Author's Notes: This is a project I came up with a few months ago while working on my other story, The Underdogs (formerly known as Pass Slowly, formerly known as Midnight Hands, formerly known as No Greater Love, and I'm still not sure I've found the right title). In the writing of the abovementioned story, I managed to grow attached to my two favorite canon characters, Wiress and Beetee. In fact, I grew so fond of them that I decided to tweak the canon of Catching Fire a little bit so that Wiress ended up surviving the events of the revolution, and she and Beetee played a large role in the main characters' story. The only problem with this was that I was focusing a little too much on them and not enough on the OCs I actually wanted to write about in the first place, so I figured if I wanted to write about these characters, I could at least do it when Wiress was, you know, actually alive and devote a separate story to them to get it out of my system.

Thing is, I wanted to write about Wiress's Games because that's when I imagine her story really starting, but Wiress is a complex character who thinks on a different level than everyone else, and I didn't know if I could pull off a story from her point of view. I could have remedied the issue by writing it from Beetee's point of view, but I also wanted to be in the action, not watching it from afar. So I compromised and created yet another OC to give myself (and the audience) some distance from a character like Wiress and provide another perspective on what's happening, this time in the form of an ally she had in her Games: Twelve-year-old Aslan Klein of District 5. Hence, the story is written in her first-person point of view, so we'll be seeing some of her life as well as Wiress's. I like it; I think it gives another layer of depth to the story and provides some of the backstory to The Underdogs, explaining why Wiress and Beetee are the way they are from the main characters' point of view.

One last disclaimer: I borrowed a few aspects of this story from Breathe by NutsAndVolts (with permission!), perhaps the longest and most elaborate Wiress/Beetee story I've read to date, and I guess I should credit her here. By the way, you should check it out.

The Lioness and the Live Wire

An account of the events of the 51st Hunger Games by someone who did not win.

It's reaping day in District 5, and I am awoken from a surprisingly sound sleep at six in the morning by the ripping screams coming from the trundle bed to my left.

My alarm goes off just as I begin twisting around in the covers, trying to find a way out, and all the commotion in the room sets Evangeline off on a mad barking streak from her bed in the corner. Above the chaos, I hear my name being shouted.

"Aslan! Aslan!"

"Feivel," I say in a relatively calm voice as I finally shed my swaddling bedcovers and get down onto the trundle, kneeling by my best friend amidst a dissonant chorus of screaming and beeping and barking. "Feivel, wake up. I'm here."

At the sound of my voice, Feivel opens his eyes and sits bolt upright with my arms wrapped around him and his face in my shoulder before I can register what's going on.

"Was it a nightmare?" I ask in his ear, and the fabric of my pajamas rubs against my shoulder as he nods.

"It was you," he slurs. "You were reaped."

"But I wasn't. It was just a dream." With kid gloves, I put my hands over his ears and pull him away from my shoulder so that I am looking straight into his eyes, all shiny with tears and red-rimmed against his dark blue irises. "I'm here, and I'm okay. See?"

Feivel sniffles as Evangeline, now more concerned than panicked, climbs onto the trundle, and I take the opportunity to let her lick the tears from his face while I get up to shut off that infernal alarm clock. All is silent again in my room, cool and clean and bathed in early morning light that filters gray through my lacey curtains.

"Aslan, what time is the reaping again?"

"Ten," I say. "Do you want to go back to sleep? You've got a little while."

"Sure, if I can."

"You can have my bed. I'm not going to be back in it."

Feivel nods, knowing that I mean it; once I'm up in the morning, there's no chance of me going back to sleep, and this goes doubly so for reaping day. He climbs onto my softer, bigger bed and wraps himself up in the blankets, and Evangeline, ever the movie-perfect canine companion, sidles up to him and settles there. I only stay in there long enough to pick out some clothes and shoes, and as I prepare to head out, I take a moment to stand in the open doorway and observe my dog and my best friend curled up together in blissful safety before I turn the knob and noiselessly pull the door shut.

