the coal miner's son (The Hunger Games)
Title: the coal miner's son
Author: lovelyracketeer @ dastardlywords
Characters & Pairings: Gale Hawthorne/Katniss Everdeen
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,886
Disclaimer: Everything recognizable belongs to the brilliant Suzanne Collins.
Summary: Their sort of life leaves no room for romantic ideals or tragic love stories.
Notes: Also available here at AO3. This is my first Hunger Games fic, so feedback of all sorts is appreciated a little bit extra. Unfortunately my copy of the first book recently met a watery end, so I was unable to fact-check. I apologize in advance for any inconsistencies.
the coal miner's son
Gale Hawthrone is thirteen years old when his father is buried beneath two miles of dirt and coal.
The news comes from another new widow just before dusk, and Hazelle barely manages to shuffle Rory and Vick off to the neighbors before folding into a heap in the middle of the kitchen floor. Gale makes herb tea and sits the mug down next to her head, feeling crushingly inadequate as he listens to her moans reverberate through the house. He should cry, he thinks, but can’t quite manage it. Impossibly long hours and a naturally withdrawn nature stole his father away from him long ago, and what sadness Gale feels now is too wrapped up in fear in uncertainty to really manifest properly.
Instead he sits and rubs his fingers against the cold floorboards, a list beginning to form in his head. Gale catalogs everything that needs to be done now, starting with getting his mother off the floor and coming to a halting stop when he reaches the empty pantry in a house of soon-to-be-five. He’s worked odd jobs for the citizens of the Seam since he was old enough to lift a hatchet, but he has no idea how to make enough money to feed a family without the mines. He’s tall and strong, certainly, but even so he won’t be able to pass for eighteen for a few years yet.
Scratching at a splinter in the hardwood until it sticks painfully under his fingernail, Gale comes to the only acceptable conclusion: he’ll figure it out.
He has to.
“We’re going to be okay,” he finally murmurs as he reaches out to touch his mother’s coarse hair. The phrase is so worn out that it should mean nothing coming from a child's mouth. Instead the words hang strangely heavy in the air. "I promise."
Hazelle is too wrapped up in her sorrow to hear it then, but Gale is thirteen when he buries himself under the weight of a promise.
---
The food in District 2 is rich and colorful and Gale hates it.
When he arrives fresh from District 13 the old woman in the adjacent apartment tuts over his skinny frame and assures him that they’ll have him fed up before he knows it. She reminds him a bit of his mother, so he tries, but in the end it proves to be nearly impossible to put on weight. For nineteen years he survived on lean meats, coarse grains, and berries, and suddenly switching to District Two’s fattier cuisine leaves him feeling slow and vaguely queasy all the time.
He never complains, of course--compared to starving, nausea is a pretty bourgeois affliction--but that doesn’t stop him from hating the dense, milky foods he cannot bring himself to waste.
Surrounded by high-ranking officials in one of the wealthiest Districts in Panem, Gale’s distaste for leaving food on his plate is largely treated as a charming little character quirk. The well-fed big wigs all smile fondly behind their napkins like he’s a particularly amusing child, and Gale daydreams about setting conibear traps in the powder room.
When he inevitably finds himself forced to step outside to calm his rolling stomach, Gale sits on the Justice Building steps with his forehead on his knees and determinedly tries not to think about light tangy goat cheese and blackberry jam.
---
Before he finds Katniss Gale hears her sing.
It’s a chilly autumn morning, and he’s only been climbing over the fence for a few weeks. He’s trying to knot a snare with clumsy fingers when a hush falls over the forest and his blood runs cold. Slowly straightening from his crouch, he glances up through the canopy, half expecting a hovercraft to appear in the sky and smite him where he stands. Coming out here had been a last resort, and so far it all seems too easy.
Out of the eerie silence the mockingjays begin to sing.
A haunting melody swells through the trees, sweet and vaguely familiar, and Gale just stands there, stunned into silence much like the birds before him. He doesn’t consider himself a sentimental person most of the time, but something about the sad little lullaby makes his heart ache. It’s been weeks since he’s heard anyone singing, he realizes, but it’s more than that. The birds learned the song from someone, and for the first time in what feels like forever Gale entertains the idea that maybe he’s not alone in the abyss beyond the fence.
Two days later, he meets her.
