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“What do you see in her?”
The question startles Peeta awake from where he’d been dozing in the chair. He jolts, and then immediately feels guilty for falling asleep. He wasn’t even tired, and yet, there he was, napping on a kitchen chair, drooling down his chin, not even trying to make sure Gale was still breathing.
Katniss would hate him for it. He wouldn’t blame her.
“Huh?”
“What do you see in Katniss, Peeta?” The question is strained and somewhat slurred from the morphling and the pain he must still be in, but when Peeta looks at Gale’s eyes, they’re startlingly clear and sharp.
People think Gale looks enough like Katniss to be her cousin. Peeta doesn’t agree. Gale’s eyes are about four shades darker, his skin deeper in tone, his nose stronger, his cheeks cut sharper, the shade of his hair on the brown side of black while Katniss’s hair could nearly pass for blue with how black it really is.
No. No, they really don’t look all that alike.
“That’s a stupid question, don’t you think?”
“No,” Gale says, and shifts a little, like he might try to sit up, then thinks better of it and sighs. “I’m just wondering…what someone like you saw in a skinny girl from the Seam.”
Ah. So that’s what it is.
“She wasn’t always just a skinny girl from the Seam.”
“Are you talkin’ about that whole…girl on fire bit? From the Games?”
Peeta actually snorts at that. “No. I just…saw more in her than that. I saw beauty.”
Gale’s face twists into something that’s almost a smile, but it’s too weak to be more than a grimace. “She sure is pretty, isn’t she?”
“It’s about more than just her face, Gale,” Peeta says, “I wasn’t lying when I talked about her in that cave. When I heard her sing, it was all over. I was done for.”
Gale’s eyes narrow, almost angry. Is that…jealousy Peeta spies on his face? “I’d hardly ever heard her sing before she sang in the Games.”
“I haven’t heard her sing since.”
“But you got to see her sing when she was little.”
“She was a lot happier, then,” Peeta says, “when life was easier.”
“Life was never easy for her. Never easy for me, either.” And there it is, that disdain that Gale seems to hold for every merchant that doesn’t run out of the Hob, anyone who didn’t have to worry about hollow ribcages and empty, growling bellies. “Just because it got harder when our fathers died doesn’t mean it was ever easy.”
Now it’s Peeta’s turn to grimace. He understands Gale, in this way. It never felt good, having enough to eat while watching the Seam kids starve. It’s part of why he threw the bread to Katniss in the first place.
Thinking about the other reason he did it hurts.
“I see why she likes you,” Peeta says. “You’re a lot alike, you know?”
“Well, we are cousins,” Gale replies, slurring, and Peeta actually laughs at that, but it’s a hard, dry laugh like stale bread. “We’ve been through a lot together.”
Jealousy. That’s jealousy, ugly and sharp in Gale’s voice. Could he…actually be jealous of Peeta? For what? Having enough to eat as a child? Not having to worry about one day working in the coal mines, even before he was a Victor? Or could he be jealous of the fact that Peeta was in the Games with Katniss, sharing that hardship, an insurmountable hurdle they jumped together, barely alive, and somehow landed upright on the other side of?
Peeta surprises himself by not feeling rage, but by feeling…bad for Gale. Gale, who would punch him as soon as share a bowl of soup with him just for saying Katniss’s name. Gale, who Katniss had known since she was a child and shared everything with. Gale, who had never, ever once had enough.
The emotion kind of makes Peeta sick. Gale doesn’t want, doesn’t need Peeta’s pity. Gale would probably wallop him just for thinking it.
“Yeah. You have. You’ve got something with her that I can only play at,” Peeta manages, keeping the pity out of his voice if only just, “Katniss really loves you, you know?”
Gale grimaces, his back shifting. The bandages are damp and bloodied, and Peeta can see the ends of the less-severe whip marks around the edges. He’ll need fresh ones soon. “She certainly doesn’t act like it.”
“What do you mean? She spends all the time she can with you, you’re one of a very small group of people she trusts. She’d die to save you, Gale.”
“That’s because she’s a good person, whether she wants to admit it or not.”
“She’s not very good at recognizing her own good qualities, is she?” Peeta asks, but the question doesn’t need to be answered, not by them. “And she wonders why people like her.”
“People like her because they liked her dad,” Gale says, and there’s an undercurrent of something Peeta can’t quite pinpoint in his voice, “and because she’s a stubborn bastard, just like him. She’s a survivor, but she’s a survivor that makes sure everyone else is still breathing first. She’d starve if it meant her mom and sister would have full bellies. That’s why people like her.” Gale’s eyes flash in the dim light as they lock onto Peeta’s. “Is that why you like her, Peeta?”
“It’s definitely a part of it,” Peeta says, “but there’s more to her than just that.”
“Like what?”
Peeta scoffs at that. “Come on, Gale, you’re her best friend. You know her better than anyone, the good and the bad.”
“Oh, so you think she’s got bad qualities?” And Gale’s teasing him, of course, but the mean undercurrent in his voice is definitely real. “You sure you’re in love with her?”
“Of course I am. And yeah, she’s not perfect. Nobody is, but…I love her anyway. She’s…stubborn. And smart. And she’s kind, whether she wants to admit it or not.”
“Only Katniss would take offense to being thought of as a nice person.”
Peeta smiles. “You’re damn right about that. And that’s what I think is so…tragic about her.”
“Tragic? So you pity her?”
