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It's a bit of a commotion as the newcomers exit onto the platform. Mayellen steps forward, as she had when Katniss and the others arrived, and as she did when the Healers and soldiers arrived, cementing her position as mayor. "Welcome to District 7," she says. "You must be tired from the trip, how can we assist?"
Chambray steps forward as well, this time taking command, no longer the deferent person she was when Paylor was around. "My name is Chambray Owala, and I am an assistant of the President. We would like to finalize the transaction of the initial shipment of lumber this evening, and send that off, along with the soldiers, back to District 2. We'd also like to establish lodging and an office for the inspectors. Tomorrow, I will check on the progress of the Healers, and assist with some of the codification of laws."
Mayellen nods, shaking her hand. "Certainly. Acer, can you show the inspectors to the mill office, and take them to the hotel along the way? And Hudson, go fetch Martin so we can sign that contract for the shipment." She turns to the Captain. "Captain, thank you for your restraint with the tensions high around here."
He nods, both at her and at Chambray, and Katniss wonders if he had really thought she had been bluffing that this was going to be reported to the President. "Let's move," he says, to the remaining soldiers. "It's time to pack up."
There seems to be a collective sigh as the soldiers move out to the Victor's Village, and the residents begin to chat, speculating on what this means, about the new laws, the Healers, the enforcement of no child labor. "Let's move to the town hall," Mayellen suggests. "I'll have some dinner brought over, and we can speak more privately."
Chambray nods, but turns to the crowd first. "My name is Chambray. I'm here on behalf of President Paylor," she says. "I will be staying one week to observe the efforts we are making to improve working conditions. If you would like to discuss anything with me in that time, please come find me, or leave a note at the front desk at the hotel."
They move to the town hall, and food is brought as Mayellen requested. Plutarch, Chambray, and the lead inspector who attended with her eat as introductions are made and there is a recap of what has happened in the week leading up to their arrival, but Katniss has already eaten, and she can't help but feel uneasy.
It should be over now. She's finished. She just needs to report to Paylor, or maybe just to Chambray. She should do her part for Fraser and commend his efforts. She should ensure the mill owners are arrested before they flee. She needs to secure her end of the deal: that this is it, the end, and she can now live unbothered in District 12. But more and more, she wonders if that's really what she wants. Or regardless of what she wants, she wonders if that's a valid desire anymore.
It's clear that the war did not fix everything. The problems in District 12 are certain to reflect the problems she will uncover in District 12 once they have the immediate problem of shelter taken care of. But the petulant voice keeps ringing in her head 'haven't you done enough?'. When will it be enough? When can she let someone else take over? She isn't yet twenty years old but she's so tired, so sick of seeing her friends hurt and scared and trying to cope with drugs and alcohol and she really does just want to sit on her porch and forget about the rest of the world.
She's lost track of the conversation, but it must have been about thirty minutes into the meeting when Haymitch stands. "Sorry, I need to check on something. Katniss, can you come along?" he says. He catches Mayellen's eye and she nods, and Peeta looks at Katniss, but she tries to indicate that it's fine, that he should stay. He's always been better at these things than she is anyways. He is charming, he is patient, and he is kind. She hadn't even been listening.
They step outside, and Katniss half-expects Haymitch to turn towards the tavern or just take a break on the steps of the town hall, but he immediately walks off back towards the mill district. "Where are you going?" Katniss asks, and this time she's the one a half-step behind him.
"Wondering where the fuck Jo is," he says. His voice is low, and she can hear the edge of worry in it. To her left, she can see the soldiers packing their things onto the train, along with the residents helping to load the lumber onto the trailers. She ignores that and presses forward.
"You don't think she's home?"
"I hope she is," he says, but continues on towards the jail anyways.
When they get there, it's quiet, and she doesn't see a light on inside. The sky is dark now, and there's no moon tonight. Haymitch stops, pulling one of the painkillers from his pocket and dry-swallows it. Katniss pauses on the steps as well. Her arms feel tight, the old scars prickling.
It's Haymitch who goes in first, and she follows behind him. The waiting room is empty, and there is just the chair that the guard had been sitting in when he was harassing Peeta. Haymitch moves past that, into the back. "Jo?"
"Haymitch?"
