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Sometimes she wonders if she really died in that underground torture chamber in the Capitol, if they shocked her with a little too much voltage, or they held her under the water just a little too long, and the life she is living in District 13 is just a delusion. She's never seen the sky, never seen proof that they're still on earth, for one thing, and though Katniss's friend Gale is there- apparently he pulled her out of whatever crappy cell she was laying in- he now avoids her, as if she frightens him. She bares her teeth at him sometimes, a skeleton of a woman against this soldier, and still he backs away.
Haymitch doesn't avoid her, which is nice, even if they are in hell. Once she leaves the hospital, he gives her the tour of the District, though she has no stamina anymore, so it takes a full afternoon since she has to sit and rest at each new site.
"Come in here, I want to show you something," he says, his eyes gleaming with a mischief she thought she might never see again, a look she feared the Quarter Quell and the rebellion had completely snuffed out. He pulls her into a warehouse with rows of old, rusting farming equipment, probably stored in anticipation of a time when District 13 could again emerge above ground, and from the seat of a tractor, he pulls a jug of liquid.
"What is that?" she asks, eyeing floating pieces of food.
"Hoochata," he grins smugly. "District 11 style."
She knows a little about this, each district's preferred vices, through her time in the Capitol, but has never seen this one in person. Vaguely, she knew Districts 1 and 2 preferred wine, 4 preferred beer, 7 tobacco, 6 and 9 had morphling problems, 10 and 12 liked white liquor, but she's never seen hoochata, the fermented fruit liquor traditionally brewed in secret in District 11. "Did Chaff teach you this?"
Haymitch's face falls, likely remembering Chaff's death in the Quarter Quell. He nods, inspecting the jug, perhaps to avoid meeting her eyes. "We made it once, in the Capitol, back when we were young."
She knows what he means. Back before her Games, or Finnick's. Before Enobaria or Cashmere or Gloss. Back when it was him, and Chaff and Brutus and Elin, a whole different cohort causing drama in the Capitol. Back when things were simpler, when everything sucked but it was a familiar repetitive suck, before they knew how much worse it could get.
"Are you going to try it?" she asks.
They bring it back to the compartment she shares with Katniss, and he pours two cups. It's bad, sickly sweet and astringent from the alcohol, but she hasn't had anything to take the edge off in weeks, so she drinks a second cup, and this seems to work, as she feels lighter, tipsy, less hard edges and unrelenting pain, and more like a gap that needs closing, a question that needs answering.
So she reaches for him, her hand on his cheek as he sits beside her on the bed, and she feels the way his beard has grown in these weeks in 13, tries to unearth the man she remembers, or figure out if she's dreaming. She kisses him, cautiously, self-conscious of her shorn hair, of the scabs that haven't healed, of the way she feels insubstantial even to herself.
But of course he kisses back, the flavor of the liquor on his lips, but underneath something more permanent, something familiar, and she pushes him back to get closer. She's still clothed but straddling him, her tongue in his mouth when Katniss opens the door. And then closes the door again, mumbling something incoherently as she bumbles away, embarrassed.
When she wakes, Johanna is somewhere she doesn't recognize. The light above, though, is familiar, and she immediately tries to move away, to hide, to find a weapon, anything to get away. That long, fluorescent light is the same as the dungeon where she was tortured in the Capitol after the Quarter Quell - she recognizes it from the hours spent laying on her back, exhausted.
But now her limbs aren't working right. Her mind is telling her to move, she can feel her heart hammering, but she isn't going anywhere. And then Enobaria is there, her face deadly serious. For a moment, Johanna is suspicious of her, wondering if Enobaria turned on her. But Enobaria comes to sit on the edge of the bed, and tucks her head next to Johanna's ear. "Someone tried to kill you," she says.
"What?" Johanna's voice is weak, as if even the muscles in her throat have been paralyzed, but this word makes it out.
"Coin is covering it up, acting like you just panicked on stage. But there was poison in that drink." Enobaria says this all quickly, quietly. "I don't know if it was intended for you, or for her or Plutarch, instead."
