A/N: I'm still not quite back up to full speed on updates, but I'm getting a little closer.
thanks to english5672 for the pre-read and to dandelionsunset for the beta. Here's a short Lemon Gadge for you.
Chapter 28—training
Gale stood at the edge of the Meadow before sunrise, game bag and a blanket slung over his shoulder, and waited impatiently for Madge. She'd been on his mind non-stop. Like any 18-year-old guy, Gale was very familiar with how it felt to desire somebody. But he'd never anticipated how intoxicating it felt to be desired. Madge wanted him. All of him. She wanted his anger, his passion, his body and his mind.
Yes, other girls at school found him attractive. He knew that if he'd ever wanted female company, he would not have to look too hard. But those girls were mostly interested in his surface, his appearance. Worse, some of them saw Gale as a potential provider. He'd spent the last few years taking care of his family. He wasn't looking for new obligations.
Madge, on the other hand, didn't want a provider or arm candy. Madge wanted a partner, an equal. She understood his anger towards the Capitol, gave him focus for it. She shared his desire to push back against the world. It felt like some missing piece had fallen into place inside him. In Madge, Gale felt like he'd found a soulmate.
Any doubt he may have had about whether he truly belonged with Madge vanished when she'd mentioned a few days ago that Katniss and Peeta had started holding hands at lunch. Gale waited for the familiar jealousy to kick in.
It didn't. He worried for Katniss' sake (did she have to pick a guy from the most dysfunctional family in the entire district?). He privately harbored doubts that Peeta had the fortitude to handle Katniss. But the jealousy had been replaced by relief at no longer needing to chase something he could never catch.
He understood now why Madge kept herself hidden behind a sheet of blond hair. Most Merchant folks were very fair, like Prim—blond hair, head to toe, and blue eyes. Madge, on the the hand, really didn't look like anybody else in Twelve. She had dark eyebrows and eyelashes that framed her brown eyes. She had shell-pink lips and a bow-shaped mouth. She wasn't just pretty—Madge was memorably beautiful.
A few days earlier, in a stolen moment after school, he confessed to her, "I can't decide if I'm upset that you hide that body under those ugly dresses, or relieved that nobody else is going to start eyeballing you."
Her eyes had sparkled at him. "I like the idea that my body is your secret."
Oh, he liked the sound of that. "Say that again," he'd growled.
She'd stood on tiptoes and whispered in his ear, "My body is your secret, Gale."
It made him want to bury himself balls-deep inside of her. He'd gone to the Hob that afternoon to see if anybody had condoms.
Birth control was mostly banned in the Districts, but Peacekeepers had access to condoms and other forms of birth control. (The Capitol didn't want its lapdogs having kids with any of the locals. Babies and families had a bad habit of interfering with Peacekeeper loyalty to their employer.) Some of the Peacekeepers sold their condoms to traders in the Hob, who re-sold them at a healthy profit.
Nobody had any for sale at the moment. Ripper raised an eyebrow at him when he'd asked, but didn't ask for details. "Talk to Amando, let him know you're lookin'."
Amando was one of the few old men in the District. He bought and sold scrap metal, plus other odds and ends. He had the arrow point mold that had belonged to Katniss' grandfather. When Gale asked him about condoms, Amando gave him a long, icy stare. "Son, if you're fuckin' the Everdeen girl, you start runnin' now. I'll give you to the count of three."
The Hob traders were all very protective of Katniss. They'd certainly respected her father and grandfather. More importantly, though, they'd admired the nerve of the scrawny, socially backwards girl who'd single-handedly saved her family from starvation.
Gale met the old man's eyes with a level stare. "I'm not with Katniss. We're hunting partners, nothing more." Not strictly accurate—they were also best friends—but it was an answer that Amando would understand to mean I'm not sleeping with Katniss, and I'm not cheating on her by sleeping with somebody else.
The answer satisfied Amando, but he didn't have any condoms to sell. "Come back the day after the next Capitol train. Might be I have some then."
Gale would come back. Until then, well, there were other things he and Madge could do.
Madge arrived on time, dressed like she had been last week—hair pulled back, jeans, enormous, ugly jacket. As soon as she reached him, they silently headed towards the tree line. They had barely crawled their way under the fence when Gale impatiently reached for her. He was already hard.
He kissed her fiercely, his tongue demanding entrance. She willingly obliged, kissing him back with just as much passion.
