Twinflower

Gale woke at 4:12 with his hand already closed into a fist.

That was new, or newer than the old habit. For the first year after the war his hand had reached for things in the dark: a bow, a knife, a rifle, the shoulder of someone who wasn’t there. Somewhere along the way the reaching had stopped and the fist had started, as if his body had given up looking for anything to hold and settled for being ready to hit something instead. He lay on his back and made himself open it, finger by finger, the way you’d pry a snare off a leg that had stiffened in the cold. His knuckles ached. They always ached now.

District 2. Officer’s quarters, east block, fourth floor. He’d asked for the fourth floor because no one could walk past the window, and he’d told the housing clerk it was for security, and the clerk had nodded the way people nodded at him, carefully, as if he were something that might go off.

He didn’t try to go back to sleep. Sleep was a room he only entered by accident now, and he never stayed long. He got up and made the bed, corners pulled so tight the blanket hummed when he flicked it, and then he stood at the window in the dark and waited for the mountain to appear.

It came the way it always did, slowly, black on black and then gray on black, the long slope of it, the scarred places where the rock had come down. People in 2 still called it the Nut. People in 2 still lived in its shadow and bought bread in its shadow and sent their children to school in its shadow, and every one of them knew whose idea it had been to bring it down on the people inside.

He looked at it every morning. He had told himself, at first, that this was penance. That a man should look at what he’d done. But penance implied regret, and the ugly, honest truth, the one he only let himself touch at this hour when there was no one to see his face, was that some part of him still thought he’d been right.

It had worked. That was the thing. It had worked. The war had needed it to work, and it had, and the district had fallen, and the rebellion had lived, and a hundred other things had followed from it like water following a channel cut in stone. He could trace every one of them. He could draw the whole map. He had been nineteen and furious and right, and there were men under that mountain who had been just as furious and just as sure, and some of them had died fast and some of them, he had learned later, had not.

He pressed his forehead to the cold glass until it hurt.

Right and wrong weren’t opposites. Nobody had ever told him that. You could be both at once, and live in the space between them, and the space was very small and very quiet and had no door.

The work was good. People asked him how he was, the few who still asked, and he said fine, and he meant it in the narrow way a tool is fine. The work had edges. Problems came to his desk in pieces, and he broke them into smaller pieces, and he found the weak point and pressed on it until the whole thing gave. Supply routes. Rebuilding schedules. The long, dull logistics of putting a country back together after you’d spent two years helping take it apart.

He was good at it. He had always been good at it. When he was twelve he could look at a stretch of woods and see where the rabbits ran before he saw a single rabbit. He could look at a fence and see where it would sag. He’d been proud of that, once, with the clean uncomplicated pride of a boy feeding his family, and the pride had been a warm thing in his chest on cold mornings, something he and Katniss had shared without ever needing to name it.

Now his mind did the same thing everywhere, constantly, without his permission. It looked at a corridor and found the chokepoint. It looked at a crowd at a ceremony and found the place it would break if something went off at the front. It looked at a children’s playground once, on a walk he’d stopped taking, and calculated, before he could stop it, how long it would take people to run toward a sound.

He had stood at that playground fence with his hands shaking and bile at the back of his throat, and a mother on a bench had looked up at him with polite concern, and he had turned and walked away so fast he’d nearly broken into a run.

He did not go to the woods. There were no real woods in 2, just scrub and quarried stone. He told himself that was the reason.

The first person he hurt that day was a nineteen-year-old named Corwin Pell.

Corwin had transposed two figures in a supply report. It was a small mistake, the kind Gale would have caught in his sleep if he still slept, the kind that would have cost a few days and some irritated phone calls, nothing more. Corwin stood in front of his desk in a uniform that was a little too big in the shoulders and explained it, stammering, and Gale listened, and somewhere in the middle of the explanation something in Gale’s chest went bright and hot and sharp.

He didn’t shout. He never shouted. He’d learned a long time ago that shouting let the fire out, and the fire was more useful kept in.

He said, very quietly, that people died from mistakes like this. He said that Corwin was lucky this was a supply report and not a casualty list, because in the war, a transposed number meant someone walked into a building they should have walked away from. He said that if Corwin couldn’t keep two digits straight, maybe he should think hard about whether he belonged in a uniform at all.

He watched the boy’s face go white, then red, then very still. He watched him try not to cry. And the worst part, the part Gale would turn over in the dark for hours afterward, was that while he was watching it happen, he felt something close to satisfaction. Like a trap snapping shut exactly where he’d set it.

Corwin said yes, sir and left.

Gale sat in the silence afterward with his hands flat on the desk, and the heat drained out of him all at once, the way it always did, and what came in behind it was cold and heavy and familiar. He thought of his brothers. Rory was nearly Corwin’s age. Vick wasn’t far behind. He thought about someone speaking to Vick the way he’d just spoken to that boy, and his hands curled on the desk, and the fist was back.

