daddy, you hide under the bed, okay? and you stay there until all the loud noises are gone."
clove is six when she actually has to hide. she hides under the kitchen table as the world caves in, or maybe it's just the room or maybe the sky is exploding, it doesn't matter and it all feels the same. she holds her hands to her ears and in a few days she hears shouting in the streets, happy shouting and "we're free, we're free, we're free" and then they come in and take away the bodies of her parents and she's not free at all but she can pretend. clove can't get out from under the rubble so she falls asleep and hopes she'll never wake up and she wishes she had her knife.
clove is seven the next day: her birthday is the day after what everyone calls Day of Freedom. clove is seven when cato pulls the bricks off of her tiny body and his mother picks her up from the dust.
"fucking mockingjay." the woman says, as she dusts the girl off, and then again when she's bathing her.
that day there are barbecues all over town. cato's mom doesn't let them go celebrate. cato doesn't want to anyways. clove doesn't either. clove sleeps huddled under the kitchen table with her hands over her ears.
clove is eight and in her mind she is still laying under the wreckage. perhaps she always will be. there are no more Hunger Games celebrations anymore, but the training center is alive and well. Cato's mom signs her up for training. she still has her knife from when she was two, but it's scalded on one side and the blade is melted dull.
"don't worry about that." enobaria says, and replaces her knife with a shiny silver one.
clove retrieves her real knife from the trash and makes it stick because enobaria took her knife and they took away her parents and—
"my god, she's gifted." enobaria says, staring at the perfect bullseye.
"beginner's luck." brutus replies, but enobaria isn't having it.
the woman's shiny teeth and hisses of joy feel something like having a mother.
clove throws knives again the next day, and the next, and the day after that.
one day, she understands free. she doesn't feel it, but she understands it.
clove is ten when she is taught how to kill. clove is ten and she hates it because the people dying on TV look just like her mom and dad looked when they were dying and she swore she wouldn't cry. cato laughs at her and she slices his jaw just enough to hurt. just enough to bleed. just enough that he knows her pain.
"you're such a girl." he says.
"your parents are still alive." she replies, and there are no more tears in her eyes now, just apathy in her voice.
"oh." he replies. that night, he sleeps under the kitchen table with her.
"just once. just because i know it hurts." he says, and she feels less scared because he'll pull her out of the rubble before it starts getting hard to breathe.
clove is fourteen when she learns what a mis-an-thro-pist is, and she can't pronounce the word without pausing for every syllable but she knows exactly who she is now. she is not an orphan. she is a mis-an-thro-pist. she learns that "anthro" means human. she learns that she hates humanity. she learns that she's sick of seeing people die. she learns that she has no other choice. one day they show footage from the other districts and she learns that she was wrong.
clove is sixteen when she runs away. she packs a bag half-filled with cato's things and her melted blade. she leaves a note in one of his coat pockets that says "i'm sorry". she moves on. she walks until district two feels like a distant memory and cato isn't real and her parents never were, either. and then she walks some more. she hates the world and everyone in it, but the birds are pretty. mockingjays.
she remembers a song her mother sang to her before the bad men came.
"deep in the meadow, under the willow" and then she can hum the rest of the tune to herself but she forgets the words.
she remembers a song her dad used to sing, too. his voice was rough from the quarries but it made her feel warm.
"wear a necklace of hope, side by side with me" and she'll never know where the songs came from. all she knows are the occasional hissed whispers in cato's house.
