This was kinda delayed. Oops :/

Disclaimer: Actually, you know what? I do own the Hunger Games. Sue me, bitch.

TW for gore and violence.

[Cato]

The memory of her falling body stays with him forever.

He sees her just as she collapses. She's so powerful, so sharp, her nails and eyes and hair are razor blades and draw blood but in that moment she's nothing. She could be a flightless bird, stumbling off a tree and falling down, she could be a dark-clothed, pale-skinned scrap of silk tumbling through the air. The Career in him hates her for it. He can hear his district, disappointed, wondering how some nobody from 11 could be the one to split the skull of their best and brightest.

Someone screams her name, some breathless boy as he races across the grass, as he cradles her head like a lovesick puppy. Someone begs her to stay with him, though it's pointless and only makes him seem weak for the sponsors and does jack shit to actually bring her back, as if hope makes things happen-

Clove no please don't Clove stay just stay we were supposed to win together please Clove please

It's pathetic. He's pathetic.

She deserved better. The thought springs to mind, burns the tip of his tongue. He doesn't love her, he doesn't know how something like him could love something like her, but they deserved better. They were meant to go home together, the first famous pair, bring twice the glory to their district. And some thick bastard from 11 had ripped their dreams apart. How dare he.

So he takes his useless grief and pours it into something worthwhile. He turns it into rage and hate and fire. He remembers the dent in her head so big he could fit four fingers in and he runs until his legs burn. He remembers how she looked, rag-doll thin, and he stalks Thresh across the grass, into his domain. He remembers how she was, the malice that she had pooled behind dark eyes, and he channels her as he finds the brute.

He wouldn't have minded dying. He'd prefer to live, but without the Games, what else is there? Clove would have replaced Games with killing, and she would have walked into an ocean of fire to win, but if not for the animal instinct, the fear inside him, he could have died glorious and peaceful here.

There's a crypt in his district that towers above most other buildings- marble-white, the colour of death and huge. The words MORTUI SUNT HEROIBUS are engraved in gold, bold and imposing, daring you to think any differently, written so forcefully that it couldn't be anything but the truth. Thick coffins lie spaced, some with names, most blank. Some are written with quotes-

She died in glory

We will never forget

The best of what he could have been, he was.

Along the floor, over and over, is written the strongest and bravest and best. It's those words that drive him and so many to the Academy, to hold their heads high and volunteer. All those who die in the Games die in glory, and that is enough for him.

Or it could have been. But now, now he knows that he can't die, not before he's ripped Thresh's heart out from his ribs. He'll pay, he mutters under his breath, and the sponsors clap their hands and giggle with delight. They know a show's coming.

He finds Thresh in the grass that goes up to his jaw, whispers against his temples. Thresh is barehanded but not weaponless- he has his fists, and out of his pockets he pulls the stone he used to kill Clove

(kill Clove- he's never thought about her in past tense before; he can't imagine world that she's not a part of, where she fades into nothing but memory, and he hates it more than anything)

If he was sane before, he isn't now.

The fury explodes, landmines of rage and fire bursting across his skin. The boy stepped off his podium and he's been blown to smithereens, leaving only the ashes of a skeleton. He lunges at Thresh and they fall to the floor, fists and bone and flesh ripping, dark skin pale skin, you can't tell where Thresh ends and the monster begins.

Thresh screams and Cato grabs his jaw, hooking his teeth and ripping out half of them with a lump of stringy, dripping flesh-

Cato brings his sword down and Thresh grabs it just before the hilt, the steel biting down on his finger-bones-

A fist against a nose, a sickly-sweet crunch-

Cato's sword goes flying, but Thresh is torn in shreds with holes and gashes-

He feints, he ducks, and Cato shoves a fist into a bright red wound in Thresh's stomach and grabs and pulls-

The image of Cato, holding a fistful of Thresh's bloody innards in triumph, as the tears fall down the boy's face and he collapses to the ground is one that will live in infamy for as long as there are Hunger Games.

When he makes his last stand, it's on a blood-slick Cornucopia with the Seam girl pointing an arrow between his eyes and her lover clenched between his forearms.

The boy is choking, his face turning the colour of a bruise, the breath choking out. The girl's fingers are trembling, the silver bow seeming less threatening every second.

The boy's eyes roll back in his head, and the girl howls.

Her arrows shoots forward with lightning precision and hits the boy's body as Cato holds it up, skull rolling back on his neck and he charges forward and collides into the girl and she slips, stumbles, screams and falls.

They play it in slow-motion at the recaps- Peeta's limp corpse colliding into a crying Katniss even as she fumbles with her bow, his body pinning her to the ground as the mutts snarl and catch the scent of blood and bare pearl-white teeth.

