Like most people, Madge's childhood memories are hazy; a sequence of blurry photos with an occasional frame that stands out in its clarity. One such memory, in which Madge can close her eyes and relive the moment perfectly, is her very first day of school. She had been bouncing up and down in excitement the night before, so much, that Rosa, the Undersee housekeeper, had added a teaspoon of honey to her nightly glass of milk so she would be able to sleep.
Mother had woken her up with a gentle kiss to her forehead.
"Are you ready for your first day, sweets?" Mother had whispered, brushing a stray hair behind her ear.
Almost instantly, the sleepiness had left Madge's eyes and she was grinning widely, throwing her small arms around Mother's neck, pulling her into her warm and happy nest.
"Yes, Mama!"
That was the last time Mother had ever woken Madge up, her headaches only increasing with age, which meant an increase in morphling dosages as well.
So when Madge is violently shaken awake, only to open her eyes to see her frantic Mother, Madge is confused to say the least.
"Wha's going on?" Madge slurs, her mind still not yet awake.
"Madge you must get up immediately!" Mother cries, giving her one last shake before going over to Madge's closet.
Madge sits up completely and realizes that Father is in the room as well- packing away her clothes?
Flinging the floral quilt off of her, Madge has just slid out of bed before Mother thrusts an outfit into her hands.
"Change into this, now!" Mother orders and Madge is no longer sure if she's actually awake because this possibly can't be happening.
"Madge, please listen to your Mother," Father speaks up, and Madge takes in how panicked he looks. She's known her Father all her life, and she's never once seen him this uncomposed. "The district is in grave danger, you need to go to Rosa's house and evacuate."
Madge gasps, as icy terror seeps into her bones.
"What is going on?" she demands, unable to take not knowing what's going on a second more.
Father opens his mouth to respond but is cut off by the sound of frantic knocking coming from the main door downstairs. Without another word he rushes down to answer it, leaving Madge with Mother.
"Change!" Mother hisses, practically tearing Madge's nightgown off of her. With jerky movements, Madge complies and a minute later she's in corduroys, a t-shirt, sweater, jacket, and boots.
"Isn't it too hot for this?" Madge asks in complete confusion as Mother ushers her out of her room and downstairs.
"Let's hope that's the least of your worries," Mother says tightly, and Madge wants to pull her hair out- why won't anyone tell her what's going on?
"I'm here for Madge."
That voice. Madge knows that voice- she'd recognize it anywhere. Deep and strong, like its speaker. But why is he here? Moreover, why is he here for her?
"Gale?" Madge whispers as she rounds the corner of the stairwell, finding Father and Gale in the entryway.
Gale only glances at her for a second before looking back at Father.
"I saw the hovercrafts, we have only minutes before this entire place is bombed to hell," Gale explains quickly. "We need to leave now."
Madge's knees nearly give away. She had known something bad was going to happen after the Quarter Quell blackout, everyone did, but wiping out the entire district?
"They're waiting for Thread and his men to clear out, the train is set to depart in about ten minutes," Father says to Gale. "I'll go to the Justice Building and cut the power so you can get past the fence and into the woods."
"No!" Madge cries out. "You can't Father, you won't make it!"
Father captures her in his arms suddenly and presses a kiss to the crown of her head.
"I must, my daughter," he says in a strangled voice. "All my life, I've never been able to help this district that I love. The time has come when I finally can. Please, you must understand."
Madge doesn't understand, and her eyes are burning from the hot tears that are spilling out of them.
"You can turn off the power?" Gale asks from behind them, reminding Madge of his presence in her house.
"My dear boy," Father smiles sadly. "All those years the fence was off, you thought that was mere coincidence?"
Gale stares at Father as if he's seeing a man he's never realized was there, but Madge has known the goodness of her Father's heart for her entire life, and she refuses to part with him now.
"I won't leave without you," Madge says as steely as she can while crying. Turning to Mother, she adds, "Without either of you."