"stupid fucking mockingjay…..should've died…..74th…"
and then she remembers her mother's excited voice saying "if we can just fight the bad men, the mockingjay will come and save us."
and then she remembers the bricks and stones laying heavy on her heaving chest and decides that that mockingjay never did that at all, and whoever this mockingjay is, she hates them.
one day, clove sees people. they look different, maybe it's the fact that they smile and hug in the marketplace and that they carry many, many kids with them and that they all feel so warm and whatever this place is, she decides it's made of light.
the lights twinkle everywhere, outshining the stars, and clove sees a redheaded girl with amber eyes and a face like a fox. she isn't ugly, not at all. she looks like she never held a knife before and it makes clove feel scared, all of these untrained people in one town just waiting to be slaughtered.
she turns around and runs back to the safety of two, back to cato's arms. he says she feels skinny. she says she knows.
clove is eighteen when district two starts teaching about the rebellion in their history classes. there are riots outside of the mayor's house, people screaming and throwing torches and holding signs that say "we don't need a reason to hang him for treason" and "can't you see that we aren't free?" and clove understands that last one, feels it in her soul, so she screams with the crowd.
the next day, cato asks her to go pick up his little brother, and when she walks into the school nothing looks the same. the teacher is teaching about the mockingjay- katniss everdeen, clove has heard the name before, mostly some derogatory variation of it but every now and then whispers of the real thing.
clove watches reruns of the hunger games sometimes. a lot of people from two do. rumor has it that enobaria was in them, but if she was, she never talks about it and her games are never shown.
when she is twenty, cato proposes to her. when she is twenty, she says yes. when she is twenty, enobaria grips her shoulders, thumbs just under her collar bones, and says "run. get out of here as fast as you can." and clove remembers her mother's panicked voice and clove trusts the woman with her life, so she packs a bag again and cato doesn't stir when she rises from his arms. he is a light sleeper, and she wonders if he's only pretending. she decides it doesn't matter. she decides nothing matters.
clove runs until her lungs ache, runs until she cannot run anymore, wakes up in a bedroom and wonders if whatever she was running from finally caught her. then, she comes in. the girl clove never forgot the face of, with that fiery hair and those analytical amber eyes.
"i'm finch." she says.
"what is this place?" clove asks.
"you from the capitol?" finch asks, and clove frowns. she's never heard someone say capitol like it's poison.
"no. from two."
"oh. i hear things are getting worse and worse there. i'd worry that you're a spy, but you just don't strike me as that type. i should probably see that as even more reason to suspect, but i tend to be a good judge of character. need a place to stay?"
clove is tired, and she nods.
clove sleeps for almost a day straight. when she wakes up, there is food on the bedside table and she practically swallows it whole. clove has never been hungry besides those two weeks she ran away, and even that pales in comparison to the hunger that seems to be eating her.
she wonders if this was how the kids on TV who starved to death or froze to death or just passed away in their sleep felt.
finch comes back with those piercing eyes and that mischievous smile and clove understands the word "captivated" for the first time.
"what's that on your wrist?" clove asks.
"it's a tattoo." finch replies.
"i know that. i have some too. i mean, what's that symbol? is it a bird?"
"you've never seen the mockingjay symbol? oh my god, what's in the water at two?"
"what does that mean?"
"nothing, don't worry about it. what do you know?"
"about?"
"about anything. knowledge is the only weapon we have against potential oppressors. what do you know about the rebellion? about our history?"
"not much. there's the day of freedom, and there aren't any more Hunger Games."
"you have a lot to learn." finch says.
little by little, finch shows her pieces of history. videos of katniss speaking on stages and some weird hand signal with three fingers and a clip of her and a blonde boy holding poison berries in one of the few Hunger Games tapes district two doesn't show.
clove learns about the past, and clove learns about finch. finch is the youngest of three daughters, and she takes after her mother. clove sees a family picture on finch's mantle and for just a moment, some odd monster of jealousy and repressed heartbreak is wrapping its tendrils around her guts, but she refuses to let it crawl its way up into her throat. finch loves history, and when she talks about the past, whether 10 or 100 years ago, her face lights up and she bubbles over with words.
clove is twenty-one the first time she ever kisses finch.
"there was a place called America!" finch says one day, holding a cup of tea as they eat breakfast together. finch's eyes scan the newspaper with piqued interest, and clove finds herself noticing just how honest the headlines of these articles are in comparison to the ones in two. she refuses to read the papers, but she reads the headlines.
