May 8th
District Twelve. The poorest district in Panem. People die of starvation every day. And yet, parents keep bringing helpless mouths to feed into this world. Most of these helpless life's are insignificant to the Capitol. But every once in a while, someone who started out as just another mouth to feed, will grow to become a person, who can change the fate of Panem.
Sage Everdeen was a coal miner from the Seam, the poorest part of the district. But Iris chose to be with him although, her best friend, the baker, was more than willing to marry her. Iris loved Sage with all her heart, and, despite the merchants looks, she married him. The baker was depressed, but found someone who could carry his children, and he married her. By the time his wife was carrying his third child, Iris was pregnant with her first child. The months were long and stressful, but that May, on the seventh, Iris went into labor. And on the eighth, Sage and Iris's daughter was born.
She was born with the Seam features, grey eyes and dark hair, and Sage named her Katniss. Sage and Katniss had this bond that Iris couldn't understand. While Sage was at work in the mines, Iris could barely get Katniss to stop crying. Iris gave her the middle name Orchid.
When Katniss turned two years old, Sage would take Katniss into the woods to hunt with him, even thought he knew it worried Iris. He could tell Katniss enjoyed the woods, away from the district. That's what made him continue to bring her.
Iris was pregnant again by the time Katniss was four, Katniss was overjoyed that she would have a brother or sister, and had made sure to tell everyone in the district as soon as she'd found out. And two weeks after Katniss's birthday, Prim Rose was born. Prim was born with the merchant features, blond hair and blue eyes.
Right before Katniss's sixth birthday, she found out about The Hunger Games, and had stopped talking to her classmates. Katniss started building walls around herself, shutting everyone out, by her eleventh birthday, she'd only let her walls down for her family.
But then, tragedy struck. Sage, and many others were killed in the mines. Iris had been so devastated that she stopped taking care of her children. She just watched as they slowly starved to death. One day, Katniss came home with some burnt bread she'd managed to get from the bakery. And rationed it until her twelfth birthday. Then she signed up for a tesserae, to enter her name into the reaping bowl, for some extra food. Katniss was infuriated with her mother and only let her walls down for Prim and Gale, her new friend, she met in the woods, who's father died in the mines that same day.
The next four of Katniss's birthdays were spent hunting in the woods with Gale, and then looking at the cakes in the window of the bakery, with Prim.
Katniss spent most of her seventeenth birthday in the woods. Gale had started working in the mines. And Katniss didn't need to hunt anymore. She'd won The Hunger Games, along with fellow tribute Peeta Mellark, the youngest son of the baker who wanted to marry Katniss's mother many years ago. When Katniss came home her mother, sister, and Haymitch, her mentor in the Games had set up a party for her. But Katniss's last birthday party was years ago, when her father was still alive. Katniss did her best to act happy, she had gotten really good at acting recently...
Katniss's eighteenth birthday was not special at all. Within the past year, she'd gone back into the Games in the third Quarter Qwell, and had been through a war, against the Capitol. Prim was dead. And Katniss's mother moved to District Four. Katniss only had Prim's old cat, Buttercup.
Peeta and Haymitch did their best to make Katniss's nineteenth birthday special, but Peeta ended up trying to kill Katniss, because of the Tracker Jacker venom the Capitol injected into Peeta during the war. Katniss ended up locked in her bedroom closet. And Haymitch ended up passed out on Katniss's table.
During the next year, Katniss had came to realize she loved Peeta. And on Katniss's twentieth birthday, she became Katniss Orchid Mellark.