How It Could Have Been ~ The-Mockingjay-xx

Chapter 12

     A few months have passed since my birthday, and the leaves of the trees, which provide a natural shelter from the wind, have begun to cascade from their branches around my shoulders. Attentively, I watch Gale's fingers intricately weaving twigs, leaves and flowers into a beautiful wreath. He slides the final twig into place and begins turning it in his hands slowly, analysing his work.
"Beautiful," he says, gently placing the gold, orange, red, brown and white crown of interwoven pieces of autumn on my head.
"Thank you," I smile. My arms wrap themselves around one of Gale's, and I lean into him. "I love autumn," I say.
"Me too," he replies. "The woods are most beautiful around this time of year..." he hesitates, "...almost as beautiful as you..." I sit up straight and roll my eyes at him, one eyebrow raised.
     "Yeah right," I say sarcastically, jumping off the branch we were sitting on and landing neatly on my feet on the earth, which is almost smothered in leaves. "As much as I would love to sit and laugh at your cheesy compliments all day, we have a job to do." Gale smiles and tosses my bag down, followed shortly by my bow and arrows. I re-equip myself before he throws me his, and I hold them until he lands on the ground next to me.
     "What will it be today?" Gale asks, sliding the strap of his quiver over his shoulder. I fumble with the pages of my plant book until I arrive at the relevant page, and point to several of the plants.

     Since the war is over, Gale and I have, in a way, adopted the duty of collecting several medicinal herbs and plants, which only grow in the woods, for the pharmacologists who produce the medicines now made in our district. And we get payed well too, although I can't exactly say we are short of money.
"That's the last one," I say, pulling the final plant out of the earth. I slot it into my bag and shut the flap.
"Ready to go?" Gale asks.
"Yep," I reply, and we begin to set off back through the woods.

The meadow is soft and grassy and tickles my legs as we emerge out of the shadows of the trees into the broad daylight. Today is a beautiful one, the sky a cloudless blue, flowers peppering the grasses which stretch their way up my legs and the sounds of wildlife igniting the wilderness with their natural orchestra. Finally I give into a temptation which has been taunting me for a while and throw both my bag and Gale's on the floor.
He looks at me, confused, "Wha-", but I take his hand before he has time to finish... and run.

For a few seconds he stumbles behind me, not yet having realised what is happening, but he quickly equals my pace. I swing his arm and he begins to chuckle as we slow down and crash into the earth. I must have turned at least six barrel rolls before I come to a halt next to Gale, and both of us are laughing. "What was that for?" he smiles.
     "I don't know," I say. "I guess I just wanted to do something fun and slightly wild for once."
     "Ha," he laughs. We sit in silence for a few seconds, trapped in our own thoughts. "What do you think would have happened if we had run away, when I said we should before your Games?" he says completely out of the blue.
     "Hmm, its ironic really," I reply, "I thought about that all the time in my Games, but I guess I didn't have chance to in the war. I don't know. I guess we would have found somewhere to live, all of us together, and then..." I trail off. "Then some time in the future once we had settled down I guess we might have got married and even started a family eventually."
     "I thought about that all the way through your first Games you know," he says. "I imagined us taking off and being together and after time you would learn to love me as much as I do you. Getting married and having kids would be next. But of course then there was your romance drama... that hurt a lot, you know. To watch you with him was painful. People in the Hob tried to cheer me up by telling me that it was always me you loved. They said that you had always loved me and I should see it. Before Prim was reaped many of them told me that they thought the two of us would marry eventually. I really hoped they were right. It took me a couple of years to realise I liked you in that way once we met that day in the woods, but when you were in the Games I missed you like crazy and it was only then that I realised... that I was in love with you."