Disclaimer: I don't own THG or any of the characters.
Warnings: violence, rape/non-con, alcohol/drug abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation, depression, sexual content, language
They sat in a room in 13 and watched reconnaissance footage of every district in Panem except 2 rioting.
Ephraim and Roach and Cecilia and Dighton and Iola and Rhiannon and Seeder and Loa and Wiress and Jesse and Blight and Cashmere and Gloss and Taryn and Mags.
Most of them were surrounded by their own medical team of surgeons and nurses and pain management specialists.
Almost all of them had sutures of some sort.
Many of them had had to have blood transfusions.
Mags was slathered in a soothing mud mixture to help with her blisters.
Blight had a concussion from hitting his head when he was thrown back from the force field.
Poor Gloss had it the worst. He'd had to have surgery on three of his limbs, all of them involving bone grafting and steel plates and pins, and he was so doped up on morphling, that he wasn't really aware of what was going on.
Cecilia sat between Taryn and Seeder, who each held a hand and murmured soothingly to her as she cried over the loss of her district partner, Woof.
The final hovercraft was making its way from the arena to District 13, and onboard, a doctor bent over Finnick, checking the stitches of the superficial bite wound in his throat, as a nurse tried to help him scrub off the blood-red dye that had bubbled up from the salt water beneath him and stained his skin.
"Shut up," he growled as Johanna laughed at him. She had a wound that matched his, but her fake blood had seeped out from a hidden pocket on the jungle floor, as she lay facedown horizontally on a hill and so that only her neck and shoulder were stained.
Beetee sat with Chaff, holding his old friend's hand and feeling guilty that he had only been struck by "lightning" that was nothing more than special effects before they'd activated the tranqs in his tracker and set the cannon off for him, whereas poor Chaff had volunteered to go without water for three days. They'd monitored his vitals through his tracker carefully, ready to "kill him off" earlier than planned if necessary, but he'd managed to go the whole time. Now he guzzled water as an attendant adjusted the IV bag over his head and kept an eye on him to make sure he didn't go overboard and accidentally flood his cells.
Haymitch and Enobaria were in relatively good shape. Each had a set of twin bruises, the size and shape of Cato's hands, around their throats, and Enobaria had a puncture wound in her thigh.
Half of Katniss's face had been rubbed raw, her forehead from friction against grass, her cheek and temple from friction against sand. Her entire body hurt from straining as she'd instinctively tried to escape from Cato. The space between her legs was sore and throbbing-and not in a good way. Her shoulder was bruised, and the outline of Cato's fingers was plain to see just above her hipbones and around her right wrist.
But it was her heart that hurt the most as she looked at Cato, who was huddled in on himself in the corner facing the wall.
He wouldn't look at her. But she was ok with that. She wasn't sure she wanted him to. She wasn't upset with him. After all, she had agreed to this, and he'd been the more reluctant of the two of them. But it didn't make things any less painful, and in that moment, Katniss thought to herself that if she never saw him again that would be just fine with her.
Still, she felt terrible for him. She didn't fully understand what he was going through, but something told her she wasn't the only one who felt as though she'd been ripped in two by the whole experience.
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The medical team cleaned her and Cato up and gave them some clothes to wear, and as soon as she entered 13, her mother and Prim threw themselves at her.
Mrs. Everdeen had kept her promise, and so Prim had no idea what had happened, but Katniss had a difficult time meeting her mother's eyes.
Cato stood off to the side, all alone and still unwilling to make eye contact with anyone.
And then Gale appeared, fists clenched and shaking. "You son of a bitch!" he ground out through clenched teeth.
Cato didn't react when he punched him in the face.
"Gale!" Katniss cried.
"Fight me!" Gale roared, punching him again. "Fight me, you motherfucker! Fight me!"
But Cato wouldn't. He just looked at Gale with eyes full of pain as the blood began to flow from his nose.
Instead of diffusing Gale's rage, Cato's pacifism inflamed it, and in a matter of seconds, he was laid out on the cement floor as Gale drove his fist into his face over and over.
"Gale!" Katniss cried again. "No, Gale you don't understand!" She grasped his shoulder, trying to pull him back, but he shrugged her off roughly.
A swarm of men in olive green jumpsuits rushed past her and pulled him off of Cato. Still, he thrashed and fought, knocking two of them to the ground before a third finally pulled out a tranq gun and stuck him with it. Gale went limp and they hauled him off.
"Sorry about that," one of the men said to Cato. "We probably should have anticipated something like that would happen given his reaction when he watched you two…" he trailed off.
Katniss, physically and emotionally exhausted, sank to the floor and put her head between her knees.
"Come on honey," her mother coaxed her. "You need a meal and a good long sleep."
She didn't think she had the energy to move, but her mother was pulling up gently on her arm. "Fine," she sighed, and when she looked up, it was to the sight Cato's back as he retreated down a long hallway.
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They fixed up his face, and showed him to a bedroom, utilitarian, but private, with its own tiny bathroom, and the first thing he did was tear off his clothes and turn on the shower. He scrubbed his penis under the hot water until it was practically raw, but he swore he could still see her blood on it.
He had been certain she'd had sex with the boy from home, Gale, and that the Capitol had sold her body the same way they'd sold his. He even thought it was possible she'd had sex with Loverboy before they went into the arena.
But she hadn't done any of those things, and now he was angry with her. It was true that her body was her body and she could make her own choices (except, of course, when the Capitol said otherwise), but his body was his body, and he had thought he understood what he was doing with it-and with hers-in that arena. He had assumed the only injuries she would sustain would be a few bruises and nothing more. But he had been mislead.
