A/N: I never thought I would receive this many beautiful amount of reviews (I consider anything more than 5 a lot of reviews) so thank you very much. I'd also like to thank all of those who've notified me that I've made a mistake with Katniss' name in the last chapter. I've gone back and fixed it already, so no worries. That might happen again, and I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me when it does :) I'm pretty sure the next chapter will be the last in this strange three-shot.

Just to let you know, this chapter contains different muttations than the one used in book. I incorporated the ones from Mockingjay instead. Was I the only one that thought the muttations looked kinda cute in the movie?


(III.)
Katniss swore she saw Caesar Flickerman standing on the branch beside her.

In all honesty, she couldn't differentiate between reality and fantasy anymore. Gritting her teeth, she fortunately had half the mind to pull out the seven abnormally large stingers out of her arms but that only made the hallucinations worse. She wondered why there was a white, fluffy rabbit doing some sort of strange dance that involved wigging its body. Another seemingly real delusion was a caterpillar cocoon that was the size of a house. She imagined a massively large and pretty butterfly would fly out of that cocoon.

Her peripheral vision started to face in and out, the outer edges blurring out as she tried vainly to focus on the sight that was laid before her. Poor Glimmer and Coral—not really—were in the process of erratically twitching to death after the tracker jacker hive burst open after crashing to the ground next to their campsite. Their identically hysterical screams had faded after about five minutes, their features eradicated by the mutant attack and their limbs swelling three times their usual size. It's the sound of two cannons that mark their official deaths.

A foul-smelling green liquid is oozing out in all the places where she pulled out her own stingers. Wrinkling her nose, there is a green catastrophe coating the bodies of what used to be Glimmer and Coral. Somehow the green liquid looks more interesting on their bodies, making her want to almost touch them—

"What are you still doing here?" A familiar voice hissed from behind her, large hands planting themselves atop her shoulder before roughly twirling body around so that she met five Catos dancing before her eyes.

"Hi, Cato! And Cato and Cato…"

"Are you mad?" he demanded. That was until he finally noticed the numerous swellings on her arms. "Oh, shit."

The male from District 2 resisted the urge to vomit at the sight of both Coral and Glimmer. Obviously, Katniss must have executed her plan well, but probably didn't have the time to avoid getting stung herself.

Cato had been at the lake the entire dawn morning just as Katniss advised him to do so. It had been only a mere twenty minutes to himself and his irrelevant thoughts when Marvel, Tai, and Clove came roaring into the lake, avoiding more of the violent jabs from the genetically-altered wasps that were bred in the Capitol's labs. While the unfortunate victims were deep in the middle of the waters, Cato quickly taken his leave to see the rest of the damage.

"You traitor!"

He snapped his head around to see Tai slashing his way through the brush, badly stung under one eye and an assortment of swellings covering his entire neck and his one of his forearms. It didn't take being a genius to figure out that the other large Career boy had directly addressed this to Cato.

In that singular millisecond, Cato made a choice that he wouldn't ever regret. It was a choice he should have taken since the start of this year's deranged Hunger Games. Whirling around in place, he fluidly plucked Katniss off the ground and threw her over his broad shoulder. Narrowly escaping a dagger that was angrily thrown by Tai, he sprinted across the glades with the intent of getting away from the rest of the Careers as far as possible. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that there was a smaller lake a couple of miles from here.

When he arrived at the lake, he delicately dropped her along a flat bank and started ripping part of the lower half of his shirt. Rolling it up into a less than distinct copy of what a rag should look like, he sipped it into the cold water, squeezing it so that it wouldn't be soaking wet before wiping her swollen arms with it. By now, Katniss was completely out of it, most likely having succumbed to unconsciousness while he had been escaping Tai's wrath. Judging by the way he was wiping rapidly at her arms, he was glad that she was too knocked out to even feel the pain.

Thank the heavens above he was smart enough to grab some of the medicinal leaves he had the luck in finding. He had found them a couple days ago, recognizing them as a treatment to the wasps' stings as the trainer had told him. Without thinking, Cato pulled at a leaf and put one in his mouth. Again, he resisted the urge to gag for the second time that day at the torrid taste as he chewed on it, surely thinking that Katniss owed him big time for this one. He draped the chewed leaf on one of her swellings and painstakingly repeated the process.

"How'd you know?" the pale girl asked, having resurged from abeyance later that night. She lied next to Cato, who was also stretched on his back with his arms behind his head, gazing idly at the darkened sky. "With the leaves and all?"

Cato snorted. "Why the tone of surprise?"

"I didn't think they taught how to chew leaves in District 2."

"The trainer at the plants station told me how to do it," he muttered back, his icy blue-eyes rolling in effect. "Good thing I visited that station too. I saved your life." With this, he sent her a cocky smirk.