"Why?" She only feels capable of short, monosyllabic grunts.
"No idea. Could have been Snow's loyalists. Or rebels who think Coin isn't going far enough. Could have been Coin getting rid of us for some reason."
As Johanna's thoughts start to catch up, as the fog clears from her mind, she considers all of these options. All of these seem possible. A Snow loyalist could have been upset at his murderer and tried to kill her in retribution: poison being his preferred method, after all. And Katniss had already tried to kill Coin, it would make sense that an extremist would try it again. She shudders to think this was Katniss's work and it almost killed her instead.
But the third option sits in her chest like lead. Coin trying to kill her? And possibly Enobaria and Peeta? Is that one of the things Katniss had suspected? Is that why Coin was playing it down, or was it just so that the people watching, so recently rattled by war, wouldn't be frightened by more chaos? Like everything else, it was impossible to tell, impossible to know what was really going on.
Enobaria looks like she wants to say more, but the doctor arrives, and she stands. "I'll come by later," she says. "But I have to get to work."
The doctor advises that there is a paralytic toxin at play, not the "hemolytic toxin that was popular in the Capitol in the last few decades". She takes this to mean she should be grateful that she can't move rather than laying there bleeding out, but she understands what else he's saying: this isn't Snow's brew. He tells her she only had a very small dose, and while she likely will never regain full function, with good effort at therapy, she should be able to walk, feed herself, and do everything she needs to to maintain her spot on the council.
For the time being, she rests, letting the nurses attend to her. They change her clothes once a day, and she refuses sips of water, making them hook her up to a venous line to get hydration from a sealed medical bag. Mostly, she stares at the ceiling, but it isn't so bad - the toxin that has paralyzed her has also numbed the constant pain she has felt every second since she was tortured after the 75th Games. It's so profoundly strange to not feel pain she feels almost giddy. She should be bored out of her mind - and in a way she is - but it doesn't matter, because she doesn't hurt.
She lays in bed making hypothetical deals with herself, deciding if she'd take them, realizing, of course, that this is some maladaptive coping mechanism after years of Snow having her under his thumb. Would she accept never walking again if she also never felt that horrible nerve pain again? Yes, probably. Would she accept half of the pain back if she could know definitively if Coin was good or bad? Yes, of course. All of it? Still yes, though her gut twists at the thought of the pain returning.
Would she live with not knowing about Coin if it meant that Finnick could live? Could she live with Snow living if it meant that Finnick could live? Could she accept Haymitch leaving her and never coming back if Finnick could live?
She stops playing the game once all questions point to Finnick, an impossible and painful dead end. Finnick was dead, he was not returning, and even if he lived, he would absolutely follow Annie to 4, where they would lead out their lives with their child, far away from her. Later that afternoon, in therapy, she manages to lift a spoon to her mouth, though she doesn't dare eat the food that she didn't see prepared, but when she returns to her room, it's back: a flash and then a constant thrum of nerve pain, humming as an undercurrent on the right side of her body. She is getting better, certainly, but at what cost?
All this contributes to her very foul mood by the time Enobaria arrives. She almost wants to laugh at the contrast between them, the way Enobaria is as tall and beautiful as a model, it seems wrong for her to come to visit short and grubby Johanna with the choppy hair, but when a male physician stops Enobaria in the hallway to talk, despite her obvious body language trying to get away, Johanna remembers that beauty is a curse, remembers their life in the Capitol under Snow, and thinks about shaving her head again.
When Enobaria finally does get away and comes into her room, Johanna wishes she could turn away, but she's only just got her right arm working.
"You can draw the blinds," Johanna offers, and Enobaria obliges, obstructing the view between the room and the hallway. This, at least, makes it feel like they're in a rented room and not just the hospital, where any passing visitor or staff can glance in and check on what they're doing. Enobaria flips the light off as well, just leaving the smaller one over the sink on, and it does make sense: it's 8PM, but Johanna has spent days staring at the long overhead light, it feels strange for it to suddenly go dark.
