So Cato is a pretty good shot. But the man is a bullet that's terrified of blood.
Bridge is a game. Water polo is a game. Murder is a crime and you will be sentenced to death for it.
They charge him with over 10 counts of murder, among those being Katniss, which still hurts, and Irving, which was out of kindness. A soldier reads each name aloud to the frightened man, who recalls nothing but Peeta, nothing but Peeta and love love love...
"How do you plead?" The solider is a thin man, pale from the lack of sunlight. He looks like a column of smoke in livery, laughing on the pane of a mirror. Cato says nothing. His face is pale green, sick with grief, and he turns to somebody.
"I don't know." And then, like any man would, we looks for an open face to plead to. "No," His voice is so small and pathetic when he gets out a small "Not guilty,"
They take him. Wearing nothing but a hospital gown and his own skin, they drag him by his arms down to a holding cell, dark, forgotten. At first, Cato had fought them, he had called out for Peeta, because that's all he had, and he was damned if her was going to loose it. And Cato's strong, he's fought before, and it took more than three of them to level the playing field, and then a smart, unpronounceable drug to get him limp and co-operative. Weak, dehumanised, emasculated, they drag him to the cell and lock him there.
Cato lies on the surly concrete floor and tries to move. His arm will not lift, but his fingers twitch, weakly. There's nothing in her,e nothing to reach out for or touch, and he's completely alone. This place is nowhere in his memories, some of which are returning. He starts to remember those names as he repeats them, one in particular being Irving.
And then in the darkness his memories seem to slip into focus. This blonde girl, so pale, and burned, badly, charred and steaming skin red-raw and bloody. The smell of a sunday roast. He feels nauseous as he recalls. They shared a flower. That flower, that Galbanna Lilly, something so beautiful had no business there, was all hers. And the girl looked him dead in the eyes, and asked for her own death.
He had killed her in her sleep. A kindness.
She became scared. Afraid by it all, with her last bit of strength, and Irving managed to ask if it would hurt her. She was already in such pain, it was funny to think she'd worry. God, how young? Seventeen, at a stretch? Looking her death in the face. Cato feels his eyes start to shine.
He'd swallowed. Not a bit, he'd told her. Not a bit, and she smiled. Breathed in the flower and thanked him. Cato has never felt more grateful for thanks in his whole life. In the cold, he feels nothing in his whole body but the tears threatening to expose him, silver as the grass at night.
"Is it meaningless to apologise?" He speaks, aloud, to himself, and knows, somehow, by words spoken to him an eternity ago, that it means the world. Irving's eyes were closed when he laid her on the river bank. And, from one side, she might have been sleeping, dreaming of her father, the tailor, and the beautiful dresses she would have one day worn. Good and sleeping. Safe and sound.
Cato thinks about volunteering, so long ago. He thinks about the teenagers around him, and about being so –Jesus Christ, he can't even fathom how hungry he was to reach out and taste victory but finding instead only...only madness. A small part of him died early with breadcrumbs in his hands.
And Clove, who they mention, and who he can vaguely recall, hysterical, crying to him, is nothing more than a reminder of why he should never try to hug the rain. He would always end up soaking wet, and alone.
He remembers her voice, but only faintly. After all of the fighting, when she came to him, sorry, and said, "Marry me," but what she meant was "Buy me a ring that will turn my finger green so I can imagine our love as a forest and I want to get lost in you, I grew like a windflower the day I-.."
He doesn't remember the rest.
Maybe he'll ask Peeta, who told him, earlier, sadder, that Clove and Cato were like paint on a slick canvas, and it took so much for them to stick but when they did they were a masterpiece. In a world as hard as metal they were soft as nostalgia.
He doesn't remember the rest. He disappears into his words.
Peeta wakes. They've given him a nice compartment, close to the ground, a small flap of a window letting in rare, precious sunlight. The paint is curling like lemon peel, as if somehow nervous. He can't comprehend this place, all of these secret people, entombed in their Pharaoh's grave, running out of oxygen to soon become a glorious feast for a God that will never be hungry.
He's alone. Tired, too. His wrist is tender. The moments pass, free, no longer owned by somebody else. And Peeta can't stand it. It feels wasteful. Unindustrious, even. He climbs out of bed and pulls on clothes. Down on the sixth floor, they have a medical station, largely empty, with long, winding corridors. With Cato. Peeta smiles at the thought. Saddest face anyone's ever seen.
They show him a canteen, where the miserable souls of 13, the hidden District, line up to collect their breakfasts, and have schedules printed on their arms. Peeta reads other people's in the line as they print his own, trying to get a feel of normalcy. He can't go back to 12 yet. He's not sure he wants to. One day, he'll return to 2, and play the piano, sleep in the pantry and dream of better things.
Someday is perhaps the cruellest of words.
