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#''senate's haunted'' ''what??'' [twirls guns] ''senate's haunted''
robotsandramblings · 2 years
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(AU where Rex accompanies Anakin when he goes to tell Mace Windu that he thinks the Chancellor is a sith lord; Rex overhears the conversation, immediately calls Fox and tells him)
random clone: oh hey Commander Fox, ur back early from that meeting-
Fox: Chancellor’s a Sith
clone: what?
Fox, checking his pistols are loaded and heading for Palpatine’s office: Chancellor’s a Sith
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badbadbucky · 3 years
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The Haunted Haunted House
The little girl, Magda, looked at the little boy, Billy, skeptically. “What do you mean you’ve never been to a haunted house?”
The two children sat together on Magda’s bed. Billy wore a cowboy costume. Magda wore a cat costume. They were waiting for Magda’s mom.
“My mama said I wasn’t allowed to go. They had one a couple towns over, in Gerda, and my friend Georgie, his daddy took him and he said it was real scary,” Billy said. 
“But this is a haunted house,” Magda said.
Billy looked at her like she was stupid. “No it ain’t, it’s just got ghosts in it.”  Billy knew a little something about Halloween. Halloween had always been his favorite holiday. Before… he’d always stayed up until the small hours of the morning, and not just because he was buzzing off sugar, but because he didn’t want it to be over. 
For the first few months her family had lived in the big old mansion Magda had been terrified, but Billy had shown her that all the ghosts were actually nice, even if they did look scary sometimes (or all the time in Starla’s case). 
“Haunted houses got like rattlin’ coffins, and guys in costumes jump out at ya, and there’s spiders and blood and skeletons everywhere. That’s a real haunted house,” Billy said. 
Magda didn’t argue with Billy, sometimes she thought that even though she was younger than Billy--he was eight and she was six--sometimes she just understood things better. He always seemed a lot younger than he actually was. She didn’t know if it was a product of being dead, or if kids were just more innocent in the 50’s. 
“That was the year though,” Billy said. He played with the fringe on his satin shirt with the pearl snaps. 
“The year what?” Magda asked. 
“My daddy said he was gonna take me. Got tired of me askin’ probably. It was Halloween, and I was waiting for him to get home then we was gonna drive to Gerda. I was practicing twirling my toy gun. I dropped it. And it broke. And a cowboy couldn’t have an empty holster right?” He dropped his head so that the low brim of his cowboy hat--that he never took off--blocked his eyes. 
Magda reached out and laid her hand over his. It phased right through, but he said that he could still sort of feel it. 
“My daddy’s gun was a lot heavier than my toy one. I didn’t expect it to be so heavy,” Billy trailed off. He glanced up at her and wiped away a few tears. “I really woulda liked to go the haunted house.” Then he disappeared. 
Magda looked around. “Billy? Billy?”
Billy didn’t answer and he didn’t reappear.   
“Ms. Elizabeth?” Magda called.
A stately woman in a maroon gown appeared, a slash across her throat continuously dripped blood down her front. She had dark hair and dark sad eyes. “What is it Magda?”
“Billy’s upset.”
“It is a rather hard day for him,” Ms. Elizabeth said. 
The little girl told the ghost her plan. And then the ghost set about her preparations, while the girl set about her own. 
When the girl got home from trick or treating she ran straight up to her room. 
“Are you there?” She whispered. 
Ms. Elizabeth appeared. “All is ready, Ms. Magda.” She smiled down at the little girl. She held out her velvet gloved hand and very nearly touched Magda’s cheek. 
Magda could feel a cool soft whisper on her cheek. 
Then Ms. Elizabeth removed her hand. “Find Billy, I have to get into place.” 
Magda nodded. She walked out to the hallway and to the staircase that led to the attic. When she reached the top of the stairs, she called out “Billy?”
She heard a sniffle coming from behind an old painting of Ms. Elizabeth in a gilded frame. Magda walked toward the sound. The floor creaked underneath her. Magda stuck her head around the painting and found Billy sitting on the floor, curled up, with his arms around his knees. His hat sat on the floor beside him. “Billy is that you?” 
When Billy heard her voice he snatched his hat off the floor and jammed it on his head, though too late to prevent Magda from seeing the small neat hole in the middle of his forehead. Though, because Billy was her friend, she pretended that she hadn’t seen it. 
Instead, she said, “I have a surprise for you.” 
