burnwithus | (gale) we're half-awake in a fake empire

It's hours before Gale finally wakes up, even with all the care it took to treat and bandage up his back. It gives me many, many moments to wonder why I'm still sitting in this chair. To wonder if I can talk to him at all, even though I thought I never would again. Gale Hawthorne gave me the last arrow I ever shot in Panem, and I was supposed to die after that.

That was the plan. It didn't work.

Now where does that leave us? My mind sifts through the details and the memories, trying to create some kind of order out of the chaos. Gale was whipped after I told him Eight rebelled. He doesn't know about the Quell, or the war, or the rebellion that he helped plan.

He doesn't know about Prim.

A flash of anger fires through me, tenses my muscles all at once. He should know! I want to scream. He should know, even though this Gale has never even seen a bomb in his life. Even though this Gale thrives best in forests with clean air and running water and wouldn't dream of living in an underground bunker.

It's petty, but I've never been forgiving. Peeta's the one who sees the good in people, or tries to. I see what's there.

But that isn't fair. It would be as if the husband of the Capitol woman I shot came and found me before the Quell. Before the world changed. I wouldn't understand why I would do such a thing. I'd think that it wasn't possible.

No amount of cruelty is impossible when it comes to humans.

I bury my face in my hands and take a moment to breathe, tears slipping out of my closed eyes. Gale can't see me - he's unconscious. There's no one else around. He looks younger and more peaceful asleep, like he wouldn't be capable of the deadly things I know he is.

There was never anyone as good as Gale when it came to snares. It was the quarry that changed.

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"Do you want to stay?"

He can feel the unpleasant sensation of blood seeping through bandages, sticky and hot. He shifts his weight in the bed and still doesn't look at her. It's easier if he doesn't.

No. I don't want to stay. But I can't say that, either. "Let me see your bandages," I move closer to the hospital bed, motioning for him to turn over. There's a good chance they need to be changed, considering how much time has passed since his back was first wrapped. It's bad luck that Gale arrived just after the snows, but there are doctors here who are far more capable than I am.

The last time Gale was hurt I was sewing stitches into his shoulder. I sewed Jason up, too. But I'm not my mother, and I'm sick of having blood on my hands.

Obediently, he shifts, breath catching as stitched skin pulls. He looks up at her through his hair.

"That wasn't me," he says to her, quietly. "I only just got you back. You...gloves. You tried to give me gloves. That's the last thing I remember."

"I remember," and suddenly the only thing I feel is tired. Both my brain and my body feel it, seeping through and sucking the fight from me. "It feels like ages ago," an entire lifetime, before the war and the Quarter Quell that changed everything. Yet it wasn't impossible to see the path we had started out on, even before I shot the arrow that started a war. Even before the berries. The stirrings of thought inside the Districts that were just waiting for their moment to rebel.

If I could go back in time, I wonder if I would change things. I wonder if my actions would have made a difference. Or would the Capitol's cruelty gotten through in the end anyways?

On his belly on the bed, Gale lets his head hang down. There's a tightness in his chest that's got nothing to do with how much his back hurts. So much has happened here that he's failing to understand and mostly because Katniss isn't telling him anything.

"How's it look?" he asks, trying to force his voice light, trying to amke it sound like it always has between them.

He's bleeding through the bandages, just as I thought he might be. I reach a hand out towards his back but don't touch him. No need to add to the pain anymore than I already have. "You'll live. The doctors here have more than my mother did. But your bandages should be changed." I glance down the hallway, hoping there's at least one doctor there. As far as I can tell, they work in shifts. "Do you want me to get someone?" My eyes glance over at the white cloth on his back, stained with blood in places. I've seen far too much of it in the past year that even now, the scent of it makes me gag.

"You can leave it, Katniss," he says because, right then, the last thing that he bear is her sounding like she's forcing herself to be there. Maybe it's the blood. Maybe.

"Somebody'll be here. I'm fine."

I should ask him if he's sure. I should offer to stay. But I don't do either of those things. "I'll come back," I promise him. He should know that it's one I'll make good on. "I just need to..." breathe is the word I'm looking for, but it sounds too harsh to use here. "Think," is what I use instead. It won't hurt him any less, and I know that's what I'm doing at this very moment. It's hard enough to watch without inflicting it myself.

But there's a weight in my chest that I need to get rid of and the forest is the only place I can breathe these days.

Edited 2011-01-08 23:44 (UTC)

(gale) we're half-awake in a fake empire

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