Gale forgets about Madge Undersee.
Forgets her like he forgets Rooba the butcher. And the sweet old couple from the Mercantile who'd had enough pity on Posy to make sure they didn't starve that first winter. And the seamstress in town who'd trade for a rabbit every other Sunday. And the girls he'd kissed behind the school and at the slag heap and in the alleys behind their houses after dark when he'd walk them home from town since they were both going the same way.
Gale forgets Madge in the hell that rains down on them out of nowhere after Katniss shot an arrow at nothing and the screens went dark. When the ash settles, he doesn't total the dead. Doesn't think about who's missing. Katniss' family isn't among them, and neither is his. That's all that matters. And then there's the confusion of trying to figure out what to do and making plans to keep everyone alive in the brief hours before Thirteen picks them up. Then there's seeing Katniss again. Training. Shooting propos. Planning. Fighting. Everything that comes after.
Gale starts a new life in the After. He gets a job with the engineering corps because he's good at building things, but he's tired of building things that kill. He knows, even if Katniss doesn't believe him, that he didn't know the bombs would be used against civilians – much less District Thirteen's own medics. Much less Prim. And eating himself up with guilt about it isn't going to help him survive. So when Katniss makes her choice, Gale makes his: a new life with a good job doing something that can actually make things better.
Coin had wanted to keep him on as a symbol – and as a strategist. Just in case. She'd wanted to trap him like he'd trapped the people in the Nut and the medics and Prim. So he's relieved Katniss shot her. He doesn't want to know what kind of monster he might have let himself become if she hadn't. Before, he had been naïve about war and so full of cold, determined hate that he would have done anything to bring the Capitol down. But after their fall, would he have become like Snow to make sure the new government didn't?
Gale doesn't let himself think about it too much. Sometimes, on certain winter nights when the darkness lasts forever and the wind doesn't stop and the snow keeps falling (he hates winters in Two) he lets himself get a little drunk, and then he stares into the fire and shudders at the possibilities. But in the daylight, in the summer, he builds a new district like he builds a new life and tries not to think too hard about Prim. If he doesn't, he can pretend she's in Four with her mother.
Madge Undersee never crosses his mind.
He meets a nice girl, named Randi. She's an economic specialist who has been sent by Paylor to help Two diversify its industries and exports. She's blond, but sometimes she dyes her hair exotic colors like pink and turquoise. Maybe because she can, now. Maybe because it reminds her of Before. He doesn't know. Gale doesn't ask. Doesn't ask where she's from, if she was raised in the Capitol. He tells himself he doesn't care. It's a new world, and he doesn't let himself think of the old one, when he hated anyone with blonde hair – and despised anyone who had the money to dye it pretty colors. Maybe that makes him a hypocrite. But, well, that's the only way he can live with himself. After two years, Paylor sends Randi to Five, and they slowly drift apart until eventually it's over, and they lose touch. But those two years were nice years, he thinks. Helped him feel normal.
If after she leaves and he's alone again things get dark for him, well…everyone struggles with memories of the war and the things they saw before and right after. And the nightmares. He drinks a little more heavily. Sleeps around a bit. But it's not bad. He's not like Haymitch or anything. Still, his boss mandates counseling. Gale tells him it helps. And it does; it keeps him functional – what else does he need? What else can he ask for, with what he's done? All in all, he's surviving well enough.
So he just doesn't think about them. The people from Before who died. They don't matter now.
It's five years after the war, and Gale thought he'd never have to see Haymitch Abernathy again, given his whole separation from Katniss and Twelve. It was the one perk of that whole situation, the only one he could think of when his mandatory therapist had told him to name the pros and cons of his self-induced exile from Twelve (until he'd finally given in and started to sneak back in to see his family, which, he thinks, was probably the whole point of the exercise). Still, being rid of Haymitch Abernathy was definitely one of the upsides to being in Two.
