ghosts that we knew: A mockingjay fanfiction

28

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Chapter 28

Katniss

I have known the gnawing ache of starvation. I have been bruised, burned, and beaten in arenas that were designed to destroy. I have danced on the line of death more times than I can count.

None of it compares to the pain of labor.

The small annoyances I had been feeling all week should have been my first clue, but with baby showers, propagandas, and rescue missions to worry about, I had failed to listen to the cries of warning my body had been trying to send me and instead focused on everything but myself.

As if it is executing payback on me for not heeding its warning, my body packs powerful punches to my gut-deep, wrenching, penetrable punches-and reminds me that this has always been at the top of my list of worries. It's just been the one that has been easiest to deny and avoid.

Until now, that is.

This baby's arrival is two weeks too soon, and my water breaking now has truly thrown a wrench in everyone's carefully laid plans for my pregnancy, especially my own.

Because this baby coming two weeks early means I've got two weeks less to prepare myself for it.

District Thirteen and its population that managed to remain calm, collected, and organized in the wake of a bomb threat is currently shambles as our distressed party plows down the bustling corridors leading to the hospital. Finnick steers the lopsided wheelchair in which I sit, alternating screams and obscenities to my audience and to my body, which radiates with a colossal pain that parallels to nothing I have experienced before. Haymitch and Plutarch flank either side of the wheelchair, shouting like sirens to the unsuspecting passersby who stand in our way.

"The Mockingjay is in labor! I repeat, the Mockingjay is in labor!" Plutarch bellows, half into his communicuff and half to the family of four who narrowly dodges Finnick's sloppy swerving.

Between waves of crippling hurt, I manage to roll my eyes over the fact that my child's delivery is comparable to that of a Level Five caliber bomb threat in the eyes of Plutarch Heavensbee.

"Get the hell out of our way!" Haymitch shrieks bluntly to several gaping nurses who are currently clogging the hospital entrance and are about to face the demise of Finnick's runaway wheelchair. They scatter in the nick of time, but not before receiving matching middle fingers thrown at them from Haymitch and the Mockingjay.

Prim and my mother are ready and waiting when our cavalry skids into the hospital wing. My doting sister immediately presses a cold washcloth to my burning forehead. The sensation is so alleviating that it almost causes me to reach out and kiss Prim. The stabbing abdominal pains tell me to think better of it.

"Thank you, gentlemen. We can take it from here," my mother assures the winded men who have just escorted me to what I am positive is going to be my deathbed.

Madge comes sprinting through the hospital doors seconds later.

"I got a call on my communicuff...is everything alright?" she asks breathlessly.

Haymitch guffaws obnoxiously and makes a showy display of my spewing curses at a nurse who had held her mortified gaze on me for just a moment too long.

"Yeah, everything's just peachy," he deadpans over the sounds of my shrieks.

What feels like the thousandth contraction hits me like the tidal wave at eleven o'clock in the Quell's arena. I find that I can no longer grit my teeth and quietly ride through my pain, no matter how trivial childbirth should seem to a two-time Victor of the Hunger Games. I scream out, instinctively gripping onto the closest person I can find, who happens to be Prim.