A/N: District Five! I had a little trouble selecting the female here, and I'm sorry if your tribute did not make it. I'm trying to spread the wealth so as many people as possible have tributes in the Games. Enjoy! :)

Trigger Warning: Swearing and talk of death and suicide

Well, the first time that I got it I was just ten years old

I got it from some kitty next door

An' I went to see the doctor and he gave me the cure

I think I got it some more

They give me cat scratch fever

Cat scratch fever

I got a bad scratch fever

The cat scratch fever

Bernadette Areli, 12

Resident of District 5

Cat Breeder and Student at Tullia Snow Middle School

Today is the day that I have been waiting for for several weeks, ever since I discovered Parchment's swollen tummy while I was feeding her and the rest of the cats in the basement. It's Saturday, so there's no school. I grab my notebook, the black leather cover beaten and cracked. Inside are the names of all of my cats, and the expansive family trees that trace their lineage and characteristics. I grab a pencil from a drawer in the kitchen, and I see another pregnant belly. My Aunt Alyson and my Uncle Dawson Tussix are having their first child soon. They're 27 and 26, young, my dad's youngest sister and her even younger husband. They welcomed me into their home after the...after my parents were taken away from me.

I push aside those thoughts. Nothing has changed. I'm just living with Auntie Aly and Uncle Daw, and today Parchment is giving birth to the kittens of Scrapper! My jubilation quickly swells again, and I shove the drawer closed.

"Parchment's kittens due?" Auntie Aly asks as she makes eggs for Uncle Daw. I think he is upstairs, showering. I can hear the far off splatter of water against the tile floor of the bathroom shower, and I know that my suspicion is confirmed.

"Yep!" I say excitedly. Auntie Aly doesn't ask if I need any help. I've brought over four dozen kittens into this world all on my own, and another dozen with the help of old Ms. Theardie before she died. Why, wasn't that woman an inspiration.

I think about Ms. Theardie as Auntie Aly plops some eggs onto a plate and hands them to me. Oh yeah, I do have to eat too. I grab a fork and tear into them. But, anyway, Ms. Theardie was this great old woman. My heart hurt when she died three months ago. I made sure to have Auntie Aly and Uncle Daw bring me to the funeral and the wake and to her estate sale. But anyway, she had this older female cat named Scribbles. She had four kittens when she was twenty and Ms. Theardie was too feeble to care for them alone. I took them in. I was nine at the time, and I had just moved in with Auntie Aly and Uncle Daw. I am terribly shy because of an acute case of Autism that was diagnosed when I was very little. I grew up knowing I had a disadvantage but I've worked through it. I'm still very shy, however, and I don't like change or talking to people, especially new people. Public speaking is my biggest fear.

But I was gifted the four kittens by Ms. Theardie, who lived next door to our home. I named the girls Scribbles Jr. and Parchment, and the males Daniel and Sebastian. Ms. Thelma Theardie taught me how to care for the cats. She taught me how to tell if they were sick, hungry, or thirsty, and what to do if they were like that. She hooked me up the one and only vet in Five, named Dr. Deb Puller. She gave me cat food and bowls and collars and toys and treats and scratching posts and everything and anything I needed to care for those kittens. Now, here I am, three years later. I've adopted a half a dozen older cats from the alleys and the District animal adoption center, including Scrapper, the father of today's litter. I've bred those six with Scribbles Jr., Daniel, Sebastian, and the mother of today's litter, Parchment. I now have three dozen cats living in my basement, and I've given away another dozen or so. To everyone in the neighborhood and in school, I am the unspoken Cat Breeder. It almost sounds like a super hero name. That makes me chuckle. Some people call me Kitty, most Bernie, though. I am famous in this area of Five for my skills, and Dr. Puller the vet has been looking for an apprentice lately. Someday, it would be great, simply great, to work at Five's vet clinic.

I slip down the stairs to the cellar, the dank air wafting up to greet me. I breathe through my mouth to avoid the smell crafted by the damp cement cellar walls and floors and a dozen kitty litter boxes. Daniel is sitting on the stairs, and I pick him up and scratch behind his ears. He mewls, and I reach the bottom of the stairs. A chain dangles above my head, and I hop up and grab it in my hands. I yank down, and only light bulb in the cellar lights up my pride of cats.

