Sup guys it's ya girl back again with the latest chapter, hope you enjoy! A couple things:

1. No, this isn't District One reapings. I realized that I couldn't bring myself to write all the reapings because they can get boring if you write literally all of them, so this is a pre-Reapings chapter detailing our lovely tributes' lives in the year before they themselves are reaped.

2. THIS IS IMPORTANT. Please let me know somehow, any way you can, which of these updating schedules you'd prefer: updating more than once a week, exactly once a week, or less than once a week. I update fast so any of these could work for me. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me which of them works for you. Leave it in a review, PM me, whatever you want, just let me know.

3. Mature themes! Every chapter will have them but this chapter has 'em in spades. If you think you will be made uncomfortable by anything in this chapter, skip Stitch Le'Craw's POV and send me a PM and I'll give you the gist of it.

Happy reading guys!

Pre-Reapings, Districts Eight and Eleven

Tomara "Tom" Silken, 12

District Eight Female

Around us the sea of young women lets out a collective breath it didn't know it was holding, begins to buzz with the near-hysterical relieved whispers of thousands of girls who've done it, who've made it past their first reaping, who've survived. And all I can do is look at Faye, with her arms wrapped around herself, with the first tears beginning their slow arc down her cheeks, with her head pointed towards the ground. She risks a glance at me and that does it, she begins sobbing in earnest, swaying back and forth.

"Don't worry," I tell her, my eyes fixed on her swaying back. "Lina's gonna win."

The crowd is breaking up, the sea dissolving into hundreds of whorls and eddies of twelve-year old survivors, and they flow through the space in between me and Faye until I close the distance and wrap my arms around her, burying my nose in the soft fat braid hanging heavy at the nape of her neck. All around us is the click of metal soles against cobblestones, the muted snapshots of a dozen conversations at once, a giggle, a sob, all of it hyper-present for a single moment, gone forever in the next.

Faye's braid smells like soap, and for a moment I forget where I am, in the very center of the Fog where the chems hang so heavy in the air you can see them. Sometimes the smell keeps me up at night, the smell so sweet it tortures my sinuses. Faye's braid isn't like that. It has a human smell. I knead her shoulders with my fingertips and close my eyes. "Lina's gonna win," I tell the back of her head, "I promise."

She turns to look at me with shining eyes. "Do—do you think so?" A hiccup.

I nod. "I wouldn't be saying it if I didn't think so." She's gone from the stage, they've all gone, but still I find myself craning my neck to see it over the thinning pack of girls around us. Four metal chairs squat in the far corner and their emptiness makes them ominous. The microphone bristles, front and center, and to its left and right are the reaping bowls, from which, not ten minutes ago, the name Lina Chevron was plucked from thousands upon thousands of other names. Just like that. It doesn't take much.

Somewhere in the distance there is a wail, a long keening animal sound that devolves into a girlish scream, and I would know that voice anywhere. "Luna!" I call, and my voice must be a light in her darkness, because the wailing gets louder and closer. She bursts through a knot of girls whispering to each other and they stream away in confused, frenetic patterns. She ignores them as she grasps the front of my dress shirt and howls into it, broad face hidden by white fabric.

I gather her up in my arms, crooning something nonsensical as she shudders and sobs into my front. Then she releases her vice-grip on me and pulls away. Her eyes are so swollen I can hardly see them; mucus drips from her nostrils. "They took her," she rasps, "They took my sister and they're gonna kill her." Her voice is raw and drips hatred.

"Lina's not gonna die, Luna," I say.

She screams at that, and the few girls that remain in the square shudder and shift away, staring guiltily in our direction. They're glad they're not us, I think, and I can't blame them. "She is!" Luna sobs, sinking to her knees, clutching at herself, "it's the Games, it's the Games, the Games kill you, it's not fair."

I drop to her side and stroke her dark hair. "Luna," I half-whisper, "Lina is strong, and she's brave, and she's daring, and she's tough. And she's gonna win." Her hair is smooth under my palm. "D'you think she could live with herself if she died in the Games? No," I say, shaking my head, "No, she couldn't, so she won't. She'll come back to us." If I look at the stage I can see her standing there, raising a fist in victory, and I swell with the realization that what I'm seeing is a glimpse into the future, because she'll be there, because she's coming home. "Lina's gonna win," I repeat, as I stare into the future. "She has to."

