A/N: Italicized quotes are from various versions of Aesop's The Farmer and the Sea and The Shepherd and the Sea.
But it's the only place that I can hold you tight
"Oh sea, how deceitful and merciless you are!"
The girl from Twelve is fire: lightning searing across the night sky, the snap of a match in an empty room, ashes and embers. And if she is fire, then Clove is the sea: relentlessly crashing against the shore, serene to gaze at from afar, treacherous turmoil in her depths. And if Clove is the sea, then Cato is the moon: beautiful, ethereal, and distant, cold, but she's captivated by him anyway. (she's the sea, and she's drowning in him.)
And if Cato is the moon, then Clove supposes that must make Glimmer the sun (radiant, golden, so beautiful she burns), but she quickly discards the idea when something slippery and jealous takes hold of her chest. Besides, she reassures herself, Glimmer won't last long, anyway. She'll die, and Cato will stop fawning over her and return to the joy of the hunt.
It doesn't happen.
Oh, Glimmer does die, a twisted mockery of her beauty, but a piece of Cato dies with her. He's silent now, rough and remote and scathing, blistering when he deigns to speak to Clove, and she can't help but snarl back. Their hatred is so corrosive that Marvel can't stand to be near them, preferring instead the company of the ashen-faced boy who'd rigged their traps.
"You can look so inviting and then you destroy all who venture out upon you!"
One day, when the supplies are vanished in a column of smoke and Marvel's scattered with the cooling body of the boy from Three at Cato's feet, she kisses him. Maybe there's a tiny part of her that thinks she can bring him out of his darkness, that maybe he'll finally understand. But instead of pulling her closer, he shoves her away, hard. There's anger scrawled across his face and disgust, so much disgust, but she speaks before he does.
Her words are perhaps the one thing she wields more lethally than her knives, and she uses them to their full force now. Cato's been on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing before, but she's always held back. There are some barriers you just don't cross, some lines it's safer not to teeter over. But her hurt and her humiliation and her bitterness boil over past any inhibitions. He flinches when she brings up Glimmer, so she does it again, and again and again and again until she's screeching and he's suffocating in her cruelty.
She knows Cato, knows his vulnerabilities, so she exploits them to full effect. All those little insecurities about him that she'd filed away for future reference, his fear of failure, of losing, of death, she twists them all. Dimly she knows she's just ruined any chance they ever had of being friends, let alone lovers, but she can't make herself stop. Her mouth keeps moving and the words keep spewing vitriol until, finally, she stops.
Clove takes a sadistic little thrill at the sheer devastation her words have caused, but that all freezes when she sees the way he looks at her. His eyes are hard, cold, and she knows it's only the years of camaraderie they've built that keep him from slicing her open on the spot. He's still weak for her, and if it isn't the kind of weakness she'd prefer, well, she's nothing if not adaptable.
The Games had always been just that- games- for Cato, and she's the sole witness to the moment in which they become his destiny.
"Deceitful and tempting element! In vain you try to engage me a second time."
District Two always sticks together, he'd hissed at her after she'd unleashed her wrath upon him. They're still an alliance for now, though how much longer that'll last is a question with high stakes in the brightly-lit gambling halls of the Capitol. Clove thinks it'll last just through the feast, when she's obtained the item she supposedly so desperately needs, but of course she doesn't tell Cato that. If he'd been distant before, he's completely sealed away now. Not a single flicker of emotion escapes him as he bids her a terse farewell and goes off to conceal himself on the opposite side of the Cornucopia.
The first victim bursts forth, but she squashes her instinct to chase, to hunt. The first kill will be Cato's. They'd agreed on that much the night before as she sat too far from him with her arms wrapped around herself, trying not to slip back into the mindset of cruelty that had destroyed their friendship for good.
So Cato rushes off to slaughter the nimble redhead from Five, and she's left licking her lips as the girl from Twelve dashes in, trailing flames in her wake. Water douses fire, consumes it so utterly that it is unable to regrow on the same spot. She's not afraid until the boy from Eleven, with the build and resolve of a mountain, hoists her in the air and splits her skull.
She's still the little girl who he taught to throw a spear and smirk at the misfortunes of others, and she knows that when Cato looks at her crumpled figure, he sees a smaller version with a tear-streaked face and a sprained leg from a fall off the ropes course before she'd learned to never let anyone see her cry. So instead of chasing after the boy who's run off with the item he needs most or killing the girl with the head wound and her sickly boyfriend by proxy, he kneels by her side and takes her hand in his.
She opens her mouth, feeble breaths rasping in her throat, and he must think she's about to apologize, for he leans down quickly, eagerly. But instead she delivers one last parting shot of cruelty and laughs as he screams in wordless rage.
She dies with blood on her hands and a smile on her face.
"You are a pitiless element of nature and an enemy to mankind."