Thanks for the sweet reviews that were left for the first chapter! I really, really hope you like this new chapter and please do let me know! It's still from Rory's point of view, but things should start coming together slowly but surely.

Chapter Two: Smartass Like He Is

"Hawthorne!"

I jump when someone shouts my name across the crowded District Two train station. It's Enobaria, no doubt. And I wish she hadn't yelled my last name since chances are at least some people around here know Gale and what he did.

She comes to stand beside me and nudges me in the direction I'm supposed to go. "Do you want to see your idiot brother first or get food and dump your stuff somewhere?"

"Somewhere? What, like in an alley?" She scares me, sure, but I've got to not let her see that. She can't think I'm just a stupid kid.

"Oh, good. You're a smartass like he is. Excellent." She smirks at me and crosses a street in front of an armored car. "I promised Abernathy you could stay with me so you'll be dumping your stuff at my place. Now, idiot brother, food, or my place?"

I decide then and there to kill Haymitch for arranging my stay this way. I don't want to stay in a house with just her for company. I could've stayed anywhere else. Including in an alley. "Idiot brother," I say, because putting off going to sleep near her should always wait and I ate on the train.

"Thought so." She starts walking faster, alternating between darting around people and pushing them out of her way - so I follow in her wake and hope everyone focuses on her.

We stop in front of a building made of steel and glass. It spans the length of a block, or at least it did at one time. About half of it seems to have collapsed, no doubt during the war. If this is the place where people who broke the rules in District Two went under the Peacekeepers, life under Cray and even Thread wasn't so bad in Twelve.

Enobaria yanks a door open and stalks directly up to a man in a uniform behind a desk. "Got a visitor for Hawthorne, Fabian. He still in cell 47?"

Fabian is clearly terrified of her. I like making up stories for people I don't know and as I follow the two of them up a set of steel stairs, and watch him tremble and shake, I decide he was born in Two. He was too poor to train as a Career so he's struggling to adjust to the new world order where she's not so powerful. He's losing the battle.

"I'll supervise. Go back to the desk," she tells him when we stop outside a door marked with a sloppily painted 47. She turns to me before she unlocks the door. "He was really smashed when he shoved her off the balcony. I don't know how long he'd been drinking before that, but he might still be drying out and coming off it."

The words on constant repeat in my head have something to do with idiotic, cowardly, foolish brothers but I try to brush it off. "Fine. Whatever. If he's in crappy shape, I'll leave."

She shrugs her shoulders and pushes the door open. "Look alive, Other Boy," she calls out into the cell. "You're brother's here."

I step inside and notice she leaves the cell door open but sits on the floor beside it in the hallway. I guess that's privacy. Not that I expected it given why I'm here. I look around the small room. It's entirely unremarkable, expect for the fact that my brother - my brave, courageous brother who isn't afraid of anything - is curled up in a ball on a filthy mattress on the floor.

I shift my weight and clear my throat, wishing he'd do what she said and look alive. It doesn't work. "Gale?" I say finally. "Gale?"

"Why are you here?" he mutters into the crook of his arm, not moving a muscle.

"Haymitch told me what happened. He said I should come. So I did." I realize as I say it that I don't really know why I came. Maybe because I knew, before I even saw him, that I am the man of the family now. "Why'd you do it, Gale?"

He straightened out and flopped onto his back, staring at the ceiling instead of looking at me. "Because I'm a cowardly, idiotic fool?"

That we think of him the same way is one part unnerving and one part comforting. I flex my fingers against the cold air and switch my bag to the other shoulder. "As true as that is, it's a lame thing to say. You pushed Johanna Mason off a balcony. You could've killed her. Were you trying to kill her?"

That makes him sit up and finally look at me, even if it's more at my knees than at my face. "No! No, I was not trying to kill her, Rory. I love her."

As he sobs into his hands, I realize it is the very last thing I expected him to say. He loves her. Gale loves Johanna Mason. I suppose it explains why she was in District Two. It doesn't explain why he pushed her off a balcony. That's important too.

I crouch down and try to get him to focus. "If you love her, why did she end up falling? That's not love, Gale. You know it isn't."

He leans back against the wall and exhales a shaky breath. "We had an argument. I didn't mean to push her. I didn't mean for her to fall. I grab her arm and she pulled away and she fell." He moans, covering his face again, and chokes back another sob. "At least that's what I think happened."

It makes sense he wouldn't remember it all. It sucks, but it makes sense. I suppose, with any luck, it happened at a place that still has cameras in place. "Do you remember what the argument was about?"

The laugh that escapes from him kind of scares me. "We were arguing about my drinking. She said I had to quit. I said I didn't."

I want to say more. I don't know what I want to say, but I want to say more. I can't though. Enobaria tells me then it's time to go and that I can come back in the morning. Since I can't say more, I bend down and hug my brother. I feel guilty for the things I've thought about him the last year. But I wish he'd have asked for help.

"Will you go see her?" he says before he lets go of me. "Will go see Johanna? Tell her I'm sorry. Tell her for what it's worth I will always love her. Please, Rory. Please go see her."

"Alright, Gale," I murmur, feeling uneasy about the state of my brother. "Alright. I'll tell her all that if she'll see me. Get some rest, okay?"

He collapses back onto the mattress almost immediately.

Enobaria locks the cell door behind me and motions me toward the stairs. "Hospital's got visiting hours that even I can't get around," she says as she falls into step beside me. "You can see her tomorrow sometime. You look tired and I have food at my place, let's just go there."

I am tired, too tired to argue. So I follow her to the District Two Victor's Village. It surprises me a little that all the houses are full, but I vaguely remember President Paylor decreeing that each living victor was entitled to a house in the district of their choice but that all other houses were to be equitably distributed to the needy citizens of the districts. Or something like that.

I wash up and dump my bag in the room she pointed me to before I go back downstairs to a meal of chicken pot pies.

She laughs when I tell she didn't have to cook for me and tells me she bought them at a restaurant in town. When I ask if it isn't odd for her to be helping me after what Gale did to a victor, she shakes her head. "Johanna and I have never been the best of friends but victors stick together. We do what we can to help each other. So I'm helping her."

I don't understand, and I say so.

"I'm the one that called Haymitch. I called because she asked me to. She asked me to tell him to send you." She sighs when I still seem confused. "Johanna loves your brother. Even after she fell. She thinks you can help him most. So I'll help her get what she wants."