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Johanna has almost fallen asleep when Enobaria enters the hovercraft, crouching down at her bedside in the dark. "Hey, wake up," she says, shaking her leg gently. "We gotta go."
"What?" she whispers back. Henderson, the annoying soldier medic, was on night duty, and she didn't want to do anything to garner the woman’s attention.
"We have to go, like leave the camp. Now."
Johanna can see that Enobaria is dressed, that she has a rucksack with her. She imagines going back out into the desert again, imagines her feet swelling up with the miles and miles of walking. She did it before, she supposes, but she had a goal, then. She was going to find Finnick and Haymitch and the others, and now she had. There's a pang in her chest now, thinking of Finnick. He had come to see her earlier that day, told her that Annie finally shared the news. He was beaming to tell her how he was going to marry Annie, and raise that baby as his own. It hurt then, but makes her taste bile now. "What's going on?" she asks.
"These people aren't good, Jo," she says. "They bombed the Capitol on purpose. They didn't even try to rescue us. They covered it up after. They didn't come look for us for weeks even though we had trackers, because it would have revealed their lies. They're keeping you here in pain even though they know what would fix it."
Johanna bites her lips. It isn't that she disagrees with anything Enobaria has said. In truth, Enobaria has taken far better care of them than the District 13 people have. It's just that she placed so much hope in coming here, and now that it's falling short, she just doesn't want to give up the dream.
"Listen, you don't have to come, but I'm leaving. Tonight."
"No!" Johanna reaches out, grabbing onto Enobaria. She only realizes as she does it how firmly she is grasping, how desperate she must seem. "I mean, I'm coming. Please."
Enobaria nods. She tosses a change of clothes to Johanna, as if she had planned for this, and she had, of course, and puts the chocolate bar wrappers filled with morphling into the rucksack, then adds Johanna's toothbrush and Blight's pipe, which had been sitting on the bedside. Johanna didn't have any other possessions, at least nothing worth keeping, so there isn't anything to pack. Johanna laces up her boots. It's the first time she's worn shoes in a week, and the calluses that have worn into her feet from the long walk now chafe against the leather after days of rest.
She stands, her boots clunking against the metal plating of the floor. She and Enobaria are silent, hoping that Henderson won't notice their movement. The rush of blood to her head causes a new round of pounding, and she doubles over, biting her lip as she waits for it to die down. Enobaria reaches a hand out to steady her, and she digs her nails in to Enobaria's arm - too tight, probably, but it's all she can do to not collapse back onto the bed. She hasn't been up in days, thanks to the medic's dumb protocol, but now that she is, she thinks she can walk. She's no weaker than when she arrived, and she was walking then.
They sneak out of the hovercraft, and once they're in the open camp, Enobaria makes a few decisive turns. She's planned this. The camp is dead - just a few soldiers up smoking cigarettes or walking back to their tents to sleep, and no one questions them. Johanna has a million questions, like if Enobaria asked Peeta or Annie to leave as well, but she thinks not. They had Katniss and Finnick, respectively. Even if there were some not-so-great things about this situation, they wouldn't want to leave. "Where are we going?" she whispers.
"Through the east gate," Enobaria says, her voice low. "It's routinely got the least strict guards. Then, we're finding my brother's family." She pulls Johanna into the mess tent, now abandoned in the middle of the night. "We need to take these stupid tracking chips out first, though."
It makes sense. Enobaria is always logical. Johanna can see the stupid little chip under the skin of her forearm, and another prickling sense of suspicion settles within her gut. Had the District 13 people ever planned on removing that? Had they planned on being able to track her and Enobaria forever, just in case? Enobaria had gone into the kitchen, and now returns with a knife. "Do mine first," she says. She bits on the collar of her shirt and hands Johanna the knife, just like that.
Johanna had done this before. She had cut Katniss's tracker out in much worse conditions. She had been told how to do it ahead of time, even. But somehow, this feels more difficult. Probably because she doesn't want to cause Enobaria any pain. Because she's being asked, because Enobaria has full trust in her. She finds the tracker and pinches it between the fingers of her left hand, then makes a small cut with her right, pushing the long metal tube out the hole. Enobaria hisses, but doesn't pull away. She is bleeding, so Johanna opens the first aid kit in the kitchen and covers the wound with gauze.
