Disclaimer: I do not own the Hunger Games.
Focusing on the blade in her hand makes things simpler. Concentrating on muting the impact that the soles of her feet make when she slides them onto the cool floor beside her bed renders things simpler still. Both, along with every other technicality of her silent trek to the closed door of her room, strikes Clove as a simpler focus than that of the owner of the pair of feet currently pounding through her otherwise hushed house and his or her possible identity.
Clove tries to think of one option, one name, that might ease the strangling nerves that have taken possession of her fingers. Their grip remains tense.
Aside from an actual intruder, some pathetic thief or criminal, there is, after all, not any great number of possibilities, and, out of that scarce variety, she cannot muse into memory one face that she would not greet with a scowl, if not a stab wound.
Her body falls thoughtlessly into an attack-prone stance as the volume of the pacing towards her room increases. She stays standing in such a manner when the knob before her begins to twist and turn in a foreboding dance.
The door creaks, maneuvered so by a hand that moves not so much harshly as it does purposefully, without a drop of hesitation to confuse the hinges, before it's open suddenly, completely.
Clove can't decide whether or not to release the breath that had trapped itself inside her throat. Still, it escapes, regardless, through a clipped question.
"What are you doing here?"
The dark haired man occupying her doorway stands as large as he does, for the moment, silent. His brown eyes - like her own only in their coldness - pierce her dissimilar stature and the shape it's taken appraisingly. Their surroundings may still lack illumination, but those familiar details don't escape her notice, despite the darkness cloaking her father.
Clove knows that the vision of her dad, the realization that he is the culprit responsible for her interrupted slumber, should cause her muscles to relax. It should cause her knife to lower, at the least. Scowling, she chooses not to alter her form in the slightest.
Gustus Fuhrman gives her a nod rather than a reply, the gesture approving but the tone used when he speaks, ignoring her question, impenetrable.
"Good form. You've fixed your knees since I last saw you."
Clove deepens her frown and considers informing him that she hadn't been looking for his opinion. She opts instead to repeat her earlier question.
He replies this time and, if he's bothered by the fact that she still has her knife aimed at his jugular, it doesn't show in his voice.
"Medicine."
It occurs to her that she's received more articulate answers from even Cato, but her father flicks on a light switch before she has time to request elaboration. Her eyebrow arches as her gaze shifts to the cast-clad left arm that the light bulbs have illuminated.
"Small accident out in Eleven," he says shortly. "Nothing for you to concern yourself with."
Clove crosses her arms. She hadn't been planning on concerning herself. She never has before, not with her father or his peacekeeper duties. "And Eleven doesn't have medicine?"
"None worth taking. Nothing worth anything in those backwoods Districts." Ire, finally, peaks through his words.
Turning around, she dismisses the idea of continuing their encounter with a reply, and climbs back into bed without another murmur.
"I didn't dismiss you." He doesn't move closer to her bed bound body to say this, doesn't even pass over her room's threshold, but the words creep closer to grate against her skin nevertheless.
Propping herself up on her elbows, Clove smiles with as much false sweetness as she can bring herself to summon. "You wouldn't want me tired during training tomorrow, now would you?"
The lights die and her door closes, but his image stays with in the darkness.
He's home. It doesn't matter how briefly. He's home, and Clove isn't well-acquainted enough with optimism to convince herself that things won't deteriorate further from there. Realism has always suited her better.
Grunting. That's the first clue Clove receives that her house has decided to play host to yet another disturbance. The sound of bodies beaten against shuddering cabinets comes next. Narrowing her eyes in the direction of the noise-ridden kitchen, she makes one final tightening tug on her high ponytail and quickens her pace down the stairs.
It's not until she reaches the room in question that she berates herself for her curiosity. Of course. When, she wonders with a roll of her eyes, was the last morning that she didn't have some cause to wonder at Cato's sanity? Still, this is impressively idiotic. Even for him.
