Whether it's her parents watching out for her from above or more of Gale's inexplicable luck, no hovercrafts come for them during the next few days.

It shocks Madge and makes her suspicious because, surely, someone must have noticed they were gone by now. But then, perhaps they think Madge died in the housefire, and if Darius fed them some story about Gale's body being hauled off to the Justice Building before it burned...maybe they haven't. She doubts the people of the Seam will report the Hawthornes missing; they pretend not to notice that sort of thing. It's how they protect each other. With new officials, burnt paperwork, and no family members working in the mines, maybe there's no record of the family at all anymore. Maybe they can all just disappear.

Her gut tells her that's a fantasy.

Regardless, the children are restless, and Hazelle can't keep them under their makeshift shelter any longer. Posy's gotten bored of hearing stories, so her mother has promised to take her out scavenging if she behaves. Madge wants to protest – it's too dangerous, what if the Capitol is waiting on them to come out – but one look at Posy tells her the little girl can't stay still much longer. And they do need food.

Not to be left out, the boys insist on going trapping. Since Madge has begun cutting back his morphling, Gale has been awake more often, and he spent yesterday telling Rory and Vick how to make snares with the spare wire he keeps in the pocket of his hunting bag. Madge suspects it was a trick to keep them entertained, but they've had enough of practicing. Today, the boys want to go set a few.

Gale tries to go with them, but he breaks open the new scabs on his back trying to crawl out of their hut. With Posy dragging her toward the woods, Hazelle orders Gale to lay back down and looks to Madge for help. It's not like she knows all that much about edible plants or setting snares, so Madge gives a tight smile and waves her on.

"Don't worry, I'll take care of him."

Gale snorts.

"Have fun with Mr. Grumpy-pants, Madge. I'll bring you back a fat rabbit," Rory promises, ignoring Gale's glare as he practically bounces off down the mountain with Vick at his heels.

Madge digs out the bandages and medicine. "Can you sit up, please?"

"I'm not allowed," Gale snips.

She sighs. "You're bleeding again. I need to change your bandages."

"Then change them."

"Rory's not here."

"So?" He turns his head away to emphasize just how much he's not paying attention to her.

Madge rubs her temples. He's been ignoring her since that time she gave him morphling against his will, and she's getting tired of it. But if he wants to play it that way, fine. Armed with her supplies, she sits down cross-legged beside him and pulls his upper body across her lap so his ear rests on her left thigh and his chest rests on her right. It's not much, but hopefully the few inches she's raised him are enough.

"What are you doing?" His body is tense, and his hand comes up to her knee, like he wants to push her away, before he jerks it back like he's been burned.

"I needed to be able to reach your bandages and Rory's gone." She says simply. Gale doesn't respond, but she swears she can feel him scowling as she unwraps his torso, careful to touch him as little as possible.

Thankfully, his back's not as bad as she feared. The bandages are nearly soaked in blood, but only a few of the wounds are bleeding. She blots them gently until they stop and then reaches for Prim's ointment. Gale hisses when she starts rubbing it down the gash that starts high on his right shoulder.

"Do you want some more morphling?" It's out before she can stop it. She shouldn't ask that; he needs to be completely weened off it by the time they run out, and that's already coming sooner than she'd hoped. But she can't stand to think about the pain he must be in.

"No," he snaps. His hand presses down into her knee again, like he's going to get up and fight her about it. Madge lays her left hand across his head to keep him from moving.

"Okay," she says.

She counts all the lashes she can differentiate to distract her from how intimate this is, now that he's awake and his family is gone. But the angry lines run together, and she loses track of them and finds herself wondering if, if things were different, Gale's wife would have done this sort of thing to soften the impact of his days in the mines. Madge doesn't know a ton about the Seam, but she's heard that a good Seam wife can give an expert massage in her sleep. It's hard to imagine Gale with a wife, but it's equally impossible to imagine him without one. He obviously loved Katniss; maybe he would have been able to talk her into marrying him one day. The picture of them together feels wrong though, and Madge shakes her head.

