I don't own Suzanne's Collins The Hunger Games characters.

I hope you guys enjoyed Finnick's Party. Quick WARNING: this chapter is going to leaning more toward Rated M because of some of the content it has. It will have some talk of abuse and self-harm.

Chapter 13:

Moving In.

Clove's POV

I feel uncomfortable with Cato's tall form walking beside me to my house. Finnick's party just ended a few minutes ago and Cato insisted on driving me to my house. I'm not sure if it was to make sure that I actually grab my stuff, but I can already feel myself getting embarrassed at the thought of Cato seeing my house in daylight. He parked the car on the side of the road a little ways back so it wouldn't look so weird.

"Are you sure your parents will be cool my living in your spare room?" I ask as we approach the forest.

"Yeah, they won't even notice that you are there. Trust me. My older brother threw a giant party once and my parents can home halfway through. My mom was so drunk that she literally grabbed a bottle of vodka and dragged my father into their room. The next morning, my dad just told my brother to make sure it was all cleaned up. He didn't even care when some random girl walked out of my brother's room in his t-shirt and underwear," Cato says. "I highly doubt that they are going to care if you are sleeping in a totally separate room from me. Besides, they are only home for like maybe a week out of every month."

He looked rather sad when he said it, but he quickly recovered a smile on his face. I weave through the forest quickly and am at my house in no time. When I open the door and start to climb down the stairs, Cato stands outside.

"You can come in," I say reluctantly. A six-foot-tall guy standing in the middle of the forest is the last thing that I need.

"Can it fit?" He asks.

"Yeah," I say.

I walk into my room and walk to the corner to grab my boxes of clothes and belongings. I always kept them packed at the beginning to keep the dirt off of them, and I just kept them there because it was easier. Cato has barely walked off of the steps when he trips over one of the protruding branches and falls on his face. I laugh.

"How do you live here?"

"I don't know. I just do."

He looks around, running his finger over the concrete on the walls.

"How did you get it concreted?" He asked.

"Uh, I stole it," I say quietly as I throw my blankets into one of the boxes. "Can you grab this one?" I point to the heaviest one that has all of my books and other belongings.

"You stole it?" He asks incredulously as he picks up the box.

"Yeah. Alright, I'm ready. Let's go." I push him towards the stairs.

"Clove," He starts.

"No!" I cut him off.

We walk in a stiff silence to his car and he helps me put the boxes in the trunk of his car. I get into the passenger seat and buckle my seatbelt. I feel tears prick at my eyes and I clutch my hands into fists. I am not someone who cries, especially not over something as trivial as leaving my underground house. I turn my head to the window as Cato gets in the car and starts driving. The further we drive from my house the harder it is to keep the tears in. When we pull into a driveway in the rich section of town, I manage to steel myself and push the tears down.

Cato and I grab them and begin walking toward his house. It literally looks like a mansion. I know that my mind is probably over-exaggerating how big it is a little bit because I have been living in one room underground for what would have been three years in a few months. His house is immense though. When we walk into the marble entrance hall, I gasp and nearly drop the box I am holding. Every surface is gleaming and ornate pictures hang from the walls. It looks like something out of one of those catalogs about the interior of celebrities' houses. We kick off our shoes and I follow him up the grand staircase to the second floor and down an equally ornate hallway to a room in the end. When we walk into the bedroom, I actually do drop the box that I am holding.

The bedroom, my new bedroom, is almost three times larger than my house. My old house. In the center is a queen-size bed, with a simple gray and gold comforter and it is neatly made with decorative pillows. The walls of the room are also a pale gray and hold nothing more than a single painting of a sailboat that is just as monochromatic as the rest of the room. I walk to the door at the left of the room and see that it is a large walk-in closet that has another door on the right side of the wall. When I open that one, I enter a large bathroom. It has a large sink and gray marble counters, a shower, and a bathtub that is more the size of a small jacuzzi.

I turn to Cato, who has put the boxes of my clothes on a shelf in the closet and I can see the one with my other belongings sitting on the floor behind him. He faces is nervous when I run past him but I hear him laugh when I launch myself into the middle of the bed and sink into it. The bed is so soft that I let out a moan of content. It has been years since I slept on an actual bed, and even then, the bed that I slept on was an almost twenty-year-old twin mattress.