"what was America?" clove asks, and whether she's genuinely curious or just wants to see that look in finch's eyes is up for debate, but finch perks up and starts to ramble.
"it was called a democracy, which meant people voted for a president. it wasn't technically direct democracy, but rather, a democratic republic. elected officials represented the people, who were also able to vote. America was here, in this land, once upon a time."
"what happened to it?" if there's anything clove is interested in hearing about, it's destruction.
"one of their presidents, the 45th i believe, became a dictator. it all went downhill from there, though no one is quite sure how. i've always wanted to find out. rumor has it the capitol library has all of those records. oh, what i would do to get my hands on one of those." it's something about the way her hands fly up to her chest and clasp together, the way her eyes close in decadent indulgence of a long-held fantasy, and suddenly clove is a few inches away from finch's slightly parted peach-tinted lips and she whispers "can i kiss you?" and finch doesn't flinch, she doesn't move away from clove's knife-scarred hands or barbed wire covered heart. in fact, she leans in first.
clove is twenty-one when finch asks if she wants to get married.
in hindsight, it becomes obvious that finch wasn't actually trying to propose, but rather, to find out if that would ever be an option. however, it all goes down well enough and clove still keeps cato's ring on a string around her neck but she decides she won't let it choke her anymore. finch brings her home a gold ring made of wires that looks something like a miniature crown, and clove makes the excuse that it's too big to fit on her finger and ties it onto a different string. they get tangled sometimes, in the middle of the night, but clove doesn't like to think about that.
clove is twenty-two when cato winds up at her doorstep.
she wakes up one day to an empty bed and finch's startled screams, and she runs to the door with her knife between her agile fingers, only to see him standing there with a burn-scarred face and singed hair and a broken look in his eyes.
"oh my god, cato!" she whispers, and then she's in his arms laughing until she cries and finch stands in the doorway not sure what to make of it all.
clove's joy is quickly replaced with a flurry of questions and the dawning realization that she is about to have to introduce her fiancee to her fiance.
she and finch sit at the table with cato. finch tends to his wounds while clove spits out questions like a machine gun spits out bullets.
"what happened to you?" she asks.
"the civil war, that's what. all the rebels in two started fighting the Panemians and it destroyed so much. it seemed like one second we were all waiting for you to come back and the next we were watching ash rain down and buildings crumble. it felt like the day you lost your parents." he said, and finch gives her a look of shock combined with sympathy. oh. she hasn't gotten around to telling her that, has she?
"you got caught up in it, huh?"
"caught up? i threw myself into it. they gave me no choice at the center. brutus insisted." cato says. "i learned to use a gun, and they sent me out with guns and swords and i was supposed to fight the rebels. and i did, at first. then i realized they were right. i joined their side and fought like hell."
"and you won?"
cato gives her a sad look.
"you won, didn't you? after all of that, everything with my mom and dad, the mockingjay, you won right?" she asks, she's standing over him now and her voice has risen three octaves and finch is calmly bandaging a wound on his forearm.
"i'm sorry, clove. they took over Two. they put everyone on curfew...elected peacekeepers. did public whippings for every rebel. i barely got out alive."
clove sits down on the floor, her elbows resting on her bent knees, and her world is collapsing around her and the bricks are falling onto her chest and finch is kneeling next to her trying to get her to snap out of it but she's lost.
cato moves her into a bed and then pulls finch back over to the kitchen table.
"she'll sleep under the table tonight, and you'll hold her, yes?"
"me? why not you? it's obvious you two know each other much better."
"because i've never seen that look in her eyes before."
"what look? love? clove doesn't love me."
"not love. freedom. to clove, they're the same thing."
clove sleeps under the kitchen table. finch holds her.
clove is twenty-three when district two starts the games back up again.
finch watches as she becomes someone very, very different, someone who stays glued to the tv screen, flipping between the news and the district two channel where they broadcast the games.
