Story [Hunger Games] Unthinkable - "How could she ever watch this happen, and do nothing?" Katniss/Gale

Title: Unthinkable
Author: karebear
Rating: PG-13 (fair bit of violence, no worse than the books. I mean, come on, it's Hunger Games)
Characters: Katniss, Gale, references to a few others
Disclaimers (Hunger Games): The Hunger Games trilogy was written by and belongs to the brilliant Suzanne Collins. I'm just borrowing the characters and world for a short while. I'll put them back in good working order, and I promise not to make any money off of this. Italicized quotes, the voices Katniss hears in her thoughts and memories, come straight from the books and therefore are not my words. The other words are my words.
Summary: "How could she ever watch this happen, and do nothing?" Snapshot in the evolution of a Mockingjay. Katniss/Gale
Notes: Honestly the hardest part about this was finding a title. In the end, I went back to the book, "Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable. Why did it take him being whipped within an inch of his life to see it?"


As she sits there in her big empty Victor's Village house, where Gale lays unconscious on the kitchen table where they should be laughing, enjoying a meal, Katniss Everdeen is reminded once again of the one and only certainty in her life.

People close to her get hurt.

They die.

Especially now.

"Him I can easily kill off if we don't come to a happy resolution."

She absolutely had not been thinking when she'd thrown herself between Gale and the whip.

If she had been... would it have changed anything?

She sits there, watching the shallow rise and fall of his breathing, chewing on her lower lip.

The jagged cut across her cheek hurts, a searing counterpoint to the swirling confusion of her thoughts.

The pain pushes in, sharp and insistent, but pain isn't anything new for her.

She can push it down, ignore it to deal with more pressing concerns.

But this is one lash, and it's enough to make her concentration slip.

A couple of times every minute, she realizes she's lost her train of thought and is focusing only on snow and blood and trying to make herself feel better.

She tries to multiply that by forty and realizes that, no... if she'd had the time to think about it, to make a conscious choice, it would not have changed a thing.

Gale was hurting. He was bleeding.

He was dying.

Unconscious on his knees, already broken, but unable even to collapse to the ground because of the rope that holds him there.

In the state he's in, he can't feel anything.

Every additional lash serves no purpose except to make it even more likely that this ordeal will kill him and the strange man, the new Peacekeeper, raises the whip again. He has no intention of stopping and no one will stop him.

District Twelve looks on, still and silent and scared, the way they had been the morning of the Reaping when she'd volunteered for Prim.

Is she suicidal?

But how could she ever watch this happen, and do nothing?

Gale was trapped just as badly as any of the animals they catch, but she can't think about that now because that's what started all this, and it immediately brings her back there, to the dead turkey haphazardly nailed above a dying man.

As she sits here thinking about it, she's belatedly angry about that too.

It seems like such blatant cruelty, that they would whip a man to death for the crime of "stealing" the animal from Capitol land, and then not even use the turkey, when there are children in the crowd watching this who at least could eat for a couple of days off that bird.

But of course they'd do exactly that.

It was never about a crime committed.

It's about power and control and intimidation, a reminder and a warning.

Just like the Hunger Games.

The turkey belongs to the Capitol.

The people belong to the Capitol.

How can she even be surprised or hurt or shocked by this knowledge anymore?

This is the same government that slaughters twenty-three children every year and calls it entertainment.

 

She should know by now that no matter how little safety there is, how little freedom you have, there is always something more that they can take away.
That line in particular stood out. Capitol stops at nothing to show their power. Great look into Katniss's thoughts on the whippings.

 

That was really good!! I feel so bad for Katniss, having to go through everything. You captured her tone very well!!

 

Thanks for reading, you guys!

FelsGoddess: Capitol stops at nothing to show their power. Exactly. And they are utterly terrifying because of it. It's really scary the kind of psychological manipulation they (we? I feel like this series is certainly a study in human nature) use technology for. Yet for all that, as awful as the mutts are, I feel like it's easier for me to distance myself from those scenes because I can sit back and say "well, okay, but those things aren't real." But the whipping scene crushes me, and the way they exploit Johanna's thing with water gets a similar reaction. The low-tech torture gets me every time.

NYCitygurl: Katniss is a pro survivor. I do not doubt in the least her ability to get through anything the Capitol can possibly throw at her. What makes me feel for her so strongly is that she can never get happiness because Snow gets what he wants from her by manipulating the people around her and forcing her to do it also. I try not to get caught up in the teen girl shipping catfights, because in the end it doesn't matter if Katniss wants Gale or Peeta or neither or both. The choice isn't hers, which means that in many ways, the feelings aren't either. Katniss can't allow herself to show any strong emotion toward Gale or he may very likely die, and if she does show strong emotion toward Peeta, he will always be thinking on some level that it's a lie even if it isn't.