Cinna, when he first met her, had been overwhelmed with guilt.

He had looked at that emaciated, tiny girl, and he thought, I'm dressing her for her death. I'm decorating her funeral shroud.

And it was strange, because he knew that the tribute he would be assigned would probably die; tributes from District Twelve had won precisely all of three times in seventy four years, and made it to the final eight barely a handful more. He hadn't much hope for his assignment, but he had wonderful idea for costumes swirling in his head, and he longed to seem them made real.

And so he had asked for a tribute from Twelve, just for his own personal doll. But he hadn't known Katniss, then. Hadn't known her black and white view of the world, the strange kind of innocence she exuded. He hadn't even known she existed.

But he did now, and as he watched her sing the female tribute from District 11 to her death, he didn't regret it. He loved Katniss. Not conventionally, at least, not by any means; not in a romantic sense and certainly not in a platonic sense. She didn't know anything about him, and he didn't know nearly as much about her as he wished he did. But they understood each other, and Cinna wouldn't wish it any other way.

That was all that mattered, to him.