[fic: the hunger games]
my feet on higher ground
the hunger games. gale x prim. mockingjay spoilers. fires leave ashes, and ashes leave stains. (this is not your story, little duck) ~4260 | pg13
“Primrose Everdeen!”
it’s the start of a story, but not your story.
The first year is the hardest. Everyone tells you that, Victors and survivors alike tell you, the first year is hardest. Gale doesn’t know. His first year stretches endlessly, it seems. He cannot see the second year, where it will not be so difficult. All he sees is this year and a mirror’s worth of bad luck.
He shatters them all, usually with his fists, slivers of glass cutting into his knuckles. He leaves little broken pieces on the floor of his home (but it’s not home; home was the Seam and home was hunting in the woods with Katniss, and Primrose waiting for them with plaits in her sun-fine hair) where they trap the light in a silvery embrace. He doesn’t step on them, goes around them until a maid comes through to sweep them away. It feels like a travesty.
He asked Katniss once, a lifetime ago, if she’d ever be able to look at him-without thinking of Prim, eaten alive by flames. But that hadn’t been what he was really asking.
In District 2 they give him a house, a nice one. A head Peacekeeper had lived here, and had died in the Nut. There had been a fine film of dust, a layer of unkempt grim over the furniture, that Gale hadn’t had the energy to scrub away. Had only collapsed onto the bed of a dead man and had watched the dust fibers dance in the shafted light. They sent him a maid later, because of his smell-a disused scent that made people uncomfortable.
The maid has turned his vanity’s mirror the right away, facing him. He catches his reflection, sunken and hollow in the cheekbones and under his eyes, but still strong and broad, with warm golden skin and dark hair. Still Gale Hawthorne, he thinks.
His fist rears back and shatters the mirror in big, sharp chunks.
Gale shows up at her door three days after Katniss has gone. He carries two squirrels on a thin, fine wire over his shoulder. He lays the bloody carcasses at your feet.
“I can show you have to skin them,” he offers.
“I know how,” you say, and surprise him.
On Katniss’s third day in the arena (alive alive alive, you think to yourself and isn’t the important part? She’s trying, just like she promised) Gale comes with a deer corpse. You don’t let yourself cry over it, though parts of you want to. Katniss always felt bad, when she brought meat home to eat and you cried over a dead bunny. Meat is meat.
“Oh no, Gale,” you say. “You need to sell that.” You’re thinking of poor Hazelle, overworked and overtired, and Rory, Vick, and little Posy, all too skinny.
“Prim,” Gale says, and what he doesn’t say is Katniss is gone and neither of you hunt. He’s looking at the delicate lacework of purple-blue veins crawling up your arms like spiderwebs. You resist the urge to yank down your sleeves.
You do take the deer, because of the look in his eyes, because you know Katniss probably made him promise to keep you and your mother alive but you insist he takes some of it with him, to sell or feed his own family, it doesn’t matter. The feeling is sort of heady, being able to make him do what you want him to. Katniss would have never. Katniss always knows she course, or pretends she does, and refuses to let anyone steer her elsewhere. You? You’ve learned to let the wind toss you where it pleases, to let Katniss take by your hand and lead.
But you bend Gale to your will, and you bask in the glory of it.
He thinks about calling Katniss, every day. His hand hovers over the phone. Just call her, just tell her-Katniss, Katniss, I need to hear your voice I need to tell you that I miss Prim too that I-I need to tell you.
But then he’ll see something-a flash of blonde through his window, the wind playing at the edges of his home. His hand will curl into a fist.
No, he will think. No.
You can’t go home.
And Katniss kisses that boy, who says he’s loved her his whole life even though you’ve never seen him before, except perhaps once or twice in a sort of dismissing glance. But Katniss kisses him like it’s true, like she’s loved him all her life, and your lips tingle with a sort of awakening.
Your mother rises awkwardly and switches off the screen. You sit with your hands so neatly folded, and your ankles so carefully crossed, until your mother goes to bed. She wanders the house like a ghost, sometimes, and you know she’s listening for the sound of Katniss’s boots clomping on the wood, or her voice cursing Buttercup. But your mother has made a promise, and she never goes to that dark place she did when your father died.
The house grows silent around you. Your stand, and find your father’s hand-me-down leather jacket, still carrying Katniss’s earthy scent. You press your nose to the cuff, inhale, before slipping it on and walking out into the night.
You don’t have to go far. You find him at the edge of field bordering the Seam, just before the electrified fence. The grass is tall, but so is he, and you can make out his shoulders and the low arch of his neck as his head hangs.
There isn’t anything to say, so you only step closer and wait. There’s no Katniss, and you’ve always followed her lead, gauged her reactions and mimicked. You’re not Katniss Everdeen’s little sister now, but just plain old Primrose Everdeen and maybe you don’t even know what that means, what it could mean. You can only do what feels right.
So you lay your hand on his shoulder. A muscle jumps but he doesn’t shake you free. His shoulder is broad, firm, and warm. A little sliver of something you’ve never felt before worms its way into your heart and starts to chew through it like an apple.
