A scream tore through Katniss' throat, hideous and raw. Her shrieking cascading from her without remorse, because she hadn't any remorse to give. Not now. She had gone through too much; she too many tears and watched too many people die.
So she would scream all she wanted to.
As she did, tears started flowing freely down her face in long, quiet streaks, dropping down onto her body with warm, wet splashes.
Birds still flocked away from her screaming, desperate to leave her behind, find safer and quieter grounds for them to settle down.
Katniss couldn't control herself; she was a bundle of raw and broken nerves that had chosen tonight to fall apart. Out of all nights, this had to be another one of them.
She still remembered the Hunger Games, both of the arenas she had been forced to fight in, forced to survive in. She still remembered the still, cold, quiet Rue, laying on the ground before her. Silent as the dead always were, and small bits of flowers and pine sprinkled upon her body.
And the image of her melded into Prim, her beloved younger sister, torn from her forever. The thought tore another anguished scream from Katniss' throat, filling the night air with her anguish once more. Her fists came down to beat upon the tree trunks, and then the solid dirt as she collapsed onto her knees.
She was breathing hard, nearly hyperventilating. She tried to force herself to breathe normally, to make her breath steady and sure, but to no avail. It still puffed out of her body awkwardly, interrupted by a hiccup that was supposed to be another scream.
Katniss held her breath, counting to ten.
Her mother had once taught her that trick; that if you hold your breath it will cure the hiccups. Maybe it could control someone's breathing as well, or so Katniss hoped.
Once the seconds were up, she exhaled dramatically, then slumped over onto herself, curling herself into a tight ball on the forest floor. She hugged at her knees, pressing them closer to her chest, and to her stomach.
It was far too early for the baby to be born, but it had started to move. The slightest motion there within her belly, and that would tell her how developed it had become. The child was quickening, and from what her doctor said, that meant it was healthy.
Katniss was glad for that.
Now that the Hunger Games were over, she felt better about having children, about brining life into this world. A world that was no longer so cruel; not as cruel as it had been to her and her sister, hopefully.
Better, safer.
She took another shuddering gasp as the tears continued to flow down her cheeks, as strong and steady as small little streams on her skin. She rubbed at her stomach protectively, and let it hover over the baby bump, waiting to see if the baby would move. For the bulge to give a slight shift and let Katniss know it was alright.
But it was still.
Perhaps I have wounded it, Katniss thought, another strangled cry escaping her throat.
There were no more birds left, and squirrels and stray cats and long since fled from her direction. Nothing should be here; everything was so completely still and silent. It was almost unnerving, almost.
Katniss sniffed.
Her nose was still plugged from all the screaming and crying she had done, but she didn't care. Wiping what was left on her sleeves, she crawled along to a nearby rock, looking out over the valley that she and Gale had spent so much time looking upon.
The moon was less than half full, so it cast a dim, shallow light upon the forest.
She sniffed again, her cuff once again at her face. Awkwardly, she was wiping away her tears with the rough fabric, scratching her skin painfully.
It was so dark and quiet, she could almost hear herself think. But Katniss wasn't completely sure she wanted to be alone with her thoughts. Sometimes, in dangerous times, her mind would drift to narcotics hidden within the cabinetry, and the weapons still hidden and stashed away from the Peacekeepers, who had long since left and retired.
No, she shook her head.
Things were different now. She knew that.
Prim may be gone, but life moves on. And Katniss had to accept that. As much as it pained her, she had to accept that. But sometimes she just couldn't, things would overwhelm her, years worth of horrible and terrible memories still playing out in her head. Vivid enough to make her bite down till she tasted blood on her tongue.
She moved her hand back to her stomach, rubbing carefully over the baby bump. Carefully, gently, slowly. Trying to feel for any movement, any movement what so ever. Though she didn't know it, she was holding her breath, waiting for the slightest shift to tell her the baby still lived.
Nightmares had kept creeping up on her as well, horrible nightmares of all of her children (though this was her first child) dying before her eyes. Dying her her womb, dying in her arms, dying from afar when she could not reach them, could not get to them to protect them, and was forced to watch with burning wet eyes while they're lives were ended.
It was then that the baby moved.
Katniss sighed in relief, and started crying again.
She didn't know why she had become so emotional during all this, but many of the women who were helping her along said that it was normal to become more emotional during pregnancy. It was normal and there was nothing to worry about, or so they said.
A smile crossed her face then, though she didn't know why.
It seemed so wrong, but she was smiling.