But Gale's in the New Capitol on business, having a drink with Johanna Mason (the one person from Before or During who doesn't hate him or, worse, pity him), when, low and behold, Abernathy stumbles in, already half-drunk. Johanna looks surprised, but not repulsed enough to ignore him. Gale's stomach sinks.
"Haymitch! Have a round!" She waves him over and has the bartender set him up with whiskey, neat.
Gale glares. He can't imagine what has brought Abernathy all the way to the New Capitol, but whatever it is isn't good. If there's one thing Gale's learned, it's that whenever the drunk's motivated enough to be involved, the world's going to hell in a handbasket. Soon. And Gale's not nearly drunk enough for that. Yet.
He's worked up a decent sort of buzz by the time Johanna manages to get Abernathy talking. Gale suspects that no matter how surly he is about it, Abernathy came here to vent to one of the few people left who understand. And he can respect that. So he keeps his mouth shut and listens.
"Paylor wants to make a monument to Twelve. To all the people Snow burned alive. Says it's her last term as president, and she wants to make sure the dead are remembered. Like I haven't spent the last –" Abernathy pauses, counts his fingers, frowns, and starts again. "As if I haven't spent pretty much all my life trying to forget them." He snorts.
Gale's hand tightens around his shot glass. It's smooth. Cold. Hard. And if he shatters it, the shards will cut his palm and make him bleed but maybe that will help remind him where he is. It's too late though because he sees them, sees them swarming out of their houses and shops, filling the main street of the town, hears himself screaming at them to run as he carries Prim from the Victor's Village because he can't let her die and he can only save so many because he's only one man. He doesn't turn around till he reaches the meadow and sets Prim down next to his mother, who has caught her mother to keep her from collapsing and maybe never getting up again. They're out of breath, but they'll have to run again just as soon as the men from the Seam knock down the fence, which they've almost done but not quite, so he puts his hands on his knees and pants and pants and catches a flash, orange out of the corner of his eye, and looks up, and there they are. All of the people running out of the town – human torches melting to the ground. He grabs Prim's face and hides it in his shoulder because she shouldn't see this, and Rory catches Posey up in his arms and presses her face to his neck, but it's too late. They saw. And they will never forget. The smell follows them into the woods, and into his nightmares, After.
The thought of putting names to that – his last memory of familiar faces being that – makes him want to vomit. He takes a deep breath. In. Out. In. Out. Cool glass in his right hand, his left a vice grip around his thigh. He's in a bar. It wasn't him. It wasn't his family. It was Townies. No one he knew. No one he cared about. No one he should think about.
Beside him, Johanna snorts too. "What does Paylor want you to do about it? All you do is raise geese and drink."
Abernathy takes another shot. Gale thinks he should too, but he's still too nauseous. "She wants me to do a write up on Madge Undersee. Turns out she was the one who turned the fence off, saving everyone who was saved. Says she deserves to be remembered for her heroism. There'd be a medal, if there was someone to give it to."
Gale hates the practice of giving out medals to dead people's families. It's just one more thing that makes you remember. He signals for another shot, but it doesn't keep him from remembering her face, medal or no medal. The last time he saw Madge Undersee was when they had all went to say goodbye to Katniss before the Quarter Quell. Madge had realized before any of them what had happened, he thinks now. Because even as she waited patiently, lips pressed into a firm line, she was blinking furiously, trying not to cry. They'd sat there for an hour like that. Gale, Madge, and the Everdeens, all waiting for a Girl on Fire who would never come. Prim sobbed; Mrs. Everdeen stared vacantly at the wall; and Madge had rubbed Prim's back and tried not to cry. Her freckled nose had quivered, like a rabbit's, and it had made her seem so young and childlike, with her wispy blonde hair and her porcelain doll complexion.
