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Later that morning, Katniss attends another meeting focused on labor negotiations. It goes well, at first, she thinks, with everyone settled a bit with a full night's rest and full stomachs. Plutarch and Haymitch still look perturbed by Hudson's gambit, while Mayellen looks a bit embarrassed about the whole thing. And now Johanna joins them in the town hall.
Acer starts the proceedings off this time, and he looks more confident and more prepared than he did the day before. "One of the biggest things that needs to change is protections for our workers. Logging, transporting, and milling might be the most dangerous jobs in Panem."
Plutarch raises a skeptical eyebrow, but does not protest this claim. "What do you propose as solutions?" he asks instead. For some reason, Katniss finds his voice more grating today. She feels determined to speak up at this meeting, if only to ensure that Plutarch doesn't represent all of them at the negotiations.
"We need individual protections for the workers," Acer says. "Things like equipment, training and such. And we need enforcement of legislation to keep them safe. I follow the existing codes at my mill, but I think I am the only one who does. Things like breaks every three hours, limits on overtime, age restrictions to use certain equipment. The people who own the other mills produce much more and get far richer, but they also have many more injuries and deaths."
"Acer's mill has not had a single major injury, and no deaths in his entire tenure," Mayellen adds.
"We need to enforce fines — heavy ones — on those who don't follow the rules," he says.
"And who are they?" Katniss asks.
"The Timber Barons. They live on the far side of the lake in those houses that are almost mansions," Johanna explains. "Yeah, they've kept the District fed and heated during the lean years, but now they act like they're above the law."
Mayellen lets out a strained sort of sigh, as if this has been a problem she's been dealing with for a long time. "Let's go back to the first thing," Katniss says, desperate for something they can settle. "The equipment. What do you need?"
"The loggers need eye protection, gloves, good boots," Hudson says. "I'll have new kids join my crew without it, and an older guy lends his glasses, only to take a woodchip to the eye and lose his income. Can't cut down trees if you're blind."
"What about the army surplus?" Katniss asks Plutarch. "I mean, we're not in a war anymore, there's gotta be extra equipment." She turns back to Johanna and Hudson. "Would military boots and glasses work?"
Johanna shrugs, but Hudson considers it. "Listen, I'll take whatever you can get me."
But Plutarch raises a finger in protest. "Well, before we start giving things away, we have to consider that the situation in 2 could devolve."
"What's happening in 2?" Johanna asks.
Plutarch looks like he doesn't want to share more, but Katniss doesn't see why this has to be a secret. "Paylor says that there's loyalists within the ranks, she went down to suppress them."
Johanna scoffs. "Of course," she says, shaking her head in amusement. "Panem needs lumber for 'rebuilding', but we might still be in a civil war."
"The war is over, Johanna." This is Haymitch, who despite his seeming disinterest, had been following the conversation, Katniss realizes. She watches as he and Johanna stare each other down, neither of them saying anything more, until finally she turns away first, sitting behind Hudson and lighting up a cigarette.
When they take a break in the afternoon, not much has been settled. Plutarch decides to go visit the 'Timber Barons' to get an idea of their power and perspective, and Johanna turns back down the road toward away from the station, where Katniss assumes the Victor's Village is located. She realizes that the other victors from 7 are dead, and wonders if anyone has taken their places in those houses, or if Johanna lives alone out there.
Katniss sees Haymitch again slinking to the tavern, but she really can't blame him. She wouldn't mind a drink, or at least the darkened atmosphere to let her forget the quagmire she finds herself in. It's just her and Peeta again before long, but Peeta still looks focused, ready to continue the mission. "I want to try to get in touch with Paylor, or her assistant," he says. "I think if we can guarantee that equipment, that will go a long way to show we are working in good faith."
She nods. She feels inadequate, somehow. Peeta has been trying to find solutions, working after hours each day to try to solve this problem. She's just been groping around in the dark, mostly. "Yeah, that sounds good," she says.
"That was a good idea," he tells her, with his trademarked reassuring smile. He squeezes her arm — the upper part, above the scarring. "Listen, Katniss," he says. "I know a few days ago we weren't planning on doing any of this. So just… it's ok. You don't have to be the Mockingjay or whatever."
She nods again, frustrated and embarrassed at how well he can understand her. Because that was the crux of this, wasn't it? Last week she was lazing about on her porch, thinking she'd probably spend the rest of her life ignoring the problems outside District 12, and today she was in negotiations in District 7. Her complacency felt fine until she was shone a mirror between herself and Johanna.
"Yeah, I know," she says, even though she can't be sure of anything, really. "I'll be at the tavern." He accepts this, probably because her drinking a cider was better than what? Her leaving? Her finding some morphling?