He gets breakfast and recreation and lots of imperious-sounding meetings. Peeta gets a sentencing hearing. Who's on trial?
Confused, Peeta consults a sentry by the door, tray of sorry food in hands. The guard recognises him immediately, and straightens. Peeta hates it.
"My schedule," He begins, in a quiet voice. The guard begins to ramble.
"Yessir, everybody is given one at the start of the day. The week commencing, you can begin to tailor yours to suit you better," Peeta waves a hand, a little worried. Something feels duplicitous, and he intends to discover what.
"I''m supposed to go to a sentencing hearing." He says, softly. The sentry nods. "Who's trial is it?"
The sentry falls silent.
Peeta prompts him. He becomes quickly indignant. "I have a right to k-"
"Cato Almasy, sir,"
Peeta's heart is caught in his mouth. He is undone. Peeta staggers backwards and places the tray behind him. Quickly, things seem to slow to an underwater pace and he speaks again, distanced, strange. Morgue to love. "What was his crime?"
"Multiple counts of murder, assault, conspiracy to commit murder, accessory after the fact." The guard looks away. "The first of many trials, sir,"
"Forget the trials," Peeta says, sharply. "What about Clove?" Because they are yet to rescue her, and Cinna, and bring them here, or somewhere safe. Memories do not equate necessity, and Peeta really believes it's a question of needs and not rosary beads, anyway. The sentry nods.
"She and the others will be charged accordingly, when they are in our custody."
Peeta feels himself grow hot with rage. "But she's done nothing wrong!" His rage turns to sorrow and he thinks he's failed them both. Oh, God. Crucified Christ, what has he done? The guard coughs.
"Any willing participant or affiliate of the Hunger Games is an enemy of the rebellion,"
Peeta will not stand what he's hearing. He draws himself to full height and spits into his palm, rubbing the ink of the schedule away. Furious, he leans forward on his toes and gets eye-to-eye with the sentry. Dangerously, he speaks.
"Hang your damn rebellion," And Peeta leaves, taking his words and a solitary pasty from his breakfast tray.
Down in his cell, Cato sleeps. He's woken by shouts outside, anger and disagreement, and then finally footsteps, ringing closer. Finally able to move, he holes himself up in the corner and tries to look unimportant. His hands and feet are bound anyway. Eyes place themselves on his body and give a new dimension to the phrase eye contact.
"Hey, Cato," It's Peeta. Shambling, slowly, Cato manages up and towards the barred window in his door. Sure enough, there's Peeta, long and lovely, like in Cato's memory. But Cato is cold.
"You never came," He declares, heatedly. The tension in his throat restricts his voice, makes him hoarse. "I screamed for you, all night. I screamed, and you never came for me,"
Peeta drops his face against the cool metal bars and shuts his eyes. Shake is head like he doesn't want to believe this world, wants to wake up in 12 to the Bakery, to before even being a Surplus, because ignorance really was bliss. "I didn't know," he murmurs. "I'm sorry," Over and over in this faint voice, he apologises. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm..."
Cato crawls forward, and faintly brushes Peeta's hand. "Don't you dare leave me,"
Peeta's eyes are blazing with passion when he nods. "Never," And them, quieter. "I'm going to get you out." Through the bars, he passes the small, lonesome scrap of food. Cato rejects it at first, out of what? Pride? Modesty? Peeta becomes annoyed. "You need to stay alive," And, finally, stubborn as he is, and charming, too, Cato takes a bite. With food between his teeth he flashes Peeta a heartless smile.
"Satisfied, darling?" Peeta nods. And then, in a moment of rare weakness, Cato looks guilty. "Who did I kill, Peeta?"
"You're not a murderer,"
Still bound, Cato shoots his hands forward and grabs Peeta by the throat. "I don't even remember it, but I killed them all, didn't I?" No answer. Peeta's eyes are on the floor. "Didn't I?!" The boy splutters.
"You had to!" He cries. Cato becomes furious.
"I deserve this, don't I?!" He starts to become uneasy. "I deserve it for what I did to them," His eyes are shiny when he looks up. "You should go,"
Very slowly, Peeta swallows and pulls back. In his whole life, he has never killed anybody, friend or otherwise. He can't pretend to know that ache, like rot. And he can't pretend he sees the ghosts, and hears their screams in bed, in the kitchen, alone in the night. So he swallows and dips is head.
"I hear her, too, sometimes." His voice is but a whisper, but Peeta's presence echoes like sin in a room full of God and Cato can always hear him coming. "Irving," The girl's ghost watches them , her eyes still blue and green, still open to things she should not see. They resign themselves to the memory. And God, Peeta isn't the type, he shouldn't have seen, he should never have seen. A strange, enduring pain ceases Cato's heart and he touches Peeta's face, briefly.
