Disclaimer: I do not own The Hunger Games.

Author's Note: Okay, so I suck. I suck at updating, I suck at keeping promises about updating, and I clearly suck at keeping New Year's Resolutions about updating. I'm really sorry if this chapter sucks, too... which I sort of feel like it does. But I really do want to finish this story, so, even if its last chapters are sort of sucky, I will post them eventually.

Anyway, if you haven't been scared off by my inactivity or quality-warnings, thank you so much to anyone who's still interested in reading this! And thank you so much - very belatedly, I know - to everyone who read the last chapter! Especially to accioyourheart, halcyon calamity, mousegoesrawr, Payson-Nicky-forever, Marina, Thornwillow6166, GottaLoveMEgan, clovelycato555, catoclove4eva, Frances Odair, Jesus the Gardener, HungerGamesHarryPotter7887, SafeEyesOpen, lbbonray, Baxter54132, TheClatoObbseser, OdairBear, aBIGfanofthis, fLowergirL11, luvxas37, argonaughty, HarvestGirl101, fizzyfurofknives, Live-Life-Loving, MissTitania, turtelswilltrend, DaffodilChains, and to everyone who reviewed anonymously!

Things turn fairly mundane from there. Cato continues breaking into Clove's home each morning. She carries on threatening him with castration. They both go on attacking one another with a variety sharp objects. The only deviation from routine - the only visible deviation, at least - is that Cato now has an array of crude comments that he can sling at her anytime he liked. Snark about her loose morals and crazy crush on him and the like. She, in turn, has learned to shrug these remarks off with some retort about his disappointing lack of virility. And that's the end of it.

Or so it should have been.

"The Reaping is soon."

These are the first words Clove hears upon yawning her way down the stairs to her kitchen. The first sight, naturally, is Cato pacing his way across her wooden panel floors. It scares her sometimes how accustomed she's grown to his daily presence there. Bloodthirsty, brutish, bipolar home-invaders simply don't make good houseguests.

She raises an eyebrow. "So you learned how to read a calendar. Congratulations. Maybe you'll figure out children's books by next year."

The Reaping is soon. Of all the obvious facts… As if every single trainee at the Academy hasn't been working even more manically than usual. As if she hasn't been tossing and turning each night, unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to think about anything other than the Reaping. The tribute selection.

Her stomach churns as she contemplates the food in her kitchen. Grinding her teeth together, she forces herself to reach for a protein supplement and a banana. The last thing she needs is to lose more weight. Clove can't do much about her small frame or lacking height, but she can keep herself from looking as though she belongs among the starving slum of the backwoods districts. If she can manage sparring with Cato, the physical - and mental - equivalent of a brick wall, she can bring herself to chew. The last thing she needs is for the Academy trainers to decide her size too lacking for a tribute.

Cato's jaw shifts. He keeps pacing. "You haven't heard anything." It doesn't sound as much like a question as it does a search for a confirmation – as well as an utter dismissal of her jibe. He doesn't retort with his usual insult or glare. He doesn't even roll his eyes.

The deviation from their routine of banter and death threats leaves her fingers fidgeting. "No." She narrows her eyes. "Have you?"

"No."

Clove cants her head. "Well then, since neither of us is deaf, it's safe to say there's nothing to know. And no reason we shouldn't have left by now."

In a jerky step, Cato pulls himself out of his pacing and towards the front door. The twisted smirk that his face has been so strangely missing for the past few minutes jogs to catch up. "Sure, there is. Gentlemen don't deny little girls their breakfasts."

Her glare could chop through half the lumber in all of District Seven.

"Every gentleman in every district would vote to go by a new title if they knew you were using it." She chooses to ignore both the 'little girl' taunt and the twinge of relief that swirls through at hearing it. It's almost like before Andromeda Weld's party, when the only ammunition he had to wield against her involved her meager size. It's still demeaning and wrong and enough to prompt her fingers into a clasp around a phantom knife, but it's better than dealing with words like 'tease.' It's better than dealing with any reminder of how stupid she had been to contaminate herself with whatever germs reside in Cato Ludwig's mouth.

As if he's peeked into her mind, his grin twists into sneering amusement. "Careful, little girl. Unless you'd rather I wasn't on my best behavior."

