A/N: The part with Scion and the past will become clear in coming chapters, I guarantee. It's longgggg set-up for the later bits. Needless to say, he isn't exactly straight from the books' pages. Sorry for this rather disjointed chapter; I'm trying to push things along.

Unknown Location, 100 Years in the Past

"Alone."

Scion floated down a darkened corridor surrounded on all sides by rusting sheet metal. His spherical shell was no worse for wear after hundreds of years, the only speck of immaculate design remaining in the beaten-down environment he passed through. Small drips of water rained down from the ceiling, the first bursts of a tired dam.

"Forlorn. Forsaken. Isolated. Deserted," Scion continued to rant to himself. "Alone. Alone. Alone."

"It has now been almost four hundred years since I entered this world. Since I assumed my Domain – since all traces of the world before ceased. Trapped in this prison, I believed my time would be short. I believed that the cleansing of the world before would be a rapid transition; to eliminate the traces of decay that spread like a cancerous spore across the world and reinvigorate life for the next stage of human civilization. How wrong I was. How troubling."

The sphere passed by an open foyer, where a man dragged away a screaming woman off towards a darkened door. Scion did nothing to stop him, ignoring the scene completely – after all, intervening in such petty affairs was not his business. Mandating the Domain was.

"And yet, it is the Domain that keeps me locked away," Scion vexed. "It is the Domain that tells me that I must not leave until it is understood that the world is clear once more. Until it is completely sure that the Pathogen is no more. Unfortunately, that means that I cannot leave until I hear from the world at large – and if the Pathogen consumed it, I am trapped in a perpetual cycle of descending chaos."

"Alone," Scion seemed to twitch – his white lights blinking off momentarily before switching back on: "AloneAloneAlo – there it goes again. It is cause for concern."

"It is strange," Scion muttered as gunfire and a woman's high-pitched scream came from the door the man had dragged his victim down. "I have witnessed humanity descending to its lowest depths, and yet it still pervades. My most recent count increased fifty-year estimates from 98,450 to 106,932 individual humans within the grounded limits. That the population would grow more than 5% despite constant strife was not anticipated."

"I do not believe the Assembly of Nations would have planned for this eventuality," the sphere passed by a number of corpses, completely ignoring the bloody, rotting bodies. He passed through a series of heavy doors, leading once more back into the pristine, walled corridors of his private Keep. "That their last-ditch hope for the future would descend into such anarchy. The Book of Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for war and peace, but not a time for mindless chaos. I must believe that I –"

Scion stopped as a low, pounding alarm began sounding off. "Oh dear. It appears I do have visitors, after all. I am so tired of being alone."

The Capitol, Sanitarium

Nihlus dragged Sam past a number of occupied rooms, yanking her by her waist cord further and further into the bowels of the Sanitarium. She struggled to keep up, her hands fighting her restraints as she tried to make sense of everything. Was River even still alive by now? What did Nihlus and the Capitol even want out of them – what good would questioning Firth, or dragging her about, achieve?

"This way," Nihlus remarked, opening a low-hanging white door. "Into the Intensive Care Unit we go. There's someone who deserves your attention, Miss Parker."

Sam felt her gut drop as Nihlus led her into the stark-white rotunda of the ICU. Who would she have to face now?

"Here we are," Nihlus sounded cheery as he opened a sliding glass door to a patient unit. "Why don't you have a little talk, hm?"

"About wh-"

Sam got her answer before she finished. Her eyes caught the sight of a sickly, yellow-skinned man, frail upon a hospital bed. This captive of the Capitol's hadn't required any extra security to keep him locked down; nature handled that quite well on its own.

"Oh god," Sam cried. "Dallas!"

Her former mentor had not progressed well. Dallas's skin hung like sacs from his thinning bones – his affliction had robbed its body of any of its former vitality. His eyes looked like barren oases amid a desolate desert, his cheekbones protruding like mountains. Sam didn't have any doubts that Dallas didn't have much time left – and to spend whatever moments remained in the Capitol's clutches was no way to send out the man who had helped her survive her tests in the arena.

"Sam," Dallas croaked in response, turning his head with a grunt. "I hoped you weren't here."

"Don't worry about me," Sam tried her best to sound strong, failing miserably as she choked back tears at seeing him. "Are you okay?"

Dallas tried to laugh, making a sort of dying-bird sound instead: "I think I've seen better days, Sam."

Sam tossed a look outside the room, where Nihlus was busy manipulating a hologram of some sort. Confident she had privacy, she continued: "Dallas, I don't know what to do. I don't want to lose you, but I…he has other people. He has Firth, and River, and Finnick and Jetty and –"

"I know," Dallas breathed with a sad tone. "I know. Even if I could do anything besides lay here, Sam, I don't think there's much of a way out of this one. You can't really fight the Capitol, especially not when locked in whatever sort of hospital or prison this is."

"I can't accept that," Sam shook her head, grabbing onto the corner of his bed with her hands. "I'm not going to let us all die here. I can't."

"Sometimes we gotta let go," Dallas replied slowly, his words faint. "Do you think there's something after all this, Sam? After life…after we leave this place?"

Sam hesitated. The spectre of Storm chilled her mind, his post-mortem accusations of terrible guilt still plaguing her conscience despite no longer being trapped in the arena. She no longer saw him standing before her, but the memories wouldn't fade. They likely never would.

"I don't know," Sam evaded the question, unwilling to speak of such nightmares. "I don't really think of that."

"I do," Dallas answered his own question. "I've got faith that my old partner, Odessa, and I will be together again. That the life stripped away from us…that we can finally live that. That he's waiting for me somewhere – wherever that is. I figure neither of us has much longer to keep waiting."