After a moment, she broke off the kiss to breathlessly ask, "Aren't we going to the clearing?"
"Eventually."
Madge took the blanket from his shoulder and snapped it open. She knelt down on it as she shrugged off her canvas jacket. Gale knelt down right behind her and started kissing the back of her neck. He ran his hands up over the front of her shirt and cupped both of her breasts. She arched her back, pushing her ass right onto his cock. Gale swore.
Madge pulled away from him, gave him a sly glance at him over her shoulder, then stripped her clothes off with no hesitation. Moments later, she lay down on the blanket before him, completely naked, her knees together and slightly bent.
Unlike last week, when she'd bossed him around while they got undressed, Madge seemed to be giving Gale the opportunity to do as he pleased. He knelt down next to her, reached behind her with one hand and took out the elastic holding her hair back in a pony tail. He spread her hair out around her head.
Madge was glorious. She had full breasts tipped with pink nipples, a high narrow waist, and curvy hips that rounded down to shapely thighs. Still kneeling next to her, he traced his hand from her shoulder, over one perfect breast, down her stomach, and finally let one hand gently rest in the triangle of glossy, brown curls between her thighs. He could feel the heat emanating from her core.
He stretched out beside her, lay on his side and rolled onto her side to face him. She was beginning to shiver, so he pulled her close and wrapped the blanket around them both. Madge still watched him, her eyes giving silent permission. He cupped his hand behind her knee and pulled it over his thigh. Then he leaned in to kiss her mouth, while he ran his palm up the back of her leg, and almost let his fingertips touch her folds.
Madge had one arm trapped between the two of them. The other, she put around his torso and pressed her center into him. She broke their kiss and ran her tongue along his jawline, down his neck, back up and then around his earlobe. His erection pulsed against his jeans, but he wasn't quite ready to relinquish control. Rolling her onto her back, Gale languidly kissed her collarbone, the curve of one breast, and finally he took a nipple in his mouth.
Madge inhaled sharply, then exhaled his name, Gale, Gale, Gale. She was beginning to tremble, so he took his time, learning what elicited the most noise from her. When he switched to the other nipple, he finally allowed himself to run his fingers over her folds. Oh fuck, she was dripping wet. He teased her, only barely brushing her clit and her folds with his fingertips.
Madge writhed underneath him, silently begging him for more pressure. He increased it only slightly. She looked at him, her brown eyes pleading. He increased it only a little more, but still he held back. Knowing that the always cool and collected Madge Undersee was falling apart under his hands gave him a rush.
Finally, she gasped out, "Gale, please." Gale dipped his head between her thighs and pressed his tongue to the swollen button of flesh. He inhaled her scent—she smelled musky and clean at the same time—but he had no time to register much of anything else because Madge came, a cry getting strangled in the back of her throat.
He pulled himself back up beside her, wiped his mouth and pulled her onto his chest until she caught her breath. Dew was beginning to soak the blanket, so he expected her to at least get dressed. Instead, she rolled back onto her side, faced him, and unbuckled his belt. "Aren't you cold?" he asked her, as she unzipped his pants and tugged them down. "Do you want to put your clothes back on?"
She answered by wrapping her fingers around his cock. Fuck it, he decided, this isn't going to take long anyway. "Show me what you like," she said. He wrapped his own hand around hers, and showed her the pressure and speed he needed. Then he let his hands and eyes roam freely over her body. The sight of his own dark hands on her breasts and her pale fingers around his cock was right out of one of his fantasies. He spilled himself into her hands.
Madge wiped her hands in the wet grass and got dressed as quickly as she could. She was beginning to turn blue from the cold. Her clothing, discarded in haste on the ground, had soaked up some of the dew.
He'd never even taken his jacket off.
Now that his desire had been at least temporarily satisfied, Gale felt like an inconsiderate jerk. She would be cold until her clothing dried. His clothes were wet, too, but he was used to being out in the morning chill. Madge wasn't. Her teeth were chattering. As soon as she was fully dressed and back in that enormous jacket, he unbuttoned his own jacket, pulled her close, and wrapped her up into his warmth.
"I'm sorry, Madge, I should have waited until the grass had dried. I wasn't thinking straight," he apologized.
"Don't be sorry. Did I look reluctant to you as I was tearing off my clothes?" Madge teased. She smiled up at him.
They snuggled for a few minutes. Madge told him about the wedding, and reported that Five to Twelve had been a huge hit. "I did hear some, 'I wonder who she had to do to get in the band.' But that all came to a stop once she started to sing."
