I am so sorry for the huge delay! I was busy as could be and the fight scene here proved harder to write than I thought. Enjoy!
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Chapter 11: Gale and I
The next time I remember to pack a file in my prosthetic, I need to put an extra set of clothes in there, too.
I trek through the woods in the scorching heat of what is only mid-morning. Tripping over rocks and roots in my bare feet, I can't help but also wish that I brought my boots with me from my would-be grave.
Even though the trees are providing somewhat of a canopy, I can still feel the sun beating down over my bare back. My sweaty curls hang down over my forehead, allowing sweat droplets to drip down my chest. My somewhat tight denim pants are not helping with my overheating and a lot of dirt is accumulating around the bottom due to my lack of shoes. I am dressed in the worst possible material for a hot day's hike.
I continue stubbornly through the brush as heat waves rise up from the ground in the distance. The dirt on my face and the blood on my hands have long been dry, a stark contrast to the overwhelming wetness I feel on my sweaty chest.
Despite having taken a generous drink from the stream, I still feel dehydration seeping into my being. I walk like this for hours, holding onto my sanity through sheer will power and the desire for revenge. My dry mouth is still dangling open when I reach a clearing where a huge hill stands in my way.
The land is so steep that I am forced to climb on my hands and knees, and my chest rubs on the grass as I ascend the mountain.
When I finally pull myself to the top, I stand triumphantly on the hill and gaze down at not one, but two of my targets.
Gale is just pulling up in front of Prim's home, swinging a silver parachute in his arm. What the hell is he doing here? I can't see much from up here, but he appears to be wearing a new suit which looks to be plain. Good for you, Gale. You may be an asshole, but you still never bought into any of that Capitol fashion garbage.
Prim stands in her doorway, clad in only a long shirt and what looks to be a pair of thin underwear. Gales stops dead in his tracks upon seeing her sleepy, half-nude figure, clearly appalled by the nudity of the girl whom he once looked after like a sister. They don't seem to have the same relationship anymore. It makes sense; Prim is crazy and Gale is pure evil. They're simply not compatible at all these days without Katniss to glue them together.
Though all of this doesn't matter; they're both going to be dead very soon. Just after Gale ducks into Prim's home, I begin my sneaky descent into her compound.
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"Now that is a District 12 funeral!" Gale jeers in joy. "Bury him alive just like our fathers. Genius, Prim!"
Prim is only half-listening. She's half-asleep, half-awake and making an alcoholic drink that doesn't look half as good as anything Greasy Sae would have made. It's possible that spending her teenaged years in a dry district has ruined her taste for alcoholic beverages.
From where I'm crouched, I can see Gale, too. He's waiting in her sitting area while she mixes the drink in the kitchen. Thankfully for the sake of awkwardness, she has put on a robe. Prim may have a beautiful body, but the one thing that Gale and I can agree on is that we never want to think of our little sister in that way or have to look at her now curvy figure.
"What's the name on the grave he's buried under?" Gale asks, pulling out an electronic tablet to take notes.
Prim still doesn't look at him, but begins to actually listen. "Maysilee Donner," she says, punctuating each word with the tossing of a piece of ice into their drinks.
Gale carefully copies the name into his tablet from Prim's rocking chair. He's sitting with one leg crossed over the other, his cleaned and pressed suit draped over his body like a flag over a mountain. He may have grown even more since my coma began, but I'm pretty sure I can take him down.
"Can I look at the knife?" He asks Prim, nodding in the direction of something sheathed on the table.
Oh, shit.
She's selling him my knife. My knife. The knife that Beetee made for me especially to kill Katniss specifically. Oh, they are both going down hard.
Prim cocks her head with one drunken eye closed in the direction of Gale's suitcase that she is now pointing to with her pestle. "That's my money in that silver parachute, isn't it?"
"It sure is," replies the sly Jabberjay.
"Well then, Gale," she says, returning to her concoction. "It's your knife now."
Gale walks over like an excited child and tears the knife from it's leather home. As the metal rings in the air, Prim begins to pound some cilantro with her pestle and mortar. Gale says something that no one hears.
When Prim is done pounding, she throws the pestle in the sink and yells, "What's that you said?"
"I said, 'So this is Beetee Latier technology?'"
"That's Beetee's work," she confirms, placing the cilantro bits in each drink. Gross.
"Didn't you used to have one of these?" He asks, sheathing the instrument.
"Yeah, at one point," she replies, evening out the level of each drink.