“Don’t let her hear you say that. I don’t pity her. I’ve never pitied her in a million years.”
“But you threw her the bread.”
“I threw her the bread because I hate watching people starve, Gale. It had nothing to do with pity. I don’t think of myself as being so high-and-mighty. I’m just a person, and I don’t want people to go hungry, especially not the people I love.”
Gale’s face twists, and Peeta doesn’t know exactly which pain is causing it. “Still sounds a hell of a lot like pity to me.”
“Well, it’s not,” Peeta snaps, and then feels guilty for snapping. “I love Katniss. It has nothing to do with pity. I fell in love…with Katniss’s joy before I fell in love with anything else. God, when she sang…the birds outside stopped to listen. Her voice was pretty, sure, but I’ve never seen anyone so happy as when she was singing that day. She had this great big smile on her face, and her hair was already coming out of its braids, and by the end of the day her dress was covered in mud, and she never stopped smiling. I stood no chance.”
“She was a lot happier when her father was still alive.”
“Yeah. I know. But I still love seeing her smile.” Peeta doesn’t mention that most of the smiles he gets out of her are fake, just for the cameras, and the ones that Gale sees are real. It’s just another thing Gale has from Katniss that Peeta never, ever will.
Damn the Capitol. Damn the Games. Damn Gale, and everything he gets from Katniss that Peeta doesn’t.
Jealousy isn’t a pretty emotion.
“So that’s what you see in her. You see someone happy.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“But she’s not. She hasn’t been in years, not really.”
Peeta’s heart aches. “Yeah. I know.”
“Nobody who lives and works the coal mines ever is.”
“Do you think Katniss would have worked in the mines?” Peeta asks, voice very flat and very quiet, “if she hadn’t been a Victor? If Prim hadn’t been reaped?”
“Probably. I don’t think she’d have had much choice. Most of us in the Seam don’t. It’s not like we all just wake up one day and discover an affinity for dark, cramped places that smell like death and could bury you alive with one false strike of the pickaxe.”
Somehow, Peeta can’t picture Katniss in the mines. He’s been down there, everyone’s been down there, regardless of social class, and it just doesn’t feel right. Katniss belongs outside, in the sun, a bow in her hands and the wind at her back.
But if she hadn’t been reaped, she’d have had no choice. What a sick, sick life they lead.
“She hates it down there,” Gale continues, though his voice is slurring more, now, like sleep is clawing at him once more, “it makes her feel sick. She’s told me.”
“It makes everyone feel sick. My dad once told me he threw up once they came back up from a trip to the mines when he was still in school.”
Gale huffs. “How do you think everyone working down there feels? You know, once you’ve been working in the mines for five years or so, you can’t taste anything anymore. Can’t smell, either. I’m already starting to lose them.”
Peeta winces. Maybe the anecdote wasn’t the best thing. “I’d apologize, but it wouldn’t do any good.”
“I don’t want your pity.”
“You don’t have it.”
“Good,” Gale says, even as his eyes slip shut and his face contorts into a sleepy grimace, “I don’t need it. Katniss doesn’t either.”
“I don’t pity Katniss, either. Nobody has my pity. I thought I told you that.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“C’mon, I’m a terrible liar.”
Gale’s face shifts, and Peeta thinks he’s trying to smile. “No worse than Katniss.”
Peeta smiles back, but it’s strained. It feels…odd, to be talking about Katniss with Gale like this. Peeta doesn’t mind Gale, he really doesn’t, at least, not when he’s trying to weasel answers out of Peeta about why he loves Katniss. But this? This doesn’t feel right. He feels like he’s betraying Katniss, somehow, like this conversation is going behind her back and stealing something from her. “Nah. I’m definitely a worse liar than she is.”
“That’s because Katniss isn’t a liar.”
“No, not as much as she likes to think she is. Katniss has a habit of only seeing the worst in herself.”
“That she does,” Gale agrees, “but I don’t think those are bad qualities the way she does.”
“It’s not that they’re not flaws. It’s just that she’s so much more than them. They’re a part of her, just like everything else, but before I see her flaws, I see her joy.”
Katniss’s joy is the most beautiful part of her. Damn the Capitol, damn the Games, damn the coal mines, damn District 12 itself for stealing that away from her. Peeta’s never been someone to hate, but he hates, hates, hates all of them for stealing away what should have been hers by birthright.
Gale mumbles something, but Peeta can’t quite make it out. He tries asking for clarification, but Gale’s already sleeping again, pulled under by the drugs and the pain.
Peeta studies Gale’s face for a moment. He’s decent-looking, Peeta supposes, though he’s not really sure what he’s supposed to be looking for, since all of his markers for beauty seem to fall back on Katniss. No matter what people say, Peeta just can’t seem to see more than a passing resemblance between Gale and Katniss. Sure, they’re similar in coloration, dark and lean the way so many in the Seam are, but Gale’s sharper, bigger, a nearly exact copy of his father, who Peeta had seen in passing at school pickups a few times. Katniss, while not soft by any means, is…almost dainty in comparison. She has a lot of her mother’s features, and is speed and agility to Gale’s brute force.
The one thing they do share, though, beyond anything, is the permanent set of their scowls. Neither of them are happy.
Damn the Capitol. Damn the Games. Damn the coal mines. Damn President Snow himself for stealing away what should have been theirs by birthright.
What a sick, sick life they all lead.