Author´s Note: Hi, again! I´m sorry it took me so long to post another chapter to this collection, but here it is. This may be considered a character´s study, and that´s what I think it is, but I still wanted to post it here. This chapter was inspired by the prompt "the difference between the first death you remember and the most recent one", from the book 642 things to write about. I hope you guys like it, and please let me know what you think of it, even if there´s anything I should correct or improve.
A sudden scream cut through the air, momentarily muffling any other noises. All heads turned in direction of the sound, eyeing the grey walls and the black paviment in search for a clue. The first person ran to the boy on the ground, who was in obvious pain.
Cato remained still, watching everything happening with a blank expression. It wasn´t the first time he saw blood, that was for sure, and he didn´t want to join the chaos that had just began, with people running out of the training room with their faces twisted in disgust while the older students tried to calm down the injured boy. The boy; that was where Cato had deposited all his attention. The boy was one or two years older than him and they had talked a few times. He was laying on the cold ground, with tears streaming down his face, which was covered with redish and purple points by now. Around the boy, whose name Cato couldn´t remember, there was a pool of blood, getting wider at each minute. So much blood, Cato thought, all coming from just one person.
However, what really caught Cato´s attention - he hadn´t noticed it until the person blocking his view changed positions - was the large cut in the boy´s torso. It was a clean cut, so deep that the blade made it´s way through flesh and bone - Cato suspected the weapon used was a sword; he knew what sword injuries looked like very well by that time.
The smell of blood was everywhere when the doctor came running into the training room, with a nurse behind him, pushing a stretcher. Brutus was already there as well, kneeling near the boy and telling him to stay awake, that he could bear the pain. All the others students had left the room as soon as they could, but Cato was still there. He couldn´t move; he was petrified, and he had no idea if it was of horror or admiration of the view in front of him. Someone was dying right there, no more than fifty meters from him, and all he could do was stare. Even when Brutus angrily yelled at him to leave, Cato didn´t move. He kept watching the color drain from the boy´s face, as his body slowly went lifeless.
Only when the doctor checked the boy´s pulse and declared they had been too late to save him, Cato was able to move again. Two days later, and he still smelled blood everywhere.
Xx
The last time he watched someone die, Cato was prepared for it. He felt hatred and a desperation for blood shed and something else he couldn´t quite describe that had been burning within his chest since he watched his district partner being taken away by an hovercraft.
It was raining when he first decided to go after Thres. By the time they met, it was pouring hard and Cato´s clothes were soaked. It was cold, So fucking cold, he kept thinking, and Cato could barely see anything through the fog caused by the excess of rain and humidity, but he wouldn´t stop; not now, not when he was so close to his revenge.
He reached the area where Thresh had been hiding during those last two weeks. It looked just like one of those open fields Cato had seen in television, in some documentary or short talk about district 11. So yellow and fertile, so different from District 2, where everything was born to either kill or be killed. For a moment, he let the beauty of that place distract him, to numb the pain as he hopped his revenge would; then he heard her voice, so warm and close, reminding him that beauty was as dangerous as a knife and all the beauty he thought he had seen disappeared in the matter of a second.
When Cato first saw Thresh in middle of the storm, his blood boiled in a way he never thought could be possible. It felt like his veins were aflame, every single part of his body had woken up from that numb state of pain and the pain never seemed so strong. Through the blurriness of his mind, Cato compared his actual state to a few years earlier, when his trainer forced him to be sober for two weeks - it was horrible, so fucking hard and he promised himself he would never repeat the experience. Yet, it was nothing close to what he was going through now; this time, the venom was already a part of his being, and now that it was gone, so was a part of him - the sane part, or whatever was left of it.
Everything he remembered from that moment with Thresh, the fight he was the Capitol had been craving for, was just flashes. He remembered yelling at the boy from 11, telling him he would make him pay for what he did - and for what Cato hadn´t be capable of; then it was like two volcanos erupting at the same time, each one snapping with devasting fury; blood, flesh and more blood, and the sounds that reminded him of a wounded animal.
The last time he watched someone die, Cato thought he would feel relief, yet there was none. That satisfaction he had always found in murder, in the action of covering his hands with someone´s else blood, it just wasn´t there. In fact, nothing was. All that he felt was emptiness, like the insides of his body had been removed along with his will to fight. He was completly alone, except for that familiar voice in his head and her shadow dancing around him in circles, like a ghost dressed in blood.