Chapter Text
This seemed to Lucy Gray like as good a place as any to die.
The frost had come earlier than she’d expected. With the earth frozen, she had no way to get food. It would get harder and harder to keep warm. As she sat down at the base of the big tree, it started to snow. She couldn’t make it back to Twelve before the cold got her. It was too far now.
“I’m sorry, baby.” She placed her hand over her growing belly. It felt bigger to her every day. “Your mama’s no good. She couldn’t even get you through to seeing the world for the first time.”
Lucy Gray had lived through some hard times. She’d been hungry before. She’d been cold before, and exhausted beyond belief. But she’d never been all three at the same time. Not until now. She couldn’t even imagine moving.
“I hope you can forgive your old Ma for being foolish and dragging you into this.”
Finding out she was with child in the middle of nowhere, with winter approaching, had been terrible news, but at least it gave her someone to talk to. The loneliness had been getting to her too. But now she carried the burden of ruining another life besides her own.
“I should’ve gone right back.” She said, rubbing her fingers together in a futile attempt to feel them again. “Then you would’ve had the Covey, even if something was done to me.”
Lucy Gray got a flash of memory then. Coriolanus Snow, aiming that rifle around wildly, tearing his throat screaming for her. No, that was also too dangerous.
“I’m sorry.” She felt her eyes get watery, and not just because the wind was picking up. “Sometimes, we get dealt lousy cards.”
Yes, this seemed like a good place to die. Small hill, nice tree, wind in her hair.
“It’s so pretty here, baby. I wish you could see it.” She fought to keep her eyes open, but not for long. The last thing she heard was the wind.
When Lucy Gray next came to, she was warm. Warm like she hadn’t been in weeks. And the howling of the wind was replaced by a sort of humming she hadn’t heard before. When her eyes adjusted, she was greeted by two soldiers in gray uniforms.
After the initial shock and terror, they reassured her they weren’t Peacekeepers, and she wasn't under arrest. With a little bit more time, they’d explained she was now in District 13, which was apparently still alive and kicking. They invited her to stay, and went on about the enduring battle against the Capitol. She didn’t care about none of it besides one thing.
“I can have my baby here?”
“Naturally, the child is welcome to the space and resources as well-” The bald man had no idea when he started that sentence that Lucy Gray would launch herself at him and throw her arms around him, but here they were.
“Thank you.”
“It’s… It’s not up to me, ma’am. It’s policy.” The man seemed very uncomfortable, so she let go of him. She was just so excited to be around people again!
As they were leading her further into their compound, she placed her palm on her belly again.
“See, baby, we pulled it off, the two of us.”
Lucy Gray didn’t want to be ungrateful, she knew better than to tune a borrowed instrument, but if she understood correctly, they lived underground. All of them. No sky, no breeze, no grass. It sounded like torture. Even before the Games, the Capitol had put her in a pen outside where she could at least look up at the stars before bedtime. It was no kind of life, closed up like this. Prisons in Twelve had more light and life than this gloomy place.
The food was probably bad too, but after not eating for who knows how long, it was a feast worthy of the President of Panem as far as her tongue was concerned. And they said they had doctors. A child might need one of those, especially her child who’d begun starving before they’d even begun breathing.
After the meal, she asked to look around, hoping to meet some regular people. It's been nothing but soldiers with her so far. But no, she had to be registered. The baby, too, they said.
“And when is the baby’s due date?” The woman with a clipboard, who was apparently doing the registering, would just not relent with the questions.
“In the spring.”
“Alright, so unknown.” She wrote that down, even though it was not what Lucy Gray said. “Info on the father?”
“Dead. Ran from Twelve with me and the fever took him.” A little lie never hurt nobody, while people who devoted their entire lives to hating another group of people often did.
“Sorry for your loss.” The woman said in a way that made it seem the only thing she was sorry for was that she had to do this job. “Do you know if you’re having a boy or a girl?”
“I can’t see the future.” Lucy Gray chuckled. “But I guess she feels like a girl.”
