Fic: Swear I Was Born Right In The Doorway.
Title: Swear I Was Born Right In The Doorway.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Victor!Peeta/Gale
Spoilers/Warnings: Warnings for discussion of children murdering children (though no descriptions I'd consider graphic; if you read the books or saw the movie, nothing here should take you by surprise).
Summary: For the prompt, "victor!peeta/gale, [au] katniss dies in the arena and peeta starts a revolution in her name; gale hates the merchants but he hates the capitol more."
Notes: The Hunger Games, a fandom in which I can warn within the same story for both the discussion of children murdering children and the fact that I am (not so) secretly kind of a sap. Also! The title is from the Bright Eyes song First Day of My Life which I listened to obsessively whilst writing (see aforementioned warning re: 'I am a sap') and does not belong to me, nor does The Hunger Games trilogy or anything you recognize from it.
"Gale? Peeta Mellark is here to see you," his mother calls down the hall a week after the Games.
"Tell him if he doesn't leave I'm going to kill him with my bare hands," Gale says and then, ignoring his mother's too-bright eyes, thinks better of it. Death threats are, he's almost certain, meant to be delivered personally.
Peeta is standing on the front step. Despite the open door, he hasn't moved to cross the threshold.
"Leave or I'll kill you with my bare hands," Gale says, and closes the door.
+ + + + +
Peeta shows up again the next day, and the next, and the next. Gale's mother, who still tries desperately and unsuccessfully to hide her flinch every time Gale tells Peeta he's a dead man if he doesn't move, is just as hopeless at hiding how grateful she is that something, anything, is getting Gale out of his room. He's sure her ideal scenario didn't involve him stalking down the hall once a day to deliver a death threat to a baker's son (to a Victor), but apparently it's better than nothing.
On the twelfth day of this, Peeta turns up with a cut on his right cheek, just above the bone. It stands out, sharp and clear against his unnaturally unblemished skin. Gale doesn't ask him about it. It's still there on the thirteenth day, not bandaged, not even cleaned, the blood smudging over it. On the fourteenth day Peeta is favoring his left leg so obviously Gale actually feels a stab of pain in his own as Peeta limps away from the closed door.
On the seventeenth day Gale opens the door and bites out, "What happened there, Lover Boy?"
Peeta visibly winces when Gale uses the Careers' name for him; Gale remembers with sudden and vicious clarity the wrench in his gut when he'd heard Peeta swear she'd gone that way, point out that the best way of killing her would just be to wait her out. No, he'd thought at the time, hold on. It wasn't right. He'd known it wasn't right. He shakes his head.
"I-it's not important," Peeta says. "Listen. Please?"
"How did it happen?" Gale asks.
"It's not important," Peeta insists, and then lets out a startled cry when Gale starts to shut the door again, leaping forward onto his bad leg and stuffing his foot into the crack between door and frame.
"Wait, wait," he says. "Alright. Fine. It's important. I just got on the wrong side of one of the Peacekeepers, that's all. It's fine."
"I know it's fine," Gale snarls. "Christ, Lover Boy, did you insult someone's mother? Because even us degenerate lawbreakers have to work pretty damn hard to awaken the wrath of a District 12 Peacekeeper. Are you telling me law enforcement isn't treating our Victor with the proper respect?"
Peeta is staring at him, his eyes wide.
"Have you-have you not been-you don't know?"
"Don't know what?" Gale asks, low and lethal even though out of the two of them he isn't the one who can lay claim to murder.
"The Peacekeepers-they're all new. Shipped in from the Capitol. It's because of-of the Games, of what happened. They're worried there's going to be a rebellion."
"Well I'm sure they'll stop worrying soon enough," Gale says. There's something bitter rising in his throat, yanking at his tongue. He doesn't want to be having this conversation any more. Never wanted to be having this conversation.
"I don't want them to stop worrying," Peeta says. "I want to give them something to worry about."
He stands there on Gale's doorstep, all blonde hair and lost eyes, and the more accidental glimpses Gale catches of the way he's favoring not just his leg but his whole left side the more obvious it becomes that he probably has one or two broken ribs. Or bruised, at least. It's laughable that he could worry anyone. Gale opens his mouth, probably to laugh-though he doesn't ever really know what's going to happen when he opens his mouth, these days-but Peeta beats him to the mark.
"I want you to help," he says.
"I'm all out of patience, Lover Boy," Gale says. "Leave or I'll kill you with my bare hands."
"Go ahead and try," Peeta says. "I'm pretty sure I could at least make it a fair fight."
Why that makes Gale let him into the house, he honestly has no idea.
+ + + + +
Peeta has half-formed plans that Gale scorns because that feels right, doesn't it; he scoffs at the blind spots and the failings of strategy and the inconsistencies, and Peeta doesn't even flinch, just nods and makes thoughtful noises and once, when he thinks Gale isn't looking, jots down a note on the first thing that comes to hand (which happens to be the inside of his wrist).
