Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine. Any lines from the books are hers too. It's all hers.
Tears (Anniversary)
The first time Madge sees Gale crying is the anniversary of the bombing of Twelve.
She wakes and finds the bed across from hers empty, still made despite the fact that she'd seen him getting ready for bed at the same time as her. He'd even told her how tired the train ride had made him, how happy he was to see a bed, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Madge rolls out of bed, bare feet softly settling on the expensive carpet of the hotel room. She sits there for a moment, getting her balance back, before standing and stretching. A breeze, a bit warm, thick and uncomfortable, floats past her, and when she looks toward the double doors leading out to the veranda she sees it's open.
Getting up, she slowly makes her way to the door, open just a hair, and quietly steps out.
The wood is still warm under her feet, the nights are still too hot for it to cool completely, and she lets her skin soak in the pleasant heat for a moment before looking around.
Gale is sitting at the little café table, his elbows to his knees and his head in his hands, fingers woven into his dark hair.
At first Madge thinks he's asleep. Maybe he came out for a bit of fresh air and just nodded off, but then she hears him take a ragged breath and that possibility dissolves in the humid air.
Silently, she pads across to him, reaches out and lets one of her hands come to a rest on his shoulder. "Gale?"
He doesn't look up, just sighs. "Go back to bed, Madge."
There's no conviction in his voice, just a sad sort of resignation, so Madge walks around to his front, runs her hands through his hair, tugging gently on it. "Gale."
It takes a minute for him to look up. He scrubs his hands roughly over his face before he does, forces a small smile, but his eyes are red rimmed and pink still.
Madge's eyebrows pull together. "What's wrong?"
He gives her a wet little chuckle. "Nothing. Go back to bed."
"Gale-"
He gets up, rubs his neck in agitation and walks to the rail, crosses his arms and stares out across the dimly lit city.
Feeling put out, Madge walks across to him, leans against the rail and looks up, wide eyed and waiting. He'll tell her if she's persistent enough.
Finally, he closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose before glancing down at her. "Do you know what day it is?"
Madge's nose wrinkles. "Well, it's after midnight so-"
"Today is the day they bombed Twelve," he cuts her off. "It's the anniversary."
His eyes, as intensely gray as ever, seem to burn through her as he waits for her response, but she doesn't have one. She'd forgotten that was today, and she isn't sure if that makes her happy or sad.
"Oh," is all she manages to say. "I didn't realize."
He huffs, shakes his head, as though he can't believe anyone could forget something as terrible as the destruction of their home.
"I've spent a long time trying to keep my eyes on the future, Gale," she tells him coldly. "Forgive me if I don't put my misery on the calendar."
With that she heads back in, to let him wallow in his misery alone and not let him make her feel bad for not remembering something so terrible, but he catches her by the wrist.
"Wait," he sighs, eyes closing and expression shifting from disgust to something softer, apologetic. "I'm sorry. I-It's just hard to imagine forgetting something like that."
Taking his hand from her wrist, Madge clasps it between her own, smiles sadly down at it.
"I forget days, not events, Gale." She looks out at the city, at the speckles of light spread across it, stretching into the distance around them. "This was the day my parents died. I don't really feel like celebrating it, or ruminating over all the things that went wrong that day, or whatever it is you want to do."
His hand, so much larger and rougher than her own, wraps around one of hers and gives it a squeeze as his eyebrows scrunch together. "I'm sorry. I forgot I guess."
"Must be nice," she mutters before she can stop herself. A little ache filling her chest at the thought of her parents.
Gale pulls her into a hug, crushes her against his chest and buries his face into her hair, taking a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Madge. I didn't mean it like that."
She knows he didn't, but it still stings. He escaped with his whole family, went to a new life, a better life, gained freedom and respect, Madge had lost everything. She can't forget that, even if she can forget the date.
His fingers weave through her hair, comb through it softly as he gently sways back and forth, letting Madge absorb the pleasant warmth of his skin through his pajamas.
"I guess I'm a little morbid, huh?" he mumbles into her hair.
Madge chuckles, all her annoyance vanishing with the feel of his lips against her scalp. "My mother loved anniversaries. Birthdays and weddings…and when people died." She shrugs. "I just didn't get that gene I guess."
She feels him nod and it eases her mind just a little. He doesn't think her heartless for trying not to remember one of the defining moments of her life, and that eases the pain in her chest a little.