He regrets not saying something comforting to her then, something about her meaning a lot to Katniss, or being a good friend, or anything really, in hindsight. She had been a good friend to Katniss. Madge had cared whether the girl from the Seam lived or died in the arena, had cared about what might happen to her family, had cared about keeping her grounded after she did come home. Madge had cared, and he should have acknowledged her for that. But instead, he watched her walk down the steps of the Justice Building in her white reaping dress and slip into her dark house alone, like a ghost.
And he'd hated her. He'd hated that she was going home to nice food in her nice house in her nice white dress. He hated that Katniss hadn't shut her out like he'd been shut out. Instead, she'd taken Madge into the woods – their woods – and listened to her play piano and talked to her all summer instead of him. Mostly, he hated that she hadn't been reaped for the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games. If that one slip of paper had of just been her name instead of Prim's, his life wouldn't have been ruined.
He wasn't the only one in the district who had resented and ignored her. Almost the whole district had distrusted and shunned her, except for Katniss – who had only tolerated her in the beginning, as Katniss tolerates everyone until she needs them.
And still Madge had saved them all.
"How do they know?" He asks Abernathy, because he doesn't want to believe it. Can't let himself until he has proof. Otherwise, his pit of guilt and self-loathing will bottom out on him again, and he'll fall even farther down the rabbit hole. For a girl he hardly knew. A girl who was only Katniss's sort-of-friend from school. A girl who was a better person than he'd ever be.
"They found her body at the master switch. Dental records –" Abernathy swallows. "Dental records and DNA all matched."
Gale shouldn't be surprised she had dental records. He shouldn't resent that either, but the part of him that is still a vengeful, angry teenager scared of being buried alive in a mine resurfaces just enough to make him squirm. He feels himself free falling down his own personal chasm of self-loathing. Madge Undersee – pampered, rich, Madge Undersee with her status and her dental records and her pretty blonde hair – ran into town while everyone else ran out, to save them. And he'd never known. Never considered what might have become of her. Never thought to turn off the fence himself. Worse, the Seam boy in him sat here resenting the fact that she'd had enough dental care in the Before for them to identify her body.
"Damn," he curses. It's all he knows how to say. But it embodies his remorse, his guilt, and his awe of her. It's stupid, but in this moment, he wishes he hadn't over-charged her for strawberries. He wishes he hadn't charged her at all. He wonders what she would have been like, in the war. If she'd have fought. Or maybe done something administrative. He knows in his gut she would have been an ace at propos. He wonders what she'd be like now. Maybe Paylor would have groomed her to be a presidential candidate.
Abernathy glowers at him, as if he's just realized who it is sitting on the other side of Johanna. "Damn? Damn? Is that all you can say, boy?" He slaps the bar. The glasses jump. "The girl risks her life to save you twice, and all you have to say about it is damn?"
Gale blinks at him. Maybe he's successfully intoxicated by this point because he doesn't follow. "Twice?"
"Yes, twice!" Abernathy curses at him, calls him all the names he deserves, and asks: "Didn't they tell you about the morphling?"
"Morphling? Never heard of it."
"Mmm," Johanna hums, cradling her shot glass in both hands. An index finger traces the rim. "It's good stuff. Expensive, Capitol stuff that takes away your pain so that someone could saw your leg off, and you wouldn't feel a thing." Then there's no way he's been near it. He doesn't remember being injured enough in Thirteen.
Abernathy studies him for a second and concludes, "They didn't tell you."
"If there's something you have to say, say it," Gale snaps. "No, no one ever told me anything about morphling."
"What did you do, Sweetheart? What did you do by forgetting to tell him?" Abernathy mumbles to himself. He's talking to a ghost now. Maybe Katniss's from the sound of it. Crack-pot drunk.
Gale's about to get up; it's been too much tonight. He needs to go back to his hotel. Sober up. Think about it in the morning. But as he's standing and picking up his jacket, Abernathy growls, "I knew you were dense; I didn't know you were an idiot. How do you think you survived that whipping, boy? Do you think Katniss got there in time to save you? Well, she didn't. Not without morphling. So Madge brought you some in the middle of a blizzard. And you didn't even thank her for it."
