Summary: Gale's love for Katniss doesn't come right away.
A/N: Just something fueled by watching the Hunger Games a second time. I own nothing. Please review!
Wildfires
.1
Gale's love for Katniss doesn't come right away. It comes sneaking from some other part of him - something hidden away deep inside - as the years pass them by.
At first she is the little annoying girl - short of a father like him - wearing fire in her eyes and a sullen mouth; a lithe, graceful thing who refuses to trust him no matter what he does. He tugs at her braid like he always does with his baby sister but Katniss almost bites his hand off. She stubbornly takes on the biggest bow even though she's so tiny still and climbs the tallest, murkiest trees even though he protests and she carefully counts the dirty coins they get, all while looking at him suspiciously. He almost snorts. Yeah, right. Like he'd steal.
"Are you sure this is right?" he asks her sarcastically after she's handed him his share, her hands hidden in new mittens that are too big for her.
She doesn't crack a smile. "Yes."
"So, see you tomorrow, then?"
She just shrugs, her shell as impossible as always. Gale walks home through the ash-tasting snow shaking his head and fuming a bit, wondering why he's even bothering with this stubborn-minded child. His friends at school would laugh themselves silly if they knew about her bossing him around the way she does without uttering a single word, by just being granite-eyed under her fringe.
But she shows up at the same place in the woods the next day, at the same time. And the day after that. They don't say much, but they learn the language of the other anyway. When they bring down a deer wearing hazelnut fur swollen with enough meat for months, she smiles at him for the first time. It's the first unguarded thing he has ever seen her do and he smiles back before he can stop himself.
That night, belly full and his family sound asleep and with the prospect of hunting with Katniss tomorrow, Gale feels happy for the first time since his father died. It's an odd, raw emotion and he falls asleep dreaming of woods, not mines.
Then there is Reaping day. It's Katniss' second and his fourth, a suffocating day. Right before it begins and he's caught in a sea of bodies stinking of fear she casts him a look that startles him a bit. She's all bare eyes and biting her nails to shreds and not at all like the Katniss he knows from the woods; Katniss who wears thick skin on her nose and a straight spine curving to no one. Yet something passes between them in that moment and he knows exactly what she's feeling. So he gives her a small nod like he does in the woods when they need to keep their breath locked in their palms so they won't scare game off, and when they draw the girl's name – a fair merchant child with terrified honey eyes whose milk legs tremble past him - he finds himself exhaling in relief. It's not her. Not Catnip.
That's when things start to change. When they become friends. No, not just friends. Kin. That's what it feels like, what it blooms into. A sense of trust, of companionship. The days not so lonely, not so bleak and life not just a stretch between Reapings, of waiting out school so he can start working in the mines. Together they stain their fingers with blackberries and spoil their minds with dreams and roam the woods. It becomes happier, lighter, more.
.2
At first it's only the little things he notices. The small details that make her the way she is. Like the way her braid tastes her naked collarbone just so when she teaches him how to swim on a humid summer day and how the sound of her laughter – as rare as Greasy Sae's bathing days, Katniss says - dents his dimples. He realizes how warm and right she feels, her head heavy in the crook of his neck on a tired Sunday morning when the world is a hushed place. Their place. He realizes how terrible and pale a place it would be without her in it.
Then time starts to push soft curves between her hips and the tine of her ribcage. She shoots out of the soil like a young, wiry tree and stops looking like a child. Not that she realizes that, of course. She has other things on her mind, and her mouth stays as sullen when they're not in the woods, her syllables just as clipped unless she's with Prim.
The first time he notices that she's gone from a child to a girl is when they go swimming one day, game bags swollen at the seams already. It's hot and sultry and she just pulls her clothes off like always until she's in her underpants and throws herself in the water, laughing the way she never does on the other side of the fence. Now, it's not like Gale is innocent. He's kissed his fair share of girls, pretty things with sweet mouths who make his skin warm and he's a teenage boy, after all. But seeing Katniss like this in the lush woods pregnant with honeysuckle, bare belly and thighs and all, do things to him he never really believed Catnip could do. He almost blushes as she turns in the water and grins.
"Aren't you coming in?"
He clears his throat. "Yeah."
He feels almost a bit awkward as he pulls his pants down over his scraped knees and peels his shirt over his shoulders and walks into the lake. It's night-cold still, even though it's brushing 10 am and she laughs at him and splashes water in his direction.
"Too cold for you?"
"Careful, Catnip."
She shrieks as he lunges for her and grabs her around her waist and pulls her down underwater. It's a clear mountain lake and the quiet, sunlit green flood his senses and his laugh gets water-trapped before he hooks his arms under the soft crook of Katniss' sun-stained knees and shoot through the surface. He sets her down as she weaves her arms around his neck, thumbs gripping the soft dents of his shoulders searching for balance. She's laughing and spluttering, breathstarved.
"We probably scared off all the animals within a five mile radius."
He laughs. "You did. Screamin' like a merchant girl."
He tugs at the end of her damp braid, smiles a little. Allows himself, for the fragment of a second, to let his hand slide from the tips of her wingbones, across the soft dips of her ribs and rest in the dent of her hip, tracing the edges of her hunter scars. Up close he can count the freckles mapping her nose, hiding when she smiles. He pulls her against him a little tighter and lets his gaze drop to her mouth – unknown territory - for just a split moment. Imagines what she would taste like, fresh lake water and salty skin on his tongue. What she would feel like; lazy, summer-warm limbs wrapped around his. He feels himself harden and he swallows and pulls away before she can realize.
