A silly little idea appeared two years ago in my mind cinema. More recently, I realised that it suited the Hunger Games universe rather well. The result of this realisation is hopefully of some use to somebody.

Disclaimer: I do not own Hunger Games. I'm just another avid spectator.

Warnings: Infrequent swearing, animal deaths(?), an author who is writing this as she goes along.

And a partridge in a pear tree

As beautiful as the snowfall looked blanketing the forest, Katniss didn't have the distinctly Capitol luxury of admiring it. Sure, it glimmered like diamonds as it fell, at least she imagined it did, but like any token from the affluent city, it was excessive, clinical and ultimately useless. It hindered her long-practised tread, masked the animal tracks and came close to blinding her. If only it had stopped yesterday, or the day before that. A light blanket was a hunter's dream, but these constant snowstorms were hardly conducive to finding food. And she needed to find food now that Gale was in the mines. She had vowed to support his family as faithfully as she did her own. A promise easily made, she grumbled to herself as she waded her way out of the woods with nothing but an unfortunate rabbit to her name.

If the weather continues like this, what will I do? A growing fear from her past was clawing its way back into her heart. Memories from that dreadful time following her father's death where sustenance and hope had both been rare.

I'll return in the afternoon, she vowed to herself. Surely the snow will let up by then. This had been her thought yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.

She quickly stopped at her house, avoiding her mother's enquiring looks, shedding her bow and arrows and collecting books and schoolbags in their stead. Then she went to her and Prim's shared room and knocked. 'School.'

A feeble croak was her sister's answer.

'Prim, are you still in bed?'

'…No.'

'You know I can hear right through you.'

'That's not a thing,' Prim shot back with incredible certainty.

'Get out of bed, Prim.'

'I am!' Now she sounded almost affronted.

'Really?' Katniss replied, turning the handle.

They was a squeak, a creak and a thump, and Katniss opened the door to find her sister on the floor, miserably trying to extract herself from her bed sheets. 'Five minutes,' Katniss informed her with subtle amusement.

Prim squeaked again, and suddenly escaping her blanket's grasp was a whole lot easier than before. After wasting an unfeasible amount of time on selecting an outfit from her rather homogenous lineup of simple dresses, she seemed to remember her need to hurry and dashed past Katniss, entering the bathroom with a slam.

Katniss checked the clock. 'Two minutes,' she called out.

Prim squeaked for the third time.

…

Most parts of District Twelve were as old as the dirt that powdered the slush, churned into it by myriad boots until the snow no longer resembled the pretty white flakes it had descended as. Still, Katniss preferred the sight of the ugly slush, and only wished that the clouds responsible for the meagre snowfall here on the main street would migrate over to her forest so she could finally get some hunting done. As Prim and Katniss waded up the briefly cleared road, the scenery slowly began to change: the ramshackle, wooden huts that Katniss had known for years receding before the unspoken border between the Seam, her home, and the richer merchant quarters. Straddling the two disconnected worlds was District Twelve's only high school, the one place where dark-haired Seam kids and blond merchant progeny mixed. Although mixed was a very loose word for the rigid cliques and latent snobbery that went on inside its walls.

'Oh look, darling, natives!'

Katniss and Prim slowly turned to observe the speaker and their "darling". She was one of the cluster of Capitol invaders that stood a few feet away, clutching cameras, sporting state-of-the-art yet bizarre winter wear, looking perversely bright against the brownish-white backdrop of District Twelve. Unfortunately for Katniss, this sight was becoming old as dirt to her as well, not to mention the picture-perfect collection of pearlescent buildings that loomed conspicuously on a hill above the low skyline. Victors' Village, they called it, a high-end, residential complex that housed all the Capitol folk who came here as part of the "Panem Tour". The privileged denizens could travel to each of the twelve districts and experience the supposed lifestyle and culture there, all in complete comfort of course.

The latest batch of Capitol citizens were busy snapping away as Katniss and Prim cast uneasy glances at each other. The sisters were pretty late to school, which meant that they were the only students around and likely prey for this group of cooing, ridiculous tourists.

'Aren't they charming?'

'Do they speak Panemian, Cato?'

'That's not a thing,' Prim whispered at Katniss, who nodded wholeheartedly.

'Can they understand us?'

The tour guide, a towering, brutish boy whose continued presence had come to annoy Katniss as much as the Capitol tourists, responded with the same irreverent smirk as usual. 'Of course, they should be able to understand us perfectly. They are quite far out in Panem, but they haven't lost all sense of civility.'

Katniss was impressed that he knew what civility meant, let alone that he could use it in a sentence.

'Hello!' a lady with numerous silver rings perforating her pile of green hair, and indeed her dyed-blue skin, called to them, 'people of District Twelve.'

'Quickly, do the greeting, Petronia!'

'Oh yes!'

Katniss and Prim grimaced as a patchy attempt at the District Twelve funeral gesture was sent their way: some of the Capitolites hitting each other as they pressed three fingers to their bee-stung lips and held them aloft.

Cato was clearly enjoying the show in a way only a district-born national could. Katniss was pretty certain that he was from Two, the region closest to the Capitol both geographically and sentimentally. He had the look of someone who had never faced death in the struggle to feed himself: tall and sturdily built. District Two was the main producer of Panem's Peacekeepers, the president's law enforcers, so it was no wonder that they were all well-fed. What Katniss didn't understand is why they had branched out into tour guiding.

'Cato, you were telling us about the adorable little caste system they have here,' Petronia was saying.

Adorable? Katniss frowned.

