A/N: I'm almost considering expanding this past five parts because it's so much fun to write. First and probably only time I'll write Thresh.

Trying to take what's lost and broke and make it right

His thoughts fly faster than his feet as he tears through the fields of wheat, stalks snapping and writhing and clawing at his face. The pain is nothing more than an annoyance, a sprinkle of rain beneath a blazing sun, and Thresh ignores the thin slices covering his skin even as more gash open. If he can't escape his pursuer, the brief discomfort he feels right now won't be anything compared to the agony he knows he can expect. If he's caught, he's dead.

Hot on his trail is a boy-no-longer, a brute transformed by grief into something barely human. Cato's got two inches and at least twenty pounds of muscle on him, and if Thresh were somehow able to beat him in hand-to-hand combat, he'd still have to contend with Cato's sword. It's his weapon of choice, a deadly length of silver that Thresh can see shimmering as Cato sprints. Cato is too close, well able to throw a knife and send him crashing to the ground, but somehow Thresh is certain he won't. This boy, he thrives on blood and sport. He wants a physical, personal form of vengeance. His vicious little partner would've taken any shot she could get, but that's not a problem now.

Thresh thinks of the broken corpse he'd left in front of the Cornucopia, a tiny, frail girl with glassy eyes, and feels ashamed. He'd promised himself before the Games that he'd never kill anyone who hadn't tried to kill him first, and Clove, heartless as she was, had never crossed paths with him. She hadn't even seen him coming.

The girl's pale body morphs in his mind, shrinking and shifting until it's Rue's eyes that are staring blankly up at the sky. No! Thresh barks to himself, shredding the image and running faster. Clove killed Rue, and I killed Clove. I avenged her. Despite the certainty in his thoughts, his heart is heavy. Rue was a child. Clove, despite her thirst for blood, was a child. What sort of monster does that make him?

(He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.)

He'd never understood that as a child- how could someone fighting for a just cause ever go astray? Morality, he'd thought once, was purely black and white. Murder was wrong. Murder of a child was even more wrong.

But if you win, your District will be spared from starvation another year. Isn't the salvation of thousands of innocent children enough to offset the death of one not-so-innocent one?

It's the same logic the Capitol uses to justify holding the Games- twenty-three children sacrificed to prevent war from reaching millions. Thresh wants to throw up.

"You know," Cato spits, the first words Thresh has heard him speak throughout the entire chase, unless one counts the scream of inchoate rage he'd released after Clove's cannon had sounded. "Clove was innocent."

Thresh wheezes an incredulous laugh, the air driven unwillingly from his lungs. In all his ponderings about the morality of revenge, he'd never once considered that Clove- vicious, bloodthirsty, murderous Clove- had been innocent. What was her kill count, he wonders. Far too high for a girl of fifteen. "Liar," he hisses, knowing he should save his breath but too angry at the idea to ignore it. "She killed Rue. She laughed about it. She was a monster."

"She didn't kill Rue," Cato snarls, the words made both harsher and frailer by the rasp of his voice. He's closer now, closing in as surely as the sun is tracking toward its peak. Thresh can't run any faster- his lungs are burning and his feet are nearly dragging on the ground and he's going to die, he can taste blood in his mouth. "I was with her the whole time- don't you think I'd have noticed if she killed your little friend? You killed the wrong person, Eleven."

Horror fills his mouth like ashes. He's lying, he tries to tell himself, but it's too late. His foot catches on a loose stone and then he's falling face-first toward the ground, striking it with enough force to drive the rest of the air from his lungs. As he tries to stumble to his feet, half-whirling to counter Cato's inevitable onslaught, the boy crashes into him with all of the momentum and fury he possesses, and then they're both on the ground.

It's a short fight. Cato is furious and Thresh is sluggish, drained not by the chase but by his own guilt. Pinned on his back, Thresh spits a tooth and a glob of blood into Cato's eye and grapples with his non-broken hand for something- anything- to kill the boy with.

His fingers close around a rock.

Cato sees the stone- the size of a small loaf of bread- and goes berserk, and Thresh remembers too late the crumpled body of Clove with the dent in her skull. "How dare you?" he seethes, and if he was angry before, he's enraged past all rationality now. "You going to break me like you broke that little girl?"

Cato grabs Thresh's wrist in his too-hot palms and snaps it. Stars bloom before his eyes, and they're so painful they're almost beautiful. He doesn't remember screaming until he hears it. Water collects in his eyes, streams down his face, and he screams and screams and screams until Cato backhands him hard enough that something rattles. "Do it fast," he pleads.

But there's no mercy here, not in these Games. Cato bares his teeth in a twisted mockery of a humorous grin. "Consider this your penance," he advises as he pulls out a dainty-looking knife with a cruel, curved blade. Thresh closes his eyes and thinks of the little girl he'd loved as a sister, of the little girl Cato had loved far more, as the tip opens the first cut at his lip.