"Thanks."
Johanna hands back the knife, and Enobaria washes it in the sink and comes back. "Can I do yours?"
Johanna nods. Now that she's thought about it, she wants nothing more than to have the tracker out. Enobaria's hand it warm and steady on her arm, and Johanna hardly notices the sting of pain against the pain in her head. She bites her cheek as Enobaria pushes the little tracker out, and then it's over, her arm bandaged as well.
She's too close to Enobaria, really, closer than they have been in some time without the threat of Henderson or someone else watching. "Why are you bringing me with you?" Johanna asks. Enobaria could have gone alone. She could have snuck out in the night, alone, and it probably would have been much easier, really.
Enobaria looks at her, and grabs Johanna's hand. They're still in the corner of the shadowy kitchen, and Johanna can hear the dripping of the faucet behind her. "Because I wanted to go together," Enobaria says. "I can't be here… but I didn't want you to be here either, if you didn't want to be." She sighs, rubbing her thumb over the back of Johanna's hand. "It's one prison to the next, and I know going to District 2 proper isn't going to be any better, probably. But I can't be here, not when my family is right there."
"It's ok, I'll go with you," Johanna assures her. She wonders when, exactly, she changed, that she decided that following Enobaria to District 2 instead of staying in the rebel camp was the right decision, that trusting Enobaria at all was fine, because she certainly wouldn't have as a mentor in the Games. But the thought of staying here without Enobaria, while Annie has all of Finnick's love and Peeta has Katniss, and Johanna’s supply of morphling is finite is enough to make the decision for her, really. She looks up and Enobaria is there, too close. She leans forward, kissing her for the first time since they arrived at camp.
Enobaria leans into the kiss, and Johanna can feel her smiling against her lips. It makes her squirm, in a way, to think of romance at all. Did someone like her deserve romance? Was she capable of it? Annie was right, really, that she was the other woman, knowingly sleeping with Finnick, despite him having a girlfriend. And her relationship with Haymitch was… complicated at best. But she pulls away from Enobaria, and she feels a flutter of something: affection, maybe, or desire. "Should we go?"
Enobaria nods. "Let's leave the trackers here. It might buy us a couple extra hours."
They move through the camp to the east gate, and true to Enobaria's prediction, it's a young soldier by himself in the booth. He's facing outward, obviously looking for anyone trying to enter, rather than anyone trying to leave. "I'm just gonna… incapacitate him," Enobaria says. "See where that camera is? We need to immediately bear right, and stay to the right about a quarter mile once we're out of the gate."
Johanna nods, and holds the rucksack as Enobaria sneaks in the booth and captures the soldier in a chokehold. It's how Johanna won her Games, though Johanna's opponent struggled far more, or perhaps Enobaria just had better technique. Once the soldier is asleep, Enobaria hits the switch to open the gate just a foot or so, and she takes his radio with her and they slip out, manually shutting it behind them and immediately turning right.
They're back out in the open desert, so there's nothing to hide behind, but with any luck, the camera only caught a glimpse of them slipping out of the gate, and nothing more. Once they're out of hearing range of the camp, Enobaria turns on the radio, and tries to listen for any chatter, any reports of them missing. There's nothing. "By dawn we'll probably be too far away for this thing to work," she says. "But we'll be there by then, hopefully."
And so they walk, Enobaria carrying the rucksack, stopping occasionally for sips of water, and after just a couple of hours, they stand on a ridge before what Johanna can tell is a major city. She'd only been to District 2 once before, on her Victory Tour, but she recognizes it at once, due to the giant mountain on one side: the Nut.
They start climbing down, but it's rugged, and she's exhausted, walking all night after not moving for a week, with not much to eat in that time as well. She stumbles, scraping her knee on the rocky path, and she has to keep her eyes shut against the flashing lights that start up again from the change in position. "Are you hurt?" Enobaria is beside her within a couple seconds, and when Johanna sits back to inspect her knee, it's Enobaria who brushes the gravel out of the wound.