---
Practically speaking, Gale knows he’s handsome. The girls at school tell him so, often with these weird little smiles he suspects are meant to be tempting but mostly seem vapid against the backdrop of thin bodies and coal dust. The ladies at the Hob tell him as much as well, but they, at least, have agendas he understands. Most of them are trying to sell him something. A few are aiming to buy, making it clear that there are always money-making opportunities for a tall, handsome young man such as himself.
They always used that word--man--like is absolves them somehow, but Gale isn’t judging them. Everyone comes to Hob desperate one way or another.
For the most part, Gale ignores them all. Handsome isn’t terribly useful to him (though he doesn’t forget about the easy money should he ever need it). It doesn’t feed his family or heat the hearth, so he shakes off compliments and offers and pretends not to notice when girls find excuses to touch him.
Handsome is one of those things that’s only useful to people without more important things to worry about, and Gale resents it a bit.
(And Katniss, of course, doesn’t seem to notice at all.)
---
The first spring he spends in District 2 Gale comes down the stairs to find a previously bare little bush blooming in front of his building. He’s unfamiliar with a lot of the plant life here, but this one catches his eye because does know it. The flowers are soft and white, petals folding out delicately from a warm yellow center. They are humble little blooms--less colorful or flashy than the ones the ladies seem to favor here--but they smell as fresh and clean as spring itself, and Gale stares at them for a long time before making a decision.
As soon as he finishes work that day he uproots the bush with shaky hands and carefully replants it in a little field on the far side of town. He pats the roots into the soil there with the same gentle hands he used to use to put Posy to bed. Before he leaves, he rubs one of the petals reverently between his fingers, his face feeling heavy and warm.
He avoids that side of town like the plague for the rest of the spring, and nobody asks him where the primroses went.
--
District 2 women are strange.
They aren’t quite as freakish the painted, teetering creatures on the other side of the mountain, but the close relationship between the Capitol and District 2 allowed a lot of the fashion to seep over. They don’t wear wigs or dye their skin, thankfully, but here the women are hairless everywhere except their heads, and some of the clothes they wear are so impractical that Gale can’t help but ogle when he encounters them.
A few of the women seem flattered, but most ignore him.
There is one woman who takes particular interest, though, after he spends the better part of a strategy meeting wondering how a person could possibly walk in a skirt that clings past their knees. As it turns out, the woman in said skirt is the new mayor’s daughter, and her body is lush in the way only the well-fed can be. She cuts the kind of figure he often heard the other miners covet during the long, dark hours they whittled away under the earth, though Gale himself was already a goner at that point and had never paid it much mind.
Still, the girl is aggressive and unapologetic in her flirtation, and Gale respects that considerably more. The tenacity is admirable, though he can’t honestly say he likes the vapid woman behind it.
If he did he probably wouldn’t let her coax him back to her big, empty house.
A huge part of him is wailing miserably in the back of his head as she pushes him down on her overly stylish couch, but he ignores it. There nothing for him to lose here and no trust to break but his own.
So he touches her. He runs his rough hands up her legs and presses his open-mouthed kisses to her breasts, and even as he touches her he keeps his eyes open and locked on her face. Her body is all wrong--soft where it should be unyielding and smooth where he longs to twist his fingers through downy hair--but her face looks sad, and that Gale understands.
It’s mindless and it’s good, and they don’t talk anymore, after. He likes that best of all.
---
When Katniss is reaped the whole world stops.
It hits Gale like a pickaxe to the chest, and he wants to go with her so badly his body practically vibrates Oh God, he wants to, and it’s not an idle declaration like the ones kids makes their siblings and lovers before they know better. Given an honest choice Gale would step up onto the stage and throw his lot in with Katniss’s for the whole of Panem to see, and it wouldn’t be a hardship .
He would be happy to die for her. Compared to choking on coal ash in his lungs or starving away to nothing it would be downright romantic.
But he doesn’t have a choice. He never has.
One of the baker’s soft blond sons joins Katniss on the stage, and Gale forcibly reminds himself that their sort of life leaves no room for romantic ideals or tragic love stories. For people like them there is only sustenance and necessity. What would Katniss’s own sacrifice mean if Gale followed her and left Prim and Posy and Rory and Vick to starve? He loves Katniss. He loves her an an idealistic, tragic sort of way that is currently tearing him to shreds, but he also respects her far too much to let her wishes count for nothing.