"Me, too." Cato's voice is unsteady as well, but he covers it with the coat of anger, that he wears, that he think will keep him warm if he wears nothing else in this snow. "Hey," Something trembles within him. "Hey, it's just a trick,"
Voices out in the hall tear them apart. Peeta brightens, faintly, as if he finally got something to say that isn't so heavy. Jesus, it's like the boy carries all of these problems on his back, but he's too small, he'll get crushed if he doesn't learn fast. He swallows.
"I'm not going to let them hurt you," And he turns to go.
"Peeta-" Pained, Cato gets out. He pulls himself to standing and looks very serious. The boy stops. "I killed them for her, didn't I?"
Peeta is winded by the thought. He nods. Here Cato is just a pawn, and they keep him moving forward, with promises of royalty if he reaches the other side, but most likely getting slaughtered on the way there. No, Peeta thinks there's nobility to it, that pawns keep the kings in their places, that they're always making progress.
Cato thinks that the only reason pawns can't move backwards is that if they could, they would kill their own kings in a heartbeat.
A nod. "I must have loved her incredibly hard."
He cannot bear the weight of the words. His mouth is dry and ashen when he speaks. "You did."
But Clove is not his enemy. And neither is Cato.
Their minds are already made up by the time Peeta interrupts, so pale he's spectral, so damn terrified that he's too late. He's got nothing to bargain with, here Peeta's not clever, or really useful, but they do need him. He stands at the side of a long table and swallows.
"Let him go," His voice is wounded by dawn.
An older woman at the head of the table, the president, offers Peeta a seat, but he declines. "The people deserve justice,"
He holds out his wrists. "Then kill me! Take me instead!" Breathless with indignation, he swallows hard and thinks of Cinna. The piano is not firewood, and he was right, Peeta's clever, he could sway a crowd with a few words. "I participated,"
From the other side of the table, Haymitch interjects. The audience seems disgruntled. "That's a neat way to get yourself killed, kid," His voice is an iron command when he speaks. "Sit down,"
Peeta remains standing. He's tense and motionless when he speaks. Again. "You hurt him, or Clove, and you get nothing from me,"
The President sighs. "I'm sure we can agree on the terms of his sentence, but I'm afraid Miss Almasy is quite Inaccessible at the moment-"
"You know where she is!" Peeta is not usually so angry, he's peaceful, cheerful, pensive. He would never raise his voice to speak unless it were a matter of life and death, and it is, he will not break his promise, and he will live honest or die trying. "You can't just leave her-"
"Anybody we send would be dead as soon as they reached the Capitol,"
Peeta turns to the resident and says with utter conviction, "Send Cato,"
The room goes silent and stiff as Sunday manners.
"That way, even if he dies," Something breaks in his voice and quivers to something smaller, somehow less important, less vital. "If he dies, he's carried out his sentence, and if he doesn't…" the room swallows with him. The President smiles, as honest as a politician's discourse.
"You say the word," she hedges, "And I'll have him sent. Under 1 condition," She holds up a nasty finger. "You participate in our rebellion. You represent us,"
And it's not like Peeta wants it, he just wants the smell of flowers and a big house back in 2, empty for souls and a piano. And he wants Cato to himself, yet, he knows that it doesn't work or belong, it isn't right. He has a choice, here, and he could say not, dissent, refrain.
But instead, when he goes to speak, what comes out is a strangled 'Yes'.
After an hour, they crack open Cato's cell and pull him out, shout at him, give him vague orders. He doesn't fight them, not when they throw him into a stream of cold water, with nothing but his skin to cover his heart. He won't say anything. He won't let them win. Ghosts watch the entire time, spectral spectators, admiring rather than participating in it all.
He turns to one, a tall boy a smile and a spear. There's an arrow buried in his neck: he never thinks to take it out. Cato turns to him, shivering, nose like a fox, his skin like a chicken, and swallows.
"I'm so sorry," he says, quietly. The boy nods.
"I know you are,"
Afterwards, they blindfold him, and cuff him, and take him up stairs and around corners. He thinks this place must be some kind of labyrinth. At one point he feels no contact on his arms and he calls out, suddenly terrified. "No," He panics, "No, don't leave me-" But they hadn't. And then, he gets thrown into a room, stripped of his blindfold, dressed in black and told to wait. The boy with the arrow in his neck leans by the door. He's engrossed by the other ghosts, the disfigured blonde in particular.
And Cato is so caught up in the microcosm that the door startles him, he readies himself to fight. But it's just Peeta.
"I have two minutes," The boy says, and he wraps himself around Cato. "I had to do something," His voice is weak. "I couldn't leave you to die,"
Cato is stiff and motionless, he doesn't invite or decline contact, he just remains frozen. "You shouldn't have done that," he says, slowly. "I don't deserve mercy," The boy pulls back, and looks him fiercely in the eyes.
