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

Dwell on Dreams

Gale wakes to a small foot in his face. When he opens his eyes he finds his son's blue footie pajama almost up his nose.

Glen is sprawled across him, across Madge too, his dark head is pushing into her side, ear to her increasingly swollen stomach. He keeps telling them he's listening to the baby talk, giving them instructions on what 'she' wants for 'her' nursery.

"It might be a boy," Gale tells him. He'd gotten two brothers before he got a sister after all.

His son just shakes his head, "No, isa girl."

As Gale wasn't likely to change his son's mind, he's been surprisingly persistent on this point, he nodded each time Glen mentioned his new 'sister'.

Pushing the little foot out of his face, Gale reaches out and runs his hand along Madge's cheek.

He misses their normal sleeping arraignment, but she's had to sleep on her side these last few weeks, as the baby grew. Having Glen decide he needs to stay as close to them as possible the closer the due date gets is also a little annoying. It makes even innocent cuddling impossible.

When his hand comes to a rest on her stomach, applying just a tiny amount of pressure, he feels a small kick.

His mind flickers to his mother, heavily pregnant with Posy, at the Justice Building, standing by his side as he received his father's medal.

In a flash his mother is replaced by Madge, scared and alone, holding onto Glen's little hand as a shadowy figure, maybe her father, maybe some faceless bureaucrat, hands her a cold medal, thanks her for her husband's sacrifice.

It's a stupid thought: they aren't in District Twelve, Gale has an office job, most of the resistance to the new government is long squelched out. He's relatively safe. At the very least he'll never go down in those dark mines again.

There's little chance he'll leave Madge a young widow, leave his children fatherless and starving. They're in Two, not living under the tyrannical government Gale had grown up with, even if something happened to him, they wouldn't be forced to scavenge for food, poach, and barter. His children will never go to sleep with empty bellies and Madge will never be forced to work her hands raw to support them.

She makes a small noise in her sleep, rubs her nose before shifting her hips and knocking Glen off her stomach. The boy just groggily sits up, wrinkles his nose before flopping back down, slamming his hard head into Gale's shoulder.

At least it wasn't Madge's stomach.

He extracts his arm from under Glen's head, ruffles his hair, and presses a kiss to his head.

This wasn't the life he'd imagined growing up, when he was a teenager.

His mind had been set, firmly believing he would be a miner, like his father, and his grandfather, and all the other men in his family. He would marry a girl from the Seam, for a long time he'd thought that would be Katniss, and they would have a few kids that would travel the same bleak path. He'd probably die young, in the mines, leaving his children and widow to fend for themselves, just as his father had.

It had been an almost certainty.

He'd hoped Katniss would see the light, marry him, and be happy. He hadn't been sure he believed in any higher power, but he'd prayed for that one small mercy, one miracle in his life of misery, to at least get the girl he felt most compatible with, an equal partner in life. Someone who was strong, could survive when he died, take care of their children like his mother had.

Madge had never even been in the equation. She couldn't have been.

He hadn't imagined she could ever be as strong as she is.

She had been the Mayor's daughter, a child of privilege, she'd never suffered like he had.

It hadn't occurred to him she'd suffered different ways.

Madge's life had straddled a thin line between District Twelve, a poor backwater that rejected her, painted her unfairly as a snob, and the Capitol, that saw her as the harmless daughter of a rube government puppet. She'd had to live in a limbo she had no control over, suffered abuses from both sides without so much as a whimper. She had been, is, so much stronger than he could've ever believed.

Back when he'd been arrested for poaching, whipped, she'd brought her mother's morphling for him. Run through a blizzard, probably could've died or been caught and punished herself, all to keep him from suffering, maybe even dying of the pain.

If there was ever someone that was strong, a survivor, brave, it was Madge.

He hadn't even spared her much thought when Thom had told him her house had been destroyed. There was too much to do, too many lives at stake, too many changes happening. Katniss was back, needed help, the Rebellion needed help, Beetee needed help. Gale's mind was too occupied to give her a proper farewell, be even one of a few survivors to grieve her. Honestly, he didn't even know if any of the dead had really been grieved for, it had just been too hectic for such a luxury.

When he'd admitted to Madge, told her he hadn't gone back for her, Gale had hoped and prayed that she would ream him out, curse his name for his cold heartedness, his thoughtlessness.

He'd expected her to be offended, upset, but she'd simply shrugged. As if she had expected nothing better. Not from him or anyone else.

She had deserved better, though, even if she didn't think so.

He still often wished she had gotten angry, at the very least yelled at him. He deserved it. He'd used her, differently than the Capitol had used Katniss, but he'd used her and her too sweet nature for his own comfort. He did that a lot, he realized, used the best of people against them, for his own purposes.

It's how he'd designed his bomb, after all.

