Fic Post: Delineation [The Hunger Games]
Part V of the Alternate Takes series.
delineation
the hunger games
katniss/gale, katniss/peeta
2820 words
hard r
On A03.
Katniss thinks about him, for the first time, when she’s alone in a compartment on the train. She won’t ask about him because she’s pretty sure she won’t like anything anyone will have to say, be it good, bad, indifferent. She curls up into a small ball in the center of her bed and feels a familiar ache spread through her body.
For a long while, Gale is the phantom limb she just can’t amputate.
---
She gets used to it. The solitary mental confinement. People wander in and out of her house when they feel like it with wary eyes and hearts, but she doesn’t move because it doesn’t feel like she can. She spends three or four days in one room, then travels to the next room, her legs atrophying after the extended periods of disuse. After he comes back, Peeta brings her food. Sometimes he takes it into her room, forces her to eat it like she forced him to drink the broth. Other times he just leaves the meals outside her door and waits until she makes some sort of noise to indicate that she’s still alive.
---
He arrives on a train in the middle of the night. Katniss supposes that she would never have known, but for the shrieking coming from her bedmate that evening. She tries to hold on most of the time, wrap her arms tightly around Peeta until he stops convulsing under her, but tonight Peeta’s arms flail and she can’t do anything but escape before he accidentally beats her too badly.
She knows Gale by the way his body moves, so unchanged by the War that looms behind them. He stands outside her house for a moment, looking like he might just walk up to her front door and back into her life without any explanation for why he left in the first place, but he instead strides into the light blue fog, his quiet footsteps disappearing with him as he heads to the outskirts of town.
---
Gale moves into a modest house a mile or some from where The Hob stood. For a couple days, she sees him wandering back and forth between the center of town and the woods, gathering from the land the things he needs to create a home. He’s darker, older too, and Katniss can't stop watching the way her moves.
He doesn’t see her: She flits in and out of the shadows, unsure of what she would say or do if he came right up and kissed her on the mouth.
---
“Gale’s back,” Peeta says when he comes home one rainy afternoon. “I saw him at the market. Did you know?” His voice has a barely contained uneasiness as he sets down a bag of potatoes.
Katniss feigns ignorance, turns back to the newspaper on the table.
---
It was only a matter of time, really, but the moment still catches her by surprise.
She’s walking toward the Meadow, Peeta and her bow in tow. It’s a sunny day, unseasonably warm, and she can feel a faint trickle of sweat working its way down her neck as they wander through the increasingly crowded streets of District 12.
She sees him, standing and chatting, across the road. He’s looks just like her, holding a bow to his back and clearly heading for the woods. He doesn’t see her at first, too engrossed in speaking with an older woman that Katniss doesn’t recognize.
Gale smiles when he catches her eyes. Her hand aches to wave, but stays within Peeta’s trembling grasp instead. She thinks for a moment that he’ll come over and say hello, but he just turns his attention back to the smiling woman.
She is unusually cheery as they walk in the woods that day, laughing and pointing at a flock of birds that rise and fall with the winds.
---
Katniss stops hunting for awhile.
---
“We could have him over for dinner,” Peeta says one night, just as Katniss starts to pull the bed sheets over her legs. “Honestly, Katniss. I don’t mind.”
She doesn’t think he understands that she does.
---
It rains for what seems like months. A small river forms in the middle of town, spilling out into the boundaries of the land. She ventures outside less and less, her skin paling in the limited glow of her house’s windows.
One day she finds a half-bent arrow, weathered by time and circumstance, on her front porch with a small note. She crumples the paper before she reads it, but takes the abused weapon into the house.
She doesn’t tell Peeta. He refuses to ask when he finds it in her drawer, next to the pearl in the parachute.
---
There’s a girl with bright blue eyes and a sweet smile who moves somewhere in town. Katniss sees her everywhere: By the Meadow, down in what is becoming the center of the merchant district again, walking by the train station. She’s a perfect little ghost of somebody Katniss never knew.
She sees her with Gale, once. They’re speaking quietly as they skin a large buck on his front porch. The girl cuts her finger on the jagged knife she’s working with, and the blood spills on her pretty white dress.
Katniss leaves before she sees anything else.
---
In the end, Gale breaks the silence, comes right over to her house and invites her over for dinner. She’s so shocked that she just stands there, mouth open, as he waits for some sort of response. Eventually, she nods, slightly, and flushes as he touches her cheek before he walks off.
That evening, she struggles to tell Peeta about Gale’s visit.
Peeta shrugs when she’s done. “I told you before that I don’t mind.”
---
For Gale, Katniss pulls on her father’s hunting jacket and boots.
