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Johanna knows that she's not 'better', that maybe she's gained a few pounds since she's returned from the prison, but she's still malnourished and in pain all the time, and there's other things wrong too. Her vision isn't right, for instance: there's spots swimming in front of her eyes that block out part of her peripheral vision. Her muscles don't behave right either, sometimes cramping up, and sometimes twitching like the electrodes are still attached. And there's the pain - intense and unrelenting, a headache that never stops, plus reverberations behind her eyes, down her neck, sometimes full body aches.
No, she's not better at all, especially since they've cut her morphling supply, but Finnick and Annie are getting married soon, and they're making a big show in District 13 of everyone getting ready for their military operations, so she is expected to get ready too, and that means moving into a sleeping compartment.
"You can stay," the Healer says, the one who isn't Katniss's mom. She's nice, and nice to Enobaria, which Johanna notices isn't always guaranteed around here, that some of the District 13 people have some District 2 prejudices. She wonders if she can really fault them, since she did as well, for a long time, but they weren't there in the dungeon, they didn't see what those Peacekeepers did to Enobaria, and just for being caught near a rebel. Or just for being beautiful, probably.
Johanna shakes her head. "I should go," she says. Enobaria has already been discharged, and Annie. It's just been her, lagging behind, her constant pain keeping her from taking in enough nutrition, from getting off the morphling. Oh, and Peeta, but they kept him locked up in the other room.
"You come back and see us if that head starts acting up," she says. "Don't be a stranger."
She nods. She'd been to the infirmary in the Capitol, a few times at least. But the Capitol was all about aesthetics. They were there to clean her up, never mind the damage on the inside. Here was the opposite. These Healers didn't worry about her scars, they just tried to fix the pain and the maladies behind it. It feels strange to leave, but to have her skin still be marred, her hair still shorn, an ugly, broken version of herself.
She walks down the corridor to find her room, the furthest she's been away from the infirmary since she's arrived. She's been taking short walks with Enobaria, just to move her legs, but they've never made it far. Now, she's twisting and turning down the maze-like hallways, past compartments and turn-offs until she sees nameplates that look familiar.
Everdeen, A and Everdeen, P.
Everdeen, K and Cresta, A.
Odair, F.
She pauses outside of Finnick's door, wondering if there's anything she wants from him. She had foolishly thought they could reconnect here, that after the Games and the torture and everything else, she could see Finnick again and everything would be better, somehow, but she forgot about Annie Cresta, which seems absurd in retrospect when the woman was sitting in a cell across from her every day for weeks.
Finnick did not have eyes for Johanna - head shaved, stuck on the morphling drip - when his beautiful, tragic bride was in front of him. He had vowed to save her and he did, by telling the entire nation that he and she and Enobaria were whores, sold to the highest Capitol bidders. She doesn't knock, doesn't stay at his door any longer. She moves down the hall until she sees Weaver, E and Mason, J.
They had given her the room with Enobaria, in the end. It is so strange, to be close with Enobaria now, after years and years of ignoring her at best, and hating her at worst, but Finnick has no time for her, Haymitch is busy with the Mockingjay, and everyone else is dead. She got Enobaria captured, which landed her here, so she can't really call them enemies anymore.
She opens the door, and Enobaria is there, even though it's the daytime, when Enobaria should have her tattooed schedule telling her to be at the gym or at some meeting or wherever else she's supposed to go during the day. She's lying on the bed, flipping through some manual. Johanna almost wants to back away, to go back to the hallway, to walk back to the infirmary.
Because it's hard to look at Enobaria, sometimes. She's reminded of when she had to look at Enobaria while she was chained to a table, when those guards would force themselves on her. And in return, Enobaria had been forced to watch when they roasted her with electricity. Johanna had tried, desperately, to have something to say, something that would save Enobaria but also wouldn't doom them rebels, but what an impossible line that was to walk, and once the guards realized that Johanna didn't like to watch, they only brought Enobaria in more. So she turned stoic, unbothered by such horror in front of her, but that just meant that they would use the electrodes, they would shock her until they got the reaction they wanted. It was lose-lose.
She knows she got Enobaria into that situation, and she knows she was shit at saving her from harm while they were there. And now, her presence is probably just a reminder of every day they spent there. "I could ask for another room or something, if you want," she says. She's never like this, deferent to someone else's wishes. Even with Finnick she was never like this. But somehow, with Enobaria, she can be soft.
But Enobaria just sits up, shaking her head. "No, I'd prefer if you stayed," she says.