Katniss walks in further, and sees she's in a corridor with four cells on one side, an office and an interrogation room on the other. Johanna is sitting in the first cell, the lock undone and the cell cracked, but she hasn't left. In the dim lighting, it's hard to see Johanna's expression, but Katniss can make out the pure white of the bedsheet looped around the highest rungs of the cell door, the makeshift noose sitting there, waiting to be used. "Johanna, come here," Katniss says, her voice shaking.
She had wondered why Haymitch had brought her along, once she learned where they were going. But he's leaned back against the wall on the far side of the corridor, apparently unable to speak for the moment. "They told me…" Johanna looks from Haymitch to Katniss, then coughs, her throat dry. Katniss pushes into the office and finds a cup and fills it with water, and brings it back. She reaches through the doors to hand it, aware at some level that Johanna isn't ready to walk out of the cell. There's no tray of food, no water in the cell. There's a little pit toilet in the back. It disgusts her.
Johanna finishes the water and looks up at Katniss, now refusing to look at Haymitch. "They told me they killed Haymitch, at my house," she says. She says it in the same no-nonsense voice that Johanna says everything in, like she's just waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Katniss to confirm this is the truth. "They told me Peeta was causing too much of a scene and they killed him, too. That the deal is ruined, that I ruined it."
It feels too much like when Peeta got out of the Capitol prison, when they had to play 'real or not real'. She, too, wants to back away to the opposite wall, to avoid the way that they made Johanna into something frightening in less than a day. But she reaches out, putting her hand on Johanna's shoulder. She feels Johanna flinch under her touch, and doesn't dare let herself imagine what that could mean. "Listen to me. Haymitch is alive. Peeta is alive. The soldiers are all leaving on a train right now. The deal went through just fine."
Johanna shakes her head, as if trying to reject these truths. Katniss feels Haymitch step up behind her and push the cell door open wider. "Come on out," he says.
Katniss can see her jaw stiffen, as if Johanna was closing herself off from something, and she takes a step forward, into the corridor. She crosses her arms over her chest, digging her nails into her upper arms, and Haymitch pulls her against him. "That's it," he says. "Let's get out of here."
They go back to the hotel, Haymitch convincing Johanna to stay there until they were sure the soldiers were all loaded out, and Katniss returns to the room she shares with Peeta. "I wrote a report," he says. "Want to look it over?"
"In the morning. I'm so… tired."
He nods, coming to sit on the bed with her. "I'm looking forward to going back to 12. I just want some normal days, baking bread, talking to our neighbors."
She lays back, allowing her eyes to close. "I was thinking about that," she admits. "Is that alright? To just… live normally? I'm sure there's problems in 11, and in 8, probably in every district."
He rolls over, his head resting on her shoulder. "I think we should just start with District 12. That was your deal, right? We go home after this, be left alone? But if you want to keep working, there will be plenty to do as 12 gets up and running again."
She knows what he's saying, but she's not sure how to articulate what she means. When is it alright to just look away? She's certain she'd lose herself, fade away to nothing like she did with the Mockingjay if she tried to respond to every crisis. Not to mention losing everyone she cares about as casualties. But if she turns away from everyone in need, wouldn't she become a different kind of damaged? Start at home was Peeta's advice, but Johanna had started by organizing the workers in her District and ended up tying a noose. "Guess I'll wait and see," she says, and part of her believes it will make more sense with time, and part of her just wants to be done with the conversation, a little regretful that she said anything aloud to begin with.
The next morning, they get breakfast at the Canteen. It's busy in the square, with work groups going off to cut down trees, new safety equipment on. The mills have plumes of steam coming from the smokestacks, indicating that the equipment is running. She sees some of the inspectors running here and there, clipboards in hand. And when she sees Chambray just outside the town hall, she's reviewing the testimony from the soldiers, and Katniss points her to Cypress, the man in the infirmary who overheard the plot and was assaulted for it.
Plutarch is leaving the hotel bar when Katniss is returning, and he looks pleased, and Katniss wonders if he got what he wanted: if this worked out well enough for him to keep his job. "Well, time we get going, wouldn't you say?"
It is, she realizes. The deal is finished. It's up to the inspectors and the legislators now. There's no more reason for her to stay here. She nods, unsure why she hadn't realized it sooner. She mentions it to Peeta at lunch, and he laughs a little. It's reassuring to see him laugh, after the state he had been in the day before, at the jail. "I told you as much last night, about how I was ready to go home."
