AN: So this chapter is pretty Katniss/Gale centric, but it has some necessary back story. Also, I like Gale :)
Gale's POV:
Gale drums his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of the song playing on the radio. He hums under his breath; he won't subject his passengers to his god-awful singing voice. Apparently they have no such qualms as his dad and Mr. Everdeen start singing along loudly and gratingly off-key. Mr. Everdeen usually sings in an amazing falsetto, but his drunken state has clearly had an impact on his natural ability.
"Would you two old men shut up?" Gale shouts over the racket.
His comment only causes them to sing louder. Gale shakes his head at their antics, caught somewhere between amusement and annoyance. He hears a pop and hiss behind him and the singing has miraculously ended, but they better not be doing what he thinks they're doing. He turns his head away from the road to look into the backseat and sure enough his father and Mr. Everdeen each have a beer in hand.
Unbelievable.
The very last thing he needs is to be pulled over by the cops, where they will undoubtedly discover that Gale had a single beer as his dad, Mr. Everdeen, and their fellow construction workers pounded them back. Seeing as he only had the one beer hours earlier, he's pretty sure his BAC will be under the legal limit of 0.8 %, but he certainly doesn't anticipate finding out.
He's about to yell at them to put them back in the cooler when a blinding light catches the corner of his eye. He whips his head back around, but it's too late.
The last thing he hears is his father shouting his name in horror.
Gale wakes up in a cold sweat, his whole body shaking. He fights for breath as he tries in vain to hold himself together. He tumbles out of bed and barely makes it down the hall to the bathroom before he drops to his knees and empties the contents of his stomach into the toilet. He steps back and lies down on the bathroom floor, hoping the coolness of the tile against his cheek will help clear his head.
No matter how many times he has had to relive that night in his dreams over the last year, it never fails to have this debilitating effect on him. It is something akin to a panic attack, but Gale only thinks of it as a weakness that he cannot afford. He sucks in a deep breath, knowing he will have to get up soon; he has to see the kids off to school before he has to get himself ready for work.
A sharp knock at the door causes Gale to flinch and again he curses his weakness.
"Gale, Vicky won't let me in his room!" Posy complains in a whining voice that only a four-year-old could pull off.
Through the bathroom door Gale can hear Vick shouting down the hall to stop calling him Vicky. On another day this situation might have made Gale laugh, but this isn't just any day, and right now Gale is just trying to summon the will power to lift himself from the floor.
"Ow! Vicky, that hurt!" Posy shrieks. And that's all it takes. Gale is up and out that bathroom door faster than a bat out of hell.
To his credit, Vick looks ashamed, but Gale knows this is more due to thunderous look on his eldest brother's face than out of remorse for hurting his sister.
"How many times do I have to tell you; you can't hit her! Or anyone for that matter." Gale says in the voice he has adopted for scolding his brothers and sister.
"But she won't stop -"
Gale holds up a hand to quiet him. "I don't care what she did. You're older than her and bigger than her; you ought to know better. Vick, you have to do Posy's chores for the day when you get home from school."
"Aww, Gale, come on."
He ignores his brother's complaints and turns his attention to Posy, who is still rubbing her arm. Vick takes off down the hall, muttering mutinously under his breath.
"And Posy, please stop calling him Vicky; you know he doesn't like it."
Her bottom lips trembles, but she nods her head in agreement. He kneels down so they are face to face.
"Are you okay, Pose?"
She nods her head again, though her lips are still trembling, trying to hold back the tears. But he's proud of her for not crying.
A fucking four-year-old is stronger than you, a voice in his head taunts cruelly.
"Kiss it better, papa."
Gale has to turn away for a second, but he quickly gathers himself and kisses the spot on Posy's arm.
Every once in a while Posy will forget herself and call him papa, and every time she does, Gale's heart breaks a little bit more.
He sends Posy back to her room with instructions to get ready for school.
Gale heads back into the bathroom to splash some water on his face and brush his teeth before going to check on his mom. He knocks softly on the door and hears a low 'come in'.
Sondra, his mother's nurse, is drawing the curtains back to allow the sunlight to filter into the room. She does this every morning around this time to urge Gale's mother to wake up unprompted by words. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
"How is she?" he asks Sondra.
"She tried to leave again last night, insisting she had to get to work."
Gale nods somberly; no improvement, but at least no worse than he has come to expect.