"How does this one compare?" He inquires slyly.
For the first time this morning, she shows emotion. "You can't compare Beetee's weapons. If you're gonna compare them, you compare them to every other Capitol invention ever made."
"Fair enough," says Gale, returning to his seat and waiting for his drink.
Prim sloppily lifts both drinks and crosses into the sitting area to meet Gale. I can see her sloshing the drinks around like she's already drunk four of them, and Gale seems to notice, too, when he apprehensively accepts one. He struggles not to wince as he sips it and Prim sits down in front of him.
"So," she begins. "Which 'R' you filled with?" She punctuates the thought with a smile.
What?
"What?" Gale asks, echoing my thoughts.
She readily explains. "They say that the number one killer of all the miners in District 12 was never starvation or black lung, but the lack of motivation. By the time the day ended and a man or woman's family was still starving and demoralized, he or she would face a serious logical question: Why do I even bother? No matter how hard the miners worked, their circumstances never improved and there was simply no light at the end of the tunnel. When they were children, the hope of surviving the reaping was reason enough to push on each year. But in adulthood, there was simply no reason to continue the strain.
"And the way I figure it, you and Peeta shared a similar relationship."
Great. She buried me alive and now she's talking behind my back. Gale leans in, finally excited.
"So now that you don't have that motivation to compete for Katniss' heart because Peeta is dead, which 'R' you filled with: relief or regret?"
He considers for a minute. "A little bit of both."
"Goat shit," she nearly interrupts him. "Now you're starting to sound like Katniss, all indecisive. Which one do you feel more of? Answer the damn question, Gale."
Surprisingly, he concedes, looking up after a minute and speaking. "Regret."
He doesn't explain, and she doesn't ask him to. She just stares at her glass and drones on. "You know, I gotta give it to you, Gale. Nobody ever gave Katniss as much heartbreak as Peeta did."
What is she talking about? Katniss is the one that did all the heartbreaking.
"She thought he was so damn perfect. And he was, but nobody could've avoided what happened to him." She walks to the flimsy kitchen table and sits right next to the window where I am watching, forcing me to crouch lower. The silver parachute with her payment inside is sitting before her, and she eagerly opens it.
Once she does, she begins cackling wildly. Gale should be phased by this statement of insanity, but he seems focused on her like a hawk. He walks over and leans on the kitchen bar, watching as she gratefully counts the money. She eyes him suspiciously for a second, but is too tempted by the currency before her to not take it all out and count it.
In a split second, some kind of mechanism is tripped by the removal of the money and the tiny silver thing explodes in her face.
It's not a large contraption, but its power is great and concentrated directly at her head. The girl catches fire and begins screaming and running around the kitchen, toppling things over and shouting expletives at Gale but not finding him due to the fact that her eyeballs are melting and pouring out of their sockets. She rolls in the debris and money on the floor to try to extinguish the flames, but it's no use.
Primrose Everdeen is dying in kitchen, and Gale Hawthorne has done it.
I clamp one hand over my mouth in shock, not expecting to witness Gale Hawthorne kill the younger sister of the woman he loves. She's still breathing with some difficulty, and I know that in about a minute this will stop. I can't bear to look at her bald, bleeding, and burnt head as she clings to life and Gale approaches her chuckling.
This is why he was eyeing her so much, I realize. He had no intention of paying her, he wanted to steal my knife. But why kill Prim?
When he sits down on the chair facing her, I realize he may be about to answer that question.
"I'm sorry, Prim," he says sardonically. "That wasn't very fair was it? But then again, the Capitol was never very fair with us."
The Capitol has nothing to do with Prim, so I push this possible motive out of my head.
"And here's the real kicker," he continues. "The bomb that just set you on fire is Beetee Latier technology! In fact, we designed it together, during the rebellion. This was before he swore that oath to the memory of Nuts or whatever."
It infuriates me that he's talking about my allies this way, but I decide not to attack just yet.
"I took a lot of notes on the contraptions that Beetee and I invented together, and this was one of my favorites." Gales pulls his electronic tablet back out and begins reading. "'The device will produce flames that should lick through the skin of anyone within close range'-that's you, Prim-'and cause death from bleeding within two minutes.' Pretty strong stuff, huh?"
Prim is still gasping on the floor, struggling to breathe as the embers embedded in her skin continue to hiss.