“Katniss,” Gale says roughly, “she’s-”
“She’s doing what she has to, so she can come home to us,” you say, but only because you think that’s what he wants to hear.
And then Katniss Everdeen does come home (alive alive alive and clinging to the boy’s hand like it’s the only thing keeping her feet on solid ground). Gale stands like a marble statue beside you.
She wants you back into the little places she had placed you in, wrapped up so lovingly with forehead kisses and sweet, soft songs in the middle of the dark, cold nights and Gale in the forest and you at home with plaits in your hair.
Except, she’s still holding the boy’s hand like it’s the only real thing anymore and you’ve found those familiar places to be suddenly too small. You bump your elbows on the corners, crack your head on the ceiling, and you want out. Katniss’s shadow felt soft and warm once, now it just feels suffocating, hot.
This time, between the end of one Game and the start of the next? It’s just another game. A waiting game.
Gale visits Annie Cresta-the papers never went through, changing her name to Odair, and in the end she never really pushes for it-out of an odd sense of obligation. He owes it to Finnick, in a way, who he never really knew except that he watched him die and that sort of binds you to another person. You take pieces of their life and sew it onto your skin.
And he likes Annie, because she doesn’t really know him. “Oh, you were Finnick’s friend,” she says in a vague sort of way with a vague sort of smile-not really mad, but done with the world and everyone in it; she had drowned her faith and her belief in the waters of her Game. Her toes are always curled, as if clinging to sand.
He never stays long, and they never really talk, but she bakes him sourdough bread every time he visits, gives him tea that doesn’t taste like anything he’s ever had because the water is always cleaner in 4. Or it had been.
Coming one time would have been enough. Gale doesn’t have a place in Annie’s carefully ordered world-ordered because she needs it to be, because order is something she can make sense of-but somehow Annie fits into his. She reminds him a bit of his mother, the strength hidden beneath her surface, a delicate spine lined with steel. He and Hazelle talk occasionally, but she’s gone back to 12 because she was born there, married there, had her children there-she’ll die there.
But she never asks him to visit, and Gale doesn’t begrudge her that.
When the baby comes along, Gale’s visit taper and thin and then stop. He doesn’t feel right, looking into that red, squished up face. A few more years, if you were only a few more years older, you could have been in the Capitol, you could have been there with the other children and Prim-I could have killed you too.
There’s no proof that it was his bomb, he knows, but there was never any proof that it wasn’t.
It doesn’t feel right.
The last time, he draws a finger down the baby’s cubby face. All four fingers and one thumb closes around it, holds tight. “You didn’t name him Finnick,” Gale says.
In her offhanded way, Annie blinks. “Oh. No. Finnick wouldn’t have liked that, I don’t think,” she explains. “He would have wanted him to have a fresh start. The past. The past is just too dark.”
Gale wonders if Katniss will name her daughter Primrose.
You’re there the first time Gale wakes up after the whipping. You come in sometimes, while Katniss is off with Haymitch, or in the woods, or with Peeta, and check on him, place your hand above his lips just to feel his soft, even breath across your skin. You’re not sure why it’s so important (except maybe you do and you don’t want to say it).
Gale has always been Katniss’s, her name carved into his arm since the first time she brought him home. And you may no longer fit into the little slots Katniss assigned for you, but Gale does or, at least, is still trying to.
When you reach over to change his bandages, he snaps awake, and his hand curls around your wrist, the lingering terror of agony a tense, hot wave leaping off from him and melting into you. It takes him a moment to see you, blinking away the last images of the square and the sensation of the leather whip against his back.
“Prim,” he says, and it feels like the first time he’s said your name. His thumb moves across the pulse at your wrist.
He lets you go and his head falls sideways. You stand up and leave the room, and there is a hum of nerves ruminating at the backs of your knees like a frightened rabbit. Your lips are tingling again, like when you watched Katniss kiss Peeta, except this time you realize what it is. You want to know what that feels like, lips on yours.
You can’t stop yourself. You look back at the room where Gale is.
Fire comes. Fire will always come. After all, you are sister to the girl the world set ablaze.
District 12 burns brilliant orange in the dark, spanning out, thick, heavy, black plumes of smoke twisting upward to the stars in long curled tendrils. The survivors huddle together. Even this far into the woods, there’s heat from the flames that gnaw at heart of their home. But it doesn’t warm them.
Rory, Vick, and Posy sleep against a soot-covered, exhausted Hazelle and you slip passed them and your mother. You find Gale with his back propped against a tree, bow across his knee and an arrow notched.
This isn’t like the day when Katniss first kissed Peeta. You know what do you. You lay your hand against his neck, he arches into it. What an odd sensation, to know he needs you. You don’t think anyone has needed you, not really. Katniss is strong, and your mother is wise, and you’re just little Primrose Everdeen, the Girl on Fire’s sister.
You crouch beside him, knees in the wet moss. “We’re going to be okay,” you tell him.
He doesn’t say anything. Maybe that’s worse.
