Archive of Our Own

They call it the Restoration, what the new government is doing in District Two. Like they are bringing a suffering, neglected war victim back to life. Gale thinks it is an outrage.

What they are actually doing is painting over the past and putting it away, casually as a child’s outgrown playthings. The past where District Two chose violence, chose the Capitol. Now, like their protectors, they are in ruins. Gale knows tragedy and this isn’t one. It's just consequences.

But no one's asking him. These days, with the Mockingay put out to pasture, the new government is more interested in his face than his voice. There’s a void to fill on the airwaves, and all. There’s a huge televised medal ceremony where they send him to help with the cleanup. They call the task an honor. The reality is that to rebuild the Nut, they have to clean up the bodies, and District Twelve is the only workforce available that is both loyal, and knows a mine collapse.

Officially, since Gale is the seniormost military officer from Twelve, he’s project liaison. But that’s just on paper, so they can put him on TV to talk about it. At the Nut, he leads a regular crew of miners. The guys have been working in Twelve for decades, some longer than he’s been alive. He feels like a dumbass kid playing dress-up in his uniform, giving them orders, but he has to be front and center for all the propo shots that are, inexplicably, still being filmed. It’s important to see the big names from the rebellion here getting their hands dirty, they tell him. It’s to create a sense of national unity, for cooperation.

He wonders if President Paylor asked for this, or if it’s just old habits dying hard.

The propos are all staged outside the Nut. No one films the actual work. His crew creeps down unstable tunnels, trusting the debris-strewn floors no further than the beams of their headlamps can throw. The rubble is choking. The dust has settled thick, gray. Sometimes it’s only possible to know a dead limb from a collapsed support beam by the smell.

It’s dangerous work, but everything feels dangerous with Coin gone. Nothing about Thirteen was quite what Gale thought, and now he doesn’t know who he’s meant to trust. He hates Two. He wakes five times a night and can’t sit still in the evenings unless he’s gone for a ten mile run. Ma and the kids have been issued a house, but she won’t let him sleep there because he takes a bowie knife to bed and more often than not, starts swinging it in his nightmares. So he has a spot in the barracks, and spends a lot of evenings in town. He gets into bar fights.

He knows he isn’t making friends, but fuck friends. He doesn’t need them.

What he needs is the foundation he’s laid down in his mind to seal off the dark places. He needs to focus on patching its cracks. Ghosts keep bubbling up from them. At least he only pays for his sins in the dark.

Until one of the ghosts follows him into District Two.

###

The day the ghost finds Gale is the day that they find two whole teams of miners crushed inside a caved-in tunnel. The smell is astonishing. Three of his guys throw up and have to leave on the body cart to get some air.

Gale calls the shift early because he can’t stand the sound of the pickaxes in the silence, the weight of the hours he knows it will take to dig out these men and bring them to the surface only to bury them again.

They are digging graves topside—not individual, but Paylor insists on marking where each body went in case the victims can later be identified. She says dignity is important. Practically, dignity is creating a huge bottleneck, not to mention a health hazard. There are now more corpses outside the Nut than Gale’s seen all in one place since he returned to Twelve. It reeks.

He’s suffocating. All this time digging. Thinking about why these men died, what they did, what they stood for. That’s what gives Gale claustrophobia.

He surfaces, the sun hot and bright in his eyes, to see the nauseous guys from his crew standing over the shrouded bodies lined along the rail tracks. They are sprinkling handfuls of breadcrumbs over the freshly recovered dead.

This is the custom in Two. The local rebels started doing it as soon as the war ended and the gravedigging began. Now they’re spreading it to Gale’s men.

Instantly, he's furious. These people from the Nut would have shot his men dead at point blank range if they were ever given the chance.

Then he sees her at the end of the line.

Primrose Everdeen, her hand outstretched, crumbs falling from her fingers in a soft rain over the corpses.

She doesn’t look like she did the last time he saw her. But it could be her from the week before. The age in her eyes and the length in her body, that grey medic’s uniform that was a little too long in the cuffs. Thirteen’s tailors could also see the way she would have been taller than Katniss in a few months’ time.

His eyes lock on her. She looks right back as she brushes the last crumbs from her hands. In the sunlight, which catches harsh in her golden hair, he can’t tell where they land. If they do.

He turns his back, clocks out, and goes to the bar.

She follows him.

###

Prim stays in the corner of Gale’s vision where it’s possible to ignore her, so he does, because she’s just something his mind made up.

Katniss would still be speaking to him if she wasn’t.

The thing is, he’s seen how hard it is to get your mind back once you loosen your grip. Once you start to feel it all. He lost enough people in this war, in enough horrible ways. He’ll be damned if he loses himself, too.

Eventually—three, maybe four drinks in—he clocks that the chick next to him at the bar is District Two. Everyone wears plainclothes now, so he has to figure this out by the way people hold themselves, but it isn’t hard. All the schools in Two are military schools, so all their citizens walk around with perfect posture and a snappy-sharp affect. They act like someone’s going to call them to attention at random on the sidewalk. Maybe someone used to.

This girl looks like she cuts her precisely-angled hair with a razor blade and a protractor. She sits tall instead of slouching over the bar. Her black boots are polished, her collar starched. This dive doesn’t have coasters, but she sets the whiskey glass down exactly in its own circle of condensation every time.

Gale hates this shit. Why can’t the people in this district just be human?

He sets his glass down in nine different places. Just to make a point.

The District Two girl takes two refills, tosses each one back in a single gulp while looking straight ahead, then goes home. He doesn’t think she notices him. Frankly, he wouldn’t have noticed her either, if he hadn’t been trying so hard to ignore the ghost kid sitting on his other side.

Anyway, that’s why, when he’s called into the commander’s office the next morning and she’s already there, he draws up short and says, “You.”

She cuts a look at him, as painfully sharp as the tilt of her short-bobbed black hair.

Or, more likely, it’s the hangover that hurts. He wasn’t a drinker before this post. He can’t hold his liquor.

“Sorry?” asks the girl.

“Never mind." Gale snaps to attention for the commander. He turns deliberately away from the girl from Two, because Prim has settled into the armchair right behind her. “You called, sir?”

“I have a temporary assignment for you,” says the commander. “We’ve got a problem on the back side of the ridge south of town.”

“Give me the details.”

“We spent last month clearing loyalist strongholds out of the nearby caves, as you know. We believe there are three combatants holed up in the cave system along the top of the ridge. Diana here is familiar with the local geography. She can navigate."

Gale is skeptical. “Two of us against three of them? We aren’t going to be able to bring them in alive.”

This has been Paylor’s directive about the guerilla fighters they smoke out of the surrounding mountains. Bring them in alive. Give them a chance.

“I know that’s official protocol. But, unofficially—” the commander pauses, rubs a hand over his face, shows the hours of exhaustion buttoned up inside. “They’re too close, and they’ve got a stockpile of blasting equipment.”

“How?”

“It’s ours, from the initial invasion. Didn’t have the resources to get it moved with everything else going on. We, ah, figured it would be secure up there. My ass is getting handed to me about it, if I’m honest. Just make sure it doesn’t get used.”