"I'd rather you weren't here."

He chuckles. She frowns. And then, in a step so quick it feels like they're sparring, he's walking so close to her that their strides synchronize and his breath traces patterns on her ear. "I can think of other places I'd rather be." He's too close, and, suddenly, she's too stiff.

"I meant here in the general sense. As in alive, rather than slowly decaying six feet under the ground. I'm sure District Two could always use more fertilizer."

"I was thinking more along the lines of in bed."

Her eyebrow jumps along with her heartbeat. "You could always go back there. And not get up."

"Only if you're there too," he says, laughter still coloring between the lines of his voice.

The money she would pay to have a knife in her hand right now… It's these sorts of comments that leave her tongue leaden and her knee twitching in the direction of his groin. It's the reminder that she brought this on herself that prompts her teeth to dig trenches into her tongue. Still, Clove somehow manages to contort her lips into a tightlipped smile. "All the better to smother you with a pillow."

"Kinky."

"You tell yourself that."

He opens his mouth again, and Clove resigns herself to several more minutes of innuendo.

Make that several more hours. Clove eyes the training room clock warily, and its knife case longingly. Cato, she does her best to ignore (which would be far easier if they weren't sparring, and he wasn't winning).

His fingers bury themselves into her leg, nearly digging straight through the thin, stretchy protection of her training pants to the pale skin beneath. She'd glare up at him from the floor, if she wasn't too occupied with the increasingly elusive object of escape. A knife. Where did he throw her freaking knife? And how had she slackened her grip on it to begin with?

Cato's mouth cracks into a grin, stretched to the point of pulled jaw muscles, as he drags her towards him, calf-first, across the training room floor like a flesh and blood vacuum cleaner. Less than that, even. He plays with her like a doll, putting on a show for their entire level.

A combination of shame, rage, and the Academy's overzealous heating system dyes her face a deep red.

Lying on the padded floor several feet away, far from the grasp of her searching fingers, her knife glints like a cruel joke.

One that Cato seems to appreciate. Lips pulling further apart into an even wider grin, Cato looks ready to swallow her whole; to devour her in fist-sized bites. "Done yet?"

She ignores him.

In turn, he and his cannibal grin ignore her silence. "Surrender nice enough, and I'll join you down there."

Clove makes a mental note to cut his jumping, flexing eyebrows clean off as soon as she gets her knife back. Maybe she'll let him keep his tongue. It would be nice to hear him scream. Him and every single trainee who's seen them. Every single trainer. She has enough knives to bloody every single one of them, and certainly enough motivation – but not the time. Not with the Reaping coming so soon.

She ignores Calliope's eyes, and tries to forget her trainer's view of her failure.

Even during independent study, which she spends among the weights and as far from her training partner as her ego allows, Cato still manages to work in enough time between slashes of his sword into various and sundry dummies to take a water break that just so happens to bring him right by her station.

Of course.

Yet that doesn't explain why it has to bring him quite so close to her shoulders, nor his chin directly above her face. "That's a good look on you."

She glares up at him from her recline on the weight lifting bench. It's all the response she can summon right now. A raised eyebrow would turn into a limping one, and a smirk into a wavering smile. Unacceptable.

Her arms are already threatening to go on strike in outrage at the amount of weight she'd chosen to lift (they don't understand that she has to; that Cato made her look weak; that Calliope had narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips in her direction and seen the whole humiliating interaction).

Clove keeps to her glare, and finds the strength to lift again. And then, after seconds that feel like years of silence, to speak. "Holding a barbell heavy enough to break every bone in both your feet twice over?"

His eyes dance through the motions of observing her struggle to support the load burdening her arms, let alone throw it at him. "Not that."

Before she can think to do anything other than stare, his finger descends to her neck, peeling back a thread of sweat in a slow swipe.

In spite of themselves, her arms nearly collapse, a flinch away from dropping the barbell, and breaking her own ribs into shells. Her teeth grind together. Every single tooth in her mouth begs to snap Cato's pointer finger into small carrot-shaped slices. She could serve them to the rabbits that occasionally dart across her yard. Perhaps with humus.

Her jaw hurts from clenching. The fantasy would probably be much more comforting if he wasn't still touching her.

