Chapter Text
As Plutarch had passed on, Thirteen picked her up from Seven the night after she got back on the train. On her arrival, she endured the well-wishes and cheers from a somewhat confused District Seven that had to face the notion that they’d been wrong about her for years. She was glad, as were they, to cut the questions short. It was all still too much to talk about; those unguarded moments in the arena had been for Haymitch and Finnick, not everyone in the country. She still wasn’t ready to try to justify and explain herself, at least not honestly. She’d stuck to the script for their victor interview, and only holding Haymitch’s hand the whole time had helped, reminding her they were together in the ordeal.
That night, slipping away from the winter town and hiking a couple miles to the clearing where the hovercraft was cloaked and waiting for her signal, was almost too easy. Snow obviously wasn’t expecting any trouble from either of them. Getting to Thirteen and seeing Haymitch already there, having successfully slipped the fence around Twelve’s town himself and run away, she’d thrown herself into his arms without reserve, holding him close, glad to see him alive and well still.
She’d been afraid that somehow his own rescue would fail, and he would die out there in the woods or be captured and she wouldn’t have been there to say goodbye, she wouldn’t have been there for him, and he was the only person she had left. Everyone else was gone but he was OK and so long as that was true life was remotely bearable, if only just.
She was admittedly a little pissed when she realized that Plutarch was right there with his camera crew to film their reunion. Of course they immediately turned it into a propo.
The joy of being together again, with the dizzying prospect of a rebellion and freedom, was swiftly crushed. Within a week, they found out when Snow had realized that his two pet victors had instead slipped the leash, he’d taken his fury out on Seven and Twelve. They hadn’t thought, but they should have known: with Snow, someone always paid the price.
Snow had counted on the two of them capitulating when they saw the devastation their defiance could cause. The mere threat of it had been more than enough for years, so she knew he’d certainly planned on the reality of it being ample incentive. That afternoon, in Command, the television had flickered to life with the pompous Capitol fanfare for an announcement. Snow had showed the scenes of the devastation for the entire country to see, knowing Haymitch and Johanna must be watching. The images of public executions, destroyed homes, desperate men and women pushed to the edge by unattainable quotas, announcements of cessation of food supplies, had all been carefully calculated to chip away at their resolve. “Surrender, stop this farce, and mercy will be shown to your districts,” he boomed at the end, face a portrait of righteous wrath.
All total bullshit, of course, because she and Haymitch both knew their districts had rejected them if anything. But of course nobody should suffer for them. They had tried to kill themselves to keep that from happening, hadn’t they?
Thirteen wouldn’t let them share a room without a marriage certificate, and he hadn’t asked her for a Thirteen marriage ceremony. Probably because two minutes for signing a paper saying they agreed they were married seemed so pointless, so void of any feeling or significance, she’d just as soon not bother. If he wanted to marry her, she wanted to wear blue and plant a pair of lovers’ trees with him, and do whatever the hell they did in Twelve for a wedding. She wanted any marriage of theirs to mean something, and she damn well wasn’t going to do it just because Alma Coin tried to tell them so. Besides, she’d quickly found out they were so rule-bound it gave her pleasure to tweak them where she could by ignoring their stupid rules. So she just went to his room every night anyway. Sex hadn’t come up again just yet. It seemed like most of the nights it was all too much, like tonight, and they just curled up together, holding on tight.
They both knew suffering all too well to not feel for those enduring it. But surrendering to Snow, and the probability of that miserable life, was impossible. “He won’t kill us. But he’ll keep us alive and do what he said when he crowned us as the victors,” she told him.
“I know,” he answered. “I know.” The forced wedding, being obliged to bear kids that would be reaped, the misery of seeing each other only during the Games each year, being put back on the circuit—she couldn’t take it. “He may try to do worse than that, if he can think of it. He won’t kill us, though. He’ll need us as the examples.” He sighed, breath stirring lightly against her cheek. “That leaves us exactly where we were in the arena. We could try to remove ourselves from the equation so he’ll leave off them.”
She laughed darkly. “Everything’s locked down so tight here…maybe there’s some nightlock in the woods topside.” That would be quick—one bite on a mouthful of berries and they’d be dead almost before they could swallow.
