Katniss Everdeen is busy reblogging squirrel pics (tindernest) wrote in wariscoming,
[[I g-modded/assumed Peeta would complete the walk back to the complex and climb into bed with her. I tried to stay up to ask if this was okay with you but I am sick and tired so I figured I'd put this up before I went to sleep. If this is not okay with you just let me know and I'll take it down asap and rework it!]
Katniss sighed in resignation when Peeta expressed his horror at the idea of assessing her condition based at least partially on the impression it would make with sponsors. You have to keep thinking about these things even when it feels wrong, she wanted to tell him, and you have to stop assuming that pity will ever motivate anyone from the Capitol to do anything. The second we stop being entertaining we’re dead, and there’s only so long me being sick will entertain them. They want blood. She opened her mouth to try to tell him all of that, to point out that he would be a lot easier to keep alive if he didn’t insist on being so good all the time, but then he was talking about sleep, and it sounded so achingly wonderful that she had to fight to keep her eyes open for even a moment longer.
Though she didn’t notice the transition from waking to dream, she lost her struggle to stay conscious, and as Peeta reached the other side of the road her breathing evened out aside from a dull rasping in her chest.
The buck wandered into the road, weaving around the cars that had stopped for Peeta. It was young, barely a yearling, like the buck she and Gale had shot and sold to earn Prim her nanny goat. Katniss watched it lower its head to nibble at some grass that grew around one of the decorative trees randomly interspersed into the concrete of the sidewalk. Just that one buck would fetch such a price, she and Gale would have to be careful not to bring it in to the Hob or they’d be set on like they were deer themselves. Darius could be counted on to keep order if they notified him ahead of time, promised him a piece of the meat, a flank maybe…
She blinked, just once, and the deer was gone, just the flash of its tail visible as it disappeared around a corner, into the stand of trees that signaled the dip of the arena towards the lake.
“Rue,” she whispered, turned her face away from Peeta’s chest in her sleep, “just stay here. We can light the fires later, I won’t get another chance at a deer.”
Rue was gone too though, after the deer, running so fast that Katniss’s eyes could hardly follow her, much less her legs. She called after her small ally, but the girl had gone too far too fast, tempted by the promise of all that meat, even if she didn’t have a hope of bringing it down.
…Prim looked up nervously from where she sat, cross-legged, on the floor of their house in the Victor’s Village, twisting stems of grass around her fingers. “It’s getting dark now Katniss,” she whispered, “we can’t be in the woods in the dark.” Katniss reached down to her, tucking a few strands of blonde hair back behind her ear, and smiled at her reassuringly,
“I’ll get her, I’ll bring her home Prim, don’t worry,” she whispered as they entered the complex and Peeta carried her into the elevator.
but Prim was gesturing towards something over her shoulder and Katniss whirled around to see that the buck was back. She held up a hand in a silent signal to Gale who stood just behind her, a cautionary gesture, wait and see, wait and see what it does. The buck sniffed the air delicately and minced forward into better light and Katniss frowned. Something was wrong with its eyes, instead of the warm brown that she’d been expecting they were glinting in the light, a shining color rather than a muted one…green?
She recognized Glimmer’s eyes a moment before the mutt sprang forwards towards them, shedding the deerskin like a costume and baring snarling canine fangs. Katniss reached behind her for Gale but he was gone, disappeared or fallen, and she couldn’t leave without with that thing closing the distance so rapidly, salivating and snarling…