"Right," he says eventually. "This is fantastic. Now tell me how to fix it."
Gale blinks a few times, stunned at the sheer magnitude of the task, and then remembers that this is Peeta, this is someone he hates so much that sometimes it wakes him up at night, and that he's not about to admit weakness. He's so tired. He's so angry. He wants the room to himself, he wants the house to himself, he wants the world to himself, just for a little while. Probably just for a little while.
"Fine," he says. "Get some paper, Christ, what does that even say?"
He grabs Peeta's wrist, grips it tight enough that he can imagine he feels skin shifting over bone. Peeta doesn't wince or try to yank his hand away; instead, he rotates his arm until Gale can read the scribbled ballpoint. It's something about emergency food stores, not that it matters. When Gale glances up Peeta's meeting his eyes like it's easy, and Gale stumbles without getting to his feet, thinks I'm probably hurting him and lets go like he's been burnt.
"Come back tomorrow, Lover Boy," he says.
"If I leave you'll lock me out," Peeta says. He's probably right. He's definitely right. "We can do something great, Gale, the two of us. I know you hate me, but that doesn't matter, okay? There's an entire nation out there just waiting for someone to tell them-"
"To tell them what?" Gale asks, trying not to sound like he needs to know.
"To tell them that she didn't die in vain," Peeta says. "To tell them that it's within their power to make sure it never happens again."
"So what, we just use her?" Gale demands. "We just wave her around like a banner, 'oh wasn't it sad, wasn't it so tragic, young love cut short-'"
"Yes," Peeta says. He looks sad, but he doesn't look embarrassed. "It's what she wanted."
"How the hell," Gale says, trying to shape his rage into something near enough to words. "How the fuck can you possibly know what she wanted? You didn't even know her."
"Well she didn't say it because it was true," Peeta points out. "So she must've had another reason. This one just makes the most sense."
Gale stares and Peeta stares back, his gaze still unfairly steady.
"Fine," he says. "Fine. Come back tomorrow."
Peeta does. Gale lets him in.
+ + + + +
When they can't meet at the house anymore (the surveillance is much better these days, Peeta explains, spitting out blood after a friendly warning delivered in the alley behind where the Hob used to be; you don't say, Gale says, and realizes how good it feels to have earned a broken nose) they go to the woods. Gale doesn't really think about it until they're under the fence and gone, and then forces himself to keep right on not thinking about it.
They spend weeks there, the leaves turning around them, the seasons grinding onward even as the Seam collapses in on itself, just like the mine it's named for. Gale teaches Peeta to shoot in spite of his vehement protests (I don't care if you're 'only a figurehead,' Gale says, parroting his words, I'm not going to follow a revolutionary who can't even defend himself, and neither is anyone else), and between the two of them a plan unspools. It starts with taking over the mines; it ends with taking over the Capitol.
"Could you have done it?" Peeta asks one day.
"Done what?" Gale asks.
"Saved her. Kept her alive," Peeta says.
Gale wants to say yes, badly. But he can't seem to work the lie to the tip of his tongue; it's crowded out by other things, meaningless platitudes and one or two things he thinks might be meant as comfort (chief among them 'no').
"I don't know," he says instead, honest and hating it a little. When he looks over Peeta is staring down at the ground, apparently transfixed by the autumn leaves.
"It's so hard to know what you want, once they've started," he says. "It's like you have to be someone else, just so you don't stop being anyone at all. But it was easier when she was there."
Don't tell me this, Gale thinks. He could say it out loud. He could.
"I knew I wanted to want her to win. I wanted to be that person. That person wasn't a Capitol slave, he wasn't a pawn in the Games. I wanted to be that person."
Gale doesn't ask him if he is.
+ + + + +
The day District 12 falls into rebel hands, Gale is home with the flu.
He's asleep when the rioting from the mines claws its way into the light, spills into the streets, but the noise of the newly erected gallows-only a few streets from his house-being hacked apart wakes him up. Shivering and sweating and cursing, he stumbles into the kitchen and finds his mother, her eyes wide.
"Promise me you had nothing to do with this," she says. The tears she's been holding back for months now are spilling over, and Gale thinks that this is what it's like to be the mother of a revolutionary.
"I'm sorry," he tells her, and then, his patience already exhausted, he grabs the nearest thing to a weapon they've got in the house (his metal lunch pail, as it happens) and bursts out into the street.
There are isolated skirmishes happening up and down the block, the Peacekeepers being slowly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but Gale knows that it won't be long before reinforcements arrive, and that means he has to get Peeta to the square, has to make sure he gets through his speech, has to do his fucking job, which he hadn't known he would have to do today-
He barrels straight into Peeta, who is rounding the corner, headed God knows where. Gale grabs him by the shoulders and backs him up into the brick wall of the clinic, furious and so relieved he can barely breathe.