Clove stands silently the doorway, watching with a gaping mouth that quickly reworks itself into a smirk as Cato and her father alternate between swinging their fists - well, in the latter's case, his good fist - at one another and shoving each other into various stone surfaces. Glancing at the clock, she waits for them to notice her presence. A minute passes.
"Excuse me," she speaks finally, her voice hard with amusement-marred austerity. "But you're blocking my way to the cabinets."
Both men jerk their heads over to look at her, Cato with what looks to be a black eye and her dad from the headlock that her moronic training partner somehow seemed to maneuver him into.
"Clove," the brutally grinning blonde boy pants her name, refusing to loosen his hold on her dad. "Nice of you to show up. I found this prick lurking around your kitchen."
"I'm her fucking father," her dad grits out, his bad arm clearly having left him at a disadvantage in this confrontation. "And this is my fucking kitchen. What the hell are you doing in it?"
Grin gone, Cato turns to Clove after releasing the older man, otherwise ignoring the Fuhrman patriarch. "Your dad?" he repeats through a hard exhaled breath.
Clove tilts her head. "This is why most people introduce themselves with a handshake rather than a fist. It prevents this sort of idiocy." She waves her hand to the left a bit. "And you're still in front of the cabinets."
Dazed, Cato opens the one that she'd slammed his fingers in the day before and tosses her a protein supplement.
She smiles sweetly. "Always so chivalrous."
Her father doesn't seem to share her good mood or, for that matter, Cato's numb disbelief. "You know him?" he demands, pointing at Cato with an angry finger.
Clove looks at them with mocking patience. "Really, this all could have been sorted out so much more easily if you'd just introduced yourself from the beg-"
"Answer the question."
"-inning," she continues unperturbed. "And yes. This is Cato." The idea of introducing him as her stalker flits briefly across her mind before she dismisses it reluctantly. Unless they want to arrive to the Academy late, neither she nor Cato have much more time to linger about for another fight. "My training partner."
He eyes the size difference between his daughter and the brute still staring at him with some distrust wearily. "She keeping up with you alright, boy?"
As Cato's suspicion gives way to a smug opening of his mouth, Clove leaps into action. Striding over to him, she grabs his wrist and pulls him towards the front hall. "We keep up with one another just fine," she says quickly before dragging Cato towards the front porch and mentioning something over her shoulder about how they really need to leave if they want to avoid a beating. Once outside, she quickly flinches her hand away from his skin.
"Fighting cripples now?" she asks as they walk down the steps.
Ignoring her taunt, he glares at her. "You said your dad was gone."
"He is. Most of the time."
Cato's feet assault the ground beneath them with his every step. "You could have given me a fucking warning that he was coming."
Exasperation tints her expression, curving her lips downward and fingers tight. "Sorry. I guess I forgot to include that in the newsletter I send out to people who like to break into my house."
His grin reemerges. "Get better security."
"I lock all my doors!"
A shrug is all the response her furious protest receives.
"Fuck you," she grounds out through cinched lips. "And, for the record, I wasn't exactly expecting him either."
Apparently her bitterness has grown thick enough to seep into her words, because that statement earns her a look of bemusement. "I didn't think you got caught off guard, little girl."
"I had my knife ready."
Somehow, she can hear in Cato's chuckle his awareness of her wish that she had used it.
The knowledge that he's gotten to know her at all plants a disturbed frown on her face.
The knowing smirk doesn't fade. It remains stretched across his face as unadulterated fury diffuses over Clove's own at the deterrence of her knife-station bound feet over to the spears by Calliope. For all of the times that she's wanted to stab her trainer recently, she has never found herself so close to actually doing so as in that moment. Every fire clad molecule of resentment that has been building up within her legs and arms and eyeballs since her father's arrival cries out in protest.
She needs her knives, the release they offer.
The smirk lives through each slash of her spear's tip against the plush dummies at her mercy and their violent destruction, their descent past salvation.