Enobaria bites her lip, nervous. "I didn't pack first aid," she says, "Since it is only a one-day walk. Here." She unravels the gauze from Johanna's arm, rinses her knee with some water from the canteen in the pack, and then settles the bandage on her knee instead. "It's not perfect, but we can fix it when we get there."
Johanna nods. It makes sense, logically. Enobaria always fixed things. She always got them where they needed to go. But right now it's hard to stand up. The exhaustion and weakness are winning, along with the unrelenting pain that is shifting from just her head to all over: her back, her limbs, the tips of her fingers. She can feel tears escaping, and she doesn't know if it's frustration or grief. She had left everyone behind. Everyone was either dead or with someone they valued more than her, and all she had was Enobaria, of all people. She's supposed to get down this mountain, into this District of people who might kill her or keep her as a prisoner, for all she knows, but it seems impossible, suddenly. "I can't," she says, and she knows these are the words Enobaria least wants to hear. Even when she first got out of the prison, even at her most miserable, she was never truly dead weight.
"Do you need the morphling? Or something to eat?"
She does want the morphling, but she also doesn't want to lose track of her thoughts. Things are making sense for the first time in a long time, despite the pain, and as much as she wants to sink back into nothingness, she knows she needs to embrace this moment, and the unpleasantness of the truth. She shakes her head. "I'm sorry. I thought I could do this. But I can't go forward, and I can't go back. I'm just… unnecessary." Yes, that was the word for it. The rebellion had moved on, without Johanna Mason, and District 2 was no place for her. Finnick had moved on without her. Haymitch had already grieved her death. Katniss was the figurehead of the rebellion, the one people looked to. Enobaria was going home to her family. She should stay here, on this mountainside, in purgatory, until she figured a few things out.
"Get on."
"What?"
Enobaria has moved the rucksack to her front, and is standing in front of her now, looking back over her shoulder. "I'll carry you down the mountain, so get on my back."
The lump that had been sitting in Johanna's throat seems to swell in size, and her response is lost. She wants to say that no, the impediment she feels isn't physical, really. That she could probably make it down the mountain herself, but instead she does as Enobaria says, wrapping her arms around Enobaria's neck.
Enobaria takes one careful, cautious step, and then another, down the sloping path, and then she seems to gain confidence. And Johanna lets go, for the first time in months, really, imparting everything to Enobaria, drifting off on her shoulder as they walk into District 2 proper.
Enobaria walks slowly across the expanse that leads into the District 2 city limits just before dawn. Johanna is asleep on her back, and now that it's been a while, she's used to the extra weight. She's exhausted, certainly, and thinks she might collapse the moment she lets her down, but right now she just focuses on putting one step in front of the other, not on the numbness in her arms, or the fact that her legs are shaking a bit.
It's just like carrying her nieces around, really. Well, Johanna was definitely heavier than a child, but it's thoughts of her brother and sister and nieces that move her forward, so she tries to imagine them, how much the girls have grown in the months she's been away.
And well, there was no chance of her leaving Johanna behind. She hadn't expected Johanna to stop at all really, but Johanna wasn't going home. They were far from District 7, and they'd have to pass through the Capitol to get there, so it isn't an option to go back there now. No, they're going to Enobaria's home, leaving everyone Johanna knows behind. Perhaps she should be more surprised Johanna even decided to come at all.
She hikes Johanna up higher on her hips and moves to the first buildings, leaving the open desert. There are no sentries, no guards watching the edge of the ridge, though she imagines there are some up on towers on the mountain. They had kissed. She had kissed Johanna again, just before leaving camp, just after they cut open each other’s arms. It almost makes her choke to think about now, about how bizarre and messed up her life has become, and yet there is still some room for romance, somehow.
"Hold up. What's your business?"
