161. i was born bad (but then i met you)
Title | i was born bad (but then i met you)
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Clove, Cato, various Tributes.
Summary | "You gonna cry when you kill me, Clove?" he asks, grinning breathlessly.
Notes | I haven't read the books in many months, so if any of this is not canon compliant, that's why. This is just the result of my feelings.
They call her Clover when she's a little girl.
It suits her, when she's young, a child with a mess of black curls and too many freckles across her nose. She scorns playing with the other girls in favour of running around with the boys, and it makes her parents, her older brother, laugh. The only use she has for knives is carving her name, C-L-O-V-E-R, into the prettiest stones she can find.
Clovers are harmless, useless flowers, not good for much but wishing and walking over.
When she's eleven, she drops the 'r' at the end of her name.
The training is her father's idea.
They never sent her brother. He was older but he was quieter, a hard worker but not a tough one. He stuck to his given name, Bramble - he never went by Bram. He had no chance of victory.
Clove does, though.
She will always remember her mother's reaction, the knife dropped on the floor, dinner burning as it went ignored. Her son had never been considered and, stupidly, she'd thought her daughter was safe by proxy.
She will win, her father says. Not she can win. He says, she will.
Eleven years old, Clove picks up the knife from the floor and runs the tip of her finger along the sharp, deathly blade.
She kills their cat. That is what solidifies the plan.
She kills it with one casual, lethal throw of the smallest of knives. It never stood a chance.
Her father laughs, his smile stretching wide. Bram, her brother, cries.
That's what she thinks about, in the arena, Thresh's large hands on her body, too quick, too big. She doesn't stand a chance.
She thinks about her brother, back in District Two, back at home, watching her die on a screen somewhere. She wonders if he's crying, if he's mourning the loss of the sister that came into the world four years after he did, eating up all of their father's attention. She wonders if he's laughing, if he sees it as justice, served at long last. She thinks that, perhaps, he does both.
That's what Clove thinks about in the seconds before she dies.
That, and Cato.
They meet at training.
He is four years older, the age of her brother but so very different, but she's not afraid of him, and she never will be.
"I'm going to kill you one day," she says, cocky smirk on her lips, head tilted to one side, awaiting his reaction.
Cato laughs and tugs at one of her braids. "Let's kill the rest of 'em first."
She likes to impress him. He is brutal, merciless - perfect - and she likes to show him up, to show him her own brutality.
She likes to make him laugh, that surprised, sudden sound that just bursts from his lungs, full and fresh and alive.
It isn't until she's thirteen that she recognizes all of this as flirting.
Careers of the same age usually volunteered. Eighteen was the ideal; you would be bigger and stronger and better. Cato is the ideal career, trained from his childhood to do just that, trained to win.
Clove doesn't have that kind of patience. She volunteers, first because ladies first, the year he is eighteen.
There is a murmur in the crowd. Her brother's eyes stay on the ground, her mother will not look at her. The sun glints against her father's gaze.
But all she cares about is Cato, standing in the crowd, shaking his head at her insolence, at her bravery, full of reluctant admiration.
"I'm going to kill you," she whispers to him when they shake hands, her words too low to be caught by the microphone between them.
He grins at her, a lethal sort of thing.
The train ride is boring. They ignore their mentors, huddling up together by the window.
"You could've waited, you know," Cato says in this odd voice, like he's straining to sound casual.
"I didn't need to," she shrugs.
"You're a brat," he says after a long beat of silence. "You know that?"
She giggles, adrenaline coursing in her blood. Her lips feel numb.
Her prep team is devastated by the minute scar between her breasts, over her heart. It's the smallest thing, but it's sharp, an ugly red, and there's not much makeup can do for it. There is a brief, hurried discussion about some kind of cosmetic surgery.
Clove lays still on the table under the harsh, unforgiving lights.
That scar is a mark from Cato, a souvenir from two months ago. He'd pricked her skin with the very tip of a knife; their trainer had not been pleased.
She'd watched her own blood pool up from her skin, felt her heart beating fast beneath that very spot. She'd considered her own mortality.
And she gave Cato her virginity forty-seven minutes later, in one of the changing rooms, gave it to him but it had hurt anyway, even when his hand covered her breast, his calloused thumb brushing briefly over her fresh wound.
"Clover," he'd said quietly, breathing her name into her tangled hair.
She dug her nails into his biceps, brazen but unsure. She hadn't corrected him.