“I’ll have to think, but honestly, I’ve got no idea what we do,” he said helplessly. “Even offing ourselves might be too little, too late—this has gotten a lot bigger than us.” That scared her more than anything; Haymitch who always had a plan, or a quip at least, seeming so lost.
That night was long and what sleep they got was fragmented, threaded with nightmares. She dreamed of having somehow been the one that killed them all: her axe was embedded in Finnick’s skull and he was leading an army of dead who all looked at her with accusing eyes. Haymitch’s sleep was no more peaceful and neither of them spoke about what they dreamed, but she thought they didn’t really need to say when it was so obvious.
They woke up to a changed world because Seven and Twelve had struck back. Plutarch claimed it was because they didn’t want to lose the powerful inspiration of the lovers they had so recently embraced. Haymitch shot her a look out of bloodshot grey eyes surrounded by dark smudges of fatigue, and shook his head. She nodded in agreement. She couldn’t imagine she and Haymitch were that fucking inspiring. She figured their districts had finally just gotten tired of being beaten down, and decided they’d rather take the risk rather endure than the near-certainty of eventual oblivion.
~~~~~~~~~~
He had a stirring of pride in Seven, and particularly in Twelve. He held few illusions they were actually fighting for his sake, like Plutarch claimed, but knowing how small and poor and vulnerable his home was, to see they had come together for that all-or-nothing push for fight for their freedom stirred something in him nonetheless.
After Plutarch gave them the news at breakfast, they were summoned to Command. Like good well-trained dogs, they heard a president’s command and responded. Following Johanna through the blast door, seeing how her body suddenly tensed beneath the drab grey shirt at the sight of Alma Coin, he could only agree. The woman set him ill at ease. Maybe it was austerity rather than indulgence that characterized Thirteen, but he got the same unnerving sense that to Coin, just like Snow, people were nothing more than convenient tools to be used and discarded and even destroyed if need be. One life held no intrinsic worth to her, only the value of what use she could make of it.
“District Twelve has been taken by the rebels,” she informed Haymitch coolly as he took a seat at the table. “The fighting continues in Seven, apparently.” He couldn’t help a spark of irritation as he wondered if she was judging Seven for not getting it done in one fell swoop.
He shrugged. “Easier for Twelve when it’s pretty much one population center all together at night.” Almost all the mines were within a daily train trip for the miners. Only the anthracite mine far up north was really beyond that, and that was only a few weeks’ work each year for about a third of the crews; he knew for a fact that nobody would have been there until August anyway so it would have been undefended. “Seven’s out at their camps, yeah?” They would have been pulled in to their district center in the southeast along Lake Sawyer for the mandatory viewing of the Games, of course, and Johanna told him during that time they worked the mills and workshops, as they did in winter.
“Yeah,” Johanna confirmed with a nod, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest. “They had to hang around the winter town a few extra days after the Games until I got back so there would be people to film, but pretty much an hour after I got there, they were shipping ‘em back out to the logging sites. So it’s pretty much gonna be taking the district over camp by camp. May take a little while, but,” she shrugged and gave Coin a fierce, wolfish smile, “we all know what someone from Seven can do with an axe in their hands, right?”
“The news overall is very encouraging,” Plutarch broke in with an overly-bright smile, though Haymitch saw his brow was puckered with worry. Brandishing a green marker, he started making a list on a pad of paper hung on the wall. “Twelve has been taken, Ten was taken in just a few days really, Seven, Four, Nine, Eleven, and Eight are all fighting hard and are at least in majority rebel control…”
“That’s only a little over half the districts,” Haymitch made the crashing statement of the obvious. “One, Two, Three, Five, Six? They’re the core districts, closest to the Capitol. We’ve gotta take them if we’re going to take the Capitol down.”
“Ah.” Plutarch licked his lips a little nervously. “Well, One and Two are Career, of course, so their loyalty will be harder won—Four rebelled out of respect for Finnick and Mags, naturally. And for the rest, the Capitol has, well…”
“Having lost their food supply districts among others, they’re heavily fortifying Three, Five, and Six to control the medicine, technology, power supply, and transportation,” Coin cut him off briskly. “I told you, Heavensbee, this had to be a concerted effort with all the districts rising at once. What do we have now? The shepherds and tractor drivers and coal miners and lumberjacks,” Haymitch heard the derision clear in her voice, “while the toughest nuts to crack, and some of the most valuable supplies, are even deeper in Capitol control now. I don’t need bolts of tweed to win this war.”
