Hello, everyone! I mentioned in the very first AN to my last story, Life, By The Numbers that I wanted to write a happy story for Wiress and Beetee; I later wrote in my final AN that I failed, but I wrote a story in which there were both happy and sad parts. Well, I was so distressed at having killed poor Wiress off yet again that I managed to turn my pages and pages of cut scenes and background notes into about three hundred pages of AU speculation, changing one crucial detail in chapter 20 and allowing Wiress to live up through the events of Mockingjay. What, you may ask, did this accomplish? Well, it made me determined to write a story where Wiress is actually alive at the end. But rather than taking the material I already had-because that would be too easy, of course-I started fresh, turning to the past for inspiration. I looked over the 55th Games chapters I wrote for Numbers and decided to take up the story from there. This is the story of Wiress' first year as a mentor, and how it begins to shape her from the frightened young girl she was into the woman she will become. It'll have its dark parts, like pretty much every story I've ever written, but I guarantee survival for both Beetee and Wiress in the ending...because if one of them died, all events in Numbers post-chapter 9 or so (plus various events in Catching Fire and Mockingjay) would be rendered incompatible. Take that as your guarantee, readers!

But first, some business. Disclaimer: I don't own a thing. If I did, I wouldn't be anxiously awaiting news of a possible tax rebate.

I will try to update consistently; I've got most of this story written already, but I still have about 7 chapters or so to go, so if there's an inordinate delay of more than a couple of days, it's probably due to one of the following reasons: lack of feedback (that's my shameless plug for reviews, there), outside obligations (take your pick: work, school, family, cat, miscellaneous), or unwritten material. I apologize in advance.

And so, enjoy. Think of Chapter One as a sort of prologue, if you will. I'm off to see if my husband will hold the flashlight while I change the spark plugs in my car. I probably should've done so before we got snow the other day, but I can be absentminded.

1

Summer is coming. You can hear it in the breeze; you can feel it in the weak sunshine that seems to grow stronger every day. Soon it will be here, alternately steamy and dry.

A year ago, I'd been wondering if I'd live to see another summer.

Last summer, I was in the Capitol, then in an arena where I waded through swamp water and looped wire over trees and wrestled with a scared boy over a knife and held him as we lay dying. Only I didn't die. He beat me to it.

This summer, I'm home in District Three and everything is different. My hope, my dearest wish had been that finally, once I got home, everything would go back to normal. This was not the case.

I woke up one day last summer in a bed in a white room. It was very quiet; all I could hear was the faint beeping of monitors, the almost inaudible rustle of the rough cotton gown they've dressed me in, my own slow breathing. Sounds seemed to have amplified about a million times. My senses were out of balance with each other. The room's very whiteness seemed to glow.

I don't know how long I spent in that white room, sipping broth off a spoon that my mentors Beetee and Gloria took turns holding to my lips. When they talked, their voices seemed to echo bizarrely; I don't know if mine would do the same because I couldn't bring myself to speak. What would I even say? Instead, I just lay there, my fingers tracing patterns on the blanket thrown over my lap, the splint they'd affixed to my broken leg, the almost-invisible traces of the scar under my left eye, final relic of the boy from District Two, whom I'd murdered. I wondered what they did to me while I was sleeping. Someone brought me a mirror. I didn't look like I'd been through hell—I looked fresh, innocent. Only the eyes gave me away for what I am. Haunted eyes. Hollow.

Time lost all meaning in that place. I could've been there a couple of days, or maybe a month, or even several years. I believe one of the first things I asked when I got home was "How old am I?", because I needed confirmation that I hadn't just spent most of my life in a hospital room. No, the only thing I could ascertain for sure was that it was still summer when I stepped off the train in District 3. You could tell by the feeling in the air—heavy, laden with parched dust and soot, oppressive at times. The sunlight glaring through it to the burning pavement was sharp and cruel.

I came home last summer barely speaking, struggling to recognize those around me through the haze of pain. My father met me at the train station with tears in his eyes; my sister Electra tried to bite her lip to keep from sobbing outright (she failed in this).

"My baby, my little girl," Dad murmured as he made his way onto the train platform and gathered me into his arms to a roar of approval from the crowd. I buried my face in the rough canvas shoulder of his work clothes. I could not cry. I had to be strong. I'd made it this far.

Electra had lost all composure at this point; she released her fiancé's hand and rushed over as I detached myself from Dad, taking my face in her hands and brushing errant strands of dark hair back. Her eyes were shiny with tears. "I can't believe it; we were so scared…so scared…" She kissed my cheek, squeezed me until I felt lightheaded and then set her sights on my mentors. "Thank you, thank you…I don't know how we'll ever…" she cried, all very hurriedly, as she pulled them both into a very tight hug. They exchanged confused glances, but I supposed this was better than the reception they usually got from dead tributes' families. One man a year or two before gave Beetee a black eye because his son made it to the final eight, only to die shortly after. He called Gloria all sorts of foul names, too; names you shouldn't use in reference to a lady. My family may have been oddly affectionate, but at least they were neither violent nor profane.

