The Hunger Games: Book Four - How it Might Have Been ... Gale.

Page Seven

Gale

Present Day

The next morning, even before the sun has fully risen, I'm at the Nut and assembling a team of my most highly skilled and most dedicated workers to work on this project. It's a bittersweet feeling, knowing I'm saving the man belonging to the woman I love, but no matter what past events may say about me, I'm adamant to prove that I am not a cold-hearted human being and murderer. I will save Peeta Mellark - for his kids, for his wife, and for our nation. 

Katniss had explained everything to me the previous night as we sat on the sofa watching the buzzing city below. Her head was full of questions, I could feel it, but only one person was on her mind at that time, and would be until he was found. She described the strange men arriving unannouced at their house in District Twelve three days ago; four now if you counted today. She told me how her son answered the door, a mirror image of his parents, and obliviously let the men in.

"Ku is not like that," she had said last night, her eyes still aloof as they gazed out the window panes. "All his life his sister and himself have been cautious, aware - Peeta and I almost trained them to be like that. The constant anxiety and untrustworthiness, it's something that comes with being a past Tribute... it just... it was something we had, Peeta and I." At that statement, I could feel her mind beginining to wander on to other things her husband and herself shared. She lapsed into silence, deep in thought, as I myself weighed the chances of her seemingly ever-cautious son letting down his guard on the same day strange men came for his father being a coincidence. 

It couldn't be a coicidence, and so now I am assembling this team to find out just why this boy's guard had been let down that fateful day. I have no idea who took Peeta except for what these men wore and their dialect, but even with those clues no certain match is even close to being made. It could be any two men in the whole of Panem - but I have to find them. I have to find him. For Katniss.

As I reem through the final list of names I have allocated to work on this project, I nod to myself in approval of my own choice. I see Meld, my right-hand man, and wonder if I can afford to give him up so he can dedicate himself full time to this project. But of course, he has to; I have no other choice. I need my best men and women. Then I notice the reason why this list feels so bare, so incomplete, like a jigsaw with it's pieces strewn near and far.

I scan electronically through the team's names of the organisation and pause when I see the name I want to find in bold writing. This is the team of men and women I need to allocate to the Mellark Project. A sour smile rises on my lips as I drag the names, one by one, onto my new list. The people I have allocated to the Mellark project are people who have been working to help Katniss long before she ever showed up here, and they didn't even know. It's ironic and bittersweet, but in a way, it's a full circle. The people I've allocated to find Peeta Mellark, the person who makes Katniss whole, are the people who were assigned to the Hunter-Rescuer bomb project, the thing that tore Katniss apart.