Enobaria had come to her, in the infirmary. She couldn't count on anyone else right now, they only had each other, as strange as it was. She nods, a little awkwardly, and takes a seat on the opposite mattress. There's nothing else to do: she has no possessions, nothing to move in or arrange. She just goes to this room, now. "What do we do now?" she asks, a little dizzy, a little nauseous like always, but no more than usual.
"It's almost lunch time," Enobaria says. "Then it'll be training in the afternoon."
She does as she is told, wondering if she's a rebel anymore. The prison broke her spirit, truly, in a way she wouldn't have imagined possible. The first days she had spit at the guards, she had mocked them. She hadn't realized the true depth of horror they were capable of.
Now, even an order like "it's time to go to lunch" feels like a threat. What would happen if she didn't go? Who would be harmed? Who was making the order, and what force was backing it up? She can barely eat, still, the nausea almost constant, and there was the pain beside, but she sits beside Enobaria and accepts her rations, heaps of food meant to bulk her back up.
Annie and Finnick sit across from them, and she doesn't mind exactly, but her stomach twists even more just watching them. It's hard to eat to begin with, and she is chewing the same bite again and again. "I heard they released you from the infirmary," Finnick says, and it's the same kind voice she knows, the same person she's shared secrets with for years, but now he's pressed against the woman he's going to marry in another month's time, and he's no longer her confidante, he's nearly a stranger, making polite conversation.
She nods, forcing herself to swallow the bite she's been chewing. She goes for another, despite the nausea, if only to avoid having to talk too much. "Yeah, I'm rooming with Enobaria," she says.
Gale Hawthorne sits on her other side and begins shoveling his food into his mouth. She knows him now, because he visited Katniss now and then in the infirmary. "You're from District 2, aren't you?" he asks Enobaria, without preface.
She stiffens, and Johanna remembers that this was him, the soldier that got too close to Enobaria on the flight out of the prison. She had nearly forgotten the whole trip, she had been so tired and so weak, but it must have been Gale, now that she thinks about it. She finds herself once again between them, she shoots him a warning glance.
"I am," Enobaria says. Everyone knows it, she's a fairly famous Victor, with her pointed teeth and the kill that everyone knew - her biting open a man's throat, a man who was almost certainly trying to assault her in the arena, though she doubts most people knew that part.
"District 2 is the last District to fall to the rebels," he says. "We need any help we can get."
Johanna turns to Enobaria, just to check on her. Her expression is unreadable, but she doesn't look as upset as when the conversation started. She looks amused, almost, and it is amusing in a way: to have this boy who is barely older than a teen trying to dismantle Panem's entire military.
"They will never fall willingly," she says. "Loyalty is in their bones."
Johanna feels Enobaria reach for her hand under the table, and she squeezes it. She wonders when it began to feel natural to hold onto Enobaria, but somehow it does, as if they'd done this for years. Her loss of Finnick is tempered by the fact that she has Enobaria beside her, and she hopes that at least a bit of the misery Enobaria experienced in that prison is made better by the fact that she's not completely alone here.
"Contact Lyme," Enobaria says to Gale, "The Victor. She's the one you want."
He nods, and, somehow already done with his meal, gets up to go. Johanna considers another bite, moving her food around to find something appealing. She can feel Finnick watching her. She wonders what that meant for Enobaria, to give that name. Dooming her own neighbors, probably. Helping the rebels meant hurting the loyalists, and even if it's to win a war, it meant that people she grew up with, perhaps her own friends and family, would probably die. She squeezes Enobaria's hand again. There are no good words for comfort.
By the time of the wedding, District 2 has fallen. Johanna has gotten used to life in District 13, more or less. She's still terrible at everything they ask of her: she can't run particularly fast, she can't finish her rations, and she can't sleep through the night, but she does as she is told, because what other option does she have? Each morning, she and Enobaria get up and get their tattoos, get their breakfast and work on military combat strategies.
It's fine: ever since she was reaped, all she has ever known is sex and violence, and as she is now, emaciated with a shaved head, she knows no one will find her desirable, so violence it is. She works on memorizing the formations, learning the weapons of the Capitol, understanding what it is they are going to ask her to do.
Then, after lunch it's training. Running, assembling weapons, lifting things. She's terrible at all of it, and it makes her feel completely awful, but it seems like District 13 is desperate for soldiers, because they let her come back day after day, another body to add to the rebel ranks.
Enobaria gets better and better, as her strength improves, and Johanna wishes she would be a little worse, actually, just so that they won't throw her right back into the front lines of the war. She laps Johanna on the runs, and can assemble and disassemble the gun in record time. "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing," she says one night in the dark, when both of them are lying on their beds. "I'm not a fucking rebel."