"Why?" he asks, dumbfounded. He'd hardly known her. They certainly hadn't been friends.
Abernathy snorts. "For the same reason she went to turn off the electrical switch instead of running for her life like everyone else. She knew you'd need it, so she did it. Cause she was in love with you, moron."
Gale stares at him a long moment before bolting to the door. His skin feels too tight, like he might suffocate, but then, maybe he deserves it. She'd done it – she'd done it for him? He sees Madge, in her white dress, melt like he saw the other townspeople burn. Smells it. Hears her screams. He vomits into one of the pretty Capitol bushes outside the bar.
Madge had given him something that had saved his life, something that cost so much he could never have hoped to repay her, had risked her own life to bring it to him when he needed it, and Gale had hated her. Ignored her and wished her dead. And then she had died, to save him and his family and his friends.
Bracing himself against the brick, he tries to catch his breath, clear his head. The night is cool, soothing against the burning he feels inside. But just when he thinks he might could finally breathe, he retches again.
He hates himself for not looking for her, not noticing her missing. He should have thought of her at least once since then. He'd owed her that much, even if he hadn't known it.
She was in love with you, moron. Was she? Gale had been so horrible to her, he doesn't see how that's even possible. But he calls up every memory of her he has to see if he can untangle the riddle. He can't, and it's only after he falls asleep early the next morning that he realizes how stupid he was to allow himself to remember.
Gale Hawthorne spends the rest of his life haunted by Madge Undersee: her sharp blue eyes, her clever mouth, her love of music, her bravery. Fragments of memory haunt him. Somehow, she's all he can think about now – details he didn't know he'd known, Before.
She enters his nightmares and knowing what a face should look like only makes it worse. She's added to the list of deaths he failed to prevent, is culpable for in some way, right along with Prim and Finnick. Sometimes the nightmares rotate. Sometimes they're all meshed together so that now when he dreams of Finnick being torn apart by mutts, he runs to help only to find Prim exploding, turns away only to come face to face with Madge burning. Sometimes she smiles at him while she shrivels and burns away, as if to say, "It's okay; I don't blame you." Those are always the worst, because no matter what, he can't look away.
He wishes Abernathy had never told him. But another part of him is glad, because there's something about having to live with the knowledge and the nightmares that feels vaguely like atonement because it's torture. Eventually, he comes to terms with it; not good terms, not easy terms, but terms. He learns how to take his punishment for his arrogance and resentment and blindness like he learned to take his punishment for his calculated, determined hate – by building something new.
He designs the monument himself. It's plain, but elegant. It's not a statue (he'd considered that briefly but it never felt right). Instead, it's a smooth obsidian monolith with four equal sides. One has an engraving of her face and tells her story from the mocking jay pin to the night she died; the other three sides list the names of the other District Twelve citizens that were killed that night. It highlights her sacrifice, but it doesn't overshadow the others who were lost. He thinks she would have wanted it that way. When it's done, Abernathy writes a memorial speech, and even Katniss attends the dedication ceremony – he knows because he's hiding in the back of the crowd with his family. She'd forgotten about Madge too, he thinks, because of the way it makes her cry when Peeta reads what Abernathy wrote. As he walks back to the train, he decides he'll have a big strawberry bed planted around it, free to anyone in season.
But after the memorial is built, the nightmares still don't go away, since he's allowed himself to remember. Neither does the guilt. So after that he oversees the building of a new, innovative hospital for Twelve. It's his biggest independent project yet, and he spends months traveling to get ideas for the best possible functional design. Along the way, he manages to convince some doctors from Thirteen and Mrs. Everdeen to open a medical school there, in honor of Prim. But Madge would have like that too, he thinks. He's the wealthy one now with more money than he needs to spend on ridiculously impractical things like white clothes, so the least he could do is use it to help rebuild their home as it should have been Before. Like she would, as if that makes her death any less tragic or him any less of an ass. But it's something. And he needs to hold on to something. It's the only thing that keeps the nightmares manageable.