Gale’s fine with all of this. Except one thing. He jerks his head at the girl. Diana.

“Never worked with her before.”

He’s asking, can I trust her, but the commander doesn’t like when he says that out loud. He says Gale is paranoid. As it is, the commander barely contains an eye roll.

“She’s one of Lyme’s handpicked. She was here before the Nut fell. She’s a sharpshooter and trained on close quarters combat. You’ve got the familiarity with blast technology, traps. You should be a matched pair.”

Gale nods, but he notices the way Diana flinches when the commander mentions Lyme. The old victor. One of the only not-shitty people to come out of this shitty district. He wonders what that’s about.

He decides not to care. He’s only curious because he needs something else to think about. Prim is still sitting quietly there in the office chair.

###

This is Gale’s second posting in Two, and the longer one, but there’s been no time for recreation. Last time he spent hours hunting with Katniss, getting to know the other soldiers. It was the front lines, but in some ways also a respite. There’s none of that now. The cleanup has taken up all the air, all the energy.

He hasn’t been in the woods in ages. He forgot the vitality of an early spring forest. The yellow-bright tinge of waking trees, the wet smell of leaf and loam. The way the birds sing so loud you almost can’t think.

There aren't any mockingjays—at least not that he’s seen. He supposes the Capitol didn’t release many jabberjays here. Never needed to. Two has been rotten for that long.

Prim keeps silent pace with him and Diana as they climb. She’s still in her medic’s uniform with the cuffs rolled up, sensible boots, blonde hair in a single braid like Katniss’s, fraying at the edges. She looks comfortable among these strange trees. They are straighter and easier to see through than the forest outside Twelve, less clogged with brush. It is daylight. It’s a world away from the last hours he spent with her in a forest.

Prim, in the woods? Katniss had said to him, wry, the day of the first Reaping. The day everything fell apart. It was why she’d said they couldn’t run. Because Prim would never survive amongst the wild things. She probably wouldn’t have then.

Gale tries not to think of the Reaping anymore, but seeing Prim dredges up the memory. He can’t remember if any part of him knew it was all over when her name was called. The life he’d built. The world he’d loved. Or if he still thought things could turn out okay.

“Why are you stopping?” asks Diana, when he crouches down suddenly, pulls off his pack for supplies. He needs to do something with his hands.

“To set a snare. We’re on this project a couple of nights. We’ll need to eat.”

She flips that sharply cut hair out of her face. They’ve been hiking two hours uphill, and it still looks like she just combed it. “We have rations.”

Gale scoffs. “I don’t eat that shit.”

She means the dry protein bricks they manufactured here for the Peacekeepers. There are storehouses full of them. Enough to keep an army going for a century, if they’re okay with living on sawdust.

He sets a twitch-up snare. They’ll have to double back for a safe campsite once they’ve assessed the loyalists’ location. This is a relatively flat stretch of forest with denser brush, which certainly hides small mammals and will provide visual cover once dark falls. It will be a good place to spend the night.

“I didn’t know you were serious about any of that stuff,” says Diana, once they’re hiking again. “The traps. The snares. We only ever saw you in those show-pony propos, shooting firework arrows at hovercraft.”

It is disorienting, Gale finds, to meet someone who doesn’t know him for traps and snares. Who doesn’t define him by traps and snares. Who can see him past the traps and the snares.

He does not like it.

“Seriously? You’ve heard of the avalanche at the Nut, haven’t you?”

“Sure. Beetee Latier’s master plan? The blast that changed the course of the war?”

“Not Beetee’s master plan. Mine. Beetee did all the math to make it happen, but the idea, yeah. That was me.”

He remembers how he described the Nut when he pitched the plan. A den of wild dogs. The way Katniss flinched when he said it, even though it was true.

Diana is staring at him. Flat. Expressionless. Not a wild dog, but plenty of other predators precede the hunt with stillness.

“A lot of people I knew died in that avalanche,” she says.

“Yeah, that was kind of the point.”

He wants to twitch a hand to his knife. He can hear Hazelle’s voice in his mind, telling him that it’s peacetime now, he needs to stop being so jumpy. Telling him to put his weapons on the coat rack by the door when he comes for dinner, because he’s scaring Posy.

“War is shit.” Diana turns back to the trail. The tension bleeds from the moment. "Sorry for assuming. A lot of the brass they put on TV are useless suits."

She doesn’t seem to hate him, which is weird. Everyone else who finds out about the Nut—even the ones who are grateful for it—look at him different afterward. Like they’re nervous what other dark things his mind is full of.

“So, you know the caves?” he asks Diana.

She looks away, her mouth twisting up at the corner. It's not really a smile.

“Stashed some of the original dynamite. Basically have the whole thing mapped out up in my mind.”

“How long has the dynamite been there?”

“Years. We started stockpiling during the Seventy-Fourth Games,” says Diana. Then, “Lyme told us where to stash it. It’s her old hidey hole.” Then, after a longer pause, “Us, meaning, her daughter and me.”

Gale frowns. “Lyme has a daughter?”

“Yeah, we were best friends,” says Diana.

Gale notes the past tense.

Could be that the daughter got caught up in the Purges. Lyme turned up at the bottom of a mine shaft a few weeks after the Capitol fell. There’s been a lot of that amongst the former victors. Mysterious accidents, not-so-mysterious ones, too. No one trusts victors, and so, almost none of them are left alive. Beetee apparently goes around Three with a full security detail.

Gale hasn’t asked if Katniss or Peeta gets the same treatment in Twelve. Maybe not. He supposes there isn’t anyone left back home to threaten them.

He looks behind. Prim’s still keeping pace. She doesn’t look winded, only troubled. She is focusing more on them than on where her feet are falling. The woods are a lot easier to deal with when you aren't real.

Prim nods at Diana. "That girl seems sad."

You seem nosy, Gale would say, if it wouldn’t sound crazy out loud. It’s a bad sign that she has started talking.

###

“That’s the only entrance to the caves.”

Diana points at an outcropping of rock a quarter mile down the opposite side of the ridge. They are lying flat on their stomachs in the brush at the top. The wet spring wind buffets their tired bodies, muffling her quiet voice.

“We don’t want to trap them inside,” says Diana. “They could just blow the place to avoid capture.”

“Trapping them would solve our numbers issue,” Gale replies. “Three on two, remember? We can’t just start a fistfight and expect to come out on top.”

Diana frowns, assessing the ridge, taking in dozens of details.. The wind tries and fails to muss her hair.

“Let’s wait and see if they come out on their own. We can pick them off right away if we get lucky.”

She shifts position and pulls her long sharpshooter’s rifle from the dirt. It’s military-issue, matte black metal, with a high-powered scope that Gale envies even after months of unlimited access to Beetee’s labs. She leaves the safety on as she sights down the barrel at the outcropping, using the scope as binoculars. They settle in to wait. 

Prim sits close enough to touch. She’s stripping needles off a sprig of pine, eyes half shut as she lets the wind play in her hair, luxuriating in the beautiful day. She doesn’t speak again, but Gale’s getting nervous anyway. What will he have to do to seal her back under the foundation in his mind? He doesn't know how to get rid of a hallucination without drugs, and he'd have to ask for those, which would mean admitting there's a problem.