"And since I have just enough time, I'd like to more thoroughly answer that question you asked me earlier." Gale settles back in his seat and puts his tablet away. "At this moment, the biggest 'R' I feel is regret. Regret that maybe the greatest man I ever met met his end at the hands of an insane, naïve, wimpy little shit like you."
I find it hard to take the compliment when he's spitting on a dying girl.
"That man deserved better," he finishes, gazing off into the distance.
Prim finally stops gasping and writhing, defeated by her wounds. Her charred head falls limp, and I feel a pang in my heart even though killing her myself was my main objective in coming here. Gale notices and gets up to start recollecting the money. That greedy piece of shit.
I'm about to burst in when his Mockingjay communicator buzzes. Funny, I didn't know he still carried that. I'm about to wonder who's contacting him when he says her name.
"Katniss," he answers the call, putting the device up to his ear. "I have tragic news. Your sister's dead."
His acting skills are immaculate; for a minute I almost believe that he had nothing to do with Prim's murder. This only adds to the reasons I want to kill him.
"I'm so sorry, Katniss," he drones on. "He put a bomb in her house disguised as a silver parachute from the Games."
Me? That asshole is actually blaming this on me. Wow.
"Don't worry, Katniss. I got him," he lies again. "He's dead."
Now he's about to take credit for Prim's actions.
"If you ever feel like paying your respects," he looks up from collecting the money for a second. "Come to the wilderness between Districts 12 and 13. Walk just outside the entrance to the underground part of 13 and pick some dandelions from the woods. Then, take those dandelions to the secret graveyard where District 12 nobility is buried, find the headstone marked with our heroine Maysilee Donner, and lay the little yellow weeds there. Because you will be standing at the final resting place of Peeta Mellark."
I'm standing a few feet away from the door, ready for when he comes out.
He puts the last of the money in the cloth of the parachute, the only part to escape the detonation, and grabs my knife as well. "Alright, I'll be there in an hour or so. See you then."
The moment he launches the door open and steps outside with my knife and Prim's rightful money, I meet his face with my feet and send him flying back inside.
When we both fall into the house and land on the floor, he drops the money and we both jump to our feet. He tries to open the knife from its sheath, but I resheath it and push him back into the wall. He decides to use the sheathed knife to fight me instead, and pushes me into an old television that once sat in the Everdeen's original living room. Being resourceful, I rip an antenna off the old device and whip it across his face.
He flinches before the thin piece of metal even touches his face, obviously still traumatized by his floggings at the hands of Commander Thread. I give him a laceration on each cheek and he falls backwards onto Prim's counter.
He looks horrified, and tries his best to get back up. He shields himself with the knife and tries to unsheath it again, but I stand in front of him and hold it closed. He slides the knife out just enough to expose the blade and pushes it toward my neck while sweat still drips down my Adam's apple. Before the knife can reach my throat, I kick him in the shin and he bends backward onto the counter again. I try to slit his throat as well, but he head-butts me back into the center of the room.
The next thing I know, we're both on the ground after crashing into each other and sending one another flying backwards to opposites sides of the room.
Even though he manages to get up before I do, I grab Prim's lamp and break it against his face. I stand up to attack, but he steals the lamp and clamps it down on my bare, dirt-covered foot. When I double over to grab my probably broken foot, he kicks me in the face with his boot and sends me flying backwards onto Prim's rocking chair.
The backing of the chair collapses and I am stuck on what is now just a stool, only my back touching the seat of it as my limbs flail wildly. I give up my starfish-like balancing act and fall behind the piece of furniture, but Gale stands proudly and attempts to draw the knife, only to lose all of his prestige by hitting the ceiling and being completely unable to release it from its leather cage.
I take advantage of the delay and douse him with a medium-sized tin of raw goat's milk, the same milk which Prim had taken from Lady the day before and had been sitting out all night. The disgusting white liquid splashes across Gale's front and causes him to sheath the knife and stagger backwards.
"Gross," he sneers as he wipes some of it from his face with his sleeve.
When he brings down my knife in retaliation, I stand and bring the half-chair before my face to protect myself. We have a small fight with the chair and knife until I do something miraculous: I maneuver the chair to capture the knife in its legs. Once I do, I throw both objects aside, wrenching away Gale's weapon.
He follows the items with his eyes in surprise before returning his attention to me and throwing a punch my way. I'm a little bit too proud of my previous trick to block myself, so I admit, he hits me around a lot. At one point, I just barely dodge his foot in time for him to smash the wall right where my head was.