"Javier, where have you been?" This isn't the first time his mom has mistaken him for his father. Her misconceptions sting no less than Posy's slip ups. "You didn't come home last night! You're carrying on with that Alajandra woman, aren't you? Don't think I don't see the way you look at her!"
Sondra has told him that when his mother is having one of her paranoid delusions, it's best for him to just play along and do what he can to placate her.
"No, of course not. I had to stay late at work. I love you, Arria; only you."
A faint, peaceful smile graces his mother's lips; this seems to have done the trick. Behind her, Sondra gives Gale a grim smile.
"Arria, would you like to start your morning prayer?"
When Gale had initially started doing research on Alzheimer's, he read that keeping up routines is a comfort to the person, and Sondra always makes sure his mother follows her routines down to the T. Gale wonders, not for the first time, what he would do without Sondra.
But Gale has to leave the room for this part. He can't stand to see his quickly disappearing mother still so devoted to an entity that does not exist. Because surely there is no God that would allow such a devastating disease as Early Onset Alzheimer's. Surely there is no God that would rob three young children of both of their parents in the space of just one year.
Surely there is no God.
Gale tries to push thoughts of his dream to the back of his head and focus on his work, but it is eating away at the edges of his consciousness, refusing to be forgotten or swept under the rug. This doesn't surprise him, though. Such is just par for the course with his 'night terrors', as Dr. Wilder liked to call them.
The expectation doesn't do anything to dull the anger, though. This isn't something he wants to think about right now. Aside from it being dangerous to be distracted on the job - some men have lost fingers, hands, even their lives by letting their mind wander while on the production line - he is occasionally prone to emotional displays (okay, crying) after his night terrors, and he can't think of anything more humiliating than breaking down at work.
Gale's co-workers know nothing of his life; he rarely talks to anyone unless it is work related. After numerous declined invitations they stopped inviting him out for after work beers, and eventually stopped talking to him altogether.
It's early, but Gale asks the foreman if he can take his lunch. The foreman narrows his eyes and tells him to make it quick. Gale isn't sure how you make a mandatory thirty minute lunch break quick, but he just nods in assent, grateful for the escape, no matter how brief.
He grabs his lunch out of the fridge and sits in the far corner of the lunch room, though there are only a couple other people in the room.
He bites into his sandwich and lets the thoughts come; best to get it over with while he is essentially alone and not in the presence of heavy machinery. And come they do, flooding his mind like a river breaking down a dam.
At first it is scrambled and messy, each thought attacking his mind quickly and ferociously - the semi blowing through the red light and slamming into the passenger side of his instantly totaled F-150; waking up in a hospital bed and asking where he was, where his father was, where Mr. Everdeen was, only to be told with frightening certainty that they had not survived the crash; the look in Katniss' eyes when she first came to visit him.
Eventually they even out and he is left with just a dull ache. As the dust settles, his thoughts stay on Katniss.
Gale could tell from the moment she stepped into that hospital room that nothing was ever going to be the same between them. But he didn't know at the time just how badly things were going to fall apart.
At first things were tense; they fought all the time about the most petty things and wouldn't speak for days. It wasn't uncommon for them to butt heads; they were both stubborn and fierce and wildly opinionated. But this time it was different. It was heavier somehow; it carried the weight of the words they weren't saying. At a time when they should have been clinging to each other for support more than ever, they were constantly pushing each other away. Katniss more so than Gale.
One night they were having perhaps their first honest conversation about that night that had changed both of their lives and the lives of their families forever. It was like an enormous weight had been lifted off ofGale's shoulders as he finally let out all the anger, all the guilt, all the sorrow that he had been holding back.
"I just keep replaying it over and over again in my mind, thinking of all the different ways I could have prevented it."
Katniss shook her head.
"You couldn't have prevented it." Her words weren't so much comforting as they were a statement of cold, hard fact.
His hands balled into fists.
"Maybe if I had been paying attention to the road instead of worrying about getting a DUI, I could have swerved out of the way."
"A DUI?" Katniss' voice was low and dangerous. "What do you mean a DUI?"
He hadn't meant to let those words slip. Katniss would never forgive him for this.
"I had a beer at the site." Katniss jumped up and she was more furious than he had ever seen her, and Gale was pretty good at working up Katniss Everdeen's temper, a temper that was always brewing just below the surface. Immediately he was in defensive mode, trying to salvage the situation; maybe trying to salvage their relationship. "But it was hours earlier! And you know one beer wouldn't have affected me!"
"How could you have kept this from me?"