He knows a lot of fucked up soldiers who still see things—people—that aren’t there. There were a few folks in Twelve like that after the mine accident that took Pa. The lucky ones haunted the Hob. The unlucky froze to death on the slag heap.

That’s where he learned it first. Being fucked up is deadly.

That’s why he chose to handle Pa’s accident the way he did. He focused on the moving on and the surviving, not the shit he couldn’t change. It was the only rational thing to do. It was the only way to survive. For him and for everyone who needed him.

Hell, that’s half of why he was so angry at Katniss the last year and a half. Because after everything—after her ma almost let their whole family starve to death—she’s let the past close over her head like dark water. She’s refused to swim back up.

When he found her that first day in the woods outside Twelve, he thought—well, first he thought, here’s a stupid kid who’s gotten lost. But then they got to talking, to foraging, to hunting. And before long, he knew gut-deep. Here was someone who understood the weight. Here was someone who knew what it took to survive.

Then, a couple good hits, and she just… wasn’t that person anymore.

He doesn’t mean now, after Prim. He—he can’t blame her now. But he doesn’t know how to stop being angry about everything that came before.

He would never have cracked. He was so sure of that.

But now here’s Prim, sunning herself on a rock, looking more solid by the hour.

On his other side, a sharp intake of breath. Diana startles backward, nearly drops the sniper rifle. Gale catches the muzzle with one hand, barely stopping it from clanging against the rock and telegraphing their presence. As it is, a huge spray of dirt and pebbles cascades down the back of the ridge from her scuffling feet. A cloud of dust rises into the fading afternoon sunlight.

“What the hell?” he hisses.

She points. Someone’s come out of the hidden entrance in the outcropping. A guy around their own age. The guy’s six feet tall, muscled. Looks like he throws slabs of marble around for fun. Probably used to, in Snow’s Panem.

“Shit. It’s Shale.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“Peri’s boyfriend.”

Gale shakes his head.

Diana makes an impatient noise. “Peri. Lyme’s daughter. She had a loyalist boyfriend. She smuggled a ton of information to him during the war. I didn’t think he’d come back here. We’re going to need another plan.”

“Why would we need another plan?” Gale starts to ask, but Diana is already shimmying backward, away from their target, away from the easy shot. And now Gale is pissed off.

This sort of thing used to happen all the time in Thirteen with the veteran officers. They thought he was a kid. They never told him anything—no context, no big picture, nothing more than the barest snippets. Coin herself personally trusted him, and he kept catching them snickering in the hallways about how she’d found herself a pet.

He would have liked to see any of them handle what he’d handled that night in Twelve. When all the lights went out, when you could have heard a shoe drop on the other side of the Seam. The way the air shifted with the first whump of a firebomb falling on the town square.

Would they still be laughing if they knew how many burning houses full of burning people he’d run past, all for a chance at saving one dazed neighbor in the street?

Gale lunges for Diana, catching her by the arm. He means to stop her from getting away. There’s not a war anymore, not the same need for commanding officers and hierarchy. She is making no sense, and he will make her explain.

She reacts so fast. He grabs; she yanks; the world turns in a full circle. She uses gravity to catapult him down the hill and out of a position of leverage. A breath later, her knee’s against her back and his wrist is twisted painfully up near the base of his skull. She’s heavier than he would have expected.

“Touch me again,” she breathes, “and I’ll break your femur.”

Gale speaks into the dirt. “Your best friend backed the Capitol, and now her boyfriend has stolen a bunch of Panem’s dynamite, and instead of shooting him in the head, you’re running away for no reason. Why should I trust you?”

“What reason have I given you not to?”

“You’re Two,” he says, because this should be obvious.

“Are you always so fucking paranoid?”

“Wouldn’t you be, if your entire district was burned to the ground in front of your eyes? If you were surrounded every day by the people who dropped the bombs?”

“I didn’t do that. I was trying to stop the people who did that.”

Diana shifts her weight. A sliver of daylight reaches Gale. Of course, Prim is there in it, crouching to frown at him, and not in sympathy. She looks the way she used to when she argued with Katniss’s nurses. She always waited until her sister was lost in the morphling to do it. He doesn’t think Katniss ever knew her little duck could yell.

“The war’s over, Gale," she says. "Who do you think you're fighting?”

“Shut up,” says Gale, mistakenly out loud, because he’s agitated.

Then two things happen at once. Diana goes rigid, and cold metal presses hard against Gale’s temple.

A fourth voice joins the conversation.

“Hands where I can see them, or I’ll blow off both your faces.”

###

Diana is the reason they’re found. Gale is the reason they get caught.

A shit-eating grin breaks across Shale’s face as he hauls Diana up. “No fucking way. If it isn’t the executioner herself.”

The other two guys yank Gale up to his feet just in time to see Diana spit in Shale’s face. Shale knees her in the gut, then cracks her across the face with the rifle butt.

It’s the opening Gale needs. He lunges for the pistol on one of his attacker’s hips. He gets it free of the holster and looses the safety all in one movement. How many times did they drill on disarming in Thirteen? He's good at it. Half a breath and he has the gun trained on Shale. No one reacts fast enough to stop him.

Including Prim. She stands, startled, in his line of fire.

“Move,” he snarls.

And that's the opportunity spent. The other two guys grab him, and the gun too. They hit him across the head. Stars burst in his vision. He’s down for good this time, face pressed into the dirt, and he’s pissed, but at who? He can only blame himself. What, he’s not willing to shoot through a ghost?

“Fuck you,” Diana gasps at Shale, on her knees. “You’re the reason she’s dead.”

Shale leans over her and purrs, “Oh, no, babe. Remind me, which of us pulled the trigger? As far as I remember, that was all you.”

Their captors gag them, bind their wrists and ankles, then drag them back over the crest of the ridge and down into the cave. It’s bristling with boxes of dynamite. It is not a big cave, but the stash is substantial, and packed in close to the walls. There’s very little floorspace available for prisoners.

Shale and his two guys argue amongst themselves about who will sweep the woods. It seems like they only noticed Gale and Diana on the ridge by chance—by pebble-kicking, dust-billowing chance. They’re expecting backup. Gale keeps his mouth shut and lets them sweat about that nonexistent threat. He’s plenty busy fuming.

Prim is hovering over Diana, who lies curled in the fetal position at the foot of a tower of dynamite boxes. Diana’s left eye is swelling shut from the rifle butt, and she’s pale, shaking. Her face is tucked into her knees. It’s the first time she hasn’t looked like an army doll.

Prim glances up at him, accusatory. Her ghost hand is on Diana’s shoulder, leaving no trace of comfort.

“Aren’t you going to help her? She’s having a panic attack.”

For a second Gale is in another place, another time.

A forest instead of a cave, moonlight reflecting in Prim’s pale eyes. The air is sweet with summer humidity, sweat, the iron tang of blood. They’ve stumbled as far into the woods outside Twelve as they can bear to go, and here they’ve collapsed, hoping the rest of the night will be kinder. Though she has nothing but empty words of comfort to offer, Prim moves among her neighbors with the confidence of a woman three times her age.