They stay on the veranda until the sun comes up, not speaking about what the day marks, but acknowledging it just the same.
#######
Madge finds Gale sitting in front of the fireplace on the anniversary of his whipping.
She'd expected it this time, prepared herself for what was coming, but it's still jarring, finding him sitting in front of an empty fireplace, pushing the ash around with the poker.
There are no tears this time, no emotion at all, just an empty silence and a painful cold around him.
Without a word Madge drops down beside him, lets her head come to a rest against his shoulder.
"Did you see?" He asks, his voice a rough whisper that sends a chill up her spine.
A thin silence stretches out as Madge tries to decide if she wants to admit that she is all too aware of what day it is. Finally, she sighs. "Yeah."
"How much?"
Chewing her lip, Madge shrugs. "Enough."
She'd stumbled onto his whipping and seen enough to know he'd need help beyond what even Katniss with her otherworldly powers could provide. Madge had known that her mother's morphling was the only thing strong enough to dull Gale's pain to a survivable level.
He's never mentioned it, so she assumes no one had ever told him that it was her that had provided him the medicine, or if they'd even told him that he'd received any medicine at all.
For a moment she entertains the idea of telling him all of it, but just as quickly as the idea forms it dissolves in the dark of the night.
She and Gale hadn't been friends then. He'd only barely seemed to tolerate her existence, and telling him that she'd risked arrest, gotten a cold by running through a blizzard, just to ease his suffering would only open her up to questions she isn't sure she can answer.
If he were to ask her why she did it she isn't sure she'd be able to speak to him again. He's too precious to her as a friend for her to risk losing him over her still glowing crush on him. She won't risk telling him, making the comfortable friendship they've developed awkward and embarrassing, even if she feels like he deserves to know.
Instead of saying anything, Madge crawls forward and snatches up the matches, tries several times, unsuccessfully, to light them up before Gale chuckles warmly and takes the little box from her hands.
"Watch."
With little effort the match hisses, casting them both in a dim flicker of yellow light before Gale crawls forward and starts the fire.
In no time it's burning brightly, warming the still and cold air around them.
Gale settles down on his side, propping himself up on his elbow and gazing up at Madge, the light from the fire dancing in his eyes. He reaches out, pulls Madge to him and wraps her in his arms.
"I wasn't afraid of dying," he tells her, once she's securely pressed against him. "I was just afraid of what would happen to my family."
They'd have been alone, he was their main breadwinner. The Hawthornes might not have survived the rest of the winter if Gale hadn't pulled through.
After a moment of thought, Madge starts to tell him that Katniss would've taken care of them, but stops herself. Katniss is a topic he likes to avoid, and bringing up that she would've protected his siblings when she knows he feels he so horribly failed Prim seems like a bad move.
I would've taken care of them. She bites that thought back too. Just like the morphling, she thinks it would open her up to too many questions she can't answer.
Finally, she twists around, wraps him in her arms and presses her cheek to his chest, closing her eyes and memorizing the sound of his heart and the scent of his skin. Her fingers absently trace the ridges and valleys of the scars of his back.
There's nothing she can say, and really, there's no reason to say anything. Gale had survived, his family had survived, and mulling over what could've happened is just picking at a healing wound. She won't do it.
Instead, she just holds him, letting the snowy day drift away while they sit in the warmth of the fire.
#######
When Independence Day rolls around Madge stays firmly at Gale's side, her hand wrapped around his, lending him what little strength she has.
They make it through the celebrations, once again in Ten.
Madge keeps her face pressed into his side during the fireworks, lets him wrap his arms around her and block out the loudest of the celebratory booms as they burst into brilliant colors against the western sky.
It's the anniversary of the end of the war, but Madge knows that for Gale it's also the anniversary of Prim's death. The anniversary of his bomb.
"When I was little," she tells him, as the last of the red chrysanthemums fade into smoke in the sky, "my father told me about the wars of the nation that existed before Panem."
There were people that created the bomb that destroyed cities, lead to the creation of the nuclear bombs that Thirteen was so famous for. They opened the door for an arms race that spanned decades, threatened to plunge the entire world yet another war, one that there was no guarantee anyone would win.
"I'm less terrible than the people that made the first atomic bomb," Gale shakes his head, laughs mirthlessly. "Great."
"They weren't terrible, Gale," Madge tells him. "They were just people working under extreme conditions. They did what they felt they needed to do, just like you did, and you were under a lot more duress than any of them. You'd spent your entire life being beaten down by the Capitol."