Gale and Katniss exchange niceties for what seems like hours. She comments on the wonderful job he’s done with the living room, and how well the soup is cooked. He tells her that he likes the way she’s laid flowers in a row against the front of her house.
“I’m glad you’re back,” she says before she can stop herself.
He smiles when he hands her a cup of tea. “Me too.”
---
When she’s leaving, as Gale’s hands touch her shoulders to slide on her jacket, she suddenly can’t help herself:
“You still killed my sister.”
Gale’s fingers linger on the jacket.
“Her or me, Katniss. Who would you have chosen, if you had the choice?”
Her, of course! she longs to yell, but her tongue seems to swell in her mouth when she can’t pick the proper answer.
---
Peeta’s still up when she gets back. He’s got a set of old paints in front of him, and a blank canvas placed against a makeshift easel. The television is on, whining quietly in the background.
“Nothing happened,” she preempts as she drops her sweater on the table.
“I know,” Peeta replies.
Something about the nonchalance in his tone bothers her, and Katniss suddenly feels like the sixteen year old who was made of brashness and boldness and little else.
“Something could have happened. He still loves me, you know.”
Peeta sighs. “You’re not mine, Katniss. You belong to nobody.”
Katniss feels like she should really say something, but won't.
---
Gale accosts her in town during her weekly trip to replenish Haymitch’s ever growing collection of liquor (she thinks he’s taken to hoarding in lieu of an actual life or real physical activity). Before she even realizes it, his hand is gripping her wrist, and he’s dragging her behind an abandoned warehouse, where bright yellow dandelions grow in the shade.
“You love me. Real or not?”
Gale’s peering at her with an intensity she’s never seen before. His grip tightens, and she winces when he inches closer.
“Stop it, Gale,” she whispers, pulling back. He doesn’t let go.
“Real or not?” he repeats.
He kisses her, hard, knocking her head against the dirty bricks behind her. She doesn’t kiss back, but she can’t contain a slight moan when his hand goes to the back of her head and plays with the locks that have fallen out of her braid.
“Real,” he says as he peers into her eyes, and walks away.
She cries because there’s nothing else to do.
---
She considers scraping her lifelong plans and numerous objections about children. Peeta gives her the strangest look when she starts mumbling about babies and the soot that refused to settle in District 12, but the moment tumbles ahead, barely acknowledged.
A few days later, she imagines for a moment that she’s pregnant and panics. She downs three bottles of Haymitch’s liquor and refuses to let Peeta touch her when they clamber into bed that night.
---
Peeta leaves for a couple weeks. He’s been meaning to visit Annie and the new baby for months (“she’s the only one I know who’s as crazy as me,” he says, only half-joking), and Katniss is still technically confined to her district, so she sends him off with a kiss and a basket of food she didn’t make.
“I’ll miss you,” she whispers to nobody in particular when she closes the door.
---
This time, she breaks first.
Katniss actually picks up the phone she so despises, dials the only number that she’s had ingrained on her memory for months. Gale answers with a yawn in his throat, still half-asleep on a lazy Sunday morning.
“I miss us. Does that make any sense?”
Gale is silent for awhile, just breathing.
---
They leave their bows and arrows behind.
The trails in the woods that they used to take have all but faded from disuse. In their place are new paths, mostly made from falling rainwater and occasional use by the more amateur of hunters that now line District 12’s streets.
They sit by the lake, side by side, shoulders touching.
“You never talked about it. What happened in the Arena. Not really.”
She frowns, throws a stone across the calm water. “Never wanted to.”
“Would you? If I asked?”
She ponders, shakes her head. “I like you too much.”
Gale shakes his head with a laugh. “Little Catnip, protector of the defenseless.”
---
It may have always been Gale.
They make it back to his house before the moon rises. He offers her some liquor that looks expensive and much fancier than she and Gale have ever been or will ever be. She reaches for it initially, and then makes a choice. If she’s going to do this, really do this, she needs stone cold sobriety on her side, not a woozy head and flimsy memories.
“Let’s go to bed,” she says, shakily, as he puts the liquor back into the wooden cabinet
She strips, like she did so many times in the Capitol. Gale watches, eyes flashing, as she lies down on the bed, drawing the blanket over her bare skin.
“I’m not going to have sex with you,” she says when he presses against her back, half-hard.
“I know,” he whispers, kissing the back of her head.
He holds her and she lets him and they sleep, exhausted.
---
When she wakes up, he’s staring at her. She tells him that it’s creepy, and he laughs and he kisses her, the waves of the blue sheets crashing around them.
---
Gale goes down on her like he does everything: With absolute single mindedness.
