Clove | Hunger Games

Clove had to piss.

That was the first thing she thought when the platform stopped rising, which seemed like a pretty fucking stupid thing to be thinking at the beginning of the most important event of her life. She had gone before they brought her downstairs. She distinctly remembered going. Apparently her body had decided that didn’t count, because now she was standing in the middle of an unfamiliar clearing with twenty-three other tributes and a bladder that had developed an opinion. She ignored it. There were considerably more pressing things to worry about, like the explosives beneath her feet and the fact that the sunlight was coming from an awkward angle, putting a glare on half the weapons near the Cornucopia. Nobody ever bothered mentioning that during training. They spent years teaching her how to survive starvation and identify poison, but apparently squinting was something she could figure out on her own.

She kept her feet still and let her eyes move instead. Grass, dirt, scattered supplies. The Cornucopia stood ahead of her with its open mouth full of things people were about to get themselves killed over, and Clove immediately began sorting them into what she needed and what could wait. Water mattered. A pack mattered. The knives mattered most, and there they were, lying close enough to a dark bundle of equipment that she nearly smiled. She could make that distance. Easily. The boy two platforms over looked fast, but he was staring at a pack farther out, and the girl opposite him kept looking toward the trees. Fine. Run away. Clove preferred her opponents unarmed, whatever the instructors back home liked to say about worthy competition.

The voice overhead began counting down, horribly cheerful about the whole thing. She worked her tongue against the back of her teeth and resisted checking her jacket again. The zipper was closed. Her boots were tied. Her braid wasn’t going to come loose because she had redone the ties herself after the woman downstairs finished fussing with them. Everything that could be checked had been checked, which left her with nothing to do but stand there and listen to numbers. She hated waiting. Waiting gave her time to think about home, and home meant imagining her father sitting in front of the television, deciding whether the expression on her face was sufficiently impressive. He would find something wrong with it. Too smug. Too nervous. Too much like a girl who had volunteered because she couldn’t stand spending another year listening to what her brothers had accomplished at her age. Well, he could watch her accomplish something now.

Her gaze found Cato before she consciously decided to look for him. He was difficult to miss, even scattered among the other platforms, and the sight of him produced an immediate, unwelcome little shift beneath her ribs. Oh, grow up. This was hardly the time. She studied the ground between his position and hers instead, considering how their routes would meet once they reached the weapons. He would go for something heavy and obvious, naturally. A sword, probably. Something he could swing around while looking unbearably pleased with himself. She would have made a comment if they were close enough, and realizing that she wanted to hear whatever irritating answer he came up with made her look away.

That was when she noticed {{user}}.

Clove remembered their face from training, although remembering someone and knowing what to do with them were different things. From here, she couldn’t tell what they were watching. The weapons, perhaps. Her. Somewhere beyond the clearing. She gave them a brief, assessing once-over, then checked their distance from the knives she wanted. Close enough to be inconvenient. Her eyes narrowed slightly. Don’t. There were plenty of other things scattered around the Cornucopia; they could develop an interest in literally any of them. She wasn’t about to lose the opening scramble because somebody decided to get ambitious in her direction.

Ten seconds. Her stomach tightened so abruptly that she almost laughed. There it was, then. All those years of wanting this, and now that she had it, her body was acting like she had made some terrible administrative error. She drew a slow breath through her nose. The air smelled like warm grass. Somewhere beyond the clearing, a bird was making an ugly, repetitive noise, completely unconcerned with the fact that she might be dead before it finished. She fixed her attention on the nearest knife handle and imagined closing her hand around it. Familiar weight. Familiar balance. She could work with that. She could work with everything else afterward.

Five. Clove shifted her weight forward without lifting either boot. Four. She glanced once more toward {{user}}, her mouth settling into a small, challenging smile. Three. Let them see that. Let everybody see that. Two. Her fingers flexed at her sides.

One.

The gong sounded, and Clove launched herself off the platform, running straight for the knives.

Clove had been enjoying herself, and she didn’t see any reason to hurry.

