Gale Hawthorne {belongs in the woods} (chevalier_noire) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-09-10 16:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, gale hawthorne |
Who: Gale Hawthorne (because morgan has a problem)
When: Thursday, August 20 through Monday, August 24 (backdated), after this
Where: Gale's apartment/the woods
What: Gale reads the Hunger Games books, feels about how you'd expect about it
Rating: low, but warnings for violence, death, and other sads
Three little boxes. Three little innocuous squares full of ink. They had so much power.
Gale had picked the books up from Katniss Thursday afternoon and brought them to his own apartment, laying them on the coffee table. Where they sat. And sat. He thought about reading them. He picked up each and flipped through pages, eye catching on names as the words dashed by. Starting them was the hardest part. Accepting that his life was in a book, told through the words of his best friend, the girl he loved and lost. Once you got past that little oddity, they were just a collection of stories.
Friday night, Gale found himself stretched out on the couch, an arm thrown behind his head as a pillow, The Hunger Games open on his lap. He went into his home woods once more with Katniss, and was swallowed by the trees through her eyes. There on the page were moments he had lived, and his own thoughts ran alongside hers, so that it was as if he lived the story twice in every moment. His own memory and this new perspective of Katniss's fused into a world so real that Gale forgot where he was.
While Katniss had been in the arena during the 74th Hunger Games, he'd seen her in brief clips, and every time, he'd been driven wild with the need to know what was happening to her when the cameras were focused elsewhere. Now he climbed and hid as she did, and he felt a fear he'd never known before. In all his years of sneaking to the woods illegally, in all the years of waiting for his name to be called in the reaping, all of the times they drank tree bark broth for supper, he had never been as afraid and helpless as Katniss was in that arena. It wasn't just the other tributes. It was the sure knowledge that there were no true Victors. The Games killed us all.
Through her own thoughts, Gale finally learned what Peeta really was to Katniss. Not because she said it outright. It was the way she thought of him, with respect and admiration, with gentleness. It wasn't until then that Gale even had words for what he'd been aching for from Katniss. Their relationship had been built on mutual need. Together they had achieved just enough strength to keep their families as comfortable as was possible, but they'd never made heroic sacrifices for each other. What they had was practical, humble, it was the essence of life.
And because of that Gale would never be the one who saved her. No matter that she'd saved him.
He couldn't spend much time feeling sorry for himself, so immersed was he in how Katniss had felt. It was always freshly shocking to discover the lengths his own heart could stretch to. He never met Rue, but he'd seen Katniss's reaction when she had been killed. Gale wasn't the sort of person who cried easily, but when he read Rue's death, he found himself moved to press three fingers to his lips and then lay them over the little girl's name in print.
At times, he thought he ought to put these books down. They were so personal, and while Katniss had given him permission, he knew she wasn't aware of all they contained. And yet he was compelled to continue. Among the pages, he found a line of her heart that shot straight into his. They were so alike, and the proof lay before him. With it, also, was confirmation that she cared for him -- more than he had thought she did, back in Panem. That was part of what drove him to continue, the perverse need to see her opinion of him change.
Reality was nebulous on this side of the Tesseract, but in The Hunger Games, Gale received a burning reminder of home. He'd been enjoying the long days in the woods, the legal hunting permit in his pocket. He finally had to ask himself: was there another Gale still living this story? Evidence pointed to yes. After all, the Katniss here hadn't seen a lot of things his Katniss had.
Maybe one of those Gales was changing his story, making different choices than he had in the moments before him. One who never kissed Katniss that first time after she came back. One who never took that turkey to Cray's, never gaining that second kiss. A dozen of him who fled to the woods. One who didn't expect the bombs in Twelve. Gale wanted to hope so, for Katniss and Prim's sake more than his own. A coldly pessimistic side of him acknowledged that it was nearly impossible.
The puzzle numbed the twisted feeling in his gut as he began Catching Fire in the early afternoon of Saturday. It didn't keep him from feeling like a rabbit strung up by a back leg as he read his own lashing, and watched Katniss join his side in a way he hadn't fully understood. He had been lost in a blistering red world with not enough cool green bubbles to cling to.
The memories of that whipping, and the subsequent weeks of suffering brought down on his district, drove Gale from his apartment. He cracked the book on the train -- briefly. A girl maybe a little older than Prim gave him long looks, and then finally walked up and asked him if he totally loved those books, too, because she thought they were so romantic and she just thought Katniss and Peeta were so cute together. She said he looked like the other guy, in the movies, kinda, maybe. Like Gale.