"all rebels' kids." cato mumbles when 24 district two kids are reaped. name after name, most of which barely ring a bell to clove, but seem to pierce through cato's heart. and then cato's little brother is reaped and clove's eyes look more robotic than human and cato seems like the air has been knocked out of him and finch has no idea how she got herself into the hefty task of repairing these shattered hearts. somewhere in her little heart, she loves it. it makes her feel like something she's doing is finally important.
by the time the games are over, clove looks more like a ghost than a person, and finch can't blame her.
clove sleeps under the kitchen table and mumbles to herself about the bad men in the house and cato doesn't sleep at all and finch brings them tea because that's all she knows to do.
"my mama used to bring me tea." finch says gently as she bends down to hand clove the morning tea they used to share. "especially when i was sick. besides being the power district, five had really good honey. we learned how to tame tracker jackers. turns out their honey is the best. it's healing. you're just a little sick right now, is all." she says, and it might be for herself or for clove but it doesn't really matter.
cato is sentient, if not a little unhinged, when finch hands him a cup of strong black tea, unsweet. he talks of going to see his little brother, the victor of district two's very first annual hunger games, but finch urges him against it.
"it's not safe. besides, she needs you." they took a moment to watch clove with pitious eyes.
clove shuts out finch, but she doesn't shut out cato. finch tries not to take it personally and lives for the rare moments of eye contact the broken girl gives her. clove speaks to no one, not even him, but he gets the eye contact and finch does not.
when clove is twenty-four, she speaks for the first time in almost a year.
"i was trying to shut away the world." she says as finch hands her a cup of tea, and finch almost drops it but forces herself to keep her hands steady.
"yeah." she says softly, brushing a lock of clove's hair behind her ear.
"i had two problems with that." clove continues.
"oh?"
"cato isn't the rest of the world, and you're becoming my world."
it's been awhile, but finch still speaks clove's secret language. she knows what the girl is trying to say. she loves them both.
finch couldn't agree more. worrying over clove had brought cato and finch together in the most unexplainable way.
that night, they all sleep together in the same bed. finch relaxes fully for the first time in as long as she can remember. cato keeps his arms around both of them and doesn't replay the war in his head. clove stops muttering about the heavy bricks. it isn't freedom, but it's damn close.
they all get married one day. clove ties both of their engagement rings onto the same string, signs the court's papers, and they go home.
clove is twenty-six when she feels the first wave of nausea. she is twenty-seven when her first child is born, with cato's hair and clove's eyes and finch's heart. they name her annis, after clove's mother. clove does not cry when she sees her, and she does not cry when she hears her name. cato holds her and finch rocks her to sleep and clove tries not to repeat her own mistakes.
annis is two when clove throws away all the weapons in the house.
annis is four when clove sleeps under the table for the last time, and clove never teaches her how to hide from anything.
annis is six when clove teaches her how to ride a bike.
"spread your wings and soar, little butterfly." she says, and the girl with the curly blonde hair speeds away. she falls and scrapes her knee a few times, and clove feels her heart drop to the bottom of her feet when the girl cries, but finch manages to convince her not to throw the bike into the ravine.
clove is thirty-five and annis has a baby sister named rose with finch's red hair and cato's smile and clove's courage and people stare at them when they all go out to the market together, but clove never cared about that. clove's mind still hurts sometimes, but she is done shutting the world away, especially when the world holds her husband, her wife, and her children.
cato is not the world and finch is not the world and clove is not the world, she realizes. the world is in her children's eyes, and she couldn't forget that if she tried. they have her and cato's eyes, annis has green and rose has blue, and between the life and the water someone will regrow the garden.
clove is forty-five when annis goes to fight. she is forty-five when the nightmares start up again, and when she turns the news back on and has to narrowly resist the urge to make rose learn how to throw knives.
clove is forty-seven when district two's games come to an end, and the entire world comes full circle so that no matter where she stands, she is within its sphere. for the first time since she was six, clove is not a scared little girl laying under the bricks of the smoldering remains of a home. clove is a victor.
they always said she would be.