So, I have decided to take part in the Caesar's Palace Color Challenge! 15 one-shots, 15 prompts; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, Brown, Black, White, Gray, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Rainbow. Do it all and you become Victor of the Color Challenge. It's really interesting, check it out!

I've planned out all the prompts and I'm starting with Bronze: Never Forget. Hope you like it!

Kara x

Never Forget

Even though the Games have long since become an unwanted memory, never mentioned in private, let alone in public; nobody can ever forget them. That's the nature of the Games; to strike fear so deep into your heart that it will never leave you.

However, if your curiosity were to consume you to a point that you would actually risk asking someone about the Games, they might tell you about the 74th Hunger Games; the Games that many believed provided the spark for the inferno.

Everyone remembers the star-crossed lovers, blazing with false fire; Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. The tale has been embellished and gradually changed over the years, but the basics always remain the same. If you were to come across a particularly sharp-minded elder one, they may tell you about Cato and Clove, the 'Careers' from what was once District Two, and their equally tragic love story.

But there's a third lover's tale concealed in the intertwining threads of the long gone tributes' stories in the 74th Hunger Games, one you won't find in any history book. Only two people ever knew it existed; the lovers themselves. So if you truly wish to know about the real star-crossed lovers of those tragic Games, grasp my hand and I will take you back, young one…

Normally District Eight was a lively place, full of laughter and family and community and maybe even a semblance of forbidden hope. That's not to say it was a particularly happy place; work and poverty wracked the citizens. But there was still life, and survival was the greatest gift most of the Eights would ever get, so they would always try and be thankful for it.

But Reaping Day was even more so. It was a day to pray for another year, just another year for your children to live. Every Eight who went to the Hunger Games died; it had become routine to watch their children be slaughtered. Every year two families crumbled to dust in the wake of a loved one's passing. Every year the rest of the families sent a silent thankful prayer to whatever forsaken authority might control fate outside Panem's walls-if there was anything outside Panem's walls- for allowing life to continue for another year. Just another year.

This year would be no exception.

"Sofia Cartel!"

A short girl with chestnut hair, a spattering of freckles across her rounded nose and terrified hazel eyes stares across the crowd in disbelief, before she breaks down into rivulets of tears, praying for just the slightest chance that someone might be moved into volunteering, please, please…

The moment ends.

"Alexx Wright!"

The ebony-haired and blue-eyed boy looks strong, albeit drained of colour. He glances at Sofia and flashes her the slightest of reassuring smiles. She weakly reciprocates. His arm slips behind her shoulders in a comforting gesture as they leave the stage.

It stays that way as they say goodbye to their families, making promises everyone know will never be fulfilled in a billion years, but it feels better than just admitting their mortality to themselves. His arm stays locked around her shoulders as they're escorted into the train, and as she starts quietly sobbing into his shirt, he never moves away.

She raises her head and looks up at him gratefully, eyes glazed over with a layer of grief-stricken tears, and they both think they imagined the bolt of jolting chemistry that fizzed between the two seventeen-year-old likened spirits.

Needless to say, they hadn't.

Sofia tries her damndest to follow her mentor's advice; never get too close to anyone in these Games. You'll only end up hurt or dead. Probably both. She goes out of her way to avoid Alexx, constantly screaming to herself I don't like him, he means nothing to me…

She discovers that however much she yells inwardly at her godforsaken heart, it doesn't turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Alexx throws a few axes, tries out for the Careers and is rejected, of course. He trains brutally hard; doing anything he can to keep his mind off that girl who's wrecking his plans. He was going to win this year, goddammit; why did that girl have to come and make him deviate from his carefully laid plan?

They try, they really do, but eventually both of them reach breaking point. It comes as no shock to Sofia when Alexx comes barrelling towards her in a corner of the Training Centre, pushes her roughly against the wall, and captures her lips with his own needingly like it's as essential as oxygen to him. It comes as no shock to herself when she sinks into it, pressing the kiss deeper, because she needs Alexx, somehow he's managed to become her lifeline.

They kiss passionately in front of everyone, and despite that it's changed them both irreparably, intertwining their lives irrevocably until the day they breathe their last, nobody notices. Simply put, they're the Eights; they're guaranteed for the Bloodbath. Bloodbaths are never remembered. Why should they be?

The interviews pass as normal; Sofia knows she could have done a lap-dancing show onstage and nobody would have noticed. The Careers, the redhead from Five, and the star-crossed lovers are stealing all her sponsors. She can't bring herself to hate them, even though they have practically driven a knife into her heart already.

It's the night before they're both going to die. Sofia freezes in terror as she sees a shadow creep into her room. She'd be powerless to stop it from ending her, but does it really matter when mortality has become impossible to deny?

A moonbeam ricochets through her bedroom and she realises who it's going to be before the moonlight robs him of his shadow's guise. Instantly her muscles relax, but then tense up again as she realises his only possible purpose for sneaking in here at the dead of night…even more prominent as he sits nervously on the edge of her bed and grasps her hand tightly. Irrational fear pulses through her veins like electricity.

"I'm scared," she mumbles, and then quickly contemplates how idiotic that sounds in this context. Nevertheless, he's careful to be sweet, gentle, as they kiss under the fading moonlight. Before long, she feels the hunger eating away at her, the fire in her heart, and she pulls him eagerly under her bedsheets.