Later, when they let the sun bake the sand and water off of their limbs, he glances at her. Shut-eyed with afternoon light curling under her eyelids, dark hair pooling in her collarbone. This is Katniss, whom he has known for years. Katniss, who distracted him from the pain his father left behind. Katniss, who all of a sudden makes him want to do things that turn his palms damp. All of a sudden it's like she's someone else. It's not a bad difference, but it's just that. Different.
Right before they go home that night, today's haul traded and bodies aching comfortably dull, he helps her buy the cheap candy that Prim likes. Katniss turns to him, paper bag clutched tight to her chest.
"You would take care of her, right? If I were ever reaped?"
He searches her face. "You don't have to ask. I know you would do the same."
Her face is serious. "I know. Promise?"
"I promise."
She nods.
"I promise, too."
After that day, Gale starts to see flashes of a future. Green woods and proud mountains somewhere far away, in a world not as wrecked and harsh as this. Katniss with beautiful, weathered lines in her face and a child wearing grey eyes and night hair clasped to her breast. Prim is there, too, and his brothers. It's a silly fantasy – not something an 18-year-old man should have – but it is what it is.
.3
"Up you go, Catnip."
This is the hardest sentence Gale ever has to say. Oh, he has thought it in his mind, this scenario, many times. A nightmare visiting him as often as his father does, being blown apart again and again all before dawn cracks the night sky.
They were never quite like this, though, the nightmares. Prim trashing in his arms, clawing at his cheeks; barbed-wire harsh screams being ripped out of her, and his back turned to Katniss. You don't turn your back on your hunting partner, you just don't, but it is what he has to do.
He wants them to call his name. He wants to step up beside her and shake her hand that he knows so well and shield her against dangers. But he knows he can't. She would never forgive him, and he would never forgive himself. Still, "I volunteer" tickle the back of his teeth and it is in that moment, the moment when he doesn't say it, that moment where he keeps walking with Prim whom he know he has to protect now, that he realizes that he loves her. That he loves her so much that being selfish won't work. That letting her go and keeping his promise to take care of her family is the only way to honor that love. So he does. He swallows his words, and he lets her go.
When he has her wrapped in his arms later, her heart a loud bird on the inside of her chest even though she tries to hide it and with their last seconds drowning, he wants to kiss her. He wants to kiss her before she scatters for the wind, before Panem takes her, too. But now isn't the moment. Now isn't the time. They're hunters and strategy comes first, nursing dreams come second.
He changes he mind at the last moment; he wants to tell her how he believes in her, how he loves her. But Gale was always too late, really.
"Katniss, remember I –"
Then they rip them apart and slam the door and she turns into the girl on fire.
He watches her on the screen with everyone else. Her bored mouth on the train; her bubbly personality in the interview – he knows it's all fake, all for show. When she gets thrown in the arena people watching around him gasp at her twists and turns, but Gale almost feels like he's there with her. A second before she makes a move, he sees it in his mind, feels it in his muscles. When her head snaps up at the different announcements, he knows exactly what she's feeling. He knows the way she operates, the way she functions, the way she is.
He knows - when she holds out those berries - that she's bluffing. And Gale knows - by the way she's looking at the baker boy when they arrive home on the train - Gale knows that he has lost her.
.4
Alongside with his silly boy dreams, there are dreams of something bigger. Bigger than him and Katniss and District 12. It's a dream of avenging the death of his father and so many others, dreams of breaking free of the restraints that hold him down. Neither Gale nor Katniss were born caged. They were born runners; free in the woods, unstoppable, passionate wildfire.
It's fury – not love – that fuels his dreams when he thinks of his mother, her belly a swollen globe with Posy swirling underneath, sadness consuming her when she found out about his father's fate. It's fury that makes him help design bombs, as he thinks of how he watched Katniss get taken from him, watched her get turned into a Capitol device against her will. It's fury that burns underneath his skin when he sees his home go up in flames. He needs revenge. Gale is not a caged bird. He never was.
Maybe somewhere far back in his mind, he hopes that Katniss will return to him. In District 2 he kisses the base of her throat right where her pulse breathes, works his way to her mouth, and presses her up against a tree. He feels hard against her thigh, slipping his tongue between her lips and the joy - the lust he feels at her giving back - is what he always dreamed of. He sneaks his hands under her shirt and explores the bumpy map of her body, and she does the same. He almost groans when she brushes the spots he always imagined her touching, alone in his bed and hands under the covers that in his mind were hers; familiar and delicate.
But when he opens his eyes and looks at her he doesn't see the girl in his mind, or the girl from the woods, or the girl on fire. He sees someone lost and it feels so fucking unfair when he realizes he will never be the one to help her find her way home because he has no idea where that is.
So, he tells her of all the girls he's kissed. To make her feel better. To make himself feel better. But in the end, it doesn't feel any better at all.
.5
Gale knows, when Prim dislocates in the air and scatters for the wind as easily as dandelion seeds, he knows that Katniss will never forgive him.
He thought he loved her before. But it is in that moment – staring at her in the mirror, her face so much like it was during that first reaping - that Gale realizes what love really is. What made his mother put on a brave face in front of his brothers, even as she wept into his fathers old shirts. What made Katniss sacrifice herself for Prim. What made Gale stay behind in District 12 and let her go. It's this. It's what doing what is best for them. He knows Katniss so well that he realizes she doesn't need him in her life anymore, that he is just an old wound that will never heal unless he goes away.
So, instead of telling her how much he loves her, and how he wants to spend the rest of his free life with her, and all the other selfish things that brew inside of him, he just tugs at her braid like he's done a million times, a billion days ago when she was just a child and he was, too and they were each other's home, and all he says is:
"Shoot straight, okay?"
Gale's love for Katniss doesn't come right away. But when it does it isn't consumed, and it doesn't fade, and it doesn't set any cities ablaze. But it stays. Even though he doesn't.