She should be here, Gale thinks. All he knows how to do is set a trap.

He scoots closer to Diana and mutters, “Tell me you know another way out of this place.”

Diana sucks in air. “There is no other way out. It’s storage.”

“Why don’t you ask her what’s wrong?” Prim says.

Because he doesn’t care what’s wrong. There’s going to be a lot more wrong pretty soon if Diana doesn’t get her shit together.

She owes him this. She’s the one who got them into this mess. She’s the one who spooked when she saw Shale come out of the cave, kicked up the dust that blew their cover. They’d be down the mountain by now, harvesting from his snares and making camp, if it weren’t for her bad nerves. They’d be getting this done.

Well. They might still be getting this done, if he hadn’t choked.

If he’d have just fired the gun.

Damn Prim. Why is he seeing her? Is this some kind of punishment? Is she going to follow him around for the rest of his life, watching everything he does, judging him with her steely bedside manner whenever she thinks he’s not being compassionate enough?

He can’t take it.

No, more than that--he can't do it anymore.

He can’t always be the one holding things together. He’s been handling things for so long he doesn’t remember what it was like not to. He doesn’t remember if he used to feel safe, if he used to wake without an ache in his jaw from clenching his teeth. He doesn’t remember a morning when he didn’t rise before dawn to find Ma already at the washboard, scrubbing her knuckles raw over laundry that wouldn’t pay enough for food.

Things were good for a while when he had Katniss. Afternoons in the forest, a brace of rabbits to sell at the Hob and even that damned Darius flirting with her in the dead of winter. That, because of the way she swatted him off and rolled her eyes at Gale, the way he knew she would never actually leave him.

Until the Games, when she did.

Not volunteering for Prim. Of course she had to do that. Gale would’ve for Rory. No, she left him when she came back but didn’t at the same time, when she filled the quiet in their forest with silent secrets. When she made Gale hold them together, too. He'd tried so hard to keep their Sundays. To talk like they used to while Katniss spooked at shadows and vanished into the mysteries of her own mind.

It had been Gale left living in the powder keg of both their lives. Gale left with their families together at his house, gathered around his tiny TV screen because the Quarter Quell felt like it would hurt less if it played out small and grainy. Like Katniss would be less dead if they barely saw it happen.

Gale left in charge when the power cut out. Gale, the first one who knew. Gale the one who felt it in his gut, like an animal with his foot caught in a trap—the terror of what was coming.

And he’d gotten them out. He’d been the only one there who could get them out, and he wasn’t anything like enough. For the whole district to live? They’d have needed an army.

That was what it had meant to him to finally have one. To have Beetee and Thirteen and a lab full of technology. That was hundreds, thousands of people finishing the unfinishable job together. Making them safe, making them free. That was the load shared. It was something Katniss didn’t understand and never tried to.

It had hurt all the more because he knew she’d once understood perfectly. He’d thought losing her was the most pain he’d ever feel.

And then he was in a Capitol police van, steps from the Presidential Mansion, and bombs went off—once, then again. A familiar pattern written against the back of his eyelids in wiring and diagrams, in the echoed language of a bitter fight.

When he got out of his handcuffs, there they were. Children in the wreckage. And Prim.

Or, the thing that was left of her.

The unfinishable job, complete. The world reborn without its heart. Gale had done that all himself, too.

###

“Hey,” says Gale, putting his hand in the same place on Diana’s shoulder.

She doesn’t respond. That’s Gale out of ideas, then.

Except he doesn’t have the luxury of being out of ideas. They’re stuck in this goddamn cave and Prim is not real, so he’ll have to be the one to snap Diana out of it. Alone to carry everything, the way it’s always been.

He can feel her shaking under his callused palm. She’s breathing shallow and fast. He decides to start by leaving his hand where it is.

“Breathe,” he tries, because he remembers Prim saying this to the survivors in the woods. She said it over and over again, calm murmurs, the word blending into the soothing shush of the summer trees.

“I am breathing,” Diana snaps.

“Well, I don’t know what to do,” he snaps back. “You’re freaking out.”

Diana sucks in a huge, shuddering gulp of air. Her eyes are squeezed shut, but he can feel how badly she wants to punch him. Maybe that's progress.

“I killed her in here," she says.

“What?”

“Peri. I caught her with Shale up here. She snuck out. I followed her to talk her out of it. They were shooting on sight after nightfall once we took the Nut. Everywhere was on lockdown. It wasn’t worth her life just to see that dipshit one more time. I didn’t know she was trying to hand over the dynamite to him.”

Diana sucks in another deep breath through her nose, then blows it out through her mouth, explosive.

“I got here ahead of her. But Shale was already waiting. He trapped me inside. Peri caught up and tried to talk him down but they knew I’d narc. They weren’t going to let me go, so I had to shoot my way out. I wasn't going to hurt her, but he was just--he was out of control. I had to take care of him. But when I pulled the trigger, she stepped in the way. I—shot anyway—and then I—I just ran. She fell, and I ran. It was my only chance to get away.”

She’s still shaking. Gale thinks it’s tears, but when she finally looks up, her face is stone. Tears are for much more trivial hurts.

“No one could even come for the body for a week,” she says. “She was just lying here all that time. Shale did nothing. The wolves got to her.”

For the first time--against his better judgment--Gale understands.

“Well, lucky you," he mutters. "To me it’s just a goddamn cave. A lot easier to get out of than a mine shaft.”

He can hear them coming back. He curls up and rolls away. But before he lets go of Diana’s shoulder, he gives it a quick squeeze.

He’s still pissed off, and he’s still tired of handling everything. But, fuck it. It feels like what Prim would have done.

###

While their captors bicker over a badly smoking cookfire, Gale catalogs everything he can.

The cave is a pocket of rock. More of a crack between large boulders. It has an overhang that covers a flat area in the mouth. That’s where the three boys are huddled, abusing their firewood and arguing about whether it will be better to shoot their captives here and leave the bodies, or make them walk to somewhere harder to find, or shoot them here and dispose of their unresisting corpses elsewhere.

Their concern is the dynamite, and how much time the various options will leave them to relocate it. It sounds like it might just be the three of them on this project, but Gale can’t be completely sure. They definitely don’t have any vehicles. They will hand carry as many crates as they can. Honestly, he’s wondering why the base commander found these people such a threat in the first place—if he’d just sent a standard ten-man squad up the mountain, this would be over by now.

But now the boys have Diana’s military rifle. And they’ve smashed Gale’s comms unit. So.

Gale has been working on the ropes at his wrists. There’s a broken plank on one of the dynamite boxes. The fibers are fraying slowly. Diana doesn’t have anything to work at her own bonds with, but the ones at her ankles might come off if she can get out of her boots.

He really needs to focus. But Prim keeps commentating from her perch on a nearby crate of dynamite.

“Remember when they made Peeta wear handcuffs to lunch back in Thirteen?” she muses. “I always thought that was unfair. He was really the one in danger. You would have killed him as soon as look at him, if it weren’t for Katniss.”

Gale finds it extremely unfair, the way she’s making him out to be some jealousy-crazed lunatic. “He strangled her,” Gale hisses.

“What?” Diana whispers.

