This is a revised version of the chapter. Only minor adjustments: typos, wonky sentences... Nothing major.
Gale
Gale remembers. How could he forget? How could he ever forget that day? The day he watched the woman he loved volunteer to save her sister.
How could she not? Gale knows her. He knows that Katniss would do anything for Prim. When her voice rings out in the square he has half a mind to volunteer too. So he could be with her. So he could protect her. So he could make sure she would come back to the flower who loved her goat and her cat.
But Gale knows Katniss. He knows that she would never forgive him if he volunteered. She would never forgive him for risking his own life. For abandoning his family. And most of all, for abandoning hers. It was an unspoken agreement between the two of them. No. It was more than an agreement. It was a vow. A promise. Should anything happen to one of them, the other would take care of her or his family.
The moment she volunteers, Katniss takes Gale's choice away.
Not having any other choice, Gale watches as she saves her sister, condemning herself to a game of death. Condemning him to watch her fight for her life.
He knows she can do it. He tells her so in the small room of the Justice building before she is forced onto the train that would take her away. He knows she can survive this. Because he knows her, he also knows it will tear her apart to do it.
Katniss, despite her roughness and borderline pessimistic realism, is someone pure. Someone who loves deeply and suffers greatly from the life the world is forced to live. No, not the whole world. But that is a debate he would not have now.
He watches as Katniss, his strong and beautiful Catnip, the woman he loves so deeply disappears in a train she might never come back out of.
Weeks later he watches her get out of the train. How proud he is. And relieved, so relieved, to see her breathing and there. Not happy. The dimness in her eyes and the boy's hand in hers kill Gale's happiness at seeing her again as surely as any arrow she could shoot. Of course he is happy she survived. But he knows enough to know things won't be so simple.
Maybe Gale would admit that he is also relieved and happy when the weeks pass and she keeps away from the other boy. Something fierce is growing in his heart, a wild happiness and relief that they could just be the two of them in the woods when he is not deep inside the earth, digging in the tunnels that killed both their fathers.
But he remembers other things too.
He remembers that one morning, before the sun even came up, he softly knocked on the door of her new house, his sick brother in his arms. Mrs Everdeen had opened and motioned them inside. Gale would never forget. He couldnever forget the blood-curdling scream that suddenly resonated in the house as Mrs Everdeen examined Vick. He would never forget how Mrs Everdeen had run upstairs, him right behind her, to find the door to a bedroom open, Primrose in her nightgown trying to wake a screaming Katniss up. He would never forget the feral yet terrified look in her eyes when she snapped to awakeness, still screaming.
He remembers how her scream just stopped and how she had called for Prim in a panic, her voice rough and broken. He remembers how once her eyes had found her sister she had clung onto her like life itself, like she was drowning, not even noticing the tears that were streaming down her face.
Gale remembers thinking, in that moment, that perhaps he had lied to her all those weeks ago when he told her that hunting animals and humans were the same thing, that she would be fine.
As he watches his Catnip struggle to breathe Gale realizes that maybe she isn't all right. Far from it.
After that day he pays more attention to her, to the shadows in her eyes, to the shape of her lips. And he sees that she issn't fine. She issn't all right. She is getting better. But Gale wonders if she is indeed really getting better or just better at pretending.
He watches her, over her. He passes by the Victor's Village everyday after work. She never notices.
He watched her on the couch from the shadows of the kitchen, where Mrs Everdeen asks him again and again to make himself known to her. Everyday Lylia opens her door to the quiet rasping of his knuckles on it, always when Katniss is in another room. He knows that she wouldn't want his worry, mistaking it for pity. So he stays hidden. He watches as her face grows more elongated, the shadow under her eyes deeper, darker.
He watches as she moves around in another world. A world juxtaposed to the one he and everyone else live in. Even the baker boy.
He watches as she crosses the street to her mentor's house and comes back with a waver in her step but her posture the least tense he's seen her in weeks.
That's when Gale realizes that she isn't alone in her world, even if she doesn't realize it herself. Or maybe she does. Gale doesn't really know anymore.
Gale realizes that in that world, in the other world also lives Haymitch Abernathy.
Later, when he watches her on the television, reading speeches about dead people in a voice he doesn't know, he realizes that this other world is the world of the Victors. He isn't quite sure what that means yet. Maybe he would find out some day.
When she comes back from her Victory Tour, Gale isn't jealous anymore. Not about the announced wedding. Because he has watched her and he knows this wedding hurts her as much as it could have hurt him had he let himself believe the story. Even more so.
By the look in Prim's eyes he knows that his Catnip has started screaming again. She is sinking deeper into her parallel world.