Cats mill around, eating and drinking and sleeping and defecating. I set down Daniel as my eyes search quickly for Parchment. I hear her pained mewls and quickly head over to one of the corners, where she is starting to go into labor. The father, Scrapper, watches from a distance, transfixed by his mate about to give birth to their young. Most of the cats excepting Bianca (she's always been a fiesty, ferocious one, that rescue cat) give me and Parchment and the soon-to-be-born kittens a wide berth. Usually most of them would hesitantly approach me, looking for pets and treats, but they can sense that I am taking care of Parchment as she goes into labor. I pet Parchment before leaping up and running over to a small dresser I keep in one corner of the basement. It's covered in cat scratches, and Scribbles Jr., along with a younger cat that I think is named Yule, sit on top of it. I pull out a pair of latex gloves from the cardboard box in the dresser, and I also grab several blankets. It's too late to move around Parchment, but we can wrap the little kittens in the blankets to keep them warm if need be.

I return to Parchment and help her give birth. It's a simple miracle, watching the five kittens be born. After three hours, I'm sure that they're all alright, snuggled up against their mother's tummy, suckling on her milk. I give them a parting smile, and fill up the food and water bowls around the basement and hand out treats and pets as I go. I'm trying to think of good names for these kittens. They're the first kittens since Ms. Theardie died, and I feel like I should honor her in their naming. There's two boys and three girls. One girl will be named Thelma after her. Another one Tangerine, after her original hair color (She once showed me a photo album of her prior to the Dark Days. She was a pretty girl.) The third girl I'll name after Caitlin, the granddaughter that I've never met that Ms. Theardie always tears up talking about. She must live far away, and must never visit Ms. Theardie at all. I name the two male kittens Yarn in honor of her favorite past time, knitting, and the other Theardie, her last name. I hope that is enough to honor my late mentor. I love that old woman so much.

I emerge from the basement, a triumphant smile splitting my face in two. Uncle Daw is already off to work at the plant, and Auntie Aly grins at me happily. She's prepared my favorite lunch as celebration, a peanut butter and banana sandwich, perfectly divine.

"Your mother and father would be so proud of you," Auntie Aly says with tears in her eyes, and all I can do is nod silently as I remember them. It's all I can do to keep the tears at bay. Nod, nod, nod. Eat, eat, eat. A special day, tainted by grief.

Come on don't say goodnight

With the stars in the sky

Let's wait 'til tomorrow paints the sun across the night

I see love in your eyes

And if you see it in mine

Let's wait 'til tomorrow

Don't say good, say good

Please don't say goodnight

Jayce Newman, 17

Resident of District Five

Daredevil and (Supposed) Student at Adronicus Snow High School

"What's happened to you, Jayce?" I ask myself as I stare at me glaring back at me in the mirror.

My body is bruised and battered, and my body sags with the weight of responsibility and the burden of knowledge that only one other person knows of. Usually the marks are hidden by my clothes, and the burden is forgotten in the bliss that I live in most of the time nowadays, but I always have the slightly wounded and tired blue eyes and the slightly false, blank smile, and the soft, lying tongue of a serpent that spits out words to everyone I know as if nothing is wrong, as if nothing had ever changed in my life, and as if it would never change. Just how false is that? Extremely false, believe me.

It all started roughly four and a half months ago. In the richer Districts, the Capitol is starting to repent. Repent isn't exactly the right word. A better way to phrase it is like this: In the richer Districts, the Capitol is starting to actually give a fuck about its citizens. Now that they give a fuck about us (lucky us), they want to make sure none of us are sick, so that us super loyal, super affluent Districts (One, Two, Four, and Five) can keep being loyal and can keep beating down the rebels in the Outer Districts by volunteering to be Peacekeepers and saving that asses of their young men and women, who can instead enjoy as much food and drink as their regurgitating potion allows them to swallow in one bout.

So, anyway, they've installed these "Med Centers" everywhere in the District. It's required to go get a screening in one of them. They're practically large, metallic prisms that look like the old fashioned telephone booths that we still have a few of in Five, minus the glass. You step in, and undress, and then stand there for ten minutes as lasers and prodders probe your body, and x rays and the like are taken. Your vitals are checked, and any disease ever known to afflict mankind is in the system, so it will tell you if you have some strange, rare form of mosquito sickening elixir from the days before the floodwaters swallowed up half of the dry land world. They also give you medicine and suggestions for how to solve your ailment after the diagnosis, and are probably the only nice thing the Capitol has done for the Districts since the Dark Days came to a close and they masterfully forged the rebel leaders' names on the Treaty of Treason. They were installed five months ago, and people flocked to them, excited to try out the new technology. By the time two weeks had passed, the hype around the booths had settled down, and I decided to go to one of them and have it tell me I was a handsome, perfectly healthy teenage male.

