Katniss Everdeen is busy reblogging squirrel pics (tindernest) wrote in wariscoming,
1/2
For all that she’d been raised on almost nothing as far as nourishment went, Katniss had rarely been ill growing up. She’d had the usual childhood ailments, sore throats that lingered and scratched in the winter, a nose that ran till the skin was chapped, or a minor fever in the summer, but it had all been manageable. Her mother had handed her a cup of something hot with herbs mixed in whose names she could never quite remember (head too full of the names of plants they could eat) and she’d been off to the woods to meet Gale. When she felt one of those minor ailments coming on the idea of staying home to rest never even occurred to her. Maybe if she’d been a merchant’s daughter sickness would have been a time to huddle under a quilt, to rest and laze, but that thought was as useless and inapplicable to her own life as the idea of food just appearing on the table with no need to hunt for it. To Katniss, sickness was an indulgence, and she wasn’t accustomed to indulging herself.
That was why, though she’d felt flushed and bone-weary when she woke up from her nightmares of the arena, Peeta lying on the ground with no heartbeat, and Plutarch Heavensbee closing her eyes with his fingers, she’d headed out to obtain food for her apartment without a second thought. That her mother was no longer here with her herbs and her long, cool fingers that could tell a fever from a sweating sickness with a brush of flesh against flesh did not trouble her, because to Katniss these things had always been incidental. Her mother, after she had determined she could no longer be trusted as a provider, had never been allowed to be anything other than incidental. It was Katniss’s job to get food, sick or not, and so that’s what she had gone to do.
Lawrence was the largest city, the only city really, that she’d ever been free to walk through by herself, and the maze of the streets almost made her glad of the exhaustion that numbed her to the possibility of anxiety or timidity. I wonder if this is how Haymitch feels when he’s drunk, she’d thought, as she forced her increasingly heavy limbs to carry her down a road for what felt like hours before she realized she was going in the wrong direction entirely. She was aware that she was in pain, that she was confused and lost, but everything about her body and surroundings had faded to a sort of background noise that didn’t stop her from trudging on until she’d reached her destination.
The store, “Wal Mart” it had proclaimed itself in bright yellow lettering taller than her, had been enough to snap her out of it for a moment. It was as if someone had taken several of the hob and smashed them together. She’d wandered dazedly down aisle after aisle of food, vegetables fresh and somehow still glistening with dew even in bins, and fruit larger than anything she’d ever seen growing wild. The meat was stored in freezers and already skinned and chopped into steaks or ground so that it would be easy to use in a recipe. There was a bakery with a sheer variety of breads, cookies, and cakes that put even District 12’s baker to shame (though next to Peeta’s cakes the frosted designs on the ones she’d peered at through the glass had looked juvenile, silly little flowers on white frosting, simple and almost garish), and that didn’t even begin to touch on the other products, the furniture and books and the electronics she couldn’t even begin to understand. When she’d seen an entire aisle for different kinds of hairbrushes she’d been sure she was sicker than she’d thought and that she’d begun hallucinating.
Ironically, that was when she’d felt her legs buckle underneath her and give out.