deadalready | 13th Swing

[It's still so weird that he and Clove are getting married. That it's actually happening like they acted like it could in their more stupid moments where they were both alive in the end. Maybe only one of them went to the Games and won, maybe neither of them went. Cato had wanted to with increasing desperation the closer he got to 18 but he'd told Clove before he would only volunteer if she needed him to.

Thinking about things from before the Games; about his sad, pointless life and his parents and their house and his room and the town...he wants that. He wants his mom and dad to be happy and see him get married.

Cato wonders if anyone will even show up for the wedding (still weird) or if it'll just be him and Clove and the person marrying them. The only thing he knows with certainty is that he's been here almost two years and hasn't made one friend. (Or so he thinks).

It makes him miss his parents even more fiercely and, without really thinking, he opens his journal.]

If you could have someone from back home be here, even for just a day, even if they were dead, would you make that happen?

[It seems selfish to even think about it, to him at least. He's curious to see if other people don't give as much of a crap about the life they'd left behind. He just misses his family.]

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I think so. My father - I haven't seen him since I was little.

I'd bring my parents too.

[He know she only said her father but it's the same thought.]

It'd be better than Panem, at least.

[ She'd bring her mother, too, but...she took it as "one person" and made the choice. ]

Katniss says she lived through the final games.

[ Prim wonders what the world looks like without them. ]

Lucky her.

[There is a truck-load of bitterness there but it's not...harsh, like it might have been when he was a new arrival here. Now it's just...tired. He'd heard about the previous Victors being killed in the wake of Katniss and the Quarter Quell and everything that had happened.

He hadn't expected the world to keep turning after he died. Not that he thought without him there wouldn't be a world...it was just...hard to imagine that things just kept happening, meaning you were lying somewhere in a grave rotting, or burned into ashes, or used in some crazy Capitol experiments. Cato shudders as he allows his mind to run away with the idea.]

What happened? After...After -- [Okay so it's harder to say 'after I died trying to kill your sister.' But he just doesn't trust half of what he hears from Katniss about what happens after....

her sister seems like she wouldn't tell him something different.]

After...those games? Katniss came home. We were moved. It was - normal. I guess. For how things were supposed to go.

But then - things weren't really normal. The president, he...people were...strange. They didn't like how it had ended, that Katniss...won. [ With Peeta. That they'd lived. ] ...In the end, the Quarter Quell came and the card - they pulled from past tributes.

We only had three.

[ She says that quiet. ]

Some of them worked together. Got out. And Twelve - they bombed Twelve. Some of us got to Thirteen. Some didn't, though.

[ She trails off. ]

It was a war, I guess.

[Cato is weirdly silent as Prim speaks. It's only when she trails off that he speaks up and he's really, really ridiculously grateful that this isn't video because he doesn't know what his face is doing.

Knowing that things really go to shit after you die, that you honestly missed out on worse things to come. That it could get worse - and his parents watched all that happen and then...

who knows what happened to them.

His voice is hoarse, choked almost. If he were being perfectly honest with himself he'd say he felt like crying just then.]

I didn't know about that...

[About any of that.]

I didn't know how much Katniss had said.

[ But she wouldn't lie about it. Couldn't imagine that she'd be good at it if she tried, when the truth was easier to believe than any lie could be. ]

...She says they won, though. At least - the Games stopped, I mean. I think...I never got to see that, but I like knowing that. Even if everything had to happen before that.

It's nice to know there'll be children who'll never be reaped.

So, what...everything's [He wants to say 'normal' because Luceti is, for him, now the norm. But for Panem, peace isn't normal.] good?

...I think it will be. I don't think it'll be very easy or fast, but without the Games...it'll be a better place to start from.

13th Swing - Voice

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