Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine. Any lines from the books are hers too. It's all hers.
Become what we hate
Gale stares up at the photos all gazing out unblinkingly from their places on the wall of the former museum and frowns deeply.
They've been enhanced, the washed out colors, so common in school photos from the Districts, are unnaturally vibrant, the eyes are all just a shade too bright. It's unsettling to Gale, but he supposes old habits die hard.
The Capitol loves pageantry, and continuing to display the faces of their former Victors is a small way to allow them that under the guise of a memorial to the fallen.
He doesn't like it, but it's a concession that he'd had no say in, and they aren't likely to go back on it now. There are worse things they could've done, he supposes, like the plan someone had come up with for a series of gaudy fountains throughout the city and the other for hideous commemorative plates. The wall of pictures, with each of the Victors looking as they had at the moment of their Reapings, is the least offensive and most respectful he can hope to ever get out of the Capitol.
"It's nice," Madge murmurs, her eye scanning the photo's closely. Her lips twitch up a little at the soured look Gale shoots her way. "In its own way."
Grunting, Gale takes another long drink from his glass, emptying the amber liquid from it, before turning to find the boy to refill it. That's one of the only redeeming things about the Capitol galas, unlimited alcohol. It's the only way Gale's ever made it through any of them.
Madge's hand slip around Gale's arm and she squeezes it, causing him to look down into her wide, worried eyes.
"Baby steps, Gale," she whispers, giving him a sad little smile.
It instantly eases him, and he's happier now more than he's ever been at one of these stupid parties. Having Madge there may just keep him from drinking himself into a coma.
After the mess in Seven with Johanna he'd almost decided against taking her with him anywhere that there was a chance of running into the former Victor, like a stupid, forced, and outright unnecessary gala in the Capitol that Gale imagines they'd very much like to have as many high profile figures at as possible.
He'd imagined running into Johanna again, having her goad Madge, pick at wounds, this time in front of television cameras. Gale told his mother about the run in, but he knows she'd rather not have his mistakes broadcast to the entire nation. He could almost hear her sighing in disappointment at him when he pictured the sordid scene in his head.
Johanna never showed up, though. Neither did Beetee or Annie, and of course Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch were never going to come.
That only left Enobaria, who'd shown up dressed from head to toe in gold.
"Just like old times," Plutarch had chuckled, looking entirely too pleased at the thought of the times before the rebellion.
It made Gale's stomach roll and he'd willingly let Madge pull him away from the crushing crowd waiting for the moment and onto the dance floor.
The wall had been unveiled after that, a 'tribute' to the winning Tributes, with Enobaria pulling the rope on the red velvet curtain to reveal the memorial.
"They should've posted the pictures of all the Tributes," Gale had grumbled.
It wasn't right. There were more than just seventy-five children whose lives had been changed, destroyed.
No one cares though. Every child, every family of a Tribute that had died in the Games has been forgotten. They've been brushed aside in the name of progress. Everyone is turning a blind-eye to the missing faces, just like the Capitol had done for so many years, and it makes Gale's blood boil.
With a sigh, he pulls Madge to him and buries his face in her soft, sweet smelling hair.
"They don't even care that they've left out over a thousand faces from their wall," he grumbles, more to himself than to Madge.
He feels her nod against him. "Maybe they'll put them up one day. At least there's a memorial here now, not just that awful museum. You can suggest it to President Paylor."
Madge is probably at least a little more upset than she lets on. Her aunt had been a Tribute, after all, and Maysilee Donner's face is just as missing from the wall as all the others. After Madge's parents' sacrifice, her sacrifice, Gale feels that her family at least deserves a little recognition. They'll never get it though.
Gale lets out a long breath and glares through the pillars and heavy, expensive draperies of the former museum and out at the glittering city surrounding them.
Even after the war, being bombed and invaded, having the disgusting people in charge incarcerated, the Capitol still shines. The power had been restored almost instantaneously; the water and waste, the influx of food and goods, all began again within days of the government's fall. It had made Gale furious.
