Hi everyone! This story started off as a submission for Prompts in Panem's Round Two Day Seven AU challenge. I wanted to look at how Katniss and Peeta would be in the different districts. Part II (District Two) was the submission to the challenge and I'm just tweaking some of the grammar mistakes before I post it here. This will ultimately contain eleven or so parts, one for each district. I hope you all enjoy!

Warnings for this story: I have rated it T, however, it should be read as a mature T. There is nothing explicit, but there is mention of unwanted sexual attention and in later parts there will be implied situations for sex, major character death, and violence. It toes the line, so please realize this prior to reading if that would make you uncomfortable.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Shine On My Name

Part I

"You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter."

James 5:5, New International Version (1984)

District One

Her name is stupid.

It was one of her father's ideas to name his daughters after flowers. But none of the other little girls are named for flowers, so on the first day of school, once her mother drops her off, she decides to change her name. It's ugly anyway. She looks around at the other names on the desks and when she gets to her own she crosses out Katniss and writes Gemma, her neighbor's name.

A name much more suitable to be sitting beside a girl named Lux and a boy called Fame.

The teacher reads role call and Katniss is surprised to hear about a boy named Peeta. The rest of the class chuckles at the name, but Peeta shrugs and tells the class he was named after his father's favorite bread. And, as a joke, he mentions that his brother is Rye.

So, when the teacher reads her name from the desks, Katniss doesn't feel so terrible when she explains that her name is a flower her father bought for her mother. A few of the girls even sigh. She's named after a gift. How beautiful. Katniss the gift.

She makes it her mission to thank Peeta Mellark at recess but she can't seem to muster the courage to go up to him. In the end, it's him that goes up to her.

"I think your name is really pretty," Peeta says.

It's the first time anyone beside her dad has said that.

The dress is stupid.

Her mother insists that it's adorable, but Katniss doesn't like plaid. Lux, the unofficial it girl, has proclaimed that plaid is terrible and anyone wearing it will be ridiculed. Katniss has tried to explain this to her mother, but the argument falls on deaf ears. She is wearing a red plaid dress to school.

"Own it," her mother says when she drops her off.

Katniss blinks before walking into school. Peeta is standing by the water fountain with a group of boys and he smiles at her. When she walks over to him, he tugs on one of her braids – despite the other boys telling him that he'll get cooties for touching her – and compliments her on her dress.

She skips passed Lux. She owns it. She doesn't understand the effect she has.

The next day every little girl in kindergarten is wearing plaid.

Each year, they compete in a pageant. Katniss has only been looking forward to this for her whole life and now that she's in kindergarten she can finally compete. Although it doesn't really count, if she wins she still gets a sash and a tiny plastic crown. When she's seventeen, and if she wins, she'll get a real crown. One made of gold and crusted in diamonds.

She practices her strut for weeks, trying to perfect it. At recess, she pulls Peeta away to watch her because he's the only one to give her an honest opinion. The other girls will lie to preserve their own chances of winning. But Peeta is honest and he points out flaws in her steps in such a kind way that Katniss doesn't even get offended like she does when Mother points it out.

"I think you'll win," Peeta declares on their third day of practice.

The pageants for the younger grades are only held in their classrooms, but Katniss doesn't mind. She focuses on Peeta as she sways her hips and sticks her head high. Her teacher praises her and, when she wins, she gets a gold sticker next to her name on the pageant board at the main office.

Later that day, the entire district convenes to watch the real one. Because they're mad at her for winning, Katniss's friends don't sit beside her, but she is fine sitting with Peeta. They watch the pageant, whispering about the girls that walk the stage outside the Justice Building. Peeta likes the girl in the orange dress. Katniss doesn't. She favors the girl in green.

The girl that wins, a beautiful blonde named Cashmere, gets the crown placed on her head. Everyone begins to whisper about how she is the most beautiful girl in the district. The mayor escorts her off stage and into a car. On her way out of the square, Katniss notices the car driving out toward district boundaries.

She wonders about what exactly happens when you win.

Cashmere disappears entirely from school. A month later, school is canceled for the girls for a day. When she sees him next, Peeta tells her that school was very odd. They took his blood and made him smile in many different ways for photographs. After, the teachers all put the information in special folders, and they had to watch the seventeen-year-old boys give speeches. The teachers had to vote on which was best. Then, a boy was taken in a car in the same direction as Cashmere. He, like Cashmere, disappeared.

About a year later, the two reappear for the reaping. They both volunteer.

In the first grade, they learn about what an immense honor it is to volunteer for the Hunger Games. Every child should strive to be pretty enough and strong enough to go. The victor is bathed in riches, but Katniss doesn't know if she wants to leave home. She loves her parents and her sister too much to leave for a year to train.