"Sorry, I'm getting a headache," Enobaria says. "There's so much bullshit going on out there."
"I saw Finnick," Johanna says, and though she's been much better at speaking, her voice improving as she talks to the nurses and the therapists, here her throat clenches around his name.
Enobaria sits down by the bed, but she's stiff. "What? When?"
Neither of them had seen Finnick die, but it was widely reported, a confirmed death in the war. "Right before I fell, on stage. He was there."
She knows Enobaria is going to contest this, to tell her it was Peeta, or Plutarch or that no one came to help her, but she doesn't say anything for a moment. "Did he say anything?" she asks instead. Perhaps she is thinking of Cashmere, of how completely their world has changed and not entirely for the better.
Johanna shakes her head. "No, I could just tell it was him."
"Jo," she says, using the nickname Finnick gave her for the first time, her voice gentler than Johanna could ever remember hearing it.
"Come here," Johanna says, using her newly-liberated right hand to pat the right side of the bed. It would be impossible for her to imagine this even a year ago, but it would have been impossible for her to imagine a life without Finnick or Haymitch then, too.
Enobaria lays down on the bed, her head on Johanna's shoulder, her feet stretching out longer then Johanna's towards the end of the bed. She puts her free hand to her temple, as if trying to stave off a headache, and they lay in silence for a moment. "Do you think Katniss was right?" Johanna asks, her voice almost a whisper.
Enobaria doesn't move, but Johanna knows she's heard, that she's thinking about her answer. "I think," she says after a moment, her voice a soft rumble against Johanna's shoulder, "That Katniss doesn't know exactly how bad it was. About the sex and the killings and the threats. And even after, Katniss wasn't in that dungeon with you and me and Peeta." She sighs, as if settling her thoughts. "I think that for Katniss, it's easy to wish for the perfect system, that if Coin isn't good enough, keep trying. For us, we just want anything where we aren't slaves, or animals."
It takes almost a month for Johanna to walk again, and even then, she has two crutches that fit around her forearms that she isn't sure she'll ever get used to. She tires quickly, and thinks nostalgically of the month before, when she traipsed though District 12 without a thought, when she trashed Haymitch's house without breaking a sweat.
The pain has returned, though not to the level it was at before, and the initial joy at the change in her condition has ebbed into a sort of complacency, and now into frustration at her new normal. She wants to know who did this and why, why after everything, after two Hunger Games, the forced prostitution, the torture in the Capitol dungeon, after killing Snow - someone tried to kill her and ended up paralyzing her instead.
Mr. Powers, the surveyor, has taken over her duties on the council, and the masons have been working with him, but she is wracked with guilt that she is letting them down, even though she'd be no help at all as she is. It's the way she's been trained over the years, she supposes - when she's in the Capitol, she needs to perform, she needs to prove her worth. Her hands are itching to do something, her mind whirling with possibilities, vacillating between contemplating who tried to kill her and why, and when and how she can get back to work on the council.
Even if Coin is corrupt, even if it was Coin who tried to kill her, she reasons, she ought to do her work - she is trying to rebuild Panem, she is trying to make the country better after the war. But then she will change her mind the next moment, reasoning that perhaps Katniss is right, that if Coin is rotten, then there is no point working under her, because the whole system will start to fail eventually, that she is just walking into a trap where she will either be killed or forced to turn into something she hates.
The therapist interrupts her from her musing, prompting her to work on another set of exercises. She's tired, and she's weak, not just from her muscles' lack of use, but from lack of nutrition. Since the poisoning, she's been afraid of eating, afraid that whoever tried to poison her will return to finish the job, and so she's only been eating sealed, packaged food - chips and candy bars, liquor when Enobaria will bring her some. The liquor is bad - it makes the effects of the toxin more pronounced, but with the pain returning, it's hard to give up all vices.
She does the exercises as instructed, sweating from effort, completing them more with force of will than with true strength, but that was how she finished the Hunger Games as well. "Well, I will advise you to keep attending, but I think you can go back home," the therapist remarks. "There's nothing you need to do in daily life that you can't complete."