"We lived without electricity and starving for decades," he'd snapped, anger at himself bubbling over at Haymitch, who, for what may be the first time in his miserable life hadn't done anything to deserve being yelled at. "Why can't they function for a little while?"
"They don't know how," Haymitch had answered wearily. He'd chuckled. "I think if we're going to deserve this win, we're going to have to prove it."
Gale hadn't understood what he'd meant at the time, though distance had given him clarity.
Once Gale's demons had caught up with him, dressed up in faces he didn't recognize, he'd finally realized what exactly Haymitch had been trying to tell him.
If they wanted to rule this country, they needed to prove they were better than what they were replacing, and at that point, they hadn't come even close.
Using the enemy's tactics against it, not being able to see the harm it could cause, would cause, had only pushed them further toward being just as bad as Snow and his people.
Making the people of the Capitol comfortable was the least they could do, to not would be cruel to people that Gale came to see as somewhat infantile. They'd never survive without at the very least some basic comforts.
He'd expected Prim to haunt him. Expected her to taunt him for his failure to protect her, for being the one to break Katniss, for being too stupid to see just what Coin was and how far she was willing to go to get what she wanted, for being blinded by his hate and allowing himself to be used to destroy innocent lives.
She'd never materialized. He should've known. Even in death, Prim was too good to torment him, even though he deserved it.
Instead he'd gotten strangers.
He hadn't seen that his anger, even if justified, was dangerous, lethal even, and the kids he'd murdered had infected his mind.
"Did you think only the guilty would pay?" A boy had asked him, frowning, wavy hair hanging in his eyes.
Another girl, dark skinned and so familiar Gale could taste her name on the tip of his tongue, had simply collapsed, over and over and over again, dying, bleeding to death right in front of him for weeks on end before the next little demon invaded.
They'd all seemed so familiar, not Capitol at all, that Gale had finally decided that his mind had stripped the vibrant colors from their hair and skin, changed their gaudy clothes, and made them more like himself, just to amplify his pain. Until he'd finally made the connection.
"The Capitol never really pays; don't you know that, Dorothy?" The little girl, not the obnoxious Victor with green hair and a smirk, had asked, her voice so small and broken Gale almost tried to reach out and hug her.
She was tiny, smaller than Vick, even though Gale would've pegged her at the same age, and she was wearing an ill fitting dress.
Looking up at the faces on the wall, Gale finds the same little girl in the same tattered and poorly fitting green dress with a miniscule, vacant smile, staring out at the city until eternity.
He recognizes a few other faces from his nightmares, but there are still too many missing to count. Tributes that had died on his television, murdered by the Capitol for nineteen years of his life, had taken the place of the Capitol children Gale's hands and his designs had killed.
It's fitting, he thinks, that the ghosts haunting him aren't the children of the Capitol, but the children the Capitol had murdered.
At some point, he hadn't realized when, he'd become what he hated and the little voices and faces he'd watched murdered by the Capitol had reminded him of that.
The dreams aren't as frequent now, just interspersed with his old nightmare of the mines and his father, the bombing and his pitiful failure to get to Madge, among other things, but they're still there, waiting in his subconscious to steal his sleep and frighten Madge.
"Gale," Madge's soft voice pulls him back, breaks his concentration. "Gale, they're dead, but we aren't going to forget them. None of them."
He shakes his head, lets his eyes wander, over to a handsome boy, bronze hair and tanned skin, grinning cheekily out at nothingness. Finnick Odair before the Capitol had pulled him into pieces and glued him back together to please themselves.
Arms tightening around her, Gale closes his eyes and inhales the crisp scent of the air and tries to forget that he's no better than the people that killed the handsome boy and the girl whose name he can't bring himself to remember and the little girl in the hand-me-down dress.
"We've got to be better than them, Madge," he murmurs into her hair. "I don't want my legacy to be the deaths I caused."
He feels tears prickling at the backs of his eyes and squeezes the lids tight to keep them from spilling out, but he's a few seconds too late and a few manage to slip out.
If the press sees him they'll have a field day.
Madge pulls back and Gale feels the chill of the air around him replacing the warmth of her body as she takes his face in her hands and brushes the pair of watery traitors from his cheeks.