Bolton, my brother, hung back a bit. He was fifteen, and in the midst of all the chaos I realized that I hadn't even heard him speak since before the Reaping. He'd been withdrawn and quiet before we headed to the District Center that day, and then after I was called and escorted into the Justice Building, he'd been too upset to translate his goodbyes into words. All he'd done was cry, then look down into his lap, ashamed at not having been stronger, ashamed that he may have upset me. I analyzed the cautious expression on his face. I decided he was afraid of me.

Summer slipped almost imperceptibly into autumn, and I found myself trying to establish a rhythm for my new life. We left the third floor apartment that had been home for so long and moved into a pristine new home in the Victor's Village that seemed like a palace in comparison to our old four rooms. It didn't feel like home though. This new house bore no traces of my mother, and I found it hard to pull up memories of her without the familiar triggers—the beaten-up old stove she'd made all our meals at, the spot on the window she'd always wiped clean of grim so she could peer out and watch us on the street in front of our building, the sewing basket with the half-knitted scarf she'd started for me when I was eight and died before she could finish. My father, unable to throw the basket or that old scarf away (even though none of us can knit), moved it to the new house an set it down purposefully next to a fine armchair in the living room. "Now your mother's here, too," he said simply.

I wish she really were here. I spent all of the fall and much of the winter wandering my new house at night, in the eerie silence, insensible of the draft. I'd curl up in that chair, raise the unfinished scarf to my face and breathe in her scent—or perhaps what I imagined to be her scent—wordlessly pleading for advice.

Help me, Mother, I'd think, I don't know what to do. I want to go back to normal, but I don't know how. I'm stuck, I think.

And then I'd picture her stroking my hair, like she'd done when I was just a little girl, and whispering soothingly in my ear.

Oh, Wiress, my love, she'd say, I know it hurts. But you have to keep trying. They want to help you, sweetheart, they do. They just don't know how. Find a distraction.

A distraction? How could I distract myself from what I'd seen? From what I'd done?

Wiress, my Wiress, always so smart…you have a way of drifting off into your own world. You can't let it be a world of pain and regret. Find something to draw you back into this world…the one where there are people trying to help you. You don't have to do it all alone. My brave girl…you can learn to trust again. Not everyone is trying to hurt you, and you don't have to be the only one protecting them. It goes both ways, sweetheart. It's a closed circuit. Around and around.

As the weather grew colder, I was sent off on my Victory Tour and found my voice again, though it was with a certain degree of dismay. My speech was halting now; words eked out a couple at a time as my thoughts whirred miles ahead of my comments. I left in moderate dread and minor curiosity; I returned in supreme distress and a tiny degree of relief.

"What've you done to her?" my father asked, aghast, as Beetee stood beside me on the steps of my new house, making sure I got inside okay.

"The Tour did this to her," Beetee replied levelly. "It's kind of unpreventable."

Dad narrowed his eyes, wondering how much to believe. I gazed up at him, pleading for him to see that it was true, because now that I had a friend, I didn't want to lose him. Friends had been pretty scarce since my return from the Games. They didn't know how to approach the new me.

It took until spring for the scars of the Tour to fade noticeably. I started sleeping again, though not well; I started eating again, though unenthusiastically; I started fooling around with odds and ends around the house and discovered that having a hobby did just what my mother had promised: it pulled me back. I was relieved, because I'd spent many an idle winter day flexing my fingers threateningly in my lap, wondering if I was primed to harm someone, maybe myself. By the day of Electra's wedding, in early April, I looked almost normal again.

What's the old adage? 'One step forward, two steps back?' I turned nineteen a few weeks after Electra's wedding. Beetee bought me a cake, a real cake, from the bakery, and we lit candles and everything. Then I climbed on board a train and headed off to the Capitol to spend my birthday with a man who paid money in exchange for my innocence.

April really is the cruelest month.

But now the spring is ending and summer is approaching and that means it's almost time for the Games again. You can feel it in the District; a sort of mounting tension like a pot being brought to the boil. My brother's taken to speaking even less than me at mealtimes, and now that Electra's moved out, that makes meals very somber occasions. Dad's been toying with the idea of going home, to our old apartment, with my brother, now that I seem 'so much better.' It seems it's Bolton who needs watching and caring for now. After all, he might soon become like me.

These Games are different than last year's, than any previous year's. This time, I will be a mentor. This time, it will be my job to comfort and reassure and be strong.

I'm not sure I'm up to the job.

I decide that I hate summer.

Well, I hope you enjoyed Chapter One and are looking forward to Chapter Two, in which Wiress attends her first Reaping as a victor. Who will be called? Who will be spared? Is she right about not being to to the job? And, most importantly, what did you think? I'm hoping to hear from you, so please take a minute to review and say hello.

Yours,

Delilah

PS-I've decided I hate those little gray lines, but what can we do? Doc Manager refuses to allow double spaces between paragraphs. Another pet peeve.