Chapter Text
a softer epilogue
Quote paraphrased from one by Lou Holtz.
—
Many years after the rebellion, Katniss and Gale start to mend their broken friendship. Their past is painful and there’s no changing that, but she’s had enough time to start truly thinking about her future, and she wants him in it too, despite the bad blood. She doesn’t want their friendship to be yet another thing the Capitol took from them.
So Katniss rekindles her bond with Gale by suggesting they hunt and hike together there, something she’s long missed his companionship for. Peeta isn’t keen on going out into the woods after his time in The Games, but the woods were hers, and Gale’s, long before she knew the arenas. And besides, Peeta trudges about and scares everything in a half-mile radius away. Between those things she has more than enough excuses to give to Gale about why he ought to accompany her rather than anyone else. Even if he didn’t accept those, she’s not above using what remains of his guilt, to imply he owes her to get him to agree, though she’s glad she doesn’t have to bring it up.
It’s strange going not out of necessity but for leisure. They go to the lake of her childhood, with time to savor there, and then further, exploring far beyond the confines the Capitol once imposed on them. However long the hike, they always make sure to bring back game when they return and Peeta bakes up a feast for them as she and Gale rest weary muscles. She worries at first about Peeta and Gale, how uncomfortable it might be with the three of them sharing a meal together but she needn’t have. Any tension from earlier years is gone and she realizes the two get on surprisingly well. She supposes they always did manage to, though she presumed it was for her sake, except it was apparently not just that.
The days in the wilderness with Gale and returning to the cozy contrast of home comforts to share their catch with Peeta are some of her happiest days. Something in her is still afraid any happiness will be snatched away from her, by fate if no one else, so she does all she can to not expect too much. But over time, it becomes a new habit much like they once spent every Sunday together, and there’s no need to ask if Gale is coming - he simply does. Gale must spend practically all his vacation time at hers and Peeta’s, making her wonder if there’s anyone back in District 2 missing him, but she doesn’t dare question it and risk upsetting the situation. For now, he’s hers again, in a way. And Peeta too. It feels like too much, too good to be true, something to guard her heart against.
One day, coming back from a trip to town, she walks in to find Gale arrived early, and busy kneading dough with Peeta, laughter echoing in the kitchen. Peeta plays his part in their trips by making sure to bake plenty and pack up supplies for them – which Katniss took as a silent approval of her mending the relationship. And she knows now Peeta actually gets on well with Gale, but it’s different to see them interacting without her. To see Peeta inviting Gale to join him in something so quintessentially his domain. She takes a seat at the table as Peeta recounts the last hour or so she’s missed, including Gale’s disastrous attempts at stretching out the dough for flatbreads, which ended up with it landing on the increasingly grumpy old-aged Buttercup. The situation is strange, but it’s nice somehow and she won’t ever complain about Gale coming to visit early.
Gale visits early more and more, and the extra time is spent leisurely at theirs before the hiking trip. Time with Peeta as much as with her. It’s odd at first, but she lets it be and her fears mellow once she can see there’s no sign of trouble. They get to have nice now. Gale takes an interest in Peeta’s paintings even, but his attempts to paint are given up despite Peeta’s eager tutelage. She suspects Peeta has always been a little sad that he has no one to share in the process of creation with his art and his baking, but Gales does take to the latter somewhat, unlike her.
After Gale becomes a regular fixture in both their lives, she spies Peeta sketching Gale, though only ever when he’s not there, from memory. Peeta’s done portraits of others before - her mother; Prim; her father mainly from photos but somehow managing to capture his essence from her descriptions. The portrait of Gale he finally admits to working on Peeta takes much longer over, not wanting to show her his work in progress as he usually would. It unsettles her but she can’t say why it does. Eventually, he finishes it and agrees to show it only to her, and the portrait of Gale is wonderful, not that she’d expect any less from Peeta. The way it catches the light in Gale’s eyes, a still frame of him caught in the moment he’s most alive, is perfect. But Peeta downplays any praise, a blush on his cheeks at it too, which is so unlike him because he knows his talent. She’d had an inkling then of something on the horizon, like an early warning sign your eyes see but your mind doesn’t know what to think of yet, reacting on instinct.
She’s still surprised when she quietly makes her way inside one day to see Gale and Peeta frozen incredibly close in the kitchen and staring intensely at each other. For a split second, she thinks it’s anger she sees on their faces but then she realizes it’s not that at all. There’s a palpable tension of a kind she’s never witnessed before from them. She laughs out loud – an unintended release of the weird mix of nervousness and relief she feels, that they’re not fighting at least, bubbling up suddenly – breaking the moment.
They carry on like normal and she finds it all too easy to pretend it was nothing, as if the two men weren’t close enough to kiss only minutes ago. She ought to be jealous at the idea of Gale kissing Peeta and she isn’t. Catching herself, she realizes her thought should be the other way round. Her jealous of Peeta kissing Gale, Peeta cheating on her. But she finds no matter which way round she considers it, she isn’t angry or jealous, because she knows Peeta is hers. And so is Gale, really. So Peeta kissing Gale couldn’t feel like a loss. In fact, it might make a strange sort of sense to complete this old triangle of theirs. Ironic after how they started out. Maybe there’s more there, maybe one day they might revisit whatever that moment was. But today she’s happy and they’re happy and that’s enough for the time being.
Also rebloggable on tumblr here.