i was dead when i woke up this morning (the hunger games | cato/clove)

[fiachairecht]

i was dead when i woke up this morning. the hunger games - suzanne collins, cato/clove. they adjust to life outside the arena but not to life as victors, plural. 909w, rated m. for an au comment ficathon on lj years ago.

the hunger games, cato/clove, they win instead of peeta/katniss: you get scared when we're alone, like i'm gonna suck your blood

They don't want to be here, not like this.

(The crowd doesn't want them here.)

They raise joined hands high above their crowned heads, shining silver and gold in the floodlights; but the crowns are not as heavy as the weight of millions of eyes that condemn them for being alive. They don't belong on the victor's platform, those eyes say, that platform was for the lovers of District Twelve. Not the soldiers of District Two. The soldiers who will spend weeks being condemned for the crime of being alive, before the Capitol sighs, turns to the inevitable, and embraces them.

A laugh bubbles in Clove’s throat; she makes no effort to stop it. Was it a crime, what they did? Was it a crime, as her knife slashed the fiery girl's last arrow out of the air, and then back down, whispering through the air to carve into the girl's chest? Was it a crime, as Cato's sword slipped ever deeper into the boy's side, stained red by its macabre sheath? Is it a crime, being alive?

Clove says: no

The crowd, in their silence, says: yes

Clove thinks that the true crime is that Cato is standing with her, instead of dead on the ground at her feet. That the only time she got to feel his blood rushing under her palms was when she stripped him bare in the forest, riding him til she thought they might both break. She never got to see how beautiful her knife would look gleaming in his throat, never got to watch the blood drip out of his chest and paint pictures on the ground. She was the one who won the games for both of them when she took down Girl Twelve. She should be up here alone.

There's still time for that, a voice in her mind whispers, and the smile that spreads across her face could topple cities.

*

They return to District 2, but they don’t go home, not quite.  Home was the academy, and then the training center.  Home was not these mansions in the victor’s village

They move differently around each other now. Slowly, warily, like they're not quite sure how to deal with the other one being alive. Cato remembers the terrible light in Clove's eyes as she described what she'd like to do to the girl from Twelve, I'd give the audience a good show, and her grin had been inhuman. He had shivered, later, remembering, knowing that it wasn't only Girl Twelve's death she was planning to turn into a show, but his as well.

He wonders what it would have been like. He wonders if she would still try, here where there's no cameras to put on a show for. When they fuck, his fingers find her throat and he wonders what all those little bones would feel like, cracking under his hands.

*

Clove's name is carved into the girl from Twelve's cheek and sometimes she wants to do the same to Cato. It was her victory, after all, and he could use the reminding. She imagines licking the blood from his cuts, all coppery and sickly-sweet against her tongue. One day she gets careless, knocks a bottle of juice off the counter, and it spreads sticky and red across the floor. Cato's eyes jump from the spill, to her, to the knife at her waist, and he bolts from the room.

They are more scared of each other outside the arena than inside. They each know the other is supposed to be dead.

She dips her knife into the fallen juice and carves her name into the wall. The stains dripping down look enough like blood to satisfy her, for now.

*

Cato doesn’t fool himself into thinking that she’d be easy to kill. Oh, when the visitors come, she puts on a show, laughing with other victors and swathed in silks. But at night, he lies in bed and imagines he can hear the rhythmic thud of her knives landing one by one in the wall of the house she has claimed for target practice (they live together, they must, the fools in the Capitol need a love story no matter how twisted. He wonders what they'd think if they knew how he lay awake, fingers twitching with the urge to kill his companion. If they knew how Clove imagined his heart every time she threw a knife).

*

She takes him hard against the couch one night, one hand on his cock and the other gouging deep cuts into the floorboards. (They do not bleed. She is disappointed.) He's not surprised when the blade comes to rest at his throat. he's always admired the knives more than the girl.

She licks across the blade into his mouth, the steel-to-skin transformation lighting a fire in her core. He wants to get up, to run, to scream, but her eyes hold him in place. He sees the muscles in her arms flex, her wrist prepared for the strike that would end his life. His first thought is I should have killed you in the arena, his second, We were both dead already, I just didn’t notice, and then he doesn't think anything at all.

*

When they find her in the morning the arterial spray that fell on her face like warm rain is gone. She has devoured it already. Cato's blood sings in her veins and she has never felt more alive.

Comments

[luckyzukky]

oh this is SO fucked up i'm barely familiar with hunger games but i loveee this AU and how fucked this relationship is

[fiachairecht]

aaaaa ty <33 tbh this is older even than the 2014 date it had on ao3 (the lj ficathon it was for was like? 2011? 2012??) and i was like 'do i even wanna crosspost' but the toxicity simply won out they are SO fucked up they SHOULD kill each other for my joy...