A/N: OMG, THE FICUEL!

Anyway… So, it's in Katniss's POV. You'll learn why there's no Cato POV in the story.

Also, I'd like to apologize for any potential gag-provoking somewhat-Everthorne-like scenes. But Gale and Katniss are gonna have their stupid little flings with each other whether I like it or not, so we can all gag together at the stupid potential Everthorne scenes.

*shakes head* Everlens is so where it's at. (Everdeen-Allens, as in, my version of Catoniss.)

It's been a week since I've been home. I've received one million congratulations calls, one call on Cato's report about his coma, and seen Gale…not once. I arrived on the train, prim and proper and perfect, dressed up, smiling, waving, and happier than ever. He'd been at the train station with most of the population of District Twelve. He waved, smiled, and mouthed, "Welcome home." But I haven't seen him since.

Today I finally get to. We're meeting at our spot in the woods, and I'm more excited than ever. Gale… I miss him so much! I haven't seen him in a month, but it feels like decades, centuries, ages away from him. But at last we'll meet each other again. He'll be sitting on that rock we meet at on the tick of noon, eating some blackberries, raving about the Capitol. We'll hug, we'll hunt, and it'll be just like the reaping day should've been: no interruptions, no one taken away, no one reaped that we know…

I look down at Prim as she eats her breakfast. "Slow down, little duck," I tell her, smiling.

"I can't. We're going down to the mines today, and I'm almost late." She shovels down more cereal. I feel a shiver creep up my spine; I had always hated that day. I guess that it's good I no longer have to ever go down into the mines again. "What're you so smiley about?" Prim asks. "My big sister is always so grumpy in the morning…"

I roll my eyes. "Oh, nothing. Gale and I are going hunting today, that's all."

"Ah," Prim says. "You know, Gale gave us almost all of his game to us while you were…away. You should hunt for him."

"My plan exactly."

She nods. "He was really scared there for a while, the whole time Cato was with you. I kept telling him he was really in love with you and he wouldn't hurt you, but all Gale ever said about him was bad stuff, like he was gonna trick you and kill you or hurt you in the least."

"Cato's good, when you whittle away his Career side. Until then, he's not someone you want to be around," I say. Prim nods knowingly. "I think his…two near-death situations and his actual death got him good. He'll be different when he wakes up from the coma. I won't be surprised if they kick him out of the district."

Prim smiles at my bad joke. "Uh-huh. Maybe we'll come here and he and Gale and you can all be the best of buds, hunting every day and twice on Sundays."

I narrow my eyes at her. "Don't you have school?" I ask.

She giggles and puts her bowl up, and then marches out the door.

She's grown up too much. I can tell, just from the way she speaks to me. She's wiser and she's seen more…like her sister in the Games and the sight of her name reaped. Like several miners dead. Like her own father dead. Like her mother in an endless void of emptiness. I hate it, but there's no taking anything back, and I wouldn't take back volunteering for my little sister for anything. For my life, for Cato's life, for my mother's…for Gale's.

I go back to my room, lying on my bed. The restlessness I've felt for the many Parcel Days and a banquet and so many meetings with Capitol people… Finally I can go to sleep.

When I wake up, I see it's time to go or I won't be able to make it to mine and Gale's meeting. I slip on my father's mining jacket that I brought over here from my real home in the Seam for today and look around for my hunting boots. When I find them covered in Buttercup's feces, I swear at the cat, but then resort to killing the little thing later on. I slip the boots on—they're clean on the inside—and then am about to run out the door when I hear my mother's voice.

"Katniss?"

"I'm going to see Gale," I tell her, turning around. Our relationship is slowly healing. I've begun to let her help me and do things for me. But my words are still holding that very strong air of "Your opinion is not needed here."

"Okay. So…you won't be back until five, maybe?" she asks.

I nod, and then open the door, slip out, and shut it quietly behind me.