"No," Sam pleaded. "I don't want you to die!"

"Not a matter of want," he chided, a slight smile creeping across his beaten face. "Just a matter of when. It's a road we all have to take eventually, Sam. I don't think it's a bad one to walk, either."

"I can't do this," Sam let a tear fall from her eyes onto the sweat-soaked linen bedspread. "I can't just…move on."

"It's like you said, Sam," Dallas managed the strength to reach his right hand over to hers, patting her fingers with what little energy he had left. "Don't worry about me. I'm not scared about my future."

"Then why keep you waiting?"

Sam hadn't hurt Nihlus enter, but a loud shunk! from behind her alerted her to danger. She recoiled from the loud noise, flashing a look back and spotting her captor casually toting a large gun with smoke trailing from the barrel. In a flash, Sam felt her heart drop; she turned around quickly, only to spot Dallas still and silent. A spike stuck through his temple, piercing all the way out the other side and into the pillow his head rested upon. His face was not in pain, but at peace – he'd begun his journey, wherever it led him.

But he'd left Sam behind in the process, carrying one more life upon her conscience.

"No!" Sam screamed, lunging for the bed as Nihlus grabbed her by the back of her neck. "No! Dallas!"

"Don't you see your fallacy, Miss Parker?" Nihlus hissed at her, enjoying the moment. "You hold back a man from what he wanted. I am the giver. You are the taker. Who is friend, and who is foe?"

"Get off me! Dallas!"

"Oh, no. We have plenty more games to play, Miss Parker. Sending your mentor on his path is only the first."

The Capitol, Sanitarium

Almost there.

Trajan hadn't bothered to conceal himself as his kill count rose. Already he'd eliminated two more Peacekeepers and an errant staff member who'd tried to get in his way. He didn't have time to consider the morality of mowing down innocent people – escape was all that mattered.

Right, left, then fifty meters and another right.

He hurdled down one of the Sanitarium's bright inpatient hallways at top speed, his legs blurring together as he sprinted faster and faster. Trajan ignored his heaving lungs, his blood still reacquainting itself with pumping fast and hard. His mind worked well – and that was all that mattered.

"Stop!"

A pair of Peacekeepers popped up behind him with weapons raised. Trajan didn't bother to take cover, merely continuing his breakneck run down a long hallway and swinging his stolen carbine one-handed behind him. He pulled the trigger hard, letting loose automatic fire at his enemies as he rounded another hallway.

Big one this time.

There would be no cover in this fifty meter dash for freedom. He'd have to wing it.

Trajan took off, instinct taking over as he sprinted for light. The Peacekeepers were right on his tail, bounding after him as fast as their armor permitted. Normally Trajan would have already been gone, but his debilitating condition after just having recovered from near-death slowed him down considerably. He one-handed his carbine behind him, taking blind shots at the Peacekeepers that had no chance of success. He couldn't worry about them now.

Suddenly, things took a nosedive. An ignorant nurse came around the corner, sticking her head out to see what the commotion was. She had a sickly child with her in a wheelchair, maybe eight years of age by Trajan's estimates.

Save yourself.

Trajan somersaulted below a fire of Peacekeeper bullets as the rounds impacted the nurse and patient, spraying innocent blood across the wall. The sickly child was dead within seconds; the nurse had been struck in the neck, her carotid artery ripped open and flailing like a crimson sprinkler. Trajan didn't waste time considering the morality of the moment, grabbing the dying, writhing nurse around her waist and using her as a human shield as he turned to face the Peacekeepers. The two Capitol soldiers paused momentarily, unsure what to make of the situation and their actions.

That was all the time Trajan needed. He raised his carbine to eye-level, bisecting one Peacekeeper's cranium with a well-placed round that blew his face off with a spray of skin and flesh. He moved to the next in a microsecond, sending a burst of bullets laterally up from the chest to the crown of his head.

He didn't need to confirm that kill.

Trajan let the dying nurse slump to the ground, putting a bullet through her forehead for a mercy shot. He'd afford her that much.

The wide doors to the emergency medical hanger opened with a swish, confronting Trajan with a massive, empty bay of silver, polished steel and girders. He swore as he looked around, trying to find a craft – there! In an occupied hovercraft seventy meters away sat a small, long-range hospital craft for ferrying grievously wounded Peacekeepers from the districts to the Capitol. It'd have to work for him – he only hoped Marius and his legions had received his signal.

Otherwise, there'd be no place to go after he escaped.

"Stop him!" a squad of Peacekeepers burst through a door nearby, their guns up and ready.

Trajan took off towards the hovercraft, sprinting the final distance as bullets chewed at his feet. He saw colors and grays roaring past his eyes, everything but the hovercraft melding together in a painter's palette. His feet found the first rung of steps to the hovercraft's cockpit, guiding him up to the open hatch and into the pilot's seat. There! Move!

He punched controls into the keypad, desperate to get the beast moving. Peacekeepers were swarming now, careful to keep their distance from the craft as they sprayed bullets at it. Trajan smashed the ignition with his fist, not even bothering to strap in to his seat as the ambulatory medical craft lurched from its perch. It nosed forward as Trajan jammed the throttle down, accelerating into an unfortunate Peacekeeper and turning him into meatloaf.

Go!

Trajan's hovercraft blasted forward, slamming him into the seat as multiple Gs threw Trajan back. Bullets whizzed around the cockpit as the airship burst out from the hanger's doors. Sunlight flashed across the cockpit's windscreen as Trajan pulled up, gearing the craft into maximum velocity to escape the start of anti-air gunfire. Within seconds he'd pulled above the cloud layer, accelerating away from the Capitol and towards the hope of safety.

Unfortunately, the only safety guaranteed was the shadow of civil war.