When she enters the tavern, she finds Haymitch one table over from where he was yesterday. She sits right away this time, and when the waitress comes by, she asks for the same cider. "You'll be a regular lush before this dispute gets settled," he tells her, a derisive smile on his face. It looks like he's mocking her, but she can see his hands trembling. She remembers that among all the tasks she is supposed to accomplish in District 7, she told herself she'd look after him. So much has happened in just a day that even that feels distant.
"Hardly," she says, mustering confidence she doesn't really feel. They sit in silence until her drink arrives, and he continues to sip his. She knows he hadn't left his house much before they left, and she hadn't gone to see him, but also… he was the mentor. He was the adult. She made a conscious decision to try to help him here, on this trip, but that shouldn't be their default state, should it? She didn't even have a mother anymore, she wasn't in any state to look after anyone else at 19 years old. The whole thing is frustrating, and she finds herself getting more and more irritated as they sit. She wants to ask why he can't pull himself together, but she doesn't know if it's because she really doesn't understand his issues, or if it's because she's afraid that she, too, will be like him someday, years later, still a wreck from what's happened before she even became an adult.
She couldn't leave the porch in District 12, or maybe she could, but she would rather not. Primrose is dead, and her mother has left her behind. Gale isn't the person she thought he was… or maybe he had always been that person, and it is her who had changed. All she has is Peeta, and if he is going to work in the kitchen, she'd rather not go far. The dependence is foreign to her, and ill-fitting, but she doesn't know any other way to be. She doesn't feel right doing anything really, since the war. So she doesn't really know what to say to Haymitch, about locking himself up inside his home, only coming out to get more liquor or to feed those stupid, loud geese he keeps.
"Am I stupid?" she asks him, after minutes have passed. She can see he's finished his drink now, but he doesn't immediately gesture for a new one. "For thinking it was over?"
She thinks of Paylor, still resembling a military commander, set to go to District 2. She pictures Johanna, laying on the dock, half withered away, promising to fight until she's dead. She doesn't know if she wants to punch Johanna or run her nails down her own thighs in irritation. She feels like it's impossible for the two of them to coexist.
"You're not stupid," Haymitch says, after a pause that was a beat too long. "You've done your part. You've created changes in Panem you'll never even understand the full extent of. You should be allowed to retire and have no one bother you again."
His words settle her out a bit, but her left hand is still balled into a fist, her nails digging into her palm. She takes a sip of the cider, trying to relax. "She said-"
"She's trying to get you riled up," he says, cutting her off. "I know you haven't spent a lot of time with Johanna, but this is what she does. She's incredibly good at the guilt trip."
The bubbling anxiety returns to Katniss's chest, an unsettled feeling like she's ignoring something she really shouldn't look away from. Haymitch, her assigned mentor, is telling her everything she wants to hear, and yet there's something in his words that gives her pause. Something that makes her think that maybe, this isn't about her at all, and he's telling her to hold the line because of more personal issues. It feels so tangled she thinks she might choke.
It feels almost impossible to interpret his words in a way that makes sense, to parse through the bullshit and bluster and see someone pitiable, but she tries. "Is there something you're ashamed of?" she asks.
He furrows his brow, but doesn't deny this. Now he does gesture to the waitress for another drink, and turns back toward her. "What?"
"Why are you getting guilt trips?"
He looks trapped, like he somehow said too much without saying much of anything at all. The image of Johanna and Haymitch is still hazy, mostly because Haymitch was always alone, really, and Johanna is so prickly it's impossible to really picture her with anyone. But that really isn't true, Katniss thinks. She had seen the way Johanna and Finnick had gravitated to each other in the arena, the way they slept on the beach holding each other during the Quarter Quell. Katniss realizes that Haymitch must have coordinated at least some of the plan in the arena, getting Finnick that golden bracelet, and working out with Johanna how to get Katniss's tracker out. And something falls into place. "You said you asked her back to 12," she says, unsure if she really wants to follow this conversation to its conclusion.
"Forget about that," he says. The waitress drops the new drink off for him, and it seems like he drinks half of it in one go.
"But you couldn't go back. Not when I killed Coin."
He nods in reluctant acknowledgement. The trial and the elections had dragged on, and Katniss had been in a morphling daze, but it must have been weeks, if not months before she was able to go back to District 12. "She wouldn't stay in the Capitol," he says. "Said she couldn't bear it."
It was her fault then. They had made a promise, and then she shot Alma Coin and changed everything. "You-"
"I don't want your pity," he says, "And don't start feeling guilty about this. You did the right thing. Johanna and I shouldn't have ever gotten involved, but since we did, I just came here to make sure she was alright." He takes another long sip, shaking his head. "Civil war," he mutters. "She'll go insane like that."
