One week before Reaping Day.


"What's the count, now?"

Galium laughs, bouncing the month-old on his knee. It burbles, drools into its hand, and solemnly analyzes the effect. "This one'll be Maybel's third. I do believe that makes twelve."

"Goddamn, is it just! I lost count by number eight. Wasn't that Sera's first?"

"Sedge's fourth. Your brain's corn mash, old man."

"You can't unlace your pants in the morning no more. You got a flap for your ass, half the time you walk around it ain't buttoned. Talking to me about brains." Wesley reaches over and wipes the infant's slimy chin with his sleeve. "Good head of hair on her. She looks to be healthy."

"She sure is. Bit of fat to her too. Maybel's thinking to call her Corie."

Wesley pauses, eyes sliding sideways, stern over his spectacles. He slows the rocking chair with his heel. "Best think to it again."

"It's not made official yet," Galium corrects quickly. "She's no fool."

"I know she ain't, but anyone can forget."

Anyone can. Wesley knows the example is primed in both their heads, on the unspoken edge. Sedge forgot.

Sedge, Galium's first. Sedge had four kids who counted. One who didn't. You get too hopeful, you name your baby before its first five months, and you're asking for bad fortune. You're only tempting attention to it. Wesley warned them, but there wasn't a thing he could do when the pneumonia came. Good medicine never ships all the way to Eleven. He paid for their unmarked box, and he told them, next time, mind yourselves. Don't expect living out of the Village gives you any more leave to be rash.

Sedge's family minded themselves. The Games took their second girl, but no other. They'd paid the price. They've been safe since then.

You have to mind what you do, what you say, what you think, or you've got it coming.

More cautious now, Galium ruffles his granddaughter's tight curls, warm in the sun. When she hiccups and squirms, he leans her against his shoulder, thumping her back with three coarse fingers, until she spits up all over his shirt. Galium groans, putting a hand to his stomach. "Ooohh. I might be in the same boat."

Wesley chuckles. "Better out than-"

Galium spits up blood. Wesley scrambles to get out of his chair. It's rocking, beating back and forth on the porch, and he can't get any purchase, not on thin old legs, like a frantic overturned beetle, and how absurd it is to become a weak old man after wielding such a history.

"Hold on. Galium! I'm here. I got you. Come on, little man, don't do this to me. It ain't your time. I got you-"

All the sunlight is guttering out. And the baby isn't here, but Galium, his tribute, is eighteen again at the same time as he's nearly seventy, and his face is scared and wet. This isn't what happened. Wesley took him home. He saved him.

"Galium," he croaks, reaching through a cataracted blur, and all he pulls back is a pillow.

Wesley shuts his eyes. He's twisted himself up in the sheets, which is better, at least, than tumbling out of the bed. A cold spot of drool glues his cheek down. What time is it? Wax must have drowned the candle some hours ago. There's too much brightness sheeting through the curtains. Far past dawn. A long life ago, he would've been active by five to wash up before work. But there's no work to give him now, not carpentry, nor cooking, nor gardening. If he hunches he can't be sure he'll get up. He can't mind a quick-legged toddler.

He fought to save Galium from twenty-three tributes and a metal wasteland tossed with storms, but last year, he couldn't fight time. The diagnosis was COPD. What a funny thing to make him helpless in his own Village. If Galium were in the arena, he could have sent him a medical kit in a moment. Outside of the Games, he's an irrelevant old man, and he's tired. His dreams are bad of late. It's always a sign. You have to mind that, too, or you won't see what's coming.

Wesley unknots himself and pushes his feet into slippers, wiggling his toes until feeling stirs into them. He's in his long nightshirt, and it'll be good enough. He needs...another thing. Round spectacles, dragged off the end table. His hair and stubble are a peppery fuzz. He'd only make it worse if he tried to shave. Nobody's going to care anyway.

He should check on Erika. Everything's been bitter since Galium went. He's closed himself in the house, shiftlessly tested days without eating, until she was forced to intervene. He sleeps instead of comforting Galium's family, adjusting them to their eviction from the Village, and too much of that's fallen on her. It's not what she deserves. She's his girl, too. The world didn't end with his little man.

Get up, he urges himself, hunched on the edge of the bed. You weak bastard. Corn mash for a brain.

Everything is heavy, and he's cold. Sometimes he doesn't know where he is. God give him that release.

Get up. It's not over.

Galium minded his actions, his words, his thoughts. He did everything right. He didn't have it coming. It didn't matter. If Eleven didn't feed on hope and story and snatches of pre-war homily, it would only go hungrier, and a person can't survive that. Tesserae meal doesn't feed the soul.

But believing didn't save Galium.

Misery has been keeping Wesley cold, sluggish, sunken, like a boot driving him into the mud. Trying not to feel so it won't hurt. Anger, though. It's been a very long time since he allowed himself to drink from that. Anger could give him a purpose.

He lets himself think of Pascale's dismissiveness, her perfunctory contact, only because he was one of the original set, and her absent irritation when he turned down the deal. The unbothered examination from Lorne and his protégé, last time they were all in the Capitol, like he was some obsolete specimen under a lens. Irrelevance. He lived through the Rebellion before any of them were born - before the Dark Days.

A heat in his skin makes him stand up, a noise popping in his hip. Drives him to the mirror. Well, the scruff could go, couldn't it? He looks like hell. It's not as though he was expecting to travel to the Capitol. Erika, the gentle one, unaware, and alone for another year. Stuck in the middle of two different sides that could use her up and leave her for dead. She's come close enough already.

