After they win, there is no pride, no honour. Only pain.

Clove had carved patterns in the girl from 12's face just like she'd been told to do, and Cato had watched, right after he'd skewered thresh through the throat with his sword. Give them a good show, that was what their mentor's had stressed over and over again. When it was all over, when Clove all covered in her opponents blood drove her knife through the poor girls heart, she did not seem satisfied like he expected. If anything, Cato could have sworn she looked empty.

That night the two slept in the cornucopia and she cried in his arms.
He doesn't know if she's bluffing, trying to make herself seem remorseful and pained after killing the obvious favourite. Clove never cries.
He runs his hand across her hair and tells her they'll be home soon. She just buries her head against his shoulder and mutters incoherent sentences.

They find Peeta the next day, covered in dirt and grime, his leg smelling foul and repugnant. He's crawled out of some funny little cave, calling out for Katniss, screaming her name. Clove can't handle it; she walks away white faced as Cato slides his sword across the boy's throat. He doesn't feel satisfied by the act, doesn't feel glorified and proud. He can't help but wonder what it would feel like to lose Clove, to have seen her face light up in the sky like Peeta must have for Katniss. He can't help but think he would have wound up mad too.

There are only three of them left now, and that red headed nymph that's been a no show for most of the games proves more formidable than they imagined.

The three of them practically dance across the cornucopia, careful to not land their feet too close to the snapping mouths of the mutts, the red haired girl always darting out of their reach. When Clove finally catches hold of her she's beyond insane with rage and buries the knife again and again in the girls flesh until Cato pulls her off, all too disturbed by it all. She buries her face against his chest and mutters over and over the same sentence.

"I want to go home"

She stabs herself the very second they say there can only be one winner. Tilts the hilt of her knife towards herself and buries it in her stomach. Cato screams, catching her as she falls, swearing loudly as he shakes her, begging her not to die on him. She flutters in and out of consciousness, soft eyelashes grazing against pale freckled skin.

He loses the remaining shreds of sanity he has left. He claws at his face, rips out chunks of his hair, before almost unthinkingly slicing his wrists open with one of her knives.
She moans, tries feebly to stem the blood leaking from his wrists with her tiny little hands, but it's no use, they'll both die.

He curls his head up on her chest, which is weezy, heart like a hummingbird, and then drifts out of consciousness.

When he wakes, he's in a hospital gown, surrounded by Capitol medics. He screams, tears the wires and blinking monitors free from him, grabs hold of the first scalpel he can find and plunges it into his stomach. He doesn't want to be there, because surely if he's alive then she must be dead, and right now life without her is unthinkable.

The next time he wakes they've made the smart decision to have her bed next to his, so he knows they made the decision to make them both victors.

For the first time since he was a small boy, Cato cries.

They are both awkward throughout the interview. Cato holds it together for them as best he can, rambling on about how in the end he couldn't live without her, or some crap like that his mentor has told him to say. Clove just sits beside him and forces smiles, her eyes filling up with awful tears each time from the strain of it all. She says but one sentence through the whole interview.

"I just wanted to go home."

When they do get home they both move into the same victors house. They lie intertwined in the oversized bed, her head buried in the nape of his neck, his hands twined through her dark hair.

Some nights they do more than just lie there. But it's not the same as it was before the games. Beforehand they had tore into each other, desperate to prove themselves better than the other, always wanting to be the winner, in a game that could never really have one. It's different now though, they both understand that winning doesn't always end up as gratifying as you think it does. Instead they move slowly, hands caressing each other's skin, her long ebony hair draped almost across both their faces the whole time, shielding them from the horrors they now see constantly, the memories of the boys and the girls whose lives they took away in the games.

When the victory tour finally rolls out, everything is so much worse.

12 is first, and Clove actually breaks down on stage, unable to stare into the eyes of the tiny blonde girl who's sister she cut up like a slab of meat. Afterwards in the privacy of the Justice Building, away from the public eye the peacekeepers dislocate her shoulder and then pop it back in just as fast, as punishment, but she doesn't make a sound, doesn't even flinch. It hurt much less than looking into the child's eyes.

Four is soothing; there is much madness to be discovered in the form of Annie Cresta. Cato knows almost instinctively that Clove will end up like her, and he like Finnick. She stark raving mad and he forever unable to give up on her. It's like seeing into the future, and despite how dismal it is it's all too calming.

The Capitol is the worst of it all.

They send him into a room after the dinner with a small woman with magenta skin, who begs him to call her Clove, who asks him to hurt her.
He does hurt her, but not how she wants. He leaves her in the room with a bleeding nose and a black eye and tells Snow that he'll do anything they ask, except call them Clove.
Snow much to his surprise accepts.

Clove can't handle her clients; they all want her to cut them.
"I keep seeing her when I do it Cato" she sobs, balling the sheets up in her hands underneath him. He wraps her up in his arms, presses his lips to her head.

"I love you Clove."