With another choked, tearful scream that morphed into groan, she removed herself from her place among the bushes and trees. She didn't feel like she should be there anymore, didn't feel like she should be staying in one place. The doctors had also said exercise was a good activity for pregnant women, but Katniss only half-heartedly took the advice. She considered herself active enough, and the pregnancy was so draining on her.
Rubbing her stomach protectively, she slowly made her way through the quiet and dismal forest. Her tears were drying on her face as she made her way over rocks small as pebbles and big as boulders, and laced her way through the maze of thick trees and underbrush.
Subconsciously, she was following the same hunting path she had used all those years ago, when she was still starving beyond belief. A small spark of memory flamed up within the back of her mind, and she suddenly longed for her bow and arrows, and to feel the familiar sensation of the leather quiver on her back.
But it soon passed.
The steady crunch of her boots on gravelly forest dirt soon calmed her, both with the rhythmic pattern and the nostalgia it brought her. So many years.
So many years past, and Katniss seemed to be reliving them all tonight.
The bloody Rue lying still in the dirt, and the last look on Prim's face before the hellish fire had consumed her and all those others. Her eyes squeezed shut, as if that could somehow block out the visions that she had witnessed. With another sigh, she rounded the corner, disappearing into another thicket of trees.
Katniss was already planning her way back, to made a large circle like she had done a thousand times, and then walk straight back into the town she lived in, not needed to beware of the electric fence. It had long since been destroyed, pulling apart and shredded and broken down by her fellow neighbors, all of them tired of that damned fence.
Katniss had been among them, just as eager as they were to tear down the final shackles that had kept them bound for so long and confined them all like caged animals. She had been livid, tearing apart the linked chains with bolt cutters and uprooting the deep set in posts, needing almost no help to free them from the earth. It wasn't the last oppressive reminder of the Capitol, but it had been a big one, and its riddance was like a breath of fresh air.
And once the fence was gone, she had been able to walk freely among the woods once more, not needing to crawl on all fours or shimmy on her belly to get to them, with the back of the dilapidated fence starching itself on her clothes.
It was a completely new experience for her, to be able to walk in and out of the woods. Walk. Katniss had gone back and forth and back and forth between the town and the woods for many weeks past, after the fence had been torn down, reveling in this new sensation.
The experience was so strange to her, so surreal, that she thought that she would never get used to the feeling. And of course, she never really had. It all seemed like a dream to her. A sweet, blissful dream that wove itself in between the horrible, terrifying ones that still plagued her memory.
For each good thing that lodged itself within her mind, there were at least five bad things in place.
The fence had been torn down, but she still remembered having to crawl under it and being scratched every day. Having to constantly sneak around the lame authority. The shock of hearing the electrical current for the first time, threatening to kill her should she dare touch it, and effectively locking her out of her home.
And the memory of nearly breaking her leg, and the pain of having to walk on it all the way back to the Victor's Quarters, only to be met by Peacekeepers who became more and more threatening each time the scene playing through her mind. It had started with them wanting her dead, wanting her blood, then had become something more savage. Something that promised eternal torture and emotional damage that could never be repaired.
Emotional damage.
There was plenty of that already.
Dreams of her skull being pulled back, piece by piece and leaving her weak and vulnerable brain open to the fresh air and the prying hands and torture instruments that kept reaching out for her, wanting her. Wanting to probe her and dissect her, and most of all make her feel pain.
That was one of the worse nightmares, and even Peeta couldn't seem to make it go away. Of all the nightmares that kept reoccurring over the years, Peeta had managed to thin them out for her, make them less threatening, and keep her calmer than she couldn't have been without him.
But that one dream, of them pulling organs from her and stabbing her with needles and slicing apart her head, that one he just couldn't make her forget. Couldn't make her calm herself, as much as he tried. And he had tried and tried and tried.
She had told Peeta about that dream, in vivid detail, and he looked like he was going to be sick.
He still remembered his hijacking, and the days he had spent attempting to rid himself of that horrible brainwashing. So now that nightmare had become his own, and Katniss hated herself for it. Hated the fact that she had given him a new nightmare, something to fear.
Brainwashing and Katniss' dreams of brain dissection, it had hit too close to home with him.
"I'm sorry, Peeta," she mumbled, to no one but herself and the open air.
He said that he forgave her, that there was nothing to hold against her, that he didn't blame her. All of the usual stuff like that, trying to make Katniss feel better, but she just couldn't shake the guilt of that. Peeta had told her time and time again not to feel bad about what she had done, but Katniss knew that that might never happen.