She had been in her own thoughts, and not noticed the Peacekeeper. He's at the tram stop, and looks her over before furrowing his brows in half-recognition. "Baria?"
She tries to look past the uniform, past the crew-cut that marked him the same as the men who raped her in the prison, who tortured Johanna and poisoned Peeta, and she recognizes him. "Dom! It's me!"
He'd been a friend of her sister's growing up, and they both joined the military in the same year. She remembered him coming by on the weekends to help Tamora with homework, and stay to go to the community pool with the rest of their family. "Enobaria, I thought you'd died!"
"Can you help me get to Tullus?" She shakes Johanna awake, and Johanna stands up, then sinks onto one of the benches at the tram stop. "My friend and I need to get out of sight before the sun comes up."
Dom sighs, averting his eyes. "I heard Tullus was killed, a few weeks ago, Baria. I'm sorry."
She's shaking out her arms, stretching, and keeps her head down when she gets this news. Her brother, dead? He worked at the quarry. He wasn't even a soldier! "Shit," she curses.
"I think Toni and the girls are still at that same apartment, but I can't leave my post. You should go, now, and I never saw you."
She nods. "Thanks. By the way, Tamora…?"
"She's the same as ever. Won't admit her feelings to Mina. I won't tell her you're here."
They part ways, and Johanna takes up walking, a half-step behind Enobaria. District 2 has changed, with buildings that have been bombed, gunfire in the sides of buildings, evidence of fires, and blood in the streets. She sees more patrols along the tram lines, and so she snakes through the streets to avoid being seen, sure that the next soldier she sees won't be a childhood friend of her sister.
Finally, they get to Antonia's apartment, and she climbs the stairs to the second floor. She knocks, quietly, and stands back so her sister-in-law can see her through the peep-hole. And sure enough, a few seconds later, she opens the door, tears in her eyes. Antonia looks to Johanna beside Enobaria, and Enobaria can tell there's no recognition in her eyes. Johanna's appearance is too far gone from the victor in the 66th Games.
"Well, come in, before someone sees you!" she says, her voice choked with emotion.
They go inside, and sit in the small living room. There's a shrine with pictures of Tullus set up to one side, fresh flowers and hot chilis spread around. Enobaria's mother and father's photos flanked each side. "You can lay down," she tells Johanna, because she knows Johanna is a victor, she's been trained to be polite and please, under threat of harm, but this was her family, no one would fault them for wanting to rest.
So Johanna kicks off her shoes, digs in the rucksack for the morphling, uses the bathroom for a minute, and when she returns, her face and hands are cleaned from the red dust of the desert, and Enobaria is sure she used a bit of the drug. And then she lays on the couch, her outer shirt stripped off and laid across her eyes to block the light.
Antonia had been in the kitchen, and now she returns with large glasses of ice water and two bowls of porridge. She sees Johanna and with a pitying look, places the food and water on the table beside the couch, and sits on the chair across the room, Enobaria taking the other one.
"I'm sorry to surprise you like this," Enobaria says. "There was no other way."
"I'm sure there wasn't," Antonia says. She pushes the bowl to Enobaria, encouraging her to eat, and she does. "The girls will be up in a bit. It's a school day."
Enobaria almost chokes. School. It seemed unfathomable that there was still school in the middle of war, that with the destroyed buildings and the Capitol leveled and the war and her own experiences, kids were still going to school, but she finds she's grateful for it. That her nieces weren't sitting in the apartment all day, fearing bombings and thinking about their father's death. "I can't wait to see them."
"They'll be so happy. They've been really down, since… since Tullus died."
Enobaria nods. "What happened?"
"I don't know, for sure. A witness said that he was stopping one of the soldiers who was trying to loot the store of someone who was killed in a bombing, and things escalated."
Enobaria smiles, despite herself. "Dummy," she says. "Always sticking up for people. Even dead people."
Antonia clicks her tongue. "And always picking fights he can't hope to win. He ought to have been thinking of his wife and girls at home." She nods at the couch. "Who's your friend?"
