It's really horrible that the capital names its country 'bread' when everyone is starving, isn't it? It's something Gale likes to ponder about, or scream about, if he's surrounded by trees and comforting grey eyes.
Chapter 1: un·con·ven·tion·al
adjective
not based on or conforming to what is generally done or believed.
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"Look what I shot." He teases, smirking. Holding up the arrow impaled bread, his eyes twinkle with trying mirth. He's trying, trying so hard to quench her anxiety. They have 64 slips amongst themselves and their siblings to worry about.
He sees her face light up, beautifully. His eyes linger on her brow, and he wonders when he started noticing random things about her face. He can't place it. As a boy, lanky and overgrown, he'd always known she'd been pretty, in her ways; it was a unique, innocent perception—she was pretty, passable, unsuspecting. After all, she was twelve and small when they met, and that's no time to determine someone's beauty. She's older now, sixteen, still small, but beautiful in ways most people can't comprehend, choose not to understand.
It's in her smiles: they are rare little things that must be earned, but the good thing is, they cost less every time. He used to have to haggle and joke, pull on her braids, trying harshly to see her teeth pull up in laughter. He was an arrogant boy who was used to looking at a girl and seeing her smile. It used to make him sad, thinking she was unhappy.
He voiced this with his mother, and she'd smacked him on his hand, telling him how rude it was.
"Do you expect boys to be smiley and happy when you look at them?" She didn't hold back, going off on him endlessly. Her soul was strong even if this cold district never held its tongue. "You want her to smile at you? Earn it." Then her eyes hardened, "but you aren't entitled to it, just because you tried. Remember that young man. Ignorance isn't pretty on anyone." She set water to a boil over their makeshift fire place, preparing to clean. He heard her mumbling about him being "just like his father at his age".
When a boy's father is dead and that boy is fifteen, it doesn't matter if the comparison is to horrible traits like ignorance, Gale had never felt prouder.
Gale's perspective shifted gears very quickly. He was young and arrogant, he tells himself when he cringes at his old mindsets. He's still arrogant, and knew it, but at least now he hid it better.
He still tried to make her smile, and now he tried earnestly.
When he did see her smile, his first thought was, beautiful. It confused him, the thought. He was seventeen, and she was fifteen. He had actually seen it before, directed at a sickly frail blonde girl named Primrose. Gale had adored the child rather quickly.
But when a smile like hers, rare and in between each word, so far in the river you have to dive down to touch it, is floating within your reach, it's a beautiful thing.
Then, her beauty blasted through him in everything she did. It never mattered what it was anymore, he always stopped to catch a glance, always half-hoped she'd stop to catch a glance of him, too.
Her beauty was in the way her braid followed her focus when the wisps of feathered arrows tickled her nose, met a freckle, and the way the frayed strings kissed her lips.
It was a pathetic day when he realized he was wishing to be a frayed piece of string.
He'll never know how she takes up such little space but manages to fill every crevice with her: her space pours over the edges around him, goes outside the lines. It fills his soul past its limits, and makes him feel things he never had before.
He just can't not see her.
Nothing will happen, he tells himself. He pulls the bread off of the arrow, breaks it, gives her the bigger half. It's reaping day.
He stares at her, half-hoping she'll stare back. He holds all his grief in that bakery bread, tries not to thinking about the meaning behind breaking bread in district 12.
It's reaping day after all, no time to half-hope for anything.