18 DAYS

Chapter 4: The Tribute Parade

Last night had been excruciating. The amount of determination and control Cato had to have so he wouldn't do something stupid had been inhuman. When his lips brushed hers, he thought his brain was going to explode. Pulling away was beyond traumatic. To be honest he was quite impressed he had been able of that much self-control.

So when he wakes up this morning from another night with too little sleep, Cato makes himself believe that straightening things with her was the best decision for their survival in the arena. Definitely the worst idea for his sanity though. 

He doesn't really have the time to think anything else as the his perky and heavily altered prep team barges into his room.

"Is knocking too unfashionable for the Capitol?" 

The three intruders cackle at his joke. As his prep team, those funny freaks were going to be responsible for always keeping Cato on his best profile. Clove has her own and he is curious if they were as intense as his own. Which draws a smile on his face when thinking about the face she must be pulling right about now. 

"We are just so exited!

- Oh yeah so exited to be with District Two! 

- And you are so good looking! 

- Absolutely, so good looking when we saw you on TV we couldn't wait! 

- Oh no couldn't wait!" 

Aaaand Cato drops out for the conversation. The three of them are talking like triplets, finishing each other sentences at a pace impossible to follow for a normal person. 

On top of that, they are grabbing on Cato's arms and legs to measure every inch of his body, meanwhile pulling him toward the elevator. 

*

Ten minutes later, Cato is strapped to a table inside a room of the training center dedicated to perfecting the tributes bodies up to Capitol standards. Straps binding him onto the hard metallic surface, he is not able to move even a toe nail at this point. Speaking of which, one of his torturers is now busy trimming them into perfect crescents. Meanwhile, another is taking care of trimming every patch of hair on his bod, jamming them to look as manly as a District Two tribute should be. And the last one is rubbing an odorant green paste on his body, scrubbing out all of his pores, leaving his skin clear and smooth like a baby. 

As he has nothing else to do besides wine in pain whenever one of the beauty treatment proved to be a bit too intense, Cato detailed his prep team. He wasn't really thrown off by their appearance. Unlike others, his District had a few people from the Capitol coming to visit the ever-so-sunny mining corner of Panem with hills big enough you couldn't see the horizon past them. 

The one that had been trimming his nails and was now getting interested in smoothing out the scars on his hands, is wearing a blue mohawk and bushy rainbow eyebrows matching his bright disco paints and white leather jacket. He is the most normal of all of them. 

The hair trimming one, now looking at Cato's nose bristols, is a very small man barely appearing over the table. His hair is shapped like a massive pink platter, as if he could put some drinks on there and serve at a restaurant without using his hands. His look is topped off my his very long Pinocchio nose achieving to make him undistinguishable from a garden gnome. 

The last one rubbing the green past around his feet now, and he is having the worst time keeping himself from kicking her off, is a woman with pale blue skin swollen in places like wearing prosthetics accentuating her bones and underlying the shape of her skeleton. She looks like a ghost and Cato represses a shiver as her hands glide to his ankles.