“What is it?” Billy asked. He wiped at his eyes rapidly, cowboys didn’t cry.
“If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore dummy. Come on.” Magda said. She swiped at him, and through him several times, since she couldn’t actually pull him to his feet.
Billy climbed to his feet. He never could resist a surprise. 
They climbed down the stairs from the attic and went to the main entranceway in the house. Magda’s gaze slid around, it seemed that everyone and everything was ready. She positioned herself and Billy in the very center of the room. 
Ms. Elizabeth emerged from the shadows. In addition to her customary velvet gown, she wore a cheap black cape, she’d painted fake blood around her mouth, and she wore plastic fangs. The ghosts who were older were better at interacting with physical objects.
“Velcome travelers,” Ms. Elizabeth said, in her best approximation of Magda’s best approximation of a Dracula voice, “Velcome to my home.”
“What’s going on?” Billy asked.
Magda shushed him and pointed at Ms. Elizabeth.
Ms. Elizabeth continued, “I exp-, I exp-” she struggled to speak around the fangs,  “Heaven’s sake.” She removed the fangs. “I expect that you’ll want a tour. So I shall show you around. But be warned, my friends are in town. And some people find them quite...frightening.”
The lights flickered and there was a great crash of thunder. 
Billy jumped.
Magda shot her mom, who was hiding under the stairs operating a sound machine and a dimmer switch, a thumbs up, she’d hit her cue perfectly. 
Ms. Elizabeth walked out of the entranceway and Billy and Magda followed. She led the two children toward the massive kitchen. And there stood Old Man Gibbons at the stove, stirring a bubbling cauldron of green muck. His face was painted green and he wore a ratty wig with long black hair and a pointy black hat. He cackled as he stirred.The witch costume did a marvelous job of hiding that Old Man Gibbons’ legs were nothing more than bloody stumps. He’d been the groundskeeper on the estate and had a terrible accident with a tractor.  A stuffed black cat sat on the counter behind him.
“Ah, here we have my old friend Hilda. And what diabolical potion are you making Hilda?” Ms. Elizabeth said, maintaining the Dracula accent. 
“Hehehehehe, this potion turns little boys into little mice! Ahahahaha!” Old Man Gibbons said. He lifted a spoonful of the “potion” toward Billy’s lips. “Want a taste?” 
Billy leapt backward, “no!” he squeaked. 
“Perhaps later, Hilda,” Ms. Elizabeth said. “We have many more rooms to visit.”
“Hilda” cackled. “Let me know if you get thirsty.  I could use a nice fat mouse to feed my cat, HEHEHEHEHEHEHE!”
Billy and Magda hustled out of the kitchen and followed Ms. Elizabeth to the dining room 
Tomas stood behind the long banquet style table, dressed in a white labcoat. Lucindra lay on top of the table, under a sheet. 
“Victor,” Ms. Elizabeth drawled, “you said you would show me your latest creation.”
Tomas nodded eagerly. “Ooooh yes, she’s nearly ready.” He rubbed his hands together in manic glee. “Igor! It. Is. TIME!”
“Yes, master,” a voice rasped from right behind Magda and Billy. 
Billy let out a little shriek and turned around. 
Stuart, the devastatingly handsome senator’s son with the rope burn around his neck, had sneaked up behind them. He lurched and staggered toward Tomas and handed him what looked suspiciously like salad tongs. Then he dragged his leg behind him until he reached the light switch. 
Tomas placed the salad tongs on either side of Lucindra’s head. “Give me power Igor!”
“Yes, Master,” Stuart said as he flickered the lights. 
Lucindra thrashed under the sheet.
It had taken some convincing, and a private threat of grounding from their mother, but eventually even Magda’s brother Todd had agreed to help. He was under the table, making electricity noises with his mouth and rocking the table occasionally. 
 Billy took a step behind Magda, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the scene.
“MORE!” Tomas screamed. 
“Yes, Master,” Stuart grunted. He flickered the lights more.
Lucindra flailed, occasionally the sheet would flip off her face and Tomas would quickly pull the sheet back over to conceal her face. It was not yet time for the big reveal. 
“MORE POWER IGOR!” Tomas yelled, his eyes rolling madly in his skull.
“But Master--” Stuart began. 
“NOW!!!!”
Stuart turned off the lights, plunging everything into darkness. Then he turned on a black light. The sheet over Lucindra glowed an otherworldly white. As did Tomas’s labcoat as he danced around the table. 