They spend the night together, slowly, tenderly learning every possible thing about the other person, because this is their last night on Earth and both are desperate for it to be absolutely perfect, and of course it's not and it's awkward and at times painful but they're in love, and a single reassuring smile can fix anything. Soon they're both completely twined in the other and it's impossible to recognise when one ends and the other begins any more. There are no Sofia and Alexx any more; not as separate entities but as one soul, one heart, one mind.

For once, they're grateful that nobody even spares them a cynical glance as they both slip out of Sofia's bedroom the next morning, fingers firmly locked together, and nobody will ever make them let go, right? Right?

Wrong.

She suppresses a scream of rage and agony as they rip them apart, send them to two different halves of the Cornucopia. Sofia stands on her metal plate, but she's not trembling as she expected. There's a calm washing over her.

Lull before the storm, her mother used to say.

The gong rings out and bloodstained chaos breaks out. Sofia doesn't think. She just runs, lunges for a fluorescent yellow backpack and sprints for the familiar ebony-haired boy. So close…so close…yet not close enough.

Crimson spots stain her vision as the boy from Four takes her down. With a guttural cry Alexx pounces on him, fells him with a single knife stroke in pure determination to save the girl he loves. No cannon; that will come later. Sofia wonders if she should be terrified of him now, if she could be, when it's so fundamentally impossible when he's Alexx and he just saved her life.

That moment of contemplation costs her dear. The Careers are on the lovers from Eight like bullets from a shotgun, furiously fighting for vengeance, their twisted justice for their fallen companion. Sofia manages to disentangle herself, but can't bring herself to leave when Alexx is pinned down by the boy from One.

"Soph…run…run!" Alexx's voice is getting weaker as Marvel raises his knife gleefully. Her soul aches to stay with him but her legs have more inhuman sense and they take her far away from the battlefield. She's safely in an alcove behind some trees before the emotions come flooding back…

Please let him have escaped…he has to have escaped, right? He's Alexx. Alexx is too good to die, right? Who is she trying to convince? Herself? She hears cheering and her heart stills.

The Careers cheer when they've killed an enemy. Alexx was their enemy.

"…Alexx?…"

Alexx would've answered…but all remains silent as death. The agony rushes into her, splitting her heart in two.

"ALEXX!"

Sofia still has the tiniest fragment of irrational hope in the bottom of her shattered heart. He could've still got away…wounded, maybe, but not dead…not dead…never dead…not possible...

That fragment crumbles to dust as Alexx's smiling face lights up the sky and her heart. She smiles faintly back at the echo of her beloved before it slams into her, knocking the air out of her lungs.

I've lost him…the one person in the world I was certain I loved. She expects agony, sadness, grief. She doesn't expect emptiness, but that's what she gets. In some ways it's worse, but in a lot it's much better.

Denial is sweet pain relief, like an overdose on morphling.

What are the reasons to live now, Sofia? What are the reasons to carry on? Count them. Go on, count them.

She doesn't bother. There are none left. Her parents can manage fine without her. She doesn't have any siblings, only one best friend who has hundreds of other friends to comfort him. Alexx would understand how I feel…but he's gone. They killed him. They killed him, Sofia.

She nods in robotic agreement to the hardened voice inside her soul, no longer in control and not wanting to be.

So what are you going to do about it?

Alexx's hands guide her shaking ones as she lifts the flint and strikes, once, twice, three times. The kindling lights up and flames hit the lightless sky, a beacon for Alexx to come and get her. Take me with you; I don't belong here any more. Take me past these fences of mortality to what lies behind.

She smiles, and closes her eyes, waiting peacefully for death. And it comes. Slowly, more painfully than she had imagined, but it comes so the pain has no impact. The agony is already rooted deep within her soul. Her blood stains the ground, and she's still weakly breathing when vicious Cato stops playing with his toy. Softer Peeta, the Boy On Fire, encases her in his inferno when he extinguishes the light from her eyes in one quick knife motion.

I'm coming, Alexx…

And that was the story, little one, of Alexx and Sofia, the doomed lovers of District Eight, whose story is known by few and talked about by fewer.

For, you see, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark were the golden lovers. Katniss' pin shone gold within the flames of rebellion, and it cost them dear, but they were still the winners. The dazzling golden winners.

Cato Holden and Clove Switch were never quite as overtly in love, they didn't blind the viewers with the glowing light of their love. But it was still obviously there, and people said that they were silver. Silver, a deadly colour, the colour of a knife's blade before it hits your heart. Second to the star-crossed lovers of Twelve, but still worthy of a story.

But Alexx Wright and Sofia Cartel were bronze. Dull and uninspiring to a glancing eye, but if you look close enough you'll see the sparkle and glimmer akin to gold that nobody but us recognised. The spark of a love eternal, of a tale inspiring. Bronze, the colour of the underdogs, of the forgotten, yet remembered.

Now go, little one; dreams are beckoning, and you will never have the worries nor pain of these bronze souls. And for that, we will all be ever grateful for the tributes of the 74th Hunger Games, never forgetting, always engraved in our history, every individual tale.

You just have to know where to look.