Your hands cup his face, turn him toward you. He goes. There are shadows in his eyes. There’s always been shadows there. He was a revolution man when the fire was only a spark in your sister’s heart, but fires leave ashes and ashes leave stains.
And Katniss Everdeen laid on the beach that night and kissed Peeta Mellark, while District 12 burned.
“We will,” you say.
“Okay, Prim,” Gale says, but maybe just to pacify. He rests a familiar hand on your hip. These are the arms that had picked you up, carried you from the courtyard that day when Katniss herself placed upon the altar of the Capitol’s greed.
You bring him close, you rest your forehead against his. You both stay there, breathing.
Gale marries a woman from the office he works at. Even in a District like 2 everyone is still looking for someone to cling to, to hold on to. He is too. And he clings to her, this woman with an anonymous face. Her hair is an unassuming brown, her eyes are hazel. She doesn’t look like Katniss, or anyone he knows, at all. That’s a relief.
His wife never asks, about the Mockingjay or those days in 13 when it was still under the icy grip of Coin. Maybe she doesn’t care. Maybe she knows he’d never tell her, never let her into those parts of his life, and she’s too afraid of being alone again to risk the damage that would cause.
They lay side by side on the bed, their warm bodies seeking each other out, holding and gripping because the world is still a storm and, though tenuous, they are each other’s rocks.
It’s not love, Gale knows. And she does too. But maybe all the love in them burned out, crinkled and blackened like paper in an open flame. Maybe all the love in the world was sweep away, like the ashes of District 12.
But he knows that’s wrong. He knows that’s not what Prim would have wanted, for either of them. But there isn’t anything left in me, Prim.
And beside his wife he does not love, Gale closes his eyes and dreams of home.
Katniss is busy, in 13, and distant. Without Peeta she only seems half a person, like the important bits of her are tangled up between Peeta’s fingers and when he leaves her, he yanks them like hook lines from her body, leaving her bleeding and raw. She only has the barest sort of time for you, late night hugs in the dark, her scarred arms around your middle as you sleep.
Gale keeps you company, but he’s busy too, cloistered all day with that District 3 Victor. You feel restless, lethargic. In this place, they don’t expect you to be anything more than Katniss Everdeen the Mockingjay’s little sister, but you don’t want that to be all you are. You grope blindly in your sister’s shadows, you bang your head against the walls she placed around you.
That’s why you push so hard to go with your mother, to work beside her with the gory wounds and sickness, the hollowed desperation. This is something she can’t do, your sister, she can’t heal. At her heart, she is a healer, but she doesn’t know how to, she doesn’t have the patience for it, the strength to pull herself back up if it fails.
You feel a bit like a traitor, thinking that.
Maybe that’s what you try so hard, to come up with a cure for Peeta, screaming and crying and clawing at his face while Katniss stands in the corner with her arms pressed tightly around herself so she does not fly apart. There are still bruises around her neck from where Peeta had squeezed-Peeta, who would have died for your sister.
Maybe that’s why, when it fails and only makes things worse for poor, hijacked Peeta, it’s the one defeat that burns through you like salt on a wound.
Katniss has never, not once, failed you. But now, when it matters, you fail her.
Gale finds you hiding in one of the emptier corridors, crouched to your hunches and you arms curled around your middle. You’re trying not to cry, but you’re not succeeding. You’re not Katniss, never will be, who can hide her pain and her grief beneath layers of steel and ice.
“Hey there, little duck,” he says softly, and a big hand settles on the top of your head. “It’s okay. You tried. You tried.”
You knuckle away the tears the collect at your lashes. “I made it worse,” you snuffle, pathetic.
“No,” Gale assures you, and pulls you to your feet. “What the Capitol did to him, nothing’s worse than that. Just having someone try to save him, makes him better.”
“He might never be okay!” you burst out, thinking (because sometimes you are selfish and mean and cruel and sometimes you revile in it, in the idea of being selfish and mean and cruel because you know Katniss would have never thought you capable of it) that if Peeta Mellark is never okay again, Katniss Everdeen will never be okay again.
“He will,” Gale says with certain. “When the Capitol is in ruins, when Snow is dead, when all the creators of the Games have suffered, when we can go home without having to worry about reapings-he’ll be okay then.”
You peer up at him. There’s a fervor in his voice. You’ve never heard it before.
“I’m going to destroy them all, Prim,” he tells you, with such solemnity that you cannot doubt it. “The Capitol, Snow, all of them. I won’t let them a single one escape. All that matters is that they pay for everything that they’ve done.”
A trembling starts up at your knees, and then your elbows, and then your hips. You’re terrified, of that light in his eyes. Katniss is the Girl on Fire, but Gale is living wildfire-and you cannot control wildfire. You’re afraid for him, suddenly, of what will remain when the fire has nothing left to burn and dies out.
Your fingers curl in his shirt. “Gale,” you says, and tug. The force of your pull is shocking, to him, and he stumbles forward a little. You go up on the tips of your toes, and seal your mouth over his.
