AN: I love history and I love Gadge, so I decided to bring two of my favorite things together. If you've got a particularly favorite time period or historical event you'd like to see them thrown into, let me know and I'll see what I can come up with :)

1954

Dogtown, Alabama

There was something about Spring mornings that made Madge feel young again. Standing barefoot on the dewy lawn, holding a damp newspaper in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee in the other, she breathed in the smell of fresh bloomed gardenias. Spring was a time for possibility, for change, growth, and rebirth. For a moment, she allowed herself to hope, as she had as a child, that some great adventure waited for her just around the corner. She felt deep in her bones that the shape of her life was about to be irrevocably and wonderfully altered. It was a feeling that crept up on her every year around this time and every year she was disappointed. Nothing ever really changed. The promise of Spring was an empty one.

With a resigned sigh, she turned her back on the never-changing neighborhood. Breakfast wouldn't make itself. She was cracking an egg into the hot frying pan when she heard the clunk clunk of her husband's wooden leg on the stairs. He was humming Elvis Presley and she smiled. Before the war, he hummed all of the time, but he hadn't much afterwards. The loss of his leg was no where near as painful as the loss of the music in him. After years of silence, she was glad for the humming, even though it used to drive her crazy.

"Something smells good," said Peeta, limping across the kitchen to give Madge a quick peck on the cheek.

"It'll be ready in a minute," she said. "Sit. I'll get your coffee. The paper's on the table."

Every morning, they went through the same routine. Peeta flipped through the news, reading out loud the interesting parts to her. Or at least the parts he thought she'd find interesting. "McCarthy's cracking down on the army," he said as she set his coffee cup down on the table and hurried back to the eggs before they burned. "By the time he's finished with them, there won't be a single Commie left."

"That's good, dear," said Madge, distracted. She didn't care for politics. Neither had Peeta until after the war.

"He's a little too zealous, if you ask me," Peeta went on. "Sees Red everywhere, even with his eyes closed."

Madge made a noncommittal murmur of agreement. She wasn't listening. She was still thinking about Spring. She'd married Peeta in the Spring, just a week after her eighteenth birthday. It was so long ago now that she couldn't remember the color of the bride's maids dresses, or the flavor of the cake, or how nervous she'd been, but she did remember the smell of her bouquet. Gardenias.

Peeta neatly folded the paper and set it aside to make room for the plate of scrambled eggs and bacon she placed before him. Madge buttered his toast, like she did every morning. It was something she used to enjoy doing. For the first year of their marriage, she'd gotten a thrill out of being a good homemaker, a good wife. Making him happy had made her happy. Now it was all par for the course. Same old, same old. Butter the toast, wash the dishes, tuck in tight the corners of the bed. Her life was a series of chores. She never complained and Peeta never asked her for a thing. If she stayed in bed all day chain smoking, he wouldn't care. She did the cooking and cleaning, because she didn't know what else to do with herself.

Madge sat across from him, sipping her coffee, watching him eat. She always waited to have her breakfast with the children, but she knew Peeta didn't like to sit at the table alone.

"I was thinking of making a roast for dinner," she said after a while of listening to him chew.

Peeta swallowed. "I've got to work late tonight," he said.

"Again?"

"The cakes won't bake themselves."

"Well, I'll keep a plate warm for you," she said. "What sides do you want?"

"Anything will do."

He always said that. Still, she asked. They retreated back into their respective silences. Outside, the world was spinning, the leaves turning green. Inside, everything was permanent, fixed in place, removed from time.

Katniss was cozied up in bed, reading the paper, and humming Elvis. She'd never much cared for Rock-n-Roll, but lately, she seemed to have the same Elvis song stuck in her head. Gale didn't ask about it. Living with her peacefully required no questions. They came and went as they pleased, flitting in and out of each other's lives, careful not to leave footprints. On the odd occasion they found themselves together in their boxy, one-bedroom apartment, like now, the air became dizzyingly thin.

"Where are my socks?" asked Gale, interrupting her humming.

