Title: The Campaign

Summary: Contemporary college AU Gadge with background Everlark. Madge Undersee is dreading returning home for winter break and the kickoff of her father's campaign for governor. She's even less enthusiastic that Gale Hawthorne is home for the holidays as well.

Rating: T. Some swearing.

Disclaimer: Just playing with SC's characters.

Author's Note: (1) I tried to give up Gadge and failed. They're just too fun! I have three separate Gadge stories going right now on my computer and very little time to write anymore so I don't know if I'll get to all of them, but this one I keep coming back to... It's my first attempt at a modern AU with these characters so it's challenging in different ways than canon-ish stuff. I'm not sure how confident I feel about this story, but I figured I might as well stop agonizing and start posting.

(2) I'm purposely vague about the exact state where the characters live other than that they're in coal country in Appalachia; you can consider it a fake state in the Appalachian region.

(3) I can't make any promises about my posting frequency because of my limited time for writing and how long it takes me to polish/revise. But I always have a first draft of the whole story before I start posting as insurance that I will finish, so there's that. :)

Chapter 1: Arrival

One more exit, and then he would finally be there. Gale accelerated to the off-ramp and tried to convince himself that he was jittery from all the caffeine he'd consumed over the past two days to stay awake on the road. Twenty-five godforsaken hours in his truck with a broken stereo, with nothing but his thoughts to keep him company. Even his phone had let him down, running out of juice several states back.

Well, it didn't matter. He was almost to the campus, he'd pick her up, and it would be like old times for the rest of the drive home to Twelve Springs. Those last three hours of driving would fly in comparison to the last two days.

He followed her directions to the parking lot closest to her dorm, and luckily didn't have trouble finding a spot. It looked like most students had left already for the winter break. The few people he saw were the stragglers dodging snowflakes as they lugged suitcases to their cars.

After a moment's hesitation, he flipped down the windshield mirror to check that he didn't look too haggard, saying a prayer nobody he knew from high school would catch him primping. No, not primping. Gale Hawthorne never primped. But he hadn't seen her since June, and... he just wanted to look like he hadn't driven across half the country in two days. He'd sprung for a motel room last night—a cheap one, but luxurious compared to where he'd been living for the past six months—because he'd needed to get some real sleep, and had showered and shaved, so he was already overachieving compared to his recent standards. That's what the possibility of seeing a girl did to a guy.

He checked his breath. Minty. Should he take the flowers? He glanced at the bouquet of roses on the passenger seat and tried to picture handing them to her. Would she laugh? Think it was over the top? Desperate?

God, he was desperate. What had happened to him? That settled it: the flowers were staying in the car. If he struck out, he could claim they were to congratulate her for surviving her first set of finals in college. Not to accompany his hopefully-not-desperate proclamation.

Hopping out of the car, he stretched quickly and walked over to her dorm, a hulking concrete structure. He paused for a moment to imagine himself living here, the way he'd planned before everything went to hell. Would he have felt comfortable living in a bunker? Would he have cared? He'd probably have been as busy as she was, not actually spending much time in the dorm between classes, practice, and enjoying the freedom of no longer living at home.

Using the intercom, he buzzed her room. She didn't pick up so he tried again. Same. He hadn't been able to tell her exactly when he'd arrive; he'd just estimated midday. Maybe she was at lunch.

"Gale?"

He turned around and saw a girl he vaguely recognized from high school.

"Hey," he said. What was her name? Delly? Nelly? He remembered the other kids teasing her as "Smelly" something-or-other in elementary school, but he couldn't remember what the something-or-other was. He felt like he'd been away for ten years instead of just half of one.

"Can you believe we're done with finals?" she asked with an incredulous shake of her head as she scanned her card over the reader. "This semester just flew." Gale made an affirmative-sounding grunt and held the door for her. Fine with him if Delly Nelly assumed he was a student. "God, this place is huge! I didn't even know you were in Templesmith Hall."

"I'm not," he said as he closed the security door behind him. "Just visiting a friend."

She smiled broadly. "How were your finals?"

He made a face, starting to remember that Delly Nelly Whoever had a distinct and annoying knack for chatting your ear off if you let her. She apparently interpreted his expression as indicating that he hadn't done well and nodded sympathetically.

"Mine were tough, too."

She started rambling about a long psychology take-home exam, which he took as his cue to start moving toward the stairwell. "Sorry, but I'm late," he said, pointing helpfully to the stairs.

"No worries," she chirped. "See you around back home!"

"Yeah," he called back, letting the door slam behind him. As he climbed the stairs to the building's top floor he excused his lack of social grace as an artifact of having been away from civilization for so long. Nobody on the crew was big on chatting about tests, though he could think of a few guys even more hard up than him who might have stopped to flirt with Delly Nelly and figure out if she was single. (Or, if not single, willing to go out with them anyway.)

