Chapter 2: Katniss
Let's talk about Katniss, stubborn, tenacious, brave Katniss, who would be a Slytherin if she was ever sorted. Even though at first glance it wouldn't seem like Katniss doesn't have a Slytherin bone in her body she is the embodiment of the true Slytherin.
Above all else Katniss is a survivor. They push her down but she gets back up again and as she gets up she shoots. They expect her to stay down and she constantly defies their expectations, the inferno she carries inside her warping the odds, not into her favor but into her choice. She doesn't fight for the masses she fights for herself, for her friends and for her family. She cares for others, she's not heartless, but her immediate concern is them.
She is sly and cunning and ambitious, for who else but a Slytherin would crawl through a fence to the outside forest for meat (the fence is no longer electric so the only risk is getting caught. She doesn't try again once the electric current runs through it. She's a Slytherin, cautious and calculated and knows that the risks are greater than the rewards to try to go back. She's not a foolhardy Gryffindor who would brave current anyway, no matter the risk). She goes back and back again not for fun and games, not for the entire district but for not only the survival of her family but also the improvement. Food is how you improve your standing in 12, don't tell me Katniss didn't want better, didn't do everything in her power to learn how to make her family better because they had a goat and a cat and Prim stopped going to bed hungry. That's more than most families in 12 can claim. Katniss has done this all on her own, and will always do this for her sister and her mother. Katniss's mother isn't much but she is hers so she will do whatever she can. This isn't even taking into consideration Prim.
Delicate, lovely, intelligent Prim who just wants to heal people. Katniss loves her more than anything else in this word and wants to protect so so much. She will do anything she can to put a smile on her face, to keep Prim alive even if she has to break rules and sign up for more tesserae. Like the Sorting hat said, in Slytherin you will make your real friends, and no one else is allowed to make a Slytherin's people hurt, not if they can help it. Katniss couldn't, and her heart has never been the same. She will make the world burn for what it did.
They may give her weapons and put her in the Arena again and again but she will decide where, what, and when her arrow hits. They can't take this away from her and she won't let them.
Let's talk about how when Katniss volunteered, she wasn't doing it for the glory of victory, or trying to give people hope, or as an act of defiance towards the capital. Decades later speculation will run rampant about ulterior motives but let them. She was doing it so she wouldn't have to watch a small, tiny girl who she cared about more than her own skin die as entertainment for the rich bastards in the Capitol. If she is going to be separated from her sister, it will be on her terms, not theirs, never theirs. This is how she exerts her control, how she takes the variables and twists, until the outcome is not theirs. The outcome may not be ideal, but it is hers to control.
Peeta may be the one who the people love, who can change a person's heart but Katniss is the one who protects him, who keeps them all alive. He knows the masses but she knows the dictators. It was her, after all, who suggested using the berries. She knows her cards and calls their bluff and if they were going to be killed it is always always always going to be on her terms.
It isn't bravery, it isn't empathy, it is tenacity and desire for life and that is why she won't quit and die like all the game makers want her to. Courage isn't even a factor; it is instinct that makes her volunteer for Prim. There was never any question that she wouldn't. A Gryffindor would volunteer for the adventure, a Hufflepuff for a stranger, but a Slytherin would volunteer only for those they consider to be their own.
Katniss never wanted to be a leader. She just wanted her loved ones to be safe, to hell with everyone else and when she failed to convince Snow she was madly in love with Peeta she decided to run away, to take her people and save themselves. A Gryffindor never runs away, this is a Slytherin move, tactical retreat to save the remaining soldiers. It is only by the actions of a Gryffindor that stops her from leaving, because he may be brash and stupid and far too idealistic but she loves him like a brother and will not leave him to die.
Katniss doesn't care about the masses, she cares about people. She cares for Prim and Peeta, her mother and Gale and Haymitch and Cinna, Effie, Johanna and Finnick and even for her prep team. She cares for the people she interacts with, for a little girl who fell into her life like a shooting star on a moonless night, only to leave in a burst lightening. Katniss still bears the scars Rue's death has wrought.
They try to keep her out of the fighting, make her a simple figure head for people to rally to, but she wrecks all their plans and refuses to keep out of the fight because she knows no other way to keep her people alive. She needs to get back Peeta, keep him safe from harm and no one is going to stop her, not Snow, not some District that has been absent and letting the Capitol do whatever they want to defenseless children.
She will never let herself be manipulated, even if her methods can be a bit ham-fisted they work. In an equation she is always the unknown variable, the outlier, the one that changes the carefully planned results and leaves people scratching their heads and wondering what happened.
A Gryffindor is loud and brash in their vengeance but Slytherin isn't nearly as just. They have vendetta, not vengeance. Gryffindor gets mad and even but Slytherin will level the playing field from a hill to a chasm. Snow tried to destroy two people that she loves and wrecked a third, he destroyed her home and Prim, don't even get her started on Prim, so she will take away his entire regime, his purpose, even his very life if that is what it takes to make him suffer.
Katniss isn't the best at manipulation through her words but her actions are so much more effective anyway, who needs words when Peeta uses them so much more effectively than she ever could. She is an inferno, a swirling mass of destruction that wrecks anything in its path, and eventually even itself, but she is always the one who lights herself on fire. She never plays to anyone else's song, even when she should, but it is always her choice. And that is what makes Katniss a Slytherin.