"Top drawer," said Katniss without looking up from the paper. Her obsession with the news was new, just like the Elvis. When they first met, she'd rather jump from the roof of the Empire State Building than read about McCarthy.

"I've looked there," he said. He'd been sifting through the top drawer for ten minutes. His black socks weren't there, but he noticed a few new pairs of underwear, not the practical kind Katniss preferred, but the kind he tried to get her to wear when they were dating.

"Which socks?" she asked.

"The black ones," said Gale.

Finally, she tore her eyes away from the growing Communist crisis to give him a dry smile. "You've got a lot of those," she said. For a second, he was tempted to mention that none of them were clean, but that would only lead to a fight. Really, he didn't give a damn if Katniss did the laundry or not. From day one, he knew she'd make a terrible wife. He'd married her knowing that. The blonde, blue-eyed wives on the magazine covers had never appealed to him. He wanted a woman, not a wife, not a maid.

He was already late for work, so he took a pair of black socks from the hamper and sat on the edge of the bed to pull them on. "What's the joke today?" he asked.

"It's not funny," she said. It was a habit of her's to judge for the both of them. Usually, Gale didn't mind. Their tastes were almost identical, but she'd changed so much in the last few months, he didn't trust her the way he used to.

He was lacing up his boots, when Katniss put down the paper and said, "I think I'll visit Prim today."

"Oh yeah?" said Gale. "That'd be nice." He knew she was lying. If she was telling the truth, she never would've put down the paper. Lying took her full concentration and she was still terrible at it.

"I haven't seen her in a long time," Katniss went on, trying too hard.

Gale smiled at her over his shoulder. "Well, tell her hello from me."

"I'll probably stay for dinner, so you'll have to scrounge something up yourself."

"No problem," he said, striding towards the bedroom door. Katniss hadn't cooked for him in over a year. As he made his way to the factory, he couldn't help wondering if she ever cooked for him. The other man, the one she'd bought the underwear for, the one who listened to Elvis, and liked to talk about politics. The man she was changing herself for, like she'd never tried to change for him.

Gale didn't hate her for the affair. He didn't blame her for their shamble of a marriage. After all, he'd never asked her to change, had always just swept her faults under the rug until there was no more room to hide them. If the failure was anyone's fault, it was his.

Madge didn't need to start supper for another two hours. She'd done the grocery shopping after dropping Alice off at school. Timothy was down for his nap and she was just settling in to write a letter to her parents, who were vacationing in New York, when the bell rang. She wasn't expecting any visitors, so she wasn't surprised to find Johanna Mason standing on her doorstep. They'd been friends for over a decade. Madge had long since accepted that Johanna wasn't one for calling ahead and making plans. She went where she wanted, when she wanted, and took pleasure in arriving at the most inconvenient time.

Without waiting to be invited in, Johanna pushed past Madge and led the way back to the living room. "It's good to see you, too," said Madge, following after her.

"Is Peeta here?" she asked sharply.

"No, he's at the bakery. Why?"

"We need to talk," said Johanna. She sat and gestured for Madge to do the same, like this was her house. Johanna had a way of taking ownership of every room she entered. If this were the White House, she'd tell President Eisenhower how much better it would look black, a paintbrush already in hand. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it. She was a woman who never beat around the bush.

"Peeta's having an affair," she declared the moment Madge was seated. "Annie saw him with another woman. She didn't want to tell you, but I thought you deserved to know."

Madge waited for the shock to hit. Any second now, she expected to be bowled over by grief, betrayal, even rage. That's how women were supposed to react to this sort of news. Johanna wasn't a gossip. She didn't spread rumors and never said anything she didn't know for a fact to be true, so Madge had no reason not to believe her now. A few minutes passed, though, and still she felt nothing.

"When?" she finally said.

"A few months ago," said Jo, a cigarette balanced between her lips. She struck a match, lit her smoke, and extinguished the flame all in one smooth flick of her wrist. "Annie only just told me on Monday. You know how she hates drama."

