Man alive I like to write angst when it's nearly time to go to sleep. Enjoy!
Guilt
Gale still had the nightmares.
A girl, young, with two blonde plaits and wearing clothes far too big for her. Every time she'd start off the same; happy, learning the ways of the woods, mastering a bow at his side. She would smile, glad to be like her sister. But the scene would change and they'd be in the city. Gale would see her sister Katniss, screaming from across the street at something. By the time he looked back, Prim was caught in the bombs. But he could never get to her.
He'd wake up in sweats, his chest drenched and his hands clammy and shaking. He'd sit up, put his head in his hands and mumble that it was his fault because he believed it was, even if he hadn't been there. He'd stay that way, curled up in his guilt, sometimes all night, hoping that when the dawn came it would take his shame with it and hide it away.
But it never did.
He found solace in one thing each day; in the canteen at the base in thirteen, where the soldiers had gone after the war. Most people scattered back to their home districts with the Capitol overruled and being reformed. They felt safer at home. Some of them didn't have a home to return to.
Twelve was ashes in the ground, a wasteland of a district that needed rebuilding. Katniss had gone back there, and so had Peeta, and Gale had persuaded his family to as well, with the promise that he would soon follow.
It had been three months now.
But every day of those three months, when he went down for breakfast, he'd see a girl he knew sitting alone at the far end of the room. They acknowledged each other each time, and what began as a look of sympathy turned to support. Gale had no qualms with her anymore; they were the same now. The guilt he carried was a mirror to her own. He hadn't saved Prim, and she hadn't saved her family. She saw the bombers coming to twelve, and she ran to help, but she couldn't get to the house in time. Gale wouldn't let her go in.
Really, the guilt was all his.
One morning he arrived for breakfast late and didn't see her, and when his heart pumped hard in his chest at her no-show he accepted how much he'd come to need her presence in the last few months, even if they were never side by side.
He'd looked frantically for her. The canteen, the dorms, the residences, even the toxic surface…
When he'd finally found her, curled up on the floor of a quiet hallway, a battered book in her hand, he'd watched as she turned the pages. He looked on as her hair fell out of the messy bun she'd tied it back in. She kept pushing it out of the way, and finally she saw him. Closing her book, she looked warmly up at him. He slowly made his way over and slid down, sitting close by.
'You were late,' she said softly.
'You disappeared.'
She took his hand and held it in her lap, drawing circles over it with her thumb.
'I won't do it again.'
'Me either, Madge.'
Yo, I really like reviews but no biggie. I'll take cake too. x