Kissing is only a theory, not a practice, for you, so you’re only led by blind instincts, and from what you gleamed between Katniss and Peeta on the screen. Your mouth slants here, your hands go here, and maybe part your lips just a little. But, generally, you’re supposed to be kissed back.
Gale doesn’t move, not at first, and you know the minute you pull away you’re never going to be able to look at him without turning a bright, beat red as mortification eats its up your neck.
But then you feel the crush of his hands over your arms and you’re being lifted-only a couple of inches-off your feet so your heights even out and oh. Oh. Gale Hawthorne is kissing you, real kissing. Not even like Katniss and Peeta in the cave. Real. He’s so solid and firm, and you’re caught up in the sensation of him, the texture, but you’re not afraid. Maybe, you think, maybe you were made for this-for him.
Your knuckles brush across his face, and he jerks away. You hit your feet hard, and there’s a high flush off color painted on the arches of Gale’s cheeks. He blows out a breath. He can’t look at you.
“Sorry,” he says, and does he know he breaks your heart with that little word. You’ve said it a million times. Sorry. But you don’t think you’ve ever broken a heart with it. “Sorry.”
“Gale,” you begin, but you really don’t know what you want to say except maybe kiss me again.
But he would he? You don’t know, so you swallow your words and you both stand in awkward, empty silence.
Until, of course, Gale flees.
There are people piled on top of people in District 13, but it feels empty and sparse with Katniss and Peeta and Gale and Finnick gone. Only days before you kissed Gale in a dark, empty corridor. It feels like years ago.
You sit beside Annie Cresta, because you worried she’d be lonely and lost and sad with Finnick gone. Maybe now you can admit, to yourself at least, that you sought her out for company, because you didn’t want to be lonely and lost and sad.
Your hands, pale little things, rest against your knee. Annie is humming, patching a torn blanket. There’s always a chore due for completion in District 13, but since Katniss has gone they’ve given you run of the bunker.
“When they come back,” you say for no real reason, “we’ll be free of the Capitol.”
Annie looks up, blinks, as if seeing her for the first time. Her smile is like the unsure sun peering through the grey clouds after a heavy rainstorm.
“Yes. And then we can start over,” she says. Her fingers touch the loose tumble of your hair. You’ve taken to wearing it down, recently. “Or begin.”
Or begin, you think. Maybe when Gale comes back, they won’t have to be those assigned roles they’ve always had. Maybe they could find new spaces for themselves, carve out a home in wood not eaten by rot and malice and worms. You don’t just have to be Katniss’s sister. Gale doesn’t have to be just Katniss’s. Everyone can be whatever they want to be, you think, maybe Gale and you can be something together.
You hold Annie’s hand tightly in your own. Hold it until President Coin herself comes to you with that smile-sort of like an early frost, with dying grass poking out from beneath the sheet of ice.
“I have a very special task for you, Soldier Everdeen.”
It feels important, because it’s something outside of Katniss, because the president calls you Solider Everdeen like being the Mockingjay’s sister doesn’t matter.
You go.
Gale finds himself at Annie’s home by the sea with a storm brewing way out on the horizon line. He watches it, hands stuffed in his pockets, curled into fists.
Annie steps out beside him, wiggling her toes into the sand. She plants her baby on the soft, white sand and he coos happily, already taking to the water and the sight and sound and smell of it. Already so much his father.
It’s the first time in months he’s visited.
Katniss is marrying Peeta.
“I kissed Primrose Everdeen,” he says, and there. It’s out. He’s said it. The words he’s never been able to say to Katniss, even though he wanted to over and over again. Only to tell her, to show her that she wasn’t alone, that she wasn’t the only one Prim had left her imprint on. He could feel her, moving just underneath his skin. And how good it felt.
I kissed Primrose Everdeen. She kissed me, and then I kissed her and I didn’t think about Katniss, not in that moment, even though I should have. I didn’t think about anything at all, except that she felt good where she was. “I kissed her.”
Annie only regards him with guarded, dark eyes. “Did it mean anything?” she asks.
“No,” he says, and feels like weeping. “But it might have.”
Gale crashes to his knees, and rests his head against the soft curve of Annie’s stomach, clutching at the wispy hem of her skirt like an exhausted child. The tsunami of that terrible first year finally crashes and breaks against the rocks of the second.
Five years after the Capitol burned and Primrose with, Gale’s first year of survival ends.
You think you hear your name, somewhere far enough so it’s lost among the cries of pain and shock, the smell of smoke and ash. You crouch down to examine the burn wounds of the closest child. Katniss had a wound like this, her first time in the Games.
“Prim!”
Katniss.
You turn, smiling. Here you two can at last meet each other on equal ground. This is not you waiting for Katniss to come home, watching her fight and bleed and win. This is not her, rushing headlong to shield you from something terrible. You both stand on level ground.
There’s searing, white-hot pain but it flashes up and dies quickly. Your body gives out, because it’s too much, and that’s for the best. Your body simply moves to a place that is behind pain, higher than it.