The scar stays, in the end. Her clothes are constructed so that they don't show too much cleavage - she's too young, after all. That's what her stylists say.
She sleeps soundly the night before the games, sleeps in a soft pink nightgown supplied by the Capitol, sleeps with her head pillowed on Cato's stomach, his hands in her hair.
He wakes her too early in the morning. She wonders if he slept at all.
Everything is different in the arena.
Clove thinks, Papa, watch me. She thinks, don't let me die. She thinks, I am going to win.
She laughs a lot, too loud and too hoarse and too bright, but it keeps her sane. Cato holds her hand sometimes, or presses his palm to the small of her back, and that helps, too.
Glimmer is too old and too pretty and too flirtatious, just too much all around. It makes sense not to like Glimmer, she'd never really liked other girls.
Clove thinks, over and over again, trekking after the others, only Lover Boy from District Twelve behind her, watching the way Glimmer flicks her hair in Cato's direction, I am going to kill you.
The killing is the easiest part.
They take turns with it, whoever happens to be closest. Lover Boy isn't much help, but he'll be disposable in the end and they all know that.
She watches Cato kill, watches his hand darken with the stain of blood, and she gets the strangest craving for those hands on her skin.
She thinks it will be easier with Glimmer and Marvel gone.
It isn't.
They race through the forest, Cato a half-step behind her - he always is, she's smaller and faster. She's breathing hard and he is too, she can hear the strain in the way he inhales and exhales. The sun stings their eyes.
Cato laughs, that burst of mirth and air, when he sees the tears rolling slowly out of the corner of her eyes. "You gonna cry when you kill me, Clove?" he asks, grinning breathlessly.
She laughs, but she doesn't say anything, and it's a relief when he kisses her, hidden behind the falling branches of trees.
The rules are changed in a single announcement that shatters everything Clove has ever known.
She doesn't understand at first; she can't do anything but stare at the sky. Cato has to grab her and shake her, touch his hand to her sun-freckled cheeks, sink his fingers into her mussed-up hair.
"Clover," he says, his voice oddly hushed and right by her ear, the way it was that day in training when he marked her heart. "Clove - "
She looks into his face, his blonde hair and the eyes she knows so well, the mouth that smiles like it's hiding secrets.
And all she can say is, "Cato."
And all she can think of is home.
She is quiet in the evening, leaning against his shoulder, an apple in her hands that she has no real desire to eat.
"We're going to win," Cato breathes into the cool night air. "Both of us. Don't you get that?"
"I don't know," she says very softly, because she doesn't.
"Clove - "
"How would you do it?" she asks, abrupt and too sharp for the quiet of the night.
He knows right away what she's talking about. "In your back," he says, fingers tracing her spine. "A surprise. A quick one. It wouldn't hurt so much."
"With what?"
He smiles, lips against her cheek, whispers, "A knife."
"Do you love me?" she asks him on the morning that she'll die.
He cuts his gaze to her, taken aback - it's hard to get that reaction from him, and she's almost proud of it. "You kidding me?" he laughs.
She rolls her eyes. "It's just a question."
"Quit it," he says. "Twelve's got that gimmick covered."
Clove shrugs, glancing around them, keeping watch. "Just a question," she says again.
"Why?" He's laughing again. "D'you love me or something? Are they going to talk about it when we get home? Stars were never crossed for the lovers from District Two," he says, in his best theatrical interpretation of a commentator. He's laughing, still. "You're a kid, Clove."
"You said it wouldn't hurt so much," she murmurs. "When you killed me."
His question echoes in her tired mind, bouncing around, taking up all the space. D'you love me or something?
He gives her a strange look. "You're going to kill me, remember?"
The ghost of a smile finds its way to her lips, the last genuine one she'll ever have. "Yeah. Someday."
She screams for Cato the moment Thresh puts his hands on her, screams for him at the top of her lungs.
This is not how it was supposed to happen, at the hands of someone else, with the girl from Twelve watching, her eyes wide like she's never seen death.
But Cato doesn't come. Cato doesn't come and the world blurs too quickly around her. The girl from Twelve is still watching and Thresh is yelling and she knows, with perfect clarity, that this is her ending.
"Cato!" she screams, one more time, but she doesn't have enough air in her lungs for the rest of the words.
In her head, she tells him, yes.
In her head, she thinks, it was supposed to be you, inmyback, a surprise, withaknife, you'd call me clover, you'ddoitright.