Todd deployed the fog machine. Tendrils of fog curled out from under the table. Billy was too entranced to hear Todd’s muffled coughing and choking. 
Slowly, Lucindra raised her shaking arms. 
“It’s alive,” Tomas howled. “It’s alive, it’s alive.” 
Tomas whipped the sheet off of Lucindra revealing her face. The blacklight made the paint on her face glow demonically. She hissed at Magda and Billy. Billy gave out a little yip and even Magda jumped a bit. 
Magda and Billy ran back out into the hallway, giggling. Stuart and Ms. Elizabeth shared a soft smile. 
Todd climbed out from under the table, he rolled his eyes at the two ghosts making googoo eyes at each other. According to Chrissy, these two had apparently been doing this dance since at least the 80’s. He stomped out of the dining room and yelled up the stairs “Okay mom, I helped. Can I go now?” He had a date with Becky Sherman, and she’d told him that he was really going to love her costume. 
Ms. Elizabeth led the kids up the stairs to the long hallway where all the guest bedrooms were. The hallway was strung with fake cobwebs everywhere. Magda got caught in them while Billy easily phased right through them. They reached the end of the hallway and Ms. Elizabeth held the door open for the two children. 
In the middle of the room there was a sarcophagus, which was really a trunk from the attic that Magda had decorated with hieroglyphics. The lid rattled ominously. 
Magda’s father, dressed as Indiana Jones, ran up behind them. “You better get outta here kids. The mummy inside will curse anyone who looks at him, and he’s waking up!” 
But before the kids could turn back, the door slammed in their faces. Magda tried the door. Ms. Elizabeth held it closed. 
“We’re trapped!” Magda yelled to Billy.
“What do we do?” Billy asked.
The lid of the sarcophagus flopped open. Bandaged arms gripped the sides. 
Billy and Magda huddled together. Though Magda wasn’t scared. Of course not. But maybe she’d huddle a bit closer to Billy, just to make him feel better. 
The mummy, really Chrissy wrapped head to toe in bandages, rose from the trunk. He moaned and groaned dramatically.  
“Don’t look!” Magda’s dad yelled. He stood in front of the kids. “Squeeze your eyes shut.”
Magda and Billy both squeezed their eyes shut. Then, Magda’s father gave a great yell and flopped to the ground. Then the only sound was the mummy shuffling toward the kids.
Billy and Magda couldn’t stand to keep their eyes closed anymore. They looked down and saw Magda’s father lying frozen on the ground, his face wrenched into an exaggerated rictus of pain. Billy and Magda both gave little shrieks. 
When they looked up, the mummy was no longer shuffling toward them, they twisted around to see where the mummy had gone, when suddenly he appeared right behind them and grabbed Billy’s shoulders. Billy screamed and jerked away from the mummy, then laughed shrilly. 
Ms. Elizabeth opened the door and took the kids back down stairs to the conservatory. Magda’s mother had transferred the fog machine to the conservatory and it had been filling with smoke while the kids were upstairs. Wisps of smoke hovered around the bases of the trees, turning the bright cheery room into a haunted forest. 
Billy and Magda hesitantly entered the room. Ms. Elizabeth disappeared into the fog and so the two children were left alone. They walked between the trees.
Magda jumped when she heard a bird chirp, and Billy gave out a faint scream when he’d mistaken a potted tree for a figure coming for them. 
A figure whooshed past them. The kids turned to see what it was, but it was too fast. Then something went by again, and Billy was able to catch the flapping tail of a sheet. 
“There!” He pointed to the center of the conservatory. “It went that way!”
The kids chased after the figure, laughing. They almost caught up with the figure, but then lost it again. They found a small area that was largely cleared of the fog. 
The figure was hiding--very poorly--behind a tree.
“We see you!” Magda called.
“Yeah, we see you,” Billy said. 
The figure, dressed in a sheet with eye holes cut into it that had been nearly bleached white over the years, but still had the faintest hint of a floral pattern, stepped out from behind the tree.  The very spooky ghost, Starla, raised her arms over her head and the sheet dropped back a bit, revealing her blackened flesh. She wiggled her burnt red fingers. “Oooooooooooo.”
Billy giggled. “You’re not scary.”
The sheet twitched a bit, as Starla smiled to herself.  She liked the idea of not being scary, if only for a time. 
