AN: This was loosely inspired by a conversation around the breakfast table. Ah, what a conversation it was. This is a drabble−ly exploration into character. I have a headache and I can't make myself sit down and write my English essay, so I figured I may as well write something to keep me occupied.

Disclaimers: If it turns out that I owned something as amazing as The Hunger Games, I think I'd die of shock. Also, allusions to minor events in HG and CF. I'm not saying I'll completely spoil everything for you, but if you haven't read either of them you'll miss a lot of implicative symbolism.

Peeta watches them from the window as they trail about the lawn. Languid and lazy, black feathers tumbling and twirling all around them. They glide across the snow with wings outstretched. He can see the urge to fly surfacing every now and then, but they never quite gain the momentum to take off.

He'd like to paint them, he thinks. Capture them across the page in all their majesty and keep them close within a sketchbook or stretched across a canvas with Katniss watching him from the other side of the room.

There's something about them that glows. Maybe it's their stark contrast with the snow, ink−blot bodies against the crystalline, ivory landscape. Maybe it's because the rest of the winter sparkles around them and they lack so much shine that it actually makes them stand out. In the real world, they would blend into the background, complacent to a certain extent, as quiet as they can be when they find enough strength to hold their beaks shut. But out here, in the wondrous grasp of December, they are free to act as they please.

He envies their perfection.

Somewhere within the recesses of his heart, he harbors a childish desire to press his face to the frosted windowpane and drink their presence in.

He calls the group of crows a flock, and smiles at their presence.

Katniss has never been fond of birds, especially not the sort that gather in front of the window.

That isn't to say she doesn't enjoy them. On the contrary, she has fallen in love with more than one type of feathered animal in the past. But even then, all they bring to her is memories of times so far gone they can never return, and each reliving of the past burns her soul like bile.

Mockingjays and their wonderfully Rue−like countenances, with their whistles slipping out between their beaks and their voices rising to a swelling harmony that brings her back to the hours of lullabies spent on wasted ears and saffron flowers swathing stiff and lifeless corpses.

Or game fowl lost to the glory of her arrows, fresh meat now hers to secure and turkey feathers trailing in the air− and like a wound ripped red and ragged, there's her father smiling face before all the world explodes. There's Gale, that distant and reachable man, as they hunt through the woods during those fallen secret hours that they can never go back to.

Sometimes, she even thinks about pink birds in distant arenas and their sharp, relentless beaks as their bodies stain with blood from the girl she's never really met but who always seems to be standing like a ghost beside her.

Crows are no different. For now, they do not frighten her. But someday the world will no doubt taint them into something less than pleasant.

Katniss calls the group of crows a rookery, and tries not to think about life before the Games.

Gale refuses to look at the birds.

He can't stand the silence that has fallen over the table. Peeta can't stop staring at those silly crows mucking up the yard, and every time Katniss looks at one she flinches and turns away like she keeps seeing things she's never meant to lay eyes on again. He desperately wants to hunt them all down and strip the flesh right off their bones, if only so Peeta would stop looking so idiotically enthralled and Katniss would stop looking like the world was going to burst into flames.

But he can't. Because every time he thinks of the way the arrow would stab the lives right out of their veins, he's tied back to the whipping post and drowning in a haze of blood and a sea of pain.

Birds are meant to be hunted: that's what nature has always dictated. That is how the world works, survival of the fittest. The strong are to overcome the weak, and the weak are to fade away until some other defenseless creature stumbles in to take their place.

Crows shouldn't gather and meander in front of windows. They should be spiraling into the air, screaming for their survival. And he should be there beside them, bowstring drawn taught and hands ready to release their downfall.

Gale calls the group of crows what it really is− a murder.