And then she dies.
fin.
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Clove, Cato, various Tributes.
Summary | "You gonna cry when you kill me, Clove?" he asks, grinning breathlessly.
Notes | I haven't read the books in many months, so if any of this is not canon compliant, that's why. This is just the result of my feelings.
They call her Clover when she's a little girl.
It suits her, when she's young, a child with a mess of black curls and too many freckles across her nose. She scorns playing with the other girls in favour of running around with the boys, and it makes her parents, her older brother, laugh. The only use she has for knives is carving her name, C-L-O-V-E-R, into the prettiest stones she can find.
Clovers are harmless, useless flowers, not good for much but wishing and walking over.
When she's eleven, she drops the 'r' at the end of her name.
The training is her father's idea.
They never sent her brother. He was older but he was quieter, a hard worker but not a tough one. He stuck to his given name, Bramble - he never went by Bram. He had no chance of victory.
Clove does, though.
She will always remember her mother's reaction, the knife dropped on the floor, dinner burning as it went ignored. Her son had never been considered and, stupidly, she'd thought her daughter was safe by proxy.
She will win, her father says. Not she can win. He says, she will.
Eleven years old, Clove picks up the knife from the floor and runs the tip of her finger along the sharp, deathly blade.
She kills their cat. That is what solidifies the plan.
She kills it with one casual, lethal throw of the smallest of knives. It never stood a chance.
Her father laughs, his smile stretching wide. Bram, her brother, cries.
That's what she thinks about, in the arena, Thresh's large hands on her body, too quick, too big. She doesn't stand a chance.
She thinks about her brother, back in District Two, back at home, watching her die on a screen somewhere. She wonders if he's crying, if he's mourning the loss of the sister that came into the world four years after he did, eating up all of their father's attention. She wonders if he's laughing, if he sees it as justice, served at long last. She thinks that, perhaps, he does both.
That's what Clove thinks about in the seconds before she dies.
That, and Cato.
They meet at training.
He is four years older, the age of her brother but so very different, but she's not afraid of him, and she never will be.
"I'm going to kill you one day," she says, cocky smirk on her lips, head tilted to one side, awaiting his reaction.
Cato laughs and tugs at one of her braids. "Let's kill the rest of 'em first."
She likes to impress him. He is brutal, merciless - perfect - and she likes to show him up, to show him her own brutality.
She likes to make him laugh, that surprised, sudden sound that just bursts from his lungs, full and fresh and alive.
It isn't until she's thirteen that she recognizes all of this as flirting.
Careers of the same age usually volunteered. Eighteen was the ideal; you would be bigger and stronger and better. Cato is the ideal career, trained from his childhood to do just that, trained to win.
Clove doesn't have that kind of patience. She volunteers, first because ladies first, the year he is eighteen.
There is a murmur in the crowd. Her brother's eyes stay on the ground, her mother will not look at her. The sun glints against her father's gaze.
But all she cares about is Cato, standing in the crowd, shaking his head at her insolence, at her bravery, full of reluctant admiration.
"I'm going to kill you," she whispers to him when they shake hands, her words too low to be caught by the microphone between them.
He grins at her, a lethal sort of thing.
The train ride is boring. They ignore their mentors, huddling up together by the window.
"You could've waited, you know," Cato says in this odd voice, like he's straining to sound casual.
"I didn't need to," she shrugs.
"You're a brat," he says after a long beat of silence. "You know that?"
She giggles, adrenaline coursing in her blood. Her lips feel numb.
Her prep team is devastated by the minute scar between her breasts, over her heart. It's the smallest thing, but it's sharp, an ugly red, and there's not much makeup can do for it. There is a brief, hurried discussion about some kind of cosmetic surgery.
Clove lays still on the table under the harsh, unforgiving lights.
That scar is a mark from Cato, a souvenir from two months ago. He'd pricked her skin with the very tip of a knife; their trainer had not been pleased.
She'd watched her own blood pool up from her skin, felt her heart beating fast beneath that very spot. She'd considered her own mortality.
And she gave Cato her virginity forty-seven minutes later, in one of the changing rooms, gave it to him but it had hurt anyway, even when his hand covered her breast, his calloused thumb brushing briefly over her fresh wound.
"Clover," he'd said quietly, breathing her name into her tangled hair.
She dug her nails into his biceps, brazen but unsure. She hadn't corrected him.
