"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
- Howard Thurman

The day I found out I was pregnant was the day that I cleaned out the china cupboard.

I should probably back up and explain that.

Knowing that a population with a choice meant that the Games were as good as over, any concept of control over reproduction was denied. Aside from some pretty basic stuff at school, it was left to our parents to tell us how things worked, and it was therefore no surprise when girls would show up on our doorstep in the Seam, having tried to find an solution for their own problems and bleeding uncontrollably because of it. My mother would give them yarrow tea to slow the bleeding as much as possible. And she always served it in the bone china cups that she kept from before she married my father.

Might as well die with a touch of class.

I had a hard time deciding whether or not to keep the cups when I moved into Peeta's house to begin with. The moving itself wasn't a hard decision- every room of my own home had the ghost of Prim standing at the end of my bed. Or Prim sitting on the floor of the kitchen, rewinding a skein of mother's yarn. Prim- bouncing down the staircase, Prim- smiling by the kitchen sink, Prim- coming in the back door with a couple of pink lupins and a smudge of dirt on her forehead.

Prim- burnt beyond recognition, and therefore buried in a mass grave, a place that could never be truly made hers.

So, anyway: the cups. I brought them with me and put them in an empty cupboard at Peeta's, the one above the fridge so I'd have to make an effort to ever see them. For over a decade, I didn't, not even once. And then one morning in mid-March, something was conspicuously missing- if you know what I mean- so I walked to the doctor's, he poked and prodded me for what seemed like way too long, and then declared me about a month pregnant. I walked back home, pulled a chair from the kitchen table over in front of the fridge, and started taking all the cups out.

I could feel Peeta, who was sitting at the kitchen table, eying me warily from over the top of his coffee, and just when I thought he was going to play the silent card, I heard him ask, "Are you just going to throw those out?"

"What else am I going to do with them?" I snapped, putting another dusty saucer on the counter.

"You could send them to your mother in District 6."

It was a decent idea. So I went down to the basement and grabbed a box that had old clothes in from before the war, and started packing the cups, wrapping them in socks and mittens and a pair of moth-eaten soccer shorts. I was about to close the box when I remembered something: I took a pencil and a piece of paper from the study, sat at the kitchen table, and began to write as Peeta read over my shoulder.

I braced myself for the whoop of delight, which I expected. What I didn't expect was that I'd be lifted into the air and spinning, so I dropped the paper in a mess of dizziness and kissing and "really"s. Peeta was the one who put it back in the box later before I brought it to the train station, but not before he read it aloud again, just to be sure.

You're going to be a grandmother.

So... What did they tell us at school about babies if it wasn't how to prevent them? Nothing much really, aside from basic childcare and insert Part A into Part B and statistics. You know, just so that for the most part we weren't accidentally killing our kids before the Capitol could come around and do it on purpose.

It's funny how you pretty much forget those stupid, trivial little facts they told you in school, especially when you're in pretty intense pain- which must mean something after the scrapes, bruises, hearing loss, getting shot, nearly being choked to death and having your entire back sprayed with napalm. And you've chewed the inside of your cheek raw for that fact.

It's also funny how when you can finally breathe again and the air is full of somebody newer's screams, your first thought happens to be one of the few that you managed to digest at school. "For the next fifty seconds, she's the newest person in Panem."

Second thought being, "She looks like him."

That isn't saying much, by the way, considering she's got a mop of my dark hair and my eyes too. But when Peeta holds her tiny, wailing form it's obvious she has his nose, which is fortunate because I never particularly liked mine. And she has his pale skin, making her look very much like a moving porcelain doll.

I can't bear to give her my sister's name, as we have considered. We've known too many people deserving namesake to choose just Prim, no matter how much she meant to me. So instead we name her Zoe- a name which, back in the days before Panem, probably before North America itself, meant "life" in some forgotten language. Or so I've been told.

And that's the important thing, really. She's alive. We're alive. And there's still so much life left to live.

A/N: This story will evolve more and more as the mood strikes, but it's my dumping ground for post-Mockingjay drabbles. They aren't necessarily written alike, but the characters will probably remain the same. Also- before someone points it out as we all seem to be bound to do- I know their daughter has blue eyes, she's just lacking on the melanin in this since she's new and all. I'm also aware that Mrs. E is not in District 6 at the end of MJ- she's in 4- but I don't think she's ever going to be happy in one place with only one of her children left.