"You idiot," he hisses, knocking their foreheads together hard enough that it actually hurts. "Why the hell-"
"I thought you'd get yourself killed," Peeta says. He doesn't wait for Gale's answer, just plunges on. "You're angry. I am too, but you have a better idea of what to do with it, which basically means you don't care nearly enough about what'll happen to you. If you'd been in the mines when it started you would've thrown yourself at the nearest heavily armed whoever with only-"
He glances down.
"-your lunch pail?" He demands. "Yeah, I'm definitely not apologizing. Are you crazy?"
"Maybe I would've been a little more prepared if I'd known what the fuck was going on," Gale says. He should be angrier, but being angry takes more energy then he has to spare just now. Peeta has to make his speech. Gale has to make sure he has the chance.
"We're going to lead a revolution, but for us to do that you do actually need to be alive," Peeta says.
+ + + + +
Peeta's speech is fiery and desperate in turns, lays him bare in front of a square full of people who are terrified and hungry and stunned at their own ability to make, if not a difference, then at the very least a dent.
"Katniss didn't set out to be a hero," he says. "Like all of us, she set out to survive. But something happened to her-to both of us-while we were in that arena. I'm sure I'm not the only person here who knows what it's like to fall-to fall in love and know it isn't going to make you happy. Falling in love when you have no food, or when the mines are the only way to support a family, or when your livelihood is being stamped out by your own government, that's the kind of love that frightens you so much that there are days you wish you weren't in love at all. But I want you to understand something. It wasn't just love that stopped her from running. It was anger. We were in an impossible situation, and she found the strength to be angry about it, and then to act on her anger. For years, we have been united by our anger, but today we are united by something stronger then that: we are united by our actions."
He lays it all out, makes it sound wrenchingly simple, how they're going to spread the rebellion through the districts and take control of supply lines and bring the Capitol to its knees. Gale lets himself be swept up by it, just for a moment, his hands on the bow he'd retrieved before he'd let Peeta anywhere near the hastily constructed stage. He scans the crowd for danger and finds it everywhere he looks, but none of it is directed at the baker's son, their Victor, his hands white-knuckled at his sides. It's all turning outward, and Gale feels his heart thud dully against his ribcage, thrilled and frightened. This is so fragile, he thinks, and listens to his own heartbeat instead of the speech.
Afterwards he and Peeta head into the Justice Building, taking over one of the clerical offices and covering the desk in maps and lists. Gale is tracing the line of the mountains with his index finger when his path is blocked by Peeta's hand, spread flat on the table. It's trembling.
"Saving me, does that make her a hero?" He asks. "Or just unlucky?"
"You were right," Gale says. "This is what she wanted."
It isn't an answer, exactly, but at least Peea stops shaking.
+ + + + +
Gale dreams about it that night, dreams about her face on screens everywhere he looked, terrified and inescapable. Dreams about the way neither she nor Cato had been armed when, in the end, he stumbled across their cave. Dreams about the way they'd fought, clawing and tearing and ramming each other into the rocky riverbed. Dreams about Peeta's hoarse shouts in the background as he'd tried, helpless and so obviously in pain, to stand on his bad leg, and then to stay standing, about how he'd begged Katniss to just run, to please just run. Dreams about the way Cato had died first, the way Katniss had ground out Peeta's name when the cannon sounded. Dreams about how she'd died with his hand in hers, dreams about the way she'd whispered, "I love you" just loud enough to reach the cameras.
When he wakes up his first thought is that he hasn't dreamed about her in weeks, and he feels so guilty he has to swallow against it, has to close his eyes and remember that he can't make things right for Katniss anymore. But he can make things right for Peeta. And not just for Peeta, he reminds himself, scrabbling for purchase inside his own mind. For everyone else, too.
+ + + + +
The arrival of the hovercraft isn't a surprise. The people flying it are.
"District 13?" Peeta asks. "But District 13 doesn't even exist anymore."
"I can see this is going to be a day of surprises for you," one of the men says, which is pretty damn indisputable.
Having allies broadens the world considerably, it turns out, even as it narrows it almost unbearably. Peeta and Gale are made generals in what Peeta approvingly calls a good strategic move. Gale knows he's right, and tries not to bother being angry that he himself hasn't earned this, not yet.
They're sent to District 4, which means seeing the ocean for the first time. Gale surprises himself by caring, and stands staring out at the waves for long enough that the sun sinks down past the horizon and the air turns chilly.
"We should get inside," Peeta says from behind him, but he doesn't move to leave until Gale does.
