Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine.
All things wicked
"I killed her," he tells her as he stares blankly out at the ocean. "It was my bomb."
"You don't know that," she tells him as she crosses her legs and balances on the seawall. The lights from the restaurants burn dimly behind them, casting dull shadow out and to the sand below.
She'd agreed, after much persuasion, to go with Gale to the Western most tip of District Four. Madge had never seen the ocean and she didn't know when the opportunity would arise again.
They'd been more open with one another over the last few months. Slowly, almost painfully, they'd gotten to know each other again. Neither one of them were the people they were back in Twelve. Too much had happened for them to be.
It wasn't a fresh start exactly, but it was as close as they could come. They knew one another's ugly past, and somehow it made things a little bit easier.
Gale had been holding back something though. She hadn't pressed him. At first she thought maybe she wasn't entitled to know, then later, as their tentative friendship blossomed somehow she knew when he was ready he would tell her.
She really hadn't expected it over dinner.
Gale had been a little too quiet after the meeting with the committee. He'd munched on his fried octopus and listened to Madge talk about the strange clothing the locals kept trying to push on her at the market without comment. Finally she's flicked a shrimp at him, hitting him squarely between the eyes.
"Everything alright?"
The ever increasing lines in his face deepened.
"Ran into Annie Cresta after the meeting."
Madge had never met the former Victor, though she'd heard plenty.
"She had the kid. She and Finnick's kid," he ran his hands through his hair. "He's huge now."
"Well he's got to be," Madge mentally adds up the years. "Two? Nearly three?"
He nods somberly. It dawns on Madge what she's said.
Annie Cresta and Finnick Odair's little boy is nearly three years old and he's never met his father. It's been three years since he died. Three years since Annie was widowed.
"He has so much ahead of him," he say, more to himself than to her.
"That's what you fought for, what Finnick Odair fought for, so that kids like him could have real futures."
His eyes flicker and Madge realizes too late she's said something wrong.
"I fought because I was angry. I fought because they took and took but never gave back. I didn't just want to take them down, Madge, I wanted to make them suffer." He reaches across the table and takes her hand and squeezes it, "Annie, she loved Finnick so damn much and he had to do so many terrible things. He didn't have a choice about any of it. I had a choice, and I-I did so many bad things. I can't even tell you all the bad things I've done."
Then he tells her about the bomb. The trick with the parachutes. The kids. Primrose Everdeen. He doesn't ever say that it's all his fault, but the hollow tone of his voice, that empty look in his eyes, the way he seems to shrink in on himself speak louder than his words ever could.
They'd walked; Madge almost thought he was trying to outpace whatever ghosts were chasing them, the way he almost left her behind as he took long, fast strides out into the night.
His confession had culminated at the seawall.
"You don't know-"
"It was my design. Beetee and I-we-it," he picks up a sea battered rock and flings it out into the dark water. "That's why Katniss hates me."
"You would never hurt Prim, you would never hurt any child," she tries to reason with him.
He laughs, it's a cold, vicious thing that doesn't suit him.
"But I planned it. I didn't see people, I just saw the enemy. Even if I didn't order them to be used, they existed because of me. I'm always going to have to live with that."
Madge stands and walks over to him. She can see the dim reflection of tears in his eyes. They haven't hugged since the day they reunited, neither one of them is terribly demonstrative and their friendship is still so young, but Madge knows this is what he needs. Before she can think on it too hard, Madge flings her arms around Gale's narrow waist, pressing her ear to his chest.
"Maybe it was your bomb. Maybe you didn't care about hurting the people in the Capitol because they were just below pond scum in your eyes. Maybe you were wrong to design them in the first place," she looks up at him, chin in his sternum. "But you know it was wrong now. You stumbled, you fell and you fell hard, but you're still here, you can still get up. You have to choose to get up, though. Make amends. It's not over yet."
His arms wrap around her shoulders as he crushes her to him and buries his face in her hair.
"It'll take a lifetime," he whispers into her hair. She can feel his warm breath across her scalp. Her ear presses to his chest again and she can hear the steady beat of his heart and feel the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest as she stares out at the dark sea.
"Then we'll take a lifetime."