Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine.
Diamond Girl
AN: This is part of the 'Madge in the Games' story, Gale's POV. I'm considering making it a full story eventually.
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A cold sweat and a white hot terror wake Gale from his restless sleep. He sits up, pressing his hands to his eyes to try and rid himself of the image that had been haunting his nights since the last Reaping.
Madge Undersee, lifeless and cold.
Sometimes it was her actual death, at the hands of the Gamemakers or by the blade of one of the others, usually the girls from Two. Other times it was her arriving home in a box. A wooden creation from Seven, her name carved into the top alongside a daisy. Neither image was any better than the other.
It's his guilty conscious eating him up, he knows that, but he'd left the chance to clear it in the hall of the Justice Hall when he'd decided against going in to see her.
Getting up, he won't be able to get back to sleep anyway, Gale goes into the living room and switches on the television. It flickers to life and he's comforted to find there've been no more deaths. Madge is alive.
A long sigh escapes his chest.
Gale hadn't expected to ever hear Madge Undersee's name pass through Effie Trinket's unnaturally shaded lips, no one had. It was unthinkable. She, above all people, should've been safe.
It did get called though, clear as possible, unmistakable over the sound system.
She'd looked stunned for a moment, her eyes widened and her pale lips parted, before she'd looked around at the girls backing steps away from her. That had been her confirmation.
Shaking her head, clearing it of any lingering doubts, she swallowed hard and nodded to herself, almost imperceptibly, before taking her first step away from the group.
He watched as she stepped out from the sixteen year old girls, her blonde hair pulled back from her bloodless face and slowly made the death march up to the stage, to where her father stood speechless and Haymitch Abernathy sat with a look of horror on his lined face.
They'd whisked her away, after calling up the unfortunate boy tribute and reading the Treaty, to the Justice Hall. Gale had thought about going in to see her, to apologize for his snippy comment about her name not being called, but he'd stopped in the hall, stared at the door and battled something in himself. It was too late for making amends, there just wasn't enough time, he finally decided.
He regretted it later, when he stood with his family in the Square and watched the Tribute Parade.
It hadn't been too late, he'd just been too scared of what she would say, how she would make him feel.
Looking at her, draped in dark colors and smoldering against the dark of the Capitol night, a cloud of embers dancing around her pale hair, he realized that telling her he was sorry would've let Madge, someone who had so much poise and grace, even as she faced certain death, power over him. She would've had the power to deny him the closure of acceptance.
Instead, he'd denied himself.
So he'd watched closely, a little too closely if Rory was to be listened to, as she gave her interview.
She glowed, soft and ethereal, and Gale couldn't help but think that there was no way her looks alone wouldn't get her enough Sponsors to carry her to a Victory.
It took him several minutes of staring, watching the light dance off her dress, reflect the flashes from the crowd at strange angles, to realize what she'd turned into.
A diamond.
A strange transformation, one Gale doubted the Capitolites would understand, but one ingrained into the people of Twelve.
"Pressure and heat, when applied to our coal creates something beautiful, children," Gale's first teacher had told them, offering up a cheap imitation stone for their examination. "No matter how small our part may seem, without District Twelve, there would be no diamonds. We are important."
Over the years Gale had scoffed at that. He doubted the Capitol made diamonds with the tons of coal they demanded from Twelve, but watching Madge in her diamond dress, a vacant smile and a hollow laugh for Caesar Flickerman, he finally appreciates the lesson.
Madge was another piece of stolen coal, and the intense scrutiny of the Capitol was transforming her into something shiny. They even give her a silly nickname, the ridiculous moniker 'The Diamond Girl'.
In the pit of his stomach, Gale hoped it was only the outside that was changing, that deep down, just like the diamonds, Madge was still what she'd been when they'd taken her away.
"She's gorgeous," Vick had said, his gray eyes wide and focused on the girl that was so familiar, but such a stranger.
"Too bad she's going to die," Rory had added.
"Shut up," Gale snapped.
Rory's eyebrows had risen, his mouth turned down. "What's your problem? I'm just pointing out the obvious. She's a little Town girl. She hasn't got a chance."
As true as Rory's statement had been, Gale hadn't wanted to hear it. He couldn't handle hearing it.
He knew Madge wasn't going to be coming back, at least not alive, but thinking about her inevitable end was strangely painful. Part of him hoped that her shiny shell, her diamond coat, would be enough to preserve her, to keep her from what everyone expected.
Just like her Reaping had been a surprise, Gale hoped her Victory would be as well.
He doubted it though.
"She's a good person," Katniss had said as they'd sat and watched for squirrels the day before the Games started. "I should've said goodbye."
"Yeah," was all Gale had been able to answer back as he'd watched her let out a breath and then her arrow fly, hitting the squirrel through the eye. There were no goodbyes for either him or Katniss in their future. They'd forfeited that luxury.
He'd picked a bucket of strawberries after that, telling Katniss they were for Posy, but dropping them off on the Mayor's back porch instead when they parted and Katniss headed to the bakery to talk to the youngest son. Peeta Mellark had apparently harbored a crush on Katniss for some time, and Madge's Reaping had spurred him to tell her.
"You never know what's up ahead," he'd told her.
Despite her dislike of that kind of entanglement, Katniss seemed to indulge him, stopping by the bakery after hunting to talk to him.
"He's right," is all she'd told Gale when he'd asked why she continued to talk to Mellark.
Madge's mother, a wispy looking woman with pale hair had come out at his knock, seconds after he'd run off and hidden.
She'd frowned, looked around for the unseen guest for a few seconds before the bucket had caught her notice. Delicately, she'd picked it up, smiling strangely down at her find before looking around again.
"Thank you," Gale heard her tell the wind before taking the strawberries with her into the house.