"Johanna Mason. She's from District 7. She won the 66th Games. We were captured in a Capitol prison together." Enobaria sets the bowl aside, and pauses for a sip of water. Johanna has curled up into her usual position on the couch, knees halfway to her chest, one of her arms draped over her head. "It was bad, Toni, the things they did in there."
"Is that where you came from, then?"
She shakes her head. "We were in the green zone, at the rebel camp, but that was no good either."
"Of course it was no good," Antonia says. "They have good intentions, but until they get District 2 on board, they're just as bad as the Capitol, doing as they please, breaking promises, working in secret. Do they really think they can win this war without us and then take over our military and our systems?"
Enobaria shrugs, because she really can't answer any of these questions. From down the hall, a door opens, and feet pad out to the living room. "Meli, come look!" This is Ophelia, who is 12, if Enobaria remembers correctly, and she is followed by Camellia, who is 10. The girls' eyes widen, recognizing her, and they run in for a hug.
"Shh," Antonia says. "Enobaria brought her friend, and she's sleeping."
The girls chatter all during breakfast, and Antonia has to convince them to brush their teeth and get dressed. She stops them at the door before they leave for school. "Now listen," she says, more serious them she's been with them all morning. "Remember everything we talked about: where you go if something bad happens, how you get in touch with me, what to do if I don't come by sundown. There's a new rule, ok? Enobaria and Johanna staying here is a secret. You don't tell anyone at school, not your best, closest friend, not your teacher, no one. Got it?"
They nod, and she sends them off to the tram. Antonia gathers her own things, heading off to work in town. "I left the phone number on the fridge," she tells Enobaria. "Feel free to eat whatever you like, and you can sleep in the girls' beds. We can talk more when I'm home this afternoon."
When Enobaria goes back to the living room, Johanna is sitting up, eating the porridge.
"Want me to heat it up?"
She shakes her head. "No, it's good like it is. Thank you for bringing me here."
Enobaria nods, and sits down beside Johanna. She's suddenly very exhausted herself. She wants to shower, to change her clothes, to lay in one of the beds and sleep for a long time, but she also can feel her own need, the fact that she doesn't want to be away from Johanna. Johanna tugs on her sleeve until she's laying down on the couch, her head and shoulders on Johanna's lap.
Johanna puts the bowl aside, and sips the water, then leans back, her fingers running gently across Enobaria's forehead. It's peaceful, and they're safe, and Enobaria can't help but drift off into sleep.
Annie needs to calm down. She knows that panicking isn't going to solve any problems, and surely it isn't healthy for her baby, but she isn't thinking logically. Logic is something Enobaria used, and Enobaria isn't here right now.
She's sitting on the edge of the little bed she has, more of a cot, really, inside of the sleeping tent, and her breathing is too fast. Her muscles all feel clenched, and she has a rush of thoughts that haven't happened since she was dropped into the arena, or first shut in the prison. Thoughts she would never think normally. Insane, outlandish thoughts that feel like they were sent into her mind by someone else.
You did this. You drove them away. She had told Finnick about the baby, after all, their relationship changed once he found out. He had asked her to marry him.
Then there’s the other possibility: They didn't leave, they're just dead, and no one's found the bodies yet.
She imagines Johanna, murdered somewhere in the camp, Enobaria bleeding out nearby. She imagines the both of them captured inside some District 2 prison. And then the images keep coming. Finnick dead. Her baby dead inside of her. Snow resurrected, back in charge. She thinks she might throw up.
"Hey, Annie, look at me!"
This is Katniss, kneeling beside her. Finnick is on the other side of the tent, where Peeta slept. She tries, and she can meet Katniss's eyes, but she's chewing her lip so badly she thinks it might be bleeding. "We're going to figure this out," Katniss says. "There's a meeting in a little bit. But first, you need to relax."
You need to relax had been a mantra, something said to her by many people over many years. If only it worked that way.
She watches as the little sister, Primrose, pushes Katniss aside and shoves her knitting project into Annie's hands. "You know how to do this, right?" she says.
"Prim, really?"
But the younger Everdeen ignores Katniss. She nods at Annie. "Try it."