I press the wet rag against my bruised eye socket, and after a moment's hesitation I toss the second rag to my father, who catches it one-handed and dabs at the cut on his bottom lip. Blood is a tough stain to get out, I think, watching him as he winces, but I don't say anything. The last thing I want right now is to antagonize him. The last thing I need is a second black eye, and I don't want to have to hurt my father again.

The television flickers to life, unprompted, streaked with static for a moment before snapping into focus. "Mandatory viewing," announces my father to the empty air, as he settles more firmly into his ancient chair. The rag falls to the side, forgotten. I press my own rag a bit deeper into my eye socket and scoot forward on the carpet.

The interviews. Melentius Loomer plays the crowd for a bit, but it doesn't last long, rarely does. And then he's tearing through the tributes like he does every year, poking at sore subjects, hunting for embarrassing truths, sniffing for secrets. He has the boy from Six nearly in tears by the time the interview's done.

And then there's Lina, tall, slender, regal all in white, frowning just a little as Melentius invites her to take her seat. "Lina Chevron, twelve years old," he begins, grinning with all his teeth, "The youngest tribute in the 97th Hunger Games. What would you say your chances were? Do you have much hope for Victory?"

Lina, brave, beautiful Lina, smiles, and she says "If I managed to survive District Eight for as long as I did, I'm sure the Hunger Games will be doable." The Capitol laughs, Melentius laughs, my father laughs, and I stifle my grin with the palm of my hand. If anyone can do it, I think, It's her, she'll win them over and then she'll win for real. Her interview goes on and there's more laughter, and Lina cracks a smile for a moment or two, and my best friend is so beautiful and clever there on that stage I can hardly believe it.

I don't pay much attention to the other districts. Instead I think of Lina and am amazed at the charming, acerbic wit I never knew she had. My father looks at me shifty-eyed when the program ends and the television fizzles back into silence, and he says, "Your Lina did good up there." The cut on his bottom lip has crusted over and I wince when I remember how it felt to drive my elbow into it. I had to do it, or he wouldn't've stopped hitting. I didn't enjoy it. I never do.

"Thanks, Dad," I tell him, as I play with one of the loose threads dangling from the edge of the carpet. "I think so too. She's gonna win."

He grunts and looks away. After a moment, I look away too.

Faye sits beside me, hand snaking out from under her wooden desk, and I grab it and squeeze it as the projector shudders and spits at the front of the classroom. Mrs. Tailor stands in funereal shadow beside it, hands clasped behind her back, spine ramrod straight. From the projector comes the tinny desperate sounds of the Bloodbath of the 97th Hunger Games. Nobody moves. Nobody speaks.

Onscreen, tributes die and tributes kill and it's almost impossible to tell who is who. I scan every fallen face and I don't see her. I don't expect to. Only when I see a tall slim short-haired figure darting from the Cornucopia with a pack clutched in a white-knuckled grip do I give Faye's hand a comforting squeeze. She's alive, I tell her without words, as Lina and her ally, the boy from Five, sprint through a set of double doors and vanish from the screen, Lina's alive.

The Bloodbath is over only when the Careers finish mutilating the little boy from Three. Mandatory viewing ends when the little boy does, and Mrs. Tailor flicks off the projector and turns the lights back on with barely disguised relief. "Congratulations to Lina Chevron and Thread Whitaker for surviving the Bloodbath," she says, and waits for the scattered applause to die down before announcing a temporary recess from lessons, during which she advises us to "think about what we just witnessed," and advises us to "hope that Elise Janssen turns herself in soon or the Games will never stop." Thirty seconds later, the room has erupted into the chaos of forty students speaking at once.

I find myself in the center of it, perched at the edge of a desk, voice low and fast. "It'll be Lina," I tell my gaggle of listeners, "She's my best friend and she's smart as a whip, and fast. You saw how she got that pack at the Cornucopia, right?" Nods all around, and I nod too and flash a grin. "Well, she's better prepared than half the tributes that're left, and whatever's in that pack, she'll know how to use it." In the little crowd below me Faye is nodding, eyes wide and trusting. "I love Lina," I tell them, pressing my knuckles to my heart, "And I know her better than anyone except her sister maybe, and I know that she's going to come home." My heart pulses in my chest. "I know it."

