Fic: Burning Bright (Hunger Games)

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Title:  Burning Bright
Characters/Pairings: Gale/Katniss/Peeta
Rating: R - to be safe
Warnings: Explicit death-scenes. Violence. Spoilers for the entire series
Genre: Angst/Romance
Word-count:  1,741
Disclaimer: Don't own, never will
Summary: An angsty AU look on what could have been and what was, using William Blakes Tyger, Tyger as a standing point. 
 

 

Burning Bright

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

oOo

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire? (Katniss, Gale, Peeta)

He comes down for a kiss before she can even think to stop him, lips descending and enfolding. Warmth spreads in her belly and she thinks it’s a good thing that the string with their prey is wound so tightly around her wrist, or she would most likely drop it.

“You’re very beautiful.”

“Gale, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know. I’m so confused. I… I’m sorry Peeta.”

He pretends that nothing is wrong: that he hadn’t grabbed her in the middle of the forest and pressed his lips to hers, hadn’t made her burn and her head spin. He’d let go of her so suddenly, like she really was made of fire and they’d left the forest without a word.

The Reaping is a week later and she doesn’t look back as she runs forward, pushing and yelling, reaching the podium before her sister can. Afterwards, in the Mayor’s office, Gale speaks to her like he would a frightened dear, something scared and hurt that might run away if too loud tones would escape him. The promises of care – Prim will be looked after – falls towards deaf ears and all she can think as he wishes her good luck, is that if he kissed her right now, she’d promise him to come back.

He looks like he wants to. Like he wants to step forward and pull her up from the old velvet couch that she’s attached herself to. And Katniss looks right back, thinking that if she ran now, she would be shot down and someone else would be punished for her foolishness.

The sunlight flickers around her in the Arena, creating patterns of gold and green as they descend through the leaves. She can hear the small footsteps off rabbits and if she closes her eyes, she can just imagine that he’s there with her, that she’s in the forest in District 12 and not in a god-forsaken play like this.

Cato is behind her before she can hear him and the spear hits its mark.

I’m sorry Gale.

 

oOo

 

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

“I don’t even know you.” That’s half a lie. She’s seen him before. She knows his name. The handsome son of the baker, the one who had a kind smile for everyone, no matter whom.

“No. You don’t.” He says and there’s something odd in his eyes, like sorrow and regret. “I guess you don’t. But I know you.”

Katniss frowns, looking at him. The pale hair is a halo against the descending sun and he looks like an avenging angel, come to claim her life in the Games.

“I never actually spoke to you: I was too afraid.”

“Afraid of me?” Why in the world? She was just a girl from the Seam, no-one to worry about. Not for him at least.

He looks shy, uncertain. “Yes. Well. You cut a very formidable figure.”

She glares at him. “Now you’re just making fun of me.”

“No! No, I’m not… I would never.”

“We can’t be friends in the Arena,” Katniss cuts him off, looking at this boy, this stranger who is just a distant memory. “I’ve taken care of myself ever since my father died, so I don’t need you.”

If he’s hurt by that statement, he hides it well this time around. “I know. I know you’ve always taken care of yourself.” There’s a pause in which all he does is stare and she shifts uncomfortably at the almost longing look in them.

“You’ve never had help?” He whispers, the words sounded like something crushed and unreal.

“No. No one’s ever offered.” It’s a wild and harsh truth, but it’s the truth. Ever since her father died, Katniss Everdeen had been all alone.

“Right. I guess you would never accept help from me then.”

She walks away before he can say anything more. The two identical white coffins reach District Twelve on a particularly sunny day, dandelions growing on the freshly dug graves.

 

oOo

 

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

It has been so long since Prim’s name was pulled in the Reaping, so long since the Girl on Fire was born, since the Mockingjay came to claim the right for war. And yet it feels like mere days, a limbo of death and blood and Peeta’s kisses. And then to lose it all over again, like a hammer hitting its mark over and over again. Cracked ribs, cracked skull, ruined bones, ruined heart.