And for one brilliant, shining moment you know what it’s like to be the Girl on Fire.
the hunger games. gale x prim. mockingjay spoilers. fires leave ashes, and ashes leave stains. (this is not your story, little duck) ~4260 | pg13
“Primrose Everdeen!”
it’s the start of a story, but not your story.
The first year is the hardest. Everyone tells you that, Victors and survivors alike tell you, the first year is hardest. Gale doesn’t know. His first year stretches endlessly, it seems. He cannot see the second year, where it will not be so difficult. All he sees is this year and a mirror’s worth of bad luck.
He shatters them all, usually with his fists, slivers of glass cutting into his knuckles. He leaves little broken pieces on the floor of his home (but it’s not home; home was the Seam and home was hunting in the woods with Katniss, and Primrose waiting for them with plaits in her sun-fine hair) where they trap the light in a silvery embrace. He doesn’t step on them, goes around them until a maid comes through to sweep them away. It feels like a travesty.
He asked Katniss once, a lifetime ago, if she’d ever be able to look at him-without thinking of Prim, eaten alive by flames. But that hadn’t been what he was really asking.
In District 2 they give him a house, a nice one. A head Peacekeeper had lived here, and had died in the Nut. There had been a fine film of dust, a layer of unkempt grim over the furniture, that Gale hadn’t had the energy to scrub away. Had only collapsed onto the bed of a dead man and had watched the dust fibers dance in the shafted light. They sent him a maid later, because of his smell-a disused scent that made people uncomfortable.
The maid has turned his vanity’s mirror the right away, facing him. He catches his reflection, sunken and hollow in the cheekbones and under his eyes, but still strong and broad, with warm golden skin and dark hair. Still Gale Hawthorne, he thinks.
His fist rears back and shatters the mirror in big, sharp chunks.
Gale shows up at her door three days after Katniss has gone. He carries two squirrels on a thin, fine wire over his shoulder. He lays the bloody carcasses at your feet.
“I can show you have to skin them,” he offers.
“I know how,” you say, and surprise him.
On Katniss’s third day in the arena (alive alive alive, you think to yourself and isn’t the important part? She’s trying, just like she promised) Gale comes with a deer corpse. You don’t let yourself cry over it, though parts of you want to. Katniss always felt bad, when she brought meat home to eat and you cried over a dead bunny. Meat is meat.
“Oh no, Gale,” you say. “You need to sell that.” You’re thinking of poor Hazelle, overworked and overtired, and Rory, Vick, and little Posy, all too skinny.
“Prim,” Gale says, and what he doesn’t say is Katniss is gone and neither of you hunt. He’s looking at the delicate lacework of purple-blue veins crawling up your arms like spiderwebs. You resist the urge to yank down your sleeves.
You do take the deer, because of the look in his eyes, because you know Katniss probably made him promise to keep you and your mother alive but you insist he takes some of it with him, to sell or feed his own family, it doesn’t matter. The feeling is sort of heady, being able to make him do what you want him to. Katniss would have never. Katniss always knows she course, or pretends she does, and refuses to let anyone steer her elsewhere. You? You’ve learned to let the wind toss you where it pleases, to let Katniss take by your hand and lead.
But you bend Gale to your will, and you bask in the glory of it.
He thinks about calling Katniss, every day. His hand hovers over the phone. Just call her, just tell her-Katniss, Katniss, I need to hear your voice I need to tell you that I miss Prim too that I-I need to tell you.
But then he’ll see something-a flash of blonde through his window, the wind playing at the edges of his home. His hand will curl into a fist.
No, he will think. No.
You can’t go home.
And Katniss kisses that boy, who says he’s loved her his whole life even though you’ve never seen him before, except perhaps once or twice in a sort of dismissing glance. But Katniss kisses him like it’s true, like she’s loved him all her life, and your lips tingle with a sort of awakening.
Your mother rises awkwardly and switches off the screen. You sit with your hands so neatly folded, and your ankles so carefully crossed, until your mother goes to bed. She wanders the house like a ghost, sometimes, and you know she’s listening for the sound of Katniss’s boots clomping on the wood, or her voice cursing Buttercup. But your mother has made a promise, and she never goes to that dark place she did when your father died.
The house grows silent around you. Your stand, and find your father’s hand-me-down leather jacket, still carrying Katniss’s earthy scent. You press your nose to the cuff, inhale, before slipping it on and walking out into the night.
You don’t have to go far. You find him at the edge of field bordering the Seam, just before the electrified fence. The grass is tall, but so is he, and you can make out his shoulders and the low arch of his neck as his head hangs.
There isn’t anything to say, so you only step closer and wait. There’s no Katniss, and you’ve always followed her lead, gauged her reactions and mimicked. You’re not Katniss Everdeen’s little sister now, but just plain old Primrose Everdeen and maybe you don’t even know what that means, what it could mean. You can only do what feels right.
So you lay your hand on his shoulder. A muscle jumps but he doesn’t shake you free. His shoulder is broad, firm, and warm. A little sliver of something you’ve never felt before worms its way into your heart and starts to chew through it like an apple.
