❝𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐎𝐒❞ | k. everdeen

chapter 17: changes.

Gale Hawthorne had never personally met Nola Bernacci before. Yes, sure, he had heard things about her —great things, he might add— exploits mostly in her Hunger Games, but he had also had the opportunity to witness with his own eyes what had happened in the last edition: an elusive but strong girl from District 2 allying herself with the weakest, with those the Capitol seemed to have turned its back on, and betraying, in doing so, those who had brought her to the top in life.

Before volunteering for the rescue, he had decided to find out what he was going to face. Gale didn't like to improvise too much, unless it was Katniss, obviously. He liked to be prepared, to have all his points of view observed and learned and all his options weighed. He'd sat for hours with the whole team, with Haymitch at his side, because he was the only one he could really trust —he'd saved Katniss, after all, even if it meant abandoning some of the rest. He was also the only one from his District, the only one who really knew what it was like to live in that forgotten part of Panem.

Haymitch, Beetee and the rest of the team had spent long sessions explaining to them what they would see in the Capitol, but none of them were really prepared for what was coming. Gale was expecting horrors. He expected people dressed in white but with blood on their clothes, with lethal weapons in their hands, with even more brutal weapons locked away in strange rooms. He expected screams, fighting, a pitched battle in the corridors where the rebel prisoners were held.

Precisely because of everything he had been told, Gale had not expected what he saw with his own eyes that day. They had agreed that sleeping gas grenades were the best option: they could both throw the Capitol soldiers off the scent and lull the rebels to sleep so that they wouldn't be unsettled by the situation. Sure enough, it had worked. There were no soldiers in sight as grenades exploded in the white corridors, smoke seeping through the cracks in the rooms, and Gale waiting silently for it to filter into the right rooms.

When Gale opened the door decisively but cautiously, he couldn't have told how long Nola Bernacci had been unconscious. She was leaning against the wall, her hand resting gently on a crack beside her. Her neck was curved in a way that made it obvious she was not awake and her dirty clothes clung to her body in a sickly way, making her look much thinner than he had seen on her videos.

Scanning the room he quickly lowered the gun, placing it behind his back. The image of Nola Bernacci, winner of a Hunger Games, so pale, so dirty and so small, made Gale's blood boil in his veins, barely a thought crossing his mind that this girl could have killed people of his own district in a Games edition. He took her gently by the back and behind the knees, trying to mold her body to his so as not to hurt her more than she might already be. She was tall and slender, so she wasn't too heavy for Gale's corpulence, who walked out the door with a nod, and nodded again in agreement when all four cells were empty.

They were going home.

Actually, no. Gale had a lot of time to think, between the ride back to District 13 and the long wait until Nola woke up again, and he came to the conclusion that Nola wasn't returning home, and never would. Her home was in District 2, which was now in the process of rebelling against the Capitol. The place that had seen her grow up but which she had turned her back on by secretly joining District 13's plans. Gale imagined her mansion, her garden, her room. He imagined she had some family left, even if it was distant, scattered across the District. Someone Nola would be happy to see, ultimately, but no one came to mind. It was sad, and that wasn't home.

Growing a deep empathy in his gut for the girl his own age, Gale didn't break away from the glass in his room until the blonde opened her eyes. He knew that his primary mission had been to volunteer to rescue Peeta —for Katniss, the boy kept telling himself— but Nola's discovery had been shocking enough for him not to look for Katniss as soon as he arrived, but to report that he'd found the blonde and would monitor her vitals himself —because he knew the rest of the world down there would be too busy keeping an eye on the boy on fire.