A/N: Thanks to mangesboy01, PrincessLyoka and mangesboy01 for reviewing! The support is appreciated :)

I hope that you enjoy today's chapter, which ties in with my separate stories 'Second Time Unlucky' and 'Mentor' :)


"Do you know what's worth fighting for?

When it's not worth dying for?"

- Billie-Joe Armstrong, 2009.


The 75th Annual Hunger Games (The Third Quarter Quell) - Day 3, 10.50 pm

Brutus Severus Cato (49), District 2 Male (victor of the 44th Annual Hunger Games)

Green Day - 21 Guns (2009)


"Let's get moving."

Enobaria calls me to my feet, and I reluctantly join her. "It's hunting time," she tells me. I merely nod by way of a reply and pick up my thick, sturdy sword from where it lies against a tree. We have little in terms of supplies except for our weapons. There's been so much sponsor support this year that we eat whatever we're given immediately. It keeps our backpacks light and our stomachs full. On a night like tonight, that'll be as important as ever.

With just eight of us left alive, I don't know how much longer Enobaria and I will stay together. We both know that soon we'll have to turn against each other. It's always the case with our tributes. The difficulty arises in deciding what moment to make your move. I had never had this problem in my first Games. I was a lone wolf back then.

As we begin to prowl around the arena in what we now know is the two o'clock section, I begin to think about everything that has happened in the three decades since I won the 44th Annual Hunger Games.

I've become a victor. I have an excellent house in the Victor's Village, plenty of money and a lovely family. I've become a trainer at District 2's Training Centre, helping to develop our district's next generation of victors. I've become a mentor, helping those who I trained through the arena. I've married, had three lovely children and seen them grown up. For years, life was good.

Then, a decade ago, everything changed.

It all started when my eldest son, Quintus, volunteered for the 66th Annual Hunger Games. I was his mentor, and together, everything went well, at first. But Quintus was too headstrong, indoctrinated with my father's dream of our family returning to its former glory in the Capitol, much as I was in my youth. There is nothing wrong with being a dreamer, but you must be able to keep your head in reality. Quintus became distracted during the Games, and his control of the other Careers broke down, a mistake that ultimately cost him his life.

I won't pretend that I bore the loss well, because I didn't. For almost a year, I went into complete hibernation, hiding away from my family. I left the Training Centre behind, afraid of remaining in a place that held so many memories of my fallen son. Maybe I had been wrong to do so, but I had spent so much of the years before the Games preparing my eldest son for the Games that when I was gone, I was left with a family that was falling apart. Despite how everything looked on the outside, my life had been turned on its head by the time that I mentored in the 67th Games. Tension was growing between myself and the children that I had neglected, and my wife was pushing for a divorce after twenty-two years of marriage. My participation in the 67th Games as a mentor barely lasted ten minutes, as the boy I was mentoring became one of the first casualties of the Games. I didn't pay much attention to the rest of the Games until its finale. When I returned home in early August eight years ago with my younger son Sextus, I found out that my wife had left home, and had taken my sixteen-year-old daughter Julianna with her. I haven't seen either of them in all the years since.

Filled with new waves of grief, I once again failed to give young Sextus the attention he deserved. For years he seemed dependent on my father, spending hour upon hour with him in the Training Centre that I had abandoned. I had always thought that he had become obsessed with the same ideals as poor Quintus, but it turned out that my youngest son was merely trying to make me recognise him for who he was; a mightily capable young athlete, and certainly victor material.

I never realised it until it was too late. My father passed away shortly after the victor tour for the 73rd Annual Hunger Games, aged eighty-four. It was only then that Sextus Aurelius Cato returned to me, just months before the 74th Annual Hunger Games. The long months that spring were painful as I struggled to recover any relationship that I could with my son, but none was forthcoming. The only thing that connected us was the arena which had shaped all of our lives, and as I mentored Sextus into the 74th Annual Hunger Games, I finally began to appreciate the young man that he had grown into.

Tall, strong, fully independent and every inch the victor, Sextus reminded me of the footage I had seen many times throughout my life of the 8th Annual Hunger Games, and of the man who had emerged victorious that year. He lived up to my expectations, too, asserting himself head of the Career Alliance and dominating the field in the early stages. Of course, it didn't last, and the 'star-crossed lovers' of District 12 stole both his sponsor support and ultimately his life as the Games concluded, leaving me alone in the world.

For nine months I wallowed around in my misery, only to be awoken by the announcement of the Quarter Quell. For the first time since the 74th Games, my life had purpose again. I trained hard for three months in preparation for the Games, then volunteered at the reaping. I was the only one to do so. Once in the Capitol, I was the centre of attention for the paparazzi, who seemed adamant that I was returning to the arena to avenge the losses of my sons and restore pride in the Cato name. Really, I'm beyond caring about a place in the Capitol now, and Brutus Cato the family man disappeared many moons ago. Quite simply, I'm here because I have nothing else to do with my life. No aspirations, no nothing. At least this way I can go out on my terms, doing what I do best.

Suddenly I'm shocked from my daydream as Enobaria crashes to the floor in front of me. In an instant, my sword is at the ready, but there is no immediate danger. Enobaria appears to have caught her leg in a thin golden wire, which I can now see runs in both directions from me, up the hill and down towards the beach. Enobaria cuts herself free from the wire and we watch as it coils itself up downhill. It's clearly connected to something that way. Another tribute must be nearby - the wire makes me thing of Beetee. He'll be an easy kill. I pull Enobaria to her feet and we set off together, following the coil.