"Do you want to volunteer?" Katniss asks Peeta on the playground one day.

He shrugs. "I dunno," he says. He sips on a juice box and kicks sand with his new shoes that are still stiff. "I think I got enough."

Yesterday, her mother was complaining that she didn't have enough jewels to stick to Primrose's headband. If she won, Prim's headband would be the prettiest in the class. She decides it's a good thing that Peeta doesn't want to volunteer because she does and she couldn't bear it if he was her district partner.

There can be only one victor after all.

That year, Finnick Odair wins. Her district hates him. No one has ever outshone their tributes in beauty before, and yet. He's the youngest victor in the history of the Hunger Games. And he's from Four! It would have been easier to swallow if he had at least been from Two. But Four is so far away. It's nearly an outlying.

They change the rules. They move the pageant. The girls that strut across the stage can be any age within the reaping limits. They choose a fourteen year old to train up for eventual volunteering, as well as the volunteer for the Sixty-sixth Games.

There are really no such things as friends in District One. There are cliques and there are popularity wars. By the time they are in the sixth grade, she and Peeta are the top of the top. Lux hangs off her hip as her second-in-command, but Katniss knows that she's only doing it in hopes of one day overtaking her role. Katniss likes how everyone envies her. That way, she doesn't have to decide who's really her friend and who's just her friend for the glory. This way, she knows none of them are her friends.

It's different for Peeta.

Everyone loves him. The teachers fawn over his sophistication. The other boys in class always invite him to play with them. When they turn twelve, it's like he's magically turned on some switch and all the girls insist on sitting beside him at the lunch table. They bat their eyelashes. They scheme and try to wiggle their way in between the golden duo.

Although her eyes are gray, Katniss becomes a green-eyed monster.

She has never been a fan of human affection. Her mother is cold and distant. Her father works long days away from home and is often too tired to play with his daughters because he has to go out like all the other men in the district do after work. They go to the bars and drink and pretend they aren't as bad off as those in the outlying districts. Because they aren't. They just aren't.

(But they are.)

When Lux lets her fingers slide a little too far up Peeta's arm during lunch, Katniss's silver eyes turn emerald again. She stands from her seat and walks around to him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and kisses the top of his head, her lips finding his scalp hidden under his valley of golden curls. Peeta turns as red as a ruby and his eyes widen in surprise.

Lux glares at her, but backs off nonetheless.

She doesn't know what she's done, but Peeta avoids her the rest of the day. He even makes the excuse that he has to stay behind to get help on his schoolwork so he can't walk her and Prim home. She almost calls him out, but doesn't know what to say when she notices his sapphire eyes look like a puddle. He's upset.

"Peeta!" Prim says, wrapping her arms around his waist in greeting, her ivory skin blending with his. "Can we go now?"

Peeta shakes his head and disentangles himself, telling her he can't walk them home. Prim's lip starts to quiver. At eight, she's nearly as attached to Peeta as Katniss herself and Prim doesn't appreciate rejection. She's a gentle soul, so uncommon and rare in One, and Katniss can see already that her little heart is breaking.

So can Peeta, and Katniss knows this is why he relents.

Prim skips between them, bouncing without a care in the world. She holds onto their hands, the polish on her fingernails shimmering like diamonds in the crisp sunlight. When they arrive at their home, Prim rushes inside, claiming she has to tell Mother about the kitten she's been taking care of under the playground for the last few days. She says someone must have gotten rid of it because it's ugly.

(Only Prim, Katniss thinks, would appreciate an ugly cat.)

Peeta rubs the back of his neck once she disappears inside and looks at Katniss with his cheeks tinged like garnets. "What was lunch today?" he asks. He has a hopeful undertone that Katniss doesn't quite understand. "Why did you kiss me?"

"You're my best friend and Lux was trying to take you away," she says.

Peeta's eyes look down at his feet. He sighs and it feels like her heart is being scratched, like a diamond being checked if it's real. "That's what I though," he murmurs.

"Do you want to play?" Katniss asks, not liking his sullen appearance. He's usually bright and cheery. She doesn't like seeing him sad.

"I don't think I should," he says. "I have to go home."

When he leaves he doesn't look up, but she squints hard enough, she can see a tiny wet mark on the ground where he stood.

She doesn't understand why he isn't talking to her. She didn't do anything wrong. He is hers. But, apparently that isn't the case. He eats lunch with the boys and doesn't wait for Katniss after school.