Gale shakes his head. Prim’s eyes glitter with mischief. He has the feeling she was needling him on purpose. She's not mad about Peeta, really, but she would be annoyed with him for being short with Diana.

“You good?” Diana asks.

“It’s not the worst day I’ve ever had.” Gale shifts his weight to get a better angle on the ropes at his wrists, and to face away from Prim. “You got your head on straight yet?”

 “It’s been on straight the whole time. You ever heard of post-traumatic stress disorder?”

“Sounds like something we can’t afford right now.”

“Says the guy who’s talking to no one.”

“I’m not talking to no one.”

“If that helps you.” Diana goes back to prying at her left boot.

Gale doesn’t know how this conversation turned on him. He takes charge.

“You really had no idea about Peri before you came up here?”

Diana shrugs. “No one did. Not even Lyme. But Lyme was gone a lot, and she could be strange. Peri and I looked out for each other. I’m the one who should have seen it. That she wasn't just playing a part in public like her ma. That she meant it.”

Gale makes a dismissive sound. “You believed in a better person than the one you had. Happens to all of us. She was a Victor’s kid. If anyone should have known better than to trust the Capitol…”

“What? No. The opposite.”

Diana is mad. He sees it in her suddenly ramrod-straight posture, the thinning of her mouth. All of her suddenly razor lines.

“Everything was different here if you were a Victor’s kid. Sure, it meant you were destined for the Games. But you were probably gonna win, and before then, you were treated like royalty. We have whole dynasties of Victors. There was a guy, he won the Twenty-Fourth Games, then his son won the Fifty-Third, then his son—well, you know him, right? That was Cato.”

“Well, that makes sense. That guy was a pig.”

Another flat look from Diana. “I’m not saying I liked him, but it’s propaganda, what we’re raised on. Especially Victor’s kids. He didn’t know any other way to be.”

“Everyone has a choice.”

“When do you think they realize that? Because here, everything is designed to hide that choice from you. Working to convince you the world is a certain thing, and you have to be a certain thing to survive it. That it’s the only way to have honor. Don’t you think it’s terrifying to think of living any other way?”

“If it’s so impossible, how did you learn to act right?”

Diana lifts one shoulder, wiggles at her boot again. It finally comes off. She kicks it out of sight.

“It was different for me. My parents died in the mines when I was little. If it wasn’t for Lyme taking me in, I wouldn’t have had anyone. Everyone knew Peri would go for the Seventy-Sixth Games. We were the same age, and I wasn’t good enough to volunteer early like Clove. I wasn’t going to be a Victor. Best I had ahead of me was twenty years in a Peacekeeper uniform. I felt like—I don’t know. Like a cog. Like nothing was that great, but our whole district was this never-ending parade about how great we were. We believed in the glory of the Games for everyone else. We set an example of what it means to love Panem when you’re district. We were the only ones who knew how to die in a way that meant something.”

“It meant nothing,” Gale snarls. “It was a death cage. Even if you got out, you didn't. The Capitol never offered anything but crusts—and if you complained about those, they sent maggots and bombs instead. I’ve seen that.”

“Yeah,” says Diana. “Exactly. But Peri, she was going to that arena whether she loved Panem or not. She had to believe. I'm sure for Cato it was the same."

Gale is done with this conversation, even if it means that Prim’s going to start talking again. But, worse, the guys come back. Shale leads the parade, waving around that rifle. They center on Diana.

“It’s a nice change,” he sneers, “being the one with the gun. I should shoot you right here, right now. That would be some damn poetic justice.”

Gale would tell this guy to fuck right off. Diana just lifts her chin at him. Her uniform’s scuffed and dirty, that perfect hair is finally mussed, but something about the gesture puts everything about her back together. Dignity in a single stroke.

Shale grabs her by the shirt collar and hauls her up. She’s tall, but he’s still got her dangling in the air for a split second. “You think you’re better than us? A girl who was so jealous of a future victor that she decided to take down the entire system?  You make me sick.”

He throws her back down, hard, right at Prim’s feet. Gale twitches at the sudden motion too close to the crates of dynamite. They've been stowed a long time, and unsafely. They could be unstable.

The two other guys haul him up too. Fear is a scent on the air. The rope at Gale's wrists is frayed but not yet broken. Shale’s waving that rifle everywhere. Points it at the ceiling, at his friends, at the crates.

“You bring this shitty little rabble rouser for backup?” Shale sneers to Diana. “Where’d you import something this pathetic from, District Eight?”

“Twelve,” says Gale, eyeing the rifle with scorn. “We learn some basic explosives safety there. Wonder if that’s why it went so badly for your little buddies in the Nut. Didn’t have enough sense to protect themselves from a chain reaction when the rocks started falling.”

He sees more than feels the blow to his jaw. Bright pops of all-consuming color. Something cracks. He realizes, when his ears stop ringing, that it wasn’t a bone—it was Diana’s gun. Shale’s shot it into the ceiling. Fragments of rock rain down.

"You took everything I give a shit about," he hisses. "My girl. My district. My nation. I can’t get it all back, I’m not stupid. But I can make you pay for taking it. This dynamite can make you pay.”

“Good luck,” says Diana, withering. “Half the Free Panem Army’s down there at the fort. You won’t make it within a mile of the gate.”

“That’s why we aren’t going there,” says Shale. “Because we aren’t stupid, are we boys?”

The two holding Gale yank on his arms, pleased with themselves.

“We’re going to blow up the houses tonight,” says the one on his left. “All those temp houses. All those people you scum imported to flush us out of our own district. We’ll blow all the outsiders to bits. That’ll send a message.”

It sends a message to Gale, all right. That’s where Ma and the kids live.

###

The guys take three boxes of the dynamite on a sled and force Gale and Diana out of the cave at gunpoint. They take off the ankle bonds—rendering all Diana’s work on the boots useless. The two captives stumble down the hill in the deepening dark.

Gale’s plan has narrowed considerably now that he understands the stakes. They are out of time. The ropes on his wrists are on the edge of snapping. One sharp tug will do it. That will be his moment to act.

He could maybe make a run for it, but he’s outnumbered and unarmed. It won’t save anyone tonight. Better to blow this load of dynamite. It’s enough to kill all five of them instantly. That will protect the base housing, and the rest of the explosives, for now. Diana’s commander will see the blast and figure out something’s wrong. He'll send someone else to move the rest.

Gale will have to grab one of the guns. Point-blank range with a bullet is his best chance of setting the boxes off. Heat and pressure, like a blasting wire. Then, nothing.

His mind is clear as the cold spring night. Danger is the only thing that makes him feel like himself anymore. It’s like it was the night of the bombing in Thirteen, when he charged up dozens of metal stairs in a dizzying spiral, the blare of the blast doors’ klaxon in his ears. Straining to hear Prim’s footsteps on the grating above, or the thump of a bomb finding its mark.

All he’d known was something dangerous had to be done, and he was fast enough and bold enough to try. Time shrank, measurable only in moments, the way it’s moving now. It's always been easier to bear that way. It was the same reason he’d volunteered for Peeta’s extraction team. He'd needed to be on the front lines. It was the only place that made any sense.

