Disclaimer: I don't own the Hunger Games.
Movement behind me – merely a greyish discolouration in the subtle green and brown shadows of the mighty forest.
Sunset is coming – evident in the increasingly-significant butter-gold streaks that in-filtrate and encroach on the deepening blue of the late afternoon sky.
He places a hand on my shoulder.
"Katniss."
Gale's telling me that it's time. That it's time to go and attend the reaping of the 74th Hunger Games, the artificial killing field where youths are placed to battle to their own bloody, mutilated deaths.
Forty-two and twenty slips. Will luck and sheer chance be enough to distract the gloved hands of pink glitter and ribbons? Will they be ample to keep my brother figure from the torture and suffering of the killing fields?
He sees it in my eyes too. Silver, ash, steel and mist all in one, shadow upon shadow, overlapping in beauty and harmony. Made all the more beautiful by the reflection of the pure gold and reddish-pink of the fire of this tragic sunset that shall see twenty three youths to their deaths.
"Backlit by the sun, you look beautiful," he whispers, fingers cupping my face, and in that one gesture he breaks my barriers and leaves me vulnerable to the passionate fire of repelled emotions.
My hand reaches up to stroke his chiselled, angelic face, backlit by fire.
"Before one of us dies?"
Or both of us, actually.
"Okay."
Just one kiss. Just one minute of love, one minute of keeping absolutely no secrets at all from each other. One minute to move as one, to wrap my arms around his neck and feel his own around my waist.
"But if one of us goes, the other has to stay," we whisper, words coming in perfect harmony. "To continue the life."
We don't mention that it will be unbearably difficult and as close to impossible as the complete eradication of Panem's evil.
The time of the reaping is abundant with terror and tears – terror in the screams of the stormy sky and our shaking bodies, tears in the cold water falling from the bruised dark clouds and in the salty droplets leaking from our eyes and forming diamonds in our lashes. Terror especially in the names that are called - the names of the two people who are little more than the grey shadows that dart as one in the rain-blurred greens of the trees.