Victory plus 10

The spring breeze was cool against his face, a welcome change from the stuffy air of the train car. The warm afternoon sun helped take the chill out of the air. He knew that the wind this time of year tended to blow in from the east, and he remembered which watering holes had blinds to the east of them so they could only be hunted in the mornings.

However, none of this knowledge helped Gale Hawthorne navigate the unfamiliar streets of District 12.

He had seen plans before the rebuilding began, understandably curious about the future of the district. But he didn't spend enough time here to really learn the new layout. Catnip would try to explain it to him, and he'd remember for a while, but after a month back home he'd forget again, the details lost in the sea of issues he had to deal with every day from his office in District 2.

Just after the war when plans were drawn up for the rebuilding of District 12, making the new district layout as different from the old as they could had been a deliberate choice. No new streets covered old ones, or even paralleled them. Certainly no building plots were aligned with the old district. Nobody could claim that the new grocery stood on the same ground as the old florists, or that the new butcher's stood over the old bakery. It was impossible to see the old Twelve by looking at the new. Even the train station was at a different place along the tracks than the old. District 12 was a monument to the idea of looking forward, not backward.

Luckily for Gale, District 12 was still smaller than any other in Panem, and finding his way to the town square was not difficult. But when he finally found the town bakery, he found it closed up, with a sign in the front window that read, "It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon! Go spend some time with your family!" On the ground under the sign was a small stack of tightly wrapped bread loaves for sale and a bowl full of coins where people had left their payment.

Gale shook his head. Only in District 12 could the baker get away with something like that. Even with the new medicine factory that had opened several years earlier, there were still less than two thousand people living in Twelve according to the last population report he'd seen. Everybody still knew everybody. Certainly Gale would never see this sort of thing in Two; both the bread and the coins would be gone before the baker had finished turning his back.

Gale made his way across town once again, finding the unfamiliar path to a very familiar destination. Some things just couldn't be moved when redesigning the district. He found the Meadow right where it had always been, and there he found his quarry.

The baker sat against a tree near the edge of the Meadow. His wife was in front of him, her back leaned against his chest, with both of their hands clasped together over her stomach. They both had soft smiles on their faces as they watched the antics of their children playing in the tall grass. It was an idyllic vision of family. It practically belonged on one of the propaganda posters promoting Panem's post-war rebirth.

Gale paused a safe distance away. After all these years, the spike of jealousy he felt when he saw Katniss and Peeta together like this was like an old friend. He knew it was irrational, that he had chosen his life and Katniss had chosen hers. Deep down he knew that this would have happened anyway, that he would always have chosen to do the work for Panem that he did in District 2 and Katniss would never have chosen to live anywhere but District 12, and that Peeta Mellark ultimately had nothing to do with those choices.

But the part of him that was still an angry 20-year-old rejected these more mature thoughts. He wanted to be the one leaning down to whisper playfully into Katniss's ear. He wanted to be the one to make her smile, and make her laugh. He wanted to be the one she turned her lips up toward, waiting for a kiss.

Gale shook his head, forcibly clearing his thoughts. Just because he spent his young adulthood wanting that didn't mean that he still wanted that now, he reminded himself. He had his job in Two, and Katniss had her family in Twelve, and that was the way things were.

Once he had control of his treacherous thoughts, he resumed his walk and approached the couple. "You think you can quit work early just cause you own the place? I had to walk across the whole district twice looking for you two," he said once he was close enough to be heard.

"Gale!" Katniss called out in surprise. She jumped up from the ground and ran over to give him a quick hug hello. "You should have let us know you were coming, we could have met you at the station."

"But then it wouldn't have been a surprise," he said.

Katniss gave him a knowing look. "More like you would have had to plan your travel more than ten minutes ahead of time, you mean."

Gale was saved from having to make a reply by Peeta's approach. "Hey, Gale," he said, and the two men shook hands. "Prim and Rye have missed you."

"Oh, and you haven't?" Gale teased. Katniss socked him in the arm.

