Birdsong
Some nights, he's on the shores of sleep but semi-conscious of the reality moving around him. The shadows striking the wall are long in the yellow, flickering candlelight. They console him; they devour him. It's around two A.M at night that the power goes out. He blows out the candle then. This happens every night. He lies in his bed, the cotton quilt fisted in his hand. His legs are cold and sweaty. He's been trying so hard to sleep. And just when he's on the edge of oblivion, she comes to him.
The thought of her comes to mind, unbidden.
And he remains wakeful. He is waiting. He is waiting for judgment and resolution. He is waiting for the day his trial comes.
He knows he didn't do anything wrong, but he still wants to be put on trial.
The good citizens of Two glare at him accusingly. Some openly spit on him. Others yell and curse.
He killed their family, their people. Gale knows that the majority of Two didn't support the rebels, who they viewed as the renegades, the rejects of their District. They call them traitors.
"They brought dishonor to our District," an elegantly attired man with white hair and piercing blue eyes screamed at him. Everything about him exuded respectability, and Gale grimly wondered if bringing a gentleman like him to this hysteria was an accomplishment or a travesty. His son had been killed in the Nut, and he bristled when Gale said that this was the action the Two rebels had wanted to take. "They are not our people! They can never be our people! They are traitors!"
Lyme, for all her faults, was the exception, not the rule.
That is the only time Gale speaks back. Most days he keeps his head down and silently moves through the streets. The people scream at him, and he sees the burning faces of the children in Twelve.
Many children burned. They don't remember that, not even in the history books.
In their hurt, accusing faces, he sees Katniss' quivering lip, her hollowed out eyes rife with astonishment and betrayal. He remembers the way she breathed. Passive, labored breaths, audible in the liquid silence.
And that's why he can't sleep at night.
They start protesting in July. The people of Two loathe the rebel-installed interim government, and they protest with placards, chants, property destruction, and Molotov cocktails. One demand rules them all: Justice for our martyrs. Justice for the martyrs of the Nut.
"You're getting a bodyguard," Nikolas Alexopoulos, a leading Two rebel and widely hated among the pro-Capitol population, tells him one day in his rasping smoker's voice. They're standing in the office that deals with military fortification and infrastructural reconstruction. "We don't want you dead. I travel with three and that's too much, I'll give you one of mine. I'll see if the others can give you one more."
"What good is a bodyguard when he's going to be shot?" Gale inquires bluntly.
Nik smiles cynically. He appreciates gallows' humor, Gale knows. "Better him than you, innit?"
Gale stares beyond his comrade's shoulder. He sees the scenic beauty of Two, the cavernous mountains, their purplish-blue outline in the daytime sky. What have those mountains seen? What secrets do they hold in their jagged walls and silent caves, in that indestructible and immortal rock?
"He dies, then they'll get me."
Nik is impatient. "What's your point?"
"Why don't you put me on trial?" Gale demands softly. "Try me for a war criminal. They want justice for their martyrs. We may as well give it to them, and they'll be pacified."
Nic guffaws. It lasts for long, interminable seconds. Then he leaves the room, disgusted.
Gale exhales the breath he didn't know he'd been holding for so long.
He writes letters to Katniss.
He burns them before he can send them to her.
He receives a letter from Twelve. He thinks it is his mother or Rory, but his breath catches in his throat when he sees the street address.
The Victor's Village.
He thinks it is Haymitch.
Likelier Haymitch than her.
He opens the envelope nevertheless with trembling, fumbling hands. And it is her neat, print handwriting on the white expanse of paper. The letter is torturously, gracelessly short. Just a few words.
We need to talk, and
I'm sorry.
She signs, Catnip.
He books a train to Twelve. He suspends all work, foists it on his subordinates, and apologizes to his superiors for the spontaneity of his trip. But he needs to go.
Nik comes to say farewell at the train station. They tried to make him travel with a bodyguard, but Gale refused. So they amped up the security on the train. He doesn't trust the bodyguards, and he carries a four-inch revolver in his briefcase.
The old man's eyebrows are stitched together. "You're not giving up are you, Twelve?"
Gale's expression does not change. "Never."
Nik knows he is telling the truth, and waves when Gale's train leaves the platform.