"Margaret," Mother says quietly, and in the moonlight coming in from the open door, she looks more of a ghost than a person. She lifts up a pack that was on the entry table and helps Madge shrug it on, just as she did all those years ago with Madge's first backpack. "You must live. I knew from the day you were born, you were a very special girl. Your life cannot end tonight."
"You," Mother addresses Gale for the first time in her life, and her tone is neither haughty nor demanding. Instead, it is soft, almost loving. "Please, take our daughter. You have both my husband and I's blessings"
Gale nods and takes Madge's hand. Madge is shaking so violently she doesn't even know how she's still upright. As she scrambles through her yard behind Gale's silhouette, she can't help but look over her shoulder. The last sight she has of her parents are them standing in the doorway of her childhood home, smiling and waving at her as if it's her first day of school.
"Come on," Gale says gruffly, tugging her along. His legs are much longer than Madge's and she's barely keeping tempo with his running pace. It's just been a few minutes and Madge's lungs are already burning. There aren't many townsfolk running, and Madge wonders if anyone warned them. Madge wants to run and knock on every door, to scream run but she knows she'll never make it, if anything she'll bring out the Merchants into the open where they'll die faster.
Her sight is blurry from her tears, so she doesn't see the rock in her path, and trips over it, her wrist landing painfully on the coal smeared ground.
"Get up, Undersee!" Gale barks, not giving her a moment to recover from her fall. "Those bombs could fall any fucking second!"
Her collision with the ground has cleared her head some, and she realizes that she still doesn't know why Gale risked his life to come into town to save her of all people. But she barely has enough breath to run, let alone speak, so she swallows down her questions like they're bile, her vision growing spotty from her depleting oxygen levels.
"I can't," Madge wheezes painfully, trying to gulp in as much air as she can. "I can't run anymore."
Before Gale has the chance to respond, the ripping noise hovercrafts make when they fly at high speeds tear through the sky, followed by the lonesome crescendo of a singular warhead falling.
For one terrible, terrible moment, all Gale and Madge can do is watch the bomb fall in the middle of Seam, a brilliant orange hue stretching into the sky, before a deafening boom cracks throughout the entirety of the District.
Then the shockwave hits them.
Madge is blown backward, her head slamming painfully against the brick wall behind her, before crumbling into a writhing ball on the ground once more. There is a loud buzzing in both of her ears and it feels as if the axis of the very Earth has been tilted, that's how dizzy she is.
She's barely able to pull herself onto her hands and knees before she's vomiting her dinner from earlier that night. She regrets not holding it in, because each heave felt like a dagger being stabbed in the back of her head.
Her shoulder is being shaken, and she looks up to see a blurry Gale, skin bright red from the heat of the explosion, and soot smudged almost everywhere on him, yelling at her. She wants to tell him that she can't hear him, but the throbbing from the base of her skull makes it difficult to keep even her eyes open, let alone open her mouth and use her tongue.
She really is her Mother's child. All she needs is the morphling, and then she can die just as wasted as her Mother has always been.
Gale seems to have given up on trying to communicate with her because suddenly Madge is being lifted up. The sudden movement makes Madge's skull feel as if it's cracking in two, but Gale ignores her, tossing her over his shoulder like how he used to with his game bag, and then they're running once more.
Even though it makes her feel as if her head is about to fall off, Madge keeps her head up to watch the only home she's ever known, reduced to ashes and death. Two more bombs fall, this time further away from them, so all they feel is the Earth shuddering in pain beneath them. All around her, the once familiar landscape has been so quickly turned into an image that can only be described as hell. Madge knows, without doubt, her parents are dead.
It's only when she hears Gale's panting does she realize her sense of hearing has returned, at least to a point where she can hear something other than buzzing.
"Gale," Madge croaks. "Gale, you can put me down now."
He does so immediately, which confirms her suspicion that he's tired too. Her vision is not as blurry, but if she tries to focus too hard, like she tried to do on Gale's face, her eyes almost roll back into her skull in pain.