“With Four, Nine, Ten, and Eleven in our hands, we do control the entire food supply, ma’am,” one man pointed out, a rather junior looking officer by the look of him. “They probably have some limited warehouses, but…we could wait them out?”
“No,” someone else spoke up. Boggs, one of Coin’s colonels, silver-haired and blue eyed. To Haymitch’s eyes, he looked almost like he’d originally been a Ten native with that coloring. “They have Six, mind, and that means they have all those hovercraft. They’ll bomb the hell out of us while we’re trying to starve them out. Plus they’ll probably be twice as hard on the districts they still have underneath their control.”
Coin turned on Plutarch again. “It was your responsibility for the public mood to incite rebellion. You assured me the time was right.” She turned and next eyed Haymitch and Johanna.
“Yep, we’re still here,” he told her flippantly. “Good of you to notice.”
“He told me you two could get it done. That you would inspire people. “ Her near-colorless pale grey eyes raked them up and down. “I’m not seeing it, Soldier Heavensbee. Maybe you overestimated the appeal of two people who obviously didn’t even have the respect of their own districts, let alone the nation?” She shook her head. “Do your job and fix this, and get the rest of the districts in this war,” she gave it to Plutarch with the air of a command.
Plutarch sighed, dropping his marker to the table, and held his head in his hands, fretfully rubbing his face for a moment. Then his blue eyes peered from between his spread fingers. “So we need to inspire the nation,” he said, and it was a measure of his grim determination that his usual glib cheer had faded from his voice. “Tomorrow we’re taking you to District Twelve for a propo.”
Johanna’s fingers found his underneath the table and clutched tight.
~~~~~~~~~~
“Haymitch,” she answered politely, wiping her bloodstained hands on a towel. Johanna heard the muffled moan of someone in pain. “Perulla Everdeen,” she said, finally noticing Johanna. She held out her hand, looked down at the streaks of blood on her fingers, and moved as if to pull it back. Before she could, Johanna reached out and took it, shaking her hand. She’d had blood on her hands before, and not from anything as well-intentioned as healing. The momentary thought of Cashmere’s blood spraying her made her suppress a shudder only with effort.
“I’m the district apothecary,” Perulla told her. No wonder the woman looked so frazzled. Trying to try people who’d been flogged, beaten, shot, burned, or endured any number of other punishments or war wounds, with what amounted to a few herbs and a lot of hope, had to be an overwhelming task.
“We brought you some supplies,” Haymitch told Perulla. “Bandages. Sutures. Anti-infection injections. Morphling. I figured it might be bad so I got ‘em to hand some stuff over. There’s some crates being brought here with all of it.” Johanna saw the older woman’s blue eyes light up with gratitude.
“Thank you.”
Haymitch shifted uncomfortably as if he wasn’t used to hearing those words. Maybe he wasn’t. “How is it?”
“At least the fighting’s done,” Perulla sighed. Wisps of her blond hair were escaping from beneath a faded blue kerchief. “You’ll have to ask Mayor Undersee for official counts, but I think it’s close to a thousand dead between the executions and the fighting. As for how many we may lose yet to injury…” Her mouth tightened into a grim line.
He gave a hasty nod. “Would you want to tour the ward?” Perulla inquired politely.
Plutarch, camera crew at the ready, eagerly said, “It would be some wonder—“
Johanna cut him off with, “So what d’you think, Haymitch?”, not interested in hearing about the propo opportunities. They may not have readily embraced him any longer, but it still had to be hard for Haymitch to think of neighbors lying there broken and bleeding. She waited.
Finally he gave a low sigh and nodded again. “I got ‘em into this mess,” he muttered half to himself, “least I can do is show up.” With that he squared his shoulders and headed into the lunchroom that had been turned into a makeshift hospital ward. Johanna and Perulla followed close behind. Obviously they’d done the best they could to clean things with strong soap—probably lye, much like in Seven—because the smell of shit and piss and blood and burned meat and rotting flesh in the summer sun was faint, but it was there all the same. From then on, Johanna thought she always would remember that as the smell of a slow dying.