The three talked like the old friends they were as they watched the kids playing in the Meadow. It didn't make sense to Gale at first when they named their children after the lost family members whose memory always brought them so much pain. But over the years since Prim's birth he could see the change in them. The joy they found in their children had helped them rediscover the joy of their lost siblings, helped them to move past the bad memories and focus on the good. To be honest he envied them for that: Even living among death in a murdered district, these two had moved on from the war, moved on from lost siblings, in ways that Gale himself was still struggling to.

He shifted his attention away from his own dark thoughts and back to the kids. He had no idea what they were actually doing, they both seemed to be trying to catch the other while also trying to escape the other. Somehow he was sure it made perfect sense to them, though. Prim's dark tresses spilled around her shoulders as she ran, loose from the braid she normally wore her hair in - "Just like Mommy's!" she proudly proclaimed to anyone who would listen. Rye had lost some baby fat since the last time Gale saw him, and was starting to grow into the same stocky frame as his father.

People in other districts wouldn't understand, bringing children to play on a graveyard. When the initial cleanup began, the Meadow had been the largest open area that wasn't covered in rubble. It was the obvious place to bury the bodies recovered during cleanup. The bits and pieces of thousands of unrecognizable bodies, buried together in a mass grave near what had once been the dividing line between town and Seam. A few years later when the field began to grow green again despite no one having seeded it, it became a symbol for the rebirth of the whole district.

One of his colleagues from Two had once asked Gale why the folks in Twelve saw the mass grave as a sign of new life, while at the same time they actively worked to obscure those deaths with the new district design. He had had no answer for her; it just felt right to them.

"So I assume you heard?" Katniss asked after a brief lull in the conversation.

Gale shrugged uncomfortably, feeling somewhat sheepish that they hadn't had the chance to tell him themselves. "My mom still talks to your mom. She told me the other day, and I wanted to come offer my congratulations in person."

Peeta had the same dumb smile on his face Gale remembered from the first two times. Katniss shifted her weight from one foot to the other and began to unconsciously rub her stomach, which still wasn't showing yet. "We went to Four for a checkup with my mom last weekend. It's a boy."

"That's great," Gale said. "So who're you going to name this one after? Your dad?"

Katniss screwed up her face. "No. That'd be too weird. Raising a kid with my dad's name? No."

Gale thought for a moment. "You had another brother, right?" he directed at Peeta.

Katniss and Peeta exchanged a quick look, hers questioning, his encouraging. "Actually, we've been talking about it," she said. "And we were wondering, um, we'd like to ask…" She faltered again, and turned back to her husband, who smoothly took over.

"We've talked it over, and if it's okay with you, we'd like to name him Vick."

Gale's throat closed up on him. Vick. He didn't often let himself think of his youngest brother. Vick, who spent years jealous of Gale and Rory's service in combat squads, who had never been prouder than when he was finally assigned to one himself. Vick, who was dedicated and eager to contribute and always did what he was told and received several posthumous medals after the Capitol fell. Gale didn't attend the ceremony, having fled the city and taken out his grief on remaining pockets of Peacekeepers holding out in Two, but Katniss and Hazelle had assured him that Thirteen had done a fine job honoring those who died in the final push.

Hazelle still had the medals. Gale could hardly stand to look at them. What use were plaques and commendations when his brother was dead? They meant about as much to him as the medal of valor the Capitol had given him when his father died, which he had sold as scrap metal a week later.

He felt a hand on his arm, and it pulled him from his dark thoughts. Katniss wore a look of concern on her face, the kind she normally reserved for her husband and children. "If you don't-"

She was cut off there, because the kids had paused in their game long enough to notice their parents' new companion. "Uncle Gale!" Prim cried out, followed closely by her brother's less-well-enunciated echo, as they both ran over to greet the new arrival. The kids' enthusiasm helped improve his mood, and he dropped to one knee so he could meet them on their level and pulled each into a one-armed hug. "Hey, squirts," he said around the lump in his throat.