A week later Lina's ally from Five trips her in front of a heavy wooden door and swings it shut on her skull, over and over again, while my mother cries and my father looks away.

I don't cry, and I don't look away. When the cannon sounds and the rage suffuses and ignites my body, I promise myself that all of them will pay.

Stitch Le'Craw, 18

District Eight Male

The sheets are stifling and entirely decorative, anyway, and after several sweltering seconds I kick them clumsily away from my sweating body and let them pool at the foot of the bed. I curl my toes, arch my back, and hiss through my closed jaw. I want to scream. Instead I swivel onto my side and say, "You still here, sweetheart?"

She isn't. The other side of the bed is cool and empty, and I flop onto my belly and push myself onto the colder side of the bed with aching knees. I grip the side of the mattress and slide my hand under the pillow and a few pieces of paper brush up against my pinkie finger. I crumple them into a fist and pull them out, examining them in the dim blue-ish light filtering in from the thick glass and gauzy curtains.

Three denarii. That goddamn bitch.

Better that she left before I woke up, because if I'd seen her leaving three denarii as a tip, I might have told her not to bother, or I might have strangled her with the decorative sheets, and Rita can overlook a lot but murdering a client would not look good on my record.

Better that she left for a lot of reasons. I get out of bed and pad to where I left my clothing in a crumpled heap on the chair, stuffing the bills into the pocket of my hoodie. Mine, I think, and there's warmth in my chest when I think it, My money, I earned it, but then I remember how I earned it and the smile that had begun to work its way across my face evaporates.

I pad back to the bed on bare feet and huddle amongst the blankets, wishing it were colder in the room. Rita likes to keep this place hot. She likes to see the sweat on us. She has us tell them that their bodies drive us wild with desire, but really we're sweating because it's so fucking hot in here that one or two of the whores possessing more delicate constitutions have passed out from heatstroke in the act.

Whore is an ugly word.

In the dream I'd been having before I woke up clawing at the sheets, the Peacekeeper from Two had transformed into a bear that held me down with massive iron-tipped paws and ravaged my torso with vice-jaws. Then the bear transformed back into the Peacekeeper from Two who held me down with a muscled forearm while he fumbled with the clasp of my belt and I stared up at him all doe-eyed because Rita told me, don't resist, and so I didn't. The bear and the Peacekeeper both whisper it while they savage me, whore, whore, whore, and I usually wake up with the word still ringing in my ears.

I groan, run my fingers through my sweat-soaked charcoal hair. Oh man. I feel like I'm dying.

For a while I stare up at the ceiling and drum my fingers against my abdomen. When someone taps at the door I barely raise my head, consider shifting the sheets to hide my privates, and realize that I don't really care. "Come in," I call, and go back to looking at the ceiling and tracing the raised lines of scar tissue on my torso. Every scar tells a story.

I can tell that it's her from the way her shape blocks the light from the hallway. "You did well, Stitch," says Rita, closing the door behind her and going to sit on my chair with my clothing still on it. She hunkers down like a big cat, all lolling curves and simpering smiles. "Cami praised you very highly."

"Oh, wonderful," I say, tracing blithely away. "Good to hear that high praise from Cami is worth about three fucking denarii."

Rita flicks an eyebrow. "You don't survive on tips, dear," she says. "I'm sure you'll be fine."

"Yeah, yeah." I wave a hand, close my eyes. I am so tired. "What are you doin' here, Rita?" I continue. "If you're here to fuck me, I've been told I'm expensive."

She shifts in the chair. "You'll be entertaining another client tonight," she says, picking at something under her fingernail.

That gets my attention. I half-rise from the bed, supporting myself on my elbows, and gape at her. "What?" I exclaim, "I'm finished for tonight! By Everdeen, woman, I probably couldn't get it up even if I wanted to, which I don't." I'm panting. "I'm done," I repeat, knowing full well that it's useless from the way she crosses her legs at the ankles and folds her arms over her chest.