“So, unknown.” The woman was holding back a grin like she wasn't the one that just asked a stupid question. “Now, let’s get back to you. I have your age, your place of birth, your time in the Hunger Games. Any relevant aptitudes?”
“Aptitudes?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t know that word.”
“What. Are. You. Good. At.” The woman announced every word.
“I’m not stupid, you know.” Lucy Gray tried to calm herself. “I can sing, play guitar, write songs… I can put on quite a show.”
“Anything else?”
“Trust me, if you have some kind of entertainment here, I could join in. They loved me in the Capitol.”
“This isn’t the Capitol, people need to do actual work here.” That seemed to have been the wrong thing to say. “Anything else?”
“No.” Lucy Gray looked down. If they could just hear her sing one time, they’d see it was important. It made people happy, gave them hope, made them feel things.
“How did you make money?”
“Music.”
“Aptitudes: None” It was written down, even though it was not true. “Can you handle kitchen duty?”
“I never much dealt with that. We had Barb Azure for that, my cousin. She was good at things like that. I just helped her by looking after Maude Ivory most of the day. She's my cousin too.”
“You’re saying you have experience with childcare?”
“A bit. I cared for all the Covey children ever since I was little.”
Apparently, she’d finally said something this woman liked, since she put the clipboard away and informed Lucy Gray she would get a week's rest to get her strength back before they would expect her to start working, looking after their youngest kids. That didn’t sound so bad. Actually, after a week walking around their dreary district she welcomed it.
The adults around here weren’t exactly friendly. She got a few noisy questions about how she’d ended up there, but other than that, most didn’t really pay her any mind. Almost every time she tried to start a conversation, the person said they were hurrying to someplace or another, and after she got her first daily schedule on her arm, she believed them.
She hoped the kids would be an improvement, and in a way they were, but there was something about them. Most of them were so still and calm for their age. From the youngest baby to the oldest, who would be ready for education soon. The children she’d seen in Twelve had always been more lively, curious and, yes, even disobedient, but she would honestly welcome some of that too.
But she could sing to them, and that made all the difference for her mood. Not to mention, when her own child arrived, she would be able to spend the entire day with him or her as part of her job. The days really did go quicker now that she had something to do again.
The days weren't the problem, though, it was the nights. Lucy Gray had been given her own compartment. It wasn’t big, but for one person it was more than enough. More personal space than she’d ever had, actually. With the Covey, someone was always sleeping close, snoring, mumbling, or just breathing. Here in Thirteen, she could hear nothing but the humming of machines making sure the air was good. At night, she felt completely alone, and that’s when her memories would start to eat at her.
She missed the way Maude Ivory would sneak into the bed to sleep with her sometimes. Tam Amber’s snoring that made their little house shake. Waking up to Barb Azure humming while she worked. But the stuff she didn’t miss was way harder to get out of her head.
The Hunger Games. Mayor Lipp. Billy Taupe. And of course, Coriolanus.
The worst nights were not the ones when she remembered running frantically through the woods to get away from him. The worst ones were when she thought about what could’ve happened if they hadn’t stumbled across those guns that day.
Would he have stayed? Would he have told the truth about the third murder eventually? Would he be here now, in the bed next to her, holding her?
“You are not pining for that man, Lucy Gray,” she ordered herself in the dark.
There was only one way she managed to distract herself in those times. They had no guitar in Thirteen, she’d asked everyone she could, but that didn’t stop her from trying to come up with new songs.
“If you’re awake, baby, I hope you like it.” She took a deep breath.
“Marching like ants,
Working like bees,
Lost in the gray,
Away from the trees…”
Lucy Gray gave birth to a completely healthy daughter one early morning in the spring.
“There you are, sweetheart, I’ve been waiting.” Her baby was cleaned and checked before being returned to her arms. She already had a little patch of blonde hair. Thirteen demanded to know the baby’s name right away, but luckily, Lucy Gray had already picked weeks ago.
“You’ll be Alma Juniper Baird. We need a little green in this gray place.”