She wouldn't have stepped outside if not for Cato pulling her along with him, firmly gripping her hand as if to forcefully remind her that there was no running away and hiding from this. The games had been easier. Surviving in an arena designed to kill dozens had been easier.

Playing with her ring around her left middle finger was the only way to keep herself grounded. She lifted her gaze towards the crowd in front of them, the furious horde of people pushing back against the sturdy wall of Peacekeepers that stood between them and the Justice Building. They chanted their names, as if that in itself was an act of defiance.

Cato began his speech, his cue card in his hand by his side. He spoke evenly into the microphone, although even the speakers dotted around the square didn't stand a chance against the shouts and jeers of District 8.

"We are united, as Panem is united. Our love has opened our eyes to the greatness of the country. Love illuminates the truth, just as it can obscure–"

The square briefly fell silent upon hearing a four-note whistle. It was a familiar tune. It had Nova's heart hammering against her chest.

Someone must've brought a gun. The rapid fire of bullets was deafening, as were the panicked screams that followed. She instinctively ducked behind the microphone stand. Her eyes widened as a single bullet tore through the wooden panel that sheltered her and flew just millimetres away from her neck.

Two sharp breaths left Cato's lungs. She turned her head. He lurched forward, stumbling with both of his hands covering his left hip. His expression twisted unpleasantly in discomfort. The barrage of gunfire was countered by armed Peacekeepers with automatic rifles that could permanently silence a crowd of that size in a matter of seconds. People screamed. Children screamed.

She was carelessly dragged inside by her upper arms. The doors of the Justice Building firmly closed behind her. A group of Peacekeepers moved to stand in front of it, to secure their shelter from the forces on the other side. People were pushing helplessly, shouting, pleading, and then screaming as their bodies were fatally punctured with countless bullet holes.

It fell quiet. The pushing stopped. The Peacekeepers stepped away from the doors.

"Nova, it's okay," Tiffany gripped her shoulders, "we're inside . . ." Nova's eyes locked on Cato. ". . . safe. Nova?"

Cato growled in pain. "Fucking hell," he muttered with his hands unmoved from his side.

A medic, dressed in the familiar Capitol medical uniform, moved his hands away from the wound. "Mr Hadley, I need you to lie down–"

"I'm fine," he grumbled, bristling as a team of doctors began to assess his injury. "It's just a flesh wound."

As they tended to him, her gaze didn't budge from his hands. They were covered in a thick layer of blood. It soaked the sleeves of his coat, dripping from his body and pooling on the polished floor by his feet. The uniforms of the doctors and medics were splattered with messy strokes of red.

Her knees hit the unforgiving floor. The impact sent a shock wave through her legs and up her torso. She lifted her gaze the moment a white-masked medic grabbed her right arm and slid a long needle into her vein.

She awoke to someone touching her hair, stroking it back behind her ear. Her lungs burned with breathlessness. The air was sticky and humid, leaving a horrid lukewarm taste on her tongue. She scrambled upright.

"Relax." Her gaze shot upwards. It was just Cato. "We're out of the district now. We're on the train."

She didn't trust his words until she'd looked around and seen for herself. This was her room. An engine purred beneath the floor as they sped down the district lines, far away from 8 now judging by their speeds.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

His laugh was short. "Yeah. Fine," he responded. "Somehow better than you."

He turned on the TV. It served as a welcome distraction from the avalanche of feelings that were swamping her every thought. Instead she could focus on Caesar Flickerman's evening show, as he and a special guest dissected some of the outfits so far from the tour. They spoke intently about Peeta's "choice" of attire, trying to find hidden meaning in it like an English teacher searching for symbolism and imagery that just wasn't there.

Cato changed the channel. It was something to do with nature, parrots maybe. A man with a deep yet pitchy voice explained the necessary steps to take in order to keep a parrot as a pet, including appropriate names to give the bird and food to avoid feeding them, such as cake or chocolate.

"Sure you don't want that morphling?" Cato offered.

"I'd rather die," she stated. There was no doubting that he'd rolled his eyes. "Why did they shoot at us?"

"It wasn't at us," he corrected her.

She looked up. Cato had his eyes on the screen, and hers followed. This was an unedited replay of the events from that day, raw footage of the speech and the disorienting violence that followed it.