On my walk to the bathroom, I pass by my brother Thomas's bedroom door and catch the distinct noises of bedsprings rattling, covers whooshing, and a human voice—his own—forming words I can't pick out. I know what this usually means, but don't care to think of it, and I pointedly ignore it as I continue down the hall and into the bathroom to take a hot shower—not a lot of kids outside the Capitol can say that—and get dressed.

The clothes I put on are not reaping clothes, but a blue T-shirt and gray knit shorts and my sturdiest pair of tennis shoes. Walking clothes. All I have to do is throw them on and pull my strawberry blonde hair back into a sopping wet ponytail before heading downstairs to fill a gunnysack with apples, oranges, rice, sugar, bottled milk, canned vegetables—all the usual staples, plus a new plastic bottle of chocolate syrup as a bonus.

I leave as silently as I can so as not to disturb my sleeping family—not even Mother is up yet—and walk through the town square, past the Justice Building where two people my age or older will be saying their final goodbyes to their families in a matter of hours; past the stage where my mother will be reading the Treaty of Treason at ten; past the chrome-and-glass laboratories that design and create the muttations that will doubtless appear in the arena in a week; and into the part of the district with the nuclear and electrical plants that will supply the Gamemakers with the power needed to make all this happen. Soon, I reach the neighborhoods on this side of the district, the ones where the wooden houses are in need of repair and not a soul is stirring, the adults taking advantage of their day off and the children paralyzed with fear in their beds.

With my hair still damp and my clothes sticking to my body from the overcast humidity, I knock on the old wooden door of the house of Mr. and Mrs. Maloney. Even though I have done this many times before, I'm always a little surprised when they answer the door within ten seconds of me knocking, mainly because this is a day off and they have no reason for the fear of reaping day to keep them up.

"Aslan, come in, come in," Mrs. Maloney says, smiling when she sees me standing with the sack of food in my hand, right on time as usual. "Good to see you, as always."

"Good to see you, too, Mum." Although the Maloneys are not in any way related to me, I am so close to them through their son that they insist on me calling them Mum and Pa, just as Feivel does. They've always said that it's good practice for when they actually become my mum and pa as soon as Feivel and I get married. Funny thing is, they think they're joking, but when I say it, I'm serious as a heart attack behind the goofy smile and the good-natured elbow in Feivel's direction.

"Is that for us?" asks Mr. Maloney, even though he knows full well that it is, just as it has been every week for the past six years.

"Yeah." I raise the gunnysack high enough to set it down on their kitchen table, which groans in protest under its weight.

"I swear, Aslan, how do you manage to carry all that?" Mr. Maloney winks and smiles. "Let me see those muscles."

This is another part of our weekly ritual, a relic from when I was seven and tried to show my big, strong, spinach-and-broccoli-fed muscles to anyone who would stand still long enough. Over the years, I have actually developed some through fist-fighting and arm-wrestling and sack-carrying, and it shows when I flex my left arm in the tone and toughness of my bicep.

"I got you all the usual stuff," I say as I unload the contents of the sack onto the table. "Fruit, vegetables, salt, sugar, milk, canned goods, and finally,"—I take out the grand prize of chocolate syrup and present it to them with mock ceremony—"this."

"Feivel loves this stuff," Mrs. Maloney says, and I laugh.

"He's the reason we never have any, so I figured I may as well give some to you."

I stay and talk to them for about half an hour before excusing myself to go home and prepare for today, asking them, "When should I bring Feivel home?"

"After your choir rehearsal is okay," says Mrs. Maloney.

"Duly noted."

"Good luck at the reaping today, Aslan," Mr. Maloney calls from the table. "I know it's hard for you, being the first…"

"I'm pretty sure I'll be okay." I smile, not mentioning Feivel's earlier nightmare. I don't need to stay for another hour dissecting this with them and risk being late for the reaping. "I'd wish you the same, but there's really no reason to, is there?"

Mrs. Maloney's warm smile vanishes, and for a split second, the wrinkles on her forehead and by her mouth stand out to make her look ten years older than she really is. "Two years," she mutters. "Just this and another year of safety. I don't know what we'd do without your family. He'd have to take out tesserae left and right, and…" She chokes up and has to pause to wipe the tears from her eyes. It scares me to see her like this, bad enough that I almost start to cry, too. I always thought the possibility of Feivel being reaped was the furthest thing from her mind, especially since he's only ten years old and not yet eligible. I guess I was wrong. "I just…I was always so worried."