"I just-I never even thought about it," he says later that night. "The ocean, I mean. I was never going to leave 12, was I? I wasn't even angry about it. It was just never going to-I never even thought about it."
Peeta smiles at him, and Gale realizes abruptly how long it's been since he saw Peeta really smile. It turns out he's been waiting to see it again.
"Well," Gale says. "Meeting with the local leaders tomorrow morning, right? Better get some sleep."
+ + + + +
They never stay in one place for too long. Their presence is a double-edged sword, energizing the rebellion even as it covers entire districts in neon targets. So they spend their forays out of 13 in wooden shacks and crumbling brick buildings and houses with peeling paint and sagging corners. The sound of Peeta breathing in the next bed over becomes almost as familiar to Gale as the feel of a bow in his hand; so does the sound of Peeta waking, his breaths caught in his chest. Nightmares.
So he shakes Peeta awake more nights than he doesn't, his hand steady on Peeta's shoulder, feeling the warmth of skin through his shirt.
"Thanks," Peeta always says, and Gale takes his hand away and climbs back into his own bed and pretends he isn't waiting to hear Peeta's breathing even out again before he closes his own eyes.
His own dreams are a jumbled mess of cheering mobs and burning buildings, all overlaid with maps he can't make any sense of. He wakes from them feeling useless and stupid and very much alone, and waits for Peeta to be ready so that they can go to breakfast together.
One night, after they've had to fight their way past a Capitol blockade that wasn't supposed to be where it was, Gale is woken by a hoarse cry and shakes Peeta awake, murmuring nonsense, promising it's alright until Peeta is lucid enough to know what's actually being said to him, at which point Gale promptly snaps his mouth shut.
"What are they about?" Gale asks for the first time.
"I don't know," Peeta says, which is such an obvious lie that it actually takes Gale by surprise. "What are yours about?"
"About getting people killed, mostly," Gale says, because he knows it's true. "And about-about you not being there to stop me from doing it."
"Mine are-look, I know we've had this conversation before," Peeta says, "but don't get yourself killed, alright?"
"Alright," Gale says.
"Alright," Peeta says.
+ + + + +
"I really did try to protect her," Peeta mumbles at the District 8 victory feast, more than a little drunk. "I really did want her to come home. I wanted it to be her. I did."
Gale believes him. Gale believes him and it's terrifying.
They stumble back to their room, drunk and holding each other up, adding the forces of gravity to their ever-growing list of enemies.
"I'm sorry," Peeta mumbles into his ear where he's propped up while Gale fumbles with the doorknob. "I know you loved her, or you love her, or-or both. I'm sorry it was me, I'm sorry-"
Gale cuts him off by pressing their lips together, at least half because their lips are so close already that it just seems easiest. It's close-mouthed and chaste and tastes like cheap wine, and when it's over Gale opens the door and they both collapse, exhausted, into their separate beds.
When Gale wakes up the next morning he can hear the water running, the sound of a toothbrush. The minute her realizes what it is it becomes immediately necessary that he brush his teeth; he'd forgotten the taste of a hangover.
He stumbles into the bathroom and elbows at Peeta's ribs until he moves over enough that Gale can use the sink too, and then doesn't think about anything else until his mouth feels like it might, at some point, be clean again. Then he spits, rinses, and walks back out into the other room. He pulls on a shirt and makes his bed for the first time since he was eight and folds and refolds three different pairs of socks before Peeta appears in the doorway.
"We can't let this wreck things," he says, and then before Gale can answer he says, "I-we need you. Things are going well but the tide could turn any moment, we haven't earned any guarantees yet, and-"
"I'm not going anywhere," Gale says. "I kissed you, remember?"
"Didn't I kiss back?" Peeta asks, staring fixedly at the far wall. "It's just that I thought I must've. I guess I was pretty drunk."
It's very quiet for a moment. Gale concentrates on breathing, in and out, thinks about how they haven't earned any guarantees yet and if they fuck this up they probably never will.
"You were apologizing," he finally says, deliberate. "For living. I couldn't-I couldn't listen to it. I couldn't. Jesus you're an idiot."
"You miss her, I know you do," Peeta says.
"So do you," Gale says. "I didn't volunteer you know. I could've. You should hate me, right?"
"Don't be stupid," Peeta says and Gale raises an eyebrow even though Peeta isn't looking at him to see it.
"I'm not sorry, not really," Peeta says. "It's awful, some days, how glad I am that it was me."
Gale lunges across the room and kisses him again because it turns out he has to. He grips Peeta's shoulders hard enough to bruise and bites at his lower lip until Peeta moans and sends his fingers carding through Gale's hair and kisses back, and it's like he hasn't been breathing properly for months, like there's extra oxygen slamming into his lungs.
"I think," he says when they break apart, "I think-don't get yourself killed, alright?"
"Alright," Peeta says, and smiles, sudden and unexpected and warm.