With shaking hands, Annie moves the needles. She almost drops a stitch, but pushes it back onto the left needle. Under. Wrap the yarn. Slip it across. Next stitch. She works quietly for a few moments, her teeth still digging into her lip, but her breathing slowing. "There you go," Primrose says. "Keep it up for a bit. We have plenty of time before the meeting."
Once she does arrive to the meeting, Annie is feeling much more composed. She can still tell she's nervous: the compulsion to tap her fingers, to hold her breath is more frequent than when she's calm, but her thoughts are making much more sense. She sees Finnick, Peeta, Beetee, and Haymitch, along Katniss and some of the rebel leaders, like Coin and Plutarch and a few of the soldiers she doesn't know the names of. They're seated in one of the larger tents, out of the desert sun.
"Last night, Weaver and Mason disappeared from Camp," Coin begins. "The last check-in Lieutenant Henderson has of Mason was at 23:30, and the last sighting of Weaver was at 22:00. Their tracking chips were found in the mess, cut out with a kitchen knife. There was a soldier attacked with strangulation at the East gate around 00:45, but we have no footage of the attack. He is recovering well this morning, but did not see his attacker, or if they opened the gate. We have to assume they did."
"Johanna won her Games by choking someone," Plutarch notes.
"Have you seen her?" Haymitch says. "She couldn't attack a soldier right now."
"So you think it was Enobaria," Katniss says.
There's a pause, and Finnick clears his throat. "There's three possibilities, right? Either they worked together to leave, Enobaria forced Jo to leave, or a third person came in and took them both."
Coin looks stern, considering this. "I know we've been putting off dealing with District 2, but we ought to consider this carefully. If Enobaria was just here on their orders, her taking a rebel by force could be enough justification to overrule the treaty."
Peeta has been quiet, but this seems to hit the limit of the logic he can tolerate. "How could she possibly be here on their orders? She went directly from the Games to the prison, and from the prison to here, same as Annie and I."
"Johanna went willingly." Annie almost looks around to see who said this, before she realizes it was her. Now all eyes are on her, from curious to suspicious, asking her to explain herself.
"At least, I think she did," Annie says. She didn't actually know the plan, or know they were leaving, after all. "Of course Enobaria left. She wanted to go home, and no one even gave her the option to go home. You're talking about kidnapping, but didn't you kidnap her?"
She glares at them, but no one says anything. "Johanna and Enobaria are close. I think Johanna was having a bad time here, so if Enobaria said she was leaving, Johanna would have agreed to go too. She only fought that guy because you wouldn't let her out."
Coin considers this, and looks frustrated. "She has rebel secrets. She knows things that would give our enemies an advantage. I understand this is frustrating, but this is about all of Panem being free from tyranny, not just one person."
"We do need to move forward with our operation on the Nut," one of the soldiers says. "Before they break the treaty first."
Annie thinks about the streets of the Capitol, completely decimated, and about the people in that bunker, trying to make sense of their entire lives being destroyed. She thinks of Aspen, trying to help despite everything, despite being treated as a slave before the bombing. "Have you tried talking to them?" she asks. Coin looks at her like she has two heads. "I mean, not the guy in charge. But the people in District 2, most of them lead ordinary lives, I'm sure. Most would just be happy for the war to be over, for people to be safe, for their District not to be destroyed." She doesn't really know what she's saying, she's aware she sounds naively hopeful, and not like she's planning a war, so she sort of trails off.
"We'll take that into consideration," is all Coin says.
Later, Katniss and Finnick are needed for some propos, and so she helps Peeta with the beginnings of supper. He’s taken up in the canteen to keep busy, but he is down a staff member due to an injury, so she fills in, sitting on a stool and peeling carrots and potatoes, endlessly. They chat about this and that, but ultimately, she is curious about a couple things.
"Why is she here?" she asks, "The little sister?"
He turns back to meet her eye, from where he had been stirring something on the stovetop. "Primrose?"
She nods. "This is like… a forward base, right? She's not a soldier."