"How did you . . .?" she trailed off.

"It's a good thing I've nearly graduated the Peacekeeper senior academy," he said, in a manner that was bragging and prideful, "or else I wouldn't have known the code to access the data stream. They were shooting at the Peacekeepers below us. We just got caught in the crossfire."

"How did they get guns?" Nova questioned.

He shrugged. "Stolen," he suggested. "Smuggled from my district. Could've been anything–"

"Smuggled?" Her brows drew together. "I thought you guys just build walls and stuff."

"I'd guess there'll be a few hundred dead by tomorrow morning," Cato continued, completely ignoring her interjection. "The Head Peacekeeper over there must be pissing himself."

Nova shivered. That really wasn't something she wanted to be thinking about right now. Fatalities like that made the games look like child's play, which in an awful way it was just that. Those were games.

"Let me guess, Luciana's not happy," Nova remarked.

Cato's lip curled in displeasure. "Does it matter? No one cares about fucking Luciana. She can talk all she wants, but if she was in the arena, she would've been killed within the first 10 seconds."

Again, she frowned. "You're really bad at this whole comforting thing," she said, hiding the disturbance in her voice.

The TV was turned off. She twisted her head around, regardless of the resultant pain in her neck. Cato looked weak, like nothing she'd really ever seen outside of an arena. He had an almost defeated look about him, like the weight of this tour was finally starting to settle in.

"We'll be in the Capitol on Friday," he reminded her. "It's almost over."

She nodded. He was right, as always, but this time it didn't have the kind of tough love effect his remarks often did. Her eyes were watering again, but there was no way of telling whether this was as a result of sadness or fatigue.

She shuffled up, in turn offering a space for him beside her. He lethargically rose from the chair he'd pulled up and lowered himself onto the bed with a tense breath. Adjusting himself until he was comfortable was a painful-looking process, but for the most part he kept a brave face.

Curling up against him caused him to hiss in pain instantly and grab at his left side. She retracted back.

"Sorry," she whispered.

He shook his head. "It's fine."

His arm opened up. She nestled herself against his side hesitantly. His free hand didn't move from his hip, acting as a barrier between her and his wound instead. At least it hadn't been so severe as to hospitalise him.

Although maybe it was, but being sent to a hospital just wasn't possible. That would publicise what had transpired in District 8, and she had the feeling Snow wanted no one to know of the things they'd seen there.

District 11 was just as tight on security as District 8 had been, but there was no aggression this time. Maybe their last victory appearance had stunned them into silence. No one said a word. No one clapped. No one whistled.

The train weaved its way through the rocky mountains into the Capitol late the next evening, and suddenly they were being ushered around from location to location — a 5 minute hospital visit for Cato's gunshot wounds to be erased, autograph events, celebrity meetings, the Remake Centre to be stripped of every fine hair and small blemish, and then finally the Tribute Centre.

By that point, she hadn't been given a break to sit down or have a glass of water or a bite to eat in about 3 or 4 hours. She'd lost track of time — timing her chores would only make them feel longer.

While being careful to not appear too greedy, she continuously reached for the various snacks laid out across the coffee table in the apartment while they watched TV. It was just like old times — the group watching Caesar's interview of Katniss and Peeta together, making remarks, gabbing about things she didn't care about — except with the seat to her left purposefully left empty. Nobody dared to sit where Chase had always sat.

The entire building gave her a very strange and unpleasant sense of nostalgia. It was difficult to pinpoint where it stemmed from, because just about every detail was unchanged since the games, from the avant-garde decor to the tiny smudges on the windows, and the little tear in the fabric of the sofa where her nails had torn through during her live training score announcement. Just being in that same room had her heart thumping wildly.

"I remember when you — more champagne," Tiffany held her glass out for an Avox to refill, "thank you, darling — when you were sitting in this very seat, fretting over Cato."

Nova winced. That was the chair that had been dragged into her room while her prep team had done her makeup, and while she'd contemplated throwing up in her lap over the idea of being trapped in an arena with Cato.

"Let's not go there," she responded dismissively.

"Oh, it was cute–!"

"It wasn't cute," Nova interjected before Neptune could say anything further. "How is me fearing for my life cute? Cato threatened to kill me."