The scar stays, in the end. Her clothes are constructed so that they don't show too much cleavage - she's too young, after all. That's what her stylists say.
She sleeps soundly the night before the games, sleeps in a soft pink nightgown supplied by the Capitol, sleeps with her head pillowed on Cato's stomach, his hands in her hair.
He wakes her too early in the morning. She wonders if he slept at all.
Everything is different in the arena.
Clove thinks, Papa, watch me. She thinks, don't let me die. She thinks, I am going to win.
She laughs a lot, too loud and too hoarse and too bright, but it keeps her sane. Cato holds her hand sometimes, or presses his palm to the small of her back, and that helps, too.
Glimmer is too old and too pretty and too flirtatious, just too much all around. It makes sense not to like Glimmer, she'd never really liked other girls.
Clove thinks, over and over again, trekking after the others, only Lover Boy from District Twelve behind her, watching the way Glimmer flicks her hair in Cato's direction, I am going to kill you.
The killing is the easiest part.
They take turns with it, whoever happens to be closest. Lover Boy isn't much help, but he'll be disposable in the end and they all know that.
She watches Cato kill, watches his hand darken with the stain of blood, and she gets the strangest craving for those hands on her skin.
She thinks it will be easier with Glimmer and Marvel gone.
It isn't.
They race through the forest, Cato a half-step behind her - he always is, she's smaller and faster. She's breathing hard and he is too, she can hear the strain in the way he inhales and exhales. The sun stings their eyes.
Cato laughs, that burst of mirth and air, when he sees the tears rolling slowly out of the corner of her eyes. "You gonna cry when you kill me, Clove?" he asks, grinning breathlessly.
She laughs, but she doesn't say anything, and it's a relief when he kisses her, hidden behind the falling branches of trees.
The rules are changed in a single announcement that shatters everything Clove has ever known.
She doesn't understand at first; she can't do anything but stare at the sky. Cato has to grab her and shake her, touch his hand to her sun-freckled cheeks, sink his fingers into her mussed-up hair.
"Clover," he says, his voice oddly hushed and right by her ear, the way it was that day in training when he marked her heart. "Clove - "
She looks into his face, his blonde hair and the eyes she knows so well, the mouth that smiles like it's hiding secrets.
And all she can say is, "Cato."
And all she can think of is home.
She is quiet in the evening, leaning against his shoulder, an apple in her hands that she has no real desire to eat.
"We're going to win," Cato breathes into the cool night air. "Both of us. Don't you get that?"
"I don't know," she says very softly, because she doesn't.
"Clove - "
"How would you do it?" she asks, abrupt and too sharp for the quiet of the night.
He knows right away what she's talking about. "In your back," he says, fingers tracing her spine. "A surprise. A quick one. It wouldn't hurt so much."
"With what?"
He smiles, lips against her cheek, whispers, "A knife."
"Do you love me?" she asks him on the morning that she'll die.
He cuts his gaze to her, taken aback - it's hard to get that reaction from him, and she's almost proud of it. "You kidding me?" he laughs.
She rolls her eyes. "It's just a question."
"Quit it," he says. "Twelve's got that gimmick covered."
Clove shrugs, glancing around them, keeping watch. "Just a question," she says again.
"Why?" He's laughing again. "D'you love me or something? Are they going to talk about it when we get home? Stars were never crossed for the lovers from District Two," he says, in his best theatrical interpretation of a commentator. He's laughing, still. "You're a kid, Clove."
"You said it wouldn't hurt so much," she murmurs. "When you killed me."
His question echoes in her tired mind, bouncing around, taking up all the space. D'you love me or something?
He gives her a strange look. "You're going to kill me, remember?"
The ghost of a smile finds its way to her lips, the last genuine one she'll ever have. "Yeah. Someday."
She screams for Cato the moment Thresh puts his hands on her, screams for him at the top of her lungs.
This is not how it was supposed to happen, at the hands of someone else, with the girl from Twelve watching, her eyes wide like she's never seen death.
But Cato doesn't come. Cato doesn't come and the world blurs too quickly around her. The girl from Twelve is still watching and Thresh is yelling and she knows, with perfect clarity, that this is her ending.
"Cato!" she screams, one more time, but she doesn't have enough air in her lungs for the rest of the words.
In her head, she tells him, yes.
In her head, she thinks, it was supposed to be you, inmyback, a surprise, withaknife, you'd call me clover, you'ddoitright.
And then she dies.
fin.