For the first time, Katniss doesn't want to ask him about his culpability at the end of the war. Her own involvement in his mess — the drinking, the seclusion — it feels like some kind of reciprocity, like perhaps there should be some unknowns that remain unknowns.
That night, she gets dinner with Peeta at the Canteen, and then they go for a walk around the lake. It's lively, buzzing with crickets and singing with birdsong, and they pass others walking every couple minutes. The sky is a deep orange, and she feels tired, but isn't sure if she will be able to sleep well, since she's so unsettled.
"Did you talk to Paylor?" she asks. She feels her connection to Peeta becoming more tenuous, which is funny, since they haven't been more than a quarter mile apart this entire trip, but that feels exponentially bigger than the one room away she's been from him for the past year.
He shakes his head. "No, but I did talk to her assistant, Chambray. They are down in District 2, and I guess there are some minor skirmishes. At least that's how she put it. She said she's going to put in the request to the 'appropriations committee', but she doesn't see it as a problem."
"Skirmishes?" Katniss wonders if Johanna was so off-base for predicting a civil war. "Was there anything on the news?" For the first time, she realizes that she hasn't seen any television or listened to the radio since she arrived. Even at the tavern, there were just some billiards tables and a jukebox to play music, no televisions for showing the broadcasts from the Capitol. She wonders if it was intentional — it must be.
Peeta only shrugs. "I assume it's not simple to separate Snow's loyalists from the people who are fine with the new government, especially when everyone has guns."
Peeta slaps at a mosquito and Katniss shakes her shirt to try to fend them off. He stretches his arms over his head and yawns. "Ugh, what I wouldn't do for some bread worth anything," he complains. "All they have here is cornbread and muffins, which are fine, but,"
"But you miss your daily bread ration," Katniss finishes for him.
He nods.
"Well, go ask if you can use Johanna's kitchen. They did give us 'discretionary funds'. I'm sure flour and yeast fit in the budget."
When they get back around the lake, there seems to be some commotion in the town square. Katniss sees dozens of District 7 residents milling about, their expressions ranging from nervous to excited. "What's going on?" she asks a younger girl towards the front.
The girl looks surprised when she recognizes Katniss, and takes a step back towards her mother. "They… they put the timber onto the railroad tracks," she says, in a timid voice.
Hudson is there, suddenly, looking serious, but a little triumphant. "That's right," he says, looking at Katniss and Peeta. "200 pallets of lumber, right across the tracks. No trains in or out until this is settled. And any funny business, we burn it."
Katniss goes to the train platform to look, and true to his word, there is more lumber than she's ever seen at once stacked across the tracks. There are two men with axes guarding the pile, and sitting on the bench, as if waiting for a train that was never coming, and smoking a cigarette, is Johanna.
She smiles at Katniss, raising an eyebrow. "Told you I'd think of something else," she says.
Katniss has so many thoughts, she doesn't even know where to begin. She knows the men guarding the lumber are simply doing that, but the axes suddenly add a new dimension to this — weapons — that seems more aggressive than before. "I thought the only hospital is in 4," she says. "What if you need that?"
She tries to remember what Johanna had said. She goes every month for pills. For seizures? She imagines one of the people in the square getting sick, or injured, and not being able to get to a Healer. "Yeah, you see the problem now, don't you?" Johanna says.
There's something in the back of Katniss's mind, Haymitch voice she supposes, that tells her that Johanna is playing her, that Johanna wants her to get upset. But she can't help it. She walks up to Johanna and grabs onto her shirt collar, forcing her to stand. Johanna drops her cigarette and twitches in that same half-wince that she did on the docks, but then she looks up at Katniss, challenging her. "You're putting people's lives at risk," Katniss says, "There's other ways we can do this."
One of the men with the axe comes up just over Johanna's shoulder: a warning. But Katniss doesn't loosen her grip. She doesn't think this man would dare kill the Mockingjay, even after the war, even though she, too, is a murderer. She feels Peeta come up behind her, feels his nervous energy. She could be back in the arena, right now.
"I'm not doing that," Johanna says. Somehow, she looks old to Katniss, much older than 27. "Your Capitol buddies have the ability to bring a Healer here tomorrow. They could drop in a whole damn hospital. Our suffering is a choice."
Katniss has no idea if this is true. She doesn't know if Johanna has unrealistic expectations of the Capitol, based on her time as a mentor under Snow, or if Katniss expects too little, because of how often she was disappointed, or forced to lower her expectations during the rebellion. But it's the fact that it's so clear that Johanna no longer sees them as allies, in fact, she sees them as enemies, really, that fills Katniss with actual revulsion.
She shoves Johanna away, into the chest of the axe-wielding man, and turns to walk away, sick of the whole scene. And only then does she see Haymitch watching from the other end of the platform.