It grows when they're told to fight, keeps itself present for each angry move of attack she makes.
"Your dad should visit more often," Cato teases through a short breath once they've managed to knock each other to the padded ground.
"Oh, really." Flipping her head over on the gym floor to look at him, Clove raises an unamused eyebrow. "And why's that?"
His eyes bore into hers, fire trying to melt ice.
"Rage looks good on you, little girl."
She pushes herself up into a standing position, speaking coldly before walking away as soon as the timer marking the end of the training day sounds. "It don't know what you're talking about."
Cato stares after her with a smirk. She's beautiful when she loses control.
"Lover's spat?"
Clove's lips cinch together tightly as Gregoric falls into step with her, clinging to her pace. She's not in the fucking mood for this; barbed banter holds no appeal to her at the moment, not today. All she wants is to get home, to forget her father's invasion into her perfectly content world of solitude, and find solace with her knives, her targets. That's it. Arrogant morons don't factor in to her plan.
Raking a hand through his curls, the moron in question flashes her a mocking smile of sympathy. "Turned you down then?"
"Will you just fuck off?"
He continues on, unperturbed. "Or have you just given up the schoolgirl crush on Ludwig? Realized there are better men." Although they're not particularly bushy or unruly, Clove can't help but regard Gregoric's eyebrows with disgust. It might have something to do with the way that they waggle with his last sentence.
"Fuck. Off."
Extending an utterly unconvincing white flag, he surrenders his hands in the air. "No need to get hostile. I'm just looking to see if you've come to your senses and decided to reconsider my offer."
Perfectly still, she stares at him for a silent, blink-less moment before walking again. He jogs to catch up with her.
"Well?"
Resigning herself to his pestering, Clove responds, her voice taut with irritation. "I don't waste my time with losers."
"Right then," he mutters, running a hand through his curls. "Still playing hard to get."
"I'm not playing-"
"I'll let it go. For now." If Clove were the praying kind, she'd thank the heavens. As it is, she releases an exhaled breath of relief as she picks up her pace towards the door.
Still, Gregoric does not abandon her side. "But," he drawls the condition out, "I did have something else to say to you."
"Why don't you say it to yourself," she suggests, finally resigning herself to participating in the conversation, to calling upon the energy to fill her voice with artificial sweetness. "You seem to be much fonder of the sound of your voice than I am."
That earns a strained smile from him. "Maybe I just like hearing yours," he taunts back.
"That would make you a machoist." Honestly, she can't recall ever having spoken a word to him that wasn't at least vaguely derogatory, if not blatantly so.
"You're the one voluntarily spending time with Ludwig."
"In lieu of you. That's a sign of sanity, not machoism."
His façade of charm breaks a bit more with her each syllable. A clenched jaw occupies his mouth before he manages to relax it enough for a response. "I'm hoping you're not such a bitch when you're drunk."
Clove's forehead creases into angry, confused folds. "Why would you hope that?"
"Andromeda Weld's throwing a party."
The skin above her eyes doesn't smoothen.
"You should come," Gregoric says. It's the most pathetic attempt at a persuasive argument that she's ever heard.
"I would rather spend my Friday night with my head in an oven." Again, she urges her feet to hasten, to carry her far away from the figure stalking her each step. She's begun to turn the idea of tripping him around in her mind when a familiar blonde haired boy barges in between them. The corners of her pink lips curve in barely perceptible tug towards her ears. Strange, she observes, as she quickly straightens her mouth. He usually sends them plummeting towards her chin. For once, though, Cato's arrival doesn't leave her longing for a sharp instrument of torture, even with his distasteful proximity. As though Clove needed another reason to loathe his rival.
"Aldrin." A stiff nod accompanies the cold greeting.
Gregoric's reply might as well be a mirror. "Ludwig."
