"The next time I see you," Donna realized, "will be when I'm out." She did the calculation in her mind. Two parents, five children, one husband, one brother, one granddaughter - twenty months' worth of visits, technically speaking, but due to scheduling issues, Lars' name was not in the list anymore.

Lars nodded. "It's hard to believe, right?" He ran a hand over his short coily hair. Was it her imagination or was her son's hair starting to recede? "The next time I see you, we'll finally get to hug."

"I never knew you particularly liked to hug," Donna said. She had never been that sort of parent. Dem had been the provider of hugs - though their eldest had always hated them.

"I do now," Lars said with a shrug. "I keep on wanting to hug Joel, but he runs away or wriggles out. Thought maybe you'd appreciate it."

Donna smiled wanly. "Now that you have a child of your own, you feel bad about what you subjected your poor Dad to?" The guards seemed amused, or maybe they were just deceased.

"Oh, not to that extent." Lars shook his head. "If I had misbehaved half as much as him, Grandma and Grandpa would have buried me under the onions."

While they had been willing to threaten all sorts of dire things to Alex, and then Donna's children, they had the same problem with Joel as they had with her. They had no idea how to react to someone actually transgressing the boundaries of what they imagined to be normal human behaviour. The threats they had used with occasional success on Alex, scaring him out of his apathy for a few weeks or months, had no effect on a boy who was at peace with the fact that he would never amount to nothing.

"Does he still want to be an engineer?" She had no idea how to interpret that facet of his personality.

Lars nodded. "And his marks are pretty good, but then again, it's grade six. I don't know how he'll react when he needs to put in serious effort and study." He tapped his fingers against the table, looking completely wrung out. "I try to dangle it in his face, but I think it just backfires. If I tell him he won't be able to become an engineer if this is what he does in his free time, he just says that it's fine by him. At this point, I think he only says it to get everyone to relax."

"And how much does he know about me?"

"When we were at Grandma and Grandpa's for New Year's, Sooyen tried to read him an entire lecture about, uh, that stuff." The guards didn't twitch. "He didn't care. He tells all his friends that you and Coll are some sort of murderers."

Even though Donna was not amused by that, she found herself laughing out loud. "Really?" she gasped, wiping tears from her eyes. "That's amazing."

"Less amazing when you've got neighbours assuming the worst of Dad and Aunt Cynthia," Lars said, shaking his head. Donna felt offended on her husband's behalf. He was completely blameless. "And in our neighbourhood, most people don't know what it's like to have someone in prison." He lived in a middle-class neighbourhood.

"Maybe you should move back to the Capitol," Donna suggested. "Everyone says that the neighbourhood is much better now, thanks to that factory."

Lars waved the suggestion away. "I know. I was still in undergrad when construction began. It's still on the sketchy side, but I don't have to worry about seeing stabbings on my way to visit Grandma and Grandpa."

"That's because everyone's employed now."

"Yeah." Lars cocked his head and smiled. "Having a stable income does tend to make one less interested in staying out all night and getting drunk." Crumpling, he ran a hand over his face. "I thought maybe Joel would calm down if he was taken out of his neighbourhood, but he just hops on the bus and goes there. And he's got kindred souls closer to home, too. At this point, when the phone rings, I have to brace myself for a new portion of horror."

Donna wished she could help her son, but the only thing she could offer were books he had also read. A few of them had grandkids or grand-nieces and nephews and the like who got into trouble, but none of them were even a tenth as bad. Hryb tried to offer her advice based on letters from his wife, but all his son and her grandson had in common was mild developmental disabilities, which presented themselves very differently. And, of course, her own situation was, if anything, the opposite.

"I don't even know if you should encourage him to be like me or to not be like me," she joked.

Her son winced. "I don't know." He twisted around in his chair. "Half his biological family is locked up, the other is who knows where. And since he doesn't care about history, he had no idea that you're in a completely different situation. He just thinks that, huh, even Da's Ma is locked up, and so is Da's Da." There was a slight difference in inflection in the two 'Da's, but Donna couldn't quite figure it out. "He just doesn't grasp that it's not a normal path in life."

