Chapter Text
“Marry me,” Gale said, his voice low and urgent. His eyes—usually sharp with certainty—were clouded with something close to fear.
Katniss didn’t flinch. “No.”
His breath caught. “You don’t mean that. You’re just scared.”
She shook her head. There was fear, yes—how could there not be? But not about this. About this, she was certain.
“I mean it, Gale. My answer is no.”
He stepped closer, jaw tight. “Why not? Katniss, come on—why not? Is this about that soulmate crap?”
Her fingers drifted unconsciously to the place just below her collarbone, where the word had always burned like a secret since that fateful day in the rain.
“Don’t wait for me,” she said softly. “You deserve someone who’s truly yours.”
***
They told him to sit still, but his hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
The waiting room smelled like cold metal and old grief. Marble floors, thick walls. District 12’s version of dignity. He stared at his wrist, at the word he’d traced a thousand times in the dark: Nightlock.
It shimmered faintly under the fluorescent lights, just visible to him, just out of reach of meaning.
He used to think it was a warning. Lately, it felt like a promise.
Across the hall, he’d heard Gale’s voice—low and desperate. And hers, sharp but steady. He hadn’t meant to listen.
Don’t wait for me, she’d said.
He hadn’t meant to.
Just like he hadn’t meant to notice her all those years ago, soaked to the bone behind the bakery, eyes hollow with hunger.
He still remembered the sting of the welt across his face from where his mother hit him. The acrid smell of burning bread. The way Katniss hadn’t begged—just stared, too proud to ask, too desperate to turn away. He’d thrown the loaf anyway. Not for thanks. Not for recognition.
He did it because he had to. Because something in his chest cracked wide open when he saw her, and from that moment on, it had never quite closed.
That night, lying in bed with the pain still fresh on his cheek, he’d looked at his wrist for the first time and seen the word glowing soft and unmistakable:
Nightlock.
He didn’t understand it then. Not fully.
But now, sitting in the Justice Building, waiting to be dragged onto a train with the girl he would die for, he wondered if the Games weren’t the beginning of their story at all.
Maybe they’d started years ago. In the rain. With bread. And a mark neither of them could explain.