She's glad Prim is too preoccupied to notice. Her sister giggles fiercely while holding her coat oddly, her hands cupping her stomach, which is slightly extended. Katniss raises an eyebrow and Prim giggles more. When her sister's stomach growls, it sounds like a cat's meow.

It is the first time that she hasn't won the pageant and it is her fall from grace.

When she walks passed the boys, they all throw their heads back and make a sound with the back of their throats. Choke. She choked. She won all of the fake pageants and then the first year she's eligible to actually win it she blows it. All because she froze when she saw Peeta watching her. She misses him.

Lux won their age group. She was taken. Katniss doesn't mind. She never liked her anyway.

She doesn't like to cry, but when some of the older boys begin to pick on her she finds herself losing confidence. She always had such an effect on everyone, even the boys like Marvel who were a year ahead of her. But, with Marvel off to train, his group of cronies pull at her braids and one even tries to claim her as a plaything. She doesn't like it.

She screams during upper school recess when a boy from her class, Fame, tells her that she's worth as much as dirt.

She's just turned thirteen. Her body is changing in ways she doesn't quite understand. Peeta is gone. He spends his days on the other side of the yard from her. She misses him, his gentleness, his unwavering kindness so rare amongst the boys in her district. Fame kisses her on the lips, sticks his hands in her shirt, but then someone comes up behind him and chucks him across the yard.

They get sent to the principal's office together. Peeta's knuckles are the color of rubies, the liquid from Fame's broken nose dripping to the floor. Katniss's braid is falling out from her attempts to make them stop.

The principal sighs and shakes his head at them. "What am I going to do with you two?" he asks.

Neither of them answers.

Her parents have never been completely attentive. It's worse now. Her father doesn't come home for days in a row and her mother wanders around the district gossiping. Neither of them really knows what's going on with their daughters. If they did, they would have noticed Buttercup, the world's ugliest cat, has now taken up permanent residency in Primrose's room.

And that Katniss, by the time she's fourteen, does not sleep by herself.

No one in District One marries for love. There is no such thing. People are paired based on ranking systems arranged through the pageants. Top place go to the Games, and then after that everyone marries their equal. It makes things simpler. Love is a weakness, something still indulged in by those in the outlying districts, and they are better than that.

Peeta's parents are just as inattentive as hers, so it's easy for him to sneak out in the night and climb up her window. Katniss likes the thrill of it. Something just sort of snapped in them after the incident with Fame. Peeta kissed her that day and it had been awkward and wet, but nice. So very nice. A fire in the pit of her stomach grew and grew and she knew she wanted another. She's from One. She's greedy. She took another. And another. And another.

People in the schoolyard whisper about them, but they're always careful. They know not to hold hands in front of people or kiss in public. In some ways, she's glad that Peeta was angry with her that day when they were twelve. If he hadn't of been, she probably would have won and then she'd be gone. And she wouldn't be feeling like this.

When she's sixteen, she asks, "When did you know?"

"That I loved you?" he asks. She nods her head. He pretends to think for a moment and she hits his arm with her fist. "The second day of school. When you wore the red plaid dress and you didn't care what anyone else thought. It only grew from there."

"Is that why you got mad at me when I kissed your head?"

He nods. "I was upset that you didn't love me back."

"I do now," she says. They stay quiet for a moment. "Peeta, what are we going to do?"

Primrose Everdeen's name is called at the reaping of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games. She doesn't go. A girl Katniss never really knew volunteers in her place. Glimmer. She's been training for years. For the boys, Marvel volunteers. He's so excited, he mistakenly does it before the reaped name is called, and the escort lets it slide.

After the reaping, Katniss watches Prim walk back toward home with the group of giggly girls that follow her. (She'll be fine, she tells herself. She's got Buttercup.) Then she takes Peeta's hand. They walk toward the fence, which is really only there for show, and she looks up at him. He looks down at her, confused.

"Peeta, if I asked you to run away from the district with me, would you?" she asks.

He steps toward her and takes her face in his hands, kissing her for the last time within district boundaries. It's her answer. They know they'll be caught if they even make it in the woods for more than a day. The capitol will find them, cut out their tongues or worse, but if they stay that's the end. When they're eighteen they'll be separated, forced into marriages based on rankings to produce the best possible offspring. She can't survive without him, so she'd rather die with him.

Peeta sneaks under first. The fence isn't on because no one from their district has ever even tried to escape. Katniss slides under and takes his hand. "Stay with me?" she asks. Until they catch us. Until we eat something we shouldn't. Until we die.

He nods. "Always."

And they go.

The title comes from the song God Help The Outcasts sung by Heidi Mollenhauer for the Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Thanks for reading! I hope you all enjoyed it. Part II should be up soon. Let me know what you think!