The boy had grown up in a destroyed family, and when he had gotten a new one, it had had more in common with the old one than one could have expected. Donna felt ashamed of herself. "It's my fault," she admitted. "Doesn't matter what the situation is. Prison is prison." One of the guards chuckled soundlessly. She had smuggled in alcohol for Smith's birthday the other day. Donna had gotten none.

"It's mine," Lars insisted. "He's got Primus and I to look up to, after all. We must have done something wrong." Suddenly, he chuckled. "Did I ever tell you that Donna has stopped complaining about Sooyen to me?"

"Why would she need to complain about Sooyen?"

"That's the thing, there isn't anything, really." He paused. "Or maybe my standards are skewed. Sooyen just likes to climb things and always comes back when called. They got her a membership to a rock-climbing gym, so now she doesn't run around the streets as much."

Donna vaguely recalled Slice telling them about how much fun it was to climb during lunch one day. If her granddaughter had found a hobby that kept her off various roofs, that was good. "She got straight A's, too," she said. "I'm sure Donna and Daeho are thrilled."

"I feel like a failure," Lars said, shaking his head. There was a slight grimace on his face. "Sooyen's doing all that, and I don't even know what Joel is doing right now. When I got on the train, he wasn't responding to calls."

As far as Donna could tell, that was par for the course. "You must be so worried," she said sympathetically.

Lars nodded glumly. "I should be used to it by now, but I'm still worried." Donna was also beginning to feel stressed. A part of her resented her son for bringing in bad news when there was nothing she could do about anything, but she knew it was foolish to expect a parent to not talk about their children. "I keep on thinking - what if someone calls me right now, and I don't even have my phone with me?"

"Someone would answer it and give it to you if it's an emergency," one of the guards said.

"Still, though." Lars sighed, looking so much like Dem in that moment, it hurt. "I shouldn't be dumping all of my problems on you. I'm sorry."

"It's nothing." There was an awkward pause. "How's everyone else? Are you just back for the weekend?"

"Yeah, I'm going back tomorrow. Dad's thrilled to see me, of course. Offered to let me stay, but I crashed at Grandma and Grandpa's instead. In my old room." He smiled, round eyes crinkling. "Can't believe how long ago that was."

"I'm sure it was nice," Donna said, not bothering to hide her sadness. Her children had grown up in that house without her. "Feeling nostalgic?"

Nodding enthusiastically, Lars tapped his fingers on the table again. "A part of me longs for when my biggest worry was the fact that I couldn't get straight A's. Though it didn't seem so insignificant back then."

"That's how it goes," Donna sighed.

"On the other hand, though, I'm liking being an independent adult with a job. Not as much free time, but I can do whatever I want." He paused. "It's funny, how when Aunt Cynthia's kids all moved in, I flipped out when Dad tried to make me share a room with Primus. It was hate at first sight. And now we're married." He giggled.

"Funny how things turn out, isn't it?"

Lars nodded. "It all worked out in the end. It's a bit strange that the others are like my siblings when Primus was someone I could consider dating, but I like the way things turned out."

"Yeah."

"I was just thinking," Lars said, dropping his hands into his lap. "It's a bit of a strange question-"

"Go ahead," Donna said encouragingly, even as she dreaded it.

Lars moved around in his chair, not looking at her. "I don't recall you ever telling jokes or being sarcastic before," he said hesitantly. "I'm not sure if I'm not just misremembering, though."

That question was such a relief, she nearly laughed out loud. "You're right," she said. "I didn't. I picked it up much later." She couldn't elaborate about how sitting in the same dock as the snarkmasters-in-chief had broadened her horizons, but hopefully her son would get it. "Your Uncle Alex complained once that I was supplanting him."

"Uncle Alex was crazy," Lars sighed. "Remember when he called you from a bar and asked for you to pay the tab?"

