#romulus thread

dont think about him going into the woods alone for the first time in years, all of the pain and rage and sorrow and grief and despair rushing up at him in the hollow of the trees. how he still has to hunt, how he still has mouths to feed. about his weekly visits to the everdeen house to drop off game, how their house is empty of her, how alone he is now, how the loneliness has returned more viciously than it ever has been because now he knows what companionship means, how the task of surviving becomes less burdensome in the presence of love. and the whole time, he is watching the games. he is staring at her face, noticing every change with the capitol's makeup and waxing. he watches all the interviews, sizes up her competition, assesses their strategies. many are bigger, stronger, have more combat training. but no one is a better hunter. he tries to tamp down his hope. then comes her interview, her extravagant dress that’s worth more than his entire home. the mention of prim enrages him; not even her sister can she keep to herself. he thinks that if caesar flickerman spoke the name of Rory, Vick, or little Posy, he would kill him right on that stage. and then comes Peeta’s interview. and whether Katniss does or not, he knows the truth of his words. he’s seen the way Peeta looks at her. and what he feels isn’t jealousy—not really—after all, they are both likely going to die within the week. but he does feel a profound sadness, a disappointment and rage. how futile that love becomes in the face of the games. he is glad, too, that Peeta said what he did. he admires the rebellion in it—tributes are not supposed to be human. at least to the capitol, Gale reasons that the monstrosity of the games is harder to ignore when it becomes a love story. he recognizes the way that they are both—that all the tributes are—playing the game before they’re in the arena. then airing is done for the night, and he leaves the square. he heads to the woods—tomorrow, the games begin. there is no hope of sleep. he wanders until the misty sun rises; he cannot return to the cove they spent their last hours together with blackberries and mocking the voice of the reaper. it’s not funny anymore. and there’s no one to hear it anyway.

he’s holding out hope, watching Katniss be traumatized in real time and half making peace with a death that would spare her survival after all this. eventually, he watches her pretend to fall in love with another man, and maybe knows it isnt true but knowing that it doesnt matter anyway, that she will be bound to those lies even if she survives. watches her kill and watches people try to kill her, watches her hunt and be hunted. he watches her notch her arrows in the swift and familiar motion he has seen countless times, and he resents the eyes he knows are boring into her all across the country. because their relationship, the sacredness of their survival, will never be their own again. knowing that even if she comes back, nothing will ever be the same. and then she makes it, and shes home, and everything is different. watching her move away, and change, and process, seeing her have more money than he has ever seen in his life, knowing that she would provide enough for him that he would never have to hunt again, but she never offers because he would never accept it. working in the mines, where his father's remains still sit, where he was always headed. watching the capitol freaks visit her, dress her up and strip her down, watching the camera crews roll into town and steal her away and she is so distant now, so distant and never comign back. and still he loves her. still he knows her better and more deeply than anyone in the world. they still hunt together, but infrequently and she doesnt do it out of necessity anymore. snow threatens her and him, and she has to marry peeta and he knows she has to and still his mouth is soured at the thought. because he loves her, and because she isn’t her own person anymore. she’s a prop for the capitol, and he misses his friend.

there is buzzing in the mines of rebellion. finally, finally, a reason to stay, something to live for. he has always wanted to fight, had always harbored anger that even katniss had never understood. and one day, he brings a turkey to the head peacekeepers house, as he’s done countless times before. but it isn’t cray, with his lenience for rules and his pension for young girls. it’s a new, severe looking man that takes him to the whipping post. he can’t remember the last public whipping in 12, and it isn’t a popular event. eventually, darius tries to step in and is lashed for it. there is community, camaraderie between the peacekeepers that are starving like him, illegal like him. he is whipped until pain is the only thing he’s ever known, until he wishes he could stop bleeding because even though it is beginning to snow and he is bare, the heat of his own blood is excruciating. finally, he blacks out. katniss is there, he thinks. peeta too. another man from the seam, the mentor. of course, they carry him to katniss’ house. the healing house, the place he’s carried game to once a week for as long as he can remember, but for the worst months of his life he did it alone. he is only aware of light and pain, and katniss close by. she is hysterical, and then there is snow coat on his face and prim and asterid are there, and he trusts them, and then there is a needle in his back and things go softer. katniss stays by him, takes his hand. kisses him. promises to stay, promises to fight.

and then the announcement of the quarter quell strikes. she's going back in. he'd be a fool to think she will ever return. he readies himself for grief again, but this time it's different. shes married, and distant, and things havent been the same since the reaping anyway. he won’t bring game to their house in the seam. this time, he will be isolated in his survival, in his terror too. this time, he is just some starving boy from the seam among starving boys from the seam, and she is the capitol’s darling with her husband at her side. still, he prepares to watch his best friend die.

