Imprisoned By Love

Chapter 9

Peeta

I sit, low in a valley, waiting for Katniss. She should have been on my trail by now, following it from home. We, Johanna and I, have been training her hard for a solid week and a half for this day. Her test of the basic tracking skills ,that she as a female should possess, was passed with flying colors with in two days of training. She battled fiercely in both wolf and human forms with both men and women who represent the most fearsome fighters we have to offer, which is a feet for a natural born wolf. And tonight, she's attempting her final test, tracking three individual wolves who began together and broke apart. There's a lot of back tracking and numerous attempts to cover trails. I've already heard her howls of victory as she found my sister and Gale, Johanna's mischievous mate who had decided to join our pack rather than drag Johanna from her post as Beta.

I'm the last one to be found. I didn't make it easy for her. It would cheat her out of the skills she needs to prove tonight. And I'm confident she's not too far from me as I hear a soft rustle to my right. I turn my head that way just as she appears over a rocky ledge.

"You could have made it harder," she laughs through our link and I just stand and shrug. "You left muddy paw prints all over the rocks by the stream. Yeah, they went all over that shore, but it made your scent thick enough to catch again."

"Well, you are supposed to track with your nose anyway," I say. "You passed. In record time too." Katniss sits and looks at me quizzically.

"So, what now?" She asks.

"Now you get a scouting bird," I say gesturing to Summit, my bald eagle. On que, he swoops down from his branch and lands on my shoulder, his talons grazing my skin through the thick rough of fur on my shoulders and neck. "Your personal eye in the sky."

"So how exactly do I get one?" She asks. Summit stretches his wings and starts back towards the nests . I nod in his direction and Katniss follows me as we chase him through the trees to the giant oak tree. Summit settles himself in the branches and Katniss reaches the foot of the tree and pulls out blankets from beneath the roots. She kicks one towards me and crawls beneath the other before wrapping the blanket around her naked human form.  I pull the blanket around myself as I stand on my own two feet.

"This is new," Katniss says.

"They like it here," I say.

"So I just pick one or.." she stops as she spots a small bird slowly making her way further down the branches to get a closer look at Katniss.

"You'll know when you see it," I say and Katniss moves to the branch the falcon sits upon. "She likes you."

"Don't they all like us?" She asks. To answer her question, the falcon lunges at me and hisses before scooting back on the branch to Katniss.

"Not her," I say. "She's always been really aggressive. We would have let her loose a long time ago if she hadn't insisted on remaining in the tree." Katniss reaches out tentatively and the falcon hops into her hand, being careful of her sharp talons against Katniss' flesh.

"I'm sure she's just misunderstood," Katniss says holding the bird up and allowing her to perch upon her shoulder. "She's very beautiful."

"Her name is Persephone," I say. "She's a two year old peregrine falcon."

"She's lovely," Katniss says.

"You picked each other," I say. Katniss smiles.

"Well, she needs to learn some manners," she says. "But I love her, Peeta. She feels right."

"Then she's yours," I say. "She'll come when called and be your look out whenever you are out here on your own."

"I'm allowed?" Katniss asks shocked.

"You've proven yourself," I say. "You are as much a member of our pack as anyone born with our gift." She smiles and looks at me gratefully.

"Well, it is nice to be a part of something," she says. Her eyes glitter in the setting sun. "Are you nervous about Friday?"

"Yeah," I say. "You've been a wolf for barely two weeks. It feels kinda rushed to put you in our customs so soon. And with it being marriage to someone you've only known a few months, I am a little nervous as to how you'll react to  how everything will go."

"I know how I feel," she says. "I feel so much anxiety about all this. But I'm ready, I think. To be your wife, I mean. The kid, not so much. But I've got a few months before it's even a flutter in my belly even after we conceive." She stops and looks at me softly. "And we'll have you and the others. It's not like I'm alone. But marriage, a baby, it's all very new to me, Peeta. I've been a loner for a long time. And even if I remotely thought about sharing my life with someone, a child was never really something I remotely wanted."

"Why?" I ask, leaning on the branch beside her.

"I don't really like children," she says. "I've always been a really stern person and while I can see they can bring people a lot of joy, I never really wanted that. And most of the time, kids aren't too fond of me either."

"If you wanted to leave," I say softly. "If it really would be what made you happy, I'd let you go."

"I don't want to leave," she says. "I'm happy. I'm just still really unsure if you understand the terrible mother I'm going to be." I brush a piece of her hair away from her face and Persephone flutters back into the tree.

"I think you'll be a really good mom," I say.

"I'm not the most nurturing," she says sadly.

"It's different when it's your own," I say. "You will be a very good mother when it carries your blood. It always happens this way with our kind. They get frightened from watching others children as adolescents and worry even more than you do sometimes. She shoves me playfully and I chuckle and lay an arm around her waist. "But when they finally do inevitably give birth to their own cubs, everything turns out fine because of the intense draw of a mother wolf to her offspring. It's more civilized than some human things." Katniss says nothing. She doesn't even look at me. She just stares at the darkening sky and the small scratch off moonlight that's left.

"I hope you're right," she whispers eventually. "For the sake of this poor kid I'm going to bare,  I really do hope you know what you're talking about."