And there was something else about the experience that upset him. Something that scared him.
He had asked Plutarch to provide him with one of the pills he had used since he returned from his games, since he'd assumed that he would need to take it to fulfill his final responsibility in the quell, and although the gamemaker hadn't given him a pill, he had ensured that a vial of the same chemical was placed in his tracker, to be released into his bloodstream when Cato gave the agreed upon signal.
But it had never been released. He hadn't needed it. He felt like a monster. It hadn't technically been rape, but it was close enough.
And he'd gotten hard, all on his own for the first time in a year, at the sight of her lithe, graceful body in the water.
He had come, all on his own for the first time in a year, at the feeling of being inside of her.
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They settled into a routine.
The nation was under the impression that 22 of them, at least, had been killed in the arena. To the people of the Districts, the fate of Katniss Everdeen and Cato Hadley was unknown. It was widely accepted that Cato had either killed Katniss after he raped her and then been picked up by the Capitol, or that the Capitol had taken both of them and that she was now a prisoner.
The head of the resistance, Alma Coin, and the other leaders did nothing to correct the rumors, since both scenarios renewed Panem's outrage and kept the rebellion fueled.
Only the people of 13 knew the truth, and so that was where all 23 of them had to stay.
They never really saw anyone high-ranking. Their purposes had been served, and they were treated well. Fed and clothed and lodged and updated on the day's events just like everyone else in 13, but otherwise they were left to their own devices.
Although more than two thirds of the D13 soldiers had been deployed to the Capitol and the other districts, Cato spent the bulk of his days training those remaining behind in hand-to-hand combat. Some evenings he sat with a few of the other victors, mostly Haymitch and Finnick and Beetee, while they talked over the status of the revolution, but he never said much. He stopped by to say hi to Gloss a few times a week. The two of them, though not exactly friends, had not disliked each other either, only playing up the rivalry as a buildup to Cato's "betrayal" in the arena. And though Gloss harbored no ill will towards him for his three broken limbs (after all he'd agreed to it), Cato felt guilty nevertheless.
Katniss found that her skills weren't particularly relevant in this new environment. The soldiers shot guns rather than arrows, and they had already learned all of the survival skills they needed. But after her father's death, she had been the one to cook for her family for the first few years, until her mother gradually came out of her fog of grief, and so she returned to it here. She didn't really enjoy it, but she was good at it and it gave her something productive to do with her time. At night, she shared a room with Prim and her mother.
Gale had fully immersed himself in training to go into combat in one of the districts or the Capitol, so the two of them only saw each other a couple of days a week, and when they did, it was painfully awkward.
As for Cato…
He and Katniss never spoke. They never even looked at one another during the rare times-usually at meals, where he was careful to choose a table on the opposite side of the dining hall-that they were in the same room at the same time.
They passed each other one day in the hallway, and Katniss glanced at him, but he kept his eyes trained on the ground at his feet.
And so the days came and went, one after the other, each indistinguishable from the next.
At night, she felt stifled by guilt and confusion, while her mother and sister slept peacefully beside her.
In spite of all of her self-destructive behaviors, her old guilt over her first games remained, and now, added to it, was a fresh layer over Cato, whose body had not been his own since he was six years old. Now she was just one more person who had manipulated it.
And she was confused because she didn't know whether or not she had done the right thing by agreeing to Plutarch's scheme. It was terrifying, really, the power that she had wielded in that arena. And maybe there was something to what Cato asked her the night he'd agreed to participate in the plan: Have you thought about the implications of it? That it's misleading?
No I did the right thing, she tried to comfort herself. Anything is better than this-Snow, the games, the Peacekeepers, the starvation.
Right?
After all, it's better to see a child shot to death by a Peacekeeper than watch them slowly starve.
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Night was Cato's least favorite time.
For one thing there were the nightmares. On top of all of the tributes he'd killed and Clove, he had started seeing Thresh's sister in his sleep. And Katniss. Crying out in pain (which he now knew had been genuine rather than feigned) as she struggled to get away from him, and then burying her face in the sand and sobbing.
But trying to stay awake as he lay in bed was no better. It was too quiet, too still, and his thoughts and feelings rushed in to fill the vacuum.
They were not pleasant.
For years he had been sure of his destiny as a proud, glorious Victor, but now he didn't understand his place in the world. He wasn't sure that he had a place in the world.
What he did understand was that he had never really had any control over his own life, although he hadn't realized it until after his first games.
Maybe he was meant to do nothing more than play the villain to her heroine.
And if that was the case, well then, he was past his expiration date, wasn't he?
One of the soldiers he was training in hand-to-hand combat had shown him his gun. He had demonstrated how to load it and unlock the safety. How to cock it and aim it and how to pull back steadily on the trigger. They had gone to target practice together.
Cato looked up at the plain white wall above his bed and wondered what his brains would look like splattered across it.
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Katniss had never really been well-fed enough, until recently, for her periods to be regular. So she didn't think anything of it when six weeks, and then seven weeks, and then eight weeks passed and she failed to bleed between her legs.
And she didn't think anything of it the first day she lost her lunch in the toilet.
But on the second day, as she wiped the vomit from the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand, it hit her.
"Oh fuck," she whispered, as she rested her forehead against the cool porcelain bowl.
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Thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far! Things are about to get more uplifting. We aren't going to get to the Catoniss just yet, but we're gonna start taking some pretty big strides towards it.