Cato watches as the mutts rip at them, as Katniss snatches her bow and aims arrow after arrow at them. But they overpower her eventually, and the sleek, vicious mutt that Cato can't help calling Clove sinks its teeth into her throat and her cannon sounds.

He doesn't want to go. It had her eyes. It almost felt like she was there.

As a reward, he supposes, Snow lets him have two weeks with his family. When he gets out of the train, his parents are waiting, his mother weeping softly. Even the dog, bounds up into his arms to meet him, sniffling at his face. The rest of the District too, reporters and excited children, giggling girls with their made-up faces, aspiring boys and Volunteer hopefuls.

There's a traditional ceremony- they burn the death mask they'd made for him at the start, and the bronze-gold alloy it was made from melts down into liquid and is poured into a sword mould. They hang it on the door of his home in Victor's Village, saying immortal, saying this is what you cheated. They chant his name, over and over, Cato Cato Cato.

Clove's funeral is a quieter affair. The plain white coffin she is shipped home in is discarded, her body hoisted into the marble casket. The mask is placed over her face, eyes still open, and the lid is slid shut, heavy and unyielding. He makes sure they bury her knives with her. It's what she would have wanted.

Her casket is plain, bearing only her first name. But Cato knows what it should say. She deserved better. That's what he would write.

When Snow summons him to the Capitol and he makes his first appointments, he doesn't particularly see what the fuss is about. He only has three, and they're all women. He's fucked girls before, and women aren't particularly different, even if some are violet-skinned and have gems for eyes.

His fourth is an almost-thirty year old woman named Adserta Crane. The name seems familiar and she says it should be- her father is Seneca, Head Gamemaker. Snow is delighted with the latest Games- that plot twist, that fight with Thresh, that girl with her arrows, it's better drama than any reality TV-show could ever come up with.

"And perhaps," she titters, "he'll let me keep you indefinitely."

And he does, apparently. All his meetings from then on are with her. Her skin goes from pale blue to a bright yellow, and he spends almost every night with her now, she crawls up on top of him and whispers nonsense in his ears, blackpurple hair trickling down her back. She's mostly an annoyance, but a tolerable one. If he can face Thresh and Katniss and Clove's glass-eyed corpse, he can fuck some plastic woman from the Capitol.

She takes him to other places, too. Drags him along to balls and dinners and galas, drapes herself in silk and satin gowns, clings to his forearm. Shows him off like a pretty trophy that sings, dresses him up in suits. He won't get any of their surgeries, but he lets himself be pulled to her events and in front of the bug-eyed cameras, their photographs in the magazines: (Head Gamemaker's daughter talks budding romance with this year's hottest Victor).

Adserta bubbles that he's becoming a celebrity, a proper one, and tucks her yellow, tattooed legs around his waist as they sit on her couch, drinking her wine, and she reaches glittery nails under her shirt, and he takes

it as a cue to fuck her again. She's enamoured with him. Her pretty little Victor.

He takes what he can get. Adserta is fake and made-up, but it's just her for now, and he's seen what some of the other Victors are made to do, and as much as it pains him to admit it, she's his protector. She doesn't like to share, she admits in a guilty pout, fake childishness in her voice. And no one will mess with her Daddie.

He's empty enough that he doesn't care anymore, that when she proposes to him on New Year's Day he takes her by one hand and says yes in a dull blank voice. She squeals and clutches his waist, and he starts to despise her.

When she finally has the decency to die, she's taken twenty-six years of his life. He's not even sure what she dies of, only that she's finally gone. She's only given him one good thing to show for it.

You'd think that Snow would let him be forgotten. But no. The balls and events Adserta has pulled him back and forth to haven't gone unnoticed by paparazzi, his shocking Games have not been forgotten. There are still people in the Capitol that want him to smile and lie down for them, be their little fucktoy. When the notice is pressed into his hand, a date and time and name and a white rose, he tears it into shreds and goes home.

His District taught him not to feel. The children he hunted down didn't seem real- he doesn't know their names, mostly, he's not numb, he just doesn't see why he should feel anything for them. It was bred out of him. Even Clove. Maybe if they lived in another district he could have loved her. But you can't grow affectionate towards your district partner, how else would you kill them?

No one ever told him you couldn't love your son.

When the 100th Hunger Games roll round, the twist is that children of previous Victors are to be reaped. He punches a hole right through his television set. And he has to watch as Litan, not yet thirteen and skinny and wide-eyed, is called into the arena.

To pay for his father's sins.

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