He changed trains and kept the book in his bag the rest of the trip. The long hike to a good secluded campsite afforded him plenty of time to recall what came next in the story.
In a tent, by lamplight, with a dinner of baked fish and wild greens, Gale cracked Catching Fire once again. He huddled in his sleeping bag as the night grew more bitter, trying to decide along with Katniss who -- if anyone -- could be trusted. The Finnick Gale knew was funny and a little bit sad, more of a flirt than Gale could stand, really, but not bad aside from that. In the arena, though, he had clearly been different. Maybe he just read into things more than Katniss, or maybe hindsight made it seem obvious, but Gale saw everyone gathering around Katniss to protect her while she was trying to figure out how to kill them. Not that he blamed her. In that situation, he couldn't help thinking he probably would have killed one of them and ruined all chances for an alliance. Like her, he would have preferred to go it alone.
As everyone gathered around her, Gale saw what they had carefully hidden in television. He saw what Snow saw. People believed in her enough to take risks, to give up the ones they loved. These former Victors believed in bringing down the government enough to give up their loved ones in order to preserve this revolution's mascot. And he was both appreciative and disgusted with them all.
Back home, Gale had thought only that Katniss had been saved and that Beetee was someone he enjoyed being around. Looking back at it now, Gale could see all of that manipulation.
So as Sunday drifted in, Gale began Mockingjay filled with the same anger Katniss was feeling. He sympathized with her fear, but he knew how the story ended. Peeta would be just fine, more or less. It rankled Gale, frankly, to see how Katniss fretted over his well-being. The entire nation was at stake, but she was lost in a world of torture and mind games.
Gale wished he'd known even half of what was going on inside her head, though he could see how she would be reluctant to share any of it with him. It stung, too, to see how his own betrayals had hurt her. Keeping Peeta's suffering a secret had been such a breach of trust. Gale had known it was even as he was doing it, but he'd let himself be convinced that it was the right thing to do. For Katniss's protection. He burned with shame all over again for forgetting that his friendship was stronger than some silly district rules.
And then he was burning in another way. Katniss took him back to Twelve. With knowledge of the silence that was yet to come, this fight seemed so small. At the time, though, it had been the first time she'd ever been so angry with him -- or him with her. He'd wanted her so much; not to have her as his own, but to draw her close and chase that darkness away. He had ached for her to turn to him, like she used to, when she was in pain. Instead, she'd given him what she thought he wanted.
Even now, he had to close the book and force himself not to wallow in the memory of that kiss. He told himself he couldn't feel the slippery velvet of their lips crushing their teeth. He told himself their mouths didn't taste like salt and hot fires in the night. He told himself to stop waiting. He told himself her choice is made. He's hanging in this tree alone.
He couldn’t stop thinking about it, the tent filling with ghosts of heartache. He left the book --cold blue in his sun-warm tent -- and walked in the forest, bow slung across his back. Even this forest was redolent of Katniss. He had never known it without her and right now he needed to get away from the emotions that were tied to her. Shedding all his gear at the edge of the small lake he often fished in, Gale submerged himself in the cool blue water and swam as deep as he could. He kicked fast, reaching for the sandy bed, dark and undisturbed. He buried his hands in it, using up the last of his oxygen to lose himself in a place no other human had ever touched. He wanted to be like that sand, unturned, hardly even aware of life’s currents up above.
But his lungs were human parts after all, and he was driven back to the surface. Noise burst upon him, hot sun radiating over his face while birds called to one another. They had not noted his absence, nor his sudden arrival. He felt small and quiet again, ready to continue reading. He gathered the few late summer berries not picked off by animals on the way back, stuffing them in his mouth and noting that he’d skipped breakfast, submerged in the world of Mockingjay.
He returned to the book, to a Thirteen in lockdown as bombs from the Capitol rained down. He remembered the envy that soured his bones as Katniss walked right past him without a glance, seeking comfort in Finnick Odair. As he read, though, he saw the way Finnick’s mind was only for Annie. He saw that Finnick helped Katniss in a way Gale never could have. That wasn’t a wisdom he’d possessed.