It rolls off his tongue almost before he's even had a chance to think about it and he instantly regrets it. She cries harder.

"There's no time for love. Not for people like us."

They lose both tributes in the following year's games. The boy dies in the bloodbath, overestimating himself against his opponents, while the girl has her throat slit by the boy from district 1 while she sleeps. Cato gets drunk and vomits everywhere; Clove just locks herself away in her room. That night when the officials come to take them to their clients she just screams and claws at their faces, refusing to leave.

In the end it's the two of them hulled up in her bedroom, the dresser blocking the doorway.

"I used to hide like this to keep daddy away from me." she mumbles into his shoulder as they sit in a crumpled heap beside the dresser, her lips grazing a puckered scar earned long ago in training.

That night they return to their old ways. It's brutal, her hands clawing the flesh from his back, his hands pressing into her hard, bruising the porcelain skin. Afterwards she practically melts into him, purring like a cat.

"I know you love me too Clove." He says, tracing and counting the freckles on her cheek with his finger, hardly able to see her in the dim light of the room.

She brushes his hair back from his forehead, traces a pattern absentmindedly across his brow lines.

"How could I not?"

The Capitol punishes them severely this time. They send bolts of electricity through her body over and over, forcing him to watch. He screams, snaps the neck of one of peacekeepers who's holding him down. They beat him severely for that. Break his arm in three places and crack one of his ribs.

The train ride home is spent in silence, the two of them quietly indulging in some morphling one of the district six mentors slipped them on their way out.

Within three months, Clove is pregnant. She was against it at first, thought it a ridiculous idea, but he figures it'll stop them sending her to clients.

He's right it does. Caesar Flickerman interviews the two of them, who sit stuck together at the sides, her hand gripping his so tightly that her knuckles are ivory white.
"Sixteen is an awfully young age to become a mother don't you think?" he asks Clove, flashing the camera his trademark grin. She pauses for a moment, her eyes shifting to black.

"Oh I don't know really. Do you consider fourteen to be too young an age to commit multiple counts of murder?"

They beat Cato that night instead of her, and she cries her apologies into his hair.

Their daughter has her dark hair and his blue eyes. Cora. Clove is not as bad a mother as she first thought she'd be. She finds that the child has given her a reason to smile. Cato can't help but marvel as the little girl grows, so fast, so strong, sweet dark curls inching down her back as the months pass by. She is perfect and she is theirs.

The Capitol kill her anyway.

He should have known they would, that kind of happiness is never going to be allowed for them. It hurts in a place so deep inside him that he knows he'll never be free of the pain.

Clove disappears into a darkness he didn't even know existed, and no matter how hard he tries he can't bring her back from it. She's borderline catatonic most of the time, and when she's snapped out of that she's brash, unthinking, crying all the time. Cato doesn't know what to do anymore; he doesn't know how to fix this.

She kills herself the night before her eighteenth birthday. He finds her body partially submerged in the bath, dark hair making the water ripple, her wrists still staining it red. He wraps her tiny body up in his arms and he screams, screams until his voice is hoarse and cracked, screams until someone finally comes and pulls him away, pulls him away from her tiny frail body. His Clove, gone like that.

He has nothing to lose anymore.

He volunteers to take the place of mentor over Brutus for the year, and he trains both his tributes up with an intensity he didn't even know he was capable of producing. The boy has dirty blonde hair and green eyes. The girl is small, dark haired and blue eyed. Cora. She looks just like Cora, but older. How she would have eventually looked had they the decency to let her live.

It appears the girl also possessed some of Clove's ferocity, because she inevitably comes out the winner.
He eagerly awaits the victory tour. The Capitol stop above all else.

Before he leaves he collects a punnet of nightlock from the districts black market, hiding the berries in amongst a basket of fruit. He worries constantly that they'll be discovered on arrival, but just as he hoped the officials mistake them for blueberries.

The night of the dinner he collects a handful, pushes them into a small blue and green pastry already over flowing with berries and carefully places it onto the presidents tasting plate unnoticed as he talks to him.

"I'm deeply sorry for your losses Cato, it's been quite a year for you, I can only imagine how deflated you must feel."
Snow smirks as he says it and Cato can feel his blood boiling underneath his skin, struggles to remain composed. He manages a smile that's half a grimace.

"You have no idea."

He avoids the presidents snake like gaze and swallows the cherry tart he's had clasped in his hands almost whole. Deflated he may be, but not defeated, not quite yet.

By the time Snow realizes what's been pushed into his pastry it's too late. He slumps onto the ground and Cato as best he can imitates the sound of a canon going off. His laugh afterwards is beyond manic. All eyes in the room are on him and soon enough security closes in.

When they shoot a bullet across the room and it lodges in his brain, Cato can't help but think that death hasn't come fast enough.

The last things that flash through his head are dark hair and sparsely freckled skin.
There's no more pain.
Only Clove.

AN: I am an awful person. This is what I do when I can't sleep at three in the morning. I break my own heart into tiny pieces.