There had been many such incidents, but Donna was shocked that Lars had been old enough to remember them. "That used to happen all the time," she explained, "but I thought he stopped long before you were old enough to understand."

Now it was Lars' turn to look shocked. "That happened frequently? I thought it was just a crazy onetime thing."

"Oh, no, no, Uncle Alex wasn't exactly selfless in his youth. I remember as soon as I got that construction job, he started demanding more and more, knowing I'd pay his rent."

"You worked construction?"

Taken aback, Donna nodded. "Uh, yes. When I was in grad school. Did nobody tell you?"

"Nobody." He paused. "Wouldn't Grandma and Grandpa have disapproved of you working with your hands?"

It was strange that Dem would have not spoken about that. That early phase of their marriage was full of amazing stories. "Oddly enough, they didn't," she said, thinking back to the simpler times when it had been just her, Dem, and a small clump of cells inside her that was in the process of becoming her eldest child. "Maybe it was because they knew it was a part-time job. And they aren't hypocrites, so they knew they couldn't cheer me on to have kids and get my Master's at the same time without also expecting me to get a job on the side."

"Still, though, construction? I'd have thought you'd have been an intern."

Donna snorted. Lars may have been nine at the start of the Rebellion, but there was still a lot he did not understand about the time. "I wasn't well-connected enough for that," she explained. "The fact that I managed to nab a paid internship afterwards was thanks to my student organization connections, which took time to build up."

Lars looked horrified at that. "That doesn't sound fair at all."

"Nothing back then was."

To that, Lars was willing to agree one hundred percent. He sat back in his chair with his arms crossed, looking upset.

"So," Donna said after yet another silence, "has anything funny happened at work recently?"

Back in the gym, the conversation was entirely focused on Xu, who was currently hospitalized with pneumonia. Despite all reason and logic, the former Steelworks functionary's prognosis was quite good even though she was ninety years old and had a body mass index of seventeen. "Was there an update?" Donna asked as she took her seat on the bench. Things developed quickly at times.

"Sort of," Katz said. She was stretching out her fingers. "No change."

"That's good. At least it's not getting any worse." Donna didn't want the older woman to die, even though logic dictated that she didn't have that long left. Selfishly, she worried about how that would affect her and the others. "Though I don't think I can allow myself to be optimistic."

"Same." Li stood up and stretched. "How did the visit go?"

Donna gave them a quick summary, not going into details about Joel. The former functionaries would have started muttering about District troublemakers, the former Peacekeepers would have started muttering about what would have been done to kids like him back then, and the two groups would have started fighting. "It's strange, how little my son knows," she said. "Even the things that happened during his life, he doesn't remember."

"Could be worse," Hryb said. He was still stubbornly refusing to see his family. "Mine only knows me from photos."

Instead of rising to the bait, Theodosius commiserated with Donna. "That's how it goes," he sighed, pulling the yarn taut. "I don't think mine even want to know. They're all off doing their own things."

"You think mine aren't?"

"None of mine represent onetime forced labourers when they sue for compensation," he reminded her.

Once, the two of them had been Blues-and-Coll, the only ones to take responsibility. Now, though, thanks to Aulus' activism, she was much better known than her friend. The other four did nothing worthy of notice by the world at large, but her middle child was rapidly becoming the face of the family. "He shouldn't have changed his name," she said.

"Didn't you say you weren't offended?"

That was true. She wasn't particularly worried about who took whose name. "I'm just worried it'll look like he's trying to abnegate himself from me, and people will assume the wrong things about him. Though I'm sure my parents are outraged that the kids are going to take the name of someone with a working-class background."

"You don't have to sound so dismissive," Grass cut in. "Of course they are outraged. That's not how things were done back in the day. Figuring out the name is a serious process, not a coin flip!"

"Wait," Katz said, putting her crochet down in her lap, "kids? Already?"

"Not yet, but they're trying."

Katz sighed. "I keep on thinking of your kids as teenagers, but they're grown adults with families of their own. How time flies!"