Ms. Elizabeth returned, and she’d put the fake fangs back in. “I hope you enjoyed our little tour. Because you can never leave.” She lunged forward with her fangs bared. 
Both of the children screamed and ran out of the conservatory.
 Ms. Elizabeth reached out and squeezed Starla’s hand. “Well done, darling.”
Magda pulled Billy up to her bedroom. They jumped into her bed and threw the covers over their heads. Magda stuck her arm out of their blanket fortress only long enough to snag her flashlight off the floor. She turned it on, casting both their faces into sharp relief. 
“I think we’re safe,” Magda said.
Billy nodded. 
They sat in silence for a moment. 
“Did you like it?” Magda asked shyly. 
Billy answered by trying to throw his arms around her. He phased through, but she got the idea all the same. 
They lay down for a bit, but both of them were still wide awake. Their eyes slid towards each other.
“I can’t go to sleep,” Billy said. 
“Me neither, Magda said. 
They sat, talking and laughing until 11 o’clock, when Magda’s mother stumbled in and told them to go to bed. Then they huddled under the covers, whispering and giggling, until 2 in the morning, when Ms. Elizabeth appeared and told them in no uncertain terms that they must go to sleep “this very instant.”
It was only then, that Magda’s eyes finally began to flutter, and Billy found it harder to hold his form. Eventually Magda fell asleep and Billy went where all ghosts go when they are too tired to be visible anymore. For them,  Halloween was over.
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whiskeykneat · 5 years
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One More Saturday Night [2]
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CHAPTER TWO
Smoke curls upwards from the cigarette dangling out of Joanna's mouth as she looks Gale up and down. It's near ten o'clock, long after the street lamps have clicked on, and the air outside the carhop smells of oil and grease. Gale has just gotten off his shift at the mine, he's scrubbed and scrubbed at the coal dust in the seams of his hands, but with back to back twelve hour shifts, they'll never be clean.
The letter that came this morning from the capital is burning a hole in his pocket.
He'd taken one look at it sitting forlornly on the kitchen table next to his warm dinner, and when his mother's step had creaked on the bottom stair, Gale didn't have to look past the washtub curtain to know that she'd been crying, he could hear it in her voice.
[[MORE]]
I'm going out, Ma, he'd said, but hadn't stopped her when she'd drawn him tight to her thin body for a fierce hug.
You tell Katniss, Gale. Tell her tonight, Hazelle had whispered, wiping her eyes. And give her my love.
"Katniss?" Joanna purses her red lips, sucking on the cigarette so hard he can imagine what those sinful red lips would look like wrapped around his cock, and Gale gives her a once-over of his own. "She's working. Took my shift." She brushes past him, letting him feel every inch of her pointy brassiere pressing up to his chest. "You're gonna have a hard time prying her from that dump up to Lookout Point tonight." Joanna rolls her eyes, nodding towards the parking lot, full of every warm-blooded teenager in town, as if there's nothing better to do on a Saturday night in 1964, in every house in town a television, on every radio the sound of the devil's music.
For the times they are a-changin’...
"You could come up to Lookout Point with me." Joanna's red nails lightly trail down his forearm, and goosebumps pimple along Gale's skin. She looks up at him from under her lashes, biting down on the tip of her thumb. And he considers it for a moment, he really does, but he's been down that road before: sinking down into her warm wet softness, hearing her mewl as she claws his back, begging him to empty himself inside of her, anything to fill the gaping hole inside them both.
Joanna purrs as she runs a finger up his chest, playing with his collar. "It ain't as pretty, but we can go down to the Slag Heap if you've a mind to get ham-hocked." There's no reason he should refuse her. Thom will be there, after all, and every other man on the crew. Right now, nothing sounds better than drinking so hard he can't see straight, anything except thinking about the letter in his pocket.
Gale looks down at Joanna for a moment, and he hears what she's saying to him, offering him a way out tonight, a way to forget that in two days, he’ll be on a train to his army training, where they'll put a gun in his hands and send him off to the jungle, and there will be no more Saturday nights like this one, where all he has to worry about is which pretty girl he’ll be taking home.
(All of them. None of them. Any of them except the only one he wants, the only one he's ever wanted, the one he can never have at all.)
He fingers the ribbon wrapped around his wrist, threadbare now, but once as sky blue as the bottles that hang from the chinaberry tree outside his mother’s front door -- as if it is what is keeping him tethered to this town, like a candle burning against the darkness. "Nah, not tonight."