The bastard doesn't even bother to hurry, too sure that she won't dare put her barbell down without a spotter. His pointer finger moves further down, setting course towards even sweatier and more shadowed regions of her upper body, only stopping when her tank top insists. His eyes keep going.

Mustering every bit of strength her upper body still has, Clove does her best to slam the barbell up against his face in a firm lift.

It would have worked, too, would have given him the bruise or even the blood she wanted to see on him so badly, if he hadn't dodged away.

Cato's grin widens. A moment later, the distance between them follows suit.

Clove still wants to feed him to rabbits. She settles for forcing herself through another set of reps.

The spear arcs (as always), falls (as always), and hits its target (as always). Gregoric Aldrin doesn't seem to care. His mouth doesn't twitch into a smirk, nor do his shoulders slacken with triumph. As always, his spear isn't as satisfying as a sword.

As his swords had been before his fight with Ludwig. Before they had failed him.

Gregoric only smiles once the whole morning, and his eyes aren't even following the path of his spear as he does so. They've drifted over to the weight training station, to a panting girl with dark hair, wearing a bright red tank top, a high ponytail, and a helpless glare at the smug blonde standing above her.

He realizes that he's not the only one watching, and gives into a flat out grin.

The lettuce served by the Academy is always left a bit too large. Clove saws into hers with a dull dining knife, taking even more care than usual to slice the green leaves into sizes more suitable for human consumption. She supposes she should thank the Academy for that; half of her own culinary skills stem from dealing with their laziness (which probably isn't laziness at all, she admits to herself in less bitter moods, but yet another way of forcing their trainees to learn how to manage a knife).

Then again, it's also possible that their cooks simply aren't the coddling types. Failed trainees wouldn't be, she supposes.

Several tables over, Cato shoves his own salad, uncut, into his mouth between bites of sickeningly red meat.

Clove rolls her eyes. Caveman. It's really no wonder he was such a complete novice with a knife until this year, if he can't even bother to use one to cut his food.

As if summoned by even the thought 'cavemen,' a boy sporting dark curls and darker bruises slumps down at the seat across from her.

"How bland," Gregoric Aldrin says, thrusting a fork in the direction of her lettuce. His eyes don't waver from her face.

Clove pushes her lips into a tight smile. "Leave."

"Scared?" He leans across the table towards her, dripping sweat onto his own meatloaf. "I wouldn't blame you. Bit off your game today, aren't you?"

"Well, you would be familiar with the concept."

"You think you're better than me. Really? Letting Ludwig drag you around the training room like a kitten with a leg for a leash?"

If her fork were made of plastic, it would have snapped clean in half. As it is, the silverware turns clammy against her hard grip.

A smirk crawls onto Gregoric's face, molding his lips into worms. "But then, that's what you are, isn't it? Cato's little pet."

Clove shifts her hold on her fork, wielding it like a knife. She wonders how far she could drive it into his hand, how much skin she could break, how much blood she could draw. Still, she lowers the utensil to her plate in a slow motion of practiced indifference. He can have his taunts. She won't let him have her rage.

Crossing her arms, she straightens her posture and raises one eyebrow. "You went through an awful lot of trouble to get a pet for a training partner."

He laughs, a chorus of friendliness and fakeness. "Don't tell me you thought that was about you."

"No, clearly it was about your unrequited passion for Calliope."

His laugh dies, only to rise again as a sneering twist of his mouth. "Cute. Truly adorable. But – and it truly pains me to break this to you - it had nothing to do with you. Smart girl like you, you had to know it was never but anyone but Ludwig."

Clove smiles back a snarl. "And your unrequited passion for him? Sorry. Not sure you're his type."

He shakes his head, tilting his chin down as though to hide a smile, only to look up at her a moment later with an even deeper sneer. Still, he keeps his voice low. "Listen, you little bitch. You're nothing special. You're nothing but Cato Ludwig's favorite toy, and I thought it would be fun to steal you from him. You know how he gets when people take his things."

Her fingers claw, begging to tear him apart, to cut him apart into a salad of flesh and blood. She forces them further into her lap. It's not worth it. He's wrong. No matter how certain he sounds, no matter how brutally Cato had beaten her today, he's wrong. Cato has always been her toy; hers to rile and mock and manipulate, and she won't allow herself to forget that. "You've thought about this a lot, haven't you?"

