AN: Okay, folks, SO SORRY for not updating sooner, but school + work has been INSANE. Been sick and everything from utter, evil STRESS. But summer is HERE and I'll be able to be your best friend again. 'Course I'm not gonna give any specific deadlines or promises since Diablo 3 is out, and I've rediscovered my love for Rusty Hearts! :-)

Disclaimer: Not Suzanne Collins, don't own Hunger Games, don't own Collins' characters, blah, blah, blah…

Chapter 3:

A few hours after beginning her night's rest Nira woke. The earliest of the morning hours were painted dark as night; in but half an hour the eastern horizon of sky would begin lightening.

She slipped from her hidden room quietly, so as not to wake her Papa quite yet. He slept peacefully in the corner of the room he had stationed himself, propped up with his head tilted to the left. She gathered the empty buckets stacked in a far corner of the room and exited the house. The nanny goats, knowing the procedure, followed her to the back of the lean to where she sat between two tall, thick bushes. She faced the fence, which was rather close, and the walls of the home and the thickets to either side of her hid her most effectively from almost any passer-by.

Should anyone ever come around the back of the house, there was a Nira-sized hollow underneath the bush to her right that led to a crawlspace. The crawl space opened into a tiny room under the house should Nira heed an extra hiding space. She had never had to use it for the purpose it was created; rather she used it for storage. She and her Papa's money were stored underneath the house, along with several keepsakes of her mother that the Goat Man had been covertly given by first Nira's mother and later, her father.

A family picture album, locket, ring, shawl, and aged baby doll were all that was left of the maternal half of her blood. The album was ancient, and hadn't been updated since a little girl – her mother – had been approximately ten years of age. Nira remembered looking through it at a young age, asking her Papa this question and that, never getting more than an affirmation that the young girl was her mother.

A more updated picture of the girl remained in the antique locket, of when she may have been sixteen or seventeen. The opposing side was empty, and old remnants of photograph paper remained in the cinches of the frame as if it had once been occupied but later emptied by a hasty ripping. In her younger years she often wore it to bed, with the locket open, looking at the girl and rubbing the pad of her thumb across the empty frame, wondering whose face had once graced to opposing side. Nira hardly ever broke the locket open anymore; she had memorized the face of the young woman at a tender age. Since her teen years Nira had but to stare in any reflective surface to be reminded of the girl from the locket.

The other jewelry, the ring, was a simple affair. Still in the jeweler's box, it sat untouched by time, a simple silver band on which was mounted a single diamond, understated in size but exceedingly vibrant and reflective in light. Nira had never retrieved the ring from the pillow to try it on; she always felt that is exuded an air of sadness and grief at lost life and opportunity. Some days she could hear it sing in the sparkle it gave off, but it was a brief occurrence and very short-lived.

The shawl was a precious keepsake with a story. The Goat Man had always regaled her of her attachment to the thing, even as an infant. Nira, as a babe, would refuse to sleep unless cocooned within the thick woven wool, and the best way to quiet her cries would always be to wrap her soundly in it. Once she had grown older, she had parted with this bit of her past, but always kept it near. Though in the rough colder months Nira retrieved it to add to the pile of blankets used in an effort to keep warm.

The baby doll was her constant companion as a child. She was never allowed to venture into the township and make friends with other children, and Dolly proved to be the best playmate and confidant that a girl of her tender years and circumstance could hope for. Until the age of ten Nira was kept in the lean-to, either in her secret attic or basement during the daylight hours, unless given special permissions to accompany Papa and hide amongst the goats and sparse foliage. For the space of four or five years it was believed that the Goat Man's lean-to was haunted in broad daylight. The families of District 12 would distinctly hear girlish giggles and laughter. Upon investigation of the supposedly one-room construct, they never saw a flesh-and-blood girl, even as Nira held perfectly still above their heads, clutching her doll close, their conversation temporarily stalled by the intruder. Once she was released to accompany the goats into the wilds outside the fence, the doll joined the storage in the basement, for Nira couldn't bear the thought of possibly losing Dolly.

Nira knew now that these were all keepsakes and reminders of her mother. The album was the only common record of Nira's maternal family. The locket she imagined was a family heirloom that Elinore had filled with her and her love, or a memento given to Elinore by her biological father to give proof of their affections. The ring Nira understood on some intuitive level to be Haymitch's ring of proposal to Elinore – a question that never got asked, and a happy moment that had never come to pass. The shawl was the swaddling she had been presented to Papa in. And Dolly, with her faded features, broken eye, broken music box, and missing stuffing, a likely companion of a young Elinore, as well as the daughter she only had for a short time.

That daughter, fully grown, milked the goats easily in her nook behind the lean-to, the nannies willingly going to her gentle hands, so different from her impatient father's. In no time the chore was done and the goats dispersed as Nira ensconced herself within a cloak and staggered around to the front of her home, two buckets of goat milk in hand. Papa was slowly awakening, his snores intermittently breaking in awareness, to be replaced by great racking coughs.

"Nira?" he rasped as she walked in. He broke into a coughing fit and she hurriedly filled a tin with the fresh milk, placing it at his lips as the coughs subsided somewhat. It was then that she noticed the dark spatters on his hands.

Nira's hands shook as she wiped the blood from his skin. Blood that had come from his lungs when he'd coughed. She knew as well as any in District 12 what this sinister symptom meant. The sick Goat Man gently took the handkerchief from her hands. "Now lass, we knew it was gonna come to this. No use crying over it, girl."

She nodded distantly and avoided his gaze, lips clamped tight.

"Go on, girl, to the forest wif ye. Leave the goats. The Capitol will be looking closely now, and it wouldna do for a Goat Man ta be wifout his goats."

Nira glanced at him briefly before scrambling out the flap, missing the weary sigh and worried glance he shot at her as her back disappeared into the pre-dawn gloom.

A/N: Sorry if this was a little brief, but I'd been sitting on some of this chapter for a while and needed to end it to avoid writer's block. Got my ideas lined up for the next; Gale's ready to make his return to the text!

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