She was too wrapped in guilt from other things, that perhaps she wouldn't notice one more.
And the eyes Peeta had looked at her with; they were so sorrowful, but yet so knowing at the same time. He knew what she was going through, because he lived it almost the exact same way as she did. The sad, understanding eyes that had seemed to seep into her soul and find her, pull her back out and into him, and make her understand.
But still, she had held fast to everything she had known and thought and believed.
And not even Peeta and his loving, knowing stares could change that.
The night was starting to wear into her aching, tired bones, and her eyes felt dry. She blinked, rapidly, trying to put some moisture back into them. All those shed tears seemed to have taken all the liquid from her.
With heavy eyelids drooping over her sore eyes, Katniss made the large widened circle in the trees, following the familiar bend in the path, littered with brown pine needles and rotted berries.
The carpeting on the forest floor was thin, with the Spring having taken all the debris away. The small berries were once more blooming on the bushes, the the dead pine needles had almost all been washed away by the rains.
Katniss stifled a yawn, and tears once again sprung from her eyes against the strain. She didn't know why, and she cared even less, but the tears began to flow freely again, soaking her cheeks once more. Her hand was still pressed to her stomach, and she could feel the smallest of kicks up against her hand.
And she thought that was what drove her over the edge, made her start sobbing openly once more.
She was too emotional tonight…
Peeta and her had half-heartedly discussed names for their baby, both male and female names that had been tossed around and then forgotten about. Katniss hated to think of it, and she would never have admitted it out loud, at least to Peeta anyway…but she wasn't entirely sure the baby would live long enough.
She had heard too many times about a stillbirth, which had been far too common in District 12, even after the Hunger Games had ended. But the threat was still there; every year there had been babies born without any life to them, or completely dead from the start. And then the weak babies, too fragile to survive in the outside world, their tiny bodies giving up on them outside of the womb.
Katniss' baby was kicking though, weakly but with a steadiness that put her at ease. It beat like a drum, one small kick after another, not seeming to end anytime soon.
Another yawn reached across her mouth.
Her jaws opened wide and another strangled cry escaped from her throat.
Stomach swollen and feet aching, and still another two miles from her home, Katniss sat upon a large boulder, crowded in between two large and knotted trees. It was easy enough to climb up the rock, since the tree roots were thick and strong and wrapped around the rock. She picked her way up the roots, before settling down again.
She was tired.
She was so very tired.
"What is wrong with me?" she thought aloud, her voice sounding oddly wet.
The names Rue and Primrose had both floated through her mind, sounding oddly loving and hollow at the same time. For the same reason she liked those names, she disliked them for her child. They would remind her of her sister and friend, but in a way that she didn't want to be reminded of. Besides, she felt that it was some kind of cruel ploy to name a baby after a dead friend. Like it would somehow be robbing them of their own story.
Carrying on the tradition of her mother's names was another thought, one that she didn't seem to mind all that much. She had been trying to forgive her mother, still after all this time, and it somehow got easier with the passing years, and the elongated distances.
Especially the elongated distances.
Nature names, and names of flowers that her mother had given her and her sister. Many different thoughts had come into both her head and Peeta's. Heather. Juniper. Lily. Luna. Even strange and crazy names had come onto the list, mainly by Peeta, who was trying to make her laugh at the time.
Which she did.
Cyprus. Delta. Lemongrass. Horn's Wood…
"We could call them Horny for short," Peeta had said.
That actually had made her laugh,
just as the memory of it was easing away her pain now.
"And if not Horny…well then, how about just Horn?" he had asked her, trying once more to make her laugh. Katniss had smiled and nodded, playing along with him for the time being.
"I like that—" she had told him with a carefree smile. "Horn. Simple. Tasteful. Gender-neutral."
Spots of ink started floating across her vision, dancing in the air before her in a splattering and dizzying pattern. Katniss blinked rapidly, trying to clear her sight, and then shook her head trying to clear away an approaching headache. A headache that had taken a long time to reach her.
"I should go home now," she whispered to herself, climbing down off the boulder.
Home. A place where she could shelter herself from the world for a small time; where she could go to bed, and lose herself in the soft warmth and tug the blankets up around her like a cocoon. Where a hopefully restful sleep waited for her, where she was see colorless voids instead of her dreams peppered by nightmares.
"Let's get some sleep, Horn," she said to her belly, giving it a small pat.
The baby kicked in what seemed to be a response.
"And not scream…" Katniss added.