~~~~~~~~~~
“Lily,” Perulla said, “how’s the leg feeling today?” Haymitch managed to not glance at the stump wrapped in bloody linen where Lily’s right foot had once been.
“Been better,” Lily said with dry understatement.
“How would you rate your pain, one to ten?”
Lily hesitated, and Haymitch saw the sheen of sweat on her brow. “More than willowbark tea’s gonna handle. That’s all that matters.”
“We have morphling now,” Perulla answered. “Haymitch brought it from Thirteen.” Now Lily’s eyes, grey Seam eyes like his own, moved to him, and to Johanna by his side. Her face was drawn tight with pain.
“Well, maybe you left us to deal with Snow’s shit for you escaping him, but at least you came back, and you made ‘em give us supplies,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s something.” That’s not much, Haymitch interpreted.
This was stupid. Did Plutarch really think he’d walk into a room full of people in pain, some dying, some crippled for life, and they’d just light up and count themselves blessed because Haymitch fucking Abernathy and his sweetheart graced them with his presence? After all the years they’d spent essentially just tolerating him? He felt all the more awkward and ashamed at the idea of their suffering being exploited for a camera. Maybe Coin was right, maybe Plutarch had seen something that wasn’t there at all. Whatever power to inspire he might have had was something that belonged to a teenage boy, not the man he’d become.
Anything he could say as attempted justification or encouragement just sounded trite and loathsome to him, so he only nodded and said, “I’m doing what I can.” Poor little, as always, that it was.
“Thanks for coming,” Lily told Johanna. “Not your district, so…”
“We’re all in it together now,” Johanna said with an awkward shrug. Haymitch could practically sense Plutarch silently screaming in frustration.
He looked over his head at Plutarch and shook his head. The man wasn’t going to get his shots of the two of them tenderly holding hands and whispering words of encouragement in grateful ears. The best they could do was give over the supplies they had and leave these people to their dignity. Johanna stopped to talk to Perulla, and he moved away from Lily to chat with Plutarch. He was grateful the man gestured for his crew to stop filming this disaster of a propo. “Coin needs to send more supplies,” he told Plutarch, looking over the room filled with broken bodies. “Look at this.”
Plutarch hesitated, his eyes meeting Haymitch’s. “With Three still in Capitol hands, you know medical supplies are going to be prioritized for soldiers in the field. You were lucky to get the few crates she would send, and those were mainly because we convinced her it would be good for the propo.”
He gritted his teeth, hating Coin and her callousness, where everything was about whether it fit her needs or not. “They need it, Plutarch. What’s the point in fighting if everyone’s dead of injury or infection?”
Plutarch looked at him, expression almost apologetic, “Then you’d better give her what she wants. She wants something to fire up the nation, she wants the two lovers who defied the Capitol and showed us that everybody has something they’ll fight and sacrifice to keep.”
Haymitch let out a strangled laugh as he headed for the door, pushing his way out of the school and into the fresh air of a Twelve summer. Give her what she wants. He’d always been good at acting the obedient little whore, hadn’t he?
~~~~~~~~~~
It took a while to find Haymitch. Finally she found him out behind the school, inside what looked like the worn loop of a running track. He was looking at an old tower-like structure made of logs, near a rather pathetic swing set and a scuffed-up patch of dirt and grass that barely passed for a baseball field. The tower was treated oak, made to last, though it was weathered and she could see where the bolts were now loosened from wear.
“We used to climb that, when we were just littles,” he said, nodding to it. “Tell each other what we saw, make up big stories about what might be out there far beyond the border. I used to dream I’d get out of here, go somewhere.” He gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I went somewhere, all right. Never really came back either.”
She understood what he meant. “None of us came back from the arena.” Little Hanna Mason had died in there the moment she’d killed another child to save her own life. The girl went in. The victor came out. The second time was even worse—the victor went in. She wondered if a monster came out. She felt like she could barely stand what she’d become some days. Though she hadn’t been willing to kill him, not even to save her own skin. That was something still human left within her. Thinking of Finnick curled in on himself in the sand looking strangely small and so alone in death, like the fourteen-year-old child he’d been rather than the man of twenty-four, she pushed the memory away only with fierce effort.
