"Ah damnit!" Katniss threw her hands in frustration as she watched her computer crash right while she was polishing the last Keynote slide. She normally tried to keep her cool, but this was killing her ... she needed to get this pitch deck done before her meeting with Snow Ventures next week. Gale made a sympathetic huff, his eyes never leaving his own screen as he clacked away on his keyboard, dubstep coming out of his headphones. Thom was clearly in his own zone with his brows furrowed as he scanned his lines of code trying to find the elusive bug that kept their app crashing on Android. Katniss sighed, and headed to the kitchen to refill her 4th...no maybe 5th cup of her drug of choice, caffeine, for the day. She repeated her Dad's favourite mantra from Nietzsche "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" hoping it would give her some reprieve. Instead she was hit with an overwhelming pain of loss, and she had to take a deep breath to will herself not to cry at the thought of her father's soothing voice...man, she always knew that regardless of how tough entrepreneurship could be sometimes, her Dad had trekked along a much tougher path...

Katniss' father had been a provider, he had immigrated to the US as a PhD student from Salzburg and had never stopped busting his butt since he set foot on US soil. Within weeks of landing he had met Katniss' mother, Lily, at an ESL class. She was filling in for her friend that night as a volunteer English conversation partner, and as both described it, as soon as gray eyes met blue, they were both goners. They fell hard and FAST, and within 1 year of that first glance, the Everdeens were living in a tiny basement apartment in the Bronx, with Katniss popping up shortly thereafter. Her father was never willing to take it easy, he did everything and anything from delivering pizza to plumbing to shovelling driveways to scrape up enough cash to keep Katniss well-fed and happy. When he finally landed a teaching position at Colorado State, her mother and father were so happy they held each other with the widest smiles. They jumped up and down until they both hit their heads on the damp, low ceiling of their basement home, and laughed until they cried. 7 year old Katniss had squeaked in excitement when she led baby sister Prim into their room in their new home in Colorado and saw that they had their very own window! Years of living in a basement apartment had left Katniss and Prim in perpetual dim lighting...the first things the little girls did was push their beds next to the window so they could stare at the stars at night. Life had just started to feel blissfully like the American dream, until a mere 3 years later, her father left early for a hike and never came home...and the dream vanished into tear-filled thin air...

"Earth to freakin' Katniss" Gale chucked a ball of paper at her hitting her smack in the forehead. She snapped out of it and scowled, "Well at least your aim's getting better in one part of your body, don't forget to clean the bathroom." Gale turned a deep red. They had moved into a place with cheap rent to keep their costs low but they didn't anticipate a tiny house also came with a tiny toilet ...Gale had been having a hard time "aiming" and it had been the running joke of the startup. She felt a twinge of guilt both for chirping Gale and for also zoning out on work to think about her father. After all, Gale had been through just as much. Gale's father had been her father's regular hiking buddy and the two regularly drove off to explore the nearby mountains. She could still vividly remember that night when a pregnant Hazelle Hawthorne had arrived with Gale and Rory, her eyes hopeful that they had received some sort of contact from the men ...Lily Everdeen's face remained emotionless as she faintly shook her head. Both families spent the entire night worrying, Katniss remembered making her first pot of coffee that night, watching Hazelle and Lily share restrained looks of fear. Prim and Rory had eventually dozed off but Gale and Katniss sat awake the entire night sharing a pained silence as they choked back tears, waiting for their fathers to return home. She was grateful he hadn't tried to comfort her with false hope. She knew something was wrong - her father always made it home before sundown when he left for his hikes. Always.

Both men were listed as missing after 48 nail-biting hours, and Katniss remembered riding shotgun in the car with her frantic mother, stopping at every ranger station asking for any clues on her father's whereabouts. It was 2 weeks until a local ranger found their bodies, or what was left of them...they had been crushed by a sudden rockfall, apparently there had been a thunderstorm the night before and the heavy downpour had loosened the earth in the area. Their fathers had just ventured one step too far along the trail - wrong place at the wrong time. Their deaths devastated both families, pushing Gale and Katniss into supporting each other. They started off with more silent moments, eventually turning into shared hikes and an easy friendship that weathered over 12 years of painful recovery. Last year they had scraped together the last of their fathers' life insurance payouts and set out to do something huge with it. Katniss and Gale had been freelancing for a few years to make some extra money to support their families but it had come up too short to keep Prim with her.

Katniss' mother had remarried last year to one of her former flames, taking underage Prim with her to the Upper East Side. She had offered to take Katniss, but Katniss was trying to finish off her degree at CSU and she knew she could never leave her father's beloved mountains behind. Part of Katniss resented her mother for remarrying, but another knew this was her twisted way of "providing" a security net for her and Prim. Katniss only hoped that if she could make more than a meagre salary, she could pay for Prim to come live with her.

Gale's mother had responded differently, pouring her heart into starting a cleaning business, the Hawthorne Home Cleaners. Something about how Hazelle Hawthorne had forged her own way of controlling her destiny set something off in Katniss last year and she had talked Gale into launching a tech startup with her. They already knew how to code and design as well as anyone, and she sure as heck knew they had the drive to pull it off. Fast forward a few months and they were now living in a tiny house with their buddy Thom, who they had wrangled into this operation.

Their social platform and app, District 12, had launched with quite a bit of buzz a few months ago. It was geared at outdoor enthusiasts providing wilderness survival tips, push notifications for hazards or inclement weather, and recommended routes of travel for various seasons of the year. Her favourite feature however was a safety log that let users log their planned route and estimate time of return and share it with their loved ones. The initial buzz for District 12 had waned a little since the launch, and Katniss hated looking at their dwindling savings - this wasn't just a dream, this was her and Gale's entire hope to save other children from their painful fate- so the trio kept themselves powered on coffee and Red Bull dreaming of landing a TechCrunch story, reaching 1 million users and raising their first round of capital.

She pushed the hair from her eyes, and restarted her computer - she had to make this work, for her, for Gale, for him.

...

"Ah fuck, I'm running late! Gale hurry the fuck up!" Katniss pounded on the bathroom door, braiding her hair to hide the fact she had slept in too late to shower, while trying to tuck in the tail of her shirt into her dress pants.

"Calm down Catnip, I'm almost done...what are you in such a rush for an-oh shit!" Gale opened the door, whatever sleep had been in his eyes now jolted awake with realization, "today's the pitch with Snow Ventures isn't it?" Katniss didn't waste a breath to answer as she shoved her toothbrush in her mouth and nodded wildly. "Okay, don't worry Catnip, you've done this pitch a million times, just go out there and come home with $1 million dollars, no big deal! Thom finally fixed that bug last night, so you can show them the updated demo, I'll get coffee started."

Katniss mumbled a thanks and splashed water on her face. Within 5 minutes she was out the door, scrambling to get downtown for her meeting with Seneca Crane, the Associate at the VC firm. She hopped off the bus quickly, only then realizing she had left her phone on the seat. As she turned around to chase the bus down she ran smack into a pole...no wait, too soft to be a pole...she opened her eyes ready to curse the living daylights out of her obstacle but instead her mouth gaped open as she stared into the most breath-taking blue ones. And then she started to feel hot, burning sensation on her breasts...