Why
Cato Hadley x Plus size!reader
Word Count: 2108 words
Warnings: none
Summary: Reader is a tribute for the Hunger Games, no one thinks she’s going to make it until Cato steps in. The one thing you don’t understand is, Why does he care?
Updated version of “Why Does He Care” an old fan favorite.
—————————————————————————————————
They knew you wouldn’t win.
It hadn’t even registered as a possibility in most of their minds, but that didn’t matter all that much.
All the game makers cared about was that you made a show of it, and if you could, got stabbed in view of one of the thousands of cameras surrounding the arena.
That was all you had to do.
You weren’t the strongest, the fastest, or the smartest that your district had to offer and everyone seemed to have already come to terms with the fact that you would be leaving the arena in a body bag.
They just didn’t see how a woman of your status and stature could ever hope to compete with others in the games. Against the Careers, a group of highly trained young people whose lives revolved around being able to win, you would surely meet your end.
However, you weren’t going to just accept defeat right off the bat.
Even if you didn’t win, you were going to put up one hell of a fight once that canon went off. You owed that to your family, and your district, and yourself.
No one in their right mind wanted to participate in the Hunger Games,and you certainly didn’t want to either, but you had been chosen to represent your district and you weren’t going to shy away from the responsibility.
At the very least, you had to try.
If nothing else, the fact that no one believed in you could serve as an extra push, the push you would need to take down as many other tributes as possible in the process.
You knew that you could do that.
Though, that fire did sort of dull as soon as you walked into the large training room, surrounded by all the other tributes from all the other districts. Once you got a look at them up close, you were less sure of yourself than you had ever been.
How quickly it had all changed.
From the moment you walked into that room, which was more of a cell of brushed aluminum and cool steel, you were forced to recon with the reality of the situation.
This was happening.
You were going to die.
The way in which you would die wasn’t something you were all that fond of considering, but as best you could tell, the Career pack would be to blame.
Stories of what they were capable of, training tirelessly to volunteer for their games and slaughter the competition were widespread all over Panem but you couldn’t have imagined how intimidating they were in real life.
Each one of them was a skilled, and accurate, death machine and you had no chance of surviving an altercation with even the weakest among them, who you had ultimately decided was Glimmer.
She was talented and smart but lacked the determination that the others had.
Even in her case though, you could see what they always said about the Careers. They were raised to believe there was no other point to their lives other than to win the Hunger Games.
If they didn’t win, they weren’t worth anything, not that it would matter. If they didn’t win, they would end up just the same as all the rest of you, in a shallow grave somewhere.
That was just how it was.
You did your best to keep to yourself at first, not wanting to elicit any more violence than absolutely necessary right off the bad. It was no secret to you that the other tributes didn’t take you seriously.
The last thing you wanted was for them to try and prove themselves at your expense before you were out in that arena.
Unfortunately, the other tributes, namely the Careers, had already made up their minds. In the few days that you had been training, they had been making fun of you the entire time.
For them, it was one big joke.
When they looked at you, it was clear that all they saw was the first person they were going to stick their swords into. They didn’t take you seriously at all and at this point, you weren’t even sure if you blamed them.
Each time you threw a punch or swung your axe at a target, they hooted and hollered from their place on the sidelines and called you out for each imperfection they saw in your maneuvers, and they weren’t wrong.
You had no idea what you were doing.
This was all new for you, because where you were from, hand to hand combat just wasn’t something you would have ever come across. Before now, you hadn’t even seen most of the things in front of you here.
You were out of your element.
By the end of the first week, you hadn’t even begun to make any progress. However, there was one thing that had changed and you couldn’t even pinpoint when or why it had happened.
At some point, Cato had stopped criticizing you in the same way his compatriots were.
You weren’t sure why he would even bother, but seeing as you didn’t really talk to him, you couldn’t ask. It was much easier to just be silently grateful for the break, and try to focus on what you were doing.
While it wasn’t looking good to start, you didn’t want to sabotage your chances of survival with any more wasted time.
The other Careers had noticed the change in him too, but not one of them dared to comment on it, even if it didn’t make any sense to them. The anger that they would risk in doing so just wouldn’t be worth getting answers.
Instead, they let him do whatever it was he was doing, waving it off as some kind of tactical maneuver. He knew what he was doing, and it wasn’t their place to ask too many questions and get him off his game.
When Cato first headed in your direction, closing the vast distance between you on the training floor, you assumed that he was intent on proving to you just how out of place you were here.