"Stitch," she sniffs.

Oh boy. Here it comes.

"When I found you," she says, tossing her head of black hair, "You were scrapping it out on the street with knives, you had nothing, you made so little that you had to steal, your family was dead and you were sickly and alone. Now you are well fed, make money, are safer than you've ever been, and you complain about extra work?" Her nostrils flare. "Unbelievable," she crows, "Sometimes you make me wonder why I took pity on you in the first place, dear. Honestly."

Goddammit. Forget strangling Cami, strangling Rita would probably be more productive.

I pull myself upright and lean against the headboard. "Who is it?" I ask, because saying anything else might open the floodgates completely, and if I want any sleep tonight I won't piss Rita off any more than I already have. She swivels to face me, nodding as though I've come to my senses.

"His name is Dalton," she says.

"Peacekeeper?" I ask, palms sweating. She nods and watches me from underneath thick eyelashes.

"You'll do it," she says. "Won't you, Stitch?"

I want to bury myself in the sheets and never come out. I want to vanish into the Fog and get eroded by chems. I want to be somewhere else.

"I'll do it," I mutter, and roll onto my back.

I can't see her but I can sense her approval. "Good choice," she says, and the chair squeals as she gets to her feet. I can hear her long nails clicking against the doorknob. "He wants to be dominated," she says into the darkness. "I thought you were the best choice for that tonight."

"I'm sure," I mumble into the pillow. My eyelids are so heavy.

"He'll be up in five minutes," says Rita, behind me. "Be ready, Stitch." I don't grace that one with a response, and after a moment she closes the door and leaves me to the dark. I toy with the idea of falling back asleep and then the thought of a Peacekeeper looming over my unconscious body has me sitting straight up in bed, the hairs on my forearms stiff at attention.

I slide from the bed, slouch to my underwear and jeans, and drag them onto unwilling legs. Then I arrange myself on the bed in a pose I've always thought is more ridiculous than sultry, but it always seems to get them going. A bead of sweat drips down the side of my neck, past a pulsing vein. Passion. Right.

I can hear him in the hallway. His movements are tentative, the way the floorboards squeal under his weight somehow unsure. The Peacekeeper from Two, he wasn't unsure for a moment, not when he pulled me by the shirtfront into this very room, not when he pressed me down, not when he went for my clothes. A tremor crawls down my naked torso. I shouldn't have done it, I think, for the thousandth time, I should never have agreed to this.

The door opens.

He's a young man. Gangly, not particularly attractive. His eyes are sunken and suspicious. He slips into the room and is careful to close it quietly behind him. It's almost endearing.

"H-hello," he says, his throat catching on the word for a moment before letting him carry on. He wrings his hands. "I don't know if Miss Rita told you what I—"

"Get on your knees." My words are short, cold, brutal. I hardly look at him. Just enough to see the confusion and arousal swimming on his face, in equal measure.

He gets on his knees, presses his palms into the white fabric covering his thighs. By Everdeen, he's blushing.

I yawn, stretch, fiddle with my belt buckle. I can see him shifting, so I bark, "Don't move," and he goes still. With painstaking slowness I slip from the bed, amble over to where he kneels on the warm wood, and I unclasp the belt and loop it around his pimpled neck, tight enough that panic flickers into his eyes momentarily. I tug on the loose end and he chokes and whimpers, bent nearly double at the waist to alleviate some of the tension at his neck.

Poor bastard. I almost want to put the belt away. But he'll get what he's paid for, at least.

"You know what to call me," I whisper, against his ear, tugging all the while at the end of the belt. He shudders, and I don't know why, but I know he'll tell me to stop if he needs me to.

He doesn't. Instead, he manages to wheeze out the word "Master" between increasingly vicious tugs on the belt. "Very good," I whisper, while in my mind I bleat, Wrong word, the correct answer would have been whore, nice try though.

I get to work on the first button of his uniform, and think that I must be losing it.

Lily White, 16

District Eleven Female

"One more time," says Foxglove, as we walk the path that winds its way through Little Field and tapers to a stop dead center of the resident settlement. "Tell me one more time that this'll work."