"I didn't think it was important. I mean that asshole ran the red light, but the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe..." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Maybe it was my fault after all."
He wasn't expecting much - or any - comfort from Katniss at the moment, but the next words out of her mouth shocked him to his core.
"You know what? Maybe it was."
They didn't talk for a week; Katniss' last words hung heavy between them. She wouldn't answer his calls, and whenever he stopped by, Prim would say she was at work.
One night as he dialed her number and absently held the phone to his ear, more out of habit than out of expectation that she would actually pick up, the line connected.
"What do you want?" she said, her voice sharp and impatient.
"Katniss, please, just talk to me." He didn't care that he was begging, something he told himself he would never do under any circumstances, relationship or not.
"I have nothing to say to you."
How could she have nothing to say when Gale could think of a hundred things just off the top off his head?
"Gale, I can't do this anymore, any of this. Please don't call me anymore, and stop bothering my sister. She doesn't need to see the man that killed her father on her doorstep every day."
As the line went dead, a piece of Gale died along with it.
Katniss' POV:
"Katniss, can you drive me to the mall?"
Katniss is in her room, unwinding from a long day at work, and the last thing she wants to do is drive 20 minutes there and back to the mall - but she can't resist the puppy dog look in her sister's eyes.
"Sure," Katniss says, pretending like she wasn't just seconds away from falling asleep. She knows that Prim sometimes feels guilty about everything that Katniss does for her, and that's more weight than a thirteen-year-old needs to bear.
"Are you meeting your friends?" Katniss asks as she grabs her keys.
"Well, just one friend." Prim clarifies, and is it Katniss' imagination or do Prim's cheeks blush at this admission?
"Prim..." Katniss says, half warning, half questioning.
"Oh, relax, Kat. It's just Rory."
Katniss' eyebrows raise, a quizzical look on her face.
"Didn't he humiliate you in front of all your friends just last week?"
Prim blushes again.
"Yeah, but he apologized, " she says, as if it's simple as that. And to Prim, it is. To her way of thinking, if someone wrongs you and they apologize, you put it behind you. No questions asked.
Normally, Katniss would call this particular way of thinking a little naïve, but now she wonders if perhaps Prim is more mature than she is. The thought it a little unsettling, because it forces Katniss to rethink things she would rather not rethink, things she would rather not think about at all.
So she pushes the unwanted thoughts to the back of her mind, something she has become quite adept at, and switches gears to a safer and more neutral topic: wondering when exactly her baby sister had grown up so fast. What seems like just yesterday, she was crying on the steps of the school on her first day of kindergarten, and now she is teaching her twenty-one year old sister life lessons.
Last week for example, she had told Katniss politely and diplomatically, but in no uncertain terms, that she had been completely out of line in calling Peeta out the previous night. She had urged Katniss to apologize and take the time to get to know him.
"He could make you happy, Katniss. You deserve to be happy," she had said in a way that suggested she was wise beyond her years.
Never one to disappoint her little sister, Katniss had done just as Prim had advised, and she had to admit - if somewhat grudgingly - that she had been wrong about Peeta. Despite herself, she found that she actually longed to know more about him.
Which is how she found herself agreeing to a second date.
Peeta picks her up that night in his outlandishly expensive car that she wants to hate on principle, but surprisingly finds herself liking. Which, amusingly enough, seems to be an analogy for her relationship with Peeta. She also wants to hate the fact that he insists upon picking her up, something she would ordinarily write off as chauvinistic and outdated, but he somehow turns it into a charming endearment.
"Hey, Katniss." He smiles easily, genuinely pleased to see her. His perpetually cheerful disposition, that Katniss had originally assumed - based on experience - was an act, is apparently just a product of his optimistic outlook on life.
His constant positive attitude is somewhat of an enigma to Katniss, but she is determined not to read too much into it and just take Peeta at face value.
As they walk into the banquet hall where the annual Taste of Newport festival is held, Katniss nearly turns on her heel and walks right back out the door.
Peeta lays a hand on her tensed shoulders, noticing her distress. He leans in and asks quietly,
"What's wrong?"
Before she can respond, the very last person Katniss wants to see is upon them. Gale looks up from the platter of dirty dishes he's carrying and his eyes widen in surprise and another emotion that Katniss can't place. In no time at all, however, his expression smoothes out to the emotionless mask he has taken to wearing whenever he is around her.
"Katniss," he says, his voice similarly void of emotion and impossible to read. For someone who can usually read people with ease, it is more than a little disconcerting for her not to know what he is thinking.