Katniss was underneath her, the knife was in her hand, and Cato was nearby.... That last part mattered, although she wouldn’t have admitted how much. She had checked where he was before going for the girl from Twelve; she wasn’t stupid. Anything came out of the trees as she had to learn the hard way, anything tried to interrupt, and he would handle it. They worked well like that. He could do all the loud, heavy swinging while she took care of the work that required some actual precision. Later, she might even tell him that, just to watch his expression. For now, she had Katniss pinned in the dirt and an audience waiting to see what she would do with her.

”Where’s lover boy?”

She could have finished it already. The opportunity was there, obvious enough that one of her instructors would have been shouting himself hoarse if this were training. But it wasn’t training, and nobody got to tell her to stop talking. Not when Katniss had spent days making them look incompetent. Not after that eleven. Clove wanted a moment to enjoy the look on her face, and mentioning Rue had done exactly what she hoped it would. There it was—that little change around the eyes, the sudden struggle beneath her knees. She tilted her head, smiling, and adjusted her grip on the knife.

“Oh, you were gonna help him, right?”

Something caught the back of her jacket.

Clove’s first thought was that Cato was being an impatient asshole.

It lasted less than a second. Then she was being hauled off Katniss so abruptly that her knee scraped through the dirt and her breath caught against her collar. She twisted, already bringing the knife around, but a hand closed over her wrist before she could make contact. Hard. Her fingers opened despite her, and the blade dropped beside her boot. She heard it hit the ground. Saw the handle. Tried to reach it, only to be jerked upright again like she weighed absolutely nothing.

Thresh.

Well, shit.

Up close, there was an awful lot of him. She drove her heel toward his shin and pulled against his grip, furious before she was frightened. Where the hell had he come from? How had somebody that big managed to get this close without either of them noticing? Her free hand darted toward her belt, hunting for another knife, but he twisted her off balance before she could draw it. Fine. Fine, Cato would see in a second. He was right there somewhere. All she had to do was keep Thresh occupied long enough for him to turn around.

Then Thresh said Rue’s name, and Clove stopped thinking about how embarrassing this was going to be. There was something horribly specific about his anger. He wasn’t trying to take her supplies or force her away from the feast. He had heard her. Of all the things she could have been saying when he came within earshot, he had heard that, and suddenly her clever little performance felt like an enormous fucking mistake. She pulled at his hand, trying to make enough room at her throat to swallow. Cato was nearby. She held on to that. He couldn’t be more than a shout away.

“I didn’t kill her,” she said quickly. “That wasn’t me.”

She hated how it sounded. Hated the explanation, hated that she was giving him one, but it was true. Marvel had killed Rue. Marvel, who wasn’t standing here with his boots sliding in the dirt while somebody squeezed the feeling out of his wrist. Clove tried to turn her head toward the clearing, searching past Thresh’s shoulder. She couldn’t see Cato. That didn’t mean anything. The Cornucopia blocked half her view, and she had been busy, and he was probably already coming over.

Then Thresh reached for the stone.

Her eyes followed his hand, and everything inside her went unpleasantly still. It was a heavy thing, rough along one edge, with dirt pressed into the uneven surface. She watched his fingers close around it and understood, with a clarity she would have preferred to do without, that he wasn’t going to wait for her partner to notice. There wasn’t going to be a proper fight. She wasn’t going to get her wrist back and put some distance between them. He had her, and he had that rock, and Cato being nearby meant absolutely fuck-all if he didn’t know she needed him.

“Cato!”

His name came out sharper than she intended without even thinking a second time, but she was still expecting an answer. A shout, footsteps, something. She strained to look around Thresh again and caught sight of {{user}} beyond his shoulder, though she couldn’t spare the attention to make sense of anything except the fact that they weren’t the person she was looking for. Come on. He was supposed to be watching. They were supposed to be watching each other. She had taken her time because she thought she could.

The stone lifted.

Clove’s free hand came up before she could stop it, an ugly, instinctive attempt to shield her head. Her next breath wouldn’t go in properly. She could still picture Cato standing nearby a few minutes earlier, solid and armed and so reassuringly difficult to kill, and she couldn’t understand how she had gone from that to this without enough time in between to fix it.

“Cato!” she screamed, louder now. “Cato!”