He watches her when they hunt. She has always been silent and observant in the woods. But she is different now. She is anticipating, expecting, the string of her bow ready to snap.
One Sunday he is later than usual: his mother had asked him to help move a heavy piece of furniture. In the woods he follows Katniss' tracks (just his usual line of snares she has taken upon herself to relieve of their prey). He arrives behind her silently.
Gale will forever remember her eyes.
How for one fraction of a second those eyes make him feel like he is in front of a predator. Those eyes that do not waver, that burn with a fierceness he has seen glimpses of on a screen. She is back in the arena.
He will forever remember how a fraction of a second later her eyes widen when she recognizes him. Her arrow is already flying.
That fraction of a second is barely enough for her to alter her aim. Gale knows he will remember the noise of the arrow whizzing right past his ear, grating him slightly and drawing one drop of blood.
He will remember how she yells at him in a strange mixture of anger, panic and self-loathing. She hits him. He has to call out to his Catnip several times before she calms down enough to really notice that he is all right. When she does, she snaps her mouth shut, goes to retrieve her arrow, turns around and leaves as silently as ever. Gale doesn't follow her. He knows she doesn't want him to. So he simply picks up where she left and inspects all of their snares. He doesn't shoot anything that day. Her scream scared any wildlife away for a few hours.
At the end of the afternoon on that day, when he goes to her house to give her her catch she isn't there. Lylia takes the rabbits and gestured towards Haymitch's house. When he knocks on the door, the Victor opens his door and motions him inside. Gale follows the staggering man to his living room and finds Katniss passed out on the couch, an empty bottle of Ripper's rotgut in her hand.
Gale feels his heart break at the sight. And hate fill him. Hate for the Capitol who made her like this. He swears to himself that he would make them pay for it. For breaking the wonderfully strong woman she had been.
Gale marches over the bottle-covered floor and to the sofa. He picks her into his arms and carries her back home. Lylia's eyes are sad when she opens the door. He promises to pop by in the morning to check on her (he would make sure Jared covers for him at the mine for a few hours, consequences be damned). When he comes back in the morning it is Katniss who opens the door. She frowns and glares and turns around without a word. When he enters the kitchen she is chopping carrots with a sharp knife, her back turned to him and the rest of the house. She ignors his attempts at conversation. Gale knows she's got him cornered. He sighs and sits down on one of the kitchen chairs. He remains silent, knowing that she would eventually talk to him. Maybe.
In the silence he sees Prim walk to the kitchen in her school clothes. She is holding a metal basin. When she enters the kitchen the basin slips from her hands and crashes loudly on the floor. Gale watches as it happens almost in slow motion. He watches the basin bang and bounce loudly on the floor, Prim jumping in surprise.
He hears the thwackof the sharp knife Katniss had been holding when it embeds itself in the wall behind Prim. He remembers turning around and seeing Katniss, another knife in hand, poised ready to spring, muscles tense, eyes hard, jaw set, nostrils flaring.
He remembers this eternal second it takes for everyone to understand what just happened. Gale watches as Katniss crushed Prim in her arms, crying and apologizing again and again and asking her again and again if she is alright.
In that moment Gale understands. He understands so many things that he isn't even sure it all happens in a single moment. It feels like he's been understanding for months and not at all at the same time.
He understands that the other world where Haymitch and Katniss live is a terrible world. He understands that it is not a world parallel to the normal world. He had misunderstood. It is worse. It is a world of the past. It is the arena.
Gale understands in that moment that his Catnip doesn't sometimes go back to the arena when she is in the woods. No. She has never left. He understands that when she looks like she is in the other world, her eyes distant, it is because she can't get herself to believe she is in the real world again, out of the arena.
He understands that she will need a very long time to recover from all this, if ever. He understands that as strong as Katniss was, there are just some things that would never leave her free.
Many other things go through his mind in that moment but Gale does not understand all of them.
The moment ends and in the next a smoldering hatred sweeps everything else inside of him. He would forever loathethe Capitol for this. For making a loving and protective sister throw a knife at a girl for having dropped a basin.
In that moment Gale hates Peeta Mellark for not being broken like Katniss. For not being broken insteadof her. Him, who has done nothing but rely on her for his own survival. Who is playing with Katniss' life like the Capitol wants him to. Him, who never screams at night.
Gale hates the Victors who are not broken like her. He hates them. He hates Finnick Odair, who was on the television a few days ago, smiling and joking and being happy. He hates all those Victors from 1 and 2 who spend their whole life basking in the attention.
In that moment Gale hates Haymitch Abernathy a little less.
He understands a little better why the Victor is always drunk, if this is the world some of the Victors live in.