Katniss was too focused on survival to care about romance. Even once Prim was grown, she never would have married a miner from the Seam. She'd have been too worried about losing him like she'd lost her father, and the very thought of providing for their children if that did happen would have terrified her. There was a haunted look in her eye that said Katniss had starved too long to ever risk it again. Besides, she never struck Madge as the motherly type anyway, and Gale would have wanted kids eventually.

Madge has only seen him with his siblings for a few days, but she's already seen how his eyes light up when he's telling Posy ghost stories and teaching Rory and Vick how to tie snares. Gale's young, and a man. He has enough fire burning inside him that he'd convince himself it could be different for him. That he could protect his children – from the reaping, from starvation, from the Capitol, no matter how untrue it might have been. If Katniss rejected him, sooner or later he would have fallen for a simple but hardy girl, someone who was born to be a good Seam wife.

Madge pictures a gaggle of dark-haired, ragtag children pouring out to greet Gale upon his return from the mines, all as precocious and adorable as Posy, and can't help but grin. He would have made a good father, both loving and firm. It's a shame he'll never get the chance now. She feels a tiny bit guilty for that.

"Why'd you do it, Undersee?"

"Hmm?" She's wrapping new bandages around him now, lost in her imagination.

"Why did you save me?"

Madge pauses for a moment. "I didn't, exactly. They'd taken you and the Everdeens. They killed my parents. They were coming after me next. I had nowhere to go. So I decided I wanted to send Snow a message to remember me by. But then I heard you, and you were somehow hanging on. I had the morphling." She shrugs. "It was Darius' idea really. He said if I was going to run away to the woods, I'd need you. It was the first time I'd really considered the possibility of getting out of District Twelve alive. So I told your mom my plan, and they got you out."

"So setting fire to the Justice Building was really just an act of spite?" She's surprised to hear more amusement than sarcasm in his tone.

"More or less."

"I was shocked when Rory told me. The perfect mayor's daughter, committing arson."

Madge smiles. "I'm insulted you're just now noticing my hatred of the Capitol is as real as yours, Hawthorne. I'll have you know my whole life has been a series of small rebellions. Befriending a girl from the Seam. Buying illegal strawberries. Giving Katniss my aunt's mockingjay pin."

Her voice gets softer as she lists her last act from before. She'd done that to remind Katniss that the Capitol couldn't control everything – because she'd wanted her to rebel in a way, but Madge had never expected it to cost Katniss her life. That particular spark of rebellion had gotten out of control, and it makes her feel guilty because it means that all of this is partially her fault.

"Saving a condemned felon from certain death." He's joking, but there's a gravity to his words all the same.

Madge ties up his new bandage and gently scoots him off her lap. Her feet are asleep, so she waits a minute before getting up. "Yeah, well, I just drug you out into the wilderness to spend the rest of your life hiding from the Capitol, so don't thank me yet."

He gives the hint of a shrug. "I wanted to do it before the reaping. I was trying to convince Katniss…"

Madge is taken aback. She doesn't know what to say to that. It makes her feel better and worse all at the same time because maybe he doesn't hate her for dragging him out her then, but she feels like a paltry replacement for his dead best friend. For the girl he loved. And it's a totally different situation (that would have just been disappearing, this is being chased), and she wants to say so, but if she thinks about Thread searching the woods for them anymore today, she's going to scream.

"Does it hurt?" she asks instead.

"I don't need more morphling," he snaps.

She sighs. She thought they'd been getting along. "That's not what I meant."

He turns his head to fix her with a deadpan stare. "I was whipped until I blacked out, Undersee. It burns like hell, thanks for asking."

She shoots him a dirty look and begins to rummage through one of Hazelle's bags.