By the time he's forty-six, he's lost count of the number things he's built throughout Panem over the years, but he knows his crowning achievement is the Madge Undersee Conservatorium for Children in District Twelve. He gives Mellark's children scholarships, so they can play their mother music. She doesn't know this though. Neither does Mellark. Gale's been very careful to keep his name from being publicly associated with the school. That would tarnish it somehow, he feels. So neither Katniss nor Peeta guess that both Haymitch's drunken suggestion to send the kids and the Dean's offer of a full scholarship when they ask about enrollment really come from him. Gale figures he owes them something to make them happy too, while he's at it.
But he gives out scholarships to other children in the district. He gives out as many scholarships as he can while keeping the school self-sustaining. And it thrives. While music had been a luxury before, anyone can have it now, and everyone wants it. Eventually, kids from as far away as the New Capitol and District One will travel to Twelve to study music and medicine, where they can be surrounded by beautiful mountains and cultivated fields of wildflowers and medicinal herbs. Eventually, not everything will be covered in coal dust or ash. And one day, a few decades after Gale dies of old age, the fear of the Games and the mines will be a distant memory to the inhabitants of twelve. But Madge's monument will still stand, and the strawberries will still ripen every summer.
Of course, Gale will never know that. He'll also never really know why Madge brought him the morphling or turned the power off, despite what Abernathy thinks. Now, on those cold winter nights when he's a little drunk, he lets himself wonder what she saw in him that made the sacrifice worth it to her, and he desperately wishes he knew – or that he at least had had time to find out. But it makes him want to only be that, whatever Madge saw in him that was worth dying for. So he tries, for her, and the therapy starts to help more until one day he realizes he hardly drinks at all.
When he's not drunk, but wants to be, he lets himself wonder what knowing Madge would have been like, in the After. In this new world, they could have been friends. He could have supported her presidential campaign, and she could have seen the music school. They would have been good friends, After. Maybe even something more, he thinks when he travels to Twelve for the Mellark children's senior recital. It's the last time he plans to ever visit the district again. His mother died last year, and his siblings have all moved to other districts, so he's cutting ties today. What he's built in Twelve has become self-sufficient, and it's only right he turn everything over to the people who came back, since he can't.
Still, before he goes, he has to hear the Mellarks sing, one last time. Katniss's children are star pupils of course, they have their mother's voice. But the girl has her father's blue eyes, and the boy has his blonde hair – a perfect mix of Seam and Town – and if Gale lets himself get lost enough, he can almost imagine the possibility of another life, in a world where things had gone differently. The music stops and the fantasy fades, and Gale slips out of the concert hall.
Two's back on its feet, its infrastructure and housing rebuilt better than before. They no longer need him, so he's decided to move to Four, see what he can do there. Paylor had wanted him to stand as a presidential candidate, given his war hero status and his experience in infrastructure and administration and – Before. Things are changing, she says, but we need someone who remembers Before. Gale's thought about it, but being a visible public figure is not really his thing. Maybe when he's older and wiser, when Panem really does need someone who remembers. But not right now. Right now, he thinks it's okay if the people forget Before in dreaming their dreams of After.
He'd like to too. That's really why he's going to Four. Rory's family lives there, and Vick and Posy will be closer. He's learned to cope with the depression and the PTSD and the nightmares, and it's time to finally get to know his nieces and nephews. He thinks he's earned enough redemption for that.
In the middle town, where he'd once been whipped, the strawberries are ripe, and he picks one carefully. It's big and plump with a cleft in it, a bright shiny red. One of the best looking strawberries he's ever seen. He studies it carefully, remembering when his blood had stained the flagstones of the old Square. He wonders if somehow his blood had helped nourish it – gave the soil something it needed to produce a strawberry like this. It's a pleasant thought. One that colors his whipping it a different light, makes it less senseless.