"That's all it ever does," Li complained. "I keep on wondering if the person who got the first sweater I made in here has passed it on to their child yet."

"Don't remind me!" Theodosius exclaimed.

It was, as always, boiling hot in the laundry room. Donna, Katz, Hope, and Grass waved to the four men who were leaving the room as they took off their shoes and socks, rolled up their trouser legs, and took off their shirts. The floor was covered with water, and they'd be the ones cleaning it up.

"Why can't you make them clean up after themselves?" Grass complained as she turned on the tap and waited for the small tub in front of her to fill with nearly-boiling water.

The guard shrugged. "You'll just get more water on the floor," he pointed out, turning the page of the book he was reading. "Might as well not waste time."

Donna walked over to the tub she always used, trying to avoid the puddles. The floor was warm against her feet. She turned the tap, wincing at the heat of the metal, and watched the steaming water fill the tub.

"My wife met with the president," Grass said, rubbing the yellowish-brown bar of soap on a shirt. "Says there's hope."

"That's nice," Katz said blandly, throwing half of her laundry into the tub. She threw in the bar of soap, too. "But we've had hope for the past twenty-odd years, too."

Glancing at Hope, Donna thought about making a pun but decided it would be better not to. "My lawyer just says to sit tight."

"He would."

The tub filled with water, so Donna closed the tap and tossed in the laundry, pushing it into the water. Her clothes didn't get too dirty in the winter, but keeping them clean was still a struggle. The hot water scalded her hands, and the soap was rough on the skin. At least they were allowed to use hand cream now, as their hands were in various stages of arthritis. Donna herself only had issues in extreme temperatures, which meant that her finger joints did not like the scalding water at all. She scrubbed the fabric against itself carefully, trying to avoid excessively harsh movements.

"Crap," Hope said, holding up a sock. "It's worn through." She put it on the table. "Good thing my cousin sent in more. I don't fancy waiting for a new one for months."

Hope chuckled. "Look on the bright side. At least we're not darning them over lightbulbs."

"We never had lightbulbs back then," Katz reminisced. "All we had was the television. My mother used the batteries to power a small heater she got somewhere, but that meant that we couldn't watch television. Not much of a loss, that." Back then, households with no electricity had been given small battery-powered televisions. In practice, the batteries hadn't been delivered half the time, and so the villages had been free of propaganda.

"Sounds nice," Hope said. "I wish we could have done the same, but the neighbour was the sort to turn you in for not watching. "

"Really?" the guard asked. He was a younger man from Twelve, maybe thirty or so. "We never had lightbulbs, either. We had coal, though."

Hope chuckled. "I noticed. You should have seen our faces when we got there."

"I did," the man said. "And I was terrified."

Hope had nothing to say to that. Donna focused on scrubbing her laundry, trying not to look at the guard. He had been there for a while now, but they had never actually interacted before. She had assumed that he had moved there later on, but this meant that he had been born and raised there.

It was still difficult to talk to someone who had lived in Twelve before the Rebellion. Donna was used to Hawthorne at this point, but even with him, it was always tense. Due to the District's former size, everyone had at least known of each other there, which meant that anyone who had ever served there had a much higher chance of being recognized.

"Did you know her?" Donna asked, curious.

The guard shook his head and put his book away. "Not in person, no. I was too young."

Realizing what the guard was getting at, Donna turned around to look at Hope, as did the other two. The older woman didn't bat an eye. "And in any case," she said, "once Thread arrived, there wasn't as much room for interaction. Asshole burned down the black market. The older hands always went on and on about how good the soup was." She sighed, as if black market soup made from who knows what was better than the chicken with still-frozen vegetables they had had for dinner.

"It wasn't, really," the guard said with a chuckle. "It consisted of whatever could be scrounged up."

"Did you go there often?" Hope asked.

"No, only once, and that was on a dare. Nobody in my family went there." He leaned back in his chair. "None of us wanted anything to do with the illegal. My parents remembered how things had been like before we got a Head more interested in drink and prostitutes than policing."