"So I take it that this room is alright?" He says with a small smile on his face.

I sit up and look at him. "It has an actual bed! So yes, this room is more than alright!" I am beaming from ear to ear.

His expression darkens a little and he sits on the bed next to me. I turn and sit criss-cross so that we are looking at each other. He just stares at me for a second, opening and closing his mouth once and then again before he finally manages to get the words out.

"How did you end up living there?" He asks quietly.

"My parents are gone," I say.

"I'm so sorry." I realize how that sounded.

"I don't mean they are dead," I clarify, my voice is emotionless and hard. "The left me when I started high school. They were there when I left for school but when I got back everything was gone. No note, no anything. I managed to get away with paying the mortgage with the money they left behind and whatever I made from the café but I ran out at the beginning of my sophomore year. That's when I started digging under the tree. It wasn't really done when I got evicted from the house in October so I just slept on a street corner until I finished it. I stole some cement from the re-paving job that year and then I got more when they did the re-paving for, well, actually, I think it was your neighborhood, last year. I almost got caught a few times."

"Do you think they will ever come back?" Cato whispers.

"No," I say sharply. "And I wouldn't need them if they did. Even when they were here they never cared much about me. When I was in second grade, they went for a trip to visit my Aunt or someone in California for two weeks and didn't even tell me. I wasn't signed up for the school lunch so I just shoplifted some stuff from the local grocery store until they came back. They left again for a week when I was in fifth grade, a month in sixth grade, and by eighth grade, the only time I saw them was when they ran out of money. I started to steal some money from the safe in third grade, just in case they left. When they found out, they used to hit me until I gave it back. I finally caught a pair of throwing knives when I was in fifth grade, taught myself how to use them when they were away off of videos from youtube. Let's just say, next time my mother and father tried to lay a hand on me, my dad walked away with one less digit."

Cato's face is full of shock and-fear and I realize how much I have told him. Ten times more than Johanna, who thinks that my parents still come back to an actual house once a while to check on me, knows. I wasn't supposed to tell him all this, no one is supposed to know this much about me. The look on his face proves to me what I always worried about. He sees me for what I am. A psycho, a thief, someone who was so terrible that not even her own parents loved her enough to feed her, to stay. To love her. I feel tears that I didn't even know were gathering in my eyes trickle down my face. I curse myself for breaking the promise that I made to myself after the first time my parents hit me-that I would never cry in front of someone again.

I scratch at my right arm like I always do when I am nervous and I realize that during my outburst, the light shawl I had been wearing had fallen off. Cato's eyes follow my fingers and I cover up my arm on instinct. He gently reaches for my hand and pries my fingers off my arm. When his fingers trace the four faded and unnaturally straight scars I feel a sob escape me because these are just another thing that proves how broken I am. Because I used to cut myself not because I wanted to die, or because I was depressed, but just because I liked the pain, I craved it.

"Clove," He whispers sadly. He places his hands gently onto my cheeks, holding my face in his hands for a few seconds, before pulling me close to him. "Clove. No," He whispers against my hair. I feel the wetness dripping down my forehead and face, as tears that are not my own mingle with the ones that drip softly from my eyes. He pulls back and holds my face again. His handsome face is blurred slightly by my tears, but I can make out his water blue eyes looking into my dark brown ones. "Clove, please never..."

"I don't anymore," I whisper, cutting him off.

"You promise?" His voice cracks as he says it.

I nod my head vigorously before burrowing myself back into his arms, letting this new and foreign feeling wash over me. The feeling that someone cares whether I live or die.

Hi guys. I know this chapter was really depressing and I swear that this is one of the last really sad ones for quite a while. I fell like I just had to do this for Clove's story, but this chapter was really hard for me to write because I have had personal experience with one of the more mature topics I talk about in this chapter in my own life. I just want to say, that no matter what is going on in your life right now, you matter and you are loved by someone.

Stay happy, healthy, and safe,

-Jewel.