"How about we let Uncle Gale breathe, huh?" Peeta said, nudging his daughter back a bit. The kids relented and took a step back. Gale was struck, as he often was, by what weird combinations of their parents the two kids were. Prim had her mother's skeptical, penetrating gaze, but it came from her father's big blue eyes. Rye was reserved and taciturn like his mother, but with a quiet happiness about him that was much more reminiscent of his father.

As they began walking back to the bakery, Prim began excitedly chattering about seemingly everything she had done since Gale had last seen her - pictures she had painted, books she had read, her new favorite song, her new new favorite song, how her hunting lessons were going, the time she got to measure out the flour for the Colemans' toasting loaf…

Prim didn't get her outgoing nature from either of her parents, who were both rather private people. That was all her own. Even Posy hadn't been this chipper when she was a little girl. But then, Posy had lived a much different life. Crammed into a tiny, cold house with four other people. Her father already dead by the time she was born. Never a full belly, not for one single day of her life. Prim, this Prim, had never known a single one of those hardships. This Rye had never known what it was to fear your own parent, had never had his childhood innocence warped by growing up across the square from the whipping post. And this Vick would never know any of those things either, Gale realized.

"And you have to try some of Rye's cookies," the girl continued, oblivious to Gale's dark thoughts. "He iced them all by himself, with just a little help from Daddy."

Gale laughed at the girl's contradictory explanation. "All by yourself, with just a little help from your dad, huh?" he asked the boy, who rewarded him with a nod and a bashful smile. "That's good. I like your mom and dad well enough, but I really came here for the cookies."

"You have to have some of my stew, too, Uncle Gale!" Prim said.

"You made stew?" Gale asked, wondering which parent she took after in the kitchen.

"Prim shot the squirrel for tonight's stew," Katniss said with obvious pride in her voice. "It was her first kill."

"You're teaching her to hunt already?" Gale asked. He belatedly remembered that "hunting lessons" was one of the things the girl had mentioned earlier when he hadn't really been paying attention. He turned back to Prim, who was surely too young to be shooting things. "You shot a squirrel?"

Prim nodded. "Mommy said I can only shoot little things like squirrels and rabbits with my little bow, but when I'm bigger I can use the big bow and shoot deers and bears!"

"Just deer," Katniss said. "What did I say to do if you ever see a bear in the woods?"

"Climb a tree as high as I can," the girl recited.

"That's right," Katniss said. She bent down and gave the girl a kiss on the top of her head.

Gale was momentarily struck silent by the exchange. It made him think of his younger days, learning snares from his father. His father had been a stern, quiet man, but Gale remembered the obvious pride he had displayed the first time Gale had correctly replicated one of his snares, the first time one of Gale's snares caught something, the first time Gale improved one of their snare designs.

"Even in the Seam, a man with the right skills can take care of his family," his father had told him. "That should be your number one priority in life. Always take care of your family." And Gale always had. Through starvation and bombings and war. Until Vick.

"You know, the first time I ever met your mother, she was using a smaller bow herself."

"Really?" Prim asked, her eyes wide with wonder at the idea that her mother had even been any different from the woman she knew.

"Oh yeah," Gale said. "She taught me how to shoot, just like she's teaching you."

Prim turned back to her mother. "Did you teach Uncle Gale how to shoot a bow?"

"I did," Katniss confirmed. "And you want to know a secret?" She leaned down conspiratorially, but still spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. "You're a much better student than he was."

Prim beamed at the praise. Peeta and Katniss chuckled at Gale's expense. "You weren't my mother, I didn't actually have to listen to you," Gale tried to defend himself.

"Only if you wanted to learn," Katniss jabbed back.

"I learned eventually," Gale insisted.