Instead, he’d done the only thing he could for her. He’d risked his neck to get Peeta back. To be honest, he would have done far more dangerous things for people he cared far less about if it meant Katniss didn’t have to be tortured by their absence. Gale read just how much it troubled her, how horrific the revelation of her weaknesses was to her, how little she had suspected the psychological blows Snow could still heap on her from afar. Seeing her thoughts written out plainly in front of him, Gale wished he could protect her from it all even more than he had when he was living it. At least then, he’d only felt his own heart breaking.
So he saved Peeta, which almost cost him Katniss. For once, he got to see what it was like to implicitly trust someone who betrayed you. Gale put himself in her place. If Katniss had been hijacked, if he’d been waiting for her, would he have suspected she’d been sent to kill him? Not in a million years. That didn’t make him feel any more charitable toward Peeta as he recalled the angry bruises curling under her jaw.
Gale lay the book aside and let himself get lost in the memories that surfaced from that simple little paragraph. He had been trapped only a few rooms away, knowing Katniss was injured not far from him. That he had brought back her would be killer -- to myriad cheers, no less -- chipped away at him. He was afraid for her, because no one would tell him much about her condition. For days, he had been strapped up to so many machines he couldn’t move, but finally a simple IV on a little stand with wheels remained, and he dragged it down the hall with him to check on her.
He was tired and in pain by the time he reached her side, but he forgot all of that upon seeing her. Her slender neck looked so fragile, covered in the after images of Peeta’s grip. He could scarcely believe everything was still whole under the skin, so he reached out, running the very tips of fingers over her throat. As he traced the bruises, his heart lurched. So close he’d come, in an instant, to losing her. Tears had threatened, so Gale had placed a brief kiss on her forehead and then left Katniss’ room for his own, but the damage he’d seen and it’s pursuant emotions stuck with him.
It was hardly the worst of what they went through, though, in the following months and Gale was almost surprised at how much he dreaded reading about it. So many good people were going to die. So much heartache was coming for them all.
Gale could never forget the Nut; he saw it every day that he worked in District Two. But it was a distant range from the new base of military operations, a mountain formation behind which they watched the sun set. In the book, it’s ugliness -- and his own -- was shown anew. Gale’s plan had worked, and he still couldn’t think of a better way, but he admitted now that there might have been one. He thought maybe Katniss had been right to be mad at him. But he thought he was right to be mad at her now.
Perhaps foolishly, when Katniss went away to the Nut, Gale had assumed it was to be free of Thirteen and free of Peeta. Except Katniss had carried him with her, indeed let him drive her all the way to District Two. For some reason, Gale had always thought her motivation was something else. Militant zeal or pure restlessness he hadn’t known exactly, he’d simply been glad when he was finally sent to follow her. Now, the tone he’d always seen that time in was changed. He saw how Peeta began to appear in her thoughts as much as Gale himself had, once upon a time.
If he had been able to read her mind then, Gale would have been bitterly self-satisfied to find her thoughts reflected what he already thought. He would never be able to compete with Peeta’s pain. If he had known she was thinking about Peeta constantly he would have left her alone, if only to save himself a little dignity. But where Katniss was concerned, Gale’s pride wavered. When she turned to him, he opened his arms to her. He wanted her, that was no secret. And maybe he had exaggerated how many girls he’d kissed -- a grand total of four, Katniss included -- because he was feeling a little jealous. But who could blame him?
That night set the tone, though, for the shift. With the help of events and feelings in print, Gale traced it all back to the Nut. The moment he truly started to lose Katniss. Maybe all the jealousy he felt -- toward Peeta, Finnick, Darius, anyone who might dare want Katniss -- wasn't so misplaced after all, considering what was to come. Some idiot shot her and then she was back in the hospital and he was training for combat. Then they were both training and everything was moving so fast until suddenly they were dumped outside the Capitol and given staged tasks to impress whoever was still watching instead of fighting. The irritation at least gave them some intrigue in a world that was insultingly boring -- until Peeta showed up.
In all the years he’d known her, Gale had never quite conceived just how much guilt Katniss could feel. When something terrible happened to the ones she loved, she took it upon herself, rather than pointing fingers where they needed to be pointed. Peeta’s condition was her fault. Darius’s death was her fault. The rebels deaths were her fault. Gale could see her thoughts laid out in front of him, and while Katniss did blame Snow for all that went wrong, in Gale’s opinion, she wasn’t blaming him near enough.