A few months? At that, Madge did feel something. Her cheeks turned pink. All of those late nights at the bakery, all of the missed dinners, and the late phone calls of the past few months. The humming and the way Peeta smiled, like he hadn't since before the war. It was all so obvious. She felt stupid for not realizing sooner what was going on. Annie knew. Johanna knew. Who else did?

"I wanted to be certain before I came to you," said Johanna. "So I followed him yesterday. He picked her up downtown."

"Who?" said Madge. "Did you recognize her?"

Johanna looked around for an ashtray, found none, and ashed her cigarette into the dregs of Madge's forgotten teacup on the table. "No," she said, leaning back against the couch. "But I asked around a little. Her name's Katniss Hawthorne. She lives in one of those red brick apartments on Pearl Street, works at the diner."

"You should become a private investigator," said Madge with a little chuckle. Then she remembered that she wasn't supposed to find any of this amusing. Johanna gave her a curious look.

"Are you alright?" she asked. "I know this must be a shock."

It should be a shock. In all the years they'd been married, Peeta had never so much as looked twice at another woman. He was as faithful as Sunday morning. He was everything a husband should be. Their life together was everything it should be. They were the perfect picture of a respectable, middle class family. Madge wanted for nothing that he didn't immediately provide. She had everything she'd imagined having as a little girl, except for one thing that she hadn't realized was missing from her life until this moment.

Peeta was having an affair and she felt nothing, because she didn't love him. Not in the way that a wife was supposed to love her husband.

Gale didn't have any doubts that he'd loved Katniss in the beginning. Loved her more than he thought himself capable of until he met her. She was everything he'd dreamed of. Determined and untamable. A dark-haired beauty who could cut you quick with a sarcastic remark and kept a man on his toes, always wondering what was really going on under her unruffled, laidback surface. He proposed after only dating for two months and now remembered that time as a whirlwind of flying colors and bright lights.

Soon after the honeymoon, he regained his sight. So did Katniss. They realized their mistake too late. Love was easy without responsibility, when you weren't living together, when you weren't tied to each other until death do you part. They were equally stubborn, equally flighty, and they'd shared a similar off-the-beaten track perspective of the world that had immediately bonded them together. That kind of connection was all well and good for dating, but for a marriage to work, there had to be a willingness to change, to make room for another person in your life. Something neither of them were good at.

Or maybe it was just him. After all, Katniss had changed an awfully lot for her new man. Gale had known about the affair for months. Over and over again, he debated confronting her, but they were hardly ever in the same place at the same time. It was never the right moment. Besides, he wasn't sure where he wanted to go from here. Divorce, of course, was an option. Divorce was extreme, even in his liberal opinion.

Once or twice, always late at night, when Katniss crawled into the bed with the other man's smell, something sweet and yeasty, all over her, he thought about tracking down her lover. Who was he? What did he look like? Would he wake up one morning to find Katniss' bags packed, her mysterious man waiting by the car to carry her away forever? More importantly, would Gale even care if she left?

For all of his midnight queries, he knew he'd never seek out the other man. It didn't matter who he was, what he looked like, what he did for a living, how much money he made. Those things didn't matter to Katniss and they didn't matter to Gale. He wasn't jealous, just curious sometimes. Whoever this man was, he must be something special to have made such an imprint on Katniss, who bowed for no one.

Gale rounded the corner onto Pearl, concerned more with what he was going to do for supper than where his wife was now, but he stopped short, his hunger forgotten, at the sight of a blonde woman loitering across the street from his apartment building. He'd never seen her before. If he had, he'd certainly remember. The way she was dressed, it was clear she didn't belong on this side of town.

Gale crossed the street, intending to ask if she needed directions, but as he approached, he noticed the nervous way she twisted a pair of white leather driving gloves in her hands. It dawned on him that she wasn't lost at all. She was looking up at the apartment with a purpose, craning her graceful, white neck and searching the rows of windows. He knew which one she was searching for.

"I'm guessing you're the wife," he said. Startled, her hand fluttered to her chest and she dropped the gloves. Gale bent down to pick them up. When he held them out to her, she made no move to take them. Her eyes were blue as a summer sky, but cold as winter with suspicion.

