Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine.

Touchy Feely

Madge didn't quite understand Gale's near constant need to touch her.

Since District Four, since he'd told her about the bomb and Prim, his guilt, and how angry he'd been, since she'd opened that particular door and hugged him, not the other way around, he'd constantly been finding ways to touch her.

He'd brush the hair from her face and tuck it behind her ears, hold her hand and brush his calloused fingers over her knuckles, hug her and bury his face in her hair…

"Are you smelling me, Gale?" She'd asked him as he'd inhaled her, breathed her in like oxygen.

"You smell nice," had been his simple answer.

She saw herself as his roots, holding him to the earth when there was so much trying to pull him away. His hugging her was just the physical manifestation of that, at least that's what she told herself.

Besides, Madge knew the Hawthornes were, in general, very affectionate, she'd probably received more real hugs from Vick during the 74th Games than she had from both her parents combined in the entirety of her life. Not that her family hadn't been loving, they simply hadn't express it that well. A pat on the shoulder every now and then, a hug goodbye and an awkward kiss on the cheek were their mainstay.

Gale was always giving his siblings hugs, playfully roughhousing, giving his mother and sister a kiss on the cheek, though. They were just a much more physical family, she decided.

Eventually she got use to it, after several months, the hugs, the hand holding, the touching.

Then she and Gale had gone to a gala, something to do with the military she wasn't exactly sure, and they'd dance.

It had been nothing special at first, she'd had to lead him a bit, he'd never done ballroom dancing or slow dancing, but they'd muddled through. As the night had gone on, though, his hand had slipped lower and lower on her back until his fingers were just below the sash at her waist.

Maybe it's a territorial thing. There had been a lot of old men with leering eyes and eager hands.

"Gale," she'd murmured into his shoulder. "Your hand…is a little low."

He pulls back, some of her hair still clung to his face where he'd been resting it against her head, and his hand readjusts on her waist. A small frown forms on his lips.

"Oh, sorry."

Madge couldn't help but laugh just a little. Maybe she's the first girl to ever tell him to get his hands off her backside.

His brow knits, "What?"

"You're a little handsy," she finally tells him. Mostly because she can't think of a better term for it.

Not handsy like the Capitol programs she'd watched with the staff, particularly Mrs. Oberst, where the exchanges had escalated far quicker than Madge had felt was right. The actors and actresses would go from nauseating flirting to unnatural acrobatics in under thirty minutes, a fact that Madge is certain mentally scarred her to some degree.

He isn't even handsy like he'd been back in District Twelve, where his reputation at the slag heap was of mythical proportions.

It was sweet, Madge decided, somewhere between hesitant and eager. Painfully curious about what boundaries she would put up. He's not touching her just to be touching her. It was as if he wanted constant reassurance that she wasn't a dream, wasn't going to dissipate, turn to dust and blow away in the wind.

She pulls him to her, tightly against her chest, and rubs her hands up and down the length of his back. The fabric of his suit is smooth under her palms.

"It's okay," she tells him. "It's nice. Kind of like you want me around."

He chuckles. It vibrates through them, between them, and Madge remembers being seventeen and thinking that laugh was the most beautiful sound she'd ever heard and being so proud at being the one to cause it.

She presses her face to his chest and takes a deep breath, he still smells of detergent, earth, and wind. Just like he always had. She wonders if, maybe, she smells like home too.

A small part of her mind wonders, and she wishes wouldn't, if his lips taste like home too.