"Alright," Gale says.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Victor!Peeta/Gale
Spoilers/Warnings: Warnings for discussion of children murdering children (though no descriptions I'd consider graphic; if you read the books or saw the movie, nothing here should take you by surprise).
Summary: For the prompt, "victor!peeta/gale, [au] katniss dies in the arena and peeta starts a revolution in her name; gale hates the merchants but he hates the capitol more."
Notes: The Hunger Games, a fandom in which I can warn within the same story for both the discussion of children murdering children and the fact that I am (not so) secretly kind of a sap. Also! The title is from the Bright Eyes song First Day of My Life which I listened to obsessively whilst writing (see aforementioned warning re: 'I am a sap') and does not belong to me, nor does The Hunger Games trilogy or anything you recognize from it.
"Gale? Peeta Mellark is here to see you," his mother calls down the hall a week after the Games.
"Tell him if he doesn't leave I'm going to kill him with my bare hands," Gale says and then, ignoring his mother's too-bright eyes, thinks better of it. Death threats are, he's almost certain, meant to be delivered personally.
Peeta is standing on the front step. Despite the open door, he hasn't moved to cross the threshold.
"Leave or I'll kill you with my bare hands," Gale says, and closes the door.
+ + + + +
Peeta shows up again the next day, and the next, and the next. Gale's mother, who still tries desperately and unsuccessfully to hide her flinch every time Gale tells Peeta he's a dead man if he doesn't move, is just as hopeless at hiding how grateful she is that something, anything, is getting Gale out of his room. He's sure her ideal scenario didn't involve him stalking down the hall once a day to deliver a death threat to a baker's son (to a Victor), but apparently it's better than nothing.
On the twelfth day of this, Peeta turns up with a cut on his right cheek, just above the bone. It stands out, sharp and clear against his unnaturally unblemished skin. Gale doesn't ask him about it. It's still there on the thirteenth day, not bandaged, not even cleaned, the blood smudging over it. On the fourteenth day Peeta is favoring his left leg so obviously Gale actually feels a stab of pain in his own as Peeta limps away from the closed door.
On the seventeenth day Gale opens the door and bites out, "What happened there, Lover Boy?"
Peeta visibly winces when Gale uses the Careers' name for him; Gale remembers with sudden and vicious clarity the wrench in his gut when he'd heard Peeta swear she'd gone that way, point out that the best way of killing her would just be to wait her out. No, he'd thought at the time, hold on. It wasn't right. He'd known it wasn't right. He shakes his head.
"I-it's not important," Peeta says. "Listen. Please?"
"How did it happen?" Gale asks.
"It's not important," Peeta insists, and then lets out a startled cry when Gale starts to shut the door again, leaping forward onto his bad leg and stuffing his foot into the crack between door and frame.
"Wait, wait," he says. "Alright. Fine. It's important. I just got on the wrong side of one of the Peacekeepers, that's all. It's fine."
"I know it's fine," Gale snarls. "Christ, Lover Boy, did you insult someone's mother? Because even us degenerate lawbreakers have to work pretty damn hard to awaken the wrath of a District 12 Peacekeeper. Are you telling me law enforcement isn't treating our Victor with the proper respect?"
Peeta is staring at him, his eyes wide.
"Have you-have you not been-you don't know?"
"Don't know what?" Gale asks, low and lethal even though out of the two of them he isn't the one who can lay claim to murder.
"The Peacekeepers-they're all new. Shipped in from the Capitol. It's because of-of the Games, of what happened. They're worried there's going to be a rebellion."
"Well I'm sure they'll stop worrying soon enough," Gale says. There's something bitter rising in his throat, yanking at his tongue. He doesn't want to be having this conversation any more. Never wanted to be having this conversation.
"I don't want them to stop worrying," Peeta says. "I want to give them something to worry about."
He stands there on Gale's doorstep, all blonde hair and lost eyes, and the more accidental glimpses Gale catches of the way he's favoring not just his leg but his whole left side the more obvious it becomes that he probably has one or two broken ribs. Or bruised, at least. It's laughable that he could worry anyone. Gale opens his mouth, probably to laugh-though he doesn't ever really know what's going to happen when he opens his mouth, these days-but Peeta beats him to the mark.
"I want you to help," he says.
"I'm all out of patience, Lover Boy," Gale says. "Leave or I'll kill you with my bare hands."
"Go ahead and try," Peeta says. "I'm pretty sure I could at least make it a fair fight."
Why that makes Gale let him into the house, he honestly has no idea.
+ + + + +
Peeta has half-formed plans that Gale scorns because that feels right, doesn't it; he scoffs at the blind spots and the failings of strategy and the inconsistencies, and Peeta doesn't even flinch, just nods and makes thoughtful noises and once, when he thinks Gale isn't looking, jots down a note on the first thing that comes to hand (which happens to be the inside of his wrist).