He looked over at her and nodded. “And now here I am, still trying to come on back, dumb shit that I am, and bringing Capitol camera tricks with me as usual to tell ‘em who I am.” He shook his head, palm resting against one of the supports of the tower, fingers spread and tensed. “No matter. It is what it is and it’s gotta be done. Let’s just get this fucking propo over with and give Plutarch what he wants.”
So it was that twenty minutes later they were trying to shoot the damn thing in the courtyard in front of the school. “You’ve just come from viewing the hospital and it was dreadful, and this is Haymitch’s home district with people he knows in there,” Plutarch coaxed. “You’re in love! What would be the natural reaction?”
Johanna felt like she was trying to please a demanding teacher as she answered stiffly, “He’s probably upset and I probably try to comfort him.” How the hell to do that, she wasn’t quite sure. She knew how to straddle him and fuck him—although they’d done that so carefully the one night and never since—but this? She’d acted for so many years as the bitch with an axe who didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything. Those few moments they’d captured in the arena had been genuine, the grief for Finnick’s death and then the determination to not lose Haymitch too. But today she felt awkward, wooden; far more naked than when they’d given her just a couple scraps of fabric to wear and sent her out to shoot publicity photos.
She didn’t know how to console him, how to put aside that prickly self-preservation and open herself up to him like that. The awareness that it was prompted rather than inspired by her own feeling, and the ever-voracious cameras being right there, just made it far worse. So she was thinking frantically, What will look good, what will they expect? rather than simply following instincts as she touched his arm and he looked at her with a gaze of barely suppressed anguish that she realized was due to far more than just his helplessness at the hospital. He honestly looked like an animal caught in a trap.
“It’s all right, I’m here, you’re OK,” she was babbling all kinds of inane nonsense, even as she moved in to just kiss him and shut herself up and just end it.
Alongside the anxiety was a steadily growing rage. This was theirs, something precious, and now they were expected to give it over to a Capitol-born camera crew to be molded and shaped into something new, a story for the nation to inspire them. I’ve never had anything, she wanted to scream, I’ve had to give everything and be exactly what the cameras demanded, and now you want this too.
Johanna could act, wouldn’t have survived this long if she couldn’t. So even as the cameras would see only two lovers tenderly kissing and reassuring each other after the horrors of war-torn District Twelve, the kiss was actually awkward and inside she was raging, because this moment shouldn’t have been anyone’s but theirs. Fuck Plutarch, fuck this propo, fuck the whole ‘star crossed lovers’ shit. Haymitch must have felt her gathering rage, how she needed to lash out and feel in control of someone in her powerlessness, and because he was the one kissing her and forcing her into that place, he received the full brunt of her anger and aggression. She felt the moment he transitioned back into his old rut too, knew exactly when he went emotionally dead on her and suddenly it was empty and she was just kissing a well-trained whore acting on command. That loss of everything real between them, even broken and anxious as it was, hurt more than anything. She’d never wanted it to be like this.
Haymitch was the one who broke it off first. He looked over at Plutarch, cameras still rolling, and she saw his grey eyes were glittering dangerously with a barely-suppressed fury of his own. “We’re not doing this again, Plutarch.”
Plutarch threw up his hands. “Haymitch, Johanna, you know we’ve got to have some—“ The exasperation in his tone made him sound like he was dealing with two errant children.
“Shut the fuck up!” In all the years she’d known him, she didn’t think she’d ever heard Haymitch yelling in actual temper. Irritated snark, definitely, but genuinely just losing his shit? Standing there next to him she could sense the tension of rage in him, the barely-leased potential for violence. No, little teenage Haymitch hadn’t come back, and this man was what the Capitol had ruthlessly broken and reshaped, over and over. “You people in the Capitol never want to listen, never think we’ve got anything worthwhile to say, so you’re damn well going to do it for once.” He paced a little closer to Plutarch and Johanna noticed the camera crew taking a step back. “I’ve had to fuck on command, act on command, play whatever role that got shoved on me, be exactly whatever I had to on camera, since I was a kid. I’m damn good at it and I’ll act my ass off and say whatever you need to shut Coin up, but Johanna and me? From now on that’s off limits. I’m not whoring that out for your propos.” With one last look at Plutarch, glare still fiercely defiant, he turned and walked away.