Gale has faced down starvation and thousand-pound black bears with an almost numb sort of calm, but at that moment he realizes that everybody’s bravery meets its end somewhere. Watching Katniss glance out at him with a stunned desperation in her eyes, Gale’s finally runs dry.
He’s afraid, really and truly, that he’ll be seeing those eyes in his nightmares for the rest of his life. Looking away from the stage helplessly, Gale pushes through the crowd to find Prim. He can hear her screaming and knows it’s what Katniss would want him to do.
In his head he starts to compose a speech.
You’re stronger than they are, it begins.
---
On the rare mornings he wakes up with no agenda, Gale runs. He pulls on the coarse-sewn boots be brought from home and sets out for the woods on the east side of the diamond mines. They’re nothing like the woods back home-- piney and inclined sharply up the mountainside that hides the Capitol from view--but they do well enough. .
Sometimes during his runs he pauses to sets traps. Vines wind into rope in his nimble fingers, and the nets and snares seem to manifest almost organically after that. They are set near water and around dens where they will be most effective, and Gale leaves them behind without any real intention of coming back for them. On some level he realizes this is probably more wasteful than leaving food he hates on his plate, but he can't seem to stop himself from laying traps. It’s more than a habit: it’s part of his very makeup.
Still, it’s not behavior he’s proud of, and one morning he's running through the undergrowth when he catches a glimpse of something swinging like a pendulum from a tree ahead. Slowing to a jog, he halts in front of it and stares.
It's a rabbit carcass. The bunny is dangling by one of it's back legs from his old trap, flesh mostly picked clean by birds but a few stubborn bits of hair still sticking up from it’s haunches. The rotting creature’s oversized front teeth stand out monstrously from its skull, empty eye sockets glaring at Gale accusingly. The smell is ferocious.
The trap was meant to snap the animal's neck clean but this one probably dangled in the heat for days before it died.
Gale observes the poor animal in silence and recalls the look in Katniss’s gray eyes when she visited him and Beetee in the workshop and met his bomb. Distantly he wonders if this is what she had seen in him then: a darkness inside him that had made her recoil.
There is no reason for her to have been surprised, Gale muses as he pulls the animal’s decomposing body out of the trap with a firm tug and tosses it to the side for the bugs to eat. There has always been less honor in laying traps than shooting a creature through the eye, after all
Before he leaves Gale resets the trap with his lips pressed together tensely, and when he starts to run again he practically flees.
---
During their final interview Peeta tells Katniss (and Panem) a story.
Speaking in his soft, earnest tone, he relays the memory of an innocent little girl Gale hardly recognizes as the Katniss he met years later in the woods. On one hand, Gale wants to doubt the sincerity of boy’s professed feelings--for all his apparent pining he doesn’t really know Katniss the way Gale does, after all--but Gale refuses to delude himself. Peeta Mellark has gift for words and bleeds honesty and kindness from his pores when he talks, and though Gale resents him with a ferocity he usually reserves the Capitol he never once doubts his honesty. That’s the boy’s power, he supposes.
The funny thing is that while he has no knack for words himself, Gale does have a knack for Katniss, and he knows just by the look on her face as Peeta talks that he lost this battle before it even began.
For all her toughness and all her strength, Katniss needs Peeta’s effortless proclamations. It’s written all over the startled expression on her familiar face, still so unused to seeing herself as others do. She trusts so poorly and understands her own magnetism so little that the quiet displays of affection Gale might have to offered her would have never have been enough. In his more sentimental moments he had imagined bringing her plump blackberries in the summer, quietly redoing her braid when her hands were covered in dirt, saving up his pittance from mines to build them a life that would be tiny and unadorned but unarguablytheirs.
(It’s all laughable to someone on a Victor’s pension.)
Compared to the clarity Peeta can express with a few well-chosen words, Gale’s heart would have seemed like a feeble offering indeed. It would be nobler--kinder to all three of them, no doubt--to bow out now, but Gale isn’t earnest and soft like Peeta Mellark. He is a son of the coal mines, and given the choice he always elects to burn.
---
It’s hopelessly sentimental, but sometimes when the forest surrounding District 2 sprawls vast and empty in front of him and he misses her so much he can hardly breathe Gale will fold himself down into the undergrowth and whistle a lullaby he can’t bring himself to forget.