He’s careful, alarmingly so, like he’s somehow afraid she’s going to make for the door at any moment. His hands run across the center of her, fingertips dragging along the taught flesh of her stomach, across the meager expanse of her chest. His mouth is disturbingly familiar, and she rocks with the ebb and flow of him.
“Please,” she says, once.
Katniss notices the differences between Gale and Peeta’s fingers inside her, and the way Peeta breathes between her thighs while Gale pants against her hip. She notices how Gale is quiet and consumed while Peeta and his mouth never seem to stop whispering. She even notices that Peeta’s hair sticks to his forehead while Gale’s becomes wild, twisted.
But when she comes, it feels exactly the same, and this is somehow the mot unnerving part of the whole thing.
---
Peeta calls that night, from Annie’s house. He doesn’t think anything of it when Katniss doesn’t pick up, just assumes that she went to bed early.
---
She lays on top of the sheets, her hair tangled and her hands sweaty.
“Why did you come back, Gale?”
He kisses up her spine, bites into her shoulder until she whimpers into the darkness. She screams when she comes a third time, and he clutches at her waist so hard she’s afraid he’s going to draw blood.
---
She calls the number that Peeta left for Annie’s house. She hangs up before the phone can ring.
---
Back up against the wall, and she’s not sure if she can’t breathe or if she simply doesn’t want to.
(Gale made her dinner that night. He’s a surprisingly adept cook, and she wonders when he got so good at roasting meat. No bread though, she realized almost immediately, but then again, Gale’s not an idiot.)
Even like this, unrestrained and bordering on violent, Gale is still somehow the boy she met in the woods.
---
Peeta brings back drawings of Annie and Annie’s child, brilliant watercolors of the ocean that surrounds District 4. He talks animatedly about the progress Annie is making, and how Johanna Mason of all people has moved to District 4 to help out with the child. He makes an offhand comment about how close Finnick and Johanna were, but doesn’t press the underlying matter when Katniss doesn’t answer.
Katniss can still feel Gale around her, inside her, and his memory makes her squirm in her seat until Peeta asks if she’s ill.
---
Peeta knows, she thinks. He’s not stupid, and they haven’t made love since before he left for District 4, so when she starts sleeping in the downstairs bedroom, he doesn’t make any comment, except to say that particular room gets drafty at night.
He brings her a heavy blanket the next day, puts it on the barren bed.
---
Katniss knows why Gale came back.
It’s simple: She could live without him, but he can’t live without her.
---
“You’re sleeping with him now.”
It’s not a question, just an expression of the reality of the situation. Katniss doesn’t attempt to deny it, because lieslieslies have gotten in their way in the past, and she frankly doesn’t have the energy to concoct a story to ease his mind.
“Do you want me to move out?” Peeta asks.
“Why would I want you to move out?”
Peeta continues flipping channels on the television. “I said it before, Katniss. You don’t belong to me.”
“What if I want to belong to you? Would you fight for me?”
Peeta turns off the television.
---
Peeta comes home the next day with a bloody nose. It’s not hard to imagine how he got it, or how Gale’s fist looks from the blows that mar Peeta’s still-fair skin. She spends awhile trying to get him to go to the doctor’s, but he refuses, and stuffs an old shirt over his face until the bleeding stops.
Katniss wonders how she ended up right where she started.
---
The one-year mark of Prim’s death comes and goes. Peeta and Katniss mourn, and Gale leaves pink flowers on their front porch when they’re out buying milk.
Katniss doesn’t cry, but Peeta does. She wants to yell at him, remind him that he never really knew sweet, sweet Prim, but she’s just too tired to open her mouth.
---
“I love him.”
Gale’s heart races next to her, sweat clinging to their entwined hands.
“I know.”
“I love you too.”
“I know.”
---
Peeta sits in their bedroom, folding her nightclothes and putting them into a neat little pile on the dresser. She wants to tell him that he doesn’t need to do that, since she’s just going to put them on again tonight, but he looks content in his perpetual domesticity.
She knows how Gale’s room looks, clothes strewn every which way, and she thinks that, together, they would make a mess of a house, of life, in a matter of days.
(It’s not about Gale being a slob, really. It’s about the hurricane that they are when they are together, two people pretending to be stronger than they ever could be for the sake of everybody around them.)
---
Gale marries the girl in the white dress. Katniss wonders if he’s still punishing her for choosing Peeta when she finds a little blue envelope with a wedding invitation in her mailbox.
---
Katniss is glad Gale came back, in the end. She’s glad that she gets to choose.
fin
Disclaimer: Decidedly not mine.
the rest of the alternate takes series
| i. the capitol wins | ii. prim does not die | iii. peeta never recovers | iv. katniss does not shoot coin | vi. katniss refuses to have children | vii. annie dies, finnick does not | viii. katniss dies