Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine.
Old, New, Borrowed, Blue
Old
Madge wished her mother were with her in times like these. Not that she'd have been much help, probably would have lost interest and dozed off within minutes, but still…mothers are supposed to help their daughters with wedding details.
She's picking through an ancient jewelry box looking for suitable earrings for the ceremony. It's less than a week away and she still hasn't matched any to the simple silver chain and pendant Gale had given her as an engagement gift earlier in the year. Their ancient neighbor, a stately woman who'd apparently had more husbands than she had memory for, had lent her the box of her accessories.
"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, my dear! Surely even in that backward District you came from they knew the tradition? It's quite important."
They really hadn't, but Madge would eat her shoes before she let her know that.
So she'd graciously accepted the box and agreed to 'borrow' some earrings.
Unfortunately, each one was as ghastly as the next.
No wonder her earlobes are so saggy. Madge thought as she held up a particularly hideous pair made of craggy gold and dotted with rubies that must have weight a pound at least.
She sighed and dropped it back in the box with a clank.
The downstairs door rattles and opens then Madge hears voices in the kitchen. Before she has a chance to greet her guests there's pounding up the stairs and the bedroom door swings open and Posy bounds in. Her shirt is half untucked from her skirt and one of her socks has fallen down around her ankle.
"Madge!" She shouts, "Guess what happened at school?"
She flounces over and flops onto the bed.
"Marcia, remember her? I told you about her the other day, the girl they caught in the bathroom? Well, she was behind-"
"Posy!" Hazelle appears in the doorframe, hand on her hips and giving her youngest child an exasperated look. "What have I told you about gossiping?"
Posy wrinkles her nose as she looks back to Madge, "It's not gossip if it's true, mother."
Hazelle's eyes narrow and her eyebrows shoot skyward.
Their having some kind of power struggle, have been for weeks, over what is and is not appropriate to talk about. It's clearly going very well.
Apparently deciding to let the conversation die for the moment being, Hazelle's face rearranges into a much more pleasant expression as she turns her look to Madge.
"How goes the earring search?"
Madge groans and closes her eyes. Hazelle gives her a sympathetic smile before crossing the room to examine the box of atrocities herself.
"This was on your door," she hands Madge a plain white envelope before picking up the jewelry and carrying it to the bed for she and Posy to sort through.
Madge gives the envelope a look over: white and battered looking, heavier than she would have expected for being so thin, no return address is posted.
She frowns at it before tearing off the end and pulling the note from inside. Her stomach drops to her knees when she recognizes the handwriting.
Madge,
We heard about the wedding and thought you might like this back. It was yours to begin with.
Congratulations and Love,
Peeta and Katniss
It's Peeta's tidy scroll in pencil. There's a smear where he'd erased the farewell message, perhaps several times, and rewritten it. Maybe he and Katniss didn't know if the event warranted a congratulation, or maybe they hadn't known if they wanted to send their love. She'll probably never know.
She had seen them only one time since her return to the land of the living, at Mr. Abernathy's funeral. He'd finally put himself out of his misery, drank himself into a stupor and never woken up. At the service the two Victors had expressions crossing between relief, anger, and disbelief. Madge had understood at the time that, despite his abrasive personality and his poor manners, Mr. Abernathy had been a stabilizing force for them, and he'd abandoned them. Madge had also understood, though, the guilt of survival. She'd watched her mother's depression crush her, the guilt of outliving her twin kill her soul long before the Capitol took her life. That had been almost two years prior.
How they'd learned of she and Gale's engagement was a mystery. They hadn't even spoken to him at the funeral.
She empties the heavy content from the envelope. It slides, slowly scraping down the crease, before plopping into her lap.
Her pin. The mockingjay pin. The object that had given Katniss her title. The pin that had, in some small way, lead them all to where they were at this very moment.
Madge imagines Katniss must hate that pin. She wonders where it had been all this time. Maybe hidden under the stationary Peeta had written the note on, in the back of some dresser in a little used room in their lonely house in District Twelve's Victor's Village.
It was battered and tarnished, dinged, the clasp on the back appeared broken.
Somehow, that's fitting.
"What's that?" Posy asks, looking past a pair of gaudy studs her mother is holding out to her and to Madge's hand, where her pin rests.
"My something old."
New
The dress is green. Not bright or dark, but a pale, like the earliest bud of spring that hasn't seen light but desperately wants to. She loves it instantly.
Madge runs her hand over it, smoothing the nonexistent wrinkles out. It was shipped all the way from District Ten. It had been Birdy's, Madge's unexpected friend from during the 74th Games, before her death and Katy-Jo Lewes had begged her to at least look at it.
"Why green?" Posy asks. She doesn't look terribly impressed with the gift.
"Green is lucky. In District Ten they always wore green to the Reaping for luck, at least in the early years of the Games," she explains. "By the end, green was their color of mourning."
Posy looks over at her, face pulled back in confusion, "Why would she want you to wear a funeral dress?"
Madge gives her a small smile, "The Capitol took so much. They even took a color, something so simple, and destroyed its positive meaning. A lot of the Districts are trying to reclaim the things that were destroyed that way."