Heat rises in shimmering translucent waves from the asphalt underneath our feet. I've seen skin stick to asphalt like this when it gets really bad. It's a smell you never forget. "It'll work," I tell her, eyes fixed on the clustered buildings a few hundred feet away, "I think."

Foxglove sighs and shakes the sweat out from her ponytail. "And you don't think this is something they flog for, if you're wrong."

I close my eyes for a moment, remember the bite of the whip against my father's broad back, how he muffled his screams for as long as he could but eventually they tore free from his bleeding lips, the weeks of treating him after the incident, keeping the flies from laying eggs in the meat of his body, and I say, "I don't think they'll flog us." But now I'm not sure. I'm chilled, despite the heat, and I rub my hands against my torso to warm myself up. But the chill is internal, I think, because it doesn't work.

For a while we walk in my preferred silence, until we reach the outskirts of the settlement and the shabby little buildings rise up around us, dark grain-wood buildings with windows lacking glass, only curtains that flutter in the wind like heartbeats. The square is our destination and we pass these buildings by. Those buildings are for people who don't have to take a suicidal amount of tesserae, who can buy a little extra; they're not meant for people like us.

In the middle of the day the settlement is almost deserted. There's an old woman throwing scraps of something to a mangy old dog, a boy balancing on a fence watching some pigs rooting through a trough, and the ever-present Peacekeeper population. There's a squad on the road in front of us, standing almost dead-center, staring out at District Eleven like it has something to prove. From the looks of them, none are from this district. Well, Peacekeepers rarely are.

We draw closer. Foxglove hardly glances at them, but when one looks my way my cheeks color and I drop my gaze to my sandals, staring at my dark toes as they curl into the sole of the shoe. Closer, now, closer for one of them to reach out and touch, or at least to put us to a halt, to force us to reveal our business. None of them say a word. I catch the eye of the smallest Peacekeeper for a moment, the white-blonde pale one who has the looks of a child of One. He's the Smiler, I guess, noting the way he stands with an almost-hunch, withdrawn, perhaps despising the two men around him. The one on his left, that's his handler, I decide, seeing the man's watchful eye, and the other guy is the artillery.

It is only once we've left them far behind that I relax, draw a hand over my forehead. Foxglove catches me and raises an eyebrow. "Come on, Lily," she says, "If you act guilty around Peacekeepers all the time eventually they are gonna do something to you."

"Not guilty," I say, but don't bother finishing the sentence with the 'Just scared' it deserves. Surely Foxglove must know me well enough by now to figure that out on her own.

The only person in the square is a man sweeping detritus of some event out into the street. I look at him and envy him the job he's been given, the simple task of sweeping an empty square. I doubt he's ever known the brutal heat of the orchards, the aggressive terror of the simple knowledge that a single bruised fruit means no money will be made that day. I sigh and look away. Lucky, I think, as we cross the square and head to the shallow steps that lead up into the Justice Building, and he doesn't even know it.

There is some sort of cooling system installed in the Justice Building, because when we enter the heat is blown away from our sweating bodies and relegated to the porch like an unwelcome house guest. One of the great doors swings shut behind us. I fidget in the lobby, feeling very out of place here amongst the paintings and statues and ornate staircase. Foxglove grabs my forearm and yanks me towards the desk by the staircase, and I imagine how I must look and am ashamed.

She only lets me go when we reach the desk. "Hello," she says, "We're here for tesserae."

The woman behind the desk raises an eyebrow. "Tesserae?" she says. "Honey, you've been waiting an awful long time. Shipment was half a month ago. It might not even be good."

Foxglove fixes a grin on her face. "We'll still take it," she says.

The woman heaves a great sigh and pushes away from the desk, reaching for the phone by her hand. She taps in the number and holds the phone up to her ear. For a moment we make eye contact, and I look away immediately, forcing myself to stare at the arched ceiling, anywhere but her.

She finishes her call without me hearing a word and sits back down at her desk, going back to drumming her fingernails against the wood. They sound like raindrops.