"It doesn't bear thinking about," I assure her. "He's safe. As long as I'm around, I promise you, he's safe."

I give them each a hug goodbye and start off on my long walk back to my own house.

It's past eight-thirty by the time I get back home, where things have begun to come alive. I walk in through the door to see my father sitting at the table in a striped shirt and shiny leather shoes and white underwear (no pants, as of yet), slurping cereal and reading a Capitol newspaper with a worried set to his face. I hear Mother's high heels clicking around upstairs as she goes about getting ready for her duties at the reaping. Feivel is having his breakfast of toast and chocolate milk in the living room because he hates the sound of my dad eating, and I see Evangeline's disembodied tail thumping against the ground with the rest of her hidden by the sofa. Thomas is nowhere to be found.

"Your dog needs to go outside," Dad says as I shut the door behind me, then resumes slurp-slurp-smacking his cereal.

"You didn't let her out?"

Instead of answering my question, Dad simply laughs. "Oh, I know where you've been, all right. Your accent's coming out again."

"Yes, yes, yes, thank you." I can distinctly hear Feivel and his parents' strong accent—the accent that belongs to much of District 5's lower class, actually—in my speech now that Dad's pointed it out. It usually reaches its peak after I've been interacting with Feivel's family, or when I'm in a state of heightened emotion, but due to prolonged exposure from Feivel and at school, it's there pretty much all the time. "Evangeline, sweetie, come outside and go potty."

Evangeline's collar jingles as she gets up from behind the couch to lead me to the back door. Her legendary golden retriever's tail is doing ninety a minute, threatening to knock decorative glassware and framed photographs off the hallway tables until I open the door and follow her outside. The first place she heads, however, is not to the center of the lawn, but rather to the white fence that separates our yard from that of our assistant. Still wagging, she aligns her nose with the hole in the fence and takes a good, long sniff.

"You smell Percival, don't you?"

I listen hard and hear our assistant's kids' Siberian husky snuffling on the other side of the fence, and I look just in time to see his black nose poke through the hole with wiggling nostrils. Upon further listen, I hear Thomas's best friend yelling, "Percival, get back here!"

"Sorry, Nukem!" I pull a plastic lawn chair from the table up to the fence and haul myself up so that I can see the neighbor twins standing on their back porch. "I think she's going into heat again."

"Not that Percy's complaining," Nukem replies, grabbing his sister Nova by the hand and leading her over to the fence. "District Five needs a vet clinic."

"There aren't enough pets for that," I say. We and some of the district's other more wealthy people are the only ones that have pets, save for some scraggly half-strays in the poorer areas. We could probably afford to ship them off somewhere for treatment if they got sick, but it's not worth it to take care of an unnecessary procedure like spaying or neutering.

"We've got plenty of mutts."

"True, but they're disposable; you've got a problem with one, you just grow a new one in a tank."

Nova sighs and bends down to give her beloved Percival a pat on the side. "Sad, isn't it?"

I nod in agreement. It is sad, sad that a district that concerns itself so much with the study of living things doesn't care all that much for their value. Speaking of which: "So, are you ready for the reaping? I see you've got your clothes on."

Nukem's eyes go down to his faded tuxedo and Nova's grass-stained yellow dress in turn. "No one's ever ready, really."

"At least it's your last. After this, you'll both be safe."

"Then we'll just have you to worry about," he says. "But hey, you've only got one entry. Nova and I've got seven."

"That's not so much."

"For District Five, it is," Nova says, startling us both. She does that sometimes. She's smart, smarter than her brother for certain (even he freely admits this), but she lacks his tuned-in nature and common sense. She's always off in her own little world, so much so that people are often surprised when she contributes to the conversation without looking like she's even paying attention.

"Still, just seven slips in a couple thousand. Are you still walking with us?"

Nukem smiles. "Same as always."

For the second time today, I say goodbye on the grounds that I have to get dressed and ready for the reaping and run back into the house with Evangeline in tow.

