Make Me Your Maria
This is as good a place to fall as any
Will you build our altar here?
"Please," she says, her voice hollow and broken. She looks at him pleading, desperate. "Let's not act this all out. Try not to say her name when you're kissing me."
He shrugs. Fair enough. He wouldn't want her calling out her paramour's name in the middle of their… whatever this was shaping up to be.
"I won't."
The Games start playing on the television in the living room, where both of them are seated alone (and won't be disturbed – the servants have retired, the Mayor is in the Town Hall for a meeting with the Peacekeepers and her mother never comes down anyway). It is then that his tough guy façade melts away. Instead, he suddenly is weary, and he drops back onto the sofa, utterly defeated as he watches Katniss and Peeta struggling to survive in the treacherous arena of the Hunger Games, looking like an Adam and Eve, isolated from any semblance of civilization.
He hates it. He hates that he isn't with Katniss, that he cannot protect her, and that her chances of surviving – though admittedly better now – are still slim. Most of all, he hates what he sees on the television; he hates that she is now closer to another. No one can doubt the baker's son's feelings for Katniss; he looks at her like she is his entire world (his gaze is reverent) and whispers her name as if it were a sacred, holy thing (as if he were uttering a prayer). Worse, Katniss seems to be entirely receptive to it all; no, it seems as though she's initiating most of their embraces (feathery kisses over his face, warm and loving embrace) and it hurts, God damn it, it hurts, that the God damned baker's boy is the recipient of her affectionate caresses. The God damned baker's boy, who wouldn't have been able to survive in the wild for a day, who would have driven Katniss mad as he proved how inept he was at surviving if they were back in District 12, who shouldn't have even thought of Katniss the way Gale does…
The injustice of it all drives Gale mad. Madge must have sensed it, because her (white, pale, not calloused) hand drops over his in a reassuring gesture, and Gaze squeezes it hard as he pulls her in for a kiss.
The kiss is hard and forceful and (not what the Mayor's daughter is used to until their worlds collided) animalistic. He tries his best not to whisper Katniss' name as he pulls her flush against him, and she says nothing. Her hair is loose (always loose and never in a braid, never like Katniss' braid) and he combs his fingers through golden locks. This is all wrong, he thinks to himself, he shouldn't be using Madge Undersee like this, but she is responds with the same primal rage. Perhaps she is using him, but it doesn't matter, does it? Not when both of them are angry and hateful and distraught at the hand of cards they've been dealt.
A romantic would say that their encounters always ended in love-making, but that's wrong, Madge thinks. It's not love-making when a participant in it is not in love with his/her partner. There is another word for it, a crude, vulgar, insulting word that people would use instead, but Madge has been brought up well so she doesn't use that to describe it. Besides, even if Gale is not invested in their… dalliances, she can't bear to think that this is all pretend, because it most definitely is not, not on her side.
He thinks that she is (was?) in love with Peeta, and that really is her fault, and to tell why would require her to start from the beginning, after Katniss and Peeta had left for the Capitol.
He came to the Mayor's house, angry and curt. He brought her strawberries and she paid for them. As he angrily stalked off, Madge felt her heart break.
Stupid girl you knew that something had to be going on between Katniss and Gale and yes he's very handsome and he's not afraid of you and he's intelligent and different and he doesn't care who you are and doesn't try to use you like other people of course he would like Katniss why did you foolishly think that it could be possible and you know how Seam/Merchant alliances end up look at Katniss' parents and did you want to end up like that or…
"I know how it feels," she calls out, softly to him, before he leaves the compound completely.
Gale looked back and sneered. "You know nothing, Undersee."
That triggers something inside her, and she replies: "No, Gale, you think you know everything, but you know nothing. When they announced who would be going to the Hunger Games, my heart broke. Because it confirmed to me that the person I was in love with was already in love with someone else."
He took this to mean Peeta then, and she never corrected him.
The first time they made love (it's not making love) was the next time he brought strawberries. She was playing a soft, sweet melody on the piano. The servants had gone to the marketplace, her father was at work and her mother was in a blissful state of unconsciousness with all that morphling.
When she heard a knock at the back door, she stood up to open it.
"I have some stuff," he said stiffly. He never tells her what he has, for fear of Peacekeepers catching him.
"Come in."
He stared at her. He'd never been invited in before. Suddenly flustered, Madge said, "We don't want to attract any undue attention. We might get caught."
He entered the house and looks around, clearly indignant of the amount of material wealth in the room. It isn't much but it's far more than what he's accustomed to in the Seam and she felt his hateful gaze on her.
"You hate us, I know," she said. "And you hate the Capitol, it's not news, Hawthorne. I do think that you sometimes forget that we hate the Capitol as well."
"Really? When you live so comfortably like this?" he sneered, and it was all she could do to not slap him.
Instead, she pulled him down towards her and kissed him fiercely. For a while, he did not respond, then, to her everlasting surprise, he kisses her back, just as hungry and fiercely.