"Well, if you want something to take the edge off, you know where to find me." Joanna pouts dramatically, one hand on her hip. She winks, then, and leaves him, a cloud of Chanel in her wake.
As if his body has a mind of its own, Gale finds himself hopping back in the truck, and bringing it around to the parking lot. The carhop is jumping tonight, hormones and energy pumping out of every sleek car, on beat with the music.
Stay… just a little bit longer…
Gale parks in the back, near the tree line, and cuts the engine. The place is full of Townies, all dressed to the nines, the boys with shaggy Beatles hair and the girls in mini skirts and beehives. In his work denim and his button down plaid shirt, Gale feels suddenly old beyond his years and out of place, as though he's peeped into a pinhole camera of an era gone by, one he never belonged to, was never a part of. These boys have never spent twelve hours down in a mining shaft, working every muscle as they lay waste to the mountain. They've never left school to become breaker boys, separating the impurities from the coal. They do not know what it's like to descend down into the darkness, day after day after day, until it is like you have never known the light.
“What would you like?” The voice, a car over, arrests him in his tracks, and Gale feels his whole body shiver with recognition.
It's the voice that's haunted his dreams since the summer of 1961, sleepy afternoons and strawberry kisses. It's the haunting melody of the piano drifting through the dusty air as he makes his way to the mine in the dawnlight, pricking memories long buried: of her in his arms, twirling around in that big, empty gazebo. That slate-tiled gazebo, with the big cupola, with lots of shady corners for stealing kisses. It was where Madge Undersee had her debutante ball, as Gale watched from the shade of the sycamore tree in his ill-fitting suit, and knew he could never be a part of her world.
He'd taken employment in the mine the very next day, and the day he'd turned eighteen he'd gone down in the pit for the first time, the memory of the girl he could never have seared forever on his heart.
•••
Gale hasn't seen Madge Undersee since the morning after the debutante ball, when he'd met her under the sycamore tree just past the edge of the sprawling gardens, where once he'd carved their initials together: M+G.
She'd been wearing white, he recalls: a frothy camisole, so fine he could see the outline of her breasts and feel the answering swell in his denim jeans, and pine green silk pajama pants that hugged her delicate curves. Gale knew that if he touched her, the silk would whisper over her skin, that she'd make a little moan in her throat, and that her lips would be velvety and plush, tasting of clouds and cream as he parted them with the tip of his tongue.
If he kissed her, he'd be unable to finish what he came to do, and that's the one thing that killed him, to take the only thing good and fine in his world, and make what lay between them something cheap.
He thought about her father, and the suitcase of money, money that could have fed his whole family for a year, and bought a new house besides, were he the kind of man who didn't have his pride, the kind of man who didn't know right from wrong. He was seventeen, but he's been a man since he was twelve, the night his father died and mantle of responsibility, of family, came to lay on his shoulders.
Madge smiled up at him, handing him a tiny teacup filled with black coffee, his big, rough working man's hand nearly engulfing her own. For a moment, he let his hand linger on hers, until her cheeks turned pink, and then he took a step back, the space between them thick with words unspoken. There was an eyelash on her cheek, he wanted to blow it off, he wanted to make a wish. But the time had passed for such foolish fancies.
My daughter is not for you, Gale Hawthorne, Mayor Undersee had said gently, the suitcase lying on the table between them like Pandora's Box, the sounds of the party drifting up from below. There was a line of coal smudged along the cuff of Gale's suit jacket, and he tugged at his sleeve, feeling the poorly constructed seams give out just a touch.
The tux belonged to Thom's pa, who was as of a mind as Gale's in that a suit was only for marrying and burying. Not fucking around at a party to impress some high class piece of tail. Gale had never wanted to deck the elderly man more in his entire life.
I wanna hold your hand, crooned Paul McCartney on the record player.
Under the ancient sycamore tree, Madge's eyes were as deep and blue as the Delft china plates in the display case at the five and dime, and the little gold flecks danced like specks of sunlight as she gazed up at him. When he spoke, tears sprung to her eyes, and her teacup fell to the roots of the tree, shattering and spilling like the sound a heart makes when it breaks beyond hope or repair.
High in the tree, a pair of mated bluebirds sang, to usher in the morning.