He could go and apologize. He knew exactly what to say. He knew it would take two minutes.

He didn’t go. He pulled the next report toward him instead and read it with a terrible, focused attention, and he despised himself with the same precision he used for everything else.

The mess hall was loud at midday, and he liked it loud. Noise kept things from coming back. In silence there was room for the square, and the parachutes, and the bright foil of them drifting down over the children, and the long half-second after the first blast when the medics ran in.

He sat with his back to the wall. He ate without tasting.

Two tables over, a group of junior officers was arguing about a broadcast, and he wasn’t listening until one word cut through the noise the way a bird call cuts through wind.

Mockingjay.

His fork stopped. Then he made it move again.

“—full pardon. Not just the acquittal this time. Paylor signed it this morning.”

“About time. Four years stuck in 12.”

“Stuck. She shot the president.”

“She shot the other president. It’s different.”

Laughter. Someone said she could go anywhere now. Travel. See whoever she wanted. Someone said she’d probably stay right where she was, with the baker, didn’t she live with the baker now? Someone said of course she did. Where else would she go.

The heat came up through him so fast it was almost dizzying.

It wasn’t jealousy. He wanted to be clear with himself about that, and he sat very still with his fork in his hand and was clear about it. He had let go of that a long time ago, or it had let go of him. It was something worse and harder to name. It was the sound of her life being handled by strangers with their mouths full. The baker. As if Peeta were a job and not a man who’d been tortured until he didn’t know which of his own memories were real. As if Katniss’s confinement had been some long dull sentence she’d sat through, and not four years in a half-dead district with her own ghosts.

And under that, under the anger at them, was the thing he actually couldn’t stand. Four years ago he would have been the first to know. He’d have known before she did. He’d known her by the set of her shoulders, known when she was about to lie, known which way she’d step before she moved. Now he was a man two tables away, hearing it at lunch, the same as anyone.

He’d made sure of that. He’d made his choices. He had gone to 2 and taken the job and not written, because what could he possibly write? I’m sorry about your sister. I may have killed her. I’ll never know. He had built that silence with his own hands, stone by stone, and now he was sitting inside it, furious that it was quiet.

One of the officers glanced over. A flicker of recognition, then embarrassment, the look people gave when they remembered who he’d been to her. The look slid away.

Gale finished his food. Every bite. He returned his tray. He walked back down the corridor at exactly his normal pace, and he didn’t go to his office. He went down two flights to the training room, which was empty at that hour, and he didn’t bother wrapping his hands.

He hit the heavy bag until the skin over his knuckles split. Then he kept going. He hit it until his arms shook and his breath came out in rough, ugly sounds he didn’t recognize, and then, when there was nothing left in him to hit with, he stood with both hands braced against it and his head down and blood on the canvas, and for one moment that he would never tell anyone about, he thought her name.

Not Katniss.

The smaller one. The one with the braid.

He made himself stop. He had learned how. You took the thought before it finished and you put it somewhere and you shut the lid. He went to the sink and ran cold water over his hands and watched it go pink, then clear. He wrapped them himself, badly, and went back up to his office, and when someone asked him what happened, he said training in a tone that ended the conversation.

The letter was waiting in his box that evening.

He almost didn’t recognize the handwriting. It slanted the wrong way, cramped and uneven, each letter pressed hard into the paper as if it had cost something to make. He turned the envelope over. District 4.

He knew then, and something in his stomach dropped. He opened it standing in the corridor.

Gale,

Finn turns four on the 20th. Annie wants a party. I want a nap. We have compromised on a party.

I’m writing because I’d like you to come. I know that’s an odd thing to hear from a man you haven’t spoken to since a sewer, but there it is. I’ve meant to write for about three years. My hand is slow these days, so you’ll have to forgive me for taking my time.

It’s quiet here. The sea is loud, but it’s the good kind of loud. You can sleep through it. Most nights.

No need to answer. Just come if you want to. There’s a spare room, and Annie has already decided you’re in it, and you know there’s no arguing with her.

— F.

Underneath, in a lighter, rounder hand:

Please come. He asks about you. — A.

Gale read it twice in the corridor. Then he went into his room and shut the door and read it a third time, and the anger came again, not hot this time but cold and suspicious and almost relieved to have a target.

What did they want from him?

He took it apart the way he took everything apart. Finnick Odair had been beautiful once, the most famous face in Panem, and the last time Gale had seen him that face had been streaked with sewer water and blood while the mutts came screaming down the tunnel. Gale had planned parts of that mission. He had sat in rooms where they talked about acceptable losses. He had read the medical reports afterward, the long clinical list of what had been torn and what had been lost, and he had signed his name at the bottom, and he had gone to lunch.