When I get in, I hear that Mother has moved her frenzied efforts from upstairs to downstairs, as evidenced by the different sound that her high heels make on the tile floor of the kitchen. She's talking to our assistant, who must have come over while I was outside, in a panic because she needs to be at the Justice Building to rehearse the Treaty—the same treaty she's read every year since she became the mayor, before she even met Dad—in thirty minutes whether the family's ready or not. To avoid her, I run upstairs to find that Dad has hung my powder-blue dress with matching shoes and a bow on the bathroom door, and under the threat of Mother's wrath, I put it all on and run downstairs in five minutes.

"Aslan, eat something," Dad says, tapping the box of popped oats on the table.

I shake my head. "I'll probably throw it up later," is my reasoning.

"Honey…"

"Dad…" I say, using the same tone as he did for "honey." That shuts him up, and I must say I'm surprised. Since Mother is so busy with her lucrative mayoral duties, Dad's only obligation is to take care of me and Thomas; with no day job, fatherhood is his only outlet for his naturally strong work ethic. It's not like him to retire so quickly from parenting efforts. Must be the reaping, I figure with a shrug.

"Kevin!" Mother shouts, even though she's already three feet from Dad. "We have to be ready in twenty minutes. Aslan's little friend and my assistant are both here; the least you could do for their sake is put your damn pants on."

Dad sighs as though he is the most henpecked husband in all of District 5—asking him to put on his pants when there are guests over, can you believe it?—and grabs his wadded-up dress pants from the chair next to him. As he's putting them on, he mutters, "You know, once I get these on, I'll be ready. Aslan's ready. Feivel's ready."

"Then what's taking so long?"

"Your son." Before Mother can ask, Dad moves to the bottom of the staircase and calls, "Thomas, get down here!"

"Just a minute!" comes Thomas's muffled reply, the first words I have heard from him all day. "I'm getting dressed."

"But Thomas, why?"

"It's reaping day, isn't it?"

"Not for you, it's not," I shout back against my better judgment. Thomas just celebrated his nineteenth birthday last month, which is why my parents are baffled that he's putting so much effort into his appearance anyway. They don't know the real reason; he's not comfortable telling them, but he trusts me and Feivel with all of his personal secrets, so he and I know all too well.

"Are the twins here yet?"

I clear the foyer in two steps to look out our peephole, only to see our sidewalk and beautifully manicured lawn (another product of Dad having too much free time on his hands). Nova and Nukem are out of sight, presumably still at their house. "No," I say.

"Okay, then."

We hear Thomas's footsteps before we see him standing at the top of the staircase, dressed in a crisp night-sky-blue tuxedo with a tie at perfect length around his neck. He's borrowed a pair of Dad's dress shoes, and his blond hair is gelled and crusted into neat little spikes that frame his forehead. With only a muttered "sorry" to Mother and Dad on his way to the kitchen, he pours himself a tall bowl of cereal and sits down to eat. Seeing this, Dad decides to go for a second helping and takes it into the living room to watch the pre-reaping coverage, an action which elicits an, "Aw, man!" from Feivel before he runs upstairs so he won't have to listen to any more smacking. With her work done here, Mother and her assistant leave for the reaping, and I must say I'm glad to be free of her despotism for the time being.

"So, Thomas," I begin with a wry smirk and—I imagine—a twinkle in my eye as I take my seat across from him, "I guess you had a better time than the rest of us this morning."

Thomas's cheek is resting in his hand as he stirs his cereal, looking off past my head into space. "I had a dream about Nova," he says.

I heave an exaggerated sigh and reach out to pat his shoulder. "Oh, dear brother, does that mean I have to do your laundry for you again?"

"Not that kind of dream!" He wakes up out of his stupor long enough to knock me across the head as a warning to hush when Dad is still in the house. "I meant a nightmare."

"Reaping nightmare?"

"Yeah. Last few days, actually."

This is a familiar occurrence to both of us. They've happened for about a week before the reaping ever since Nova and Nukem turned twelve, though Thomas frankly has much more at stake with them than I do.