The world is a certain thing, and you have to be a certain thing to survive it.

Diana’s words come back to him. He swats them away. He’d honestly rather think of Prim. Prim the way she was on the steps, charging down to meet him. Even six inches taller and worlds older than she was at the Reaping, she'd been dwarfed by that giant orange cat in her arms.

He wonders what happened to that thing.

When Diana stumbles close to him, he looks pointedly at the crates. He whispers, “Help me.”

Her gaze cuts to him, then away again. He sees her connect the dots. She doesn’t betray any emotion, but then, half her face is swollen stiff, and she’s a stranger, so how would he know her tells? How would he know if she feels resolve, fear, both, something else entirely?

Why does that matter, anyway, when time is measured in moments?

Prim is keeping close now, much surer on her feet than she was in the District Thirteen bunkers. “What are you thinking, Gale?” she asks.

Does she miss the cat? He wishes he could ask. He’s wondering if maybe she's a premonition, realer than he thought. A spirit sent from wherever comes next.

“Just don’t do something stupid,” says Prim. She has a bossy look in her eyes that he knows she got from Katniss. “Please. We’ve already wasted so much. You owe me a favor, don't you think?"

Shale draws up short then. "Good enough," he says.

They’ve walked maybe half a mile. That’s not Gale’s idea of good enough. If they make a racket here, gunshots and bodies, it’s going to make it hard to circle back to that extremely obvious cave to retrieve more explosives. But if all goes well in the next few moments, Shale won't live long enough to face that problem.

Shale leans in close to Diana and spits in her face. Payment for earlier. “Peri's gone because you put your fucking lunacy over her life. Now you can pay with yours.” He raises the rifle.

Diana surges forward. Feet kicking up, high, catching Shale in the gut, the shoulder. Gale takes the opening to yank at his bonds. The rope snaps; he lunges, taking his captor down sideways. Hears a gunshot but there’s no time to look. All his focus goes to his hand closing around the pistol at his captor’s belt. Hands on the rubber grip. He twists. It won’t come out of the holster.

The guy bucks Gale off. They tumble over each other and his advantage is gone that quick. Knees against his chest and the gleam of metal rising overhead. No time even to panic.

Crack.

The guy lurches sideways, suddenly boneless. Gale grabs at the gun as the guy goes down, gets it this time. He twists up and it's Diana standing there with the smoking rifle. Shale’s prone at her feet. That was the first shot he heard

The third guy’s lunging for her, though, from behind. She doesn’t see him.

Gale raises the pistol at the sled of dynamite. It’s at a ten-yard pace now; he’s rolled down the hill. But a clear, easy shot, a clean finish.

Equally clear and clean is his line of sight on the guy rushing Diana from behind, raising another gun in a two-handed grip.

Gale shifts his aim.

Crack.

The guy drops. His momentum throws him onto Diana, knocking her to the ground. His hand flies wide, toward the sled. The gun hits the ground hard.

It goes off.

Everything blows sky-high.

###

Gale knows the other side of an explosion like every inch of his callused hands.

The deafening silence. Then the ringing.

Sight coming back wavy, the air full of grey and orange. Mostly an afterimage of Prim crouched low, too close to the boxes, her blonde braid the first thing to catch the light.

Ash the first taste on his tongue. The first breath in his lungs.

Everything is in splinters.

###

The sled is gone. Another sight Gale’s seen before: a field of carnage, dark patches that aren’t shadows, unnatural stillness. He gropes forward on unsteady limbs, feeling the bile rise in his throat.

Prim stands by one of the trees, untouched, which makes this not one of his nightmares.

It’s happening again. It is always happening again, and he doesn’t want it to. He doesn't want this. He wants afternoons in the forest, the snap and spring of a well-made snare. Roast turkey for dinner and fresh berries popping between his teeth in summer. He wants to laugh, and he wants to dream. He was trying to build a world where he could do that.

How can he know when he has, if he has? How can a person be sure there won't be a need for any more explosives, any more bodies?

“She’s bleeding."

Prim drops to her knees beside the nearest thing on the ground, which is Diana. Of course. He destroys everything he tries to protect.

“Well, put some pressure on it!” Prim demands.

“Put—”

He looks down. Diana is moving.

It’s hardly more than a twitch, an attempt to curl in on herself, fetal. And he realizes—Shale’s lackey fell on top of her before the explosion. He shielded her from the worst of it.

She groans when he flips her onto her back. No more impeccable posture now. These woods, so similar in the dark to the woods of Twelve. She could be a neighbor dying under his inept hands. Blood mixing with earth. The world always so hungry for it.

“What—” Diana tries to say.

“Just hold still, would you?”

A lot of the blood is from her head. That isn’t necessarily serious. Prim taught him that. More important to check the torso, the big veins in the legs, make sure everything’s intact. A huge gash in her thigh bleeds freely. But when Gale presses two hands into it, he can feel that the blood isn’t pulsing out. Not an artery.

He needs to not be doing this in the woods, in the gore, in the black and hungry night. Every shadow is a person who never made it past the District Twelve fence.

He looks up at Prim, who crouches over Diana alongside him. “Can I move her?”

“No vital injuries,” she says. “At least not anything obvious. But where are you gonna go?”

“Somewhere I can think. Come on, let’s sit up,” he says to Diana.

He isn’t going to be able to carry her far. They’re nearly matched for size. But he gets her on her feet, arm slung like lead weight over his shoulder. He wraps an arm around her waist and directs them, step by stumbling step, back up the hill. His clothes grow warm and sticky with her blood. Prim hovers close.

“That’s it. One foot in front of the other,” she croons.

“I know how walking works,” Gale grunts.

“I’m telling her.”

“She can’t hear you.”

“Kindness always comes through.”

He takes Diana back to the cave. He gets that it might be a rude choice, emotionally, but dry shelter matters more. He’s hoping to find supplies beyond Diana’s rifle and the knife he took off Shale, but if they’re crammed in here among the dynamite, he can’t find them. He at least gets the cookfire going again. The guys didn’t put out the embers right.

He props Diana up in the entrance and tells her to keep lookout, and pressure on her leg. He strips off his shirt and tears the bottom half into strips for a bandage. Her eyes go to the scars from the whipping when he does. He does his best to bind up the wound, but blood seeps through the feeble efforts before long.

He should probably leave Diana here and go for help. But he’s not sure if she’s stable. And what if someone comes looking for Shale?

“They’re all dead?” Diana croaks.

“Yeah. Good riddance.” Gale bends to blow a low and steady stream of air onto the kindling, coaxing the flames to lick up taller. 

He was trying to provoke her, but she doesn’t reply. Eventually he looks around just to make sure she isn’t unconscious or something. Her head is leaned back against the rock, her skin white and her eyes shut, but her chest moves. Half her face is caked with drying blood. It’s matted in her once-pristine hair. 

“You'll think I'm insane, but I’m glad it was Shale,” she says, eventually. “I needed to see him one more time.”

Gale shakes his head. “I think you’re talking like you lost a lot of blood.”

She sighs. "He was a jackass but he was the only one left who knew her too, you know."

"And then he abandoned her corpse."