"The fence is just over there," Gale pants. Madge follows his gaze to see that a hole has been cut into the fence. So Father had been successful in turning off the power.
As she follows Gale, trying to keep up despite every muscle protesting and her head minutes away from undergoing an explosion of its own, Madge notices that there's a scattering of bodies: people that tried to brave the fence before Father got the electricity.
Madge forces herself to look away from their charred bodies and climbs through the fence hole, Gale right in front of her.
"We need to-" Gale is cut off by the dropping of one more bomb, this one stronger than the past several ones all combined. Once more Madge is thrown forward, though this time her landing is blessedly softer, a shrub bush cushioning her fall.
The screams that had been heard scattered around have silenced completely. All Madge can hear, see, and feel are the vicious red, orange, yellow flames that eat gluttonously through what was once people's homes, dancing almost mockingly through the district as if they taunt her.
We are here! They snicker nefariously. And we have destroyed all that you've ever known and loved!
Madge groans in pain and she climbs out of the bush. The bombs haven't taken everything she loves.
"Gale?" Madge calls, trying desperately to find him through her blurry vision in the illuminated darkness. "Gale, where are you?"
She's answered by a male grunt, and she immediately turns towards the source. Squinting (and ignoring how that makes her eyeballs feel like they're about to liquidize), Madge is able to make out the outline of Gale's body on the grass. Crawling over to him, Madge pushes away his singed hair away from his forehead.
"Gale," she cries meekly, gently taking his face in her scrapped and blistered hands. "Can you hear me?"
"Uraghh…" Gale moans, face scrunching in pain. Madge never thought such a nonsensical sound would bring her nearly to tears.
"Gale, wake up," Madge tries to say as soothingly as she can. "Your family must be worried."
His eyes flutter before Madge is able to see their grays, and even then, they're narrowed in pain.
"Ribs," Gale gasps.
Madge's heart leaps to her throat, and she's able to banish all thoughts of her headache as she lifts his shirt.
On the left side of his upper abdomen is a bruise the size of a baby, already well on its way to blooming.
"Oh, Gale." Madge has to bite her lip to keep from crying, she can only imagine how much pain he's in. And all because of her.
With just her fingertips, she traces up his side, holding her breath as they reach the purple-green discoloration. Gale doesn't flinch though when she runs her fingers up all the way.
"I don't think they're broken," she tells him, tearing her eyes away from the bruise and back at his exhausted face. "Otherwise you would have jerked pretty violently when I touched them."
"Bruised then," Gale says through clenched teeth. Madge nods. "Hell's teeth."
"Let me help you up," Madge offers, but Gale slaps her hand away.
"I don't need your-" Gale hisses in pain before he can finish speaking, doubling over in pain. Ignoring his initial reaction, Madge tucks herself under the arm of his good side, her lips tugging into a smile for a moment as she feels him lean his weight onto her.
Gale is tall. Easily one of the tallest in the district, which means even with the poor diet he no doubt has, he still has a lot of mass, and by the time they've crossed up the hill into the denser part of the woods, Madge feels drenched in sweat from exertion.
She and Gale hobble along slowly, when suddenly out of the darkness darts a younger Gale.
"Gale!" younger Gale exclaims, his hair in complete disarray. "Are you ok?"
"Rory," Gale greets tersely, though the relief in his voice is evident. "Where's Ma and the kids?"
"Forget them, they're fine!" Rory cries, rushing over to extract his older brother from Madge's grip. "What happened to you?"
"Other side, idiot!" Gale hisses at Rory as he tries to wind his arm around his injured side.
"Right, right!" Rory quickly rushes to his other side and Gale finally leans into him, more, Madge realizes, than he had when she was helping him.
A bit awkwardly, Madge follows the two Hawthorne boys into a clearing where the survivors of District 12 lay scattered.