Thomas leans forward, looking to the left and the right to make sure we're the only ones listening, and whispers, "I got this to give to Nova after the reaping." From the pocket of his tuxedo, he pulls out a black velvet box that I can only hope is not a wedding ring, and opens it to reveal a delicate silver (or stainless steel, most likely) necklace with a single black quarter-note pendant hanging from the end. "If there are two things Nova likes, it's shiny trinkets and music, so I figured…"

"It's perfect," I say, but that's not what I'm focused on. Instead, I can't figure out how my nineteen-year-old brother could afford this without revealing to Mother and Dad his secret crush, since they would never let him borrow a large amount of money without asking why. "How long…I mean, how did you get the money for this?"

Thomas smiles, showing off straight white teeth and huge dimples and bright blue eyes that catch and scatter any light in the room. He is dashing, truly, and any girl in the district would be lucky to have him. "Picked up a few extra hours in the lab, did some odd jobs here and there."

"I'm very proud of you, Thomas."

"It wasn't that big a deal," he says, stifling a smile that clearly betrays the opposite. "Do you think Nova will like it?"

"She'll love it."

Ding-dong.

"They're here!" Thomas bolts out of his chair, leaving his cereal uneaten, and yanks open the door before Dad is even off the couch. I get up and peek out the doorway enough to see Thomas trying to sidestep Nukem, who has taken to teasingly blocking the path to his sister with outstretched arms and a mock scowl. After a few seconds of this, Nukem relents, and Thomas approaches Nova in her threadbare dress as she concentrates on stripping a fallen leaf from its stalk. She loves to do that, always tracking dismembered flora indoors and getting chlorophyll all over her clothing. Thomas thinks it's adorable.

"Nova," he says, taking her free hand, "how are you on this fine reaping morning?"

"Good, good," Nova says, not looking up from the new challenge of stripping the leaf one-handed.

"Are we all ready to go?" Dad asks from the living room, brushing cereal crumbs off his shirt. Hearing this, Feivel scampers down the stairs in his best reaping clothes—a worn red T-shirt, black athletic shorts, socks that may have once been white, and holey tennis shoes—and greets Nova and Nukem with a swift nod and a smile in their direction.

"Guess we're ready," I reply, gesturing down to my blue outfit with the itchy white frills and the scalp-pinching bow. If nothing else, I want to get this over with so I can get out of this stupid dress, which I wouldn't be caught dead wearing at any other time.

"Your shoes are blue," Nova notes. "They're pretty."

"Yeah." I look down at her shoes, a pair of white tennis shoes hot-glued with lace and rhinestones to make them look dressier. "I, uh, I like yours, too. Very utilitarian, very resourceful."

"Blue shoes," she says, her voice picking up a slight singsong cadence. She often does that when she likes a phrase—she latches on and doesn't let go for an indefinite length of time. It's probably the sonority of the double "oo" sound that's causing it here. "Blue shoes, blue shoes."

"Great." Nukem sighs. "I'll be hearing that all day."

"It's not so bad. Actually, I kind of like it. Blue shoes. Blue shoes." Thomas picks up Nova's soft, peachy-white hand in his and they skip out the door, singing in unison about the color of my footwear. Feivel and I follow shortly—minus the chanting, of course—and I look back to see Dad and Nukem exchange glances, shrug, and start walking.

We take the same route to get to the district square as I take to get to the Maloneys' house. Dad and Nukem are chatting about what I presume to be father-and-son things in the back—sports performances and suchlike, things that Dad's actual son doesn't spend too much time on—and Thomas and Nova are skipping merrily along in front, so close that their moist post-rain shoe prints are intertwining on the sidewalk, lacy dress-tennis-shoe zigzags mingling with flat loafer ovals.

Their chatter serves as white noise to prevent me and Feivel from having to create our own with conversation. We instead stroll along in amiable silence as I contemplate my wonderful big brother and the love of his life, making mental Punnett squares to figure out what their children might look like one day. His children most likely wouldn't be blond; the blond allele is recessive to most alleles for her dark hair, although it's not as recessive as my red hair, which he is a carrier of. Her green eyes are more recessive than his blue eyes, but Dad has green eyes, so perhaps he's a carrier of that, too. Practically everyone is a carrier of one or the other, as Five is almost exclusively a fair-haired, light-eyed district, so perhaps…

"What was with you and Thomas in the kitchen earlier?"