“Katniss,” Gale says roughly, “she’s-”
“She’s doing what she has to, so she can come home to us,” you say, but only because you think that’s what he wants to hear.
And then Katniss Everdeen does come home (alive alive alive and clinging to the boy’s hand like it’s the only thing keeping her feet on solid ground). Gale stands like a marble statue beside you.
She wants you back into the little places she had placed you in, wrapped up so lovingly with forehead kisses and sweet, soft songs in the middle of the dark, cold nights and Gale in the forest and you at home with plaits in your hair.
Except, she’s still holding the boy’s hand like it’s the only real thing anymore and you’ve found those familiar places to be suddenly too small. You bump your elbows on the corners, crack your head on the ceiling, and you want out. Katniss’s shadow felt soft and warm once, now it just feels suffocating, hot.
This time, between the end of one Game and the start of the next? It’s just another game. A waiting game.
Gale visits Annie Cresta-the papers never went through, changing her name to Odair, and in the end she never really pushes for it-out of an odd sense of obligation. He owes it to Finnick, in a way, who he never really knew except that he watched him die and that sort of binds you to another person. You take pieces of their life and sew it onto your skin.
And he likes Annie, because she doesn’t really know him. “Oh, you were Finnick’s friend,” she says in a vague sort of way with a vague sort of smile-not really mad, but done with the world and everyone in it; she had drowned her faith and her belief in the waters of her Game. Her toes are always curled, as if clinging to sand.
He never stays long, and they never really talk, but she bakes him sourdough bread every time he visits, gives him tea that doesn’t taste like anything he’s ever had because the water is always cleaner in 4. Or it had been.
Coming one time would have been enough. Gale doesn’t have a place in Annie’s carefully ordered world-ordered because she needs it to be, because order is something she can make sense of-but somehow Annie fits into his. She reminds him a bit of his mother, the strength hidden beneath her surface, a delicate spine lined with steel. He and Hazelle talk occasionally, but she’s gone back to 12 because she was born there, married there, had her children there-she’ll die there.
But she never asks him to visit, and Gale doesn’t begrudge her that.
When the baby comes along, Gale’s visit taper and thin and then stop. He doesn’t feel right, looking into that red, squished up face. A few more years, if you were only a few more years older, you could have been in the Capitol, you could have been there with the other children and Prim-I could have killed you too.
There’s no proof that it was his bomb, he knows, but there was never any proof that it wasn’t.
It doesn’t feel right.
The last time, he draws a finger down the baby’s cubby face. All four fingers and one thumb closes around it, holds tight. “You didn’t name him Finnick,” Gale says.
In her offhanded way, Annie blinks. “Oh. No. Finnick wouldn’t have liked that, I don’t think,” she explains. “He would have wanted him to have a fresh start. The past. The past is just too dark.”
Gale wonders if Katniss will name her daughter Primrose.
You’re there the first time Gale wakes up after the whipping. You come in sometimes, while Katniss is off with Haymitch, or in the woods, or with Peeta, and check on him, place your hand above his lips just to feel his soft, even breath across your skin. You’re not sure why it’s so important (except maybe you do and you don’t want to say it).
Gale has always been Katniss’s, her name carved into his arm since the first time she brought him home. And you may no longer fit into the little slots Katniss assigned for you, but Gale does or, at least, is still trying to.
When you reach over to change his bandages, he snaps awake, and his hand curls around your wrist, the lingering terror of agony a tense, hot wave leaping off from him and melting into you. It takes him a moment to see you, blinking away the last images of the square and the sensation of the leather whip against his back.
“Prim,” he says, and it feels like the first time he’s said your name. His thumb moves across the pulse at your wrist.
He lets you go and his head falls sideways. You stand up and leave the room, and there is a hum of nerves ruminating at the backs of your knees like a frightened rabbit. Your lips are tingling again, like when you watched Katniss kiss Peeta, except this time you realize what it is. You want to know what that feels like, lips on yours.
You can’t stop yourself. You look back at the room where Gale is.
Fire comes. Fire will always come. After all, you are sister to the girl the world set ablaze.
District 12 burns brilliant orange in the dark, spanning out, thick, heavy, black plumes of smoke twisting upward to the stars in long curled tendrils. The survivors huddle together. Even this far into the woods, there’s heat from the flames that gnaw at heart of their home. But it doesn’t warm them.
Rory, Vick, and Posy sleep against a soot-covered, exhausted Hazelle and you slip passed them and your mother. You find Gale with his back propped against a tree, bow across his knee and an arrow notched.
This isn’t like the day when Katniss first kissed Peeta. You know what do you. You lay your hand against his neck, he arches into it. What an odd sensation, to know he needs you. You don’t think anyone has needed you, not really. Katniss is strong, and your mother is wise, and you’re just little Primrose Everdeen, the Girl on Fire’s sister.
You crouch beside him, knees in the wet moss. “We’re going to be okay,” you tell him.
He doesn’t say anything. Maybe that’s worse.
