Disclaimer-

Suzanne Collins owns The Hunger Games.

Author's Note-

These are brief, short moments in Katniss and Gale's relationship up until "Catching Fire", as they are torn apart and brought back together. There are some minor spoilers, but not many.


i.

We could do it, you know.

What? she says.

It's the day of the reaping and of all things he could say, right then, right now like the idiot he is, he's spitting out to her that they could leave the district. Discard their souls at the electrical wire, last game skinned and gutted, at the Hob. Live in the woods, no longer like holed-up animals in cages.

She knows more about him than he'd like to admit—how his hate for the Capitol, so deeply burrowed under his skin, among the dying arteries and too many white blood cells and just Gale, is slowly exposing itself to the light no matter how hard he tries to hide it. How he has entered his name for this year's Games a total of forty-two times. How his determination to prove to her that they could do it, run away, is so strong, so real and breathing and alive, she can't begin to understand such a vast and vague topic.

It is incomprehensible; impossible; but so, so, achievable.

A muscle twitches at the corner of his lip. You and I, we could make it.

(His mouth tastes sour because even he knows that will never be true.)


ii.

All Effie Trinket has to say, in her pink hair and disgustingly same-colored dress suit, is Primrose Everdeen, and then the world comes crashing down because he knows what's going to happen next.

I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!

And then he's running for Primrose faster than he's ever ran for anyone before, and she's screaming Katniss, Katniss, and it's all he can hear through the blood pounding in his ears and the thick air rushing down his mouth, choking him. The sun is so blindingly hot and white, throwing shadows where they are none, and he's shoving through bodies or shoving up against them until he finally grabs Primrose, who thrashes in his arms as if she is a newborn baby, (and maybe she is, maybe everyone has a breaking point) and drags her away, towards her mother, but not before he says, up you go, Catnip.

(And he says it like it's easy, like he can watch his best friend fight to death against a baker's son without tears in his eyes and a part of himself breaking, too.)


iii.

She is holding his hand—Peeta's hand, the baker's son, the boy from District 12 (that should've been him, could've would've should've been him)—and he has never felt more jealous of anything in his entire life because she is beautiful, she is unbreakable—she is the girl on fire—and he wants her, needs her, aches for her, can and will not breathe without her.


iv.

After all that, it's come to this exact moment: she is holding Peeta's hand (the baker's son, the boy from District 12 that should've could've would've been him) and doesn't think of her cousin, not even once.


v.

He can't doesn't won't exchange the lonely words, I miss you, so instead he just kisses her for the first time in the middle of the forest and it's everything he thought it would be but better, because I had to do that, just once (and then he's the one running away and she's the one left to pick up the pieces.)


vi.

The second time they kiss it is snowing outside and he is half-passed out on her kitchen table, broken and bloody and raw, because this is the only way she knows how to ask him if he'll take her back (and he will, he always will.)