Chapter Text
Katniss has weathered many a blizzard in her short life.
Her earliest memories are hazy – flickering embers in the hearth, the warmth of both parents around her and the tiny Prim, a deep, beautiful voice singing softly in her ear.
Then came the one a few days after the mine collapse, after the day when their world exploded and changed. Their house has gone cold and silent, little fingers brushing tears from pale, hollow cheeks. Katniss sometimes thinks back to what could have been her first actual meeting with Gale, right before the onset of that storm, during that bitter January night when he came banging on the door, shouting that his mother is having a baby and needs help, could the healer come? Her mother refused to move, Katniss refused to open the door. No, she couldn’t come. Couldn’t even take care of her own kids at the moment. (Posy lived and they never mentioned it again.)
Later, after they became friends, she’d wait out storms sandwiched between Gale and Prim – both families packed into one house to spare firewood and to share some warmth between them – , a ragged blanket over her knees and the sparse fire casting a golden glow on their faces, her stomach tricked into fullness by hot herb tea. Then she could relax, knowing nothing more could be done until the weather clears, and venturing too far outside could mean death.
One year, the drifts got so high a few people wouldn’t be found until after the most of the snow has melted. This year – in a house large and heated, pantry stocked full, all paid for with shreds of her heart and soul – she’s more worried than she’d been in years. For all the fresh horrors they might face in the District, she’s partly relieved they ended up not making a run for it – this snow would have made a quick work of them all – , but she can’t help but wonder what she’ll find when she’d be able to go to the town square again.
The cold iron of the new whipping post. The blood frozen deep under the snow, Gale’s mixed with a few drops of hers.
The whole district, including her home in the Victors’ Village, is just a continuation of the arena, and now it’s Gale who lays there bleeding. Wounded but breathing, she confirms with relief as she steps closer. Just like she knew he would, but her nightmares are too quick to whisper otherwise.
He’d made it from the kitchen table to a small guest room during one of his longer spells of consciousness – insisted on going by himself, almost crashed into every doorframe along the way –, and Katniss spends most of her time by his side, retreating only when her mother and Prim come to change his bandages. Or when they chase her upstairs to get some proper sleep, but she hadn’t been too successful on that front.
This night is calmer and darker than the last few, some snow-laden trees have given out and fallen onto cables, busting electricity in the whole village. Flickering candles made the house feel a bit more like a home that evening, but she doesn’t light one now, feels her silent way through the gloomy corridors. The darkness makes her feel safe. Unwatched. No electricity, no cameras. It doesn’t really matter anymore – her public stand in the square must have told Snow everything she never wanted him to know – but she breathes easier. The act of jumping between Gale and the whip was love and defiance intertwined, a lot like lifting the nightlock berries to her lips, but without a moment of hesitation, a moment of calculation. There was only the visceral need to prevent the unthinkable.
Stealing into his room, she takes Gale’s hand in the darkness when she believes him asleep, but doesn’t slip it out of his grasp when she feels his fingers return the gentle pressure. Her skin is polished new after the Games, but his thumbs trace familiar paths where the tiny scarred cuts from arrows or wires used to be. He knows them by heart, perhaps remembers them better than she does herself.
When his movement stills as he falls asleep again, she presses a kiss against his rough knuckles and the feverish heat of his cheek, and tiptoes back to her lonely room.
She digs her fingers into her own blanket and fights the urge to steal back to him.
In the end, she gives in.
No other arms can save her from this nightmare, anyway.
Lifting the blanket draped over his legs, she slips next to him, lying on her stomach just like Gale does, and squeezes herself halfway under his arm. Close enough to feel his heartbeat, to breathe in the heady scent of herbs and blood.
Her attempt at stealth wasn’t good enough; he stirs and murmurs, “What are you doing?”
“Causing all kinds of trouble, probably,” she retorts in a whisper, and tries to nestle against him.
Gale draws her closer with a soft laugh and drapes his arm more comfortably over her back, his hot palm sticking to the sliver of bare skin between her top and pyjama pants. The shift strains his shoulder and back, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Her position is a bit awkward too, with one of her arms squeezed between their bodies and her head sharply turned to face him, but Gale’s soothing warmth makes up for that. His breath fans over her forehead, over her cheek where her wound is still healing, too. Only the tip of a single whipcord caught her there, but a scar will surely form. Her only now, matching all of his new ones.
Gale traces her cheek under the cut and the bruise, the touch of his thumb butterfly-light. “Thank you, Catnip,” he says softly. Any attempt to lie about the origin of the wound would have been pointless, she realizes, but he spares her the need to explain. “And I do know, now. I’m sorry for having been such an ass about it.”
Katniss laughs softly, even though the idea that he almost died with his declaration of love unanswered chills her to the bone. Perhaps he’d deserve a harsher rebuke after their argument at the lake house, but he’s certainly suffered enough for now. And she’s too happy to have him with her, warm and breathing. She runs her thumb over his cheekbone, along the curve of his lower lip. “Good. And don’t you forget it. And if you do something this stupid again, I might just change my mind.”
She feels his smile against her fingertips. “I’ll behave, I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to that. And to fighting for everyone else too. When the time comes.”
For now, though, she just holds onto him. When their lips meet in the darkness, he is fully conscious and she is fully prepared, to kiss him and to own up to it – at least to herself, here in their warm refuge where nobody else can see them.
They are suspended in their warm retreat, in each other’s arms, before the fight of their lives has to go on.
It’s no longer snowing, a swift wind has cleared the clouds, but snowdrifts are piled almost to the ground floor windows. Bright, wintry moonlight is filtering through the closed curtains, painting shadows of swaying branches on the walls. For now, the rest of the world recedes to that – the snow and the shadows beyond.