MEGASPOILERS for Mockingjay and the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. She owns all the characters. DO NOT READ if you have not finished/read the series, because if you have not, go out and read it. These books were amazing. Except for the ending.
…I run down the hall, out the front door, and around the side of the house, because now I'm pretty sure I can scream at the dead. When I see him, I pull up short. His face is flushed from digging up the ground under the windows. In a wheelbarrow are five scraggly bushes.
"You're back," I say.
He contributes a half smile in my direction, leaning his shovel haphazardly against the wheelbarrow. "I couldn't stand the work. The indoors. I needed to be back here—home."
I look around the circle of carefully groomed houses, so different to what Gale and I once called home.
"Nothing is home anymore, Gale. Everything is gone."
It was true. The ash still lingering in the sky condensed with water, and every few days the sky would rain black tears. Once the ground had dried, a thin layer of dust would rest over everything until the filtered sprinkler water washed it away.
I lean down now and run my finger over a patch of grass untouched by the pure water, and the soot clung to my fingertip.
"That's not true." Gale had come to crouch down across from me, looking down at that same patch of imperfect grass with admiration. "All the houses, all the plants, all the… people… that burned... they're still here. And their remnants will go into the ground, and feed the plants that feed us, so that humans and animals can keep on living."
I look up into Gale's dark eyes, so close to my own. The eyes that housed such hatred and hardness during the war, but that were now calm and peaceful. And his voice, that spoke only of tactics and strategies in the months before, but that now offered comfort.
How can I blame him for a crime I, too, committed?
"But it's not about life, Gale." I say, my voice growing higher in pitch. "It's about the people. They're gone. Dead. I don't care that they'll make life again, or that they'll make plants grow. I don't care that we're just animals, and we're all part of a big circle—I care about them. Humans have something more than just a need for survival, don't you understand? I loved them, and you loved your father! And they're all gone!"
I hear snaps as grass is pulled out from the ground under me by my own dirt-crusted fingers. I fling the green and black shreds away angrily, wiping my filthy hands on my pants, and plop, defeated, onto the ground.
"Remember the souls?" I ask Gale, dropping my voice to a whisper. "From the history books? That's what humans have. That's why we're not just a small part of the world. And that's why it hurts so much to lose them."
"Because we loved them."
I look up at Gale, now sitting across from me, looking down at the grime. The urge is suddenly so great and powerful that I throw my arms around him, for once ignoring doubts and reason. Because, in that one sentence, he seems to understand. It is a combination of his words, his expression, and his tone. And that, despite how eager he was to take down the capitol—at all costs—I know he understands me. We'd been through everything together. We knew each other when it was just us, before the capitol brought out our worst.
No, he'll never have been through the Games with me, or experienced all of the capitol's horrors. There were only a select few who ever have, and even fewer still living.
Not among those few living is the boy with the bread.
He may still be alive, in body. His soul has not left him—but it has been forever changed.
The boy who once loved me is gone.
Instead is the man I always loved.
I denied it as friendship when I wasn't allowing myself the possibility. But whether it was friendship or not didn't matter, because we did love each other. If Gale had been the one chosen for the Games, and my mind had been on his survival instead of fully focused on my own—I would have realized I loved him, just as he had.
Just as I do now.
And as we dirty our clothes in the wet grass, trying so hard to be close to make up for times lost, I think not of Peeta, or Finnick, or Boggs, and all that could have been. I think only of what is here now—a new life, growing inside of Annie, a new Panem, achieved from the loss of thousands of lives, and my Gale.
Who has been here all along.