...But that couldn't have been farther from the truth.
In truth, what Cato was doing was far from a tactical measure. More than anything, he just couldn’t bring himself to make fun of you anymore.
He didn’t think that your weight alone was enough to warrant the constant abuse you were suffering.
Besides, It was clear that you were putting in a lot of work to get better, which was more than most of the other tributes were doing. You weren’t going to take this lying down, which he could respect.
From the looks of it, your technique just needed some polishing, and you would be just as good a fighter as anyone here, with the exception of himself.
“You need to strike higher” he prompted, coming out of nowhere and nearly shocking you out of your fighting stance. You had been so focused that you didn’t even hear him approach.
Still, it didn’t occur to you that he might have been trying to help at first. After all this time, he didn’t strike you as the friendly, just trying to help type. He was much more of the scowl and stab sort of person.
You couldn’t be blamed for feeling that way.
“Strike higher” he repeated, closing the space between you to wrap his arm around your frame, moving your axe in the exact way he had been telling you to do.
There was nothing snide or rude in his tone, but you couldn’t focus on that.
All you could think about were his strong hands on your body, and the clear concern he had for whatever in the world he could have wanted from you.
You tensed under his touch, desperately trying to decipher how you had gotten to this point or what you were supposed to do now that you were here.
There was nothing particularly romantic about his touch, which you understood, but it was still foreign to be on the receiving end of. No one had ever held you like this, under any circumstances.
“Hit here, not here” he muttered, his voice far too close to your ear this time, forcing a breath from your lungs you weren’t aware you’d trapped there. He moved the axe, and your arm attached to it, to demonstrate what he meant.
...And as much as you hated to admit it, he was right.
When he moved his arms, in succession with his words, he hit the target at jugular height, instead of in the trunk where you had been aiming.
It was a much better hit than you had been landing all day, showing how much more experience he had with this than you.
“Thanks” you muttered, glancing at him quickly, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t look at you but you wouldn’t have been so lucky.
Cato looked down just at the same moment as you turned your head to take in his profile.
You expected him to say something about it but he offered nothing, content to just stare back down at you with a slight smirk on his face.
“Somebody bigger than you is going to be able to push back if you aim here” he explained finally, lightly resting the palm of his right hand against your abdomen where you’d been aiming before.
It made sense, of course.
“If you aim at the weakest part, it doesn’t matter how much stronger an opponent is” he hummed, this time bringing that same hand up to where your throat was, not missing the way you gulped under his touch.
“And you can’t kill anyone aiming at their ankles” he laughed, shrugging at that, as if he shouldn’t have to explain that part to you. Even someone who knew nothing about this wasn’t going to be shocked at that.
Cato just didn’t want you to think that he was playing some sort of sick game with you. He was really trying to help, even if that wasn’t really in his nature.
Never in his life had Cato cared about anyone, or been drawn to another person like he was with you.
His entire life was all about winning the games, and there was nothing more than that.
That was all he’d ever cared about.
...But for some reason, making sure that you survived this whole thing was becoming really important to him.
There was just something about you that he couldn’t put his finger on, but whatever it was, he didn’t have all that much time to figure it out. This whole thing was happening, whether he wanted it to or not.
The best thing he could do for you was prepare you to survive, with or without him.
“Oh, I couldn’t kill anyone” you hummed, doing your very best to be as nonchalant about it as you could. You were doing your best to figure out how to protect yourself out there but you had already made you mind up on that front.
You weren’t going to kill anyone.
It was something you had decided on before you even knew your name had been drawn the day of the reaping, but this was new information for Cato.
New information that almost shocked him into silence.
Cato had always known that he would need to kill someone, at some point. It was never a question in his mind, or something that even had any effect on him. It was part of his life, and to hear that someone else had never even considered it was new for him.
If you didn’t kill anyone the entire time you were in the arena, you would die.
You had to know that.
Surely you knew that.
“If you don’t, you’re going to die” he spoke, the words leaving his lips before he even had time to react. There was a finality to it, something you hadn’t seen coming, and at first, you thought it may have been a joke.
The two of you really didn’t know each other all that well, or at all, so making jokes seemed sort of strange but it wasn’t necessarily something that upset you.
You were just shocked at his urgency.
This really was something that was bothering him, but there was one thing that was still bothering you. This was the first time you had ever spoken to him in your life, and as flattered as you were that he cared about what happened to you, it didn’t make any sense.
Why did he care about someone like you?