The rebels had used the Capitol's tactics against it with the propos and Gale had only been following their lead. He'd been thinking like the enemy, for better or worse, and now he was living with the emotional fallout from it.
"If it hadn't been you, it would've been someone else," she says.
"But it was me." His expression gets taut. "I came up with it. I designed it. I killed those kids. I encouraged the destruction of the Nut in Two. I'm a bad person. I'm a murderer."
"Gale!" Madge grabs his hand and squeezes it, fixes him in a hard stare. "You are not-"
"I-"
"No," she shakes her head. "You made mistakes. You acted out of fear and anger, but who hasn't?"
"Have any of your temper tantrums ever gotten anyone killed?" He asks, his voice a low growl as his eyes burn into hers.
Madge feels her skin heat under his gaze and she focuses her eyes on one of the pins on his jacket. It's a bit ostentatious, a bit too formal for Gale, but he wears it well.
"No," she swallows down a lump, "but I've watched terrible things happened and kept quiet, been too afraid to say anything. Silence makes me just as much a murderer as you."
There had been raids. Peacekeepers, caught by bands of angry wranglers and worn and weary citizens of District Ten, had been taken and beaten, strung up and hung. Revenge killings for decades of watching the hand of the Capitol crush the spirits and hopes of their people.
It had been wrong, even the newly elected Mayor had acknowledged that during her acceptance speech, but in the heat of the moment no one had spoken up for the terrified Peacekeepers.
"They were someone's children, daughters and sons. They were human beings plucked up and placed into an unsavory position," the Mayor had told a crowd after her election. "The people of District Ten send our sincerest apologies to the families of the Peacekeepers killed. We will never forget the sins of our anger."
Madge had watched, horrified but silent, as men and women were taken and humiliated before very public executions.
Her heart had always told her to speak up, try to stop the madness, but what good would one voice in a sea of thousands have done?
Still, she thinks she should've tried. Her failure will haunt her conscience for the rest of her life.
Gale's rough hand comes up to her cheek, his thumb brushing under her eye and smearing something wet and warm across it. She's crying, again, damn that.
Looking up through her stinging eyes, Madge forces a little smile for him. "So I guess we're just a couple of horrible people, then?"
Before she knows what he's doing, Gale has pulled her into another crushing hug. She feels something warm and wet trickle onto her scalp, where Gale has his face pressed into her hair, but she doesn't say anything.
"I don't think you're horrible," he whispers, his hot breath chilling against the moisture from his tears in her hair.
Madge snakes her arms around his waist, closes her eyes tightly to try to keep from soaking his shirt with her silly tears. "I don't think you're a horrible either."
After a few long minutes, she pulls back, rubs her eyes with the back of her hand, smiles up at him.
"Do you know what else today is?"
A little line forms between his eyes as he thinks then shakes his head.
"It's the anniversary of the day we met again."
He hadn't known it at the time, and Madge hadn't wanted him to, but he knows now that the girl he'd tried to comfort after the celebration was her.
A little smile creeps onto his face and a soft chuckle rumbles in his chest. "Yeah, I guess it is, isn't it?"
Madge falls back into him, keeps him held tight against her in a hug. She'll squish happiness into him if she has to, surliness, she's decided, doesn't suit him. His smiles are too nice for him to revert back to his scowls.
They walk back to his hotel, sit in the garden for hours before Gale convinces her that it wouldn't be safe to walk back to the coffee shop by herself.
"You take the bed," he insists. "The couch isn't too bad."
He's asleep, softly snoring, before Madge has even finished brushing her teeth.
Smiling to herself, Madge snuggles down into the sheets. They smell like Gale, like earth and wind.
Rolling to her side, her eyes drift shut as she watches the rhythmic rise and fall of Gale's chest from his spot on the couch.
This won't be the last time they deal with his bomb, his scars, his guilt, things like those don't vanish even with time, but she hopes he learns to remember the good that comes with each tragedy.
Twelve was gone, but so was the Capitol. He'd been whipped, but he'd survived. He'd created a bomb that had killed innocents and been on the side of those in favor of destroying the Nut, but he was making amends for those sins, he was becoming a better person with each day. Things have changed, he's changed, and she'll be by his side reminding him that even though he's made mistakes, he is more than that.
Hopefully, she thinks as he mind slows and settles for sleep, she'll be able to make more of his tears happy ones in the future.