PROLOGUE
strawberries;

── THE MEMORY WAS IMPRINTED into Gale's mind, as clear as the morning sky, of the first time the mayor's daughter had crossed his path.

It had been a hot and barmy day in late June, the shadows of summer only just beginning to creep over the dull streets of District Twelve. The location of Panem's poorest district meant that their summers were often long and humid, but for some unknown reason, that year had been a particularly scorching few months. It was late afternoon on a Tuesday, and above Gale the sky was dazzlingly blue yet still partly cloudy.

Though that wasn't particularly unusual for District Twelve, where it was almost always partly cloudy.

School had finished for the day less than an hour ago, and Gale had decided to spend the day foraging in the woods for stray berries and herbs. Usually when he wandered out to the woods, it would be to hunt, but he tended to save hunting until the weekends. No, foraging wasn't the most thrilling activity, and if he got caught the peacekeepers would have his head, but it was what he had to do to keep his family fed.

Though he was not yet even fourteen years old, Gale had been a provider for his family for several months now, after his father died in a mining accident in the spring. His mother, Hazelle, was heavily pregnant with her fourth child, and her inability to work had made the adolescent Gale the breadwinner of his family. Thankfully, despite his young age, Gale had always been resourceful, and he had quite the knack for designing traps. These days, the unruly woods that surrounded District Twelve were filled with snares and traps crafted by Gale's own frail hands, so much so that they would be deadly for anybody that walked through them.

And Gale Hawthorne had always been rather mature for his age, in attitude and in stature. Certainly, even in his youth, Gale already looked like a man. He was the tallest in his year with incredibly broad shoulders, and alongside his olive skin and dark, brooding features, he managed to appear handsomely damaged. For a boy from the Seam, one that was constantly battling with starvation, he was abnormally large.

Indeed, even at eleven years old, Madge should have known that Gale's beauty would be the cause of her destruction.

The bristled points of the pampas grass tickled Gale's bare kneecaps as he trudged along the meadow grudgingly, sun summoning sweat on his furrowed brow as he walked with sullen shoulders. He didn't take well to such warm weather; the heat seemed to aggravate his exhaustion, making him groggy and slow, while the added sun only fuelled his additional rage. As he pushed through the jungle of grass, each brush of green that tickled his face caused his temper to grow shorter by the second.

By the time he reached the depths of the forest, he was thankful for the shade the towering trees provided. Gale had fallen in love with the woods from a young age. Not only did they shield him from the sun during the boiling weather, but when he needed them to, they shielded from the world too.

The trees had always been Gale's sanctuary, and he felt the most at peace when he could escape the boundaries of District Twelve and pretend for a minute that he was anywhere else.

His tiny home district was overcrowded and riddled with familiar, worn out faces. People were poor and desperate, and for many of them very rarely would you see a smile on their face. In the morning, he would wake to the sounds of a hundred strained miners marching through the Seam with their heads hung low, and at night, he would be kept awake by the sounds of his siblings' stomachs and his mother's tears. The sounds that haunted him were only getting louder, and his ears were beginning to ache.

Certainly, in a world full of nothing but noise, the forest seemed to be the only place Gale could hear himself think.

Gale collapsed to the ground, sending the tattered linen sack hanging on his shoulders rolling across the dirt. Leaning his head back against a fallen log, he allows his body to finally breathe, inhaling deeply through his nose to invite as much of the brisk fresh air into his lungs as humanly possible. And slowly, as he breathed more and more, the nightmarish images that so often haunted his memories began to dull, the noises starting to quiet.

His mind had just fallen into its peaceful lull when the screams startled.

They were callow and shrill, like those of a child, and they were naive, like those of somebody who had never experienced danger before. It only took Gale several seconds to locate the perpetrator whose lungs they came from.

Deeper into the woods, hanging from a loose, low-hanging branch of an oak tree, was a girl. As she was upside down, Gale struggled to properly make out her face, but he could see that she was abnormally petite and rather young - a good couple of years younger than him, anyway. The contours of her limbs were thin and bony, but her ribs were full and hidden by fat; the first thing signalling to Gale that she had never been starved.

And on top of that, she didn't possess his dark colouring or eyes like concrete. Her skin was not tanned and covered in dirt, and her features were not dark or brooding. Her skin was not littered with scars and bruises, nor were her shoulders sullen or her kneecaps muddy. She didn't look troubled or strained, she looked innocent - she looked pure. Her skin was pale, her body clean, and her eyes were bluer than the sky above their heads. Most shockingly, her hair was not ebony like his own, but rather appeared to be the colour of straw.

This was all he needed to see to know this was not somebody from the Seam. This was a merchant girl. And what on earth could a merchant girl be doing in the woods?

"Are you just going to stand there and gaup or are you going to help me?", the tiny voice shrieked frustratedly, interrupting Gale from his contemplation.

"Oh, right", he mumbled, approaching her briskly, "Sorry."

"And I suppose this is your death trap, too", she raised her eyebrows and gestured to the noose of rope wrapped around her ankle, "is it not?"

It was, and it was making Gale feel sick inside. He set the snares to capture rabbits and squirrels, and so the loops of rope were far too meagre to wrap around a human limb. He'd never really contemplated that there might be a person out there small enough to fall victim to his trap.