"This isn't a mercy. If you get caught, you'll wish they killed you," So Peeta raises a finger and addresses Cato sternly. "Don't you dare get reckless, because people care about you,"
Cato swallows, but his bitterness claws it's way back up his throat. "Don't lecture me, sweetheart, I don't even get to decide how I die,"
It makes Peeta angry. "And you should be so lucky!" He crosses his arms. "You get back here alive or so help me God, I'll-…" Cato laughs at him, genuine, not hurtful, but amused.
"What'd you do, kill me?" And Peeta laughs, because it's the only thing keeping him from bursting into tears. He nods, and places a hand on his shoulder. "No matter what happens with Clove, I don't want to lose you as my friend,"
Cato crouches slightly, so that they're eye-to-eye, and he says, without a shadow of a joke, "I will never be your friend. Never. I promise," And they take him.
Later, somewhere else, a promise has been broken. In truth, it had been broken long before, but it's only now that Clove's reviewing, that she's looking at these things as minor offences adding to the charge against the slaughter'd youth: Cato Almasy.
He promised to be faithful. Repeated the words when they were married. Clove wonders if she's a fool to love or believe, but even then, she'd rather be a fool than a cynic. She was happy that day, because they'd made it. Just once, she smiled because there he was, her nihilist, her happy man, her manic.
So, he broke that promise. And he wasn't hers, either. He wasn't hers until he died, but rather Peeta's, and Clove knows the irony in her jealousy, but she cannot help it. Her heart aches. However futile, her thought will never be that Cato is dead. He can't have gone, he can't, he can't…
This will always be a night Clove remembers that, for whatever reason, she cannot bring herself to touch her daughter, even though she has never had a problem with touch in her life.
Her heart hurts, like the mercilessness of a drawn-out death. All that time she had told herself that she didn't need him, not at all. But something in the cadence above her ribcage, beating the shit out of her insides to remind her where something should be, and she can't taw it. Maybe her heart is ailing, making for useless for that same cold, cold boy but he was like whiskey that burnt her lips and kept her insides cosy and warm, she was indulgent before, and now? Sober is just another word for thirsty.
She lies on her back in the darkness of the rom. It's been a day, or so, but time escapes her, and she still feels fatigued and tired. Sometimes staff come in and out, they have learnt that she'll not touch her daughter or even speak to them about Cato, not a word Because nobody wants to hear about how he was a loving husband, they just want to watch his car-crash of a death, how could she not see this coming, they'd ask her. And she has no answer to give, so she doesn't say anything.
The door creaks open, and a figure passes through. Clove remains wary, she doesn't trust them, and it seems too late, too quiet. Kara isn't crying, there's no need for anybody in here. The shadow pauses, tall, obscured, in the door and then walks along towards the cot, and Clove has started to obsess over her childhood memories, over Cato, so small. Did she hold his hands too tightly? When his parents fought, did he mistake it for lovemaking?
The shadow pauses by the cot and reaches in. And it gives her incentive to move. Slowly, and quietly, she picks up the butterknife from the table besides her, and drops, flat-footed onto the floor. Clove makes not a sound as he goes for the stranger scared for her child's life, and her own, she knows how to kill. It was the sound of knives hitting the targets, back in 2m, it seduced her, sounded too much like her own pulse.
So she slinks around the side of the bed, and freezes when the shadow takes a sharp breath in, adjusting the blade to look menacing.
The white-hot crack from the doorway spills enough light to see Kara's eyes, blue like Mercy, like Cato's. She cannot stand it any longer.
In a second, she arches up and throws her arms up, around the shadow's neck, and poises the blade by his jugular. Stubble indicates it's a man. He freezes, right away, and holds the child, still, out in front of him.
"Put her down," Clove warns him. "Put her down or so help me God, I'll heave your corpse through the goddamn widow," The shadow is obedient. He sets her down, awkwardly, avoiding the sharp enough blade. And really, Clove is terrified, her body is weak and this man could overpower her easily, but he doesn't.
"Good," she says, slowly, trying to sound masterful. "Turn on the light,"
The shadow tenses. "I don't-"
Clove poises the weapon again, moving it closer to the skin. "Turn it on." He holds his hands up in defeat. He moves forward for the switch, and the second he's away, Clove grabs Kara, and lifts her. She's scared, and useless, but there's nothing else she can lose.
The shadow pauses by the light. He sighs, as if contemplating dissent. "Well? Did I stutter?" His hand goes, and the room illuminates. All at once, Kara starts to cry, and Clove blinks, blinded. Her legs give out first and she ends up sprawled on her knees, body shaking ,pulse running, child crying. Because she must be wrong. Her eyes are going in and out of focus when she speaks.
"That's impossibl-…imposs…impossi-…." She can't even say it.