Disclaimer: The rights are not mine. (And frankly the odds are not in my favor to ever procure them.)
A/n: I just love Gale - he's so compelling to me. That's clearly showing through this ficathon, as almost everything I end up writing is Gale or Gale/Katniss related! I ship Katniss with like everyone tho, so, it's only a matter of time before I've written a fic with her and everyone else. ;)
Prompt: gale/katniss; i never felt so wicked as when i willed our love to die. (For jada_jasmine)
If I Didn't Care
He didn't tell her. He didn't want to wreck what they had. Didn't want to change their dynamic, to take that smile (her real one, the one for him, for the woods) from her face (because he knew her stance on love and family and children and he used to agree until the one he was loving was her). Didn't want to change a single thing.
When she screamed for Prim and volunteered in her place, he knew he should've told her.
He wants her to come back, of course he does. He feels like there's something huge missing when she's not there, something is wrong and nothing he does can tear him away from the fact that he fell in love with his best friend and she's going to die.
He believes in her, believes she can survive – she's amazing and skilled and smart. But this is the Games and he's seen them for 18 years and he knows the odds are in no one's favor.
Somehow he thinks it's less painful to just think of her as gone already.
Late at night when he's wide awake, inevitably unable to think of anything but her fighting and hiding and dying, he wonders if it makes him a horrible person to wish he'd never loved her at all. Surely it wouldn't hurt this bad if he'd never cared.
It might've been easier without the looks he gets from people, from friends, from family. The ones who are used to seeing Gale and Katniss, Katniss and Gale, and now there's only Gale. And Katniss is kissing Mellark and everyone just assumes – has assumed for years – that Gale and Katniss were together, and in love with each other, and he just can't bring himself to say, No, just me.
He rushes to the forest, to their spot and there's too much emotion, overwhelming and crushing and suffocating and he's never wished harder for everything to just be different. He's punching a tree so hard his knuckles bruise and bleed and scream and it's a different kind of pain that can take him away from thoughts of her.
And here he thinks that maybe it's a good thing she's never coming back. He doesn't know how to deal with them – Gale and Katniss, Katniss and Gale – if she does.
When it's over, when they've won, when they've bent the rules and impossibly triumphed, and she's standing on the train platform holding Mellark's hand and smiling...
He wishes he could still tell if it was her real smile or not.
A/n: Thanks for reading! More HG ficcage from me soon.
