Chapter Text
The rabbit lifts its head. Glass-like eye blinks. Wind brushes through the snow-white fur. Ironically pristine on a day like this one.
A smooth and long inhale rushes through her lungs as Katniss narrows her eyes in concentration. On the exhale, she releases the arrow, only conscious of the reaction as muscle memory carries the arrow true through the blinking eye once filled with life. The impact is true and clear. The little body drops to the forest floor, pristine no more. The forest floor will meet more bodies in the coming days. The rabbit will not lie alone.
Unshaken by the blood now marring the floor, the woods move in the breath all beings share. Katniss lowers her bow slowly, checking for movement deeper in the woods. Seeing none, she stands from her crouched position, moving towards the fresh kill. Fingers press gently into the still-warm fur.
“Good shot,” a voice calls out to her.
Katniss sighs and turns to look at the intruder.
“Gale, I was waiting to see when you’d announce your presence.”
“Oh, I didn’t want to interrupt your flow, of course,” Gale quips back. He moves from the foliage where he was hidden. Tall and thin, you could mistake them for siblings. Dark hair was cut short, emphasizing the hollows of his cheeks that nearly every person in District 12 could be seen with as well. He carries his own hunting bag. Full.
Katniss stores the rabbit and begins the path back towards the boundaries of the district they move in a comfortable silence. Birds chirped above their heads as the two predators moved back towards the fence of District 12.
Gale breaks the silence, “We could do it, you know,” he says almost conspiratorially. “We could leave.”
Katniss scoffs in response. Her answer always remains the same. She would never do something that meant she had to leave Prim. Prim is the only thing shes sure she loves in this world. She would never voluntarily leave her in a world too dangerous for a girl that pure.
“I’m serious,” he says. “We have the knowledge. We could survive.”
“I know you are Gale,” Katniss says curtly. “You know my thoughts on that. Don’t start with me."
Gale opens his mouth to extend his point, but Katniss cuts him off before he can begin.
“Gale, they would send the peacekeepers after us. It would be us in a constant state of running. We’d be hunted. And what about the kids? They’d use Prim as bait, you know it. Don’t say these things. Not today of all days.”
Gale understood her point; the reality sets in a little more on Reaping days. Most of the time, they could ignore that they are sheep that the Capitol plays with. Not on a day like this. On Reaping days, everyone holds each other a little closer. He wouldn’t cause an argument on a day that holds so many unknowns.
They returned to their companionable silence as they left the woods towards their homes to prepare for the reaping.
At the fork where their paths home split, Gale stops her with a touch to her arm.
Holding out half a loaf of fresh bread from the bakery, he says to her equally as sincerely as obnoxiously in the silly capital accent, “may the odds… ”
Katniss laughs and takes the bread offered her and finishes in that same nasally tone, “… ever be in your favor.”
The overcast sky mirrors the gloom of the square, reflecting the mood in an image so clear it felt almost orchestrated. The people are packed and organized, like electronic components in District 3. Divided by age groups, it’s common to see families looking above others, trying to communicate with their eyes what words cannot express. Despite everyone wearing their Reaping Day best, the shine of freshly pressed shirts and nearly mended dresses couldn’t mask the fear etched on every face.
Katniss and Prim walk hand in hand toward the square, connected until they are forced apart. A peacekeeper meets them at the entrance; Prim is directed one way, while Gale pushes Katniss in the other.
Katniss quickly bends down and whispers to Prim, “Nothing will happen, little duck, don’t worry. I’ll meet you at the corner of the bakery when this is over.” She presses a kiss to her hair and signals for Prim to join the other 12-year-olds.
No matter what she does, Katniss cannot shield Prim from the reaping. No matter how strong, how quick with a knife, or precise with a shot, she cannot stand between Prim and the reaping. Katniss can only hope they go through the process unchosen, as she has every year for the past six. But what are the chances Prim will be picked in her first year, with only one slip of her name in the bowl among hundreds?
When Effie Trinket reached into the bowl of names while cheerfully declaring that “ladies go first of course,” the square breathed as a unit. Each person wished the same as the one standing next to them. Each prayer to save their child, their sister, their friend, damned another’s. It was the drawing of the names for the 74th annual Hunger Games.
Katniss rose on her toes to see above the crowd surrounding her, looking to Prim to make sure she wasn’t too worried.
Just as she caught sight of her little sister, still too small and thin at 12, the name is called.
Primrose Everdeen.
The world stood still, but Katniss was still moving. Surely Prim was not the name she heard, and it was just her mind playing tricks on her.
Stillness covers the silence, filling the space between each person. Covering them all in the weight of the knowledge that the female tribute for District 12 was Katniss’s sister, a girl of 12.
The Capitol clown calls again, “Primrose Everdeen?”
The group of girls around Prim breaks, as if to put her into an artificial spotlight made of her peers, leaving her to join the lambs to slaughter.
Movement catches Katniss’ eye. A peacekeeper in a shroud of pristine white moves by her.
The world moves again. Faster than she could even think, her mouth moves.
“I volunteer”
Prim moves through molasses towards the stage.
Ripped from her throat, Katniss shouts, “I volunteer!”