"Ms. Everdeen and she are both medics, and they need those. And well, I guess when we were still gone, Katniss wanted her family. She didn't want to come alone."
Annie considers this. She herself doesn't really have a purpose. Was she just here to help motivate Finnick? Why did they keep Johanna here for so long? And Enobaria? Even if they did have 'rebel secrets', couldn't they have gone back to the actual District 13, not this tent city in the middle of the desert?
She's surprised when Peeta moves closer, reaching for something on the spice rack. He's not exactly in her space, but he's close enough that his voice doesn't carry when he speaks. "Didn't it sound like Coin was just looking for any excuse to bomb the Nut this morning?" he says, voice low.
She nods, and then she allows herself to follow her thoughts to the conclusion she didn't dare before. "What if… Coin wanted her to leave, so she'd have an excuse to break the treaty?"
She sees Peeta's hand twitch, and the cannister of chili powder crashes onto the counter. It was closed, but they both startle from the noise. He takes a deep breath and rights it, checking that she had not cut herself when she jumped. "I don't know," he says at last. "I want to say there's no way, but I read the report about the Capitol bombing. The rebels break the law when it suits them."
Peeta has a job at the mess tent now, and it's been a few weeks since he arrived in the camp, and he's more or less gotten used to the way things work. District 13 is supremely organized, he's learned. Each soldier got a card every week for the mess, which showed their last name and rank, and the staff serving punched a hole in the card for each breakfast, lunch, and dinner they attended. The card also showed the portion size the soldier received, and that corresponded to a colored ladle in each pan.
Peeta followed the system, more or less. But he knew Pollard hated green vegetables unless they were in soup, so he would skip the vegetable scoop that he knew would not get eaten, and give the largest ladle of soup to him instead. And he knew the old woman who did the budget, Mrs. Feverfew, loved his bread, and so he always gave her two slices instead of her prescribed one, and in exchange if he ever needed a certain ingredient, he hoped she'd find some money in the budget.
As it turned out, he would need that favor, he realizes, when Coin announces a party 'for morale', and Peeta notes that they have all the ingredients for cake, but not in the quantities needed. He'd use up a week's worth of butter just whipping it into frosting. Luckily, Mrs. Feverfew seems smitten with the idea of a celebration, and orders all the necessary ingredients from the main camp, as well as an allowance of an extra 30 cents per meal for everyone to eat that night.
Reed, the woman running the kitchen before Peeta, seems more than happy to return to cooking and leave the menu planning to him. "You deal with the budget and do the baking, I'll deal with the stovetop and any personnel issues," she says, and this seems fair enough. She had cut her hand a couple weeks ago overworking herself, and seemed happy for the help.
Katniss is less interested in the kitchen, and he sees her at meal times and at night, when they take a walk together in the evenings, but she's with Haymitch and Finnick and Plutarch and Coin, planning and planning, always thinking about the war. He's relegated to feeding the army, and he finds he's alright with that.
He takes a break one afternoon to walk around the camp and get out of the hot tent and sees her nearby, shooting some kind of propo for Plutarch. He wants to get closer, listen in, but something about the camera makes him dizzy, and he feels a rush of disorientation he felt right after getting out of the prison. The violent urges aren't there, but the rest is: his memories feel jumbled and his adrenaline is surging. What had he said to Panem? What had they forced him to say? He can remember it, barely, being shoved in front of that camera, but it was always sandwiched between being manhandled and the injections.
He drinks a glass of ice water to calm down, and focuses only on his work til the end of the day. The next day he'll have to start preparing for the party. He can't let himself get distracted or sick. Annie stops by, and it's reassuring to see her face. Her assigned job is in the laundry, but she comes by to deliver fresh towels and aprons.
He pours her a cup of coffee for her break and works nearby, still on edge from before. "Do you remember what happened? When they took you out of the prison?" She was the only one they took out, besides him. Enobaria and Johanna were always kept underground. And there were others, brought in, but they never left alive.
She furrows her brow. "Yes. I don't remember going in or out, but the actual time I was away, I remember."