I then bend down and pick up Prim's washboard. The thin wooden contraption does not last long, because I use it as a makeshift club. Gale dodges it and leaps over Prim's kitchen counter, landing on her charred body as I inadvertently smash the washboard on the bar. Gale, ever the asshole, uses Prim's body as leverage to jump up and grab the edges of two ceiling tiles. Like an evil acrobat, he swings his legs to kick me across to the other side of her sitting area.
I land on the chair Prim had been sitting in that leans against the wall of the bathroom. Suddenly, I get an idea. When Gale stands several feet before me, poised for a menacing flying kick, I decide to use his cockiness against him. When he is almost upon me, I stand to dodge his kick and use his momentum to launch him through the wall into the bathroom.
Shower tiles fall around him as he struggles to adjust to the fact that he is now in another room of the house. I hop in and join, wrapping my arms around his neck as he tries in vain to return to the sitting area where my knife is.
We grapple on the floor, the wrestler and the hunter, him trying to elbow me as I choke the life out of him. I find myself thanking my brothers for putting me in choke-holds for all of my childhood, because now I have Gale in a near perfect one. When I get tired of him elbowing me, I dunk his head into Prim's toilet and try to drown him.
He struggles for a bit, but soon discovers the flush switch on the toilet and uses it to get rid of some of the water. Unfortunately, he starts to breathe again and elbows me in the crotch, forcing me off of him. I roll backwards into the shower curtain and double over in pain. I only push the curtains aside when I hear him start to leave the bathroom.
I chase him out, and the two of us engage in one final fist fight. He gets a few good jabs in, but I am unable to hit him once. After he dodges my fist, I end up making a large hole in the wall instead. I try to pursue him in the hallway, but he only turns around to kick me far from him. I land and bash my head into a chest in what I can only guess is Prim's closet.
He smirks at me as he whips around to return to the sitting area and retrieve my knife. I am about to acquiesce when my eye catches something. My vision darts around the dark closet while I pant faster than ever, and I discover a glint in the corner of the small room. I immediately grab it and scoot into the light of the hallway.
The object is a knife just like mine. Funny, Prim must have lied about not having a knife anymore. I unsheath the weapon and read an inscription inside.
"To my sister Prim, the only person I'm sure I love -Katniss"
I feel a smile flash across my face as I punctuate the quote with her name, and I'm not sure why.
The knife is more than a few years old, but it will have to do, because I am now standing menacingly at the end of the hallway, facing Gale who has now returned with my own unsheathed knife.
I am calm, but he is all out of sorts. He looks surprised at the knife.
"What's that?" he gestures to the weapon.
"Prim's Latier knife," I respond coolly.
"She said she didn't have one anymore," he inquires, resting my knife on his shoulder.
"Well I guess she's a liar then."
There's a short uncomfortable silence as we process the fight that is about to go down. But before we kill each other, I have one last piece of business.
"Gale," I start.
"Peeta."
"There's one thing I've always been curious about: what exactly did you say to Haymitch for him to let you get back with Katniss? Don't lie, I've seen the propos. I know that you two began to see each other again. It doesn't surprise me that she would go so quickly back to you, but for Haymitch to allow that to happen, you must've done something."
Gale is silent for a minute, but he then begins to burst out laughing. I am appalled.
"Are you sure your stay in the Capitol didn't permanently damage your brain?" he gasps. "When you let Katniss go for my girl Madge, Katniss didn't come crawling back to me! I don't care what the propos suggested, she would never get back with me no matter what I did. Even now, she won't give me the time of day."
I am thoroughly confused. "But...I don't understand. It seemed-"
"Shouldn't you know better than most people that things are not always how they seem?"
He's right, but I don't admit it. How could it be that Katniss isn't with Gale now? Nothing makes sense.
"Besides," Gale continues, "Haymitch would have killed me. Of course, that's not a problem, since I killed him first."
My jaw drops. The words hit me faster than I can process them. Of all of the pain that Gale has caused me, this is one of the worst things he could do. Haymitch was my mentor, my friend, my father figure. My thoughts are pierced only by his ensuing laughter
"I poisoned his liquor," Gale explains between cackles. "The old drunk bastard was just lying on the floor, pointing to me and saying that he would 'give me his word.' But I told him that, to me, the word of an old drunk bastard like him was worth less than nothing."
I'm only half listening, too hurt to take in the words.