He looks up and sees Madge's obsidian smile, and it triggers something within him. A thought he desperately needs to believe.
When Gale was nineteen, he was determined to take down the Capitol, had helped plan it's demise, but he'd failed at the long game. He hadn't once considered the consequences of creating bombs he couldn't control or anything else besides killing Snow. But Madge – Madge had grown up as a politician's daughter, had had to learn foresee the consequences of her words and actions for herself, her family, and a whole district by the time she could talk. (It's funny, he thinks, how he only sees this in hindsight, and only after he's seen more of the world than the Seam.) Madge had been playing the long game with the Capitol before he'd even known it existed. After all, Madge had been the one to give Katniss the pin – the spark that had created the Girl on Fire. So it made sense that Madge had looked at him being whipped and had seen someone who Katniss would need by her side later, for a successful revolution. And that when she saw the screen go dark, she had understood what it meant and known that Katniss would need her family, Gale included, to survive it.
It humbles him to think that she might have trusted him enough to leave Katniss, District Twelve, and the rebellion in his hands. Gale still doesn't know why. What could she have possibly seen in him to make her trust him back then? Still, maybe she had. Maybe she'd looked ahead and seen a future where children weren't torn from their families and sent to their deaths all for the delight of a sadistic audience – a future where Twelve and all of Panem could finally be free – and she'd sacrificed herself for him and his family so he could help Katniss bring it about.
Whether or not it's true, the theory makes the knot in his chest loosen a bit so he can breathe. In this light, Madge's death is worth something more. More than just him and his sins. It's Rory's boys and Vick's girls and Posy's shy smile and the blond boy and the blue eyed girl who sing like Katniss. It's all the kids in Panem and the rebirth of Twelve and the hospital and the conservatorium and the strawberries and everyone's hope for the future.
And for the first time since Haymitch Abernathy staggered into that bar, he breathes without the weight of her death on his chest. Her spectre will still haunt him. But now she is more guardian angel than ghost.
"I'm not coming back anymore," he whispers to Madge's portrait in the stone. "But that doesn't mean I've forgotten you, Undersee, or what you did, or how sorry I am that things weren't different. That I wasn't different." He's still holding the strawberry between his fingertips and it grounds him, makes him feel like he's eighteen again, back from the woods, sneaking a strawberry while waiting on her porch. Before he'd seen war. But he feels lighter now than he ever did then, free from the hunger and the worry and the anger and the hate. For the first time, he feels like himself outside of the woods. Like the man he's supposed to be – would have been without Snow and the Capitol and Coin. He rests his free hand on the stone. "I think I've done all I can for Twelve, but they'll take it from here." His people are strong; they always have been. "Just...watch out for Catnip for me."
He eats the strawberry on the train. It tastes like her blessing.
Gale does make his way back to District Twelve again, in the end.
They bury him, at the age of eighty-three, under an oak tree at the spot where he and Katniss used to slip under the fence.
Peeta shows them where, because Katniss had showed him a long time ago and it seems fitting that Gale should be buried there, somehow. And Peeta wants to make Gale's burial as fitting as possible. It's a cold day when the New Capitol brings Gale's body back to lie in state, and his children don't want him pottering about the meadow, telling the new mayor where it should be buried, but Peeta feels like he owes his old rival this, considering.
He goes to the funeral too, without Katniss; dementia has made her forget almost everything but him, if she would have come anyway. Violet comes with him instead. Peeta suspects she's half worried about him going alone and half curious about her mother's best friend from before the war. Both she and her children studied Gale Hawthorne in school, but that's different from knowing him or his family.
She looks confused when the senior class from the Madge Undersee Conservatorium for Children gets up to sing. But Peeta leans over and whispers in her ear, "Gale founded it you know; gave you and your brother your scholarships and everything."
Violet's eyes widen with surprise. "Why?" she whispers back. She's in her fifties, but she looks just like she had when he'd first taught her how to bake.
