Gale slowly wakes pleasantly to fading rays of sun warming his face. Eyes half open he stretches on the soft bed of moss he fell asleep on, and half regards a pair of bird's eyes staring at him in the darkness from several feet away. He half-heartedly chastised himself for falling asleep in the woods until nightfall again but then remembers with a start the events of the past few hours. Opening his eyes, in place of the bird he thought he saw earlier were two angry orbs glowering at him from the shadows.

This had to happen sooner or later.

Gale sat up reluctantly and immediately was assailed with insults. "How could you? Do promises mean nothing to you? What are our families supposed to do now?" Katniss began, nowhere near the end of her belligerent questioning. "Do you remember what you told me less than a day ago? You told me we could run away together into the woods. Do you even remember my reaction?" It was true. Less than a day ago Gale had told her, faintly and in a hopeless plea, that they could do it. They could disappear into the woods and live the remainder of their lives out of the Capitol's grasp. Of course, she was completely against the idea – refusing to abandon Prim with only their mother to support her, but Gale had actually meant it, despite the idea of leaving his own family behind. He knew now that Katniss was extremely relieved by her decision to stay, for otherwise, who would have volunteered for Prim? But the idea of escaping in the woods and leaving everyone behind sat easily with Gale in the woods, and it sat easily when it meant volunteering to go into the Games to protect Katniss.

Gale knew, however, that if he relayed this sentiment to Katniss, she would never forgive him. However, he was never the type to lie, no matter how bad the truth sounded.

"It didn't seem like I was breaking a promise," Gale said evenly. "It felt like I was fulfilling another one. The one I made with myself when I accepted you as my hunting partner though you were young and weak and still too loud to sneak up on a deaf rabbit." Her eyes still flashed dangerously.

"This was never about me! " she shouted into the dark. "It was about Prim, the reason I hunted all those hours and all those years and the reason I'm sitting next to you on this stupid Capitol train. With nobody left at home to take care of her, I might as well have let her go off to these Games, because at least then she'd die quickly instead of the slow, starving death you've sentenced her to by abandoning her when she needed it most."

Gale kept his eyes locked firmly on Katniss, fire flashing behind his eyes now. "Do you think I'm stupid enough to risk my life in that arena if I really thought I couldn't get you back alive?" Gale said harshly, resentment coloring his tone in an angry mask. "You're going to get back to District-" but he doesn't get to finish his sentence, because just then a loud knock reverberates through the room and Effie Trinket comes bouncing into the room without an invitation.

"Up, up, up! It's going to be a big, big, big day!" she says brightly in her weird Capitol accent and I have to smile at Katniss. It is not returned, though the fire behind her eyes is gone. Effie turns on the lights and jumps in mock surprise, "Two tributes! Excellent!" she says, looking absolutely delighted but a little out of sorts. I go ahead and assume that she's never seen two tributes from one district speaking together so intimately before – though the argument she walked in on was far from intimate. "I'm here to bring you to dinner," she says cheerily.

'If this is what they call dinner in the Capitol, I'd like to see what they call a feast,' Gale thinks with wide eyes, as he takes in the mounds of food on the table. He steals a look at Katniss before remembering that she hates him right now, but even she can't contain her surprise at all the food. Out of all of district twelve, the Everdeens and the Hawthornes probably eat the best out of most of the inhabitants, save for the merchants, Peacekeepers, and politicians, but this is something else entirely. The quantity alone would probably feed Gale's family of five for at least a month, but the quality. Mushroom soup, greens, peas, roast beef, noodles in a green sauce, cheese, blue grapes, and beyond that more food that he didn't even know the name of. Come to think about it, there was probably too much food and they were sure to run out of names for all of it.

Gale thinks for a moment that he may start to drool.