And just like that, they let her go that evening. She calls a car to drive her home, and though the driver is just like every driver she's ever had, she wonders if he wants her dead, and why. Is there really anyone that was upset that she killed Snow? Or is this just a paranoia Coin has planted in her head?
She arrives back to her apartment building without incident, but her apartment is a mess. There's dust everywhere since she hasn't entered it in over a month, and prior to that she was on two extended trips to District 2 and District 12. There's no food, and clothes and papers scattered about. She gathers her tobacco and rolling papers and knocks on Enobaria's door instead.
"You're out," she says, opening the door to let Johanna in.
Johanna hobbles in, the crutches awkward, and she sits at Enobaria's kitchen table. "Do you know who did it?" she asks. She pulls out the tobacco to start rolling a cigarette, and Enobaria begins to pull out some ingredients to cook, cutting the meat and vegetables up on the counter beside where Johanna is sitting.
"At first I thought it wasn't the rebel group, because if they were really trying to kill Coin, well, they failed the first time, they ought to do it in a way that was more certain this time." She adds the ingredients to a pan, stir-frying them. "The assassination attempt really seemed to galvanize Coin's support, if anything, a second one couldn't fail."
"But?"
"But I think it could be them…" She adds spices to the pan, giving it a good shake. "The toxin seems to be something from the outer districts, like 10 or 11, and it would almost certainly be lethal if you drank more than that small sip. It would paralyze the lungs and heart, the parts you need to stay alive."
"But it was for Coin, not for me?"
Enobaria dumps the meal onto two plates, handing one to Johanna, along with a fork. The whole thing was so smooth, so wordless, it was like they had been living together for years. "I don't know, I told you this is all my guesswork," Enobaria says, coming to sit with her own plate. "I would assume it was meant for Coin or Plutarch, but also the schedule of speakers was available before the event. The key would be who set up the podium, who provided the refreshments, who had access to the backstage area, all of that, but of course that will be impossible to track down."
Johanna eats, the motion of lifting a fork to her mouth still awkward, but it is so nice to eat food that isn't junk, so nice to have a hot meal that she is certain isn't poisoned. "Should I have left?" she asks, after a long while, after more than half her meal is gone. "With Haymitch and Katniss?"
The names themselves feel taboo, like saying the names of devils or swearing in the council chambers. There have been no formal warrants for the arrest of Katniss, in fact, the entire thing has been swept under the rug in the name of peace and progress, but there is also the undercurrent of treason running through the Capitol. The idea that fighting this new regime is traitorous, and supporting Katniss now - now that she's made an attempt on Coin's life - would be akin to having drawn the arrow herself.
"I was half-surprised you didn't, in the beginning," Enobaria admits. Her face falls a bit, and she opens a bottle of wine. "I wonder if it's too late for us."
"Too late?"
Enobaria nods, pouring them each a glass. "We've been in the Capitol too many cycles. It's impossible to think about escaping now. Even though I have family in 2, I still stay here." She sucks on her teeth, as if annoyed at her own inertia.
"Haymitch left."
Enobaria shrugs. "Maybe there's something different about people from 12. Or maybe he just really bought in to the Mockingjay. I mean, Peeta stayed."
It is true. Peeta didn't have their years of experience in the Capitol, but he also didn't follow Katniss like a lost puppy anymore. It must have been his time being tortured by the Capitol - it was as Enobaria said, it just broke people, made it impossible for them to really leave. "She probably hates us now," Johanna says, imagining Katniss seeing herself and Enobaria and Peeta on the Council, part of Coin's new government.
"Perhaps. You hated me for a long time," Enobaria says, a teasing smile on her lips as she finishes her glass of wine and pours another.
