A/N: No beta on this chapter. All mistakes are my own.


The passing of my eighteenth birthday introduces the heavy sense of dread that I know will follow me until the month passes.

Birthdays were always a big deal in the Seam, especially those of children. In a place where infants died frequently and most adults didn't make it past their fifties, living another year was always a cause for much celebration. Even in the worst of times, I can say with absolute certainty that there was not a single Seam child whose first birthday passed without the knowledge of the entire community. Since coal miners only received Sundays off, one-year-old birthday parties would begin Saturday night and not end until well into the next day.

Due to our age difference, I can remember every birthday that Prim ever had. On her first, I remember everyone from our neighborhood and the mines and the Hob—seemingly the whole world, from my five-year-old perspective—crowding onto our muddy front yard and into our dingy, baron main room. I remember singing and instrumental music and Prim, potbellied and rosy, smiling her toothless smile while she was passed around for seemingly everyone to see and hold. I remember my father dancing with her on his hip and me trying to copy his footwork and mimic his movements, my two Dutch braids and oversized red plaid dress swinging rapidly around me.

The spring following his death, it was Prim's eighth birthday that caused my mother to leave her bed for the first time in months. Without him around, May 23 seemed to be the only time my mother and I could ever truly get along. We'd save up tesserae grain, goat milk, and wild berries for days leading up to the event so that we could make a flat, dry, bruise colored cake. Gale and I would shoot squirrels and geese in mass numbers to trade for gifts in the Hob; hair ribbons, jewelry, books, whatever small treat we could find that we knew Prim would enjoy.

If she was still here with me now, my mother and I would still be spoiling her. I have the money to do it; to buy her expensive goods firsthand and fill the house with Capitol decorations and Seam music. But my mother's not here now and neither is Prim. This thought follows me everywhere now.

Perhaps it's my dwelling on the permanency of my sister's absence that causes the beginnings of my downward spiral. Maybe it's just my self-loathing catching up with me.

Regardless, within weeks, I find myself once again suspended in a melancholy existence somewhere between time and space.

Everywhere I look, I see Prim staring back at me; honey blond and bright-eyed, engulfed in flames, and forever thirteen.

Every passing day brings me closer and closer to the fourteenth birthday she will not have. The presents she will not open. The friends she will not bring home from school. The promise of womanhood which I stole from her before she'd even had her first period.

Dr. Aurelius wants me to channel my grief into some sort of project. Peeta drafts up a plan on an empty page in his sketchbook and we head out on the weekend after my birthday with goals of cleaning out the unused houses in the Village. We journey into the center of the cul-de-sac after breakfast, planning to begin with the innermost property and work our way outwards. The empty houses in the Victor's Village prove impenetrable at virtually every possible area of entry. By the time Greasy Sae orders us to stop and take a lunch break, we are both soaked in sweat and teeming with frustration.

I roll up my baggy jeans, sitting on the front steps of my house with Peeta beside me. He takes off his shirt and I focus intently on the contents of my sandwich. There is a bead of sweat rolling down his bare chest and I can see it catch on a particularly bad burn scar which interrupts his patch of impossibly blond chest hair. I bend my knees and tuck in my legs so that they are mostly covered by the wooden step below the one where I am sitting.

"What if there's nothing inside of the other houses?" Peeta asks. He's squinting in the direct sunlight.

"There has to be something," I say. I want to smooth back the frizz of his ashy blond hair, but I don't think I could stand it if my arm brushed against the bare skin of his clean shaven face. "They wouldn't make the houses so hard to get into if there wasn't something worth taking."

"I don't know," Peeta says. He takes a bite of his sandwich and we both chew in silence for a period of minutes. He swallows and opens his mouth to say something, hesitating before the words begin to flow. "When I was in the Capitol with Aurelius, there was this woman in the hospital who was homeless, and she was very stressed because she didn't know where she would stay once she was released. And I thought about when we were going through the city, and we went through all those empty buildings where the people who lived there had fled for their safety or—" He looks at his shoes. We are both thinking about the Capitol woman I killed for her apartment. I can see it in his eyes. He clears his throat, forcing himself to continue. "And I told her that maybe she could live in one of those old apartments, since some had to be empty. And she told me that just because they were empty, didn't mean people could live there. She told me that people in the Capitol always had to pay a monthly fee for their home, or else they lived in the streets."

I think about all the houses in the Seam, how the government assigned a couple one when they married and passed it onto their next of kin when they died. If nobody claimed it, then it would be left until it was assigned. There'd be abandoned houses filled to the brim with people who didn't have any family to live with but were too old to be sent to live in the community home. I think about after my father died, in the months before I started hunting when we almost never had anything to eat. Would we have just lived in the streets if we were citizens of the Capitol? Would we have just wandered until the weather made us sick or our bodies surrendered to starvation and died?

Peeta wipes his hands on his jeans and stands, done with his lunch. "I'm going to go home and shower," he tells me.

I watch the muscles in his back as he walks across the road to his house, thinking about the Seam and the Capitol, wondering if our housing was always provided so that they could keep track of where we lived, or if we were assigned permanent residency after marriage only to ensure that we lived long enough to produce children to be reaped and slaughtered.

The next day, Sae asks one of her grandsons to drive the construction vehicle sent by the Capitol Relief Fund into the Village. He uses it to break into one of the large windows in the sunroom. Without the barrier of the window reflecting the sun, we can all see the emptiness within the house. Peeta was right.


A/N: I'll be eighteen on the sixteenth and I've recently committed to a college :D With the help of Koruba, I've also uncovered some fics from 2014 which I deleted years ago and have been searching for copies of ever since. They're cringey and tasteless at times, but they definitely show my growth as a writer, and as a writer for Everlark specifically. Check out those on my Ao3 (also stupidityisdangerous) my recent Skins U.K. fics on here.