Katniss shook her head, biting back a smile. "You're overdramatizing the whole situation."

"No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are."

"Why can't you just say thank you?" Cato threw at her with mild irritation. The Capitol must be eating all this up.

Fully donning a shit-eating grin on her face, Katniss edged closer, hovering near Cato's face. Although it was dark, she could tell that the male's face was heating up rather adorably. Flushed, he silently threw every curse word he knew out there and closed his eyes to resist the temptation of looking at her face. She kissed him again, this time on his upper cheek, for a brief amount of time that was enough to nearly undo him right then and there.

"Thank you," she murmured, her breath just ghosting past his ear, all evidence of tease overridden by sincerity to exemplify how serious she was.

"You're welcome," he grumbled. He could feel his face turn redder when he heard her tinkling laugh.

It's Panem's national anthem that erased all traces of what was supposed to be adolescent normalcy. Looking back up at the sky with severity, they are not surprised to find Glimmer's face looking down upon them. However, they were both shocked—Cato more so than Katniss—when Clove's face appeared right before Coral's.

"They killed her," Cato snarled with turbulent rage. "They fucking killed her!"

"Maybe it was one of the other tributes," Katniss offered in the strained tension.

He continued to display ferocity. "Bet you it was Tai that killed her," he glared into the open air in front of him. "She was pretty much my only connection to home. Of course he would destroy all remnants of that. Her cannon must have shot while we were sleeping."

Cato would murder the both of them—Tai and Marvel. He would kill Marvel first for being a useless bastard and not stopping the idiot from District 4 and then save Tai for last for killing Clove in the first place.

"I think it's time we cut their supply short."

He was nearly started by her cryptic remark, almost forgetting she was there. "What?"

Katniss elegantly lifted an eyebrow. "Haven't you been listening to what I've been saying?"

She's been saying something? Cato unintentionally blanched.

"Just kidding."

Damn her.

A few daylight hours later found Cato face to face with Marvel himself. The blonde male knew that Katniss was watching their encounter from somewhere high above, concealed by the boughs of the tall trees. The moment morning struck, Katniss lured the boy from District 1 in by fleeing in and out of his vision like a scampering squirrel. It was their luck that Marvel chose the chance to follow her with aims to kill her, rather than staying with Tai and a new member to their alliance, a small girl from District 3.

Marvel put up a strong face in front of the whole Panem, but Cato could see his Adam's apple wobbling. "Cato."

He merely inclined his head brusquely at the other male.

"You're probably pissed as hell. I get that but—" Marvel started to explain, yet he couldn't continue after those first few words.

"Did Tai kill Clove or was it you?" Fuck this, he already knew the answer.

"…It was Tai."

The overwhelming fury from yesterday came surging back tenfold. "And you stood there and did nothing to stop it? Tai has shit with me, not Clove. The least you could have done was preventing it from happening, asshole."

Marvel's face reddened with his own anger. "Don't call me that, you backstabbing, traitorous—"

The ranting male didn't have enough time to push the rest of his words out because at the very second he came back with a rebuttal, Cato had diminished the distance between them in two long strides. As Marvel managed out the last word with a fruitless grip of his spear, Cato's hands had found their way around the other boy's neck. With a quick and hard snap of his throat, Marvel's face had twisted with an unhealthy snap and had fallen to the floor.

After the distant sound of the cannon, Katniss lithely dropped to the ground from literally out of nowhere. She surveyed the dead tribute, her nose wrinkling at the sight of his head fixated unnaturally before tugging on Cato's arm. "C'mon, I've found out where Tai is keeping all his supplies at."

It was not far from the Cornucopia. Why Tai needed that many supplies was simply ridiculous. All of the things were stacked up into a high pyramid, with several of the circular metal plates surrounding the large pile. Katniss recognized the metal plates as the same one they stood on right before the initial bloodbath. Of course that was why the boy from District 4 allowed that girl from District 3 in on his alliance so easily.

"You sure this is going to work?" Cato asked from his position, hidden under patches of leafy bushes.

"Yes," Katniss nodded, reaching for an arrow and notching it against taut string of her bow. With her tongue pressed against her cheek in concentration of the vast difference between her and the target she was aiming for, she added, "If the metal plates were designed to explode if a tribute stepped off, it should happen the other way around."

With that neatly said, Cato watched as she let the arrow fly with exceptional accuracy, the tip of the shaft making its way speedily towards a…bag of apples? The pointed tip cut the net that held the apples, observing as all the apples went spilling out slowly down the tower of supplies. One fruit was rolling down the supplies within each bump until languidly stretching upon the ground, inching towards one of the metal plates. An enormous explosion followed once the rounded fruit touched just a millimeter of the metal plate.

