Rue could barely sleep. The bright light of the moon reached for her through the cracks of her home in the Community, shining a prickling feeling over her eyes and forcing them to open and take in the darkness around her. She was sleeping on the floor with Terra, her little sister, but it wasn't the dirt she minded; Rue knows that her parents deserve to sleep on the bed just over her head; they barely got any time to just be with each other.
But the seven-year-old had no reason to worry about her parent's marriage—she had more prominent things to wonder about. Tomorrow she would join her father as a Harvester for the first time, and the young girl couldn't wait.
The girl knew that she was gifted; her parents told her that the first thing she'd ever said sounded like an angel had sung her father's name, and that she could shimmy up a tree long before she could walk. And when she would sit in the Community tree for hours on end, the mockingjays would crowd around her in the nearby branches, and she would serenade them with her mother's lullabies, and they would sing them back to her.
"Rue?" a child's voice whispered. Snapping out of her dream, the older sister put a finger to her lips as Terra blinks the sleep out of her eyes.
"I'm sorry, did I wake you?" she whispered, and stroked the hair out of Terra's eyes. Terra shook her head, no.
"Sing." She said back. Glancing around to make sure she wouldn't wake anyone, the older girl hummed into Terra's pink ears until her eyes drooped back down. Rue had managed to do the same, and as she drifted back into the precious realm of sleep, she thought she heard a single mockingjay singing back to her Terra's lullaby.
A/N: Thanks for reading!