"Looks like you got conscripted," Johanna says, because what else can she say? The Capitol may have captured them first, but in saving them, District 13 was imparting their will.
"I'm going back to 2, when this is all over," Enobaria says. She sounds emotional, though Johanna can't see her face in the dark. "I don't care if it's rubble now, or rebels have taken it over or whatever. I just fucking want to go home."
Johanna can't imagine this, really. District 7 was her home, but her family has been dead for years, and who else was there waiting for her? No family, no friends. Blight is dead. The other 7 Victor, Jackson, might have survived, if he was lucky, but what would they do in 7? Smoke a pipe and go ice fishing? She tries to imagine where she would go if the war ended tomorrow, and has no idea. She'd probably just stay in this room.
They get the help of a stylist for the wedding, an odd indulgence in District 13. It feels a little too much like the Capitol, except that the stylist himself looks too thin and haggard, his clothes much too bland to be top-of-the-line Capitol fashions. They sit and get their makeup done in one of the community rooms, but it's quiet, still a couple hours to go before the wedding. Nearby, there are people darting back and forth with trays of food, flowers, and other decorations.
"I have some skills with wigs, if you'd like," he offers, leaning over Johanna's shoulder to speak quietly in her ear.
She can handle things touching her head now, sometimes. She imagines a wig would be irritating, but not unbearably so. She tries to picture herself with hair again, to her chin, to her shoulders, past them? She knows why they cut her hair and bites her lips, remembering.
"So you don't get tempted to fuck rebel scum," the one guard had said to the others, taking the shears and then the razor to her hair. Enobaria, of course, was able to keep her hair, a sign that beauty didn't mean a better outcome, necessarily.
She shakes her head. "Leave it," she says. It's grown a bit now, two months or so since it was originally shorn. She wonders if she'll let it continue to grow, or get irritated and cut it back again. It feels like it could go either way.
Enobaria emerges in a green gown, decorated with hundreds of beads, something obviously salvaged from the Capitol. She looks gorgeous, her hair now pressed smooth, not in her usual braids. Johanna flips through the rack of clothes, picking out a silvery dress that seems like it will fit, and it fits well enough, but she doesn't look like herself anymore: her hair shorn, her frame different, little scars dotting her hairline and chest. But it's fine. It's not her wedding.
She joins Enobaria in the large gymnasium-like hall where they have set up for the wedding, and it feels like the end of something. She knew it was coming, certainly. Finnick couldn't have two lovers forever, and with both of them in one place, she knew he would pick Annie, but the marriage feels final, like there is no more 'Finnick and Jo'. It makes her angry, in a way. She wants to scream at him: 'We used to sleep together, didn't we? We used to cry together, and drink together. We used to laugh together!' But mostly it just makes her sad. Because she thought she had loved Finnick, but a month in the prison had taught her that she didn't love him the way that Annie did, and made her wonder if she really understood love at all, really.
She watches Annie enter now, glowing in a white dress that looks to be one of Katniss's, salvaged from the Capitol. She still looks a little thin, a shadow of the Capitol prison still haunting her, but she hides it well on her wedding day, beaming as she walks to join Finnick in front of the crowd gathered to bear witness to their marriage.
Johanna had been across from her, in the prison, for all those weeks, listening to Annie mutter, to Annie yell, listening to Annie call for Finnick. It was enough to set her off sometimes, if she had any energy to yell, or to tell Annie that he isn't coming, that they were all going to die down there. She regrets it now, a bit, as her head aches and her heart aches and she watches them say their vows. Maybe Annie is smug. I knew he would get me out. Or I knew he would pick me in the end. Logically, she knows Annie isn't like this, that Annie has only ever been kind to the pathetic, ugly Johanna who has been the other woman in her relationship for years, but she feels rotten, and ill, and she thinks maybe it would be better if she just left the wedding.
It's Peeta who stops her, in the end. "You should try the cake," he says, after the ceremony, as the chairs are being moved to make room for dancing. "I made it."
He also looks better. He still has dark circles under his eyes, and all the baby fat from his face has disappeared, but he looks in his right mind again, more sure of himself. "Alright," she agrees.
She sits with Enobaria and eats the cake and watches the dancing, unable to take her eyes away from Annie and Finnick's intertwined forms for the first ten minutes. But Enobaria pokes her in the side, reminding her of the cake half-eaten in her lap. "It is really good cake," says Enobaria, smiling a little. It feels like the end of something, even though she shouldn't be shocked; all the signs were there. He hadn't come to visit her in the hospital, he barely talks to her now. She both understands it and doesn't, but she doesn't want to push too hard, she doesn't really want to understand this rejection on top of everything else. So she just watches the way they stare at each other, dancing, their perfect and beautiful bodies moving together as if made for one another as she sits out of sight, trying to imagine herself that close to anyone ever again.