"I was wondering how long you'd be able to hold out before you went looking for clean clothes," he smirks. "Honestly, I'm surprised you didn't change yesterday. Your dress reeks of alcohol."

And smoke and sweat. And it's thin and ripped and bloody and caked with mud and wholly impractical for living in the woods. Madge ignores him though and pulls out a worn shirt. It's big enough to be Gale's, so it should work for what she has in mind.

She steps over him and walks out to the stream. Even in summer it's cold, and she presses her lips firmly together to keep from gasping as she dunks the shirt in the water before wringing it out. When she lays it overtop of Gale's bandaged back, he sighs in contentment.

She doesn't let him see her satisfied smile.

It becomes a routine, her taking care of Gale while his family roams the woods, looking for food. Hazel and Posy find a patch of wild carrots, and, when Rory brings back his first kill, both him and Gale glow with pride.

It isn't a rabbit, but they all appreciate fresh meat, even if squirrels are tiny. Madge ends up helping Rory skin it while Gale gives them instructions. They have a hard time separating the meat from the fur, so she swallows her squeamishness, grabs hold of the skin Rory's carefully cut away, and yanks while he holds the rest. She falls on her butt when it gives, and they all laugh. But they get the job done well enough that she hears Gale mumble they aren't completely hopeless.

The cookfire Hazelle lights makes her nervous, she saw what happened to the girl who lit a fire in Katniss' Games, but Gale assures her that as long as they put it out before dark they'll be okay. She lets herself believe him.

The next day when she checks his back, it looks almost fully healed, so she waits for Hazelle to come check it before she wraps it back up. She doesn't want him causing another setback, so she refuses to let him up, but that doesn't stop him from making plans.

"We'll need to get Katniss' bow and quiver, and my old snares of course. Then I'll have to get started on a more permanent shelter for us, so we'll be prepared for winter."

"Don't you think we should push on so they don't find us?" Madge asks, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.

"To where, Undersee?" Madge doesn't have a response for that, so Gale continues. "We're safer here than tromping out in the open when there's nowhere to go. By now they'll have assumed that we're heading away from the distract if they're even looking for us, so they won't look here. Besides, you can't go tramping through the woods in that." He motions to her dress, which has only become filthier and more ragged over the past couple of days.

She looks down and blushes. Hazelle had offered her the extra set of clothing she'd brought for Rory, but Madge didn't have the heart to take it. Of course, the boy was so skinny that Madge doubted his pants would fit over her hips anyway.

"It's not like anyone would see me," she mumbles as she cuts up the wild carrots Posy had proudly carried back yesterday.

Gale snorts. "I know we poor peasants don't count, Princess Undersee, but take mercy on us anyway."

"Is it really that bad?"

Gale won't meet her eyes. "If you climbed a tree or got rained on, I think Rory would have aneurysm."

Madge covers her face and wishes the earth would swallow her up. She should have thought to take Katniss' hunting clothes. It would have felt wrong to steal from her dead friend, but…it least it would have saved her from scarring Rory Hawthorne for life. Katniss of all people would have understood.

"I don't have anything else," she moans, still hiding behind her hands.

A large piece of fabric flops over her head. She pulls it off and recognizes the shirt she'd used to sooth his back. He must have – "Gale Hawthorne, if you've reopened your back throwing things at me, I'll–"

He's fallen backwards, snickering, so he must not be in too much pain. "You'll what, Undersee?"

Madge desperately wants to throw something at his head. She has nothing but precious food, though, so she glares instead.

"Just put it on. I'm sure mom brought some extra pants too." He gestures toward Hazelle's extra clothes bag. "That way you can at least look presentable for dinner," he mocks, imitating a Capitol accent.

"Hey, I'm not the one going around half-naked now, am I?" she snaps before she realizes that she probably shouldn't have brought unnecessary attention to the fact that she's acutely aware of his shirtlessness.

Gale, at least, has the decency to blush. "There are extenuating circumstances."