"That's because you were insufferable." But even without Enobaria protesting this, Johanna knows this isn't true. Enobaria never did anything to make Johanna hate her - she never taunted her like Cashmere or Gloss did, she never tried to gain extra Capitol popularity like Brutus, she never went out of her way to use her Career advantage. She was more like Finnick than Johanna gave her credit for, and she was the oldest of their cohort, which meant that she had to deal with the Capitol bullshit the longest. Johanna just needed a target that was reachable, not the untouchable Capitolites or Snow, always hidden, always protected.
Perhaps Katniss has nowhere to put her anger and it is on Johanna now, and she supposes that's fine. "Aren't you glad we lived long enough to become friends?" she teases Enobaria, distracting herself from those thoughts.
Johanna gets a stylist in the Capitol to cut her hair, finally, and she once again has sleek, straight hair, cut just below her chin. Since the poisoning, it's hard to reach up over her head, so she needs hair that is simple to take care of, but more than that, she needs to project confidence and professionalism, she needs to show that she can still do her job even if she can't quite walk right.
Plutarch wants to find a way to spin a whole story that she had some long-acting nerve gas damage from the war, some injury that didn't show until the assassination, that it was actually Snow's regime that took her ability to walk correctly. She wonders how they can possibly sell this, when she was poisoned on live television, but apparently, according to Plutarch, it appeared that she just was overwhelmed and passed out on the stage, that the water was not associated with her subsequent disappearance from the public eye.
"Well we can't say you were ill, that will spread fear about a pandemic," he argues with her after a council meeting. Fulvia and Coin are there, too, looking at her crutches like they're a personal affront, like she's responsible for creating this scandal.
"Can't you just say you don't know who it was?" she asks.
"No, we need to assure people that we have the answers. This is… quite unfortunate," Plutarch says.
And then Johanna wonders if this was the goal of the assassination attempt, to poke a hole in the transitional government, to show how it would do in a crisis. "I don't care," she capitulates at last. "I won't lie for you, but if you want to publish some story, I can look the other way. I just want to get back to work."
And so it goes that the next week Peeta shows her some story in a Capitol newspaper about how a doctor speculates that her muscle weakness was a sign of a nerve gas used in the war, or possibly a rare disease only seen in a few Victors.
"Oh, Cashmere had that," Enobaria says, nodding with interest as they read the article at the tavern.
"What?" they both ask.
"Yeah, it's real. She wouldn't dare tell anyone, but Gloss told me. It's probably related to all the injections and supplements the cadets at the training academies get. But at the end, she was getting all sorts of infusions and medications to stop the muscle weakness from spreading."
"Like, during the Games?" Peeta asks, as if this made a difference. As if this would have stilled Johanna's hand from swinging her axe into Cashmere's chest.
Enobaria doesn't reply, just continues picking at her mostly-finished dinner.
Johanna won't eat dinner at the tavern, so when they go home, she plans to eat her 'safe' foods, the canned soup or the ration bars she has in her apartment. "Come in for a nightcap?" Enobaria asks, before they part, and Johanna obliges, knowing she'll accept Enobaria's liquor, except Enobaria doesn't pour liquor. Instead she begins cooking, pulling out some ingredients from her cabinets.
"You don't have to - I can-"
"But you won't," Enobaria cuts her off.
It's true, Johanna never cooks. For the 11 months when she was back in 7 between Hunger Games cycles, she always relied on Blight for meals, or she would eat cheese on bread. "Well it's your choice," she says clicking her tongue as she sits. She feels tense, the way she usually feels after a day of work. Recently she's been meeting with architects, trying to understand the best plan for the new station halls. It's necessary work, but it is filled with long meetings, and she needs to make sure everyone is included: the transportation council, the industry council, the budget council, and probably others she's forgetting.
She finds Enobaria's tobacco and makes herself busy rolling tobacco while she waits for her first real meal of the day. "Coin said they saw her," Enobaria says, her voice casual, but Johanna almost drops the half-rolled cigarette. It's hard enough to complete the task with half the sensation missing from her fingers, but news of Katniss is enough to spike her heartrate.
"Where?"