As we travel down the hill, we hear disturbances in the foliage around us. The scuffled sounds of tributes moving, the occasional plea for help. Something's kicking off, I'm sure of it.

It takes us less than two minutes to find the first body. At least, I think it's a body, but then I realise that there's been no cannon. Either way, it takes me a minute to identify the broken figure in the undergrowth as Katniss Everdeen of District 12, the one who killed my son. Fury bubbles through me, but I can see the swelling on her head, the horrific wound in her left forearm, her blood staining the leaves around her. She'll be on her way out of the world soon. Enobaria reaches for the knives in her belt to finish the girl, but I stop her.

"She's as good as dead!" I tell her, holding her back from the girl before striding off into the jungle. "Come on, Enobaria!" She pauses for a moment before following me, as though she's having second choices, but she does come. There will be no mercy killings tonight. Let the girl suffer, for all I care. Let her suffer as Sextus did.

"Brutus," Enobaria warns me as she catches up to me fifty yards from the girl. "Brutus, the alliance has split. There is no way that Chaff would have done that." I picture Katniss' wounds and know it to be true. Someone has turned on Katniss, and the grand alliance has fallen. It's everyone for themselves tonight.

"I think you should-"

"I know. I'm going."

Enobaria doesn't even look back as she marches up the hill away from me. I watch her disappear into the jungle before turning heel and running down the slope towards the beach.

I guess I've been running for around a minute when I find myself on the floor, having collided with something solid and moving at an oddly high velocity. It takes me a minute to realise that it's another tribute; Chaff. We both end up on the floor in a tangled mess, and as I fall I lose my sword, which clatters away into the foliage.

Rolling on to my back, I see Chaff standing over me, pulling a knife from his belt. Before he can use it I grab his ankles and send him crashing to the floor beside me, temporarily stunned. I try to dive into him to prise the blade from his hands but he lashes out with it and the knife buries itself in my forearm.

For a moment I'm seeing stars; the pain has no parallel. Never have I suffered anything like I am now. I collapse to the ground, lost in the agony, suddenly aware of just what my sons must have been through in their final moments in the arena. Chaff reaches to try to prise the knife from my wound, but I muster all my strength and swing at him with my good arm, my fist colliding powerfully with his temple. The Chaff's body goes limp and collapses onto me, knocked out cold.

I roll him off of me and pin him to the floor, sitting on his chest exactly how Cicero Turner had taught me to do it many moons ago in District 2's Training Centre. Chaff is just coming round as I pull his knife from my forearm. It hurts, but I'll be able to cope with the pain. I have no alternative. I have a job to do. Then I ram the knife through his throat. There's a horrible crunching sound as metal shatters bone, and the cannon sounds almost instantly.

Just seven of us left.

As I stand over Chaff's body, I become aware than I am not the only tribute in the small clearing that I have found myself in. Standing ten paces away from me is Peeta Mellark, the boy from District 12, a knife very similar to my own in his hands. Peeta looks as though three days in the arena have made him far worse for wear, and his bedraggled look is accentuated by his ripped clothing and the rapid rise and fall of his chest, which is presumably due to a long run. But what unnerves me is that this isn't the same Peeta, Peeta the lover, who won the hearts of the nation last summer. This is Peeta the victor, the won who killed mercilessly at the bloodbath last year. The one with that odd look in his eye, somewhere between desperation and fury.

Then, without warning, he launches himself at me.

After my years of training back at home in District 2, I like to think that I would be able to hold my own in any close combat battle. But the victors in District 2 never touched anything above the basics with one-on-one combat with knives, because there is no real skill involved. There is no weight to compensate for, no extension of the arm. It is as though you are fighting with blades for fingers. We were never taught past the basics because, more often than not, knife-vs-knife bouts are decided by luck.

Peeta demonstrates this point perfectly as he charges at me like a man possessed, with a flurry of offenses that leave me with little choice but to go on the defensive. His strikes come without precision, without reason. Faced with unpredictability itself, I find myself being slowly driven back towards the edge of the clearing, where I pick my moment to stand and fight. I swing my knife at his, going on the offensive for the first time, and the blades jar against one another one, two, three times, sending sparks flying in all directions. Then I lunge for Peeta himself, but he dodges and strikes low with his knife before I can react. If I thought I knew pain before, then I was wrong. Every previous experience of my life loses all meaning as Peeta's blade slices through my body, leaving a foot-long gash in my stomach, splitting whole organs in half. Peeta is already forgotten as I crumble to the floor, cocooned in my agony. The knife leaves my hand along the way, but I don't care where it lands. All I can think of the pain.

For a while, pain seems to be all there is, all there was, all there ever will be. But then other thoughts rise vaguely from the mist. Memories of summer days long ago, when the children were young, the times still good. But even the pain distorts them and I remember the agony of watching my sons die, the agony of returning to an empty home. I am - I was - the last of the Cato line. I outlived the males and abandoned the females. Now there is only me, and the Games that defined my family's legacy. As the pain finally subsides I'm left with something far more fearful, and I'm forced to once again remember my sons, Quintus Licinius and Sextus Aurelius, who have already taken the journey that I'm about to embark on, hoping that I can reach the end of the line with no fear and no regrets, just as they did, but in my final moments, I accept that I can't.

I was only ever half the man that my sons turned out to be.


A/N: If you enjoyed this chapter, please review! Constructive criticism is welcomed :)

P.S. There's just one chapter left in the Third Quarter Quell... Anyone worked out whose POV is left? ;)