Her nose wrinkles up, lips puckering as she thinks before popping up on her toes and pressing a kiss to his lips.
"Our legacies are only our mistakes if we don't learn from them." A little smile forms on her lips. "And you know you made a mistake. You've seen what you can do and you aren't going to let that happen ever again, not by your hand or anyone else's, right?"
He wishes he had half as much faith in himself as she has in him, but he doubts he ever will. Not after his bomb, not after seeing just how dark his soul really is, not after knowing just how bad he can be.
His eyes are opened to just how terrible he is, he'll never be able to unsee that.
She isn't wrong though, he'll spend the rest of his life keeping anyone else from condemning themselves to his fate. It's one of his missions, to make up for his blinding anger that had cost him and so many other so much.
"Right," he finally answers, taking her hands and kissing her fingertips. Glancing around to make sure the press is still safely trapped with Plutarch and his assistant, blabbering away about something or another, Gale begins tugging her toward the balcony. "Come on, let's get the hell out of here."
There's a staircase down the back, and Gale knows for a fact that they've forbidden the press from going back there. Something about needing a medical exit or a fire exit, Gale wasn't really paying attention.
They reach the edge of the wall of Victors, and Gale is anticipating an early night wrapped around Madge, which might keep the nightmares he knows are just waiting to edge in at bay, when she stops, her eyes brightening.
Her delicate fingers reach out and almost touch the face of a boy staring out at her from the wall, but before her finger hit the thin plane separating the picture from her skin Gale grabs her wrist.
"Don't," he warns her before flicking his free hand at the photo.
A zap of electricity snaps in the air as his finger tries to hit the frame.
"To keep anyone from stealing them," Gale explains as she takes his hand and examines it for damage.
It's fine, he knows that, he knows exactly how long skin can be in contact with the 'webbing' protecting the memorial, but he lets her fuss over him anyways. It's a strange sort of comfort, having her worry over him, and he eats it up.
Once she's happy he hasn't cooked his fingers, she lets go and smiles sadly over at the picture.
"He was handsome, wasn't he?"
Gale finally gives the picture his attention, and is unhappy to find a boy with olive skin and dark curly hair, carelessly smirking out at him.
To Gale, Haymitch Abernathy at sixteen is no more handsome than the middle-aged bastard Gale had last seen when he'd hoofed back to District Twelve years before, leaving Gale and so many others to finish rebuilding the country. He keeps that thought to himself though and settles on a noncommittal grunt.
Madge's eyes linger on the boy in the picture for a few seconds longer before her smile brightens and she turns to Gale and takes his hand.
"I think it's nice," she says, her voice strangely thick. "To let them be as they were, not what they had to become. It isn't giving them back what they lost, but it's-it acknowledges that they weren't what they became, if that makes any sense."
It does and it doesn't. They were who they became in part because of the Capitol, but maybe some of them were like him, rotten and only needing the opportunity to show their colors. There's no way to see which are which, and Gale supposed that may be a blessing. They'll forever be innocent, even if they might not have been.
Her lips press together then unpress several times before she sighs and let's her eyes drop, focus on her fingers twining with Gale's.
Wrapping his arm around Madge, Gale kisses her hair again as he steers her toward the exit.
"I understand," he whispers into her ear, causing her to shiver against him.
The wall of 'winners' isn't perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. Not using their Victory photos, but instead their pitiful ones from school, letting them be seen and remembered as the children they should've been can only help to open more eyes to just how terrible the Hunger Games were. Maybe seeing the seemingly innocent faces of the Victors will encourage the people of the Capitol to look at the Games a little more closely, and that might help when Gale tries to get the names and faces of the other children, Tributes that hadn't survived their Games, memorialized.
With one last glance over his shoulder, Gale lets his eyes flicker over so many of the faces that have haunted his nights, noting the missing ones, and sighing as she steers Madge towards the steps.
It isn't perfect, but it's a baby step in the right direction, to helping others see things as they should be, and not as they were presented to them.
If their faces open even a few eyes, like they had his, then he'll take it.