"That's right," he confirms. I watch the crease between his gray eyes, the wrinkles of his nose, and crook of his smile as the evil displays clearly across his face. "I killed your mentor. And now, I'm gonna kill you too! With your own knife, no less. This knife will become mine, and with you out of the way, in the very near future, Katniss will finally give up and let me take over."
Gale Hawthorne had Katniss for all of our childhood, keeping her away from me. He continued to keep part of her heart even after I had tried to win it in the first Games. And in the end, he stole her from me completely after I just had won her over. Now, he's promising to take her for himself.
This makes absolutely no sense. If Katniss doesn't want me, why am I a barrier between Gale and her? All I know is one thing: I can't let Katniss be seduced by a murderer. There's no doubt in my mind that Gale has kept and will continue to keep the secret of Haymitch's death, and I know that he will always frame me for Prim's. Katniss deserves a lot of pain, but she does not deserve to live the rest of her life settling for this piece of shit standing before me. In fact, no one deserves to have to deal with him. Ever.
"Asshole," I say, "You don't have a future."
I step back into fighting stance and lift my knife to my face. His face softens as he does the same. We look at each other from across the hall and I realize that this is the moment I have been waiting most of my life for. All of the afternoons when I watched enviously from the bakery window as Katniss and Gale returned to the Seam after trading with my father, all of the pent up anger at seeing his smug face walk alongside Katniss in the hallways of school, and all of the betrayal I felt after watching them together in the propos lead up to this moment.
Even though he is smiling at me cockily, I am fuming. I can feel my bloodshot eyes boiling with rage as my dirt-covered skin grows flush with goosebumps of fury. We stare at each other for a moment, the Victor and the soldier, the baker and the miner, the lover and the fighter. It is time for this rivalry to end.
He screams a battle cry and rushes towards me. I do the same, hitting him with full force as we converge right outside of the bathroom door. Our knifes lock together, the sharp blades threatening to slice into one another, barred only by their mutual sturdiness. We push with all of our might, each of us trying to push our knife into the other. The veins in my bare arms and chest push up against my pale skin, a visible sign of my struggle.
The tables turn on me in a matter of seconds. I may be stronger and steadier than Gale, but I am a bit more awkward due to my prosthetic leg. I lose my footing for a second and begin to slide backwards, prompting an eerie smirk from Gale. My shocked blue eyes meet his dark gray irises in fear that I may actually lose this fight.
But then my eye returns to the knives between us; mine, in particular. I remember something that Beetee put in my knife, something that only my knife contains. A mechanism that represents something that I have always been there to kindle in Katniss. Something that Gale always had too much of. Something that led to Prim's downfall and will now lead to Gale's.
With my last bit of strength, I reach over and flip on the fire mechanism on my knife.
Gale's body catches ablaze and he drops everything. The man screams and begins to roll around on Prim's bathroom floor. Pitiful moron.
What Gale didn't know about my knife that he wanted so very badly was that Beetee's fire mechanism will catch anyone close to it on fire if they are not careful enough. Because the flame was so close to him and he didn't know that it was coming, he suffered the consequences.
What's more, it releases amounts of flammable liquid that are embedded into the person afflicted. It will keep him burning. Indefinitely.
He screams in pain as he rolls around on the tiled floor, trying in vain to extinguish the flames as they slowly kill him. He clutches his melting skin which has already fallen off much of his face.
"You fucking prick!" he swears. "I'm gonna fucking kill you! You're sick! Where are you? I'm gonna fucking kill you, you son of a bitch! You asshole!"
I watch him stoically, oblivious to his pain. He grasps at the air, knocks furniture down, and spits on the floor as he searches for me.
I walk calmly down the hallway to find the sheath for my knife and catch a glimpse of the parachute bomb that killed Prim. Only the base remains. It sounds like it's ticking, so I go over to it.
To my surprise, this is a double explosion bomb. And there's less than a minute left on the dial for the second explosion.
Without hesitation, I sheath the knife and bust open the door. I give Gale one glance over my bare shoulder. Most of the flesh is gone from his face, but he's still screaming.
"You piece of shit! I'm coming for you, you fucking prick! You're a fucking prick!"
I limp down Prim's steps and onto her lawn where Gale's Capitol class hovercraft is parked. I slam the door behind me loudly and step into the craft.
I can still hear Gale crashing around Prim's home when I turn the machine on and hover away. The explosion that follows does not faze me, and I don't bother to look at the smoke cloud in the rear-view mirror. All I can think of is my next goal: I am going to kill Katniss.
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I promise I will update more often! Only a little bit more to go!