Gale had decided that even if he was never going to get the chance to make amends with Madge for his thoughtlessness, he could at least keep her parents in strawberries for as long as he was able. It was the least he could do.
The next day, as he'd stood in the Square, hot and uncomfortable, holding an antsy Posy, Gale's doubtfulness had received its first chip.
Madge was brilliant, running from the fray without looking back and quickly beginning her search for water.
"That was so smart," Vick had said, his eyes wide in awe. "How did she know there'd be water there?"
"Bees nest near water," Gale had answered.
Madge knew more about surviving than Gale had thought it had seemed.
When she dropped the nest of angry Tracker Jackers on the obnoxious Careers only a short time later, cleverly using a smoke screen to cover her tracks, Gale had actually smiled. She had a chance. He wouldn't have thought it, no one would've, but she was proving them wrong, one day at a time, one unseen move after another.
That had been the second chip in his lack of faith.
It was while watching her quietly planning, sitting in the middle of the deadly, Gamemaker created forest and devising her next move, that the third chip began to emerge.
Gale watched as she emptied the contents of her pot, puzzlingly her only gift from her Sponsors, then filled it with what Gale easily recognized as nightlock. Her plan was indecipherable right up until the idiot boy from One took the bate.
The boy, Marvel, which Gale thought was a stupid name, chased Madge. To anyone on the outside watching, this was clearly part of her plan, though what that plan was, no one seemed to know.
"She's thought this through," Mellark had told Prim, comforting her as she cried on Katniss' shoulder. "She wants him to chase her. This is part of her plan."
"And what a plan it is," the horrible girl, Miss Alameda, who'd come to prep Madge's family and friends had smiled wickedly, green lips stretched out exposing her unnaturally white teeth. "She'll do so well with us. Assuming she lives, of course."
"You don't think she will?" Prim asked teary eyed. "I thought you liked her?"
"I don't know her," Alameda answered simply. "I'm not attached to people I meet through the television, you shouldn't be either."
"We know Madge," Katniss pointed out, her expression dark as she narrowed her eyes at the girl, dislike oozing from her pores.
Alameda idly twirled a lock of her mossy hair and chuckled. "You did."
It took a considerable amount of Gale's self-control not to question what that meant, mostly because he was fairly certain he already knew.
Over the agonizing course of the Game he'd watched the quiet, kind girl he'd helped sell strawberries to change. Or maybe, he thought with a flare of worry, she'd never been any of those things. Maybe he'd misjudged her. Maybe the Capitol wasn't using its force and heat to turn her, maybe she'd always been one of their fake stones, hidden under the coal dust of Twelve's air.
Or, worse yet, maybe they were truly transforming her, right down to her core. Maybe they were turning her into a nearly translucent gem, beautiful but empty.
He refused to voice his concern.
Mellark shook his head. "She's playing the Game. It's her strategy. She's only letting them see the part of her that's going to help her survive."
As little faith as Gale had in Mellark and his guesses, he wanted to believe him. He needed to believe him. Madge Undersee needed to come home.
It was selfish, his reason for wanting her to come home. He needed to make amends with her, absolve himself if the dark feeling he'd been wallowing in since her name had been called. He'd been wrong, and he needed to make up for his thoughtlessness, somehow, someway. Taking strawberries to her parents wasn't enough.
As he watches her plotting again, in some far off artificial forest, the eyes of the nation on her and wondering what the clever girl from Twelve has up her sleeve, his eyes drop from the screen.
Whether she'd been a hardened diamond coated in dust or soft lump of coal yet to be pressed into something beautiful before these Games, the Madge fighting for her life right in front of him is neither now. She's simply broken.
He can see it in her eyes, dull and heavy with the knowledge of what she has to do if she wants to make it home. Gale can see the hopelessness, the resignation, hidden under layers of grime and grease, and covers his eyes to blind himself to it. He can't watch her give up. He won't.
When he looks up she's stood, her face set in determination as she heads out with her stolen spear and a poorly made sack. She hasn't given up yet.
If she comes back, Gale thinks wearily- when she comes back, he corrects himself, he'll make it up to her.
He'll bring her berries everyday, any kind she likes. He won't say one rude word to her, not again. Gale will make up for his thoughtless words and coldness, she hadn't deserved it then, and the creature that will hopefully return will most definitely not deserve it.
Gale hadn't expected to hear Madge's name at the Reaping, and no one expected to hear it at the close of the Games, but just like that warm day a lifetime ago, he knows by the expression on her face that she'll shock them all again.
This time, Gale knows he won't squander his chance to apologize. If she throws it in his face he deserves it, and he'll live with that, but she should get that opportunity.
She may not be able to absolve him of the guilt aching in his chest, he may be the only one with the ability to that, but he thinks he'll start with strawberries.
His brothers come in an hour later, followed by his mother and a doughy eyed Posy, right before Madge makes history.
The spear wobbles in the air, dropping the stones she'd placed in the sack onto the ground and sending earth into the dark sky. As deafening as the sound is, filtered through the poor audio of the television and the miles between Twelve and the Capitol, Gale can only imagine how painfully loud it must be for Madge, how hot and suffocated she must feel.
It isn't until the ground around where the Careers had been stills, the last of the dirt falls from the air and an uncomfortable silence fills the arena, that Gale hears the thunder of cannons.
Then Claudius Templesmith's voice comes over the airwaves, clear and crisp with excitement.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present the Victor of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games, from District Twelve, Miss Magdalene Undersee!"
Gale watches as they pluck Madge from the arena, squints at the television, hoping that the only girl that comes back is the one that bought his strawberries and not the Capitol's Diamond Girl. He can only make up for his mistakes with one of them.