I stepped into the both, stripped down to the nude, and ten minutes later the slick screen right in front of my face declared I have some disease that I forgot the name of the second the twenty letter long mix of characters left the screen. It said I had six months to live, and that bit by bit I'd lose my energy until I was so tired out I'd just plain fall flat dead, and there was nothing I could do to save myself.

So I've turned from the boy next door into a reckless, carefree daredevil, my only aim to experience everything life has to offer in my last months of life. I've made out with and gone farther with my girlfriend and only true friend, Delilah. With Delilah, I've gone bungee jumping, I've driven a stolen car, I've gone skinny dipping, I've stolen baked goods from the Potu bakery, I've tee peed two houses and egged three, I've broken a window with a baseball, I've broken a lamp, I've broken fine china, I've set a pile of school papers on fire, and I've gotten into a fist fight in an alleyway with Delilah waiting to go get the police if things got bad. I haven't gone to school in two months, and Delilah hasn't been in three weeks. You don't need school anyway in Five. I still have a list of things to do, and a month and a half left to do them. I want to kiss a guy. I want to go rock climbing. I want to be on a train. I want to be on a plane. I want to feel the truest fear imaginable. I want to eat something poisonous and survive. I want to see something else besides the robin's egg blue skies dotted with white, puffy clouds, something else besides the eternal red and orange rock mountains and arches, something besides the hundreds of power plants and hydroelectric dams and windmills and solar panels and labs everything else in between that produces power or studies science. There's only two ways to complete my last goal, and they're both insanely crazy. The first is to go over the giant electrified fence on Five's border and walk for days on end through the empty space between Districts to hit Four or somewhere else. That's impossible. The second is to go into the Hunger Games, and the only probable way to do that is volunteering. Sure, I've taken out a bunch of tesserae I don't need and given it to some of my poorer, closer friends because I have nothing left to lose. But I still won't be Reaped probably. There are thousands of kids in Five, it is one of the bigger Districts, just shy of having to do the double Reapings like parts of Three and all of Seven, Nine, Ten, and Eleven.

So I probably won't do everything on my list. Okay. But that's beside the point. Right now, I'm having a crisis, looking at myself in the mirror and asking how I got here, with my girlfriend Delilah now in the hospital with a broken arm and my own body fatigued and injured after we provoked a pair of alley dogs and tried to run away from them. I always used to be a good kid, but I'm falling to ruin. I stumbled home, bleeding and bruised and whimpering, and my mother and father looked at me with sad, loving eyes, tears swimming in them, and my mother asked what had happened to me.

I know she didn't mean what had happened to me with the dogs.

I love my parents. They are the most important people in my life, along with Delilah, and I have disappointed them. I've tarnished the family name and destroyed my reputation, and they think I'm just slurring my whole future because I have one. Yeah, I haven't told them yet that I'm dying. The information given by the Capitol medical booths is private and is never told to anyone else excepting authorities if the need be. No one else knows unless I tell them. Delilah is the only one that knows, because that was the only way to convince her to skip school the first time we did to go egging the abandoned houses in the slums of Five.

I stare at myself, and ask myself over and over when I'll tell them, and get them to understand.

I know I won't be able to tell them until they find me one morning, dead under the covers, my tired corpse collapsing in on itself in utter relief.

A/N: Today we had Bernadette Areli and Jayce Newman! Thanks to StarlilyJam for Bernie and david12341 for Jayce! They're both great characters and I thoroughly enjoyed writing them. They were special :)

Sorry for the longer than usual wait for an update, but I was busy doing something all of you that read Oceanside will love! I created a blog for Oceanside, and if you want you can go check it out! Here it is: oceanside10thhg . blogspot . com

Speaking of blogs, Cloe (LokiThisIsMadness) has been working on a blog for this story. It isn't yet completed, but if you'd like to go check it out, here's the link for BMO's blog. Thank Cloe for it, it's all her work :) blowmeover22ndhg . blogspot . com

Some of you have been commenting on length, and like I've said before, I'm one for quality over quantity. Not yelling at anyone just reminding you xD And anyway, I think around 3,000 word chapters for 2 POV Reaping chapters is decently long.

Next chapter I'll put up a new poll about the trains and goodbyes.

Who did you like better, Bernie or Jayce? Overall thoughts on this pair? Predicted placements? Thoughts on the writing?

Until Next Time,

Tracee