Abruptly yanked from my thoughts into decidedly less romantic territory, I turn my head to address Feivel with widened eyes and a mouth agape in feigned ignorance. "Feivel, what are you talking about?"

Feivel narrows his eyes and pushes against my shoulder with the palm of his hand, profoundly unimpressed. "You know quite well what I'm talking about. The conversation you had in the kitchen, with the dream thing and the comment about having to do his laundry for him. What was that?"

Did he really hear that? I sigh and shake my head at the ground. He doesn't miss a thing, that boy. "You're too young to understand, Feivel," I say, throwing in a wry chuckle to brush him off with a little more humor. "Just know that when I don't tell you, it's to protect your innocence."

"I'm practically your family, Aslan; I have a right to know what goes on between you and your brother." Feivel is indignant now. I don't want to have to explain this to him just because I'm not sure I can, but he's not one to let these things go.

"It was just a joke, Feivel. It's not important to you. You'll understand when you're older."

"Bet you I won't be that much older," he says, crossing his arms. "My class is starting Sexual Education this week."

At this, I stop in my tracks for a moment and blink at him in surprise. This is a new development. "Sex Ed, in fifth year?"

"Well, yeah, that's when all kids take it. You did, didn't you?"

"I know, but…" I pick up my pace and rejoin him in silent contemplation. Ten years old. Was that really when I took it? That seems much too young to know about something as potentially scarring as the complexities of sex. Of course, this being District 5, kids know from a very young age how a male and female of the same species reproduce, and that's essentially what we learned about when I was ten, except as it related to us as human beings ("Human Relations" was what they called it). We learned about pregnancy and protection and sexually transmitted diseases and unrolled cheap condoms onto phallic foodstuffs. We never delved any deeper, and that was just fine by me. But two years have passed between my time and Feivel's, and if comparing his homework to my own over the years has been any indication, they have certainly expanded and improved upon the curriculum since I was in Sex Ed.

I breathe a sigh that breaks the steady backbeat of our footsteps as we near the district square. My little friend is growing up, and all too soon.

"They say they're going to be teaching us more about the emotional aspect of sex, not just the mechanical."

"Oh, Panem. Feivel, please don't say things like that around me."

"What? Of all people, I thought my best friend would be the one I could talk with about this."

"I didn't even know there was an emotional aspect to sex," I say, absently extending my foot to kick a paper wad on the ground. Even at age twelve, two years after taking the course, sex as something that I may someday participate in is still the furthest thing from my mind, and even further from my understanding beyond the simple mechanics and reproductive results. I have heard every slang and technical term in the book from Thomas and the twins; I appreciate and laugh uproariously at the jokes my classmates make; I know that it's (apparently) something that people enjoy, simultaneously the product and producer of healthy relationships, but it's more the academic knowledge of this fact than the true understanding of what sex really is.

"Me, neither," Feivel says, possibly in commiseration. "I can't imagine one, come to think of it."

"All I know about sex is that a sperm fuses with an egg"—these are the only terms I can use with my best friend without blushing—"and sometimes, a baby results. What could be so emotional about that?"

"Nothing at all. Unless you were emotional over the kid or something."

"Well, I never want to have kids," I say with a growing smile, suddenly very grateful to have a best friend who actually gets it. "I mean, I'm a kid and I have no idea how my dad handles me, and Mother doesn't handle me at all, so…."

"I feel quite the same way. When you're poor, having kids is just an investment in heartbreak."

"So there really is no reason for either of us to have sex."

"Exactly."

I will marry Feivel Maloney one day. I just know it.

To all those of you who read through that, thanks for your time. Seriously, my first chapters are always rather long and clumpy, big chunks of backstory everywhere and too much explanation and inner monologue. Just be glad I decided to make the reaping its own separate chapter, which I've started on already. The next chapters will be shorter, I swear (and that's where we meet Wiress, the person I originally wanted to write about). Granted, I promise that on all my stories, but I've never gotten past the first few chapters, so you've never gotten to see that come to fruition. But I have a good feeling about it this time.

And, as always, please review.