A/N: Title from Viva la Vida by Coldplay. Review please!

oh, who would ever want to be king?

by lustergold

(He stands in the doorway of his grand empty house, only with sunbeams filtering weakly from the cracks in the shutters. His parents are packing to move in here too- he would prefer to live alone, but no, the doctors said, he wasn't quite right in the head, only for him to think, hell right I'm not right in the head, I've just won the Hunger Games.)

Cato comes home alive. Cato comes home the only one alive. The Capitol is all abuzz with the surprise- all along they were expecting for the two District Twelve tributes to win, but he is the one who comes out of the arena breathing, bloody, broken. He remembers the cheers as he comes out, but it's all a blur to him. He was half dead when they pulled him out, skin torn where the body armor hadn't been protecting him, and the only reason he won because District Twelve tributes had slipped and fell to the wolves.

(The victory is a blur, but he remembers dying, he remembers claws tearing at his skin and him crying out in pain like some weakling, he remembers Clove's green eyes staring at him blankly, he-)

They make his skin perfect and scarless. Not even the cuts he got when he trained remain, only smooth artificial material. It's a loss to him, like the suffering he went through to win didn't actually happen. He thinks he's supposed to feel happier. There was a time when that was all he wanted to do, wasn't it? When all he wanted to do was kill and win. Right now he feels each death weighing on his back, a thousand stones, and sometimes he wakes up feeling every ounce of blood he's spilled on his skin, dripping, and voice of the dead come and whisper in his ear.

Cato thinks he's going crazy.

Cato thinks he already is crazy.

(Did I kill them all? he wonders. Was that really me? Was it me who swung the sword and cut through the skin and the muscle and the veins, and smiled when they fell down screaming?)

His mother comes into his room sometimes after she hears him scream in his sleep, stroking his forehead gently like he is five still, five and innocent. She whispers comfort and poems and children's lullabies, quietly, soothingly, softly. Sometimes Cato tries to imagine himself five. When he was five, did he have the ripples of muscles and the desire to kill? When did that cultivate? When did he possess the desire to go to the Hunger Games? His father never told him to. His mother never told him to. He had been their darling child, their only child, their beloved son, and they never would have thought of sending him to the Hunger Games and risk his death.

He wants to yell at his mother to stop, stop acting like he didn't kill them, didn't win the Hunger Games on his utter brutality and madness, but he never finds the strength to. In the corners there are monsters, in the darkness there are eyes.

Sometimes, he wonders if would have been better if Katniss and Peeta had won the Hunger Games. If it would have been better to die than to live like this. He had imagined a life after winning the Hunger Games when he was little, filled with glory and fame; things all little children wish for at least once. As he grew older he thought of victory, pride, adventure. He had been old enough to know these were all things with a slim chance if he was betting on the Hunger Games. Better to work in the quarries, find a girl and get settled down that deal with the chances of the Games. But still he had wish, and hung on to his mad delusions.

(Maybe if Clove had lived and won with him it would have been easier. Someone to talk to, someone who'd understand. The other tributes are too old, not bothered to talk with yet another District Two victor. But then he thinks, perhaps if Thresh hadn't killed her, he would have, then, in his bloodlust, just to prove he was stronger)

Cato dreams.

(His dreams are filled with nightmares and monsters and blood, but the worst are the peaceful ones. In those he has a little boy, a sweet little boy with his wavy blond hair and hazel eyes, but with Clove's slender stature and pointed jaw. The boy never has a name, but his face is as clear as a photograph, always laughing and stumbling. He has Cato's brutality but Clove's subtlety. Cato likes this dream, even though he's never wished for a family before, or children, or Clove. Cato used to hate children. He thinks the dreams are more of everything he will never have.)

Cato dreams, but he never remembers what he dreams of.

(He thinks it would have been better if he had died)

But when he wakes up, he feels a horrendous sense of loss.

(The little boy with the hazel eyes and angled jaw haunts him, everywhere.)