"I think he wanted to be remembered for something besides the war." Peeta, as he aged, had developed a soft spot for Gale. He doesn't know why, but he suspects it's because they understood each other once. And he always respected him for leaving when Katniss had told him to, no matter how many times Peeta saw him slip into the back of the concert hall when the kids were growing up. Katniss had never noticed, so Peeta considered it harmless. He had heard that Gale had been the driving force behind New Panem's rebuilding in Two. Peeta suspects he also rebuilt most of Twelve. The government hadn't been involved in the Conservatorium though, so Peeta has spent a lifetime speculating about what happened between Gale Hawthorne and Madge Undersee to make him want to found a music school and name it after her. So he adds, "And maybe because you two reminded him of a life that might have been his."
Violet's face scrunches. "You mean he was still in love with mom, after all that time?!" she hisses.
Peeta squeezes her hand and laughs into her ear: "I doubt it. Gale Hawthorne was too complicated for that."
The choir sits down, and Rory gets up to read his brother's eulogy. But Peeta is watching his daughter and sees the light dawn in her eyes. "Oh," she breathes.
New Capitol officials proclaim that Gale's participation in the rebellion had been vital to the success of Snow's overthrow. They hand the flag from his casket to Posy, whose children support her as she takes a last look at the box that holds what used to be her oldest brother. But it's Rory who eventually leads her away, the last two Hawthorne siblings from before the war. Peeta hadn't heard what happened to Vick, only that he'd died thirty years ago.
It makes him feel old. Most days, he doesn't feel any older than he did when he left for the Quarter Quell. Not really. Most of the time, he feels like a young man trapped in an old man's body. But days like today reminds him just how old he really is.
What must be Gale's great nieces and nephews stand up. There's a whole herd of them, which is surprising. Peeta wasn't really sure how close Gale had been to his siblings and their families after the war. Johanna Mason toters up and throws a sunflower on Gale's casket as they lower it into the ground. He'd heard they'd gotten close after Gale had moved to Four. He's glad. He hopes that they were a comfort to each other.
By summer, Gale has a huge granite headstone, detailing his achievements. The epitaph relates how he lead District Twelve to safety during the bombings, rescued Peeta and the other victors from the Capitol, strategized with Thirteen to overthrow Snow and fought alongside Katniss Everdeen to make it happen. There's a brief line stating he was a President of New Panem; that had happened a little over ten years ago (or was it twenty, now?) when the country was experiencing some growing pains.
The epitaph is a bit embellished, from what Peeta's heard about the bombing and the war meetings Gale sat in on with Katniss in Thirteen. Still, it's close enough to the truth, he thinks. The problem with the headstone isn't its embellishments; it's the exclusions. The best parts of Gale are missing from that list, and that seems a shame. Because they wouldn't be where they are now without Gale, especially who he became a decade after the war. Without his vision for what Panem could become – what Twelve could become – after the revolution, Peeta's certain that the new government would have overlooked districts like theirs again, and they could have only done so much to rebuild on their own.
He whacks the bottom of the monument with his cane, wishing he could have it changed. It should say something like, Gale Hawthorne: Devoted Son, Brother, and Friend; Builder of the New Panem. Then they could add those bits about the war and whatnot, if they wanted.
Peeta ambles home slowly, his leg a little stiff. He thinks he'll have Violet plant some strawberries on Gale's grave, something to give future generations a little hint about who he really was. Then he'll tell his grandchildren and their children about how Madge and Gale loved each other quietly despite the separation of time and death, because it's a sweet story, and sweet stories about brave people should be preserved as long as possible.
Katniss is asleep when he gets home. She's almost always asleep nowadays. He kisses her head and goes to his studio, only to find himself painting the meadow, the way he remembers it from when he was a kid, but without the fence. In the corner, under Gale's oak tree, just big enough to be seen, he paints a blonde girl next to a tall, dark haired boy, and smiles. He'll have to show it to Katniss tomorrow, see if she remembers.