One by one, all the metal plates exploded with bangs that were loud enough to alert the Capitol far away. After mixing with the combustion of air, they erupted into massive torrents of flames as all the supplies went flying from the impact. In the aftermath, the supplies were either burning to a crisp of nothingness or already destroyed. Once the whole earth beneath them stopped vibrating, Tai and the small girl from District 3 came running in to witness the collateral damage.

Tai's explosive tantrum was verily expected. After kicking and screaming at the remains of their supplies, he pinpointed his dark gaze upon the girl of Three, heavy with accusation. Still concealed within the bushes, they could hear the girl begging and pleading for something—most likely her life. It took most of Katniss' constraint not to come barging into the scene to protect the little female when Tai rammed the entire length of his sword up the girl's spine.

"They were only supplies," Katniss muttered pointedly.

"I'd be pretty pissed too." The blonde male didn't understand why he was defending Tai. Judging the way he was born and raised in the path of Careers, it was pretty much expected to react that way.

Only four more tributes left.

(IV.)
"Get up the Cornucopia!" Cato screamed at her as he pushed Katniss in front of him.

The two of them were currently being chased by four-legged muttations that had sharp talons at the end of each finger, and had white skin that was eerily reminiscent of Katniss' own pale skin. They were lizard-like creatures with long reptilian tails, arched backs, and heads that jut jaws that enabled them to decapitate anything with one bite. The monsters also resembled humans, considering their size and their ability to walk on their hind legs as well as on four.

Katniss remarkably jumped the high space between the ground and one of the layers of the Cornucopia, reaching her arm back for Cato to latch on. It was a feat itself how Katniss managed to pull the muscled male up the silver assemble, reeling him in with all her strength just in time before Cato's swinging feet were almost bitten off by the muttations. She had pulled at him with another surge of force but he just came stumbling into her, easily knocking her to the floor with his own body.

Before they could have any minute to rest, a hand came upon the back of Cato's shirt and suddenly pulled him off. Cato spun around to see Tai's bruised and bloody face before the latter boy punched him squarely in the face. He would have reacted more quickly had it not been for the gruesome bite he attained from one of those damned lizard monsters.

Her arrow was aligned with her bow in her hand instantaneously, but Tai already had Cato in some sort of headlock that the male from District 2 also and occasionally specialized in. "Shoot and he goes down with me," Tai laughed manically, jerking Cato's head by roughly pulling the tips of his dark blonde hair. His invalid leg was bent awkwardly at being forced to stand.

As a last minute effort, Cato raised his fingers to Tai's arm instead of trying to push the other boy off or wresting his way free because the boy from District 4 was equal to him in height and build. While Tai was sprouting some nonsense about winning to bring glorious honor to his fishing district, Cato's forefinger veered off and made a deliberate 'X' on the back of Tai's hand. Katniss could see that Tai has realized the implication of the small gesture only a second later than she did by the way his winning smile slipped away from his discolored features.

It doesn't really matter anyway because before Tai could do anything about it, Katniss' fletched arrow was already striking his flesh. He reflexively cried out, releasing Cato, who slammed back against him in retaliation. For a moment, it looked as though both boys were going to fall off the lip of the horn. Cato gave Tai another hard push with his shoulder, almost falling to the ground below with the other male had it not been for Katniss catching hold of Cato before he had a chance to lose his footing over the edge.

She naturally wrapped his arms around his waist, silently prodding him to lean on her as they watched Tai barbarically get eaten alive by the lizard muttations. This was the climax of this year's Hunger Games, the moment that everyone has been waiting for, so of course they wanted a good show. But no matter how much she hated Tai at the moment, his agonizing screams bothered her greatly.

"Make it count," Cato spoke from beside her, pulling up the hood of her jacket when icy wind broke across the plains. He already understood what she was thinking, just by the expression on her face.

By Tai's fifth please, Katniss aimed another arrow at his skull.

"Did you get him?" he murmured questioningly.

The fire of a cannon was his eventual answer.

Now the real terror of the Games began—it was just the two of them left.

Katniss' head snapped to the side when the male beside her whispered her name.

A befuddled expression came across her facial features when sexybeautifulsadisticgorgeous Cato cupped her face with a certain tenderness she hadn't known he was capable of. All tangible thoughts were erased the moment, the moment Cato pulled at her with raw yearning that would have been foreign to any Career of District 2, their bodies crushing and molding together in accompaniment of the adamantine impact. His lips collided with hers, needing and tasting what he had infinitely longed for all this time, all but sweetly devouring her delectable little mouth.

Cato could almost hear the loud and shocked gasps of the Capitol's audience, almost forgetting the fact that their little intimate encounter was being processed on live television. They must have been wondered why a cold-blooded Career such as himself would honestly care for tribute of another district, why he had stuck with her all this time throughout the Hunger Games. This just had to be the answer to all their questions. Who knew that a heartless killing machine such as him was capable of loving a girl?