So what was this? An invitation, or an accusation dressed up as one? A man with a slow hand and a ruined body writing come see what you did, politely, with a joke about a nap?

He asks about you.

That line made him angrier than any of it. A four-year-old boy asking about him. What could they possibly have told the child? That’s the man who designed the bombs. That’s the man who was there when Daddy got hurt. That’s the man Aunt Katniss doesn’t talk to anymore. He couldn’t think of a single true sentence about himself that he’d want a child to hear.

He found his lighter in the desk drawer. He held the corner of the letter over it. He thumbed the wheel and watched the small flame lean and shiver in the draft from the window, and he held the paper there, a finger’s width above the heat, and waited for his hand to do the thing it always did, which was the hard thing, the decisive thing, the thing that ended the problem.

His hand didn’t move.

He stood there until the lighter grew hot enough to burn his thumb, and he let go of the wheel, and the flame went out, and the letter was still whole in his other hand.

You can sleep through it. Most nights.

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

It was the most nights that undid him. Not it gets better. Not you have to move on, which the counselor in the first year had said so often that Gale had stopped going. Just: most nights. Some nights not. The honest arithmetic of a man who knew exactly what it was to lie awake and had decided to tell the truth about it.

He thought, unwillingly, that Finnick wouldn’t have bothered with an accusation. Finnick had spent years being used by the most powerful people in the country, and had smiled for them, and had survived them. A man like that didn’t waste three years and a slow hand on a polite insult. If he’d wanted to say look what you did, he’d have said it.

Which meant he meant the rest of it. The party, the room, the sea.

That was worse. Gale knew what to do with blame. He’d been living in it for four years like a house he’d built himself. He had no idea what to do with a door left open.

He didn’t sleep that night, but it was a different kind of not sleeping. Usually it was the loop: the square, the parachutes, the second blast, the braid, the lid slammed down before the end. Usually it was push-ups on the cold floor until his arms gave out and his mind went blank and white.

Tonight he lay on his back with his split knuckles throbbing and thought about the boy, Corwin, and the way his face had gone still. He thought about the satisfaction he’d felt, and the shame that followed it, and how that was the whole shape of his life now: a flare of heat, then the long cold aftermath, over and over, like a fire that never quite went out and never quite caught.

He thought about his father, who had been a gentle man. People forgot that. Gale had almost forgotten it. His father had been quick to laugh and slow to anger, had taught him snares with patient hands, had never once raised his voice to Gale’s mother. Gale had always assumed he’d grow into that man. He’d assumed that was simply what happened.

He didn’t know when he’d stopped assuming it. Somewhere between the whipping post and the mountain, maybe. Somewhere in the long war, when the anger had been useful, when it had been the thing that kept him moving and kept him sharp and kept him alive. Nobody had told him that the anger wouldn’t leave when the war did. Nobody had told him it would just look around for something else to do.

He thought about the sea, which he had never seen.

That surprised him, when he realized it. He’d been everywhere in Panem by now, for briefings and inspections and ceremonies where people pinned things to his chest. He’d stood inside the ruins of the Capitol. But he had never stood at the edge of the ocean. Never been somewhere loud in the good way.

Around three in the morning he got up and wrote a leave request. It was short and precise and gave no reason beyond personal. He had never taken leave. Four years of it sat stacked and unused, like supplies in a bunker no one ever opened, because opening it would have meant admitting there was something he needed.

He signed it before he could take it apart.

Then, because his hands needed something to do, he wrote a second note, much shorter, and slid it under the door of the junior officers’ quarters on his way down to the dispatch box. It said only: Pell. The report was a small error. I was wrong to say what I said. It was mine, not yours. — Hawthorne.

It wasn’t enough. He knew it wasn’t enough. It was two minutes of work, twelve hours late, and it would not undo the look on the boy’s face. But he’d written it, and that was more than he’d done yesterday, and he stood in the empty corridor afterward feeling strange and exposed, like a man who had put his hand in a fire on purpose to see if he still could.

Back in his room, he packed. It didn’t take long. Uniforms. Boots. A razor. A few plain shirts. At the bottom of the drawer was a sweater his mother had sent two winters ago, dark green wool, hand-knitted, the stitches a little uneven at the cuffs where her eyes had been tired. He had never worn it. He’d told himself it wasn’t regulation.

He held it for a long moment. Then he put it in the bag.

Outside, the sky was starting to turn. Black, then slate. Across the valley, the mountain sat where it always sat, holding everything it held. He stood at the window and looked at it the way he did every morning, and he felt the old weight settle onto his shoulders, and he waited for the anger, or the guilt, or the terrible cold certainty that he’d been right.

None of them came. Just tiredness, deep and heavy, like something that had been carried a very long way.

He was the one who turned away first.