the games progress, and she has allies now. people hes never met, could never trust. she used to be his ally, and him hers. and then the allies turn on her, and hes watching her bleed out on screen, and then shes fumbling with her arrow, and she is about to die. then the screen is black.

then the hovercrafts come in, and he saves the people he can but the ones he cant he watches burn, hears them scream. his entire home obliterated, his best friend likely dead but undoubtedly unreachable. three hundred mouths to feed, his people injured, charred, and starving and there’s only so much he can do. katniss was better with plants. days of his dwindling community and no foreseeable end. he teaches who he can to hunt, to hitch snares, and he doesn’t look too closely at the children’s ribs, at the gaunt, hurting eyes of his people.

an eventual rescue and they let him see her, and he looks at her battered body and knows he has to tell her, and knows too that she will know her arrow sent the hovercrafts. but now his people are fed, and katniss is safe. or at least here with him. and he is trying so hard to connect with her but she is distant and scared and angry and there are parts of her now that he will never understand, but still he is the one that finds her tucked away behind pipes, knows her spots and knows too that the things she is running from are inescapable. he is the one she hunts with, even here. and she is being used as a pawn again, just like she was in the capitol. but he is a soldier now, and he is fighting the war he has always wanted to, and he is designing weapons that exact revenge he only allowed himself to dream of in the heart of the woods.

and he knows that she needs peeta out of the capitol, so he volunteers to save him. not because he cares much for peeta, but because he knows its what she needs, and he knows what it's like to have someone you love trapped in the capitol's grasp. and he knows that she loves peeta, even if she doesn't yet know. and the decision wasnt even hard. and now peeta is rescued but it was a trap and peeta is a weapon and now he knows that he will never compete with peeta, that she will never look at him how he wants her to ever again. but he still has a war to fight, and so they do. he works on designing weapons, he films propos, he stays by katniss' side because thats what he does and it was never even a question. the war progresses and he watches her die a thousand times, sees that coin is trying to kill her. he fights beside the mockingjay and remembers a time when they were children in the woods together. they have never stopped trying to survive together. he fights beside people that he has seen on screens, learns the ways the capitol has intimately damaged them, thinks that he would choose starving over any harm they enacted against finnick, johanna, annie. he grows to care for these people. to love them for their joy and resilience, to trust and respect them as soldiers, to understand them for their rage. and of course, he loses them all too. one by one, the war takes them just as they always have. he is wary of coin but wants so badly to win, is willing to serve her for as long as it takes to be victorious.

Katniss leaves a few things for Gale at their meeting place the next Sunday, including a marker pointing to where she's headed. She can't trust the usual meeting place anymore, so she's walking out to the lake.(1)

After seeing the broadcast on the Mayor's TV, she rushed out into the hallway just in time that the Mayor didn't suspect she'd been inside when he came around the corner. She continued on to Madge's room, where they chatted a bit and Katniss offered the mockingjay pin back, which Madge refused. Katniss asked where she got it, and Madge said it was her aunt's, but it might be much older than that. Katniss wondered aloud about what an odd choice a mockingjay was to get as a pin, considering they're an embarrassment to the Capitol.

In an aside, we get a brief history of the situation: the Capitol created jabberjays, which can essentially record and replay human speech. They were sent into rebel regions to spy and report back, but the rebels fed them lies. The Capitol had made all the jabberjays male, so they abandoned them and let them die out. However, they mated with mockingbirds, and created mockingjays.

Madge said that mockingjays weren't a weapon, and Katniss agreed out loud, but disagreed privately. Mockingjays were an accident, and the Capitol abhors accidents.(2)

Back in the present, Katniss knows Gale will resent the long hike to the lake along the path she's leaving for him, if he follows at all. A couple of hours after setting out, Katniss reaches the cabin that sits on the lakeshore. Her father once pointed out the foundations of many buildings here, all abandoned long ago. This cabin survived because it's concrete. The windows are almost all busted out, and there's no electricity or plumbing, but there's a fireplace, and even some of the wood Katniss and her father collected when she was a kid.(3)

Gale wasn't far behind Katniss, and he even carries a turkey on his belt. He tells her he doesn't want Peeta's old gloves, but she says they were Cinna's, and he accepts them. He's feeling betrayed, and Katniss can't blame him, but she has to take this one chance to not lose him forever. She tells him Snow threatened to have him killed in specific, along with vague threats against everyone else she knows. He thanks her for the warning, and makes to leave.

Katniss cuts in that she has a plan. Gale is dismissive but Katniss finally opens up and tells him everything, back to the night that she and Peeta were crowned the victors. Gale finally shows some sign of warming to her, and starts to make a meal of the food she'd left for him.

At the end of her explanation, he asks about her plan. She says they'll run away, both their families. She recalls he was so confident they could do it, that day of the reaping. Gale picks her up and twirls her around in his arms as they start to talk about really running for it.

Only, he also tells her he loves her. And she can't say it back.