The Victors' Village has two residents: my family, and Haymitch. My neighbor, Haymitch Abernathy. What fun that is when he's on a drunken rampage, like last Wednesday. Scared the hell out of Prim and Buttercup.

I head towards the Seam, pretending like I've just bartered with Haymitch with some squirrels for coins, and now I'm heading back to the Seam, and then into the woods. The trip to the Meadow is much longer, but I make it, slipping under the fence in the same little spot I always do, and then jogging into the forest's protection.

In the woods, instead of heading in the direction of our normal spot, I follow a trail of poorly-made arrowheads, the work of a bored Gale Hawthorne from the days when we got done hunting early and just wanted to hang out. I smile and jog along his path, swinging by the logs that hold my bow and my sheath of arrows as I go along. We've never gone this specific way, because there was no good hunting or many good plants.

Eventually I reach a clearing, and it's…beautiful. Wildflowers cover the area, engulfing the field in color and brightness. I search all around for Gale, and, finding no Seam boy, sit down in the flowers, letting the sun fall down on me.

"Surprised?" I hear a familiar voice say.

I turn around. He has the same hair, eyes, and skin tone as me. He has those smoky gray eyes that could set an ocean on fire. That black hair that is never quite perfect on Sundays, because he doesn't have to comb it for me, or for anyone, really. He does it to please Hazelle, his mother. Gale.

"Gale," I breathe, standing up. He walks to me and pulls me into an embrace. "God, I missed you."

He pulls away from me, a grin on his face. "Did you, now? Let's not talk about the arena though. Nothing…about the arena. It's just like old times."

"It is, though." I pause. "Skippin' school?"

His smile turns into an emotionless look. "Graduated while you were gone."

There's a long silence.

"What?" I ask. I know something's wrong. Gale and I can read each other like no other person can read another. We're inseparable in that way, even if we're not in love and literally inseparable. Our friendship is invincible in all ways. I don't think anything could make it break down and fall—or at least nothing could make it permanently broken and torn, hashed and cut apart, like the bodies from the arena…

"Huh?"

"Something's wrong."

He's very blunt about it. "I don't like that you and Cato became…friends."

"He's not exactly someone I want to see again, Gale. Besides, he's okay, once he dies once and almost dies twice."

Gale rolls his eyes at my words and takes an arrow from my sheath. He grabs his bow from over his shoulder and shoots a bird. It lands near us. I take out the arrow and toss him the dead animal. He puts it in his bag and picks up his own arrows. I smile and load a fresh arrow to my bowstring, looking for prey. I hear a false step behind me—definitely not Gale's footsteps that are silent when the leaves are at their crunchiest, spread all over the ground—and flip around. Gale does the same.

We move with each other. He does our hand signal for 'deer, on one,' meaning there's a deer, shoot on one. That signal usually comes near a keen-eyed deer or an antsy one. The minute I see his finger go up in my peripheral vision, I let my arrow fly, as it was already aimed for the deer's eye. His arrow is seconds off so as to avoid hitting mine. His hits the heart and my arrow hit the eye, as planned.

We've rarely ever gotten a deer before. This one kicks around a little, and then it crashes, dead.

"Thank me," Gale says softly. If we're hunting, we can't talk loud if we have anything to say at all.

I shake my head. "No. Me."

We silently walk over to the dead deer. Gale skins it and guts it as I hunt for rabbits or squirrels. It's just like we'd known before: bad hunting ground. Except, now it's also the place where we got one of the one or two deer we've managed in our lifetimes hunting together. As I finally give up, Gale calls for me. I hurry over to him and he pats the seat next to his on the flower-covered earth.

"This ought to be enough meat. We should take a break. It's been a while," Gale says as he continues to gut the animal. Then he starts to cut it apart by its limbs.

"What're you doing?" I say pointedly. "Don't do that!"