She gave him about thirty seconds head start. Nobody made a sound in all that time and it was as if they were all frozen, watching him just walk up the hill that she presumed led towards Victors’ Village. Finally she looked at Plutarch and said, “You all stay here.” None of them would do any good right now. “I’m going after him.”
“Oh, good, maybe you can talk some sense…”
“Shut up, Plutarch,” she said. “He’s right. Just…film some other shit around here for now.”
As she left she heard one of the camera crew ask Plutarch in a tone of confusion, “What was he talking about?” Plutarch’s gonna get to explain that one, she thought grimly.
~~~~~~~~~~
Upstairs in his bedroom, he was sitting on the bed with the well-handled photograph of himself, Ash, and his ma, taken the summer before his Games. He had no pictures of himself with Briar and he could hardly have asked the Wainwrights for a precious family picture of her when he was the cause of her death. Chances were the first one they could have expected to have together would have been their wedding photo. Sometimes he still looked at the book of class pictures from that last spring, to remind himself just she had looked like.
Hearing quiet footsteps, he knew who it would be. “I never packed up before I left,” he said. “I debated it. All that last week before the reaping. Figured I should…make it easy. Because the next people to come in this house would just be cleaning it out. To throw it all away. They wouldn’t want anything of mine.” He looked down at the picture, clutched tight in his hands. “But I couldn’t put them away. I was the last person left who gave a damn and…this picture, all their things, they’d just end up burned with all the other trash.”
She sat down beside him carefully. She didn’t ask why he’d retreated here, of all places, because she must know. This was where he’d hidden himself for years. The solitude was unbearable a lot of the time, but sometimes this place felt like the only one that was safe.
“We can’t be what they want,” she told him, “Plutarch’s cute little movie-star couple...did we really think anyone would believe that, about us?”
“I think we were too busy being grateful to survive.” He shook his head and gave a bitter bark of laughter. “At the time, anyway. There were so much better people in that arena than me…” He thought of Chaff, blood gushing from his torn throat with every beat of his heart. Mags, torn to pieces by that bear mutt. So many deaths and each of them someone known to him, and he would never be clean of it. Bad enough to be a killer, but to be turned loose on people he had known and in many cases cared for, was even worse.
“It’s never the good ones that make it out alive,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “But we wouldn’t become as bad as they wanted. We wouldn’t kill each other. Much as they don’t like us, at least we showed them that.”
He didn’t know how to do this, how to open up and let her in. Fear and that sense of finality had cracked the door a little that last night before the arena. It was a far different thing to love her as best he could for one night, try to give her all that was left of him as a goodbye. The idea of a lifetime, and the demands of that, still overwhelmed him. But it seemed at least this was the one honest thing he had left in his life, so he carefully put down the picture and leaned over to kiss her. Nothing theatrical, like on camera, simply seeking to give and take reassurance, to not be alone right now. Are you still with me?
~~~~~~~~~~
What could she say to him now? Bitchiness wasn’t going to help, or anger or feigned indifference. They knew each other better than that, and they’d let each other too close to just back away and pretend it had never happened and it meant nothing. She cared, she knew that, she even loved him as much as she could love anyone, but she just didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to be, or what to do. So when he kissed her that was almost an agonizing relief because it eliminated the need for words. This was the right way to say it, the only way she could bear.
Her arms slid around him, fingers of one hand tangling in his black hair as she kissed him harder, urging him on. Before long her other hand was yanking at the buttons of his shirt.
That was when he startled a little and drew back. “Not like this,” he said, shaking his head, half-turning away from her.
“Why not?” she demanded, feeling the cold slap of rejection and the shame and panic that followed. “You only want to fuck me as a dying wish? Huh? Was all that in the arena just bullshit?”
Silver-grey eyes held hers. “You really want me to fuck me right here, right now, more than anything in the world, or is this just a ‘Fucking you is only thing I can think to do’ kind of a moment?”
She didn’t answer. He gave a tight little nod. “I want more than that,” he told her softly. “I want to give you more than that.”