"Yes, but he would never," she continued to insist, "not really."

Nova blinked. "He nearly slit my throat open."

"Nearly," was apparently the word Neptune had focused on.

"He threw an axe at my neck in training. He promised me that I'd be dead first, and that I was his kill. He absolutely, without a doubt, would've killed me if he had the chance–" Nova paused, "You know what? I don't need to justify myself."

She upped and left with no further explanation. When Tiffany asked where she was going, her simple reply was "fresh air". It wasn't a lie either. She had her mind set on the roof, one of few locations that hadn't been so aggressively urbanised the way the rest of the Capitol was. There were plants, nature, trees, and most of all silence, especially at this time of night.

Her thumb pressed into the up button of the elevator. Since the entrance to the roof was at floor 12, she'd have quite a bit of distance to go, but the elevator gave her no indication as to whether it had received her request or not. No lights glowed, nor was the digital location display above the door turned on. There wasn't exactly a sign disclosing its lack of function, so she had no reason to believe it wasn't working properly.

She pressed the button again. It made no noise. Her fingers tapped against it in sequence a few more times.

"Hit it harder," Cato deadpanned. Nova abruptly turned around. He raised an eyebrow. "What's gotten you so worked up?"

She brushed past him towards the stairwell he'd apparently entered from. "I don't want to talk about it," she muttered.

The emergency stairwell wasn't just cold and uninsulated, but every step was unnecessarily steep too. It used far too much of her energy just to make it halfway to floor 4. She dreaded to think how winded she'd feel by the time she reached 12.

To make matters worse, Cato was following her, in a way that just pissed her off. Was it so difficult to believe that she wanted to be left alone? That she was well and truly sick of just about everyone's shit, him included?

"Must you follow me?" she remarked.

"I know you said you don't want to talk about it," he started, sounding marginally taken aback by her abrasive tone, "but this feels like something you should." She didn't reply. "Nova–"

"What?"

She whipped around suddenly. Her glare was icy, she could only imagine. She could probably cook a three course meal on the steam that left her ears.

His expression twisted into something tense. He cracked his neck by stretching his head to the side and turned around. "Never mind," he said.

"There you two are!" Luciana appeared quite suddenly. "Why do you look so sour?"

Nova peered over the railing at the woman. If anything, that remark only encouraged her to deepen her frown. Maybe she'd pull an unattractive expression of disgust too, just to see how long it would take her to faint from sheer horror.

Luciana ushered Cato back downstairs and gestured for Nova to follow. Nova knew for a fact that she didn't have a choice in the matter. She trailed quite a few steps behind, indignantly dragging her heels all the way. She was already dreaming of locking herself away in her room, crawling under the covers, and only returning to society again once she was good and ready.

The announcement of Katniss' and Peeta's engagement on live television was absolutely disastrous news for the other half of the victor cohort. Beetee was working himself around the clock in regular meetings with the press and reporters, trying to push forward just about anything he could come up with in relation to Nova and Cato.

In turn, they had a lot to make up for themselves, which was easier said than done. Maybe it had something to do with the Tribute Centre atmosphere, unhelped by the near constant broadcast of the 74th games recap and the regular reminders of Cato being an abhorrent asshole — whatever it was, it was driving tensions between them so far that she was sure at least one of them would snap at some point. On one occasion, she'd even managed to accidentally snap a little boy's biro pen in half while signing an autograph. That was just a little too aggressive to chalk up to nerves.

They rapidly bubbled through their interview questions with Caesar. They held hands. They sat close. They bantered. They kissed. They did everything they were supposed to do. It was agonising though. She wanted to lock herself in a cupboard and never climb out.

Caesar asked them about their homes, about their districts, about the tour, and they replied to all of these questions with charisma and beaming smiles. The shooting in District 8, as well as any further violence or unrest, was left unmentioned. Snow wouldn't want that, after all. God forbid those images upset the Capitol.

Caesar sat forward in his chair. The colour scheme of his ensemble, that twinkling shade of midnight blue, hadn't changed since the games, and naturally it wouldn't until next year. He was effectively a seasonal decoration, like a winter wreath that only appears on the front door for two months every year.