Five minutes go by. I want to ask the woman if someone is coming for us, but when I open my mouth the words die on my lips and I go back to scanning the lobby with restless energy. Somewhere behind one of the staircases a door opens, and a pressed young woman comes sashaying towards us, hips swinging, eyes glimmering. "Here for tesserae?" she says, addressing both of us, and I let Foxglove stand in front of me and take the lead.

"Yes ma'am," she says, and the pretty young woman nods and raises a hand.

"Come with me to the storeroom," she says. "It's not often people miss distribution day. I rarely have to do this job."

Foxglove fights to catch up to her. I remain in the background. "This is a special case," says Foxglove, when she reaches the woman's side. "You'll see in a minute."

The woman shrugs but says nothing. We reach a door disguised as a garish patch of wallpaper and the young woman tugs it open and descends a shallow flight of stairs, Foxglove at her heels. I take a moment before following. Will the woman call the Peacekeepers if she doesn't like what we have to say? Will the white-blonde Smiler on the road outside whip me bloody himself, or will he just tear me apart with his hands? Fear crawls down my spine as I step into the narrow stairwell. If these things happen, it will be my fault, and no one else's.

By the time I reach the bottom of the stairwell Foxglove and the woman have already vanished through an open door in the equally-narrow hallway. I smooth my coarse shirt with my hands and slip through the doorway. They've been waiting for me. For a panicked moment I think that Foxglove perhaps expects me to explain the situation, but she only nods at my arrival and tugs on her ponytail, maybe for luck.

Empty crates scatter the room and the faint smell of old grain lingers in the air, thick enough that I almost sneeze before I can stop myself. As I pull the heel of my palm away from my nose the young woman produces a clipboard from behind a few sacks of grain. My stomach rumbles at the sight and the smell.

She scans the board, and frowns. "Name?" she says at last, squeezing the board between slender fingers.

Foxglove steps forward. "Basil Carver and Magnolia Thresher," she says.

The woman's face could be stone. Slowly she turns from Foxglove to me, and I wilt under the emptiness in her eyes. Peacekeepers, I think, she's going to call them for sure and they'll whip us to death. I can feel the lash tearing into the muscle of my back even now. I can feel myself dying.

She turns her attention back to Foxglove. "Neither of you are Basil Carver," she says, "And neither of you are Magnolia Thresher." The clipboard is steady in her hands. "You know very well what happened to them."

"Right," says Foxglove, "They died in the 97th. So you know very well that they're not ever going to need tesserae again."

She's being too bold. She sounds callous. If this woman knew one of those children, if she cared for either of them, then this is over, we're finished. But the woman just continues to stare and stare.

"What about their families?" says the woman. She sounds almost intrigued.

Foxglove tugs again on her ponytail. "It's been three weeks," she says, "And they haven't collected. Tesserae becomes public property after two. We've checked the rule books and we know it's true." She sidles a little closer, bares a grin that shows teeth. "You could have just thrown it out. But you didn't. You waited for someone to claim it, and right now, that person is me."

For a long, agonizing moment, the woman only looks at her. Something flickers on her face.

Then she takes the pen on her clipboard and makes two little checks with a flick of her wrist. "Claimed," she says, as she indicates the overflowing bags. "The grain is most likely stale. I would suggest eating it quickly."

"Thank you," says Foxglove, snatching up one of the bags. She tosses the lighter one to me, and I barely catch it, managing to wrap my arms around it's warm weight before it tumbles back to the ground. I can feel the grain shifting through the bag, and it feels like survival.

The woman sees us back to the lobby with quiet grace. She smiles before she returns to her basement, at Foxglove, and says "You're a smart girl."

Foxglove shakes her head. "Nah," she says, "This whole thing was Lily's idea. I never woulda thought of it." She heaves the bag in her arms. "Come on Lily, let's get out of here."

Until we reach the porch of the Justice Building we are silent. Then Foxglove whoops and punches the air, and I smile into the bag clutched against my chest. "You did it," Foxglove grins, clapping my shoulder, "You freaking genius, you did it."

"Yeah," I agree. Until next month, I think, when we're all starving again and I have to come up with something new.

I keep that thought to myself.

Some of the more eagle-eyed among you might've noticed that I changed the chapter titles. I might do it again. I love changing chapter titles. I'm nuts about it.