Spoilers for The Hunger Games! Continue at your own risk. TW: Death So, as you may or may not know, I am a huge fan of Clato. Cato and Clove are both such lethal, vicious characters until that moment at Clove's death scene. Up until then, I never wondered who they might truly be outside of the arena. I never wondered how much of their instinct to kill was from the Capitol. Each time I read that section, I feel like my heart breaks for them. You finally get to see a hint of goodness. Just before Thresh drives the rock into Clove's skull, she cries out to Cato, and when Cato comes running for her, he calls out for her. According to Katniss, "You can tell by the pain in his voice that he sees her on the ground." This shows that Cato and Clove really do care about each other -- in direct contrast to how they just ran to save themselves when the other tributes in their Career pack died. When "Cato kneels beside Clove, spear in hand, begging her to stay with him," it's hard for me to hold back tears. He knows that it's hopeless, that she's never going to make it, but he stays with her until she dies, until she takes her last breath in his arms. Cato and Clove are out in the open, and anyone could have taken this opportunity to kill them, but they stay despite this. In the movie, just before Cato dies, he's holding Peeta in a headlock and talking to Katniss and says "Go on. Shoot. Then we both go down and you win. Go on. I’m dead anyway. I always was, right? I didn’t know that till now. How’s that? Is that what they want? Huh? No. No, I can still do this. I can still do this. One more kill. It’s the only thing I know how to do. Bring pride to my district. Not that it matters." To me, this implies that he's dead inside, and that he has nothing left to live for since Clove died. In my opinion, Cato thinks that because she was killed, everyone has to pay, and that no one is allowed to live. In his dying moments, he tries to tell Katniss "Please." I interpret this to be a cry not only for her to end his misery, but to shoot him so that he could be with the one person he cared about. Clove. [Spoilers for Catching Fire in this paragraph.] Maybe when he lunged forward to volunteer, he was volunteering to protect Clove, just like how Peeta volunteered in the 75th Hunger Games to protect Katniss. Maybe he wasn't as obsessed with the idea of winning as everyone thought. Maybe he killed to protect her. [Image from DeviantArt, I believe.]