Gale pulls away, and Katniss tries to explain that she's been scared for most of a year, since the moment Prim's name was drawn. She doesn't have room to love anyone, but it might be different, once they're away. Gale swallows his disappointment and says they should find out, but his mother will take some convincing. Katniss says Haymitch will be the real holdout. Gale asks if she's serious. Katniss says of course, she can't leave Haymitch and Peeta behind.(4)

This time it's Gale's scowl that cuts her off, and he says their party's getting pretty big there. Katniss says the Capitol would torture them both to death to find out where she went. Gale asks what if Peeta's family won't leave, what if Peeta himself chooses to stay. Katniss can't quite act as indifferent as she wants to when she says she'd leave him behind, and she pivots immediately to knowing she could convince him to come.

“And me, would you leave me?” Gale’s expression is rock hard now. “Just if, for instance, I can’t convince my mother to drag three young kids into the wilderness in winter.” “Hazelle won’t refuse. She’ll see sense,” I say. “Suppose she doesn’t, Katniss. What then?” he demands. “Then you have to force her, Gale. Do you think I’m making this stuff up?” My voice is rising in anger as well. “No. I don’t know. Maybe the president’s just manipulating you. I mean, he’s throwing your wedding. You saw how the Capitol crowd reacted. I don’t think he can afford to kill you. Or Peeta. How’s he going to get out of that one?” says Gale. “Well, with an uprising in District Eight, I doubt he’s spending much time choosing my wedding cake!” I shout. The instant the words are out of my mouth I want to reclaim them. Their effect on Gale is immediate — the flush on his cheeks, the brightness of his gray eyes. “There’s an uprising in Eight?” he says in a hushed voice.

Here, Katniss has to admit to seeing something she shouldn't have on the Mayor's television, and she adds that she knows it's her fault. If she'd just eaten those berries herself in the arena, Peeta could have been the victor alone, and everyone would still be safe. Gale asks what that safety really meant, the freedom to starve and be worked like slaves. No, Katniss has given everyone an opportunity to do better.

Katniss says the Peacekeepers outside District 12 care less than nothing for the lives of the people they monitor. Gale says that's all the more reason to fight. Katniss says it's reason to run before they get killed. Gale pushes her and says he won't leave. Katniss points out that he was eager enough to leave just now, but she refrains from throwing Peeta in Gale's face, and opts to ask what about his family. Gale asks what about all the other families who can't run away. And here's Katniss, he says, who could do so much with the reach she's been given.(5)

Gale throws the gloves back at Katniss, saying he doesn't want anything made in the Capitol, and leaves. Katniss wonders if that's a dig at her, too. Still, she worries what he's going to do now that he's all worked up. He couldn't talk to all the miners before tomorrow's shift, so if Katniss can talk to Hazelle tonight, she might be able to make her son see sense.

It's nearly noon, so Katniss puts out the fire, cleans up the food, and holds on to Cinna's old gloves. She reaches her old home while there's still light, and decides to talk to Peeta. He's heading into town for supper with his family, so she walks with him, and asks what he'd do if she asked him to run away. He asks why, and she says, because the president wasn't convinced. He asks who else would go with them, so she says, his family if they'd come, and hers, and maybe Haymitch.

“What about Gale?” he says. “I don’t know. He might have other plans,” I say. Peeta shakes his head and gives me a rueful smile. “I bet he does. Sure, Katniss, I’ll go.” I feel a slight twinge of hope. “You will?” “Yeah. But I don’t think for a minute you will,” he says. I jerk my arm away. “Then you don’t know me. Be ready. It could be any time.”(6) I take off walking and he follows a pace or two behind.

Peeta says he will go if she insists, but they should talk to Haymitch first, he'd know if their leaving would help or hurt more.

It's at this moment that he hears… something. A whistling noise. It's meaningless to Katniss, but obviously Peeta thinks it's important,(7) so they keep going until they hit the square. The crowd is thick, so Peeta stands on a crate to see better, but when Katniss moves to join him, he tells her to go home.

Katniss stubbornly pushes through the crowd, and people recognize her and panic, pushing her away just as Peeta tried to keep her out. Some even say she'll make it worse. But, she knows somehow that what's happening is meant for her to see, and when she finally reaches it, she knows she's right.

Gale’s wrists are bound to a wooden post. The wild turkey he shot earlier hangs above him, the nail driven through its neck. His jacket’s been cast aside on the ground, his shirt torn away. He slumps unconscious on his knees, held up only by the ropes at his wrists. What used to be his back is a raw, bloody slab of meat. Standing behind him is a man I’ve never seen, but I recognize his uniform. It’s the one designated for our Head Peacekeeper. This isn’t old Cray, though. This is a tall, muscular man with sharp creases in his pants.(8) The pieces of the picture do not quite come together until I see his arm raise the whip.

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