Diana, by now, seems to have learned to ignore him. "I keep thinking about what he saw me do. I looked her right in the eyes when I pulled the trigger. I’d killed plenty of times before, you know. It’s just war. I never dwelled. But now, it’s like she’s always sitting here with me. On the really bad days, all of them are. But I kind of think it's fair."

Gale shakes his head. “You can’t think that way. My best friend did, and it destroyed her.”

Diana laughs softly. “You mean the Mockingjay?” 

Gale throws another stick into the fire. “That wasn’t Katniss. That was… some thing they made out of her. Some people don’t know how to fight if they don’t have a hero to set the example.”

“Do you think she's at peace now?"

“I wouldn’t know. We don’t speak.”

Diana’s silent for a while, long enough that he thinks she’s drifted off. But eventually, she says, “Who do you talk to?”

“What?”

“When you think no one can hear you. You talk to thin air. Who do you see?”

Prim leans in from across the fire. Gale looks away.

“No one.”

She doesn’t protest. For some reason that makes the guilt rise up.

“Katniss and I don’t speak,” he says suddenly, “Because I’m the reason her sister’s dead.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t even know.” He stares into the fire until everything else goes blurry. “The Capitol was trying to get all the kids inside the Presidential Mansion. Then, Thirteen bombed them. Yeah,” he adds, when Diana startles, “That whole thing was a false flag. I found out after Coin died. She figured it would break everyone’s spirit, thinking Snow had killed Capitol children to keep himself safe.”

“So you were there?”

“Right up by the gates. We had a strike team, but we’d gone rogue. Katniss wanted to kill Snow personally.”

His mouth twists. That singlemindedness that, toward the end, only surfaced when they talked about Snow. It had felt like having her back, at times, when they were on Squad 451. He'd known it was an illusion, but he'd believed in it anyway. He'd wanted to.

“We got caught. I was in a van when the bombs fell. I could hear it was one of mine. We designed them that way, see. One explosion, then a second after people have rushed in to help. Playing their instincts to increase casualties. I don’t know why our medics were on the front lines. I especially don’t know what Prim was doing there. She was fourteen. Only just got her uniform. But…”

He could go on. The van flipping into the ditch. Breaking his cuffs with bolt cutters and wiggling out of the dented back door while his captors were still unconscious. He’d run toward the bombing because he saw the gates to the mansion were open. He thought it was his chance.

Until he got to the first of the bodies. Saw the uniforms. Realized what had happened.

Realized what he’d done.

“I’m sorry,” says Diana.

He sneers at the fire. “Will you hate me if I say I’m not?”

Diana raises an eyebrow. “Not what? Sorry?”

“Yeah. I don’t regret inventing that bomb. Honestly, if it had been my choice, I think I'd have dropped it, too. Even now, knowing—what it looked like. If I could have known it would end the war? I don’t know. How many more people would have died if they hadn’t done that? I don’t know,” he says, again, hearing that he’s repeating himself. "I guess I'm a bad person."

“Listen.” Diana leans forward, eyes hard in the firelight. They are a deep brown, but the light brings out the gold in them. Makes her angular face softer than it really is. “I think a bad person does things like that and feels powerful afterward.”

“I did feel powerful. I—you don’t understand,” he says, desperate now, “you don’t know what it was like when those firebombs started falling on Twelve. They squashed us like ants. Like eight thousand lives were nothing. To have even one moment of being the one with my finger on the trigger... designing those bombs, those traps, it was like—like I could actually protect the people I loved. Like maybe I was powerful enough to keep us all safe.”

The fire snaps, sending sparks up into the black night. Below the ridge, the unfamiliar forest fills the silence with its unfamiliar sounds. The wind through the wrong branches and the nocturnal creatures through the wrong underbrush. Gale misses home.

“Yeah,” says Diana, “that’s not the kind of powerful I mean.”

“You mean powerful like Shale?” he asks, hard-edge now. “He wasn't strong. He was just getting back at you for Peri.”

“I saw you change your aim. You could have gone for the dynamite, killed all of us, made sure. But you didn’t, and I know it's not because you give a shit about me. Or yourself. You did it because two lives were worth saving. That's not a choice the person who dropped that bomb would make."

"That's a nice thought," says Gale, sarcastic, strangely afraid.

“You’re sorry,” Prim says to him, quietly, from across the fire. “I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”

Diana tucks her good leg up into her chest, wincing. “I was raised to be the person who drops the bomb, takes the shot. Everyone in Two was. But it was just a way of controlling us with our own anger. It’s not a life. What’s the point of rebuilding this place if we don’t try to rebuild ourselves, too?”

When Gale falls asleep, early in the black dawn after taking first watch, Prim is waiting for him there. He’s never minded the version of her that appears in his dreams. It’s just a memory, not a haunting. She never says anything. Usually he doesn’t even see her. It’s just cool hands sliding gently against his ravaged back, applying poultices and snow.

He knows it’s her because she leaves the mess of him better than she found it. She always was that way.

###

Diana’s leg has not stopped bleeding by the time the sun is high in the trees. They abandon the cave anyway. There’s no comms unit to call for help and if they don’t start the walk back to town, it will mean another night on the ridge. Her odds of infection grow by the hour.

They have to stop after a quarter mile. Gale tries to fashion a crutch for Diana, but he isn’t a good woodworker, and she can’t put comfortable weight on it. He leaves her at the tree line to go ahead and check the snares. The first two have rabbits. He returns and builds a cookfire, prepares the meat. That's something.

He doesn’t want to be thinking about last night’s conversation, but he is. Little details stick today. The spring of the greenwood as he took down the snare. The weight of the dead rabbits, the mix of cookfire and tang of blood as he prepares skewers of meat. How many times has he done this task? These little violences, minor trespasses, the business of living. The quiet details of the years when he and Katniss were together in the woods. There was work to do. He was eager to do it. He slept at the end of the day.

It was the last time he thinks he felt something like peace.

Diana is putting on a good face as she leans against the tree trunk, but her bronze skin has developed a pallor. The sun wheels toward the horizon, a little lethargic with early spring. Prim is still with them, but she isn’t saying much today. She keeps company with Diana, both of them dozing. Eventually, the smell of roasting meat rouses Diana.

“Look,” Diana says. “I can’t go any farther. My head is splitting. Why don’t you head down the hill without me? You can make it by nightfall and lead a team back here in the morning to pick me up.”

“You don’t even have a tent,” he says, irritated. “If we were going to do that, you should have just stayed in the cave.”

“I can make it back. It’ll be fine.”

“Didn’t you say there are wolves out here?”

She shrugs, too casual. “Not too many.”

Gale surveys their surroundings. The forest is thick and consistent. Full of dry brush. He remembers how cold it gets once night falls.

“I could kill for a comms unit,” he mutters.

“We could try building up the fire,” she suggests. “The smoke might catch some eyes.”

Gale shakes his head. “We’d probably just burn a ton of trees.” He hesitates, then says, “What exactly was the dynamite for, do you know?”

“Hm?”

“The commander said he wanted it back because his ass was getting handed to him? Why? What do the higher-ups want it for? The mine won’t be operating again for months. Probably years.”