•••
There she is, Miss Prim and Proper, the Debutante herself: Madge Undersee. And she looks better than ever, if that's possible: golden and slender, with legs that go on forever. Gale can't help but drink every bit of her in, as if he hasn't been able to stop thinking of her since the day they parted, as if he’s never thought about walking up to the front door of her house and asking if she's home. But he heard from Katniss that Madge went up to university in Charlottesville, and he’d thought that after that, she'd never return.
He's heard a rumor that Madge got engaged, that she's marrying Seneca Crane, the son of a senator, the china already picked and the invitations sent out.
If that's the truth, why is Madge working at the carhop? She should be making her wedding trousseau. She should be shopping all over Paris with her Daddy's money, and buying French lingerie for that stuck up rich man, to lie in his big bed with the hundred count sheets, and let him taste her sweetness.
Like clouds and cream. Like strawberries.
"Fuck!" Gale presses his forehead to his hands, which are clenched on the steering wheel.
He should drive out of here right now. He should go home and get a good sleep in his own bed. He should… But he won't. And, catching himself rubbing the satin ribbon around his wrist again, he knows why.
Madge Undersee.
He's halfway out of the car already when he hears her voice again, and this time nothing can stop Gale Hawthorne from getting what he's come back for, from the one person he can't leave behind without saying goodbye.
•••
“Please, please don't.” Madge vainly bats at the hands groping her ass, and for a moment she's back in the frat house, trying to push Seneca off of her as his tongue goes down her throat and his knee forces her legs apart.
You're so frigid, Margreta. Don't be such a goddamned prude.
“You heard the lady. She said no.”
It's like she's imagining things. Gale Hawthorne. Standing between her and Cato Curlew, steel in his tone. His voice ripples with command, and Madge feels a trickle of warmth low in her belly, though she's still angry with him, after all these cold years apart.
Why is he here now, when he's stayed away for so long? Doesn't he know that she no longer needs him, that she stopped waiting for him long ago? “I don't need your help,” Madge informs Gale’s broad shoulders. “Go away.”
She can hear the sneer in Cato’s voice. “That ain't no lady.” He spits a stream of tobacco on the asphalt. “Everyone with half a brain knows that she's been spreading her legs for any Seam bastard who asks since she was sixteen.”
Gale grabs Cato by the shirt, and blood sprays against the mirror on the door. Cato comes out swinging, shaking his head like a bull before he charges at Gale. Madge screams, and they all come running, the boys laying bets, the girls huddled to the side and watching through their fingers, titillated and horrified all at once.
The two men square off on the blacktop, Cato big and square and stocky, Gale tall and broad-shouldered but with a latent strength honed from years swinging a pickaxe. Cato is bleeding from the nose, and his fists are up as he and Gale circle one another. Madge has heard the stories, Cato killed the last man he fought in a brawl, down in Wheeler.
“Don't! Stop!” She tries to dart between them, but Wheatley Mellark grabs her arm, hauling her back.
“You'll just make it worse,” he murmurs in her ear.
“Get him, Cato!” Cato’s friend Marvel cups his hands and lets out a wild yell, and Cato surges forward like he's been shot from a cannon. “Show that Seam bastard what we do to coal miners who think they can touch Town women!”
Madge is pale, she is shaking. “Stop them,” she begs Wheatley and Delly, who has appeared at her other side, a serious look on her face.
Gale and Cato circle one another on the gray, cracked asphalt, dust rising in the air.
“That's right,” Gale taunts, his voice deep and carrying. “These dirty, coal-stained hands have touched Town women… While you're at your office with your secretary, I've been plowing your girlfriends… Your wives… And your momma, Curlew.”
Cato roars, and charges Gale. Gale dodges Cato, turning and socking his fist into Cato’s jaw. Cato spits out blood, lunging for Gale, and then both men are on the asphalt, rolling over and over with the smell of heat and blood in the air.
“Stop it! Gale Hawthorne, stop it right now!” Katniss comes gliding across the pavement, but Peeta Mellark, near the edge of the crowd, catches her arm, his mouth moving in words that Madge cannot make out, even if she wanted to.
She can hear nothing except the thud of flesh on flesh, and then Gale is on top of Cato, punching and punching him, and suddenly the wail of police sirens can be heard coming down the avenue, and Madge snaps out of her coma.
“We have to go!” Madge yanks on Gale’s arm, hard, and he resists her for only a moment before snapping back into focus, his dark gray eyes gone soft as he looks at her. She doesn't want to think about what that means, not right now, not when this could all be taken away in an instant. Cato is Town, and his daddy is a rich man besides. Gale is Seam. A night in jail would be the lightest of sentences Gale could pray for.