Those words pushed at something within her, something locked up tight. It scared the shit out of her. “Plutarch’s little romantic script going to your—“
“Oh, fuck Plutarch’s script! We listen to that, he’s going to be filming our damn wedding in about two weeks as a ‘wartime necessity’. ”
Looking down at her hands, she said through the tight lump in her throat, “Fuck you, Haymitch. You know that’s all I really know how to do.” Sex was the only thing she could rely upon, the only thing she was certain she could give him.
Cautiously, his arm went around her shoulders. The solid weight of it was reassuring and instinctively, she found herself leaning into him. “I know, me too,” he said lowly. “But in the arena…we managed more. Maybe we can get there again. If we’re sleeping together again, I want it to be because I can’t keep my damn hands off you, not because it’s the only way I can give you anything.”
He was talking about the difference between desire and desperation, she realized, and while she wanted him—fuck, how long had it been since she actually wanted one particular person rather than just whoever was handy?—the latter was wound all through it too tightly to separate easily. I care too much about you to have sex with you right now was a little bit of a weird way to go around it, but it made sense. He wanted it to be different from old habits. So did she, come to think of it. “So what next, genius?”
~~~~~~~~~~
He kissed her by way of answer. Gentle, not because she was too weak or afraid to bear more heat, but because he wanted her to have this, the best and kindest he could give. He wanted to kiss her just out of love rather than something all mingled with lust and a terrified need for her.
Her fingers clutched at him as she kissed back, a little insistent, a little demanding, and he had the feeling she would always kiss like that but that was OK, it was simply Johanna. She wouldn’t be herself if she wasn’t pushy and honest. “I don’t know,” he told her. “But I want to find out.”
“Bet you say that to all the girls,” she scoffed jokingly. “That you respect them too much to fuck them.” He wasn’t insulted; he knew she wasn’t just being oblivious to the reality. She knew and she was just teasing him.
“Nobody,” he said, shaking his head. “Certainly not in this house.”
She looked at him, something flickering for a moment in her green-tinged brown eyes. “Nobody’s ever lived here besides you, have they?”
“No. My ma, my brother, they died a couple days before we were due to finish the move.” Nobody else had ever lived here with him. Nobody had really visited after the first year or two, until Cray and his Peacekeepers came knocking on the door this spring. “Nobody’s ever been in this bedroom, except me.” The Capitol doctor had kept him down in the living room while he was detoxing. Nobody’s ever slept in this bed besides me, he thought. The sight of her there, on the old quilt his ma had made, was a little strange.
She surprised him when she kicked off her shoes and lay down. Propping herself up on an elbow, she raised her eyebrows. “I promise we’ll keep the clothes on. But might as well get comfortable.” Following likewise, he lay down too—his side of the bed, as usual, and she carefully maneuvered herself up against his side, his arm around her. It felt good, like the comfort of holding her in Thirteen, but being here in this place with her rather than that sterile metal box of his assigned compartment, felt like so much more.
“Plutarch,” she prompted. “We’ve gotta give him something or Coin’s going to shit a redwood.”
He thought about it. Her head was tucked on his shoulder, her hand on his chest. His breath lightly stirring her short brown hair, as he breathed in the scent of her. Home and Johanna both; it felt strangely good. As if her being here leached away some of the awful layers of loneliness that had built up over the years. Keeping his voice low still, wondering if Snow’s bugs were still active, he said, “So we have to inspire the nation. But without forcing some fairy tale script on the two of us. What do we have that will rile people up?”
“Loads and loads of irritating snark?” He smiled in spite of himself, laughing a bit.
~~~~~~~~~~
“Get two cuter people to give them a nice romance?” he offered sarcastically.
“You can’t see it, but trust me, I am rolling my eyes.”
“Let’s face it. People aren’t going to fight for someone else’s love story. Risk their lives just in the name of our little happy ending.” His arm around her tensed a little bit. “We’ve gotta give them something to fight for. Something greater than the fear.”
She thought about it for a few long minutes. “The truth,” she said finally. “That’s the only thing that’s gonna work, isn’t it?”
Twenty minutes later Plutarch was fussing and grumbling about having to set up lights for a shoot in the evening on the green of Victors’ Village. But when it was all put together, and she and Haymitch took their places on a bench by the pond, Plutarch held up five fingers and slowly put them down one by one to give them a countdown. It didn’t matter. She and Haymitch were old hands at being on camera by now.