"Oh, just a bit."

"All that planning… It's really too bad that someone more physically capable didn't come up with it."

His eyes narrow, losing their taunting glint to slits. "Excuse me?"

Clove shrugs one shoulder, and funnels every single bit of her rage into a sweet smile. "Well, I'm still his training partner, aren't I?"

A sharp ringing sounds, signaling the end of lunch. Still smiling, Clove pats him on the shoulder on her way out.

Cato stares after his training partner as she retreats into her house at the end of the day, past the threshold and out of his vision. If there were any mercy at all in the world, that would be it. He'd be free of her. Out of mind, out of sight, and all that bullshit. He knows better than most, though, the scarcity of mercy. In fact, he has never quite become acquainted with the sentiment - not from life, not from others, and certainly not from himself.

He ignores the ache that each stride home stirs in his limbs. Pathetic. It doesn't matter that their training has gone into overdrive this month, with the Reaping approaching in only a few weeks; whining over pain is for the weak. Cato's jaw sets as he hurls his foot at a stone. His Reaping.

The impulse to sprint toward his room seizes him as soon as he walks through his front door - but he won't do that. He's not whiny. He's not weak. And he doesn't run through his own house just to avoid the sight of his failure of a brother. Cato continues at a pace slow enough to bore a crippled turtle, and pretends that it isn't a relief to find that the only sound in the house seems to come from his steps. His father and Jason must still be at the quarry, enjoying the their bright futures as manual laborers.

It's sickening. But, as it leaves the kitchen empty, he's not about to complain. He strays from his path to grab on apple before stepping out of the kitchen again. He's sickening; his urge to hide like a chipmunk or a Level One Trainee. If anything, the others should be looking to hide from him, rather than reminding him every ten minutes - with words in his parents' case, and unshakable staring in his brother's - of the looming tribute selection. Cato grinds his teeth. He doesn't need the reminders. The Reaping has always crawled across his mind, consuming his thoughts until the Games are all that's left, even before he was old enough to possibly hear his name called.

Walking into his bedroom, he slings himself onto his bed and crosses his arms behind his head. It has become a routine of his, this end-of-the-day ritual. He's grown disturbingly aware of each bump, crack, and blemish that lines his ceiling - and not for any fulfilling, libido-sating reason. Lately, he's begun just sitting there and thinking. No, not thinking. That isn't the right word for the series of images that flashes through his mind as he lies there, tossing an apple up and down in his hand.

It's because of the Reaping. That has to be it. He's clearly gone off the wall insane with anxiety. He snorts, not bothering to dwell on how crazy he would appear were anyone able to see him. A lone boy laughing to himself in bed. He battles a vague temptation to beat the shit out of himself.

His mind is otherwise occupied, anyhow. Not once in life has Cato ever wanted a girl. They were just there, and then they were under him, and then they were gone. Easy. He's never - his fingers dig hard into the red skin of his apple - obsessed.

Clove is there, alright. She's right next to him everyday, and he sometimes even manages to get her underneath him, by swords point or sparring. But that's training. The apple's juice wets his tense fingers. He wants her here.

He's never wanted for anything, save a spot as tribute, and, come to find out, he isn't exactly fond of the sensation. Especially applied to a slip of a girl who, by all appearances, seems to prefer blood to boys. In fact, he often considers just slinging her over his shoulder, grabbing her by the root of her hair, and dragging her here. Then she'd be the one lying on the bed, and he'd - well, he wouldn't be stuck here caught in a fucking daydream. Or he could sneak into her house in the middle of the night, her otherwise empty house, and pull her out of sleep. Maybe she'd scream. It didn't matter. She'd end up screaming at some point. Either way, he'd have her, and then he could move on from her. If she'd just admit that she wants him, if she'd just let them to advance to the next level of this ridiculous game, if she'd just stop being so damn stubborn, then he'd be fine.

Clenching his eyes shut, he takes a larger, louder bite from the fruit. Clove and the Reaping. They were both his already. He'd be just fine as soon as they acknowledged that.

The apple buckles and breaks under the grip of Cato's teeth.