So instead, Madge leans forward, cupping Gale’s jaw, and whispers in his ear, “Now,” and Gale, stumbling like a drunk in the dark, doesn't question her when she jumps into the truck beside him and grinds the gears, and they speed off into the night.
•••
���You're an idiot.” Madge presses the damp napkin a little too hard to Gale’s jaw, and he winces, trying to pull away. “You know that?” Her voice is low and furious, and he thinks he's never been more intrigued by her than at this very moment, all her ladylike poise gone, the air between them crackling like lightning about to strike.
“Maybe if you had stayed where you were supposed to be --” Gale growls, turning his jaw from her ministrations. “On your side of town -- Then I wouldn't have had to step in in the first place!”
“I don't see how it's any of your business where I spend my time, or who I spend it with!” Madge pushes on Gale’s chest, and he laughs darkly. “What's your problem?”
“You are! If you had just stayed in your place -- the princess in her tower -- instead of slumming it --” He’d kill any man who touched her without her permission, she has to know that.
Tears spring to the corners of her eyes, and for an instant Gale feels like a monster for wounding her, but -- You deserve this, he reminds himself. She can't know that all he wants to do is to take her in his arms and kiss her tears away. He's already made his choice.
“I…” Madge turns her face away for a moment, composing herself. He wonders if she still sings to herself in her head. He wonders why he can feel the space between their bodies so keenly, why he still wants to pull her close, to open the door they locked so long ago. “I think you should take me home.”
Gale swallows, turning his face to hers. In the moonlight, her profile would look at home stamped on an antique bronze coin, too beautiful to be anything but legendary. Wars have been fought over women like Madge Undersee, in times of old. She's everything that's wrong and right for him, and even though his heart says it's right, his mind whispers that it's wrong, wrong, wrong.
Gale leans toward Madge, who tenses, and as he wraps a finger around single golden curl, she turns her face up to him with a question in her eyes, that indent on her lower lip enchanting him as it did when he was a boy, begging to be explored by his tongue. His hand comes up, and he caresses the line of her jaw, feeling her tremble uncontrollably at his touch. “What are you so afraid of?” Gale whispers huskily, even though he knows the answer.
What he isn't expecting are the next words out of her mouth.
“I don't want Daddy to hear about…” she waves a hand to encompass their surroundings, or maybe the events that have taken place. “...this.”
“I didn't ask for his damned approval.” His laugh is rusty, as though it's been a long time since he's had anything to laugh about. “I bet Daddy approves if he's got cash in his pockets instead of coal.”
Madge reels back, as if she's been slapped. “Fuck you.” Before Gale can process what's happening, the car door slams behind her, and she runs barefoot across the dark parking lot, and straight into the Slag Heap.
“Fuck!” Gale slams his hands on the dashboard, wincing. He leaves the door swinging, and runs after her.
She's standing at the bar when Gale catches up to her, her shoulders heaving, downing a shot of something amber, the heady scent of it already purring on her skin. “What do you want?” She slams the shot glass on the bar with a hiss, and Gale grabs her by the shoulders, unsure of what he intends to do right up until this moment.
“Another shot,” the bartender drawls, and Gale slams it down, and then he's kissing Madge Undersee, his hands cupping that little heart shaped face, his thumbs stroking her jawline, the taste of her as raw and real as though it's been home all along, as if he's never known it until she's back in his arms, pliant and soft, nipping at her bottom lip, his tongue meeting hers, tasting of amber and cream and the mist that rises off the mountains in the morning.
Madge pulls back, and slaps him, hard. “You bastard.” There's a round of shocked applause, led by Joanna, who blows Gale a sultry kiss and a wink, leaning against her pool cue before lining up her shot.
But Gale isn't here for Joanna tonight. “Madge!” Gale bellows, past caring what anyone thinks. His long strides overtake her in the parking lot, and he finds her leaning against the cab of his truck, her shoulders shaking.
“Get me out of here, Gale,” Madge whispers, her voice raw.
He touches her gently, as though she is a wild doe that might startle or frighten, and she surprises him by turning around and falling into his arms, her face pressed to his chest, her heart matching the beat of his own. He lifts her tear streaked face with one finger, and then she stands on tip-toe, and they are kissing again, slow and soft and sure, as if all the time they've spent apart has been leading up to this moment.
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