"Good," Gale said. He still felt kind of bad for thinking the same thing about Katniss, but he was glad she'd done well.
"I mean, don't get me wrong. One performance isn't going to make everybody in town think the Merchant-Seam divide is unjust. But she did put a dent in a lot of people's preconceived notions about girls from the Seam."
When Madge had warmed up enough, they walked towards the clearing, stopping to rinse off in the stream, collect his bow and quiver, and to check the snare lines. Along the way, Gale asked Madge something that had been bothering him for years.
"Do you happen to know where the coal trains go when they leave Twelve?"
"I'd just always assumed our coal went straight to Five. Why?" District Five produced energy.
"Because," Gale answered, "nobody really seems to know for sure. Twice a week, an engine comes in from the Capitol with empty coal cars. Those get detached, and replaced with full cars. The foreman hands a manifest to the conductor, who is always an Avox."
Madge shuddered at the thought. An Avox was somebody the Capitol had decided to punish by cutting out their tongue and forcing them to work in whatever way the Capitol saw fit.
"I don't think our coal is really going to Five," Gale told her.
"Why not?" Madge asked, clearly curious.
"We've all seen shots of the Capitol, right? It basically sits right on top of a giant, hydroelectric dam. Five produces energy, but all we ever hear about are their fifteen nuclear power plants and all the solar panel fields they supply. Even the Peacekeeper weapons are solar powered."
Madge picked up on his train of thought right away. "So, if the Capitol already has access to nuclear, solar and hydro..."
"Then why even bother with our coal?" Gale finished her thought for her. "We don't even produce that much. How could we? We're a few thousand miners with shovels and picks."
"Do you have any theories?" Madge asked.
"Just one, but it makes me sounds like a crackpot."
"Well, you have to tell me now," Madge deadpanned. "I don't know if I want to lose my virginity to a crackpot."
Gale stopped talking and pulled Madge in for a passionate kiss. Aaaaaaand, I'm hard again, he thought.
After making out for a couple of minutes, Madge pulled away and started walking again. "Come on. Tell me your crackpot theory."
"I'd really rather discuss you losing your virginity to me."
"Uh-huh. And will you be losing your virginity, as well, Gale Hawthorne?" she asked him.
"Yep," Gale admitted, then grinned at the look of shock on Madge's face.
"Gale, you've had dozens of girls literally throwing themselves at you for years. You mean to tell me you've never taken even one of them up on their offer?"
"Shocking, I know. I'm kind of shocked myself. But I guess we should probably talk about that." Gale told her about the dearth of condoms in the Hob. Madge then told him about her plans to visit Mrs. Everdeen to see what potential forms of birth control might be available to her.
They had arrived at the clearing where they had practiced last week. Gale worked with Madge on her stance, her aim and her positioning. She learned fast and didn't complain, even when it became clear that her arms and back were getting sore. She had a long way to go before she would be competent with a bow, but the potential was there.
After a couple of hours, Madge's limbs were so fatigued that the bow shook when she held it. Gale brought her back through the woods, showing her how to place her feet to make as little noise as possible. She wasn't silent, like Katniss, but she was still pretty light on her feet. She didn't even get squeamish when he shot a couple of squirrels, and showed her how to clean them. They washed all the squirrel guts off their hands at a stream.
When they reached his hiding spot for his bow and quiver, he put his weapons away. "Before I tell you my crackpot theory, will you get some information for me first? It could make my theory either completely crackpot or more plausible."
"If I can? Of course, I will."
"Can you find out how much electricity we use here in Twelve over the course of a year?"
Her eyes twinkled with intelligence and curiosity. "Yes. I can find that out for you."
"Thank you," he said, running his knuckles over her cheek before they started walking towards home.
As they got close to the Meadow, Madge buttoned her jacket back on and pulled her hair out of the ponytail. He watched her take smaller steps, hold her head at a different angle and flip her hair over her face where it usually was. She looked at the ground as she walked. She was getting into character. It was an amazing transformation.
"You're beautiful, you know. I know why you hide it, but it's hard for me not to see it now."
She rewarded him with a soft smile, and kissed him gently on the lips. "I need to get back," she said, regretfully. Gale escorted her to the Meadow, where they parted ways. He then headed back into the woods to gather greens and wild onions, his mind on coal cars, escape plans, how much he hated the Capitol and how much he wanted Madge Undersee.