They did not separate except to gasp for air, and in between breaths, she whispers, her voice all light and breathy, "They take away our loved ones and make us live in fear, and then turn us against each other. That's not living, that's surviving."
She is sure he thought she was talking about Peeta when she said this, and even more so when she said, "Could you help me? Help me forget that he loves her, and that he'll never love me?"
Surprisingly, he accepted. Even more surprisingly, there was no pain, only pleasure that first time, and for a brief, bittersweet moment, Madge almost forgets that Gale loves Katniss, and not her, at least until she hears him whisper Katniss' name in agony after they have both reached their release and he turns away and immediately dresses himself.
She thought their next meeting would be awkward and it is, but not for the reasons she was expecting. This time, when they meet, he kisses her with a passion so furious that she is overwhelmed (and secretly delighted at). Everyone is still out and her mother has just consumed her morphling, as per usual.
He is angry, she knows, and if he doesn't hate her, he certainly doesn't care for her.
But she still wants this, forbidden kisses and secret caresses. At least she can pretend for herself.
That is the story of how they end up in this situation.
She asks him not to say Katniss' name, and he never utters it when they make love after that.
Unbelievably, both Katniss and Peeta are crowned victors. Instead of being happy that Katniss survives, however, Gale is angry that now he can never be with Katniss. Madge tries not to explore her own feelings on the subject; Katniss is the Girl on Fire now, and Panem's newest beauty and It-Girl.
They've developed some sort of weird, twisted relationship: not quite friends, definitely not lovers, but somehow they're like confidants. Or at least she is Gale's confidant, since she'll never confess that it is him that she's truly in love with, and not Peeta.
He is sitting on the sofa in her living room, and she is sitting next to him. He shrugs off her hand when she lays it on his shoulder, but she doesn't take no for an answer. She straddles him and forcefully kisses him, and gradually she breaches the walls of his angry defenses, and he allows her in.
Forget, she whispers against him. Forget, forget, forget.
He thinks she is trying to tell him to forget everything and he is right, but he does not know that she is specifically trying to say Forget Katniss, forget Katniss, forget Katniss and Look at me, think of me, love me.
When Katniss and Peeta come back, it changes.
Gale doesn't go to see Madge any more, and it stings.
Peeta isn't often seen with Katniss, but that could be explained by the fact that he is back with family who want him all to themselves.
Katniss and Madge become closer friends, though. Katniss sometimes takes Madge to the woods and sometimes, Madge irrationally hopes that she would meet Gale there but that is a futile hope since Gale is now forever at the mines from dawn to dusk. This also means that Katniss is not always with Gale, but Madge is intuitive enough to know that something has changed between Katniss and Gale.
But Madge doesn't pry. She doesn't want to. She's afraid of what the answer may be.
Gale is whipped and delirious and in pain and Madge knows the morphling can help soothe the pain. She tries to sneak into her mother's store of morphling, but Madge was never a sneaky person and sure enough her mother catches her.
Madge can only pray that her mother is not lucid enough, but it seems as though luck is against her when her mother fixes her gaze at her and looks at her pityingly. "Oh darling, take it. Help him."
Madge does not need to be told twice but she realizes her mother knows more than she lets on.
In another world, perhaps I could have cried onto her shoulders, Madge thinks to herself, tears pricking at her eyelids. In another life, I could have told her how I loved him so much that I threw caution to the wind and didn't care about the consequences.
But she is living this life, and she knows she never can. She gives the morphling to Katniss and her family ("Save your friend," she says, because she couldn't very well say, "Save Gale, because I love him,") and runs back, praying that the Peacekeepers would not catch her.
By the time she gets back, her mother has fallen into a morphling-induced haze and the moment is lost forever.
He hates that Katniss has to return to the Games. He rages internally, though, because he doesn't think he could survive another whipping.
Speaking of which, he never figures out how he survives. Were they able to get morphling or something? Mrs. Everdeen and Prim are steadfastly close-mouthed when he broaches the topic, and Haymitch only smirks at the question.
When Gale realizes that District 12 is being bombed, he tries to evacuate everyone, but only 900 people survive.
He does not see the Mayor's daughter among them. She is presumed dead.
From the woods, they can only see smoke and ash and ruined buildings where District 12 once stood. It is unlikely anyone survived.
He realizes that despite his hatred for the Capitol and his vitriol at the system, they had, in a way, become friends. It was inevitable, he supposes, after having been as… intimate as they had been with each other. Perhaps he even cared for her.
Guilt settles deep in his belly. I should have saved her, he thinks.
He tries to forget her, all golden haired and clear, blue eyes, pink ribbons and snowy white dresses, seated at the piano, playing a sweet, sad melody, in flames. In the end, even though everyone thought Katniss was the Girl on Fire, he thought it was Madge who truly personified it.
I'm not here looking for absolution
Because I found myself an old solution
Fin
A/N: Inspired by Florence + the Machine's Bedroom Hymns. Lyrics also taken from there. Unbeta'd. Reviews are love.