As they finally approached the bakery and the conversation continued, Gale could feel himself relaxing. This is what they had fought for. Carefree children, with no reapings in their future, and no mining shifts, and no floggings, and no hangings. And no hunger. These kids had never known hunger for a day in their lives, not real hunger, not like he and Katniss had. Gale could remember a time when he had hated the merchants for their well-fed lives, but even the poorest in District 12 were now more reliably fed than most merchants had been in the old days. Catnip's kids were growing up in a freaking bakery, of all places. These kids lived in a whole new world compared to the one he had known, and he couldn't be anything other than thankful.

"We're gonna eat my stew! We're gonna eat my stew!" Prim was practically chanting by the time they were headed upstairs to the apartment over the new bakery.

"Nobody's eating anything until you two get cleaned up. You look like you've got half the Meadow all over you," Peeta said.

"But Dad-"

"What's the most important thing to do before we work with food?" Peeta cut the girl off.

Prim huffed out an exasperated sigh that made her look exactly like her mother. "Make sure our hands are clean," she recited.

"And?" her father prompted.

"Working with food includes eating it."

"That's right. Now, both of you, wash." Peeta directed the kids to the sink with a hand on each of their shoulders. Gale hung back with Katniss.

"Rye doesn't talk much," Gale said.

"He's still learning," Katniss said. "Plus it's hard to get a word in around Prim."

"That's for sure," Gale said with a laugh. The two of them settled on a couch and watched as Peeta encouraged the kids to change into clean clothes by splashing them both with water. Soon all three disappeared to the bedrooms on the third floor.

Gale sat back and shook his head. "You done good, Catnip. Seems like you two have got it all figured out."

Katniss scoffed. "Hardly. Come back in twenty years to see how this all turns out. There's still plenty of time to scar them for life."

"Nah, you two are great with them," Gale said.

"So how long can you stay?" Katniss asked.

Gale stopped and thought for a moment. "You know, now that you mention it, I think I may get going sooner than I planned. I think I'm going to go see my mother."

Katniss raised an eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." Gale took a deep breath. "You know I've never even looked at any of those medals they gave Vick? I think… I think I want to read his commendations now."

Katniss nodded. She understood what he was thinking. It was just like Peeta had told her all those years ago: At some point the pain of a loss becomes bearable, and once it does then you can revisit the good memories without drowning in the pain. "He was a good kid," she said softly.

"No, he was a good man," Gale said. He looked up at his old friend. "He will be a good kid."

Katniss's lips quirked up into a smile. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Gale confirmed. "But if you're going to call him Vick then he can't come out looking like a merchant. No floppy blond hair this time."

"No promises," Katniss said with a smile. "I was convinced Prim would be blonde."

"Pretty sure they could fix that for you in the new Capitol," Gale teased.

Katniss glowered at him. "You keep talking about 'fixing' my kids and I won't let you see them anymore." Gale held up his hands in surrender.

At dinner that night, Gale was sure to be very complimentary towards Prim's succulent squirrel. And of Rye's cookie icing skills, which were not quite up to the task of coating a cookie with frosting but nobody pointed that out. Not even Prim. She really did remind him of Katniss as a big sister.

After dinner, Prim insisted on singing him her new new new favorite song, and Gale discovered that Rye was the one who had inherited the beautiful singing voice, even if he still had trouble pronouncing some of the words.

They played a round of games before bedtime, Prim and Rye teaming up to wipe the floor with each adult.

And as Gale laid down to sleep that night in the apartment above the bakery, in the spare bedroom that would soon belong to his dead brother's namesake, he didn't feel jealous at all.

…..

So this was my first time writing toastbabies, and I might have gotten a little carried away with it. Whatever. If too much toastbaby cuteness bothers you, then you and I are very different people. :)

This is the end of the line for this story, but not for this universe. I got several prompts for outtakes after the last chapter, but I'll always take more! You can send your request as a comment on AO3, or a review on FFn, or an ask on Tumblr. All three will accept anonymous submissions. I need ideas, people!

Thanks so much for reading this story, my second ever completed WIP. Particular thanks to those of you who began reading in 2013 and actually came back after I didn't update for seventeen months. You're good people.