Piling his plate with some of everything, Gale hardly realizes when a dirty man he recognizes from previous Games as Haymitch Abernathy slides into a seat at the table. Too hungry to make notice, Gale picks up his knife and fork and wishes for a moment that he could inhale food. He stops briefly and thinks wryly that the only reason the Capitol is feeding him in such a way is to fatten him up to keep up the charade that Panem is not the starving place it is, only providing entertainment for the well fed Capitol citizens. Gale thinks better of it, deciding the he will need as much weight as he can to stay alive and keep Katniss alive, and also that the food is too alluring to resist.

"At least you two have decent manners!" Effie bursts out as if we're best friends and she's confessing a secret that's been bottling up in her for ages. "The pair last year ate everything with their hands like a couple of savages. It completely upset my digestion," she says affectedly as she dabs at her face with her napkin. Pointedly I hear Katniss slam her utensils on the table and proceed to eat her food with her hands, slurping loudly. Thinking on the two tributes from last year, Seam kids that probably went days without food back at home despite the tesserae they undoubtedly each took out, Gale decides to follow suit and commits completely by dipping his hand in his soup and pulling out the chunks of chicken. Katniss smiles at him appreciatively. Effie Trinket's lips immediately sour like she drank lemon juice and she glares over her thick pink eyelashes. The meal proceeds in a stark silence contrasted by the previous chatter Effie had been providing regarding the Hunger Games and food and interviews and just about everything else. The only sound other than Katniss' loud chewing and slurping is the occasional swig from a canteen presumably where their mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, sat.

Gale starts when he receives a sharp kick under the table and thinks to himself that he did nothing to presently deserve this assailment. Gale glares at Katniss but she doesn't look at him with anger, but with a question. He follows her eyes across the room.

There she stands refilling glasses in a tidy uniform, short and unremarkable but with a shock of unquestionably familiar red hair. "Hey, I know you!" Katniss says loudly across the table as a question, as if she cannot remember from where. Immediately their eyes meet, and the red-haired girl is filled with what can only be described as fear, and immediately Gale remembers where they know her from.

"You can't possibly know her," Effie says with derision, a hint of anger still in her voice from Gale and Katniss' pointed table manner faux pas. "She's an avox. A traitor." A look sideways at Katniss and Gale sees that she remembers where we know her from as well; she remembers that regular day in the woods when they saw a young girl with red hair running for her life next to a boy that Gale assumed to be her boyfriend. Running from something they were, for moments later a hovercraft appeared before them, and the boy was killed and the girl disappeared – but not before she saw Gale and Katniss, not before she made her silent plea for help, and certainly not before the two hunters did nothing to help her. The two hunters that let her be captured and become a slave and the two hunters that let her boyfriend die. There was probably nothing the two of them could have done to help, and only would have gotten arrested themselves for the trouble, but the act of doing nothing never sat well with him, and he doubted it sat well for Katniss.

Gale searched frantically for an escape, because though they could not be held accountable for anything illegal regarding this woman except trespassing in the woods, it may cause trouble for the avox and it seemed…private, in a way. "I know who you're thinking of," Gale said, feigning a recognition while looking at the wide eyed girl. "She looks exactly like Leevy, from back at home." Katniss gave him a weird look but immediately embraced the suggestion.

"Yes, that's it. She looks exactly like her, I bet it was the hair," Katniss says gratefully. This young girl looks nothing like Leevy, Katniss' neighbor with long black hair and gray eyes. Forgetting her anger completely as is befitting the fickle Effie Trinket, she returns to idly chattering about parades and interviews and other nonsense, and Gale sits back in his chair. This is when he takes his first real notice of his mentor, Haymitch Abernathy. He appears to be laughing to himself under his breath and Gale remembers idly that Haymitch probably knows or at least would recognize Leevy – given that everyone knows everyone in district twelve. He either doesn't care or is too drunk to care because he doesn't say anything about it and nobody else seems to notice his silent laughter.

Gale continues to eat, but feels slightly unsettled about the whole affair.

Thanks for making it this far, I hope you stick with this story! I love reviews, so if you've got a comment or suggestion, I really do try to keep them in mind while I'm writing the next chapter. Thanks again!