"I didn't realize you meant like… now!"
"I wonder if Haymitch is going to stay," Peeta says.
Katniss hadn't thought about this. She's realizing more and more that certain things simply don't occur to her until someone says them outright. And it shouldn't matter to her if Haymitch comes back or not, in fact, why had she been encouraging him to make up with Johanna if she hadn't been preparing for the eventuality that he might stay in District 7? But she can't help the chest-tightening, the anxiety that she feels at the possibility. She didn't even see Haymitch often before she came, but he was one of the few people she had around from before the war. And District 7 was just about the furthest place he could disappear to in Panem.
"I wonder," she repeats, trying to disguise all of this. Haymitch had told her how he put his relationship aside to help her during the war and after, what right did she have to stop him from staying here now, if that's what he wanted? But still, she has to know. "Where is he?"
"I think he went with Johanna to try to clean up her house."
Peeta says he wants to ask about a few recipes before they leave, so she leaves him to his task and goes to the Victor's Village. Johanna's house is again welcoming, the windows and door wide open, now that the soldiers have left. She can hear movement inside and knocks on the doorframe before letting herself in. Haymitch is sitting at the kitchen table in the one chair that was not broken in the struggle, sorting through tobacco and papers and other little bits, placing them into the correct spots in little trays and jars. Johanna is in the room opposite, sorting through books and papers and what appears to be the dowels for a drying rack.
"Hey, Katniss," Haymitch says, as she enters.
There's nowhere for her to sit in the dining room, so she moves to the living room, sitting on the couch as Johanna moves around. "It already looks a lot better," she says.
"I think Annie had the right idea, burning her house from the Capitol down," Johanna says.
"Did she really?"
Johanna shrugs. "I mean, got her sent to the madhouse, and now she's living in Finnick's house in the Victor's Village anyways, but it was a thoughtful gesture." She smiles at the memory.
Katniss understands, at least a little. She had moved into Peeta's house, unable to tolerate her own house. She looks around at everything and realizes that despite all the piles, and all the mess the soldiers had made, there really isn't that much here. Johanna simply didn't own very much stuff. "Is that your idea, then? Going to burn this?" she asks, nodding to a pile with some crumpled paper and the broken parts of two of the dining chairs.
Johanna shrugs. "Bonfire along with the soldiers' left-behind crap, at least. I won't be needing it, might as well."
Katniss looks from Haymitch to Johanna, trying to figure out what they weren't saying. He looks too smug, and it's making her nervous and excited at the same time. "Why? What's going on?"
Johanna lies back on the wooden floor, taking a break from her organizing. "Decided to try life in District 12 for a while. I love a project, you know."
Katniss is speechless for a moment, unable to form a coherent response. Johanna rolls over to her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows to try to get a better read on Katniss's expression. "Sorry, was that offensive?" she asks, half-joking.
"No, I mean, who cares? I just… you have a life here. You have friends, and your cousin, and Annie is in District 4, and you go to the hospital there, and you just organized their whole labor movement and…" Katniss trails off, realizing she's making it sound like she doesn't want Johanna to come, which isn't the case.
Johanna raises an eyebrow and smirks. "Well, thank you for your concern, if we were dating, perhaps I would discuss all those things with you," she says.
Katniss knows she overstepped, and sits back on the couch, chastised. She bites her lip, waiting.
Johanna seems to take pity on her after a moment. She sits up, sighing. "Listen, I appreciate the concern. But it will be alright. There's a hospital in 13, if you remember, we spent a lot of time there. And I am alright with the trip back here. I figured I might make it seasonal, even. It's nice to be here in the summer, but not as good in the winter. After being in the jail, I don't know, it just reminded me of when I was here before the war, when I was just massively depressed. I thought, I need to go live with some people who know what it's like. I'm glad you came by."
Katniss nods. She's not sure she's glad she came. She wonders if it would have been better if she did just stay on the porch in District 12. Could Paylor really have forced her to come? But she did come, and now she can't unlearn that the war did not fix everything in every corner of Panem. But she supposes that was naive to think, and she shouldn't have assumed that in the first place. She misses her porch, and Peeta's bread, and the neighbors that come by every day and tell her about their day. "Alright, let's pack up so we can go," she says.