Hope nodded. "Thread always went on about Cray's supposed immorality. You have to admit, though, nobody ever gathered by the barracks door to see Thread. And he didn't run a side business from under his cot, or buy from poachers every day. At least he wasn't a hypocrite."

The guard sat up suddenly. "Were you there when Hawthorne was whipped?"

"Yes, and that made for a very awkward conversation when he was appointed to here," Hope said expressionlessly. "I wasn't the one whipping him, though. Nor was I the one who tried to buy him."

The four women giggled at the misstep of their former fellow inmate, but the guard appeared completely shocked. "What? How did that happen?"

"It used to happen all the time - half the force tried to buy or even just grab him at some point. I heard a story from one of those Peacekeepers. It was when Hawthorne was fourteen, or something like that," Katz explained, rubbing soap on a stubborn stain. "He turned up to the barracks to sell something or other, and a newly-assigned Peacekeeper saw him and thought he was there for her. Even back then, he was taller than most, so she thought he was an adult."

"I wouldn't have been surprised if she hadn't cared about something as insignificant as age," the guard muttered sarcastically. "Given the example the Head was setting."

"Could be worse," Katz spoke up. "I remember when I was in Seven, half the District knew that the Head preferred literal children. Good thing I was in some small town, so I didn't have to see it myself."

"That's disgusting," the guard said angrily. "Poor kids. What happened to the Head?"

"Demoted after not sharing bribe money with someone important, committed suicide when it was clear Seven was lost."

"And the kids?"

Katz shrugged. "Seven's Centre, or whatever they call it now, is a big city." Donna struggled to keep track of what everything had been renamed to, but she could recognize all the names when she read them in the newspapers. Theodosius never made a mistake. Most of them did not bother. "And these kids were all homeless. Most of them probably continued to be trafficked and are dead by now."

"I actually just read a book about an investigation into a child trafficking ring in Paraguay," Grass spoke up. "Fascinating stuff, but depressing. Even if you've got a policing force that is competent and not corrupt, it's still very difficult." She held up a bra and scrutinized the elastic before plunging it back into the tub.

"Wasn't that sort of stuff going on up there back then?" Hope asked Donna and Grass.

Donna had heard rumours, but nothing more than that. "I don't know," she said. "How would I have known? I was happily married. Nobody tried to offer me prostitutes."

"Same here," Grass chimed in.

Katz looked up from her scrubbing. "That's the thing," she said. "All of you say you knew nothing. You were either happily married or happily single. Every last one of you." It was irritating to have Katz not believe her, but there were quite a few others from whom the same words sounded rather unconvincing.

"That's because all the real criminals were executed or killed themselves," Grass insisted. "And nobody knew anything about that sort of stuff unless they were directly involved."

"Oh, don't amuse my slippers, do you really think so?" Hope demanded. "First everyone knows, then nobody knows. Make up your minds already."

Donna squeezed out an undershirt and put it on the table. "Are you accusing me of something?" She could tell that the topic had shifted slightly to something she didn't want to discuss.

"You?" Katz snorted. "Of nothing you don't already admit to." Donna wondered if that was supposed to be an insult.

"Please explain to me what I did wrong," Grass said icily.

"You knew."

There was a pause as they waited for Katz to elaborate. When it didn't happen, Grass protested. "How was I supposed to know there was something wrong? None of the Victors were doing anything I'd have considered strange."

Hope pointed an accusing finger at her. "You thought these kids wanted to spend time with people old enough to be their grandparents? Or did you think they were prostituting themselves of their own volition?" She paused. "They were underage in any case, too."

"As if there was anything but rumour about the underage," Grass replied calmly. "Yes, in hindsight, I should have paid attention to the rumours. I should have stopped to consider the fact that a nineteen-year-old was hardly likely to be in a willing relationship with someone old enough to be their grandparent, and that there was no other way to interpret the fact that they could be seen eating together at restaurants." Donna marveled at her restraint. "But you have to remember, I also dated around as a teenager and young adult. By the time I was old enough to realize that the age differences were actually wrong, I was too busy with my job."