A quick survey tells Madge there aren't many, maybe 800 tops. Out of that small number, there's an even smaller amount of townspeople. That reminds Madge once more that she should be there in Town Center, her bones melting alongside her parents, not here, saved mysteriously by the guy who probably hates her the most in the district.
"Madge!" A woman's voice cuts through her thoughts, and Madge is suddenly swept into the arms of Hazelle Hawthorne.
"Oh thank God you're alright!" Hazelle cries, squeezing Madge tightly. She pulls away from the embrace just enough to study Madge's features.
"Oh!" Hazelle gasps. "I think you've got a concussion! It's a wonder you can see at all with your eyes crossed like that!"
Ah. That explains the piercing headache and blurring.
"Sit down, sit down!" Hazelle helps her lean against a looming oak. "It's a good thing you're wearing layers, saved you from a lot of cuts and burns."
Madge's throat closes almost immediately. Her Mother's last act of love had protected her.
"Let me get Alyssum," Hazelle says, leaving Madge alone. She can just barely make out Gale and his siblings huddled together by a nearby tree. She wonders why Hazelle isn't tending to her son. Why her son is injured because of her in the first place.
And then it clicks.
Hazelle must have told Gale about the morphling. There is no other plausible explanation as to why Gale would run back into a war zone to save the district 'princess' other than to repay a debt.
Madge bites down on her bottom lip until her tongue is met with the metallic taste of blood.
"There isn't any treatment for a concussion," a hollow voice suddenly says. Madge opens her eyes to see Mrs. Everdeen standing in front of her. The woman's pale face is haunted, and Madge remembers that not only has she lost her home, but her eldest daughter also died yesterday. "I'd prescribe you rest, but…"
Whether she stops out of pity or she just doesn't have the energy to continue, Madge knows what she was going to say. Out in the wilderness, there is no place for rest and recovery.
"I'm sorry," Madge blurts, knowing this isn't the time or the place for this, but she has to tell Mrs. Everdeen this because it suddenly hits Madge all over again that her best friend is dead. "Katniss is...was my best friend."
Mrs. Everdeen doesn't say anything, just sways in the wind as if she's a bare tree branch.
"Feel sorry for yourself," Mrs. Everdeen says finally, going over to who Madge presumes is Prim. It's still hard to make out things from a distance.
"Don't listen to her," Mrs. Hawthorne tells her passionately, sitting down beside her. "Alyssum never did well under pressure"
"Mrs. Hawthorne," Madge whispers, unable to look at the older woman in the eye. "Why did you tell Gale?"
Judging by her sigh, Madge knows Mrs. Hawthorne knows exactly what she's referring to.
"I knew that winter night, when I opened the door and you looked like an angel with your windswept hair and red cheeks, that you were a special girl," Mrs. Hawthorne whispers, her voice nostalgic. She reaches over and gently tilts Madge's chin until she's looking at her. Her silver eyes are clouded by a cloud of tears. "I just couldn't let you die, please understand."
Madge is tired of being asked to understand. She just wants to lie down and never open her eyes again. Her parents are dead. Her best friend is dead. Her home rubble. There's nowhere to go and nowhere to return. But Madge doesn't say any of that, why should she? Everyone already knows this, you can tell just by looking at afraid everyone's eyes are.
"Ma," Gale's youngest sibling, his sister, has made her way over, and a strange relief fills Madge to see the small girl totally unscathed. "Why're you sitting here?"
Mrs. Hawthorne gives her daughter a tight-lipped smile.
"Madge's Mother helped a child of mine when he really needed it," Mrs. Hawthorne recounts to the girl. Madge remembers the night her Mother had pressed the three vials of morphling into her hands and had whispered go, her blue eyes hooded with understanding. "So now I'm going to take care of Madge."
This seems to be too long of an explanation for the girl, or she doesn't care enough, because she shrugs her shoulders.
"Gale said you should come to where we are," the girl says sweetly, climbing into her Mother's lap.
