District Twelve was burning, going up in flames.
And Madge Undersee was flying.
Not once did she feel her bare feet touch the ground. If they had, she would have felt it. She was sure. She would have felt the heat from the fires that had already started.
But she couldn't. She wasn't running. Wasn't even in sprinting. She was flying. Her long blonde hair, streaming behind her in the too-hot wind, could have been her wings.
She had to fly. Had to fly in order to find him. Dark hair, Seam eyes.
Gale Hawthorne.
It didn't take long. He was right where she knew he would be, right in the centre of it all, sparks flying around his face like some silly daydream, if she squinted her eyes and looked only at him.
The daydream faded if she let the smoke and flames in, too.
"Gale!"
He turned and she was flying faster, right into his surprised arms, the arms that held her more out of instinct than anything else. Strong, miner's arms. Gale's arms.
The arms that had held her in comfort during the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games when her two dearest, perhaps only, friends in the world had both been Reaped. The arms that comforted her when they were, impossibly, selected again for the Quarter Quell.
They held her now. But they couldn't, not for long.
"Madge! What..."
She leaned onto her toes, pressed her lips to his, tangled her fingers in his Seam-dark hair. Dark as the coal, it swallowed her slender, smooth, ivory-pale piano-fingers. And it was so, so soft. Just as she knew it would be.
Their lips moved together, her heart leaping when she realized at last that not only was she kissing him, kissing Gale Hawthorne, he was kissing her back. Feverishly.
Yes, everything was feverish, their lips hot on one another, their skin hot as his arms wrapped so tight around her waist there was no air between them, their clothing so hot it nearly burned the skin that was just-not-quite-touching.
And there were sparks and smoke and fire all around them but for that moment, that one blessed moment, neither of them noticed or cared.
And then Madge was on the ground again, bare feet dirty and burned, and she smiled at Gale Hawthorne with a smile that didn't belong in burning District Twelve. And then she ran. Because the fires were burning, but they hadn't quite reached her house.
Not yet.
And she had to find her parents, her mother, who could barely move on her own. The servant and supplicant of the morphling in her veins.
So she ran, back through the town, through the smoke that was gathering closer around them all, and she ignored his wild cries of
"Madge! Madge!"
She would find him again, she would. Somewhere far from here. And who knew, then? Who knew. But her family, her mother...
That was what mattered, now. Gale Hawthorne would understand that. Would understand family.
But the house was already smoking, she saw, and her blue eyes widened until they hurt as she crashed through the front door.
"Mom?"
There was no reply but the constant press of choking smoke.
"Dad?"
The Mayor and his wife were lost in the smoke, and she couldn't find them. Her feet carried her blindly to the stairs and she crawled them slowly, up and up and up, into the gathering heat and smoke. She was covered with ash and streaked with sweat, and her hair hung limp and damp around her face but for once in her life she didn't care. Couldn't care.
"Mom?"
And then, finally, a thin voice addled with the wavers morphling gave it.
"Madge?"
"Mom!"
And she was still crawling, ducking underneath smoking and cringing away from creeping flame until she could slip, coughing, into her mother's hazy room.
"Madge!"
Her mother was wrapped in sheets, curled near the window, holding skeletal arms out to her daughter. Madge hurried into them, buried her face against her mother's neck, and cried.
There was no escape. She knew it, then.
Gale's kiss still burned on her lips.
And then there was her father's voice, calling their names from the hall. And then he was there, too, face burned and sweaty and covered in ash just like them, tears cutting paths through the muck.
"I'm so sorry," he whispered, holding them both as close as he could, "So so sorry, I love you, love you both, so much, I'm so sorry."
The house as it burned began to creak, giving out slowly, and Madge whimpered as she buried herself close against her parents.
The life she could have had, ideally, was cruelly playing against her eyelids.
Toasting with Gale. A baby with her hair and his eyes. Another with the opposite. And maybe more, who knew? A world without the Hunger Games, no Reaping to worry her. Katniss and Peeta raising their own family somewhere nearby.
Dying peacefully, old and grey, holding Gale's hand and surrounded by their family, children and granchildren, nieces and nephews.
And then Gale's kiss, the memory of his lips hungry against hers, the brightness of his eyes when she'd pulled away, the sound of his voice calling after her as she ran.
"Madge!"
The strength of his arms, the rough skin on his face, the callouses on his hands.
His Seam-grey eyes, his Seam-dark hair.
Her fingers buried in his hair, her body pressed to his.
And she thought, as the flaming house began to crash down around them, as her mother's screams and her father's tears surrounded her, that if she'd had one day more, she could have made him love her.
If she'd had one day more, everything would have been fine.
If she'd had one day more...
But one day more was too much to ask.
One day more never came.
One second more and the Undersees were swallowed by smoke and by flame.
And Gale Hawthorne, voice hoarse with calling Madge's name, was too late to save her.
Just in time to watch as the smoking remnants fell.
One day more, and maybe he would have told her.
One day more, and everything could have been different.
((While in my own little headCanon Madge somehow escapes and finds Gale in District 2 eventually, this was just begging to be written. I own nothing - The Hunger Games, its world, and its characters all belong entirely to Suzanne Collins.))