Madge wakes up alone and confused.

The last she remembers, she was bleeding out to death in the Everdeen's kitchen. Then she remembers being picked up and carried by someone. And now, she's here — in a pristine white room laying down in a white bed. There's one window, by the door, and a row of two or three chairs to her right. She squints against the bright light, trying to figure out where she is and what happened.

Her first thought is that she's in the Capitol. Her heart drops. It's so obvious. Clearly, the Capitol had sent peacekeepers to round up the last stragglers in District 12. But that still didn't explain why she's alive and being taken care of in what seems to be a hospital room. Perhaps they wanted her in good health before torturing information out of her?

That didn't make any sense, either. She knew next to nothing about Katniss' grand arena exit, and even less about the apparent conspiracy between Haymitch Abernathy and the other victors.

Her vision is blurry at the ends and when she moves, her movements are made jerkily and slowly. Her thoughts are coming to her at an alarmingly slow rate, and when she tries to speak, her words come out all slurred. She feels a very, very dull pain in her legs and across her abdomen and she is reminded of the dog attack. How had she gone from foraging to dying to being in the Capitol all within the matter of a few days at most?

She slowly moves her fingers to the tube taped to her forearm, and she wonders what the Capitol had done to her to make her feel this way. She feels like a ragdoll, like she's boneless and mindless.

She absent-mindedly traces the tube with her fingers, and very slowly comes to the realization that there's a clear liquid being injected into the vein. Madge moves her fingers away with a grimace and begins trying to figure out what is in the tube.

After a few minutes, she looks up to the wall and catches sight of herself in a mirror. Madge sees her face, sallow and gray. Her eyes travel the rest of her face: her sunken-in cheekbones, her chapped lips, her dark eye bags. Her gaze ends at the blue eyes staring back at her. Her eyes. Madge's eyes, even when she was starving and dehydrated, had always been bright. But now, they're grayish, dull, and glazed over.

Like her mother's.

She feels her heartbeat spiking. She looks back over at the tube in her arm. Morphling.

Madge has seen what it does to people. Not just her mother, but people in the Seam who suffered mining accidents. They become a shell of themselves. They're enslaved to the drug. And Madge will not allow herself to do that, even if she's in the Capitol and death is probable at this point.

She reaches down and jerks the tube away from her. Madge has to pull twice before it finally comes free.

Madge sits back in the bed for a few moments, waiting for her mind to clear back up. Once it does, she begins working out ways to escape. Her mother once told her a story of how a boy from District 4 tried escaping from the Capitol the day before he was to be sent into the arena by climbing through the vents. And he would've made it too, if his District partner hadn't ratted him out.

Maybe Madge can try to do the same.

She pushes herself off the bed and slides her legs off the side of the bed, preparing to stand. Madge attempts to stand up and walk, but falls to her knees the second she tries. From the morphling in her system, everything still feels numb and off-center, but she does feel as if something else is off. She just can't tell what.

Madge tries standing one more time and is successful, though she does feel off-balance. But the moment she tried to put her left leg down on the ground and start walking, she falls again.

This time, Madge remains on the ground and reaches over to take a good look at her left leg. She draws her knee to her chest, trying to figure out the source of the issue. She looks down past her knee... and sees nothing.

Someone is screaming, and Madge doesn't realize it's her until her throat feels sore.

She shrieks and her hands instantly reach for her left leg that now ends in a stump right under her knee. The stump is wrapped in white bandages and gauze. Madge is screaming as her hands pat the space that used to be taken up by her calve. All thoughts of escape have been forgotten as Madge stares, screaming and shocked, at her missing leg. They chopped off her leg so she couldn't escape? That doesn't make any sort of sense.

In an instant, the doors shove open, and two females dressed in gray nursing scrubs dart into the room. They don't look like Capitolites, with their natural colored hair and skin, but they have to be. The women are trying to tell her something, but Madge can't hear them over her screaming.

The women shove her back to the bed roughly, and one of them begins trying to reinject the tube into her while the other runs out of the room.

"Relax, Miss," the woman trying to inject the tube hisses.

Madge stops screaming but begins clawing at the woman's hands. "Get that away from me!" she thrashes. "Get it away! Stop it!"

The woman grunts, dropping the tube in her hands. She holds Madge down to the bed with both hands and looks over her shoulder. "Annette, hurry up! I need help!" The woman looks down at Madge, her graying hair messed from the struggle. "Honey, please calm down for me. You're safe. You're in District 13, and we're going to take good care of you."

Madge pauses momentarily out of confusion. District 13?

The nurse who had run out of the room before, apparently 'Annette', returns with a syringe in her hand. Two other women are behind her. Together, the four ladies hold down a shrieking and thrashing Madge Undersee.

The gray-haired woman who had been trying to inject the morphling into her looks over at the nurse holding to the syringe sharply. "Annette, hurry up and inject her!"

Annette nods fervently and brings the syringe down to Madge. Madge feels the needle piercing her flesh, and then she can no longer move.

She can, however, still talk.

And so she curses like a miner as she feels the gray-haired nurse prodding her forearm with that goddamned morphling tube. She feels herself driting asleep — no doubt a result of the injection — and the nurses begin soothing her with their words.

"Don't you worry, honey," a nurse says, "You're here safe in District 13, and you'll be just fine."