"Yeah, it is", he murmured once again, reaching upwards to untie the rope laced around her leg, "My bad."

As he fiddled to get the knot untied, the grip around her ankle began to loosen until the loop was wide enough to set her free, sending her hurtling down onto the dirt with a thud. She shrieked again, this time more frantically, before sitting upwards to glare at her captor.

"You should be!", she screeched, "Don't you think about the consequences before you start setting those things, you could have killed something!"

Gale chuffed, "Well, I mean - that's the whole point."

The girl looked clueless now, "What?"

"That's the point", he repeated as though it were obvious, "It's a trap, for an animal? You're lucky it wasn't your neck."

"My neck wouldn't be thin enough to fit through the loop", she argued.

"Oh, I don't know, it's pretty boney", Gale chuckled, "Though you're not entirely wrong, but I think it'd be your big head that would be the problem."

"Are you always so rude?" she questioned as she finally pulled her body up from the ground and got to her feet, brushing the dirt off of her school dress.

"Pretty much", he nodded, "What are you doing here anyway? You don't usually find merchant girls running through these woods, you do know it's illegal to be here, right?"

"Yes, of course I know it's illegal, I'm not stupid", she rolled her eyes, "and I think I know the law well enough thank you, my father is the mayor."

"The Mayor?" Gale's eyes widened.

"Yes, the Mayor", she mimicked, "I'm Madge Undersee."

Suddenly, her well-fed figure and evident naivety made much more sense. If the girl standing before him was the daughter of Mayor Undersee, like she claimed, she really had never experienced the threat of starvation in her life. In fact, she was doing much better than most in their district, apart from maybe the Head Peacekeepers and those who rotted away in the Victor's Village. This girl wasn't just from a merchant family, this girl was rolling in it.

"Gale Hawthorne", he finally responded after several long seconds of staring at her blankly.

"Well Gale, you'd think for your age you'd have learned a few more manners", Madge looked up and marvelled at the extent of Gale's height, as he towered over her so highly that he could be her father, "How old are you, anyway?"

"I'm thirteen."

"You're thirteen?"

"Yes, I'm thirteen, why would I lie about it?", his tone had started to become snappy, "How old are you, then, princess?"

"I'm eleven", she folded her arms across her chest and raised an eyebrow at him, "You're rather big for a thirteen year old."

"And you're rather judgemental for an eleven year old", he countered, "Anyway, you never answered my question, Princess."

"Strawberries."

"What?", he questioned.

She rolled her eyes for a second time, "I came here for strawberries."

"You came here to pick fruit?", he scoffed, "Doesn't the mayor's daughter have enough in her pockets to afford food from the market?"

"Yes, obviously, but there aren't any strawberries available very often, not even in the Hob", Madge explained, "But I noticed you carrying them in town yesterday, so I followed you here."

"You followed me?", it was Gale's turn to shriek now.

"You don't need to sound so offended about it", she exclaimed, "Besides, it's not like you noticed - you might want to be a little more careful if you don't want to get caught."

If you don't want to get caught. With all of the havoc and the fluster of confusion, Gale hadn't even thought about that part of it. The girl standing in front of him - the girl who had fallen victim to one of his illegal traps - was the daughter of the mayor. She could get him arrested in a second if she wanted to, and then what was his family supposed to do. He'd been so careless, perhaps he should have left her there to rot.

"I'm not going to rat you out, don't worry", she spoke again, as if she'd read his mind, "So long as I get a little something in return, obviously."

Madge nodded at the sack on Gale's shoulder, and her implication suddenly became clear. With a huff and a roll of his grey eyes, Gale reached into his bag and rummaged through the plants scattered around his school books, taking a handful of strawberries and dropping them into Madge's held out hands. At the sight of the red treasure, Madge's eyes lit up, the blood in her polished cheeks beginning to flush with glee.

"And how do I know I can trust you on your word?" Gale called out as the mayor's daughter picked up her feet and began to scurry back towards the meadow.

"I guess you'll just have to believe me and find out. See you later, Trouble", she called back, and within a second, she was gone, leaving Gale to stare blankly in the direction she had disappeared in, questioning to himself whether it would come back to haunt him that his fate could potentially be in her hands.

Though, somehow, he didn't find himself particularly fearful. He believed her, so much so that he went home that evening with little anxiety at all.

No, something about the encounter lingered on his mind like a bad perfume, but through it all, Gale never doubted her when she had told her to trust him.

In fact, Gale had a feeling that one day he would depend on Madge Undersee's trust quite greatly indeed.

AUTHOR'S NOTE . . . hello there! this was a mega spontaneous write to be honest, I just randomly got inspired for a bit of gadge and this was only supposed to be a short little flashback, so I thought I'd write it! I do love this two though and I'm very excited for you to see what I've got in store for them. I love the complexity of their relationship because of the fact that they're so different and madge is so sheltered and privileged compared to those in the seam, which really messes with gale's rage a bit. but obviously, he's going to warm up and realise it isn't madge's fault that they come from different backgrounds, and they're actually more similar than he might have thought. but anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading, and I'll hopefully have another update fairly soon, though I am mega hyper fixated on my marvel/careers book at the minute, so that is taking up most of my time. all my love, dani x