Wesley's grieved for long enough. He couldn't have saved Galium with all the anger in the world, but he's not going to make it so easy as that if anybody wants to take away his girl.


Erika wakes up to the distinctly pungent smoke of breakfast burning. She spares a fond smile for it, but wastes no time in tying off her flowered robe and hoofing it downstairs.

"Cover it up. Just flap it out with the dishtowel, it don't need water."

"It'll set on fire!"

"No, it's small, it'll be fine. It's just a little smoke. Julius, help your brother with that — my oats are boiling over. If you're quick enough, we'll have time to redo the whole- er."

Michael freezes in place over the foaming pot of oats. Haven's dishtowel dangles a small corner into the skillet. Like a game of red light, Julius makes it halfway through elbowing him deep in the ribs before he sees his mother. She blinks twice, taking it in.

"Morning," Julius calls cheerfully over the spitting, smoking, semi-edible clump. Haven looks like he might make a run for it.

"You know you just gotta use the lid," Erika checks.

Julius slams it down over the skillet and extinguishes it. Erika moves around the stove and turns the heat on the oats to the lowest setting, bringing the crest of bubbles down below the edge of the pot.

"You got anything in the oven?"

"We already roasted some potatoes." Michael gestures to a pile of thoroughly roasted russets by the sink. "Remembered the oil after a minute."

"Salt too?"

"Remembered that in the first place."

"Wonderful." She kisses him on the cheek, wrapping an arm around his hips, and he smoothly rejoins, tucking her head under his chin. "Should I ask what had the nerve to sear itself to the bottom of my good cast iron skillet?"

"It was eggs," Julius inputs. "We had to do them fast before you woke up-"

"So Julius turned it all the way to-'

"Haven wouldn't let me use the hot sauce to put it out-"

"-'speed scrambling' and he was splashing them everywhere-"

"It was their idea. Crept in and woke me up half past four so we could take care of the garden first." Michael grins, bleary-eyed. "Been a while for me. We wanted to do something before you left this year. I'm sorry I wasn't on the ball as it came to the kitchen."

"Honey, you didn't grow up with a kitchen." She presses her nose into his neck, nuzzling until he leans down to kiss her again. The twins pointedly look away. Julius flicks a scrap of egg out of the pan and down the drain.

Sometimes Erika knows everything was worth it. There is a long, pursed scar drawn from her wrist to the joint of her elbow, silver in her earth-toned skin, because it's the hardest thing she ever came to accept. But she found people to get her there.

Michael never tasted anything richer than tesserae grain when he was a child; Julius and Haven will never have to know what it was like. Two children died to her, and she brought two to life. It's about making things even. Making things better. She does what she can.

This is worth it.

"I was thinking to take dinner to Galium's family tonight," she says, over salted potatoes and foamy cinnamon oatmeal with blueberries. It isn't so bad after all, though nobody tried salvaging the eggs. "At least once more before I leave this year. God knows they could use some support."

"Shopping trip, then?" says Michael, with an eagerness that would astonish nearly any woman from the Capitol. She's learned that their husbands groan over it, make excuses, resist the chore. She's sat through some of the complaints with as much sympathy as she could. You never push back on a potential sponsor. She doesn't mention that Michael had never been able to shop before. His hand-me-downs were handed down through four generations. He hadn't owned more than fifty cents in pocket money all his life.

"A real undertaking," she promises. "There's a battalion of them, and there ought to be enough left for something at breakfast. Plenty of daylight for us to make the trip. Boys, why don't you put that kettle to work on some industrial amounts of tea? As soon as we finish up here, I'll-"

The doorbell jingles. With good-natured irritation, Erika pats down her robe and goes to answer. Have they got a package in waiting? She doesn't remember one, but the stylists might have sent her something for the Reaping. Honestly, she's been reusing the same sundress for fourteen years. Even if she is going to be the sole mentor again, nobody pays Eleven much mind. She supposes a letter of thanks to the stylist team would still be in order.

It's not a package on her doorstep. It takes a moment to recognize Wesley. He looks...coherent. Steeled. Alert. Ever since Galium- he hasn't been this keen in a year.

"Wesley," she begins, the name startled out of her, and finds that she doesn't know where to continue. The warmth of her family meal is fading, leaving an unexpected curl in her stomach. Her mentor's smile is small and sad and grim, and his hat is in his hands.

"Can't let them get you too up there," he says. "Can't have it done. Ain't going to risk it again."

"What does that mean? Wesley, are you coming to the Capitol? For your health, you know you can't- after the stress you've been under, you're risking-"

"Don't mind what I'm risking." Sadder, and grimmer, but it's solid. He hasn't smiled in such a long time. He moves before she does, bony arms stiffly crooking out. There are so many things she doesn't understand about this. He's retired. What is the risk he's talking about? And resentment, too, that he up and locked himself away when Galium's family needed him and she needed him. The things he made her shoulder. But she can't make herself step away.

The frail old man comes up to her chin when he hugs her. He rocks her side to side in her doorway, soundless and tender, like she's only a kid again, trying to believe his promises that he can get her home.


(Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I am going to be a little snaky and blame my college theatre production crew (endless time in purgatory backstage, phoneless, and still under a condition of acute sleep deprivation) for the wait, but really, it ought to be up to me to stay consistent. I cannot guarantee a rapid updating schedule, but at least I'm done with crew assignment for the semester. Huzzah! Thank you so much for your patience and attention.)