Katniss runs these days.
She runs the entire length and width of the District. She sees the carnage, the destruction. Entire houses that framed the scene of her childhood collapsed. The once pristine Justice Building felled, its ivory bricks rank and dark. Everything subsumed by ashes.
Nearly everyday, be it a quarter mile into her run or a half mile or at the end of the first mile, she sits down on the heap of rubble and she weeps. She weeps without shame, and she does not flinch when people pass her by and she feels their eyes on her. It is a catharsis. It is making up for her years-long suppression of emotion, the waterfall she withheld with stoicism since the day her father died.
The rest of the District, what meager rest exists, gets used to her schedule and activity. They tailor their own actions to it. After her run, Greasy Sae is at the remains of the Hob with water in hand for Katniss to drink. The construction workers take their breaks when she's running, because they know she dislikes the fumes from their machines. But the miners, what little remains of them, come out and watch her when she runs. The children do the same, some running with her. She doesn't mind, she is even comforted by their presence, but it only makes her cry harder.
They remind her of Prim, and of her father.
She thinks, What if I moved? But she's not stupid. Experience has taught her a lesson. Her grief is inescapable. And she owes her people to stay and thrive and die in the ashes. She owes her father that. She owes Prim that.
So she stays, and she tries not to choke on the ashes.
Thinking about Prim is too painful, so she thinks about Gale instead.
She doesn't think there is a word in the language she speaks, in the other unknown languages of the earth, that can describe how she feels about Gale.
She doesn't think there is a person alive who knows how she feels. There is just Gale, and there is just her, and Prim's shadow between them.
She knows what Prim would say if she were alive. She can feel her sister's ghost beckoning her, asking Why are you doing this? Take care of yourself. Speak to Gale. Love him. Forgive yourself.
"No," Katniss cries in the darkness. "You deserve better than that."
Prim's apparition shakes her head, her blonde braids swinging, before disappearing into the darkness.
She holds a grudge against him, because she holds the grudge against herself. Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable.
They are both responsible for her death. Their hands are unclean, and she shuns him because he reminds her of her own guilt.
She doesn't go into the woods anymore.
She tries the coal mines instead.
She thinks that is braver. She hated these mines growing up, she saw what they did to her father, and even now when she ventures into the deep grooves of the earth, she wants to kill herself.
"Are you sure you want to do this, Miss Everdeen?" a worker asks her. Katniss remembers his name is Asher.
"Of course," she says. "And please, call me Katniss."
She walks through the mine. They are more than half destroyed, and Asher grips her hand when she treads over the sinking spots that could pull her to her death.
The sooner, the better.
And then, guilt. Your father died so you could live.
That was her father. But what of Prim? Prim's death was in vain.
Still, she stands in the mine. She feels the toxicity entrenching her breath, her eyes watering, the horrid taste making her nauseous.
This was Gale's reality everyday since he turned nineteen.
She closes her eyes. Is this how her father felt before he died? Is this how the miners felt before the Capitol's bombs shattered the only home they'd ever known?
She thinks, Is this how the workers in the Nut felt before they died?
She opens her eyes. She needs to get out. She tells the guide to take her up the elevator shaft.
She knows the answer. She knows the truth.
Prim greets her later that night. I'm sorry, she begs her sister. I'm so, so sorry I couldn't save you.
Prim smiles as if from heaven, and says, I forgive you. I forgave you long ago.
She was the girl on fire, until they burned her out.
She'll never forgive them for it. Plutarch. Coin. Haymitch, for using her and not telling her. Peeta, for downgrading her worth to the cheap semblance of love, to a debt that could never be paid, to her output of feeling for an entirely different person, to that interminable mantra of a question whose answer changed all the time, Real or not real?
She misses Gale's fire.
She thinks of what Gale did in that mine. But a voice reproaches her, No, not a mine. A weapons base.
Dying was dying. Destroyed and penetrated flesh, dark red and freely running blood, chopped up bodies that looked eerily similar to the turkey, rabbits, deer and dogs Katniss once hunted and sold at the Hob.
They should not have died, but she knows why Gale did it.
It wasn't about who struck first.
It was to ensure this would never happen again.