Not that Cato would notice the reflection. Before Gregoric could even emit his surname, he had already turned to her, already begun funneling their way through the crowd of trainees congesting the exit. Watching him trample a path through the masses of bodies almost sends another spasm to her mouth (the only reasonable explanation for its upward arc).
The muffled call of an address and time follows her.
That avoidance of her father may be a small victory, but, as Clove successfully finishes her walk to her room without encountering him, it's one that she's absurdly grateful for. Shutting the door behind her sharply, her eyes fly towards the glinting surfaces of her knife collection. The sight releases her shoulders from the rigidness that had clung to them all day.
Finally.
Her feet forget all thoughts of grace as they hurry over towards the shelf on which she leaves them displayed. A long sigh of satisfaction possesses her throat. Hovering her hand over the neat line of knives, she lingers over each for a meditative moment before finally allowing her fingers to scoop down. They don't grab her choice immediately, despite the desperation playing with her every pulse point. Clove's fingertips instead skirt across Sage's sleek silver blade, her hard handle, stroking each as a more romantically inclined person might caress the body of a long absent lover. Home.
Walking over to the targets set up against the adjacent wall, she loses herself, loses the daughter with a suddenly present father, and finds someone better, someone powerful - the lethal girl who laces her every action with control and cruelty, who can stow emotion away as easily as one might a winter coat during the months of spring and summer.
The sky has darkened by the time that she's snapped away from her art, but that the loss of daylight isn't what breaks her focus from her knives. Time, as it always does when she's given freedom to throw her knives as she pleases, no longer particularly concerns her.
The figure who's once again taken up residency in her doorway, however, does.
Tense, she turns around to face him, resenting his tall, massive stature and the way that she has to tilt her head up to meet his watchful gaze. With an expectant eye, she waits.
"Good technique," he notes with a nod.
"I know."
Silence lags between them before he holds his arm up, presenting the healed, cast-free limb. "Got my medicine," he says. His voice, as always, is gruff. She's never been sure whether his every attempt at speaking resounds with such scratchiness due to infrequent use or his habitual way of barking his - usually clipped - words. Clove supposes that it doesn't matter; she doesn't actually care, after all.
Apparently, he doesn't hold her disdain for stating the obvious. "So, you can leave." Clove chooses not to articulate the thought as a question, simply because she doesn't want it to be one. He's leaving. A simple, irrefutable statement.
(Optimism may have never fit her well, but neither has passivity.)
Another sharp nod seizes his chin. "First thing tomorrow morning."
Her tongue itches to ask if he could have gotten anything sooner, but she knows better. If there had been anything, he would have taken it, would have had to. Vacations, after all, aren't part of the peacekeeper package. Still, the idea of sleeping in the same house with him that night, despite the distance between their rooms, sends bugs crawling up the surface of her back. It's wrong, him being here, disturbing the comfort she finds in an empty house, and she doesn't doubt that the incongruity will mar her sleep. She catches a sigh between her cinched lips, unwilling to reveal the emotion. At least it's Friday.
He cocks his head at her, stare steady, before shifting his pupils over to her target board. Invisible insect legs continue to assault her spine. This is wrong. Completely wrong. He shouldn't be here; no one should. Her house is supposed to be her own, not a place where she has to worry about strained conversation or appraisal or avoidance.
Likely in acknowledgement of her visible accuracy, he states, "You are keeping up with that training partner of yours, then."
A smirk battling with her apathetically-clothed lips, she jerks her chin affirmatively. "Clearly."
He ignores her response. "With knife-throwing." She bristles at the lack of respect with which he handles the name of her principle passion. "How about strength?" Clove's jaw clenches at the reminder of what her scant size steals from her. "Sword-fighting?" Her fists tighten. "Spears? Hand-to-hand?"
Not giving her the chance to stop his suddenly tireless tirade of her insecurities with any acid-coated comment of sarcasm, he launches directly into his next sentence. "Because I got a feel for that boy today, and I wonder how much of a chance you have against him."