"11, sounded like…"
"Did they say if…" Johanna trails off, instead choosing to lick the cigarette paper, closing up the tiny parcel. It is hard to say his name out loud, she finds, even though it's only been a several months. So much has changed. She's cleared hundreds of corpses out across three districts, she's seen with her own eyes the true cost of the fighting. She's had an attempt on her life, making her have more in common with Coin than perhaps she would like. She's lost weight from her poor diet, and lost muscle due to being paralyzed. She's finally gotten her hair sorted, and a new wardrobe thanks to Plutarch, so if anything, she looks the part of Councilmember, except for the gaunt cheeks and the crutches needed to hold herself up. Would he even recognize her? Would she recognize him?
She pictures a man haggard from months on the run, with long hair and sinewy limbs. She pictures him angry at her, fully against the transitional government, ready to tear it all down and try again. Would he ever see eye to eye with her again? Her stomach clenches, and she lights the cigarette to settle it.
"They didn't mention it, at least not while I could overhear," Enobaria says. She plates up a toasted sandwich and Johanna passes the cigarette to Enobaria to finish.
Johanna works steadily on in the Capitol, until plans are approved for all 14 station halls - one for each of Districts 1-12, one for District 13, and one for the Capitol. She also has other side projects, such as overseeing the rebuilding District 13 to have an above-ground level, working on helping District 4 raise some of its homes and shops on stilts due to rising sea levels, and working with District 12 to replan their villages - due to the bombing, they have a rare opportunity to redesign their district almost from scratch.
She's here and there for months, always coming and going from the Capitol, sometimes by herself, and sometimes with Enobaria. It's easy to travel with Enobaria, just as it's easy to be in the Capitol with Enobaria, they can talk together, eat together, smoke together. Occasionally, they will even share a bed, not romantically, exactly, just to be a little less lonely.
It feels impossible to try to date anyone in the Capitol, the site of years of exploitation for both of them, but she can lay beside Enobaria, she can hold her or be held, and it's an imitation of intimacy, a careful, practiced attempt at comfort that does just enough to stave off the deep, dark hole inside of her that she dares not prod.
But her trip to District 11 is with Peeta, and she hasn't gone anywhere with him in some time. They take the train together and it's hot, she feels feverish, but she is still wary of water from strangers so she pulls out a bottle of wine from her bag instead.
"You're going to be ill," Peeta advises, even as he uncorks the bottle for her. Despite her therapy, she never got the hand of a corkscrew again after the paralysis.
But she just sighs, waiting for him to hand it back so she can drink. And still she's hot, and the ride is too long, and she's too jittery but with her weakness and the bumpy train, there's no way she can roll a cigarette, and she thinks about injecting morphling when she gets to 11, almost drooling with the possibility, especially since Enobaria won't be there to cook for her or chaperone her. She sips the wine as they sweat and ride, and they sleep a little, but it's impossible to sleep for long, since the train is loud and bumpy, and she's too hot and too uncomfortable to do much but sit and drink.
By the time the distinctive wall surrounding District 11 comes into sight, Johanna is grateful for the journey to end, even if she doesn't particularly want to be there. But she stumbles out of her seat, realizing she's so fatigued and drunk her legs aren't working right. Peeta sighs, a bit, but he doesn't say anything, he just helps her off the train, and keeps an arm around her as they walk down the platform.
"Do you really have to do this all the time?" he berates her, once they've greeted their hosts and are shown to their rooms. It's just the two of them now, him in her room, and he sets her suitcase on the rack and opens it for her, since she seems rather incapable.
"No, it's just a perk of the job," she says, laying back on the bed. Peeta barely drinks at all and he wouldn't dare use drugs. She thinks it's due to the hijacking he underwent in the Capitol, that now any mind-altering experience seems frightening. But he'd never before come to rain on her parade.
"Were you going to use this?" he asks, holding up a bag that held her syringe and morphling liquid. "You won't be able to walk!"
She's seated on the bed, but now she sits up straight, making sure she has his attention. "Newsflash, Peeta-bread, I can't fucking walk anyways!" God, she is angry, at him but mostly at others, but the mere thought of him taking away her morphling has her on edge.