She nods. "Sure, but what are you going to do once you're all healed up if you go around giving your shirts away now?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Miss Undersee, I had no idea it bothered you so much."

She's blushing now, so she turns away. "I just don't want to take your things. I'm not a charity case you know." It's a cruel thing to throw his own pride back in his face, but it's the only way she can think of to explain how she feels.

"Of course not," he says softly. "You saved my life and my family. I'm grateful. You ruined your dress in the process, so I owe you a change of clothes."

"But what about Rory? He'll outgrow his clothes soon, and he'll need your extras–"

"I know. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But for now, put them on. It's a lot more proper for one of us to go running around with tattered and torn up clothes than it is for you." She looks up in shock, but his eyes are focused on the ground, the tips of his ears burning.

She snatches up the shirt and an extra pair of trousers and runs out.

That night as she falls asleep, she tries not to think about the way she feels safer in Gale's clothes, even though she had to roll up the pants and sleeves about thirty times and tie up the shirt so it didn't swallow her whole. She tells herself it's only because they're warmer and she's more fully covered, giving her a wider range of motion – not because his worn shirt is big and soft like her father's hugs or because his clothes smell like lye soap and pine instead of alcohol and smoke.

And if she dreams about rushing out to greet him with Posy when he comes home to his house in the Seam covered in coal dust, well…it's only because she misses her own family so much that her subconscious is latching on to the feeling of security the Hawthornes represent. Nothing more.

Now that he's recovered, Gale's hardly around their little stick shelter. Every morning, he slips off with Rory and Vick, first to retrieve Katniss' bow and arrows, and then to teach them how to hunt. One day he materializes with a large knife that's unlike any of the kitchen knives Madge has ever seen. "It's a hunting knife," he explains, "to gut deer." Madge shivers. There's a reason she only bought strawberries. But Gale insists on teaching Rory how to use it, and then Madge. It's unpleasant, but she does it because she knows he's right when he says, "Someday you might need to know."

They eat venison for two weeks straight.

Usually though, Madge scavenges with Hazelle and Posy. They find a meadow with wild strawberry plants, and Madge fills a whole bag full of them. But most of the time, she ends up playing with Posy so Hazelle can find more things for them to eat, and she loves every minute of it. Posy is a smart, curious child, so Madge tells her everything she can remember from science class about the stars, trees, bugs, and flowers. They watch the creatures in the woods and learn about the rhythms of forest life in the summer.

But fall is coming, and it scares her. Back home, they had an icebox to store food in. Out here, they have nothing. The coming winter worries Gale too, she sees the way it burdens him when he thinks they aren't looking. And while Madge has worked so hard not to be a burden, she knows that when winter comes, her very existence might put more strain on this family than it can stand.

The old maple tree on the hill has just began to turn colors and she's sitting outside their shelter making flower crowns with Posy when Gale suddenly appears running toward them. Her blood turns cold. She stands up, ready to grab the girl and run with him when she realizes that Gale's grinning like the cat that ate the canary. He bursts into the clearing and grabs her up, spinning her around, and then she's on her feet again, and he's lifting Posy.

"Salt! I found salt! Just sitting there in a dry lakebed. Tons of it!" He tickles Posy.

Madge is struggling to keep up. Salt means seasoned food again, and that alone makes her want to cry tears of joy. But that wouldn't excite Gale like this. So it – salt! It hits her like a stone, what it means. If Gale's found salt, they can preserve food, and they don't have to worry so much about game being scarce in the winter.

He seems to see that it's finally clicked for her, or maybe that she's on the verge of crying in relief, because he sits Posy down and gives her a little nudge toward Madge. Posy is more than happy to share her innocent joy, and she doesn't complain when Madge hugs her tight.

"See?" Gale says, and she looks up from Posy's wild hair to meet his eyes which are burning bright with determination. "We're gonna be fine."

And even though she knows she shouldn't, Madge can't help but believe him.