A/N: Written for a challenge on a livejournal community, hungergamesland. (posted this a little too early on here, sssshhhhh, don't tell the mods!) the prompt was Peeta watching Katniss with their children, this is what it turned into. what can I say, I get distracted easily.

WARNINGS: um, spoilers for the whole trilogy. pain. it's childbirth, what do you expect. and holy crap, I actually watched my language for this one!

DISCLAIMER: Don't own. I'll go hide in a corner and make my sadfaces now.

Katniss understands pain. She always has. Emotional and physical, she's learned to deal.

This, this is new. Far more pain than she's ever felt. Worse than the broken bones, the tracker jackers, her father's death and Prim's.

Screaming, screaming is all she can do. She screams until her throat is raw. She screams at Peeta, at herself, at the doctors, at Peeta again, then Haymitch, the doctors, herself, Peeta. She even screams at the baby once. Peeta and the doctors are terrified. Haymitch just laughs. So she yells at him again.

The doctors call for one more push, then there's a second of relief, better than anything she's ever felt, that she wishes would last forever, so she ignores the scramble around her legs, at least until she hears the crying.

She dozes until they put a small thing in her arms, all red and wrinkly and freshly scrubbed.

The pain she understood. This thing? She has no idea what to do with it. She's never seen anything this fragile, ever in her life, and all she can do is gape at it.

Peeta is just as terrified, but he takes to parenting instinctively. He's completely oblivious to Katniss' discomfort, though; he tells her how proud he is. Katniss can't believe the next thing out of his mouth. "You're going to be a great mother."

She laughs nervously. "Why do you think that?"

"I can see it in the way you look at her."

"You mean like she's an alien?"

Peeta laughs. "She does look a little like an alien." Katniss punches him in the arm, harder than she meant to. "The most beautiful alien I've ever seen, of course. She is half you, after all."

Katniss looks up at her husband. "Peeta, I don't know how this works."

"What do you mean?"

"How do I raise a normal child, after all we've been through? These aren't good conditions for someone to grow up in. We're cruel."

"Katniss, these are the best conditions in over a hundred years. What better time than at the dawn of a new world?"

The baby girl starts crying and Katniss looks up at Peeta like she's drowning. "She's probably hungry, sweetie." He guides the baby to feed, and that's when it sinks in for Katniss. She's a mommy now, and she vows to be better than her own mother.

"We can do this," she says to Peeta.

"Yeah, we can."