"Bet you that kiss was long overdue," Katniss managed out when they finally parted, rueful smile playing at her lips.

"Agreed," he instinctively pulled her in closer, pulling open the flaps of his jacket so that she could slip in. His eyes narrowed at another brush of the bitter cold winds. "Are they trying to freeze us to death?"

"That would be better than forcing us to kill each other." After muttering that aloud, Katniss ripped the quiver of arrows away from her back and threw it, along with the long bow, aside to the ground.

Cato froze, but not from the windy weather. "What are you doing?"

"I already told you from the beginning that I'm not going to kill you," Katniss responded elusively. "One of us has to win and I know what a big deal winning is to your district so—"

"I don't give a fuck about my district!" You also promised you'd return to your sister.

Katniss tried to step away from him but that only prompted Cato to grip her even tighter. "Don't even think for a second about leaving me," he hissed warmly into her ear. Even with the obvious hints of anger, she found it a bit romantic when he harshly declared, "I love you."

If the Capitol had been shocked before, they would be absolutely flabbergasted by now.

"Do you mean it?" her voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper, avoiding the ears of the Capitol. "You're not just doing this for a good finale? Don't you dare lie to me."

"Yes." No second guesses. He knows he loves her.

Katniss didn't exactly answer back audibly, but a large breathtaking smile stole her face right then. The gesture had his heart beating a hundred times faster than it already was, hating the feeling because not only has he never really felt like this before, the feeling leaves him disconcertingly vulnerable and weak, but he loved every second if it because he knew that she loved him back. Him. She didn't have to say it aloud because the answer was clearly written across her face.

Unable to contain himself, Cato leaned in and captured her mouth within his once more. He grinned broadly against her sweet lips, not giving a single shit that the whole world was watching an interaction that was preferably private. And thus, the title of star-crossed lovers was given to them.

"You have the absolute worst timing in the world," Katniss noted while her head rested against his neck.

"What if the Games didn't have any victors this year?" came another quiet whisper at her ear.

As if to explain himself, Cato rummaged through the pockets of his jacket until he held he held a huddle of small, black berries in his curled palm. "They're nightlock. You'll be dead before they reach your stomach."

"Are you sure you don't belong in the district that deals with agriculture?" Katniss passed him a shrewd glance.

Then, despite the dangerous circumstances struck at them—despite everything, Cato laughed.

"On the count of three?"

"Yeah," she agreed, leaning on her toes to give him one last kiss. "I love you."

Cato couldn't help but acknowledge the fact that his heart swelled with happiness when she actually repeated the statement with her own strong voice. Hearing her say it made everything surreal to him. There could be no possible better ending to this after what she said.

She squeezed their locked hands together tight before spreading the dark berries out against the sun that had just appeared on the horizon as an artificial product of the Gamemakers. One. For some unexplainable reason, Cato's countdown sounded clear in her mind. Without a victor, this whole thing would blow up in the Gamemakers' faces. They would have failed the Capitol. Two. They might be slowly and painfully executed while cameras broadcasted it to every screen in the country. Or maybe they didn't care if the two last tributes died.

"Three!"

Already?

Nevertheless, both Cato and Katniss looked at each other for a split second before they pushed their hands to their waiting mouths, letting all of the berries fall into their caverns. But when the berries managed to pass Katniss' lips, the loud trumpets began to blare. Claudius Templesmith's voice was the last thing they expected to hear.

"Ladies and gentleman, due to popular demand, I am pleased to present the victors of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games, Cato Nerva and Katniss Everdeen!"

Immediately, Cato spewed out all the berries, wiping his tongue with his shirt to make sure that no juice remained. Not just one victor, but two? What were they playing at? He couldn't dwell on it as long as he would have liked because he really couldn't hear his own thoughts over the insanely loud roaring of the crowd in the Capitol that they were playing live over the speakers. It was explicably noisy enough to turn anyone deaf.

"Did you swallow any?" he asked Katniss.

The unexpected response he got was of the aforementioned girl from District 12 coughing heavily. Furrowing his brows at such a reply, he noticed that all her berries were spat and scattered about on the ground. So why was she coughing so badly?

As she continued to cough, horrid theories sprung up in his mind. A berry must have melted at her throat, the poising pooling there and not managing to make it down to her esophagus just yet, causing Cato to fear that in another few minutes or so, she would die because of one berry. Because of him. He didn't have any water to shove down her throat to wash away the building poison. When the hovercraft finally materialized overhead, he couldn't get Katniss up the latter fast enough. She was going to die—

And all because of him.

To be continued...


Another A/N: Will there be a reunion next chapter...? Review please :)