And sometimes, when he’s lucky, the mockingjays will sing.
Author: lovelyracketeer @ dastardlywords
Characters & Pairings: Gale Hawthorne/Katniss Everdeen
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,886
Disclaimer: Everything recognizable belongs to the brilliant Suzanne Collins.
Summary: Their sort of life leaves no room for romantic ideals or tragic love stories.
Notes: Also available here at AO3. This is my first Hunger Games fic, so feedback of all sorts is appreciated a little bit extra. Unfortunately my copy of the first book recently met a watery end, so I was unable to fact-check. I apologize in advance for any inconsistencies.
the coal miner's son
Gale Hawthrone is thirteen years old when his father is buried beneath two miles of dirt and coal.
The news comes from another new widow just before dusk, and Hazelle barely manages to shuffle Rory and Vick off to the neighbors before folding into a heap in the middle of the kitchen floor. Gale makes herb tea and sits the mug down next to her head, feeling crushingly inadequate as he listens to her moans reverberate through the house. He should cry, he thinks, but can’t quite manage it. Impossibly long hours and a naturally withdrawn nature stole his father away from him long ago, and what sadness Gale feels now is too wrapped up in fear in uncertainty to really manifest properly.
Instead he sits and rubs his fingers against the cold floorboards, a list beginning to form in his head. Gale catalogs everything that needs to be done now, starting with getting his mother off the floor and coming to a halting stop when he reaches the empty pantry in a house of soon-to-be-five. He’s worked odd jobs for the citizens of the Seam since he was old enough to lift a hatchet, but he has no idea how to make enough money to feed a family without the mines. He’s tall and strong, certainly, but even so he won’t be able to pass for eighteen for a few years yet.
Scratching at a splinter in the hardwood until it sticks painfully under his fingernail, Gale comes to the only acceptable conclusion: he’ll figure it out.
He has to.
“We’re going to be okay,” he finally murmurs as he reaches out to touch his mother’s coarse hair. The phrase is so worn out that it should mean nothing coming from a child's mouth. Instead the words hang strangely heavy in the air. "I promise."
Hazelle is too wrapped up in her sorrow to hear it then, but Gale is thirteen when he buries himself under the weight of a promise.
---
The food in District 2 is rich and colorful and Gale hates it.
When he arrives fresh from District 13 the old woman in the adjacent apartment tuts over his skinny frame and assures him that they’ll have him fed up before he knows it. She reminds him a bit of his mother, so he tries, but in the end it proves to be nearly impossible to put on weight. For nineteen years he survived on lean meats, coarse grains, and berries, and suddenly switching to District Two’s fattier cuisine leaves him feeling slow and vaguely queasy all the time.
He never complains, of course--compared to starving, nausea is a pretty bourgeois affliction--but that doesn’t stop him from hating the dense, milky foods he cannot bring himself to waste.
Surrounded by high-ranking officials in one of the wealthiest Districts in Panem, Gale’s distaste for leaving food on his plate is largely treated as a charming little character quirk. The well-fed big wigs all smile fondly behind their napkins like he’s a particularly amusing child, and Gale daydreams about setting conibear traps in the powder room.
When he inevitably finds himself forced to step outside to calm his rolling stomach, Gale sits on the Justice Building steps with his forehead on his knees and determinedly tries not to think about light tangy goat cheese and blackberry jam.
---
Before he finds Katniss Gale hears her sing.
It’s a chilly autumn morning, and he’s only been climbing over the fence for a few weeks. He’s trying to knot a snare with clumsy fingers when a hush falls over the forest and his blood runs cold. Slowly straightening from his crouch, he glances up through the canopy, half expecting a hovercraft to appear in the sky and smite him where he stands. Coming out here had been a last resort, and so far it all seems too easy.
Out of the eerie silence the mockingjays begin to sing.
A haunting melody swells through the trees, sweet and vaguely familiar, and Gale just stands there, stunned into silence much like the birds before him. He doesn’t consider himself a sentimental person most of the time, but something about the sad little lullaby makes his heart ache. It’s been weeks since he’s heard anyone singing, he realizes, but it’s more than that. The birds learned the song from someone, and for the first time in what feels like forever Gale entertains the idea that maybe he’s not alone in the abyss beyond the fence.
Two days later, he meets her.