"Right," he says eventually. "This is fantastic. Now tell me how to fix it."
Gale blinks a few times, stunned at the sheer magnitude of the task, and then remembers that this is Peeta, this is someone he hates so much that sometimes it wakes him up at night, and that he's not about to admit weakness. He's so tired. He's so angry. He wants the room to himself, he wants the house to himself, he wants the world to himself, just for a little while. Probably just for a little while.
"Fine," he says. "Get some paper, Christ, what does that even say?"
He grabs Peeta's wrist, grips it tight enough that he can imagine he feels skin shifting over bone. Peeta doesn't wince or try to yank his hand away; instead, he rotates his arm until Gale can read the scribbled ballpoint. It's something about emergency food stores, not that it matters. When Gale glances up Peeta's meeting his eyes like it's easy, and Gale stumbles without getting to his feet, thinks I'm probably hurting him and lets go like he's been burnt.
"Come back tomorrow, Lover Boy," he says.
"If I leave you'll lock me out," Peeta says. He's probably right. He's definitely right. "We can do something great, Gale, the two of us. I know you hate me, but that doesn't matter, okay? There's an entire nation out there just waiting for someone to tell them-"
"To tell them what?" Gale asks, trying not to sound like he needs to know.
"To tell them that she didn't die in vain," Peeta says. "To tell them that it's within their power to make sure it never happens again."
"So what, we just use her?" Gale demands. "We just wave her around like a banner, 'oh wasn't it sad, wasn't it so tragic, young love cut short-'"
"Yes," Peeta says. He looks sad, but he doesn't look embarrassed. "It's what she wanted."
"How the hell," Gale says, trying to shape his rage into something near enough to words. "How the fuck can you possibly know what she wanted? You didn't even know her."
"Well she didn't say it because it was true," Peeta points out. "So she must've had another reason. This one just makes the most sense."
Gale stares and Peeta stares back, his gaze still unfairly steady.
"Fine," he says. "Fine. Come back tomorrow."
Peeta does. Gale lets him in.
+ + + + +
When they can't meet at the house anymore (the surveillance is much better these days, Peeta explains, spitting out blood after a friendly warning delivered in the alley behind where the Hob used to be; you don't say, Gale says, and realizes how good it feels to have earned a broken nose) they go to the woods. Gale doesn't really think about it until they're under the fence and gone, and then forces himself to keep right on not thinking about it.
They spend weeks there, the leaves turning around them, the seasons grinding onward even as the Seam collapses in on itself, just like the mine it's named for. Gale teaches Peeta to shoot in spite of his vehement protests (I don't care if you're 'only a figurehead,' Gale says, parroting his words, I'm not going to follow a revolutionary who can't even defend himself, and neither is anyone else), and between the two of them a plan unspools. It starts with taking over the mines; it ends with taking over the Capitol.
"Could you have done it?" Peeta asks one day.
"Done what?" Gale asks.
"Saved her. Kept her alive," Peeta says.
Gale wants to say yes, badly. But he can't seem to work the lie to the tip of his tongue; it's crowded out by other things, meaningless platitudes and one or two things he thinks might be meant as comfort (chief among them 'no').
"I don't know," he says instead, honest and hating it a little. When he looks over Peeta is staring down at the ground, apparently transfixed by the autumn leaves.
"It's so hard to know what you want, once they've started," he says. "It's like you have to be someone else, just so you don't stop being anyone at all. But it was easier when she was there."
Don't tell me this, Gale thinks. He could say it out loud. He could.
"I knew I wanted to want her to win. I wanted to be that person. That person wasn't a Capitol slave, he wasn't a pawn in the Games. I wanted to be that person."
Gale doesn't ask him if he is.
+ + + + +
The day District 12 falls into rebel hands, Gale is home with the flu.
He's asleep when the rioting from the mines claws its way into the light, spills into the streets, but the noise of the newly erected gallows-only a few streets from his house-being hacked apart wakes him up. Shivering and sweating and cursing, he stumbles into the kitchen and finds his mother, her eyes wide.
"Promise me you had nothing to do with this," she says. The tears she's been holding back for months now are spilling over, and Gale thinks that this is what it's like to be the mother of a revolutionary.
"I'm sorry," he tells her, and then, his patience already exhausted, he grabs the nearest thing to a weapon they've got in the house (his metal lunch pail, as it happens) and bursts out into the street.
There are isolated skirmishes happening up and down the block, the Peacekeepers being slowly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but Gale knows that it won't be long before reinforcements arrive, and that means he has to get Peeta to the square, has to make sure he gets through his speech, has to do his fucking job, which he hadn't known he would have to do today-
He barrels straight into Peeta, who is rounding the corner, headed God knows where. Gale grabs him by the shoulders and backs him up into the brick wall of the clinic, furious and so relieved he can barely breathe.