This time she doesn't let him rob her of a retort. "Luckily," she says, sounding saccharine, "father isn't always like daughter. He beat you. I can handle Cato just fine."
Unfazed, he continues promptly. "When you have a knife."
Composure has never felt so slippery in her grasp - not during any argument with Cato, any defeat by his hand, any pestering by his rival. Her calm withers more and more each second and Clove's vision has blurred too red for her to see any way of delaying its disintegration.
"Did I ever tell you," he goes on, not even a flicker of feeling ever showing in his tone, "about my time at the Academy?"
"You failed," she summarizes flatly. He was never given the opportunity to volunteer, to become a victor, so it doesn't matter. Losers, as she told Gregoric earlier, don't interest her. Neither do their stories.
Before she can comprehend his intention well enough to stop him, her father has walked over to her wall of targets and plucked Sage between his meaty fingers.
Fury flows through her, like water over the brim of a cup. He doesn't get to touch that. Not one of her knives. "What the hell do you think you're-" Her demand fades when, having returned to the doorway, he throws Sage back towards the space she'd occupied seconds prior. Clove's eyes widen at the accuracy with which he returned her knife to its mark.
"I threw knives. You get that from me. Knife-throwing was my specialization, and I was damn good at it too." His stare doesn't drip with any anger, any malice, doesn't drip with anything, actually. Still, it freezes her. "Not to mention I was about the size of your partner. Now," he takes a breath that sends frost into the air. "I wouldn't set myself on volunteering if I were you. If they didn't pick me, why would they choose you?"
Clove can't move. She couldn't speak even if she had a reply, couldn't manipulate her tongue into forming a sound.
"Go back to your knives. You're dismissed."
He closes the door only seconds before she manages to stir her muscles into reaching over to her shelf for a blade and throwing it. The creaking of the wood under its attack doesn't satisfy her. Even the feel of its handle in her grip when she retrieves it fails to return her to the blissful concentration she'd known only minutes before.
You got that from me.
With one angry thrust, she flings it against the wall, for the first time in her life, paying no mind to its precision as a strangled sobbed breath rips violently at her mouth.
Why would they choose you?
Because, Clove replies belatedly, she's the best. She knows that, always has known it, still knows it now. But the claim feels hollow even in her own mind. When she mumbles it to herself next, it strikes her as more hollow still.
There's no pride left in her at the moment, no confidence, no certainty. All she knows is anger; hatred. She's never felt hate so keenly before in her life, has never known it so well as she does now.
"I hate him," she whispers to herself again and again and again until the mantra becomes mindless. She hates that he exists. She hates that he's here. She hates that he spoke to her, hates that he thinks so little of her, hates that he cares what the fuck he thinks. She hates him. She hates that he's still in her house and that she'll have to plan out her trip to the kitchen for dinner so that she doesn't encounter him. She hates that he's made her a coward, a sneak in her own domain.
Her three new favorite words still on her lips, she marches out of her room, down the stairs, and out the front door, without allowing herself to become fully cognizant of what she's doing. If she had, Clove might have remembered her disgust for parties, for Gregoric, and even for Andromeda Weld, for that matter. But it wouldn't have mattered. None of it holds a candle to the hatred coursing through her, spurring her to walk ever more quickly to the address Gregoric had shouted at her.
Clove keeps up her quiet chant the whole way there.
Author's Note: Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading so far! A special thanks to everyone who has reviewed, too: luvxas37, HungerGamesHarryPotter7887, quiveringmouse, Marina, GottaLoveMEgan, Jesus the Gardener, ronandhermy, Orange Pudding, iluvsourskittles, and anonymous. Your comments really mean a lot to me :)
Also, I'm not exactly sure about whether or not it makes sense for Clove's dad to have come back to District Two for medicine, but, since I needed him to show up somehow, it was the best that I could come up with. I don't actually know much about peacekeepers, so I'm sorry if the situation lacks realism.
Thanks again for reading!