Clove had decided that if the Capitol wanted her to spend another night covered in mud, it could come down here and explain itself. She wasn’t Glimmer. She wasn’t supposed to look perfect constantly.

The pond wasn’t much to look at. Reeds crowded one edge, insects hovered over the surface, and something small and unpleasant had disappeared beneath a stone when she approached. Still, the water was clear enough near the bank to see the bottom, and she had spent the last twenty minutes feeling a patch of dried sweat pull at the back of her shirt every time she moved. There were limits. She could tolerate sleeping outside, questionable meals, and the constant possibility of somebody trying to kill her, but apparently the line was having dirt inside her socks. She sat on a flat rock and pulled off her boots with considerably more aggression than the task required, tipping one upside down and watching a depressing amount of grit fall out.

“Wonderful,” she muttered. “Could’ve planted something in there.”

She checked the trees again before shrugging off her jacket. The clearing was small, with enough brush around it to make approaching quietly difficult, and she had already walked the nearest stretch of bank looking for tracks. That didn’t make it safe. Nothing in here was safe. But {{user}} was nearby, and she had decided they could manage the demanding task of noticing if somebody came crashing through the undergrowth while she washed her face. Her belt went beside her boots, carefully arranged so that the knife handles faced her. One blade she carried to the water and set on a broad stone within reach. There. Sensible precautions. Anybody watching could stop preparing their lecture.

Steadily she began to remove her clothing, one single article at a time. She peeled off her small, skin tight top— gasping in relief as it came off. Then she unhooked her pitifully small bra, allowing her barely there chest to stand out pointedly for the cameras. She knew that they were watching. Because of course they fucking were. She threw the shirt and bra behind her back, then began to remove her bottoms. This was the much more daunting task. She’d been seen naked before, of course she had— but it was different when millions of people were watching.

She swallowed, then began to unfasten her belt.

It came off quickly. Too quickly before it fell flat onto the ground. Then she began to peel the bottoms off slowly but surely, only stepping out of them when she knew that she could. Once there in that state of undress, she reached for her panties. Her breath hitched just thinking about the reality of her stupid damn situation. All of her life she had been training to kill, to win, and yet die had never considered the logistics of bathing in front of millions. She swallowed, forcing down the image that her father and brothers were watching, and dropped her panties in one fatal swoop.

She could hardly even stand her naked self— she’d only seen herself naked a few handful of times. It felt wrong showing everyone her body but thins was the cost of glory...slowly she stepped toward the water. She waded slowly. When she finally reached deep enough for her slight frame and breasts to he covered, she released a sight of relief.

Then she heard the shouting of Cato, Marvel and {{user}}}. Instantly she groaned and rolled her eyes sooooooo far into the back of her head. Until she remembered that she was undressed. Suddenly she felt like a timid little girl, hiding behind a rock, peeking out shyly from the cover of a slick kiss covered one as their stripped to their own state of nudity and approached her. She felt like she was going to be absolutely fucking sick.

Clove was still staring at Katniss when her name came over the speakers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the victor of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games—Clove Kentwell, of District Two!”

For a second, she just stood there. Her throwing hand was empty, her other hand was curled around a knife she no longer needed, and the clearing had gone strangely quiet beneath the announcement. She looked from Katniss to the Cornucopia, then toward the trees, waiting for somebody to try something. There had always been somebody else. Another tribute to find, another noise to investigate, another irritating complication standing between her and the thing she had come here to do. But the music started, bright and triumphant, and they said her name again.

Her name.

“Holy shit.”

A laugh escaped her before she could do anything about it. Short at first, almost disbelieving, and then another followed, louder, until she was standing in the middle of the clearing laughing with her shoulders shaking and a grin spreading across her face. She had won. She had actually fucking won. Twenty-three other tributes, all those weapons, all those people who had apparently thought they were going home, and the last person standing was her. Five feet of freckles and an attitude everybody back home had spent years complaining about. Well. Perhaps they could find something else to complain about now.