"You idiot," he hisses, knocking their foreheads together hard enough that it actually hurts. "Why the hell-"
"I thought you'd get yourself killed," Peeta says. He doesn't wait for Gale's answer, just plunges on. "You're angry. I am too, but you have a better idea of what to do with it, which basically means you don't care nearly enough about what'll happen to you. If you'd been in the mines when it started you would've thrown yourself at the nearest heavily armed whoever with only-"
He glances down.
"-your lunch pail?" He demands. "Yeah, I'm definitely not apologizing. Are you crazy?"
"Maybe I would've been a little more prepared if I'd known what the fuck was going on," Gale says. He should be angrier, but being angry takes more energy then he has to spare just now. Peeta has to make his speech. Gale has to make sure he has the chance.
"We're going to lead a revolution, but for us to do that you do actually need to be alive," Peeta says.
+ + + + +
Peeta's speech is fiery and desperate in turns, lays him bare in front of a square full of people who are terrified and hungry and stunned at their own ability to make, if not a difference, then at the very least a dent.
"Katniss didn't set out to be a hero," he says. "Like all of us, she set out to survive. But something happened to her-to both of us-while we were in that arena. I'm sure I'm not the only person here who knows what it's like to fall-to fall in love and know it isn't going to make you happy. Falling in love when you have no food, or when the mines are the only way to support a family, or when your livelihood is being stamped out by your own government, that's the kind of love that frightens you so much that there are days you wish you weren't in love at all. But I want you to understand something. It wasn't just love that stopped her from running. It was anger. We were in an impossible situation, and she found the strength to be angry about it, and then to act on her anger. For years, we have been united by our anger, but today we are united by something stronger then that: we are united by our actions."
He lays it all out, makes it sound wrenchingly simple, how they're going to spread the rebellion through the districts and take control of supply lines and bring the Capitol to its knees. Gale lets himself be swept up by it, just for a moment, his hands on the bow he'd retrieved before he'd let Peeta anywhere near the hastily constructed stage. He scans the crowd for danger and finds it everywhere he looks, but none of it is directed at the baker's son, their Victor, his hands white-knuckled at his sides. It's all turning outward, and Gale feels his heart thud dully against his ribcage, thrilled and frightened. This is so fragile, he thinks, and listens to his own heartbeat instead of the speech.
Afterwards he and Peeta head into the Justice Building, taking over one of the clerical offices and covering the desk in maps and lists. Gale is tracing the line of the mountains with his index finger when his path is blocked by Peeta's hand, spread flat on the table. It's trembling.
"Saving me, does that make her a hero?" He asks. "Or just unlucky?"
"You were right," Gale says. "This is what she wanted."
It isn't an answer, exactly, but at least Peea stops shaking.
+ + + + +
Gale dreams about it that night, dreams about her face on screens everywhere he looked, terrified and inescapable. Dreams about the way neither she nor Cato had been armed when, in the end, he stumbled across their cave. Dreams about the way they'd fought, clawing and tearing and ramming each other into the rocky riverbed. Dreams about Peeta's hoarse shouts in the background as he'd tried, helpless and so obviously in pain, to stand on his bad leg, and then to stay standing, about how he'd begged Katniss to just run, to please just run. Dreams about the way Cato had died first, the way Katniss had ground out Peeta's name when the cannon sounded. Dreams about how she'd died with his hand in hers, dreams about the way she'd whispered, "I love you" just loud enough to reach the cameras.
When he wakes up his first thought is that he hasn't dreamed about her in weeks, and he feels so guilty he has to swallow against it, has to close his eyes and remember that he can't make things right for Katniss anymore. But he can make things right for Peeta. And not just for Peeta, he reminds himself, scrabbling for purchase inside his own mind. For everyone else, too.
+ + + + +
The arrival of the hovercraft isn't a surprise. The people flying it are.
"District 13?" Peeta asks. "But District 13 doesn't even exist anymore."
"I can see this is going to be a day of surprises for you," one of the men says, which is pretty damn indisputable.
Having allies broadens the world considerably, it turns out, even as it narrows it almost unbearably. Peeta and Gale are made generals in what Peeta approvingly calls a good strategic move. Gale knows he's right, and tries not to bother being angry that he himself hasn't earned this, not yet.
They're sent to District 4, which means seeing the ocean for the first time. Gale surprises himself by caring, and stands staring out at the waves for long enough that the sun sinks down past the horizon and the air turns chilly.
"We should get inside," Peeta says from behind him, but he doesn't move to leave until Gale does.
"I just-I never even thought about it," he says later that night. "The ocean, I mean. I was never going to leave 12, was I? I wasn't even angry about it. It was just never going to-I never even thought about it."