It was damn good to be back in reality, where the ratios of males to females wasn't astronomically high. Although, all that mattered to him was one female in particular.

He didn't know her exact room number, though luckily everyone's doors seemed to be decorated with brightly colored construction paper cut-outs of their names. It actually looked kind of juvenile. Was this college or pre-school? Maybe it was just because this was a girls' floor. She'd complained that her RA was annoying and big on community-building mumbo-jumbo.

Finally he found her door. Here at last. He said a silent prayer that her roommate was gone and indulged for a few seconds in imagining what could happen if everything went well. A reunion, a bed, privacy... All right, maybe he was getting ahead of himself.

He knocked. Nothing. A couple of girls carrying boxes walked down the hallway and he squeezed closer to the door to let them pass. One of them eyed him appreciatively and he gave her a lazy smile in return. It wasn't just good to be back in the world of women again, it was great.

But he had other concerns at the moment, and when the girls had passed he knocked again on the door. After a few seconds he heard some stumbling and grumbling, and then the door flew open.

"Greg, I told you I didn't want to talk—"

Damn it. He found himself looking at a very angry, strangely unkempt Madge Undersee. Her blond hair was a riot of tangles and she hadn't taken off her makeup from last night, leaving her looking like an angry raccoon. She was the exact last person he wanted to see. He'd been counting on her having left already.

She squinted at him, still holding the door's knob. "Gale?"

Obviously. He didn't need to answer that. Instead he took a step forward so he could get a better view of the room's interior. One side featured a rumpled bed, clothes strewn across the floor haphazardly, and photos and posters on the walls. The other side was... vacant. The bed was neatly made and no clutter was visible.

"Where's Katniss?" he asked.

Madge sighed angrily. "Hello to you, too. She called and texted you like a million times. I heard her. I thought it was overkill, but apparently not. You can't check your phone in Siberia?"

"Battery died on the drive," he said absently, not bothering to correct the Siberia crack. North Dakota was admittedly pretty damn far from Appalachia. He took a step into the room, and Madge stood back to let him walk in, probably making a nasty face at him but he didn't care. This was Katniss's dorm room, a piece of her life he wasn't familiar with, and he needed to see it.

"Come on in," Madge said sarcastically.

He ignored her and looked at the room. It was simple but downright luxurious compared to his own living conditions over the past six months. A bed to herself, a desk and chair, a simple wardrobe for clothes... Katniss didn't have many decorations up other than a promotional poster for the school's track team, and a calendar of their meets. A framed picture of her with her mom and Prim at high school graduation. No pictures of Gale, he noticed.

"She left already?" he asked, pushing back his habitual Madge-related irritation. He hated when she knew more about Katniss than he did. But Madge's promotion to roommate meant he'd lost that battle for now.

"Some kind of impromptu team retreat," Madge said with slightly less hostility. "She said someone on the team would drive her back home."

"When?"

Madge shrugged. "A few days?"

Well, how useless was she without even being able to give him basic information about Katniss's schedule? He resisted the urge to point that out when he realized Katniss must have told him herself. "Can I use your phone to check my messages?" he asked. He needed to know exactly what Katniss had said, needed to hear her tone. She'd sounded so excited when he'd called to tell her he was driving back for the holidays and could pick her up on his way. It was so rare that they could actually talk instead of trade texts... Had he read too much into her enthusiasm? Her texts had seemed so sentimental lately... What had she said that one night a few weeks ago? I miss you. Nobody else really gets me. When are you coming back?

Madge crossed to the messy side of the room, stumbling on a half-packed suitcase and kicking some clothes out of her way. She unearthed a bright turquoise purse big enough to hold a rhinoceros and pawed through it until she found her phone, which was, he observed with disgust, the exact same color as the purse.

She unlocked the phone and handed it to him with a scowl.

"Thanks," he said as he dialed in to his voice mail. His eyes floated back over to Madge. She was usually so prim and put-together. Is this what college had done to her? Turned her into a mess? Revealed the mess she'd been all along? And what was that thing she was wearing? It was like a fancy white slip, lacy and silky and just barely covering her torso. Like a bra that had grown a skirt that barely qualified as a skirt.

"Nice dress," he said with a smirk. He couldn't help himself. Old habit.

Madge's mascara-smudged eyes widened in alarm. She darted to her closet and threw on a navy hooded sweatshirt with the university's logo emblazoned across the front. Just the fringe of her dress/slip/nightgown dangled below the sweatshirt. The effect was still pretty arousing, although admittedly he'd been living almost exclusively in the company of men since leaving home so his standards weren't all that high. Still, he could appreciate her legs objectively. Those were some pretty damn perfect legs, which was also annoying. Like it wasn't enough that she was rich and didn't have to worry about how to pay for college—or anything for that matter—she also had to have great legs. And from what he'd seen before she put that sweatshirt on, great everything else.

