#snowreader

Pairing: Cato Hadley x Snow!reader

Warnings: character death (non-visual)

masterlist

You were raised to see the Games as glory.

Victory, spectacle, power — all the things your grandfather taught you to admire. You’d clapped for the bloodshed, dressed in gold, smiled for the cameras. You were everything a granddaughter of Coriolanus Snow was supposed to be.

Until Cato Hadley.

You met him before the Games began, in the corridors of the Training Center — a towering boy from District 2 with a jaw set in determination and eyes like flint. You were never meant to speak to tributes. They were pieces in a game, not people. But he looked at you like he saw straight through the Capitol’s polish — straight into the terrified girl beneath the diamonds.

You told yourself it was nothing. Just curiosity. Just intrigue.

But when you caught him watching you during the private training sessions, or when his mouth twitched — just barely — in a ghost of a smile when you passed, something inside you began to unravel.

You risked everything for stolen minutes. Late at night, after the mentors had gone, you’d slip past the guards and find him. The training room lights would hum softly above you as you whispered fragments of yourselves into the darkness. He told you about District 2, about how he’d been raised to win, not to feel. You told him about the Capitol’s expectations, the suffocating perfection, the weight of a name that belonged more to history than to you.

And then one night, he reached out and brushed his thumb across your cheek — a hesitant touch, almost reverent.

You didn’t think. You just leaned in.

That was the risk.

Loving him meant betraying everything your world stood for.

It meant rooting for him when he was thrown into the arena, watching through the trembling reflection of your wine glass as blood spilled across the screen. Every scream felt like it tore something out of you.

When he fell — when the cannon sounded — you didn’t cry. You couldn’t. Snow was sitting beside you, and you’d learned how to smile for the cameras.

But later, alone, you pressed your palm against the cool marble of your bedroom wall and whispered his name. You thought about the boy who’d told you he didn’t believe in mercy, and how gently he’d held you that last night.

Maybe it had been foolish. Maybe it had been doomed from the start.

But for a little while, you’d felt alive.

You’d taken the risk.