---
Practically speaking, Gale knows he’s handsome. The girls at school tell him so, often with these weird little smiles he suspects are meant to be tempting but mostly seem vapid against the backdrop of thin bodies and coal dust. The ladies at the Hob tell him as much as well, but they, at least, have agendas he understands. Most of them are trying to sell him something. A few are aiming to buy, making it clear that there are always money-making opportunities for a tall, handsome young man such as himself.
They always used that word--man--like is absolves them somehow, but Gale isn’t judging them. Everyone comes to Hob desperate one way or another.
For the most part, Gale ignores them all. Handsome isn’t terribly useful to him (though he doesn’t forget about the easy money should he ever need it). It doesn’t feed his family or heat the hearth, so he shakes off compliments and offers and pretends not to notice when girls find excuses to touch him.
Handsome is one of those things that’s only useful to people without more important things to worry about, and Gale resents it a bit.
(And Katniss, of course, doesn’t seem to notice at all.)
---
The first spring he spends in District 2 Gale comes down the stairs to find a previously bare little bush blooming in front of his building. He’s unfamiliar with a lot of the plant life here, but this one catches his eye because does know it. The flowers are soft and white, petals folding out delicately from a warm yellow center. They are humble little blooms--less colorful or flashy than the ones the ladies seem to favor here--but they smell as fresh and clean as spring itself, and Gale stares at them for a long time before making a decision.
As soon as he finishes work that day he uproots the bush with shaky hands and carefully replants it in a little field on the far side of town. He pats the roots into the soil there with the same gentle hands he used to use to put Posy to bed. Before he leaves, he rubs one of the petals reverently between his fingers, his face feeling heavy and warm.
He avoids that side of town like the plague for the rest of the spring, and nobody asks him where the primroses went.
--
District 2 women are strange.
They aren’t quite as freakish the painted, teetering creatures on the other side of the mountain, but the close relationship between the Capitol and District 2 allowed a lot of the fashion to seep over. They don’t wear wigs or dye their skin, thankfully, but here the women are hairless everywhere except their heads, and some of the clothes they wear are so impractical that Gale can’t help but ogle when he encounters them.
A few of the women seem flattered, but most ignore him.
There is one woman who takes particular interest, though, after he spends the better part of a strategy meeting wondering how a person could possibly walk in a skirt that clings past their knees. As it turns out, the woman in said skirt is the new mayor’s daughter, and her body is lush in the way only the well-fed can be. She cuts the kind of figure he often heard the other miners covet during the long, dark hours they whittled away under the earth, though Gale himself was already a goner at that point and had never paid it much mind.
Still, the girl is aggressive and unapologetic in her flirtation, and Gale respects that considerably more. The tenacity is admirable, though he can’t honestly say he likes the vapid woman behind it.
If he did he probably wouldn’t let her coax him back to her big, empty house.
A huge part of him is wailing miserably in the back of his head as she pushes him down on her overly stylish couch, but he ignores it. There nothing for him to lose here and no trust to break but his own.
So he touches her. He runs his rough hands up her legs and presses his open-mouthed kisses to her breasts, and even as he touches her he keeps his eyes open and locked on her face. Her body is all wrong--soft where it should be unyielding and smooth where he longs to twist his fingers through downy hair--but her face looks sad, and that Gale understands.
It’s mindless and it’s good, and they don’t talk anymore, after. He likes that best of all.
---
When Katniss is reaped the whole world stops.
It hits Gale like a pickaxe to the chest, and he wants to go with her so badly his body practically vibrates Oh God, he wants to, and it’s not an idle declaration like the ones kids makes their siblings and lovers before they know better. Given an honest choice Gale would step up onto the stage and throw his lot in with Katniss’s for the whole of Panem to see, and it wouldn’t be a hardship .
He would be happy to die for her. Compared to choking on coal ash in his lungs or starving away to nothing it would be downright romantic.
But he doesn’t have a choice. He never has.
One of the baker’s soft blond sons joins Katniss on the stage, and Gale forcibly reminds himself that their sort of life leaves no room for romantic ideals or tragic love stories. For people like them there is only sustenance and necessity. What would Katniss’s own sacrifice mean if Gale followed her and left Prim and Posy and Rory and Vick to starve? He loves Katniss. He loves her an an idealistic, tragic sort of way that is currently tearing him to shreds, but he also respects her far too much to let her wishes count for nothing.