Cato laughed. 'I wouldn't say caste system, but as you have seen, there are two parts to Twelve. There's the Seam, where you had fun looking at the mines, which is poorer than the merchant quarters, where you did all that shopping.'

'There was hardly a difference,' one of the fatter Capitolites declared.

'Perhaps to you, sir, but these people feel the difference a bit more…keenly. Have you noticed how everyone in the merchant area tends to have blond hair and blue eyes while everyone in the Seam has dark hair, gray eyes and tan skin? They all marry within their groups, and those two groups rarely interact.'

'So are those two girls hostile enemies?' someone asked, wringing her hands in excitement.

'She's my sister, actually,' Katniss said. 'And as nice as it was to be the subject of your photos, we have our own lives to be getting on with. Native rituals, some chanting around the fire, probably in the nude.'

'Goodbye,' Prim called chirpily, charming the Capitol folk enough that they took yet more pictures.

To Katniss's chagrin, Cato turned that wayward leer on her and pursed his lips into something like a kiss. Her stomach turned. Then Cato himself turned and herded his gaggle of tourists away, grinning over his shoulder.

'We won't be spending much longer here, I hope, Cato?' one of the gentlemen asked. 'All the smog is getting to my lungs.'

'And this isn't exactly one of the more interesting districts.'

'You're right there, ma'am,' Cato laughed.

Prim and Katniss watched them disappear.

'Come on, let's get to school.'

…

Apart from a minor scolding from her lackadaisical Panem History teacher, Katniss's day was more or less the same as any other. She sat at the back of each class, sometimes next to Madge if the equally withdrawn mayor's daughter was in her lesson. Lunchtime was like a study of Twelve's social dynamics. There were tables full of Seam kids, carefully divided. There were the academics, who could only aim to become teachers, the popular lot that was always hanging about the slag heap, the rebels, who thinly veiled their hatred for the Capitol, the sloths who saw their inescapable future in the mines as an excuse to laze around. The merchant teens had a similar setup, a hierarchy of populars to pariahs. And there was someone in the midst of the most social group of blond heads that never failed to catch Katniss's discerning eye. He was the one that drew hilarity and rapt attention with his broad hand gestures and colourful stories. Peeta Mellark, the boy with the bread.

Katniss couldn't claim to know him personally, but their lives were irreversibly bound by the fact that Peeta had once saved her life when they were both eleven years old. In those dark days after her father had been killed in a mining accident, her mother had withdrawn herself from the world, living in a self-imposed coma, leaving Katniss as the sole breadwinner for the household. The bread was never won, however. It was given, in the rain, when the youngest baker's son had seen the shivering, starving Katniss poking around in the bins and purposefully burnt two loaves. His mother had railed at him and, Katniss discovered later, beaten him, but the two slightly charred loaves that seemed destined for the pigs ended up in her hands instead. To this day, she didn't think Peeta knew the large impact his little sacrifice had made.

'Looking at anyone in particular?' Madge asked as she came to sit beside Katniss.

'No,' Katniss answered abruptly, a touch too abruptly judging by the knowing arch of Madge's brow. Still, the blonde girl said nothing of it. This was one of the main qualities that Katniss valued in her only school friend.

The two unlikely companions, exceptions to the school status quo, went on to have their lunch in comfortable silence. What they were unaware of, since their eyes were fixed to their plates, was that between all of his jokes and anecdotes, Peeta found time to watch Katniss too.

…

The forest was yet again disappointing, and Katniss returned to the house in a dormant rage. Her feet were unnecessarily brutal as she kicked them against the doorpost to dislodge snow from her boots. Damn snow. It had never meant anything good for her district, whether it was falling for sky or sitting in the presidential office.

Her mother instinctively knew not to ask as she marched past, turning her problems over in her mind until she could somehow stretch herself to a solution. If she halved the rabbit from earlier and shared it between the Everdeens and the Hawthornes, that would leave little enough for anyone. And with Gale exhausted from the mines, two growing brothers and a baby sister, they would need all the food they could get. The Hawthornes could have the whole rabbit then. The Everdeens had some food stores. They weren't completely out. Still, a rabbit was not enough for that family. What if she pawned the rabbit off? How much could she get? Greasy Sae was always looking for meat for her soups. Perhaps–

The door knocked.

'Mom, the door,' Katniss said when no-one had stirred for a while.

'I'm doing something,' she replied.

And Prim was upstairs, studying. With a huff, Katniss went to the door, the tenuous plans she had been forming now in complete disarray. Who could it be, anyway? The only person who visited was Gale, and he wasn't off for another few hours.

Katniss tried to soften her scowl, as her mother often told her to do, before she opened the door. She had no idea if she was successful.

'Hi,' she said as she opened the door, but that was as far as she got.

She was standing face to face with a potted plant. More specifically, a tree. Even more specifically, a tree hung with copious, succulent pears. Her stomach growled. She took one in her hand. It seemed real enough. Only she had never seen one this size before, with this subtle sheen. Tied to the trunk of the tree with a red ribbon was a tag. Squatting, Katniss examined it.

"Merry Christmas," it said, "from your true love."

Due to Katniss's nature, she completely disregarded on the second half of the message. 'Merry Chri- Cry-, Merry Whatnow?'

As if this incident wasn't outlandish enough, a bird flew out of the tree, over her head and into the house. Moments later, Katniss heard shrieks from the kitchen and the sounds of pots and pans and other unidentifiable things crashing to the floor. She sat there on her haunches for a while, listening to sound of destruction with a blank expression, before taking a pear from the tree and having a bite. At least the fruit was good.

Thank you for reading. This should be updated daily. Should is a wonderfully ambiguous word, isn't it?