“I’m currently here in District Twelve,” Haymitch started, and cleared his throat, “because Coriolanus Snow has decided to make my district pay for my escape, my role in starting this rebellion. People here have died already. More are going to die yet. I thought about giving up, surrendering. But it won’t do any good. By this point it’s gone too far. Others are already fighting. And they’re not fighting for me or for Johanna Mason. They’re fighting for their own freedom, for the lives of the people that they love.”
Johanna didn’t know how she sensed it, but she was sure he wanted her to pick up and run with it a ways now. “This is what Snow does. He uses love against people. Counts on fear of people being hurt to keep everyone in line, and keep them silent about it too. Turns you into a liar keeping his secrets. He’s done it for years. This is why he couldn’t stand what he saw in the arena: people defying him in the name of people they care about, rather than submitting. And I’ve submitted, believe me,. Haymitch has submitted. Others have too—Finnick Odair, Blight Arnesson, Gloss and Cashmere Donovan. Almost every victor became his little puppet.“ She felt her hand shaking, sensing the point of no return here. Haymitch’s fingers pressed against hers, steadying her.
She squeezed his hand again, pleading with him to start it. The fear and the rage both were choking her right now and she wasn’t sure she could be the one to start the purge of all of it. She didn’t want to become the bitch with the axe right not to protect herself, not when it mattered so much. “Eleven days after I was crowned victor of the 50th Hunger Games,” Haymitch picked up the tale, “my ma, my little brother, and my girlfriend were murdered here in District Twelve by President Snow. On my Victory Tour, he told me they were the price I paid for my defiance in the arena, for using the very forcefield that was supposed to trap me in there to kill my last opponent. I made the Gamemakers and the Capitol look stupid and for that I had to be punished. That wasn’t the worst, though. He had decided I was dangerous and I had to be controlled harder than that until I was no threat. More on that in a moment for y’all watching at home, but…guess what, Coriolanus? You were right. I am dangerous. Because this time, I’m not afraid of you, and I’m damn well going to fight. For me, for Johanna, for District Twelve, for the family you murdered in cold blood, for the kids you’ve condemned to the arena, for all the friends that died in your fucking Quarter Quell.”
Hearing the anger and the spark of pride and resolution in his voice, she felt her lips curve into a fierce grin in answer. “I’ll fight. For me. For Haymitch. For District Seven, and Blight Arnesson and Cedrus Ollenheim. For Finnick Odair, because he was my friend. For my family—my mom and dad, my brother and sister—because Snow murdered them as well when I wasn’t his obedient little slave. For everyone who’s loved and lost and lived in fear because the Capitol says it has to be that way,” she chimed in. “It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. They keep us in fear because they know if they don’t, we’re far more powerful than they are. They depend on us. But we don’t need them at all.”
“This is how the Capitol has come to work,” Haymitch picked it up from her. “They turn us from human beings into numbers. The tesserae allotted that month for a fifteen-year-old child in a family of six. Expected quotas for a district given the workforce. The odds on a tribute’s life in the arena. The price to buy them water or medicine or a weapon. And if they survive, if they become a victor…the rich and powerful in the Capitol will find out from President Snow just what price their body will sell for.”
Listening to him kick the rock away and reveal the ugly reality wasn’t easy. Truth was like fire, she thought. Sometimes painful to endure, but it burned away the rot and corruption. In that moment she was surprised to realize that what she felt for him was something fierce and proud, finally untainted by pending loss or desperation. Right then, she loved him and it almost terrified her with the depth of how much she felt, and how she hoped for that future beyond the war, uncertain as the details might be. Until then she would stand by him and fight with him because this wasn’t going to be taken away from her meekly.
This was a new beginning for things. After the words were out and the veil of secrecy was ripped away, after they told the nation about the whoring circuit and Snow’s conveniently dead and poisoned rivals and all the murders and the torture and the lies, things could never be the same again. Maybe the inner districts would stand with them, maybe their fear would still be greater than their hope and their resolve. Maybe they’d even lose this war. But sitting there with his hand in hers, both of them defying Snow with the simple truth, she felt they’d won an important victory nonetheless.