Peeta smiles at him, and Gale realizes abruptly how long it's been since he saw Peeta really smile. It turns out he's been waiting to see it again.
"Well," Gale says. "Meeting with the local leaders tomorrow morning, right? Better get some sleep."
+ + + + +
They never stay in one place for too long. Their presence is a double-edged sword, energizing the rebellion even as it covers entire districts in neon targets. So they spend their forays out of 13 in wooden shacks and crumbling brick buildings and houses with peeling paint and sagging corners. The sound of Peeta breathing in the next bed over becomes almost as familiar to Gale as the feel of a bow in his hand; so does the sound of Peeta waking, his breaths caught in his chest. Nightmares.
So he shakes Peeta awake more nights than he doesn't, his hand steady on Peeta's shoulder, feeling the warmth of skin through his shirt.
"Thanks," Peeta always says, and Gale takes his hand away and climbs back into his own bed and pretends he isn't waiting to hear Peeta's breathing even out again before he closes his own eyes.
His own dreams are a jumbled mess of cheering mobs and burning buildings, all overlaid with maps he can't make any sense of. He wakes from them feeling useless and stupid and very much alone, and waits for Peeta to be ready so that they can go to breakfast together.
One night, after they've had to fight their way past a Capitol blockade that wasn't supposed to be where it was, Gale is woken by a hoarse cry and shakes Peeta awake, murmuring nonsense, promising it's alright until Peeta is lucid enough to know what's actually being said to him, at which point Gale promptly snaps his mouth shut.
"What are they about?" Gale asks for the first time.
"I don't know," Peeta says, which is such an obvious lie that it actually takes Gale by surprise. "What are yours about?"
"About getting people killed, mostly," Gale says, because he knows it's true. "And about-about you not being there to stop me from doing it."
"Mine are-look, I know we've had this conversation before," Peeta says, "but don't get yourself killed, alright?"
"Alright," Gale says.
"Alright," Peeta says.
+ + + + +
"I really did try to protect her," Peeta mumbles at the District 8 victory feast, more than a little drunk. "I really did want her to come home. I wanted it to be her. I did."
Gale believes him. Gale believes him and it's terrifying.
They stumble back to their room, drunk and holding each other up, adding the forces of gravity to their ever-growing list of enemies.
"I'm sorry," Peeta mumbles into his ear where he's propped up while Gale fumbles with the doorknob. "I know you loved her, or you love her, or-or both. I'm sorry it was me, I'm sorry-"
Gale cuts him off by pressing their lips together, at least half because their lips are so close already that it just seems easiest. It's close-mouthed and chaste and tastes like cheap wine, and when it's over Gale opens the door and they both collapse, exhausted, into their separate beds.
When Gale wakes up the next morning he can hear the water running, the sound of a toothbrush. The minute her realizes what it is it becomes immediately necessary that he brush his teeth; he'd forgotten the taste of a hangover.
He stumbles into the bathroom and elbows at Peeta's ribs until he moves over enough that Gale can use the sink too, and then doesn't think about anything else until his mouth feels like it might, at some point, be clean again. Then he spits, rinses, and walks back out into the other room. He pulls on a shirt and makes his bed for the first time since he was eight and folds and refolds three different pairs of socks before Peeta appears in the doorway.
"We can't let this wreck things," he says, and then before Gale can answer he says, "I-we need you. Things are going well but the tide could turn any moment, we haven't earned any guarantees yet, and-"
"I'm not going anywhere," Gale says. "I kissed you, remember?"
"Didn't I kiss back?" Peeta asks, staring fixedly at the far wall. "It's just that I thought I must've. I guess I was pretty drunk."
It's very quiet for a moment. Gale concentrates on breathing, in and out, thinks about how they haven't earned any guarantees yet and if they fuck this up they probably never will.
"You were apologizing," he finally says, deliberate. "For living. I couldn't-I couldn't listen to it. I couldn't. Jesus you're an idiot."
"You miss her, I know you do," Peeta says.
"So do you," Gale says. "I didn't volunteer you know. I could've. You should hate me, right?"
"Don't be stupid," Peeta says and Gale raises an eyebrow even though Peeta isn't looking at him to see it.
"I'm not sorry, not really," Peeta says. "It's awful, some days, how glad I am that it was me."
Gale lunges across the room and kisses him again because it turns out he has to. He grips Peeta's shoulders hard enough to bruise and bites at his lower lip until Peeta moans and sends his fingers carding through Gale's hair and kisses back, and it's like he hasn't been breathing properly for months, like there's extra oxygen slamming into his lungs.
"I think," he says when they break apart, "I think-don't get yourself killed, alright?"
"Alright," Peeta says, and smiles, sudden and unexpected and warm.
"Alright," Gale says.