They were slowly taking back their history, their cultures, their traditions.
She holds the dress to her chest and looks to Posy.
The girl gives it small smile, "It's a pretty dress, I guess." Her eyes light up, "I still get to wear pink, though, right?"
Borrowed, Blue
Hazelle's weathered hands pin Madge's hair, twisting it up intricately from the nape of her neck and securing it with a mass of bobby pins. Once her hand moves from its place of support the delicate twirl collapses. For the tenth time.
"I just don't know what we're going to do," she sighs as she frowns at Madge's blonde waves. "Your hair is just too fine. It won't hold."
Madge shrugs. She had warned her.
Her fingers, long and tough, comb through Madge's limp hair, "I guess this is why you always do a ponytail?"
Madge nods. Her mother and Mrs. Oberst had always lamented her hair. It was lifeless and would only hold a curl if they used a special hot iron from the Capitol and a very fresh smelling gel, and even then a good gust of air could undo all that hard work. Up-dos were simply an exercise in futility.
The thought of her mother and her cranky old housekeeper made Madge's eyes burn. Her father's face, smiling at her, appears alongside them. Tears began leaking out the sides despite her rapid blinking.
"Madge?"
Hazelle is watching her with a thoughtful expression, there's a small crease between her eyes and her mouth is downturned.
Madge shakes her head. It's stupid.
"What's wrong?"
Her throat is thick and she feels like her voice is coming out in messy globs.
"I just," she forces down a shudder, "I-my mother. My dad. My awful housekeeper." A watery laugh escapes her, "I just-I wish they were here."
A coarse sob finally fights out of her and Hazelle pulls her into a hug.
"Shhhh," she rubs her back. "It's okay."
All of Posy's hard work, her mascara, is surely smeared down her face and she prays she isn't ruining Hazelle's dress as well.
Once her fit is subsiding, Madge pulls back, sniffling and blubbering, and starts to apologize to her future mother-in-law.
"Don't," she gives Madge the stern look she's seen the woman give all four of her own children so many times.
It's just still so embarrassing.
"It's been years," Madge still begins. "I shouldn't-"
"Miss them? Madge, you'll always miss them. Every time something wonderful happens, this, your first child, first grandchild," she gives Madge a bright smile, "every single time something wonderful happens you'll miss them. You'll want them there. I wish Gale's father were here. I wish Posy had known him at all. A month, a year, ten years, it doesn't matter, there's no time limit on missing someone. We can't mire down in that though. You move forward and hope that they're with us, even in the smallest way."
She puts her finger on the knot on the sash at Madge's waist, where they'd secured her battered mockingjay pin, hidden from view.
"Your family is with you," she pulls Madge into another hug. "You aren't alone."
It's suddenly very real to Madge that she's about to be married. For so long, through all the planning and fretting, it had been some distant event that would never actually occur. She isn't alone. She isn't just getting Gale, but Hazelle, Posy, Vick, and Rory. She isn't just borrowing them. They're going to be her family.
When she finally calms, Madge stands and gives Hazelle a watery smile before going to the bag Posy had brought with her.
She digs through several sets of bras and a pair of underwear her mother would kill her for having before finding a simple elastic band and a blue length of ribbon. She pulls her hair up swiftly, secures it as she always did, then ties the ribbon in a bow.
Hazelle beams at her.
"I always did like it that way best."
####################################################################################################
If Gale had been nervous during the ceremony he hadn't let it show. He had that slight smile, like he didn't want anyone to actually see him happy, on his lips and his eyes never strayed from Madge.
Madge had grown up on a stage, always standing behind her father, where her mother couldn't be. Reciting her vows, though, butterflies the size of hovercrafts had raced in her stomach.
Then it was over, quick as it started and Gale was kissing her.
Vick wolf whistled and Rory told them to 'get a room already' before the kiss even ended.
Both were beaming as the turned out to the small group gathered around them.
Katy-Jo Lewes and several familiar wranglers gave her bright smiles and held up, somewhat discreetly, a piece of bread each. Madge vaguely remembered telling her friend over the phone that she and Gale planned on having a proper toasting like they did in District Twelve after the ceremony.
"A whating?" Katy-Jo Lewes had asked through sips of coffee.
"A Toasting," she decided to give her the simplest explanation. "After the ceremony we'd toast bread for the newlyweds."
"Oh, simple enough."
Madge suddenly regrets that conversation as the group begins shouting out congratulations and well wishes at them while flinging the bread at the couple.
"What is wrong with your friends, Madge?" Gale asks her as a burly looking wrangler launches the heel of loaf at them and wishing the best of luck in all their endeavors.
Madge begins laughing.
"Gale," she tosses her head back in a snort. "Gale, they're toasting us."
He stares at her. She thinks he's probably wondering if he's just married a mad woman when it finally dawns on him.
"They're toasting us."
Their old neighbor was right, traditions were important, but as Madge watched Gale and his best men, his brothers, her brothers now, pick up the discarded pieces of bread and begin 'toasting' the guest at her wedding, she also realized traditions could change. They needed to sometimes.