Your hands cup his face, turn him toward you. He goes. There are shadows in his eyes. There’s always been shadows there. He was a revolution man when the fire was only a spark in your sister’s heart, but fires leave ashes and ashes leave stains.
And Katniss Everdeen laid on the beach that night and kissed Peeta Mellark, while District 12 burned.
“We will,” you say.
“Okay, Prim,” Gale says, but maybe just to pacify. He rests a familiar hand on your hip. These are the arms that had picked you up, carried you from the courtyard that day when Katniss herself placed upon the altar of the Capitol’s greed.
You bring him close, you rest your forehead against his. You both stay there, breathing.
Gale marries a woman from the office he works at. Even in a District like 2 everyone is still looking for someone to cling to, to hold on to. He is too. And he clings to her, this woman with an anonymous face. Her hair is an unassuming brown, her eyes are hazel. She doesn’t look like Katniss, or anyone he knows, at all. That’s a relief.
His wife never asks, about the Mockingjay or those days in 13 when it was still under the icy grip of Coin. Maybe she doesn’t care. Maybe she knows he’d never tell her, never let her into those parts of his life, and she’s too afraid of being alone again to risk the damage that would cause.
They lay side by side on the bed, their warm bodies seeking each other out, holding and gripping because the world is still a storm and, though tenuous, they are each other’s rocks.
It’s not love, Gale knows. And she does too. But maybe all the love in them burned out, crinkled and blackened like paper in an open flame. Maybe all the love in the world was sweep away, like the ashes of District 12.
But he knows that’s wrong. He knows that’s not what Prim would have wanted, for either of them. But there isn’t anything left in me, Prim.
And beside his wife he does not love, Gale closes his eyes and dreams of home.
Katniss is busy, in 13, and distant. Without Peeta she only seems half a person, like the important bits of her are tangled up between Peeta’s fingers and when he leaves her, he yanks them like hook lines from her body, leaving her bleeding and raw. She only has the barest sort of time for you, late night hugs in the dark, her scarred arms around your middle as you sleep.
Gale keeps you company, but he’s busy too, cloistered all day with that District 3 Victor. You feel restless, lethargic. In this place, they don’t expect you to be anything more than Katniss Everdeen the Mockingjay’s little sister, but you don’t want that to be all you are. You grope blindly in your sister’s shadows, you bang your head against the walls she placed around you.
That’s why you push so hard to go with your mother, to work beside her with the gory wounds and sickness, the hollowed desperation. This is something she can’t do, your sister, she can’t heal. At her heart, she is a healer, but she doesn’t know how to, she doesn’t have the patience for it, the strength to pull herself back up if it fails.
You feel a bit like a traitor, thinking that.
Maybe that’s what you try so hard, to come up with a cure for Peeta, screaming and crying and clawing at his face while Katniss stands in the corner with her arms pressed tightly around herself so she does not fly apart. There are still bruises around her neck from where Peeta had squeezed-Peeta, who would have died for your sister.
Maybe that’s why, when it fails and only makes things worse for poor, hijacked Peeta, it’s the one defeat that burns through you like salt on a wound.
Katniss has never, not once, failed you. But now, when it matters, you fail her.
Gale finds you hiding in one of the emptier corridors, crouched to your hunches and you arms curled around your middle. You’re trying not to cry, but you’re not succeeding. You’re not Katniss, never will be, who can hide her pain and her grief beneath layers of steel and ice.
“Hey there, little duck,” he says softly, and a big hand settles on the top of your head. “It’s okay. You tried. You tried.”
You knuckle away the tears the collect at your lashes. “I made it worse,” you snuffle, pathetic.
“No,” Gale assures you, and pulls you to your feet. “What the Capitol did to him, nothing’s worse than that. Just having someone try to save him, makes him better.”
“He might never be okay!” you burst out, thinking (because sometimes you are selfish and mean and cruel and sometimes you revile in it, in the idea of being selfish and mean and cruel because you know Katniss would have never thought you capable of it) that if Peeta Mellark is never okay again, Katniss Everdeen will never be okay again.
“He will,” Gale says with certain. “When the Capitol is in ruins, when Snow is dead, when all the creators of the Games have suffered, when we can go home without having to worry about reapings-he’ll be okay then.”
You peer up at him. There’s a fervor in his voice. You’ve never heard it before.
“I’m going to destroy them all, Prim,” he tells you, with such solemnity that you cannot doubt it. “The Capitol, Snow, all of them. I won’t let them a single one escape. All that matters is that they pay for everything that they’ve done.”
A trembling starts up at your knees, and then your elbows, and then your hips. You’re terrified, of that light in his eyes. Katniss is the Girl on Fire, but Gale is living wildfire-and you cannot control wildfire. You’re afraid for him, suddenly, of what will remain when the fire has nothing left to burn and dies out.
Your fingers curl in his shirt. “Gale,” you says, and tug. The force of your pull is shocking, to him, and he stumbles forward a little. You go up on the tips of your toes, and seal your mouth over his.