Gale made the uncharitable observation that if Katniss had been focusing less on her guilt, she might have been more helpful to Peeta during his reality guessing games. Not that he could blame her. It had been strange for him, too, helping to guide Peeta back into the ability to discern truth from nightmares. He had been so pitiable -- a wounded mind, the hardest injury to recover from -- that Gale had forgotten everything that lay between them, or at least his sympathy had outweighed his possessive urge.
Gale could admit to himself, reading it back, that he had been really hurt when Katniss made plans to go on her personal assassination mission without him. He was starting to understand that she’d felt fully alone in the world, and he’d been partially to blame for that. He hadn’t always been there when Katniss needed him. But it was possibly the most important hunt of her life, and she hadn’t even considered bringing him along until he’d asked. Maybe she’d even forgotten that he knew her well enough to deduce what she was doing.
It didn’t matter, though, because everything came down around their heads not long after. The explosion that killed Boggs effectively made their ragtag party Katniss’ personal militia, and together they snuck into the heart of the Capitol. Gale was surprised to see all the deliberation and doubt in Katniss’ thoughts over the days they were in the Capitol. Out loud, she had appeared so decisive.
Even in the grisly horror of the tunnels underground, she had the elements of a true leader. She knew when to defer to those with greater experience, when to encourage, how to rest and ration. She had the strength to keep moving even when her friends fell. Gale was freshly in awe of her, with Mockingjay spread out on his lap near the fire. He hadn’t had the time or energy to be impressed with her then, but now he had the luxury of thinking how strong and good she was.
That reminder was made painful by what he read next. Gale had almost forgotten it, one of those conversations had on the edge of sleep that seems almost like a dream -- the kind where you say things you usually wouldn’t say out loud. He saw that Katniss had heard more of it than he thought.
He had woken with his cheek against cold cement, a nightmare chasing him out of sleep. When he’d risen for a drink of water, Peeta had asked for some. Something about holding a cup for someone else to drink from fosters a sort of trust that can momentarily put even enemies on eye level. They had talked about the only thing they both knew. Gale still wasn’t sure what had inspired Peeta to say that Katniss loved him. And of course Gale was convinced that he’d been right when he said he didn’t believe it. He hadn’t wanted to admit it, and part of him had still held out hope for her to choose him against all odds, but it was obvious Katniss wasn’t going to choose Gale. After all, she hadn't been a mad girl without him.
He’d gone to sleep and woken to walk the streets of the Capitol. Gale put the book down. He knew what came next, and there was nothing he looked forward to less. He could stop, right then. No one would judge him. Fatigue dragged at him. He’d never known that reading a book could be so exhausting. Despite his reservations about it, Gale curled up in his sleeping bag with Mockingjay still in his hands.
The next morning he stalled, checking his snares and fishing for his breakfast. Finally he took the book and hiked to an old live oak with fat, low branches. The oak in question served a double purpose. It was quite a comfortable sitting tree, and the ground beneath it was covered in sweet acorns. It was a perfectly sunny late summer day, so wildly incongruous with the murkiness of Gale’s heart. He gathered pocketfuls of acorns, picking through them slowly, and then took his time settling into a cleft of branches, positioning his jacket behind his head and propping his feet on another branch. Finally, he’d run out of delays.
He opened the book to watch himself be separated from Katniss, dragged away by Peacekeepers, begging for her to shoot him. Even now, alive and in New York, he was a little sorry she hadn’t. Especially as he read what she walked into after she lost sight of him.
If he thought he was scared in the hands of the Peacekeepers, he had nothing on Katniss. At least he’d only been worried about himself. And Katniss, of course, always. But most of that time had been spent formulating and executing the escape plan that got him shot. Katniss didn’t know that as she wept for him. He might not have believed it himself, if he hadn’t lived to tell the tale. Nobody lived through being captured blocks from the enemy base on invasion day. Back among the pages, he scurried through the crowded streets with her, dread and guilt and pure terror coursing through him, through Katniss.
They shuffled down the streets behind old men, together finally as they should have been in reality. Gale looked up with Katniss into the City Center, and saw the pen full of children. He couldn’t help thinking he would have suspected what was coming faster than Katniss did. Of course, it had been his idea.
Gale’s grip on reality was swept away just as Katniss was in the crowd. The parallels Katniss drew to the day of the Reaping as she spotted Prim among the medics who funneled in to treat the children wounded by the bombs tore Gale apart. Just one more time he failed to protect them both. “No. No, no, no, no, no.” He was muttering it over and over again as the words blasted through him. Tears stung the corners of his eyes and spread so that the pages became gray blurs on his lap.