"Do I know you?" she said.

"No," said Gale. "But I think we have mutual acquaintances. I'm Gale Hawthorne." A flicker of recognition passed across the woman's face, confirming his theory that she was who he suspected.

"I'm sorry," she said stiffly. "I've never heard of you." And with that, she spun on her heels to leave. Madge felt foolish at having been caught. Immediately after Johanna left, she picked Alice up from school, dropped the children off at Aunt Maysilee's, and came straight to the address Johanna wrote down for her. She didn't intend to confront the woman her husband was sleeping with. She merely wanted to catch a glimpse, see for herself, hoping that if she did, she might feel the way she was supposed to about this whole affair. She certainly hadn't expected to meet the other woman's husband.

"You forgot your gloves," he called after her. Madge was tempted to walk on. Let him keep the gloves. Give them to Katniss for all she cared, but there was her dignity to think of. She wasn't going to run away like a frightened rabbit. She had every right to be here, to be curious.

"Thank you," she said, taking the gloves from him. They stood for a few minutes in silence, neither of them sure what to say next, the dark gathering around them. Madge didn't know the proper protocol for this particular situation. She wasn't sure there was any. This man was a stranger. A very handsome one.

Gale braved the awkwardness first. "Do you want to come in? Talk or something?" he asked. Madge's eyes widened in horror and he fought not to laugh. "Katniss isn't home," he assured her.

"I know," said Madge. Katniss was somewhere with Peeta. "It wouldn't be appropriate for me to come inside."

Gale couldn't hold back a little snort of laughter this time. "What, is your husband going to get mad?" he asked, bringing a blush to her cheeks. The joke was in ill-taste. It was inconsiderate. She was probably grieved enough as it was, without him making light of the matter.

He was preparing to apologize when she said, "Alright then. Let's talk."

"Sorry about the mess," said Gale, clearing dirty dishes from the coffee table. Some of them were from last week. Between his work schedule and Katniss' affair, neither of them had much time for chores. He carried an armload of dishes into the kitchen, less than ten feet away, dumped them into a sink with a clatter, and returned to find the other man's wife still hovering by the door.

"I don't mind, Mr. Hawthorne," she said, the perfect picture of politeness. Given the circumstances, he was impressed by her self possession.

"Call me Gale," he said. "And you are?"

"Madge," she said, stepping further into the room. She held out her hand to him. "Madge Mellark."

Mellark, he thought, checking his mental files for the name and coming up with nothing. The mystery man remained a mystery. After another minute of uncomfortable silence, Gale disappeared back into the kitchen. This time he returned with two glasses and a bottle of cheap liquor tucked under his arm.

"Sit," he said, gesturing to the sofa with one hand, while pouring with the other. Madge Mellark didn't sit. He held up one of the glasses to her. "I think this is a whiskey kind of conversation."

Madge had to agree. She took the drink gladly. She hadn't had whiskey since her pregnancy with Alice. The burn was stronger than she remembered. Her eyes watered and she dabbed at them with her gloves. Don't sip it, Peeta told her the first time they stole from her father's liquor cabinet. They were sixteen years old and she'd been sick for days afterwards. That hadn't' stopped her from trying again.

Don't sip, she thought, tossing down the rest of it. When the whiskey hit her stomach, it felt like being stabbed in the stomach. She kept her eyes squeezed shut for a moment, waiting for it to pass. Once it did, she sat down and put the empty glass on the coffee table. Gale filled it to the brim this time, then topped off his own.

"So, how long have you know?" asked Madge, dropping all pretense.

"Six months, give or take a week. You?"

"Six hours," she said, draining her glass again. "Give or take a second," she added with a half smile.

Gale was even more impressed. For a woman who'd just found out that her husband was a cheater, she seemed awfully well-adjusted. She circled a finger around the rim of her glass, the only indication that she was at all nervous. It wasn't every day she found herself alone with a strange man in his house. She didn't know anything about this Hawthorne fellow, other than that his wife was fooling around town with her husband.