Gale’s kisses taste like ash and fire and Katniss wonders if hers taste as hopeless as she feels. It has been five months, three weeks and forty-five minutes exactly since she found out that Peeta had been taken from her.

Today Gale’s kisses taste like defeat. Maybe it’s the look in his eyes transferring and she wants to scream and shout and not let him go, because the team can’t save Peeta without him, but him saving Peeta – the two of them, in the same room, in her heart – is too much. It’s not right.

The rescue team is gone for hours, but it feels like years. Katniss sits and stares at her reflection in the blank surface of the steel-frame of her bed, watching herself slowly grow older, age and die.

It is a joy to see the look on Finnick’s face, the triumphant yell as he finally has Annie in his arms again. It tips the scales and suddenly there’s something right in the world again.

But of course, that can never be for too long. There’s one missing from the party.

He holds her quietly as she cries, broad hands on her back and a soothing voice that she has always loved and hated with equal abandon. She wants to cling to him and hurt him, want him to never leave and be far away. He’s like a pillar of smoke, slowly sucking her in, seeping into her lungs and making the world seem just a bit sharper and more angular.

More terrifying.

Katniss thinks of the mine exploding and of her mother’s hollow, dull eyes, of lifeless forms and the living-dead.

Some things, you never recover from.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry we didn’t get there in time,” Gale’s voice is a whisper on a cloudless night and Katniss breaks into a million pieces, silently praying that he can put her back together.

 

oOo

 

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

She’s pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to end like this. With gunfire and wounded and blood, of course, but not like this.

Peeta.

Not with the life slowly seeping out of her, painting the earth a brownish red like a canvas already painted with black and grey and smudges of green, because there once used to be life here. Once, before the Capitol and before 13 and before the Mockingjay.

There’s something so absurd and yet extremely absorbing in watching her own blood cover her hands. It’s a certainty, and while Katniss has been close to death more times than she has count on, she knows that this one is different.

This time there are no bow, no arrows, no berries that can pull her back from the brink. There’s no Gale to hold her hand and there’s no Peeta.

Peeta.

She wishes now that she’d actually done it: that she’d killed him when he’d asked her to, tears in his eyes and a strong grip on her neck, ready to crush. She knows how he feels about her: that he has to live with this isn’t fair at all. It is cruel and demeaning and now black spots are appearing in her vision, dancing like savages around a bonfire.

She wonders what Prim will do, now that she isn’t there to take care of her. How her mother will come. She wonders when it will stop hurting, when the pain will give way for liberation, for freedom and pure oblivion. She prays it will be soon.

The building next to her is on fire, the blazing heat rolling of in waves and she should be warm but she feels nothing but cold. An after-effect of losing so much blood. But above the drumming in her ears and the roar of the flames, she becomes aware of someone crying. She is too still to be able to do so.

Peeta.

Oh. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t see this. Even if he was the one to do the deed.

Even if he had killed her, amidst the war and chaos of their world.

There is a deafening silence when and after she dies, even amidst the shouting and the fighting. It stretches out and fills the holes until there is nothing but the fact that Katniss Everdeen, the Girl who was on Fire and the face of the revolution, is now dead and gone from this world.

 

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Peeta dies first: it seems cruel, but that’s how it is. Maybe it’s because she has become more sturdy, having to fight so hard to survive all her life and now the life simply will not leave her worn body.

Maybe it’s because Peeta is Peeta and he deserved this before she did, deserved not having to live without her as she is without him.

Not that it’s that bad. It’s been enough years that she’s able to handle it now, even if there are days when she just sits and stares, watching the trees age slowly and waiting for the final sleep to claim her.

It does, finally, one cloudy afternoon and the last thing Katniss is aware of is her eldest grandchild’s lithe hand in hers and she thinks; this is peaceful and closes her eyes.