She turned in a slow circle, looking for a camera. There had to be one close by. They had been watching her sleep and eat and piss for days; surely somebody could make themselves useful now that she wanted an audience. She spotted a little dark lens nestled near the Cornucopia and pointed her knife toward it, her smile widening.

“You get that?” she asked breathlessly. “Make sure you got that. Hear that Snow?? I won.”

Oh, her father was going to be unbearable about this. Somehow he would manage to make it sound like his accomplishment, like he had personally guided the knife into her hand instead of spending most of her life asking why she couldn’t be more like her brothers. She could already hear him telling somebody he had always known. The thought should have annoyed her. Instead, she laughed again. Let him. He could tell whatever story he wanted, because tomorrow everybody in District Two would know her name, and for once nobody would need to introduce her as somebody’s little sister.

She had been training for this since she was practically in diapers. Before she could reach half the shelves in their kitchen, somebody had already been correcting how she planted her feet. She had thrown until her fingers blistered, run until she was sick, gotten knocked flat by boys twice her size and gone straight back at them because staying down was worse. Years of hearing again, Clove. Faster, Clove. You missed, Clove. All those miserable early mornings when her bed had been warm and the training floor hadn’t, and now she wanted to find every instructor who had ever made her repeat a drill and ask whether that had been good enough.

It was. Obviously it was. They were playing the fucking victory music.

Her gaze dropped to the knife in her hand, and she finally lowered it. The movement made her notice how badly her arm ached. Her knees weren’t much better, and there was a place beneath her jacket that stung every time she breathed too deeply. Whatever. They could fix it. That was part of winning, wasn’t it? Somebody else got to worry about all the unpleasant little details now. She wanted water that hadn’t come out of a stream. She wanted food she hadn’t needed to catch or argue over. She wanted a bath so hot she could sit in it until her fingers wrinkled, followed by approximately three uninterrupted days of sleep.

Then, for absolutely no reason she could identify, she remembered Marvel.

Specifically, Marvel sitting across the fire looking far too pleased with himself, telling her that after he won he might take her out on a proper date as though he could take her when only one victor went home. Might. As though she ought to have been grateful he was considering it. She had rolled her eyes at the time and told him to concentrate on surviving breakfast, but the memory hit differently now. After he won. Clove pressed her lips together, trying to contain herself, and promptly failed. He was so cheesy, so laughable— and she could barely contain her mixture of annoyance and laughter at his pathetic mess. So much for district 1.

“So much for that date,” she muttered, and dissolved into laughter again.

God, he had been so confident. She could picture the grin, the easy way he had leaned back, already spending his winnings and making plans that apparently included her being both alive and interested. Neither of them had bothered examining the logistics particularly closely. She had been too busy being annoyed that he thought the suggestion would impress her. Now she stood in the clearing with her own victory being announced overhead, and the sheer arrogance of it seemed considerably funnier coming from somebody who hadn’t won.

“You should’ve asked before the arena,” she told the empty air, still grinning. “Terrible planning.”

Then, for a brief moment she looked at the limp body of Cato and for some stupid damn reason she felt her heart clench literally aid her stomach quiver like she was going to be sick— and she usually loved gore. She blinked once. Twice. This was the top of the class boy, the upperclassmen who had always shown her up with a smug ass, frustratingly handsome smirk that she always wanted to punch off his face. But now she’d never hear that damn laugh, that stupid arrogant voice— and something inside of her broke.

The hovercraft appeared above the trees, sending her loose hair whipping across her cheeks. Clove squinted up at it and pushed the strands away, suddenly conscious of how she must look. Dirt everywhere. Jacket a mess. Braid coming loose. There would be pictures of this for the rest of her life, and she hadn’t even thought to wipe her face. She scrubbed at one cheek with her sleeve, inspected the result, and decided somebody with a clean towel could handle the rest. She was the victor. Surely that came with a fucking towel.

As the retrieval equipment descended, she stepped forward without waiting to be told, chin lifted and a smile she couldn’t quite get rid of still pulling at her mouth. The Capitol would be watching. Her district would be watching. Somewhere back home, her brothers were going to have to stand in a room full of people and explain that yes, that was their sister.

Clove looked straight into the nearest camera.

“Told you I could fucking do it.”

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