Madge studied him in stolen, pieced together glances. He was ridiculously handsome, which meant his wife was likely ridiculously beautiful. His plain, navy slacks and matching button-down shirt were streaked with black grease. He must've just gotten off work. His black hair sticking up at odd angles, the shadow of stubble across his chiseled jaw, and the amused twinkle in his clear gray eyes, all added up in the best possible way. Most of the men she knew were clean-cut, well mannered, safe and dull. She'd married Peeta mainly for his wit. He used to make her laugh herself breathless. Sometimes he still did. But he'd never set her pulse racing the way it was now.

"How long have you been married to…" He trailed off, raising one dark eyebrow in a question.

"Peeta," Madge finished for him. "We've been married twelve years."

Gale let out a low whistle. "Shit," he said, filling her glass again. "That's rotten."

"It's been a good twelve years," she said, a tad defensive. "What about you and…" She knew the name, but couldn't bring herself to say it.

"Five years," said Gale. "Feels like a thousand and one. Got any kids?"

"Two," she answered promptly, almost like this was a job interview. "A girl and a boy."

"How old?"

"Seven and two."

"Shit," he said again, refilling his own glass this time. Madge didn't need to ask if he and Katniss had any children. It was obvious from the state of their tiny apartment that they didn't. "Are you going to leave him?" he asked. His bluntness left her dizzy. Or was it the whiskey taking effect?

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it," she answered honestly. She thought about it now. She and the children could stay with Maysilee and Haymitch. But for how long and what then? How would she explain it all to Alice and Timothy. They were too young to understand. Besides, Peeta was a spectacular father. She wouldn't take them away from him.

"Do you think they're in love?" she asked.

"Katniss is," said Gale with a shrug. "I can't speak for your man."

"I think he is, too," she said, putting down her glass. "This is quite a predicament we've stumbled into, Mr. Hawthorne."

"Gale," he corrected her. Though they'd only just met, he felt they were beyond formalities.

"Gale," she repeated. She leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. "Do you love your wife?"

"Every other day," he said lightly.

"What about today?"

"Not so much today," he said, his voice a shade deeper than it'd been before. She licked the whiskey from her lips and a heat that had nothing to do with the alcohol pooled in his stomach. "Do you love your husband?"

She leaned in a little further. "No, not so much today," she said, her smile an invitation that he was all too happy to accept.

Madge was a good wife. Before that, she'd been a good girl. The only man she'd ever been with was her husband. But now, as Gale undid the buttons down the front of her dress, his calloused hands just barely grazing bare skin, she realized how much time she'd wasted on being good. Her dress puddled to the floor, followed by her shift. Standing naked in the dim yellow light of the apartment, she expected to feel nervous, ashamed, guilty. As Gale's smoky eyes raked over her from head to dainty foot, she felt only a thrilling tingle wherever his gaze travelled.

"Your husband's an idiot," he said, his hands taking over for his eyes. Madge shuddered. She was far from a blushing bride, but his exploratory caresses made her feel young again, like Spring. Here was the change she'd been waiting for all of her life. Hands trembling with expectation and impatience, she undressed him and took her turn to explore.

Gale closed his eyes, his head tipped back, as she kissed her way down his chest, his stomach, and lower. When she reached a certain point, Katniss was wiped from his mind like she'd never existed. Madge Mellark was the only woman in the world. He sank down to the floor and he kept sinking.

Thoroughly exhausted, Madge collapsed against him, her ear pressed to his sweaty chest, his heart thumping against her flushed cheek. Her body was still humming from all of the things he'd done to it. Things she hadn't known were possible.

"I should go," she finally said, sitting up. Gale wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her back down for one more deep kiss, before letting her go. He watched her dress from the floor, his hands folded behind his head, stupid drunk on the memory of her from twenty minutes ago, riding him like a steed in need of being broken in. On first seeing her, he'd never have expected her to have such a voracious appetite. Not that he was complaining. He'd always loved surprises and he suspected that Madge Mellark was full of them.

"Peeta will be out of town next week," she said, slowly doing up her last three buttons.

"What a coincidence," said Gale, grinning up at her. "So will Katniss."