He keyed in his passcode at the prompt and winced at the number of messages he'd missed. His mom telling him their schedule for the weekend so he'd know where to find them if they weren't at home when he got there. Posy reporting that one of her teeth was loose.

Katniss.

"Gale, I'm really, really sorry, but something came up. Coach invited some of us to a retreat at the university cabin to talk about training next semester and I really need to go, so it won't work out for you to pick me up. Call me to let me know you got this."

"Me again. Haven't heard from you and wanted to be sure you weren't taking a big detour to pick me up from school. I don't want to make your trip any longer than it already is. I really hope you get this message in time. Maybe you're in an area with bad coverage or can't pick up on the highway. Can't wait to see you back home."

"Hi. Trying again. I'm not sure what your driving schedule is, but hopefully you get this before having to turn off the freeway. We're driving up to the cabin now. They tell me the cell reception is crap so I won't be able to talk. I really hope you get these messages. I'll be back home on Tuesday. We can catch up then. Talk to you soon."

That was the last one. Apologetic, but not necessarily longing for him. That last message had sounded kind of formal; she'd probably been with her team. When else would Katniss say "catch up" like they were old ladies who'd missed a gossip session? What happened to the old Katniss who'd call him at all hours of the day to see if he was free to go for a run? All she'd say then was, "Ready to get your ass kicked into next Thursday? Five a.m. by the broken fence. No excuses."

Well, he knew why she wouldn't say that anymore. His damn knee. She really would kick his ass into next Thursday. Hell, next month. She was varsity at the university and he wasn't even running anymore.

He looked up and noticed Madge waiting for him. Impatiently.

"Did she say anything about—" He cut himself off. He'd been about to ask if Katniss had said anything about him, but he refused to be pitiful. Especially in front of Madge Undersee. "Never mind," he muttered, handing the phone back to her. "Thanks."

Madge surprised him with a question. "Where were you again, exactly? I know it was out west."

"North Dakota."

"Doing some new type of mining?"

He nodded, feeling defensive again. She had to know about the mining because of her father, and he suspected she knew more about him through Katniss than she was letting on. He fought another flare of jealousy that she knew so much more about Katniss than he did now.

He noticed some shots of Katniss in the photographs above Madge's desk and picked his way through the chaos to study them. There were a lot of Katniss and Madge, like he expected. Katniss looked happy, usually smiling. He felt a pang that he'd missed out on what seemed to be a happy phase of her life, but mostly he was glad she'd been able to enjoy herself. She'd been so serious in high school, so focused on training and getting a scholarship, which she'd done. She deserved to enjoy the rewards of all her hard work. He was proof that things didn't always work out for everyone.

"Who's this guy?" he asked Madge, pointing at a blond kid who was in a lot of the pictures.

"One of my friends from my high school."

The blond kid looked awfully smiley. Kind of goofy. That sort of levity annoyed Gale. Although maybe his irritation was also because the blond kid with his arm around Katniss in that one picture. He also had his arm around Madge, though, so maybe it was one of those "everyone smile, I'm taking a picture!" shots. Maybe they were drunk, which was also weird to think about. Katniss had always been so strict about her training regimen in high school. No drinking, no partying, no dating.

"She dating anyone?" he asked before he could stop himself. The need to know outweighed having to ask Madge Undersee.

Madge hesitated, which was not the answer he'd been hoping for. Or expecting. "I don't know," she said.

He glared at her. Nothing other than a full-throated, automatic "No" would have been acceptable.

"The end of the term gets a little crazy," she explained. "Finals parties, people blowing off steam..." He took her in disarrayed appearance and suspected she was speaking from personal experience. "I haven't seen her much the past week." Then Madge stood a little straighter and glared at him again. "Anyway, it's her business. Talk to her yourself."

He would if he could, but instead he was left scraping for whatever tidbits of information he could glean from Madge. What was wrong with the world? He glared back at Madge, wishing he could legitimately blame her for everything that had gone wrong in his life over the past year. The knee surgery, losing his scholarship, coming up with a Plan B in North Dakota that took him away from everything he knew...

"I need to keep packing," Madge said coldly, clearly trying to get rid of him.

He snorted. "Looks like you need to start packing." His arrival had clearly been the only reason she dragged her sorry self from her bed. He knew a hangover when he saw one. "You were sleeping it off, Princess." Possibly not alone, at least earlier, if he were to guess. Unless rich girls always slept in skimpy lingerie in their dorm rooms. Apparently college had also loosened her up.

"Good-bye," she said firmly, moving to hold the door open for him.

He shot her a snide look and walked out.