Gale has faced down starvation and thousand-pound black bears with an almost numb sort of calm, but at that moment he realizes that everybody’s bravery meets its end somewhere. Watching Katniss glance out at him with a stunned desperation in her eyes, Gale’s finally runs dry.
He’s afraid, really and truly, that he’ll be seeing those eyes in his nightmares for the rest of his life. Looking away from the stage helplessly, Gale pushes through the crowd to find Prim. He can hear her screaming and knows it’s what Katniss would want him to do.
In his head he starts to compose a speech.
You’re stronger than they are, it begins.
---
On the rare mornings he wakes up with no agenda, Gale runs. He pulls on the coarse-sewn boots be brought from home and sets out for the woods on the east side of the diamond mines. They’re nothing like the woods back home-- piney and inclined sharply up the mountainside that hides the Capitol from view--but they do well enough. .
Sometimes during his runs he pauses to sets traps. Vines wind into rope in his nimble fingers, and the nets and snares seem to manifest almost organically after that. They are set near water and around dens where they will be most effective, and Gale leaves them behind without any real intention of coming back for them. On some level he realizes this is probably more wasteful than leaving food he hates on his plate, but he can't seem to stop himself from laying traps. It’s more than a habit: it’s part of his very makeup.
Still, it’s not behavior he’s proud of, and one morning he's running through the undergrowth when he catches a glimpse of something swinging like a pendulum from a tree ahead. Slowing to a jog, he halts in front of it and stares.
It's a rabbit carcass. The bunny is dangling by one of it's back legs from his old trap, flesh mostly picked clean by birds but a few stubborn bits of hair still sticking up from it’s haunches. The rotting creature’s oversized front teeth stand out monstrously from its skull, empty eye sockets glaring at Gale accusingly. The smell is ferocious.
The trap was meant to snap the animal's neck clean but this one probably dangled in the heat for days before it died.
Gale observes the poor animal in silence and recalls the look in Katniss’s gray eyes when she visited him and Beetee in the workshop and met his bomb. Distantly he wonders if this is what she had seen in him then: a darkness inside him that had made her recoil.
There is no reason for her to have been surprised, Gale muses as he pulls the animal’s decomposing body out of the trap with a firm tug and tosses it to the side for the bugs to eat. There has always been less honor in laying traps than shooting a creature through the eye, after all
Before he leaves Gale resets the trap with his lips pressed together tensely, and when he starts to run again he practically flees.
---
During their final interview Peeta tells Katniss (and Panem) a story.
Speaking in his soft, earnest tone, he relays the memory of an innocent little girl Gale hardly recognizes as the Katniss he met years later in the woods. On one hand, Gale wants to doubt the sincerity of boy’s professed feelings--for all his apparent pining he doesn’t really know Katniss the way Gale does, after all--but Gale refuses to delude himself. Peeta Mellark has gift for words and bleeds honesty and kindness from his pores when he talks, and though Gale resents him with a ferocity he usually reserves the Capitol he never once doubts his honesty. That’s the boy’s power, he supposes.
The funny thing is that while he has no knack for words himself, Gale does have a knack for Katniss, and he knows just by the look on her face as Peeta talks that he lost this battle before it even began.
For all her toughness and all her strength, Katniss needs Peeta’s effortless proclamations. It’s written all over the startled expression on her familiar face, still so unused to seeing herself as others do. She trusts so poorly and understands her own magnetism so little that the quiet displays of affection Gale might have to offered her would have never have been enough. In his more sentimental moments he had imagined bringing her plump blackberries in the summer, quietly redoing her braid when her hands were covered in dirt, saving up his pittance from mines to build them a life that would be tiny and unadorned but unarguablytheirs.
(It’s all laughable to someone on a Victor’s pension.)
Compared to the clarity Peeta can express with a few well-chosen words, Gale’s heart would have seemed like a feeble offering indeed. It would be nobler--kinder to all three of them, no doubt--to bow out now, but Gale isn’t earnest and soft like Peeta Mellark. He is a son of the coal mines, and given the choice he always elects to burn.
---
It’s hopelessly sentimental, but sometimes when the forest surrounding District 2 sprawls vast and empty in front of him and he misses her so much he can hardly breathe Gale will fold himself down into the undergrowth and whistle a lullaby he can’t bring himself to forget.
And sometimes, when he’s lucky, the mockingjays will sing.