Shaking his head, he tries to brush the thought away. Madge has told him more times than he could count that he needed to forgive himself.

For all his sins, he was alive, they were alive, and they couldn't waste that precious gift that had been denied, snatched away, from so many. To squander that would be another tragedy.

She'd told him that even if it took a lifetime, she'd be at his side, helping him through.

At the time, on the seawall in Four, it hadn't occurred to either of them that years later they'd be snuggled together, one child battering them in their sleep and another only weeks away from entering the world.

Blue eyes flutter open, Madge twists, rolls to face Gale, her face scrunching up.

"This baby has its foot in my rib."

Gale chuckles as she pushes down on her stomach, apparently trying to get the supposed foot from where it was lodged. After a minute she huffs, defeated.

Her lips in a little pucker, she looks up at Gale, "What are you doing?"

Shrugging, he reaches over Glen and runs his hand through her hair. "Thinking."

She squints, her eyes are still hazy with sleep, her skin is pale in the sliver of moonlight peaking through the window. "About what?"

His finger traces down her cheek, along her jaw, then back into her hair. "You. Me. How different thing are." He smiles at her half lidded gaze, "Did you ever think we'd end up together?"

Eyes closing, Madge is quiet, thinking.

When her eyes flicker open again, wider this time, they shimmer, "I never thought I'd end up with anyone."

That's ridiculous.

She was beautiful, smart, her father had held one of the highest positions of power in the District, along with the Head Peacekeeper. The thought that she'd have spent her life alone had never even crossed his mind.

"Why not?"

Her eyes close again, she rubs her nose and shrugs, "I didn't even have friends really, Gale. Any guy that would've even looked at me…I wouldn't've believed that they actually liked me. Probably would've thought they were after me for status or something stupid like that." A sad little smile flickers on her face, "No one could've convinced me different. It's why I didn't have any friends. People didn't want to get too close to me, and I didn't want to get too close to them. An ugly little cycle."

And it had left Madge in the cold.

Cool fingers run through Gale's hair, gently comb through it, "I thought you would end up with Katniss. The entire District did." Her eyebrows scrunch together, "You were so much alike, you were perfect for each other."

A little too perfect, Gale almost says.

He and Katniss were too much alike; they needed the calm, the gentleness they lacked, to smooth out their sharp edges. The edges they'd been forced to form on themselves to survive their harsh environment. Madge, and he supposed most of the Town people, had formed themselves into different shapes, smoother shapes, the kind that were able to navigate their different, but no less dangerous, no less perilous, lives.

Their life, the life they had now, was never supposed to be in the cards. But here they were, healthy, happy, alive.

Pushing himself up, Gale leans over Glen, presses a kiss to Madge's forehead, "Alike

doesn't mean perfect."

Sometimes different did. Complementary, they made the other better. She softened his harsh edges and he taught her that fading into the background wasn't the only way to survive.

She swats away a tear that had fought its way out the corner of her eye, lets a soft smile flitter across her face.

A few more tears trickle down her cheeks, "I'm-I sometimes think I'm a bad person, because I have all this happiness, I got you and Glen and now this baby, and I didn't really earn it. I shouldn't even be here. I lived and so many other people died, and I'm happy and shouldn't I be sad?"

He opens his mouth to stop her, but she's on a babbling roll now.

"Sometimes I think about how things would be if Katniss hadn't Volunteered, if Prim's name hadn't been drawn." A little crease forms between her eyes, "I'd be alone and you'd be with Katniss, and I wonder if that wasn't how it was supposed to be."

Gale hates the thought of Madge growing old, alone and ignored. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth. She hadn't deserved that, wouldn't in any life. He hates that she still thinks about he and Katniss. He and Madge had talked on several occasions, and he'd assured her, promised her, he wasn't carrying a torch for the former 'Girl on Fire'. Sometimes, though, he forgets she has a lifetime of insecurity, unintentionally harbored by her parents and an entire District, that she's always fighting against.

While Gale fights his demons, his past cruelties, both intentional and not, Madge fights the feeling that she doesn't belong, that she was meant to die with her parents and is living a borrowed life.

He doesn't know what his life would've held if Prim's name hadn't been picked, if Katniss hadn't Volunteered, but he knows it wouldn't be half as good as what he has now.

"It doesn't matter," he tells her, running his fingers through her hair, enjoying the silky texture of it. "You deserve to be happy too." If Gale did, as she so often told him, then she definitely did. She'd earned it as much as he had. "And as far as possible lives go, this is definitely the better deal, don't you think?"

Tilting her head, she smiles, "I do, but do you?"

"Absolutely." And if there weren't a kid in the bed he'd show her just how much better a deal he thinks their life is.

In another life, maybe Madge was alone and Gale was with Katnisss, but not in this life.

This life may not have been the life he imagined when he was a teenager, but it was so much better.