A/N: This story is for Day 1 (Mistletoe) of the 25 Days of Fic Challenge. The Hunger Games setting and characters are the property of Suzanne Collins.
My mother's steps on the snow are timid. She flinches at every noise, as if she expects a bear or a wild dog to jump out at her. But she keeps going into the forest.
"It's all right," I say. It's not. I have an arrow ready to nock to my bow and fire. She shouldn't be out here. If the Peacekeepers find out, I'm not sure even my victor's status will protect her. "I could gather whatever-it-is for you myself. Just describe it."
"I want to do this for myself."
"It's not safe for you," I repeat.
"Safe means someone else is taking the risks." In the gloom, her eyes are gray as steel. She points to narrow green leaves dangling high in the winter-stripped branches. "There it is. I'm sure that's it."
I shake the tree experimentally, but I'm going to have to climb for it. I can't leave my mother standing here in the snow, unarmed, so I dig in a frozen drift where I remember rocks.
"Put your back against the tree." I press a rock into my mother's mittened hand. "If something comes at you, throw as hard and straight as you can. Aim for the body. You may not kill it, but you're less likely to miss."
I hurry up the tree, bark rough on my hands even through fingerless gloves. The leaves surround waxy yellow berries. The whole thing's stuck to the tree so tight that I have to pull out a knife and hack at it. When the falling greenery floats down around my mother, she flinches and lifts the rock, but she doesn't throw it.
By the fourth tree, she's stopped standing guard and is gathering the leaves as they fall. "It's not safe," I for the umpteenth time. "You've got to be alert. You've got to be on guard. Anything could get you."
"Let me show you something," is all she says. My mother pulls off a handful of berries and pops them in her mouth.
I press my hands against my own mouth to stifle a scream. They're not nightlock. I know this. My mother wants this plant to make medicines for the rotting disease. I know this. I still want to shake her and yell in her face that she isn't to eat them, not these berries, not any berries. Berries are death. Berries and fire and lakes and trees and wolves. It's all death, all traps, all people who want to kill you or make you kill.
She pulls off her gloves, spits the half-chewed berries into her bare hands, and rubs her hands together. I watch through squinted eyes, fighting my breathing toward a normal pace, while long, thin ropes form between her palms.
"Wrap them around a tree branch," she says. "When the birds land, their feet will stick. My grandmother told me that you can catch the bird in your bare hand."
"You'd have to spend a lot of time in the forest, waiting." I don't say that the bird would still be alive. Prim may be soft-hearted, but I've seen my mother break the neck of a chicken with one firm yank.
"You'd eat." She smushes the ropes back into a ball, shoves it in the pocket of my father's old hunting coat, and starts to pile leaves and branches into his hunting bag. I want to yank it away from her.
"You knew a trick for getting food, and you lay there and let us starve." The words weren't meant to come out, but now they hang between us, glittering in the icy air.
My fragile, pale, little mother glares back at me like she's twice my size, then she goes back to stuffing branches in the bag. "It's what we're supposed to do. It's what every damned Hunger Games teaches us to do. Bad things happen. You can't fix them or fight them or change them. If you can't report to work, you may as well lay down and die."
A cluster of leaves sticks to her hand, now turning red in the cold. She yanks it away and snaps the stem. "They showed the last hours of the Games on the big screen in the center of the village. I was standing next to Peeta's father when that. . . that voice announced they'd changed the rules back, and there'd be only one winner after all. I thought I was going to have to watch my daughter kill a boy she'd known all her life. Half of me was horrified, and the other half wanted you to, if that's what it took to bring my daughter home alive."
"What did you think when I picked up the berries?" I'd never asked anyone this question. Everyone had questions for me, after the Games, but I never asked my neighbors any questions at all. I didn't want to know the answers.
"I wanted to cry. I wanted to tell you I was proud of you for making the right choice. I wanted to leap through the screen and say live and tell you it was the wrong choice."
She fastens the bag of mistletoe with the same firm motion she uses in mixing a tincture or binding a wound. "The Games guarantee us that the absolute worse has happened. No matter how hungry or cold we are, no matter if our shoes are held together with string and our clothes are rags, in some minimal sense, we're safe. And we're always, for the sake of safe, supposed to sacrifice the people around us."
"I want you to be safe." It's all I can say. I'd take her and run now, except we also need Prim, and then there's Peeta and there's Gale, and they both have families, and there's Haymitch. . .
My mother shoulders the bag so that my arms are free for my bow. "Safe means someone else is taking your risks. I want us to be free."