"Hi,"
There's awkward, stifling silence for a minute. Peeta clears his throat, probably waiting for an introduction, but Katniss doesn't feel bound to such niceties when it comes to Gale. For his part, Gale is steadfastly ignoring Peeta's presence.
"How's your mom?" she asks out of genuine concern. She and Gale may no longer be dating - or even friends for that matter - but she still can't will away that piece of her heart that will always belong to him. She knows this because she's tried. At the end of the day Gale Hawthorne will always be her first love and first best friend - no matter what unforgivable crimes he has committed.
Gale rubs the back of his neck and doesn't fully meet her eyes. His gray eyes skirt around her face, as if he is trying to memorize every detail.
"Not very good. She's almost to the point where she needs round-the-clock care and I won't be able to afford having Sondra at the house that often." He gives Peeta a side long glance, but Katniss can tell that he's not embarrassed to have revealed so much about himself to a perfect stranger. Gale has never apologized for who he is or what he has.
Katniss feels a sharp tug at her heartstrings. She's always had to work hard for what she gets, but she can't imagine the strength it takes Gale to be the sole provider to a family of five on top of dealing with his mother's disease. It's not fair for him to have that weight on his shoulders, not when he's just supposed to be starting his own life.
A small, ugly voice in the back of her head insists that he is getting what he deserves. She banishes the thought immediately, hating herself for it and hating Gale for turning her into someone who is glad - if only for the briefest second - for someone else's anguish.
"I'm sorry, Gale. I wish there was something I could do to help-"
"You can't," he says sharply. "Nobody can."
This isn't a response that surprises her, nor one that she blames him for, but his harsh words still cause a faint ripple of pain in her chest. When is she going to stop being so emotionally unstable and vulnerable around him? She doesn't know the answer to that, which is another way she justifies to herself cutting him out of her life.
"Well, maybe I could," Peeta says, speaking up for the first time.
Gale turns his hostile glare on Katniss' date, apparently realizing he can longer ignore him once Peeta has directly addressed him.
Gale is tightly coiled, like a cobra ready to strike. Peeta doesn't even appear to notice that he has upset Gale; he's still smiling politely, if somewhat awkwardly, in the wake of Gale's silence. But Katniss has known Gale for most of her life, so maybe these nuances aren't as easy to pick up as she thinks they are.
"I don't need your charity, " Gale bites out harshly. Katniss knows it took all of his restraint not to tack a curse word in there somewhere, and she is sure he held himself back on her account. Gale has always been stubborn and proud to a fault. Although, Katniss supposes she is not really one to talk; she and Gale have always been freakishly alike.
Peeta seems momentarily taken aback as his smile fades, but not a minute passes before a neutral expression is back on his handsome face. (Yeah, she said it.)
"I'm sorry, that was stupid. It's just that I have all this money and it feels wrong because I don't need all of it, but you're right; that was out of line. I'm very sorry to have offended you.
"Yeah, I get it," Gale snaps. "You have more money than you know what to do with. Some of us weren't so lucky as to be born into a privileged family and actually have to work for what we get."
Peeta's jaw clenches almost imperceptibly, but Katniss has always been uncommonly observant.
"I'm sorry again, and I wish you and your family the best." He turns to Katniss and rests a hand on her arm. "I'll go get us a table."
Peeta walks away, giving Katniss the space to finish her conversation with Gale.
"He's a piece of fucking work, " Gale comments as soon as Peeta is gone. And there it is. "You sure know how to pick 'em."
Katniss' only response is a slight lift of her eyebrows as Gale seems to realize what he has said.
"I should go." She gestures in the direction Peeta had taken off. "I wish you and your family the best, " she says, copying Peeta's words. But as his words had sounded sincere and heartfelt, hers just sound stilted and rehearsed.
She hurries away before she can further make a fool out of herself. She finds Peeta waiting for her at a candelit table in a secluded corner. She has to admit, it looks pretty romantic.
She sits down opposite Peeta and hopes he doesn't mention the awkward encounter, but she can't blame him for wondering what the hell just went on.
"So, I'm guessing that was an ex we just ran into?" he asks lightly, but there is an edge of curiosity.
"I guess you could say that," she relents. "But I would really rather not talk about it."
"Of course," he says, completely nonplussed.
Katniss adds 'understanding' to the ever growing list of things she might be beginning to sort of like about Peeta Mellark.
