To the anonymous Guest reviewer:
Umm…well, thank you, I guess. But I would mind…so no. Sorry. Unless you're the president of Lionsgate and plan to make this the fifth movie (seeing as they are planning on splitting up Mockingjay into two parts). So…umm…I'm glad you like it, but no.

Chapter 23

One and a half years previously, President Snow's front yard

"We'll be all right, Cai. I promise you, we'll be all right."

She didn't let go of him as she whispered the words. She, the sixteen-year-old girl in the ragged, once fine dress. He, the thirteen-year-old boy in the torn, bloody jacket. He whimpered when she pulled him closer, and she winced and drew back. "Sorry. Is it still bad?"

He nodded his shaggy black head weakly. All around them, other children huddled in the biting cold. Curled up against the concrete barricade, the two siblings were secluded from the others, so no one would see the younger boy suffer. The wound, which stretched from his right shoulder to a point just under his left arm, had been cut with the knife of one of the angry rebels that had stormed their father's mansion. The Peacekeepers had come soon after, but not soon enough, and their mother had been killed in the riot. Their father, who had run at the first sign of danger and left his wife and two children to fend for themselves, was nowhere to be found. But the two children had been immediately brought here. Here, in front of President Snow's mansion, to be used as a human shield against the rebels. They had allowed the girl to wrap her brother's wound and spread some cheap medicine on it, but little else. It hadn't been enough, and she worried that he might bleed to death before help came. She herself had smaller wounds, but she felt nothing except pain for her younger brother.

But what was that, up in the sky? A hovercraft, marked with the Capitol's seal! "Look!" said the girl, pointing up to the hovercraft. Dozens of silver parachutes began to rain down to the children, and hopefully the boy raised his head. "Maybe there's better medicine for you," said his sister, standing up and rushing to catch one of the gracefully falling parachutes.

That was when the hovercraft vanished, and a feeling like ice water cascaded down the boy's burning back. His dark eyes widened as she, standing about twenty feet away, caught one and began to open it. "Calysta, no!"

She only had time to look up and meet her brother's gaze before the parachute in her hands, along with about twenty others, exploded.

Instinctively he ducked his head and pressed himself against the wall as the explosions rang through the air. They did not last long, but quickly following the last explosion was an agonized wail. This gave way to chaos as the surviving children screamed from wounds, terror, or both.

He looked up. There, lying on the ground not twenty feet away, was the blackened, nearly unrecognizable form of a girl. Momentarily forgetting his wound, the boy scrambled towards her, though he knew there was no hope. "Calysta!" he screamed over the ringing in his ears and the agonizing tear in his back. Sobbing uncontrollably, he crouched over his sister's burnt figure. An undetonated parachute rested on the ground nearby, and in almost insane fury he grabbed it, yanked off the parachute, and threw the silver capsule as far away as he could. A tortured wail rose from his throat as he rocked back and forth on the balls of his cold bare feet.

He didn't even see the white-uniformed rebel medics in his sorrow. They swarmed all around the children, holding medical kits. One of them, a blond-haired girl who was only about his age, rushed to him, took off her coat, and placed it over his shoulders. That was when he finally noticed the medics, and looked up into the girl's somehow familiar blue eyes. She smiled comfortingly, but then she seemed to hear something and turned.

It was then that the pieces clicked together. A long-ago Hunger Games, which he had watched one rainy afternoon when he really had nothing better to do. The Seventeenth Hunger Games. Parachutes just like the ones they had received now…

It had been right after the bloodbath. There were twenty surviving tributes –– too many for a proper Games. On the second day of that Games, every survivor had received a silver parachute at exactly the same time. And, also at exactly the same time, five of the parachutes had exploded. Those who did not pay heed to the cannons died exactly two minutes later, when the rest of the parachutes exploded and took out the three who lacked the wisdom to throw them away.

It was as if his mind had been subconsciously counting down those one hundred twenty seconds, and he just realized that it was now at five. Because five seconds was all the time he had to scramble away from any parachutes. And five seconds was all it took for the rest of them to go off and the blond-haired girl to drop to the ground.

He pressed himself against the barricade as tightly as he could, turning his back to the explosions and tucking his head into the girl's white, and now red, jacket. The wound on his back screamed in protest. It was in this way, hunched over, cold, bleeding, and crying, that the rebel soldiers found him later. His battered identification card told them who he was, and immediately they had taken him to a hospital for treatment. The rebels, without the substantial medical knowledge, could not close up his wound entirely, and it scarred over. It had never completely healed, nor had the psychological wounds dealt by the death of his sister and the death of the blond-haired girl whom he had never met.

Already, at the age of thirteen, and now fifteen, Caius Adrian Angelico was a scarred veteran of war.

And at the present moment, just as Artemis and Cornelius were talking about him, he was secluded away in his cave. He preferred the cave as his hideaway, because it was dark and quiet and cut off from the rest of the arena. And as a bonus, he had manually disabled the cameras that constantly watched him and he personally found very annoying.

He was crouched in a dark corner, lost in his own thoughts. His fingers subconsciously rubbed his silver ring as he struggled with the flashbacks wreaking havoc in his already-troubled young mind. Visions of the dead flickered in front of his eyes like ghosts, there and gone again. His mother, clothed in a fine black dress, smiling kindly. Calysta, his sister, in her signature denim jacket, clutching her journal to her chest. That blond-haired rebel girl, who was only about his age, yet was already risking her life to save others. The countless faces of countless tributes, whom he had watched as they perished and yet did not do anything. Shutting his eyes did nothing to hide him from the dead.

Shivering, not from the cold but from the pain of past fears, Caius cowered deeper into the shadows of the cave, grateful that there were no cameras left to witness his weaknesses.

Completely alone.

What do you think of our favorite District 4 representative now? I was literally crying as I wrote this…

I love angst. Love it.