Gale lifts his eyes, raising his eyebrows. "I almost got caught, you know. I was taking a rabbit outside of the bag and some new, big-shot Peacekeeper almost saw me. I hid behind old Cray's house and he caught me pantin' in the window. I rose up the rabbit and he bought the whole thing for a bottle of liquor that I gave to Ripper. Gave me shoestring.

"Anyway, we can't just lug a deer 'round the district. We've got to cut it up, put it in the bag. Come bag for what's left of what couldn't fit another time." Gale shakes his head.

"I knew I should've brought my bag," I say. "I was in a rush."

"Like you always are," Gale says.

"What's that supposed to mean?" I snap.

"Nothing."

"Really, Gale."

"Nothing."

I sigh and then we decide to head back. On the way home, it's silent at first, but then we start joking and talking. We bump into each other purposely and shoot at our target practice tree. Gale yanks out the arrows in the tree when we're done and divides them between us. I get four. He gets three. Then we start off again, laughing not a second after we've started moving again. Like it's the day after the reaping, just after school, as we're hunting for our supper.

"You're keeping it all, right?" I say to him. "I don't need any."

Suddenly Gale's smiling face—a rare sight to see, one that can only be seen around me and sometimes his family, just like it is with me, as I only smile with him and sometimes my family—turns to a scowl. "I don't need handouts, Catnip," he says hardly. His voice is crackly and icy.

"I know." I furrow my brow. "I have more money than what I know what to do with. You can have the deer and the stupid bird."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm just not used to this—leaving without splittin' it all, you know."

"I know."

"You remember how I had something to say in the Justice Building, but we ran out of time?" Gale asks. We deposit our weapons.

"Vaguely. It seems decades ago, Gale." I shrug absently, thinking about the Peacekeepers yanking Gale out of the building as he struggled to get back to me to take me into the woods and keep me safe forever.

"I wanted to tell you—"

We reach the fence, and outside it is my mother, her face pale.

"Mom?" I ask. Seeing no one's around, I slip out of the fence, and Gale follows from close behind. Terror lies in my mother's eyes, making me very concerned. What could have gone wrong? Is Cato dead? Am I in trouble? Did Haymitch do something stupid? Did something happen to Cinna, maybe?

"The mines," she breathes.

I stare at her, confused. "No one's in there… Mom, Dad's not in there… How could…why are you— Oh, my God. Prim."

The last word comes out as a croak. It's her day to take a fieldtrip into the mines.

How could they be so stupid as to take a bunch of kids into a damn mine against their will?

And then I faint.

…

When I wake up, I'm at the mines. Many kids are being stirred from the mine's depths and sent to their worrying families, but no blond-haired, pigtailed, blue-eyed little girl comes running into my arms. No one that comes out is burnt yet and it looks still close to noon, so I know I haven't been out long. Which is good. My Primrose is being fished onto the next elevator and will run straight into my arms, sobbing.

"You awake?" I hear Gale say. His voice is cracking, too.

Rory.

"Uh-huh." My voice is small and uneven, rising and lowering, becoming very quiet at the end, all in one simple word.

My little sister, Gale's little brother… We've already lost our fathers in the damn mines, and they can't taking away our little siblings who we've cared for all these long years. They can't take Prim away. I've already volunteered for the Hunger Games for her, but I can't just call out two words and save her from this. My heart aches to see her, so badly I just want to go down myself and find her.

"They're gonna come up," Gale tells me, sitting down in the grass next to me. He slides his arm around my shoulder. "Not gonna be like our dads."

"You hope."

"I know."

I sigh.

But suddenly, standing next to each other, a small Seam boy—an exact replicate of Gale—and a pigtailed, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl come stepping out of the mines, a little burnt but not too badly.

And two Seam people go running after them, hugging them and holding the sobbing girl and patting the back of the scared-looking boy.

But it's not Rory.

And it's not Prim.

A/N: Oh, how I'm evil. Killing off Prim in the first chapter. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!