And as she begins to submit to the heaviness of her eyelids, Madge whispers a soft, almost comical:

"What the fuck."


It's been a few days since Madge was rescued from District 12, and it's been the most eventful few days Gale has experienced since arriving at District 13.

And it becomes very clear to Gale, as the days pass, that the Madge he knew once isn't the Madge he sees now. It's hard for him to connect the giddy, laughing Madge he remembers from after Katniss and Peeta won their first Games to the limp, bloody girl that had dangled like a ragdoll from his arms.

Though Madge's no longer in that state — but rather cleaned up, in a District 13 hospital bed, and hooked up to several IV's — it's still hard to imagine that the Madge he knew and the girl before him are the same girl. He's had this feeling since he boarded the hovercraft, for it was only then he had the chance to take a really good look at her. Yes, if he tried hard enough, he could make out that the blood-encrusted girl lying on the kitchen floor was Madge, but it had been difficult.

Madge's arrival to District 13 — though she had been drifting in and out of consciousness and Gale doubts she'd ever remember it — had caused a big stir amongst the District 12 refugees. At lunch, there were murmurs and whispers amongst the surviving citizens of District 12. Greasy Sae had even walked up to him and asked if the rumors were true. If the Mayor's daughter had really survived for that long.

Gale had tipped his head into a nod and told the older woman that Madge wasn't out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.

The District 13 doctor assigned to looking after Madge said that her wounds looked like they were caused by some wild dog or young bear. And whatever it was that attacked her must've been sick, for infection had already set in and Madge was running a high fever and frothing at the mouth when she arrived. The doctor — Dr. Gunter — had told him and Katniss that though her most severe wounds were to her left leg, he discovered several punctures peppered about her torso and arms.

He also discovered several messily stitched wounds, which he had said probably saved her from bleeding out.

Despite her other wounds that needed attention, the doctor's main concern was for her left leg. The skin was completely shredded in some areas, and in others, you could see the bone. The dog must've landed a particularly devasting bite to Madge's leg because one bite managed to damage the actual bone of Madge's leg. There were several bite wounds on her thigh, but they were showing signs of a promising recovery. But from the knee down...

Combine all that with the fact that infection had been present since she arrived, and the thought of amputation was being seriously considered.

Eventually, the left leg had to be amputated from the knee down.

And now, as Gale looks at Madge from across the hospital room, he doesn't recognize her.

She isn't the same girl who had once giggled in the woods as she held up a strawberry the size of her fist. She isn't the same girl who would whisper all sorts of rebellious secrets to him. She isn't the same girl who had once worked his fingers over her piano keys or danced in the Square when Katniss and Peeta won their first Games. That Madge had been full of life and reminded him of sunshine in every way.

The Madge he sees now is different (and understandably so). She's here in front of him, laying on her District 13 hospital bed, but she feels as if she's a hundred miles away.

She's awake, and has been for a while, but she's dead silent and has been for a long time.

When they received news that she had woken up and promptly attacked the nurses watching her, they waited for her to regain consciousness. When she awoke the second time — this time restrained to the bed — he and Katinss had come to visit her. They weren't exactly sure what to bring for someone in the hospital, so they brought nothing. Madge looked exceptionally surprised to see Katniss, and Gale suddenly remembered that Madge still thought she was dead.

Her eyes were wide and almost scared.

Katniss had nodded, apparently understanding. "I know," she had said.

Katniss then bent down to hug Madge and kissed her cheek. Madge didn't return either, though Gale couldn't tell whether or not that was due to her restraints. When it was Gale's turn to greet her, he wasn't sure what to tell her. Their relationship had been strange back in District 12, but he had thought they were friends. Well, then she had to go ahead and kiss him and then he found out about the whole morphling thing, and now he was confused again.

Finally, he settled on a, "I'm glad you're okay."

Madge had nodded and then smiled. Then after a few minutes, she asked, "Are we really in District 13?" She looked down as much as she could to her leg that was covered with a blanket. "And is my leg really gone? And can you please, please get this out of me." She had looked down at the morphling tube.

Katniss and Gale had done their best to explain everything to her as well as why the doctors are hooking her up to the morphling for just the next few days, but with her morphling-induced haze, Madge didn't really understand what they were telling her. Eventually, she decided she was too tired for all this and wanted to take a nap.

That happened yesterday. Today, when they attempted to visit her, she hadn't uttered a single word to either of them. She apparently speaks with the nurses frequently, but not them. The doctor told them that their presence may remind Madge of what she's lost.

Katniss soon left after she realized Madge wanted to be left alone, but Gale decided to stay. When he had his whipping incident, he had wanted everyone to leave him alone too. But looking back on it, he didn't know what he'd do if his mother hadn't been with him every step of the way.

So he decided to stay with her, at least until she's somewhat stable. And since this decision, she's been thinking.

Just thinking. He knows that she isn't taking the loss of her leg well, nor is she really understanding the fact that she's in District 13. She refuses to acknowledge his presence and just stares up at the ceiling, her face bearing no emotion. Her eyes, however, are full of contemplation.

He wonders what she's thinking about. He had asked her once too, but received no answer.

But at the end of the day, she's alive. And that in and of itself is more than Gale could've asked for.