Johanna takes another bite, and has to agree. "You're staring too," she accuses, shouldering Enobaria gently back. She has been watching Gale on and off the entire night. "Do you hate him?" she asks.
Enobaria shrugs. "I don't know him well enough to hate him. I just…" She shifts a bit, so she's leaning closer. Johanna can smell her, and it makes her nervous how she almost wants to kiss Enobaria. "I heard rumors," Enobaria continues. "People around here said that his plans for District 2 weren't the plans that ended up being used. That he was fine with killing people. Non-combatants. He puts me on edge."
A week or so after the wedding, Johanna is tested. There's a combat exam, something that makes her realize that the war may actually have an end, a thought that truly hadn't occurred to her before. Of course there were people planning: Plutarch and Coin and Haymitch always up in the locked rooms watching the screens and planning things, but that was separate from her. She couldn't consider much outside herself, it was enough to follow the schedule on her arm or manage to put the gun together with the constant raging headache and the nausea and the way her muscles never moved quite the way she wanted them to.
Enobaria passes her exam, of course, even though she never even asked to be a rebel. Katniss passes, even though it feels like she was shot like a week ago. When it's Johanna's turn, she knows she's slow, probably too weak, and she imagines that's the kind of challenge they'll pose her.
The exam is in a mock Capitol block, the kind of place she used to go to every year, before the war, but now it's laden with traps like mutts and weapons. She expects something that will make her run quickly, or make a snap decision with her broken brain, or have to lift something too heavy with her lack of muscles. She doesn't expect the street to be flooded, just a few inches, just like the bottom of the interrogation room. How could they know this?
She takes a few steps forward, aware that they are watching her through some camera, just like in the Games, and aware that there's some other trap, some opponent she still has to face. This is just the atmosphere. She's stiff with fear, but she keeps moving. And then she hears it: a dull buzz, electricity. She turns a corner around a building to see a power cable dangling from its pole and draped over a flipped car, a live wire inches from falling into the water where she now stands. She couldn't let anything else happen. She couldn't let the car be damaged, or she would be electrocuted, just like before.
But she can't even move. She can't even think, really. She can feel herself becoming detached from the situation, as she loses the ability to even hold herself upright. She wonders if there's some sort of chemical in the air, but she can't even finish that thought. She sees herself, moving in the water, and then she sees nothing.
When she wakes up, Enobaria is sitting beside her in the infirmary. "You scared me," she says.
Every muscle is aching, and Johanna can feel her usual headache coming back, which tells her that the medication dripping into her arm was probably not morphling. "I don't even know what happened."
A Healer walks into the curtained partition, probably aware she had woken up by some change on the vitals monitor. "You had a seizure while performing your exam. I don't know why they thought you were fit for combat, I didn't even want to release you," she says, clucking a bit as she rearranges a cuff on Johanna's arm and another device around her finger.
"Will it happen again?" Her words come out a little clumsy, and Enobaria hands her the pitcher with a straw to sip from. She takes it because she is thirsty, but the words felt wrong for another reason, like it was hard to draw them from her brain. She tries not to panic, but it's difficult. Because what if they really messed her up? What if her mind didn't work right, or her body? What if she was no use to anyone anymore?
"It's hard to say," the Healer says. "Seems like that episode of stress set it off." She crouches down so she's at eye level. "They simulated the torture, didn't they?"
Johanna nods, her mouth dry again, and she takes another sip of the water.
"I don't know for sure," the Healer says. "If you want my advice, you should go somewhere dry after the war. District 5 or District 2. Somewhere out in the desert. Get an easy job, doing the same thing every day. That kind of life. Don't feel guilty about not going out in the last battle. You've done plenty already. You both have." She leaves, apparently satisfied with her assessment of Johanna's condition, and Johanna is left alone with Enobaria once again.
"Are you going, then?" she asks. "To the Capitol?"
"Someone has to kill Snow," Enobaria says.
Johanna wonders what Enobaria's test was like. A test of loyalty, perhaps, since she was from 2, or if it was anything like Johanna's, perhaps they had sent in lecherous men. She doesn't ask. "Be careful," Johanna says. She's tired now, again, and she realizes she's going to fall asleep. She's afraid when she wakes up Enobaria will be gone: shipped off to the Capitol, maybe for the final battle of the war. "Don't you die at the end."
Enobaria leans down, resting her head on Johanna's chest. "I won't."