There is a string of girls after he moves to District Two. Blondes, redheads, brunettes. He knows the hair, but not the eyes, not the smiles, not the tiny flickers of expressions that flit across their faces.
Gale can't look at them, not when Katniss still flits through his dreams, his mind; not when he still turns and expects to see her right behind him, like always—she was always quieter than him, hands steadier, eyes sharper. She was always better than him.
But the company is good, the alcohol burns on the way down, and the days pass by.
Gale's hands itch for a bow when he's running on empty, trailing empty coffee cups and half-eaten meals through meetings and interviews. The press of people around him, needing things, expecting things from him, is suffocating, and his mind slips to quiet green woods, eyes following a deer's tracks, the sun warm on his back.
He settles for a small clearing in front of the Justice Building after dark. Sometimes the birds swoop in to lazily peck at the bread crumbs he scatters on the ground.
When Gale sees a mockingjay, he considers shooting it with the gun clipped at all times to his belt.
He throws stones at it instead until the mockingjay takes off.
It isn't that he didn't love Katniss.
He did—he does.
He just sometimes thinks that maybe it would have been better if she had died in the arena.
(But he really thinks he should have volunteered for Peeta, so it would have been him with Katniss instead of Peeta, and the star-crossed lovers would have been Gale and Katniss, and maybe things would have been different.
Or maybe they wouldn't at all.)
He writes her letters.
Page after page, starts and stops, smudged ink, crumpled paper, his hands shaking from too much caffeine and too little sleep.
When he's done with each one, he feeds them slowly into the fireplace and watches them burn into small black ashes, like the ones that fell on District Twelve, the ones that covered the Center of the Capitol for days after the war ended.
It doesn't stop the nightmares. It doesn't make his heart stop aching.
It's something to do, though.
In all the years that pass, Gale never goes back to District Twelve. He never sees Katniss or Peeta again, never revisits the woods where he used to hunt.
He can be okay with that.