Mrs. Hawthorne pushes her out of her lap, much to the girl's chagrin. "You tell your brothers to come here, and tell Gale to quit his bellyaching."
"Ok!" the girl chirps, and Madge wonders how the little girl can be so unaffected by the bombings.
"Posy is a free spirit," Mrs. Hawthorne says by way of an explanation, chuckling. "Nothing gets that girl down. I couldn't be more thankful."
"Mrs. Hawthorne, I-"
"Hazelle," Mrs. Hawthorne interrupts with a smile. "Please, just call me Hazelle."
Madge nods. She's never referred to an adult by their first name before.
"Right, um, Hazelle, Gale's bruised his ribs," Madge says. "I don't think he should move around too much."
Hazelle however, just waves off her concerns.
"He's been through worse, he'll be fine."
Madge swallows tightly, remembering how she had seen the white of his shoulder blade through the lacerated flesh of his whipped back. He certainly has been through worse.
Rory, Posy, and another younger boy all settle beside Hazelle, with Gale trudging behind them. When he reaches them, he wordlessly sprawls onto the grass, very similar to how she had found him in the clearing.
"Hi, I'm Vick," the youngest boy says shyly, and Rory besides him rolls his eyes.
"This is Madge!" Posy introduces. "She's our new sissy!"
"Who said that?" Gale suddenly snaps, still lying down, but face furious. Madge wishes she could get up and walk away from this scene forever, but she isn't sure if her legs will be able to function for the next several hours.
"Didn't you say that, Ma?" Posy asks in confusion. Madge could see how she got that from Hazelle's explanation, but she wishes the little girl hadn't voiced her conclusion aloud.
"Watch your tone," Hazelle says cooly, frowning at her son. "If Posy wants Madge to be her sister, that's up to Madge, isn't that right, Madge?"
"I, um-" Madge falters, unsure how to answer.
"Of course she's our new sister," Rory quips. "Why else would Gale swoop in and save her like this is a fairy tale?"
"To repay a debt," Madge answers immediately before Gale has a chance to. She doesn't need to hear that from him.
"Consider it repaid," Madge says this time to Gale, who's watching her closely.
"Thank you for everything, Hazelle," Madge says as she shoulders her pack. "I think it's time I took my leave."
Hazelle's hand shoots out and wraps itself tightly onto Madge's wrist, effectively anchoring her to her spot.
"Madge, Gale," Hazelle begins sternly. "Whatever differences you have, I want you both to put them away, at least for now. Our homes have been destroyed, yes, but that doesn't mean we're going to be running around like wild animals. Can I expect you two to behave civilly?"
"Ohhhh," Rory snickers. "Someone's in trouble!"
Without even looking, Hazelle smacks Rory upside the head. For a moment Madge wonders if anyone of them even remember that they just narrowly escaped a bombing.
Gale doesn't respond to his Mother, instead settling for glaring at her with a we'll discuss this later look.
Madge, who is in no position to do glaring of any kind just says politely, "Of course, Hazelle."
"Good," Hazelle huffs. "Now let's get some sleep. Lord knows we have a long day ahead of us."
Posy tries to climb onto Gale but he gently pushes her off.
"Not tonight, Pose," he says gently. Posy huffs before going to her second option, climbing onto Rory, who groans but doesn't push her away. Vick scoots very closely into Hazelle's side, and Madge can see now the fear in the boy's eyes now that his older brothers aren't up.
Madge pulls out a water bottle from her pack and allows herself just a sip, not realizing how congested with smoke her throat had been until the water washed it away. She slips off her jacket and sweater, using the former as a blanket and the latter as a pillow once she folded it.
As she slowly lowers her throbbing head onto her sweater, Madge looks up at the sky, the constellations hidden behind the billowing smoke.
I didn't die tonight Madge thinks to herself. Now what, Mama?
A/N:
Being brought over from the archive since I finally retrieved my login. Bi-weekly update until everything is brought over, then updated whenever the newest chapter is done.