Prim. Even though he’d seen her only days before, even though he knew she was alive and well here, his Prim had died. He had mourned her, had held Katniss and Prim’s mother’s hand while she wept at his bedside. All the tears he’d shed for Prim had caused him endless agony, bullet wounds searing so that he thought he was being shot straight in the heart again and again when he thought of it. Or maybe that was a morphling delusion. The pain and regret, he knew, were all too real.
Again, his own torment was poor next to Katniss’. She was lost, in a world truly unreachable, unwilling to return. Unlike all the doctors and everyone he talked to, he didn’t wish her out of it. He knew how much kinder it was than the Stygian existence she had awoken in. He could spare some regret now for walking past her hospital door without ever going inside, but he had been unable to bear it. The guilt had made him run.
Not that he was sure he could have reached her anyway. Reading her thoughts, Gale could see now that only the purpose she’d assigned for herself could have kept her moving. He wandered through the rooms of President Snow’s mansion with her until the day they stumbled into his private chambers. He had never known that Katniss and Snow spoke, but their conversation revealed everything. The final piece fell into place. Snow himself had pointed the finger at Coin.
The shock didn’t really have time to settle in for Gale, because he was suddenly reading Katniss’ last glimpse of him, and it consumed all his attention. You didn’t come see me in the hospital...Was it your bomb? Two accusations were her last words to him. He had no rebuttal. He had chosen that moment to see her, a moment too brief for fighting or tears, because he was deeply a coward in his love for Katniss. He had avoided her rejection, tried to refine it into a sharp, quick tear. And it had worked. She had answered in her silence that she could never think of him without wondering if his plans had killed Prim.
He searched for a sign of her regret. He sifted among the thoughts offered on paper for any that suggested she would ever forgive him, ever want him back in her life. He saw only grief and uncertainty. For that reason, he had stayed away. But further on, Gale found something unexpected.
Where their story had ended for him, it continued for the Katniss in Mockingjay.
Months after she returned to DIstrict Twelve, the blood began to run in her veins once again. Whether it was Greasy Sae or Peeta or Haymitch didn’t matter. Katniss returned to the woods outside District Twelve. In those woods, two scared and starving kids had learned to lean on each other and keep safe the ones they loved. Gale walked with Katniss to their old meeting place. Overlooking the valley, she finally wished he was with her again.
There wasn’t a thing in any world Gale wouldn’t give to have known, to have been able to grant that wish, to tell her that he was wishing the same thing. The pain of Prim’s death would never vanish. But they had made the terrible mistake of compounding their loss. Grief had made them turn away from the people who had been their constant comfort for years. The wedge that had been driven between them was too bitter and ugly to cross in reality, but it soothed something in Gale to know that Katniss had wished it was different, too.
He pulled out his phone and sent her a text. Come hunt with me. He couldn’t change what happened in the book, but here, Gale had the power to change what happened to him and Katniss. In this world, he got to keep his best friend.
It wasn’t until after he put his phone away that Gale read the epilogue. That Katniss and Peeta’s relationship became more than Capitol intrigue was no surprise. Gale was even almost used to it, at this point. But he had never expected children. Sorrow and jealousy, anger and remorse flowed over him. Katniss had always been reluctant at best about the idea of children. But of course, for Peeta, anything. For a moment, Gale almost wished he could take back his message to Katniss. He was too flustered to face her.
Knowing he had nearly an hour, Gale returned to the lake. Knowing he had no time for another deep diving expedition, he contented himself with removing his shoes and rolling his pants up, wading in the cool water up to his knees. The blinding gleam off the water dazzled him, making the world seem fantastic and dreamlike. Everything felt too intense. The books had been so much more real than he had anticipated.
Gale leaned forward, dipping his hands into the clear water and trailing little sandstorms in the water with his fingers. The motion calmed him, giving his mind a rhythm to slow down to. If he ever returned to his world, there was no way of knowing that he would remember anything he had learned here. If he happened to, he now knew that Katniss did in fact miss him. He could close the distance. And if he never went home, well, this Katniss had never stopped being his friend and didn’t seem inclined to do so any time soon.
Gale stood and looked out at the forest surrounding this little lake. Despite the sorrowful things he had read, Gale was glad he’d finished them. He was even more glad that his best friend would be by his side soon. He just wanted to enjoy what they had.