"I've asked this question before," Caesar started. The audience were already murmuring in anticipation. "Yesterday, for all of us, it ended in the most beautiful way possible, with the union of two of our favourite victors." He paused to give the viewers a moment to compose themselves. "And now I ask you . . . What are your plans for the future?"

Cato shrugged. "I mean . . ." He smiled as the excitement in the studio bubbled up, "actually, there is one plan I had in mind . . ."

Nova nearly threw up, making a suppressed choking sound that she was 100% certain had been picked up by the microphone attached to her dress. Cato moved off the seat beside her and got down on one knee. The crowd, a sea of Capitolites in bold colours with outlandish appearances that nearly blinded her, practically screamed. This was not something they'd agreed on. The look on her face was undoubtedly betraying her.

Cato shifted around, as if to fish something out of his pocket, but then he froze and pointed at the audience with a clipped laugh. "Ah, got you there."

The reaction to this was hysterical. This was one of the wildest things she'd ever been a part of, and it made her feel nothing but nauseous. Her hands were clammy and uncomfortable. Her eyes were so wide that she worried whether her eyeballs would simply slip out of their sockets. Her mouth went dry. She couldn't form words, nor sounds, not even the faintest laugh or smile.

In the meantime, Caesar had nearly fallen out of his chair. He had a hand over his chest, dabbing carefully at his makeup-covered face with a matching blue handkerchief. His shock was all melodrama, but it was convincing enough apparently.

"Cato, that was cruel!" Caesar exclaimed, sounding breathless. "You can't do that to us!"

Cato responded with an egocentric laugh. "You know how I am," he commented. "It's like telling the sun to stop shining."

It was difficult to be heard past the overreacting audience in front of them. "See what I have to deal with?" Nova said, surprising herself honestly. She hadn't been entirely sure of her speech capabilities after that incident.

He waved off her visible discomfort. It would've taken him just one look to realise that this had been more than just a toe over the line of what she was okay with. Her emotions were already in such a volatile state, and he was playing a risky game.

"Oh, don't be a spoilsport," Cato brushed her off.

"You almost gave me a heart attack!" she insisted. That wasn't an exaggeration or a lie either.

The audience roared with laughter. These were the kind of interactions they seemed to live for, but for her it was grating. For the most part, this wasn't normally how she conducted herself. In these situations, her usual responses and reactions were always so different to how she displayed them to her Capitol audience.

"Oh, so the idea of marrying me is that disturbing, huh?" he retorted.

Nova's jaw went slack. Way to sell her down the river in front of the whole of Panem. He'd just assured the viewers that this was not a reaction of elation or enthusiasm turned to disappointment, but in fact the most unsettled she'd ever been.

He laughed through her transparent shock and pulled her into a hug. She fought against the muscles in her face in order to form a smile and a laugh.

Their staff greeted them in front of the elevators afterwards. The cameras and photographers were very far behind them. They could finally let go of each other's hands.

Tiffany smiled. "That was–"

Nova spun on her heel and slapped Cato across his face. The sound of her prosthetic hand colliding with his cheek reverberated against the open walls. Her arm was no longer soft flesh though. The damage the slap produced was more than it otherwise would've been. Parallel red slashes decorated his face, one of which began to bleed.

"So this is how you get back at me?" She advanced on him. "You make me look like an apathetic fuckwit on national television? What is wrong with you?!"

She lunged, in time for Brutus to leap in between them. He was the only man she could imagine being strong enough to restrain Cato and hold her back simultaneously. The abrupt movement in front of her sent her stumbling backwards painfully onto her left ankle, a twinge that reminded her just a little too much of her injury in the arena.

"He gave them something to talk about," Victoria said. "While the Capitol continues to rave about the engagement, any publicity is good publicity."

Her physical pain was unmatched by her emotional one. She glanced around the faces in the room, none of which came close to sympathising with her. It was as if no one was even trying to understand that Cato was purposefully, and completely knowingly, being a bastard.

She'd love to say she hadn't shoved past him as she fled, just as she'd love to say there weren't any tears in her eyes.

⊱ ────── {.⋅ ✯ ⋅.} ────── ⊰

Author's note: Bff is traumatised on so many levels. Cato is also a passive aggressive piece of shite. What's new? Slay.