The only mines in Panem were in District Twelve, and they ate its people alive.
When he was alive, Katniss' father used to pray to God.
God's name was forbidden in the district upon pain of death. It was even more dangerous than the Hanging Tree song, and all the other songs her father used to sing, but which were lost in the deepest recesses of her memory. She remembers vague humming in the thick, sleepy nostalgia, and it sometimes revisits her in her dreams. But she cannot place the words.
He took those songs with him when he was buried stories deep in the earth. And he took God's name with him too.
But Katniss remembers some of what he told her about God. But most of all, she remembers prayer.
That's how Haymitch finds her one evening when the three of them are supposed to be having dinner together. Katniss Everdeen on her knees, praying to an invisible being.
He does not interrupt her. He only closes the door quietly and thinks of the time when he too had been brought to his knees, praying to God.
She goes to the woods.
It is cold, and the wind is sharp and chilly and makes her knuckles white. But the sun shines bright. It warms her skin and paints her black hair purple with light.
She sits in the lap of a sprawling oak tree, sniffing and basking in the scent of its sap. She feels the earth is so much older than her, and she feels its wisdom. She thinks of what the tree has seen, and with that in mind, she sings.
She sings so all the mockingjays assemble, and they sing back to her.
She stays there till dusk, till her voice is hoarse and reedy. She vows to recover the lost songs her father sang.
She wonders if Gale knows any songs.
She wonders if it's too late to ask.
She writes Gale a letter.
It is a little note, not quite a letter.
She thinks if she can write his name down paper, then she can send him the letter too.
Gale arrives at the Twelve train station on a beautiful day. It is autumn weather, Twelve weather. It is cold but sunny, and he can smell tree sap and flowers stirring on the wind.
His family is at the train station, and his brothers and sister attack him with fierce hugs and kisses. He sees his mother's gentle and worn face, and he brushes away a tear.
Gale plans to relocate them to Two when things have died down. Until then, they go to the Hawthornes' temporary housing complex. The ashes wrench his gut and heart, and he tries valiantly not to weep openly.
He is so happy to be home.
She knows he's coming.
He goes to her house. It was not only Hazelle, but Haymitch, who gave him the tip. Haymitch is trustworthy. Haymitch knows Katniss inside and out. And that's why Gale pays her a visit. His body is tensed for the possibility of disaster. He's scared. He's tentative.
He knocks on her door.
He hears her voice calling and it sends goosebumps all down his arm. "It's open."
He opens the door. Everything feels unreal, as if he's walking through a dream. The foyer is brightly lit, and so is the living room. She sits on the couch, catatonic, staring into space.
The wind swings the door shut. She startles and looks at him.
For a moment, no one speaks. The silence lasts for minutes, hours, days.
He finally says softly, "How are you, Catnip?"
Katniss bursts into tears.
She asks him later, "Do you know any songs?"
He starts whistling. He puts words to the tune, and he's shocked by how easily they come to him even after all these years of toil and hunger and war.
"Your father was the singer," he says in the barest of whispers. "My father knew some from his parents, but he didn't remember them exactly. He learned all the songs from your father. They were friends since they were children. He sang to me when he took me out in the woods and he sang most in the days before he died."
Katniss's gaze is fixed into nothingness. She is silent. She wants to know more. She wants to know about the generations lost before her. She wants to know about her father, and Gale's father in the woods. She wants to know if Haymitch knew them, and how he knew them. She wants to know the truth of how her father died, how Gale's father died. She wants to know about the first victor from Twelve, a girl of seventeen disappeared in the history archives. She wants to know how it was like before the Games, not just her Games, but the world before the seventy-five year long calendar the Capitol imposed on them.
She wants to know every song, and she wants to know how to sing it.
"You know," says Gale. "I think they were rebels' songs. That's why they were banned, and that's why they whipped my father's brother once for whistling one in public."
Katniss presses a finger to his lip. "Sing," she urges. "Sing."
And Gale sings. Katniss closes her eyes and listens, and she smiles brilliantly when the tune unites with a reminiscence of her father's voice, his low and halcyon hum. Gale enhances her father's song, Gale brings it to life, Gale fills the vague spaces in her memory with resplendent color.
She remembers, and she sings with him.