Kissing is only a theory, not a practice, for you, so you’re only led by blind instincts, and from what you gleamed between Katniss and Peeta on the screen. Your mouth slants here, your hands go here, and maybe part your lips just a little. But, generally, you’re supposed to be kissed back.
Gale doesn’t move, not at first, and you know the minute you pull away you’re never going to be able to look at him without turning a bright, beat red as mortification eats its up your neck.
But then you feel the crush of his hands over your arms and you’re being lifted-only a couple of inches-off your feet so your heights even out and oh. Oh. Gale Hawthorne is kissing you, real kissing. Not even like Katniss and Peeta in the cave. Real. He’s so solid and firm, and you’re caught up in the sensation of him, the texture, but you’re not afraid. Maybe, you think, maybe you were made for this-for him.
Your knuckles brush across his face, and he jerks away. You hit your feet hard, and there’s a high flush off color painted on the arches of Gale’s cheeks. He blows out a breath. He can’t look at you.
“Sorry,” he says, and does he know he breaks your heart with that little word. You’ve said it a million times. Sorry. But you don’t think you’ve ever broken a heart with it. “Sorry.”
“Gale,” you begin, but you really don’t know what you want to say except maybe kiss me again.
But he would he? You don’t know, so you swallow your words and you both stand in awkward, empty silence.
Until, of course, Gale flees.
There are people piled on top of people in District 13, but it feels empty and sparse with Katniss and Peeta and Gale and Finnick gone. Only days before you kissed Gale in a dark, empty corridor. It feels like years ago.
You sit beside Annie Cresta, because you worried she’d be lonely and lost and sad with Finnick gone. Maybe now you can admit, to yourself at least, that you sought her out for company, because you didn’t want to be lonely and lost and sad.
Your hands, pale little things, rest against your knee. Annie is humming, patching a torn blanket. There’s always a chore due for completion in District 13, but since Katniss has gone they’ve given you run of the bunker.
“When they come back,” you say for no real reason, “we’ll be free of the Capitol.”
Annie looks up, blinks, as if seeing her for the first time. Her smile is like the unsure sun peering through the grey clouds after a heavy rainstorm.
“Yes. And then we can start over,” she says. Her fingers touch the loose tumble of your hair. You’ve taken to wearing it down, recently. “Or begin.”
Or begin, you think. Maybe when Gale comes back, they won’t have to be those assigned roles they’ve always had. Maybe they could find new spaces for themselves, carve out a home in wood not eaten by rot and malice and worms. You don’t just have to be Katniss’s sister. Gale doesn’t have to be just Katniss’s. Everyone can be whatever they want to be, you think, maybe Gale and you can be something together.
You hold Annie’s hand tightly in your own. Hold it until President Coin herself comes to you with that smile-sort of like an early frost, with dying grass poking out from beneath the sheet of ice.
“I have a very special task for you, Soldier Everdeen.”
It feels important, because it’s something outside of Katniss, because the president calls you Solider Everdeen like being the Mockingjay’s sister doesn’t matter.
You go.
Gale finds himself at Annie’s home by the sea with a storm brewing way out on the horizon line. He watches it, hands stuffed in his pockets, curled into fists.
Annie steps out beside him, wiggling her toes into the sand. She plants her baby on the soft, white sand and he coos happily, already taking to the water and the sight and sound and smell of it. Already so much his father.
It’s the first time in months he’s visited.
Katniss is marrying Peeta.
“I kissed Primrose Everdeen,” he says, and there. It’s out. He’s said it. The words he’s never been able to say to Katniss, even though he wanted to over and over again. Only to tell her, to show her that she wasn’t alone, that she wasn’t the only one Prim had left her imprint on. He could feel her, moving just underneath his skin. And how good it felt.
I kissed Primrose Everdeen. She kissed me, and then I kissed her and I didn’t think about Katniss, not in that moment, even though I should have. I didn’t think about anything at all, except that she felt good where she was. “I kissed her.”
Annie only regards him with guarded, dark eyes. “Did it mean anything?” she asks.
“No,” he says, and feels like weeping. “But it might have.”
Gale crashes to his knees, and rests his head against the soft curve of Annie’s stomach, clutching at the wispy hem of her skirt like an exhausted child. The tsunami of that terrible first year finally crashes and breaks against the rocks of the second.
Five years after the Capitol burned and Primrose with, Gale’s first year of survival ends.
You think you hear your name, somewhere far enough so it’s lost among the cries of pain and shock, the smell of smoke and ash. You crouch down to examine the burn wounds of the closest child. Katniss had a wound like this, her first time in the Games.
“Prim!”
Katniss.
You turn, smiling. Here you two can at last meet each other on equal ground. This is not you waiting for Katniss to come home, watching her fight and bleed and win. This is not her, rushing headlong to shield you from something terrible. You both stand on level ground.
There’s searing, white-hot pain but it flashes up and dies quickly. Your body gives out, because it’s too much, and that’s for the best. Your body simply moves to a place that is behind pain, higher than it.
And for one brilliant, shining moment you know what it’s like to be the Girl on Fire.