Drenched in terror, she shoves the people around her, “I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!”
The immobilized attendees break the silence imposed on them. Friend turns to friend, questioning Katniss’s choice. Someone gasps.
Katniss drags herself to the front of the throng of people, standing in a clearing of her making, she looks the capital puppet in the eyes as she declares with more resolve than she felt, “I volunteer as tribute.”
Katniss suddenly feels a body slam into hers. Prim sobbed, fingers digging into the dress she was wearing as if it were her final lifeline, begging Prim cries to her, “Katniss, you can’t! You promised nothing would happen!”
The people around them grow restless. Peacekeepers begin to descend on the scene to force Katniss onto the stage to continue the proceedings. She looks over Prim’s head to Gale and signals to him to get her. Katniss cups her face, leaning down to her level, she says, “I have to. I love you. I will come home. I will win.”
Gale has to nearly rip Prim off her, and with tears running down her face, reflecting in his eyes, he drags Prim back. Leaving Katniss alone. Each sob that broke through Prim’s chest felt like a knife to her heart as she took the stage uninhibited from everything except the knowledge of what awaits.
An artificial mandated stillness blankets the crowd as she takes a breath on stage. Facing her peers of years, the people she has sold game to. Madge from class. They saw a girl who was ready to sacrifice everything for her sister. Katniss only saw a sea of faces, each nearly indistinguishable from the one next to it. These people would watch her televised death, and there was only so much she could do to change it.
Effie begins the draw for the male tribute, but Katniss cannot think about what poor soul would be joining her this year. Shes contemplates on stage, lost in thought. What she needed to get back to Prim. The things she’d have to do to get home again would irreversibly change her, but she would not be able to live with herself if she didn’t try her hardest to survive.
Katniss stood and saw the crowd. The crowd saw a girl of 18 ready to die for her sister.
The Justice Building was cold and uninviting. Green velvet upholstery covered the seats in the room she was unceremoniously pushed into by the peacekeepers after Peeta, the son of the baker, was called to be the male tribute.
She could almost smell the years of fear etched into the very atmosphere of the room, where every year for the last 74 tributes say their final goodbyes.
The door opened sharply, and Katniss was met with Prim flinging herself onto her, and behind their mother entered. Her face was fractured, pale. She begins, “Katniss, you can’t—”
“You cannot disappear again,” Katniss cuts her off, uncaring how her tone is mean. “You must stay here. Prim needs you. She is your priority; you cannot collapse.”
Her mother nodded, tears blurring her eyes. Katniss didn’t care; Prim needed her to be strong. Tears would not change that.
Stroking the back of Prim’s head, Katniss turned her attention to the barnacle she acquired.
“Little Duck,” she calls.
Sniffles are her only response.
“Listen to me. I will come home to you. ”
“You have to promise! ” Prim cries.
“I promise.”
“You have to stay safe, and be strong, and smart, and everything Katniss, you can win!”
“I will try, Prim, I will come home to you. It’s just the games. I know how to hunt, I will survive, don’t worry about me. ” Katniss has to fight to keep the tremble out of her voice.
Too soon, a peacekeeper came in and pushed her mother and Prim out of the room. This time, Prim walked out. Tears stained her cheeks and they both looked back to Katniss as they left her for what they hoped would not be the last time.
Katniss didn’t even have time to sit in her new reality before Gale walked in. His usual burning temper settled into a firm resolve. He knew she wouldn’t appreciate emotional comforting words. They had information to exchange.
“Do not let them starve,” Katniss says, pinning him with her stare.
“I won’t. You know I won’t. ” Gale says, stepping close to her to quickly embrace her.
Pulling back and forcing eye contact, Gale begins to talk. “You find a bow, or you make one. You get knives, you be smart. Go hunting. ”
Katniss pulls back, shocked.
“No, listen to me,” he says, voice cold, detached. “You know how to hunt. You have put down more deer than I can count. We’ve dropped more than a few feral dogs, and you killed wild cats Catnip. Sometimes death is the only option”
Katniss nodded.
He leaned in, gaze boring into her, delivering the final lethal instructions as a statement of fact rather than
“You will be hunted. They will be armed. They are the same, you and them. They stand between you coming home to Prim and me or dying. They are threats. They are obstacles. They are meat, and you know what to do about meat.”
He pauses, cementing the words in her head.
“Besides, what’s the difference between animals and humans?”
The words hung, sinking into the cold, impersonal backroom of the Justice building.
Eyes wide as she finally understood what Gale was telling her, Katniss broke the silence she had been trapped in as Gale spoke.
“I understand,” she whispered.
Gale pulled back, a faint smile gracing his lips as he realized Katniss would come back to him.
“I will win. I will hunt.” The promise was not to Gale. It was to Prim. Her anchor. The little girl who made her life worth living. If that is what was needed to get home, then hunt she will.
The door opened, and the peacekeepers entered again. Gale squeezes her shoulder in comfort one final time before he walks out the door.
“Remember.”
Katniss turned to the window, covered in dust and grime. She would go hunting once the gong of the area rang. And if the new game was human, so what? The new rules of survival were simple. The fastest kill is the fastest way home.