Diana shrugs. “Blowing up more Capitol loyalists, probably. I know we've got Paylor's orders about that, but..."

Gale looks down the hill. He judges it’ll be eight more miles to the bottom and the trailhead. Diana is right—it'll take the rest of the day for him to get there on his own, then they'll have to wait for morning so they can retrace his steps safely. It will be slow, and Diana will be vulnerable.

He holds out a kebab of scorched rabbit to her.

“Can I borrow your rifle?”

She eyes the meat. It is, admittedly, a bit blackened. “Do I want to know what for?”

“Let’s do the thing where you don’t ask, so you can’t get in trouble,” he suggests. “And eat that, would you? You’re turning gray.”

She nibbles dutifully on the meat. Gale checks over the rifle, which still has three bullets loaded. More than enough. Diana admits that the rabbit is better than the protein bars, even burned, which. Obviously. He makes her eat the rest, then leaves her to mind the dying embers while he retraces his steps.

Back over the ridge, down the other side. He approaches the cave silently and slowly the way he’d stalk a deer. If Shale had backup, he doesn’t want to find out the hard way.

But if he does, they haven’t turned up. The cave is silent once again. He creeps around until he can see the first of the stacked boxes. Prim keeps up effortlessly. They crouch behind a log together.

“You could just build a signal fire up there.” She points to the exposed ridge. “It’d be plenty visible. No brush. Why don’t you?”

Gale doesn't reply. She's not asking because she doesn't know the answer.

He raises Diana’s rifle to his shoulder, takes aim. The crates loom large in the scope. He imagines, for a moment, the other path. Eight miles down the hill, and the gratitude of the commander for their discretion as he dispatches a retrieval team. The mission completed as assigned. A few little snags, but ultimately, the dynamite safe to blow another day.

He thinks of two explosions. One to wound. One to draw in rescuers. The blueprints for his trap are still out there. The idea lives in many minds. His trap could be used again one day. Maybe even to protect his loved ones. Maybe if that day comes, and he’s the one given the choice, he’ll take on the debt a second time, despite knowing its weight. It’s hard to know who you might turn out to be one day. The things you might do.

For now, he lets out a breath and squeezes the trigger.

###

That Saturday, it’s the first warm evening of spring. Ma is teaching Rory how to roast a turkey, but it’s obvious he has about the same culinary skills as Gale. He blackens it to a crisp. They open all the windows to let the smoke out. Slowly the house fills with the scent of fresh pine.

Gale is on administrative leave while the explosives incident at the caves is reviewed. He has invited Diana for Sunday dinner because she lives in the singles barracks. He knows the slop they serve there. It explains why she thinks the protein brick rations are food. Maybe they are in a new era of Panem, a restoration of District Two, but he thinks those ideas are a little too big to bite off and chew right now. He prefers to start with something simpler. Some goddamn fresh food.

Diana shows up on crutches, her black eye colored spectacularly. Gale has a matching bruise at his jaw. Ma fusses over their newcomer. The medics should have given Diana a rolling chair, have they prescribed enough pain medication, sit down right here, good gracious. Rory, she needs water, pour a nice tall glass.

Gale slides onto the bench at the end of the table, next to a bowl of sad, melted-to-death vegetables. He is responsible for ruining those.

“Sorry,” he says to Diana. “Ma goes a little over the top when she gets to host.”

“It’s nice,” says Diana, awkwardly. She’s even more stiff and formal than usual. “Lyme wasn’t the fussing type.”

The kids are wary of her at first. They see the same things Gale did: the way she sits like a soldier even in a broken-down chair, with a broken-down body. But once the food starts, they relax. Food is always a ruckus at the Hawthorne house, especially now that there’s plenty of it. Gale passes charred turkey and mushy vegetables and wonders if having enough will ever get old.

What he does know is, he’s glad he blew the dynamite, and for the simplest of reasons. Ever since he got to Two, he’s been on daily evening shifts in the Nut. Administrative leave means the first Sunday dinner he’s eaten with his family in over a year.

Diana warms up once the food is going around. Hawthornes are rowdy dinner table people, not unlike a mess hall full of soldiers. She understands the tenor. Soon she's exchanging dry, sharp-edge barbs with Rory, who lights up at the attention. Between her presence expanding to fill space, and the kids bouncing and growing, the gap that was once Katniss’s is almost gone.

Prim is still here. She hasn’t had much to say since they got off the mountain. Her usual place would be at the end of the bench next to Posy, but she doesn’t fit anymore. Posy’s shot up three inches and out the same amount, now that she eats three solid meals a day. And Rory—his shirtsleeves are hopelessly short, barely clearing his elbows. He’s nearly as tall as Gale. You’d never guess he and Prim should be classmates, to see them next to each other now. Time pulls him forward, and leaves her sitting there in that freshly-issued medic’s uniform, forever an almost. 

Prim rests her chin in her hands, perched on a stool at the end of the table. Someone set it out in case they didn’t all fit on the benches. She watches the goings-on with that softness in her expression, the one close to tearing up. Drinking everything in. Bursting with it.

Gale wants to say something. Tell her she should be here. That he misses her. The words feel stuck though. Her gaze flits him, fills up a little more. Are the words on his face, at least? He hopes so.

He turns away, tries to stay in the land of the living. But he feels a shift in the air when she leaves the table, and has to look one more time. She stops at the open door, framed by the twilight. He catches her eye.

She twitches a smile at him, and he can see without her saying it. She isn’t coming back.

Then the table erupts into noise and motion. Ma’s told the little kids to clear the dishes, and they’ve set upon the task like wolf pups. Gale turns back toward the mayhem, saves a few plates from the floor, scolds Rory for jostling Diana.

On the table before him, one crusty, drying heel of bread remains. He stares down at it, feeling the open doorway at his back, the weight of the empty night. He puts it in his pocket.

###

Central office gives up and clears him for duty after a week. According to the report, it’s exactly as he said. The dynamite just went off. Unlucky break, unsafe storage. Gale and Diana were fortunate to be far enough away when it blew.

Of course, the commander is avoiding him at muster these days, but that’s because the commander is the only one who got a formal reprimand. It falls back on him, the unsafe storage, losing track of an arsenal like that. He resents this.

Gale supposes this is going to stunt his professional opportunities for a while. He isn’t upset. He still doesn’t like Two, doesn't like the people. Could be some of them will turn out all right, like Diana has. But he’d rather take that one soldier at a time.

He approaches the mouth of the Nut with the heat of the noon sun on his neck. Bodies line the tracks already from this morning’s efforts. The trees are greening in earnest now, filling with songbirds. There is almost enough beauty to make up for the decay. Spring will thicken, he supposes, and the bodies will dwindle. One day this place might be beautiful; no longer full of bones.

He stops at the end of the line of bodies and pulls out the stale crust of last night’s bread. He can't help looking around the square in search of a blonde head. Not seeing it raises a choking ache in his chest. He wants so badly to fight it, to shout at it, to hide from it. To stuff it under the foundation in his mind.

None of that has worked. So he tries something new.

He pinches off a piece of crust, rolls it to dust beneath his fingers, extends his hand. The crumbs fall in a rain over the body at his feet, golden in the light.