"What did they make you do?"
She sips her coffee, quiet for a moment, and he wonders if he is pushing too far. It's really for his own curiosity, he should know better. But she answers in time. "I was dressed up really nice, like we did in Remake, and sent to dinner with Snow. At first, I thought I was being poisoned. He talked to me just for a few minutes, and then he did a public address, and I stood behind him, on camera. It was just so I would be seen, I guess."
"What did he say to you?"
She taps her finger on the table, and he can tell she's holding her breath, a routine he's more or less used to from walking with her all those days, but it's a sign he's stressing her out. "He told me no one else would touch me in that prison," she says. "Like I was bait for Finnick." Her jaw is clenched, and she looks angry while she recalls this.
Peeta thinks about this during the rest of his shift, his mind focusing on the idea of 'bait'. Was that all he was, really? Bait for Katniss? Someone who had to be retrieved to get her to fall in line. He finally talks to Katniss while they're on their walk that evening, asks her to fill in the final gaps.
"What you said?"
He nods. "I can't remember. They drugged me, in that prison. I was thinking about it today, and I know I was on television, I just can't remember any of it."
Katniss holds his hand. She's still got the makeup on from the stylists. She's probably waiting to just scrub it off in the shower. "You mostly just said the rebels were causing everything bad that was happening. It was obvious it was a script, at least to us, and obvious you were being threatened. But… you managed to kind of 'snap out of it' twice, one time to warn us about the bombing coming for District 13. You probably saved everyone's lives."
He doesn't remember. He had thought he had put his memories back together, but there's still a hole. He's sure Beetee has the recordings, somewhere in that terminal with everything else archived, but he doesn't think he actually wants to see.
The party is the next night, and everyone has come together to make it a fun night, since there was so little to celebrate in the middle of a war. The cake turned out beautifully, even though sweets aren't usually his specialty. He thinks about how he'd love for his father to see it, and a pang of grief hits him unexpectedly.
Reed made delicious stuffed chicken breasts for dinner, and he catches her eye as the dinner is being passed, a satisfied smile on her face. Some of the other soldiers have decorated the tent with streamers, and there's a band playing in one corner. He grabs a plate of food for himself and eats while he watches some of the soldiers dance.
Haymitch sits beside him, looking painfully sober, and rather serious for such a fun event. "You made a good cake," he says. They look around at Katniss and Primrose waiting for a slice of cake, of Annie and Finnick dancing, of all the other people they've come to know at the camp. There are never special events, so besides the sentries at the gates, it appears that the entire camp was under this one tent.
Peeta bites his cheek as he realizes he misses Johanna and Enobaria. He hadn't been particularly close with them, having only met them a couple months ago during the Games, but the time in the prison and since had made him feel like they were companions on whatever journey they were on, and it didn't seem finished yet, but the two of them had gone off on their own.
Peeta dances with Katniss, then watches as she dances with Primrose. Annie comes by and pulls Peeta out for a dance, eventually. "Your cake turned out amazing," she says. "Did you see my impressive ironing with these tablecloths?" She laughs a little at her own joke. Her cheeks are red, and she looks beautiful in a dress that he had no idea the provenance of, her hair flowing down her back.
"You truly do impeccable work, Cresta." Peeta imagines a life where he is just a baker, where the market district of 12 still stands and his family still lives and he makes cakes alongside loaves of bread and dances at parties with people from his district. He almost cries at what he will never have. "I'm glad we had a party."
She nods, the two of them losing their breath at the fast-tempo song.
And then there's a whooping siren, the kind that cuts right through the music. The music cuts off, and it's just dozens of revelers, standing shell-shocked, waiting for the announcement to accompany the alarm. "Emergency alert. Incoming airborne weapons detected. Get to shelter immediately."
There's a scramble, almost a stampede, as people rush to exit the large tent. Peeta can hear screaming, and he thinks he sees someone fall under the trample of feet. He can't see Katniss, or Finnick. All he can do is grab onto Annie's hand and let the press of the crowd move them towards one of the underground bunkers.