"Madge." The urgent but gentle voice in my ear brings me softly back to consciousness. "Madge, wake up."
"What?" I roll over onto my other side, facing him, so that I can see what's wrong. He is watching me with that dark, serious look that still gives me butterflies. Although he seems to be about to chastise me for falling asleep – I can't quite remember our situation yet through my grogginess but I have a vague sense that we're not supposed to be here right now, wherever here is – it looks like he hasn't been totally awake; his dark brown hair is tousled and there is a slight shadow under his eyes.
"We only have an hour. Don't spend it sleeping."
My surroundings slowly come into focus – we're in the Hawthornes' living room, on the split-open leather couch – and I smile, remembering. It's the winter solstice, and I managed to sneak out and meet him here around two hours ago. Well, it wasn't really sneaking; my mother's headaches are getting worse, and my father is rarely ever home (when he is, he spends most of his time in his office anyway). But it still felt strange and good to be doing something without their knowledge, something I would never have had the courage or the reason to do before now. Such is my relationship with Gale; he feels dangerous, but safe at the same time, and I'm not sure if he is making me better or leading me down the wrong path but at the moment I don't care. Because he is sitting beside me and in this moment I feel as happy as I ever could in such a volatile time.
"Hey, I wasn't the only one to doze off." I nudge him softly, and he smiles a little.
"Yeah, well. Get up, you almost missed the sunset."
He's right; the room, with its lights turned off, has grown considerably darker than before I lost consciousness, threatening to engulf us in complete shadow. I sit up and go over to the metal-paned window, grasping Gale's hand and dragging him over as well. The sky is brilliantly colored, streaked with orange and yellow and a trace of violet, all of these seeming far too bright and cheerful for the somber winter's day and the ground and trees blanketed with snow. I squeeze Gale's hand and meet his eyes for a moment, then look away, still shy. He squeezes back and the pressure is more than of friendship. It hints at hope and possibly things to come.
"Don't you think it's pretty?"
"Yeah. I guess." He's not one for beauty, at least the natural kind. As he reminds me constantly, you, Madge Undersee, are the only thing of beauty for hundreds of miles. Not too much of a compliment, but I know what he means. And I guess that he is probably thinking of that beauty as he nods his assent.
He puts his arm around my shoulder, and I allow myself a moment to just feel safe, feel loved. I've never been one to fool myself with thoughts of marriage or even being fancied, but at least now it's different. Now I can partly that which I never dared to consider. As if sensing my thoughts, he stoops over to give me a kiss on the forehead, and I can feel myself blushing.
"So, Madge. Happy Christmas," he says.
"Christmas? I thought that was later?" I ask, my brow creasing. "Besides, no one even celebrates it anymore."
"True. Then happy Solstice, or winter, or whatever you want to call it. Do you feel what it's doing to us?"
"To us?"
"Yes, to us. To everyone. There's something about winter…I can't put my finger on it…" He is staring out the window distractedly. "It's like we're supposed to have joy, to hope. Even though winter is a time of death. It must be those old customs."
I nod, because I know what he means, at least a bit. "We should be mourning," I answer, "and I don't know, I still am, sort of." These kinds of talks often confuse me and I'm not sure what he means, but I'm getting better. Better at understanding Gale's mind and how he operates and how he wants people to think. "But I can't be sad, not entirely."
"Me, neither." He is silent for a moment, and I watch his face, mentally tracing all of the lines and dips and slight changes in skin coloration. I used to think I knew everything about Gale, just from watching him nearly every day at school – I can admit that to myself now, how I admired him for a distance pretty much constantly – but now that we're together, sort of, I have truly noticed most parts of him, the ones most people would just skim over. The way he frowns in concentration before speaking. The short hairs at the nape of his neck that always manage to avoid the shears, just as dark as the hair on the rest of his body. His eyes, grey and clouded but piercing at the same time, as if he is both looking through you and at you. He finishes his concentration and turns back to look at me. I make myself meet his eyes, not caring that much if he noticed me noticing because that's what I do and he has gotten used to that.
"Sometimes I think it would better to not be part of this, to…just be somewhere else and not have to worry about it anymore. And sometimes I feel like I want to be at the heart of it, out there fighting the Capitol and making them pay for all the hell they've put us through for so long." As he says this, his voice rises slightly, and I brace myself for the fire in his eyes; I don't tell him, but he begins to scare me again whenever he talks like this, about the Capitol and the rebellion and the Hunger Games. But his voice quickly falls again, and he regains his quiet composure, still looking at me. "It would be so easy to go, so easy, and I've half a mind to leave right now. But…" He trails off.
"But what?" I ask, feeling small below those grey eyes.
The corners of his mouth rise just slightly. "But I can't really do that, can I? Because of you. I can't leave you, Madge."
The blush creeps back up my face again, heating my cheeks, and I look away. But he gently presses my chin up, making me look back at him. "I mean that," he says, and I can tell from his tone that he's not lying. "I love you, Madge."
"I…I love you too," I say, and know that this too is the truth. He smiles wider, and bends down to give me a long and lingering kiss.
"So don't," I say, finding the bravery to speak again. "Don't leave. Stay here and get buried under the snow with me."
His eyes twinkle. "Is that a suggestion?" he says.
"No, it's an order," I reply, smiling at him teasingly.
"All right then," he says. "Let's go get coats on."
"What –" I start to say, confused, but he's already dashed from the room. A moment later he returns, two coats draped over his arm: one is his warm leather-and-wool hunting jacket, which I of course recognize instantly (having admittedly spend several fall evenings snuggled underneath it), and the other looks to belong to one of Gale's siblings, or possibly his mother, a nice one with only a few patches and fake bits of fur (or maybe they're real, I wouldn't know) around the hood. He chuckles at my astonishment. "Snow, you said, right? Let's get going. There's only so long before the world ends."
I can't help but giggle, and his face although still retaining the seriousness that makes him Gale has softened considerably as he helps me put the coat on. I think about protesting, but know that his family won't mind the borrowing of their coat; they've shown me nothing but kindness in the past months and seem to like me well enough. I zip up the front as he puts his hunting jacket on, and soon we are bundled up and heading outside.
The sun has nearly left the sky, and all the colors are gone except a lingering bit of scarlet almost touching the ground far away. He guides me to a patch of ground adjacent to a couple of scrawny pine trees, where the snow is just deep enough to reach my knees. "Come on," he says, and we both lie down, sinking into the soft opalescent surface. I can't see him – the snow gets in the way – but I feel his hand clutching mine and sense his breathing inches away. I imagine that I can hear his heartbeat as well, a muffled thumping almost lined up with mine but just a bit slower. And we stay there as that last bit of red drains from the sky, silent as thick wet snowflakes descent from the dark oblivion to cover us in their sparkling weight. For this moment, at least, I feel like the troubles of the rebellion and the oncoming war are miles away, unable to break through our protective barriers of snow, and we are safe here for an interminable time because we are holding on to each other. This, of course, isn't true, is very far from being true, but I make a mental promise to myself to never let this moment fade away even in the heat of violence because it's so very important for me to remember that I am not always so fragile.