Neither Katz nor Hope were placated by that, and the guard looked vaguely irritated. "And you?" he asked, pointing at Donna. There was no irritation in his voice, though, merely curiosity. "I believe you, by the way, Female Ten. None of us in the Districts understood what was happening, and Snow saved his best propaganda for those closest to him."

The two former Peacekeepers didn't notice the latter part of what the guard said, as they were too busy laughing. "Her? Really?" Katz asked. "She's been involved with a grand total of one person in her life. Had one of the Victors approached her naked, she'd have thought that not wearing clothes was some weird new fad."

Donna wanted to throw something at Katz to wipe that grin off her face, but she could tell that her teasing had done more to allay the guard's suspicions than any amount of denial. "Thanks," she said sarcastically. "I'm glad you approve of my relationship." She shoved her hands back inside the scalding water and squeezed the clothing slowly.

"How can I not? You two were each other's first, you have a whole bunch of kids, and you still think he's the hottest man in the world. When I was tiny, that seemed like perfection to me."

"Same," the guard said.

Grass rolled her eyes. "What, just because it took me multiple tries to find the one, somehow it's less perfect?"

Katz shrugged. "You weren't supposed to date around like that where I'm from. I suppose I'm still stuck in that mentality." She reached into the tub and took out the stopper at the bottom.

"Though you should consider yourself lucky you had the chance," the guard added. "My second cousin is only interested in men. Think about how few options he had, in a town of ten thousand."

Grass tapped her chin with a finger covered in soap suds. "It would have been especially bad when he was a teenager. Smaller age range of potential partners and all. Did he get married eventually?"

The guard nodded. "When he was nearly thirty."

"I can imagine what his parents thought," Katz said with a small smile. "Him being single at the ancient age of twenty-five and all."

Donna decided that the laundry wouldn't get any cleaner from more scrubbing. The water was merely very warm now, and noticeably dirty. She put the soap on the shelf, took out the stopper, moved the laundry aside, and watched the water disappear from the drain. Then, she turned the tap and began to rinse off the articles of clothing, one by one. The hot water scalded her hands all over again as she rinsed out a sock and wrung it out as best as she could with hands that didn't obey fully.

The guard took out his book and resumed reading as the four of them rinsed and wrung out their clothes. "How was your son's visit?" he asked.

"Good," Donna and Grass replied in unison. Donna put down the underwear she was wringing out to look at Grass, and then at the guard.

"Who were you talking to?" Grass asked.

"Either of you." He put the book back in his pocket. "I should have gotten something more interesting to read," he said by way of explanation. "How are the hotshot attorney and the indefatigable doctor? Just from the job descriptions, I'm sure you're proud."

"I'm proud of all of my kids," Donna shot back, "no matter what they do. And he's doing very well. A few days ago, someone came into the ER where he works with a pineapple in their rectum." Donna realized too late that the last two sentences did not fit together.

The guard guffawed. "Doesn't sound like he's doing well."

"At least he's got a funny story to tell at parties now," Grass pointed out. "My son had the person he was supposed to be prosecuting pass out in the middle of the hearing because they were given the wrong dosage of medication. The hearing had to be rescheduled. And that's all the excitement for the week for him."

Katz tried to brush some of the water from the table into the tub and succeeded only in getting it all over the floor. "How can a pineapple even fit in an asshole?" she asked as she dried her hands on her trousers. "And isn't it spiky? It's always spiky-looking in the photos."

"I suppose they stretched it out beforehand?" Donna hadn't thought to ask about these details.

"Wait," Hope said, holding up a hand. "How big are pineapples?" Grass showed the approximate size with her hands. "Wow. You know, I was once with a man-"

"No you weren't," Donna cut her off.

"You weren't there," Katz said, rushing to Hope's defense. Donna looked around for support, but the guard just looked confused and Grass had only been with men a few times and fifty years ago.

"Whatever," Donna said. "Do you want to hear about the person with the pineapple fetish or not?"