He shakes his head, dropping the bag back in her luggage. "Take care of yourself, Johanna. I don't want to watch you die."
"Fuck you."
He understands this to be the dismissal that it is, and returns to his own room. She takes the morphling, perhaps a smaller dose than she might have otherwise taken, and she lays in bed, eyes glazed, in absolute awe at the way she feels absolutely nothing - at the way her pain is completely absent, and she's unaware even of herself touching the mattress, she might as well be floating in space. And then she takes a big, gasping breath, realizing that she's forgotten to breathe.
District 11 survived the war without major destruction, but Johanna can tell they didn't have much before the war, so walking through the village, it's clear that any help the transitional government can provide will go a long way to helping improve the area. It's ironic, she realizes immediately, that this area produces food for the rest of Panem, and yet many of them were used to claiming tessarae and too poor to have enough to eat. Many of the workers she passes in the center of town are far too thin, and the children are undersized.
There's no morphling here, as far as she can tell, but there's a lot of people on the drink, probably spirits and hoochata. They eye her skeptically, pale and hobbling on crutches, but she's trembling from the comedown from the morphling injection, she has little room to care how out of place she looks here.
It's hot, so hot she's sweating before she can walk the ten minutes from her room to the station, and from up on the platform she sees it: the massive wall that surrounded the major farms before the war, penning the workers, allowing peacekeepers to sit in towers and watch for anyone escaping or stealing. They walls are smashed now, in many places, a sign that Snow's rule is broken, and the sections that are intact have been painted in colorful murals. But one stands out immediately, and can't stop staring at it. It's a bird, a mockingjay more specifically, tearing open a coinpurse, scattering money over a field of crops.
"I know," Peeta says, coming to stand beside her.
He looks exhausted, like he slept worse than she did, and she wonders if he did something stupid, like go out at night and look for Katniss, or just something a little dumb, like blame himself for their fight which was entirely her fault. "She's their hero," Johanna says, eyes stuck on the exact place where the bird's talons were tearing through the fabric of the coinpurse.
"They're waiting for her to finish the job," he agrees.
Despite this assessment, the people of District 11 are more than happy to accept market vouchers, to give their opinions on what they need the most assistance with at the townhall, and to come to see a reveal of the plans for the new station hall. At the end of the night, Johanna is tired, but there's still the groundbreaking the next day, so she goes to find Peeta to discuss their plans, but he's out of his room.
She wants to lay on her bed and sleep, but she hasn't eaten anything all day, so she decides to walk at least to the general store to find canned soup or one of the foods she knows is safe. And on the way she sees him, doing pull ups on a bar of a hollowed-out train car that seems to be used as children's play equipment now. "Peeta, what are you doing?" she asks, limping a little closer. The sun has set now, and the last couple children hanging around are being ushered home.
"Just finishing my workout."
He looks fried, sweat plastering his hair down, and bags under his eyes. They finished their last meeting two hours ago, and she's willing to bet he's been exercising since then. He's in a sleeveless shirt, and she can see his muscles that are usually hidden in the modest, almost frumpy councilman outfit he wears by day. He is fit, more fit than he was in either Hunger Games. "Yeah, you're done now. Let's go to the store."
He follows her but looks a little miffed at being stopped before he was finished, and she buys her soup and a candy bar, and he only buys a water. "Are you trying to starve yourself?" she asks him, eyeing the drink.
He gives her a pointed look, indicating he doesn't want to argue in front of the cashier, and then he pays for the drink and follows her back outside. The night is clear and warm, but quiet - most everyone is in the other section of town, drinking and dancing or at their homes, preparing dinner and away from the farmland and all it represents. "Funny, that, coming from you," he spits back, and she's trembling with anger, as if she's ever not eaten for vanity. "I'm going to get dinner in the tavern later, but I assume you won't be coming," he adds, almost sneering, nodding at her can of soup.
She bites her lips, holding herself back from lecturing him. He was there beside her in that fucking prison when they were tortured, he was there on that stage when she was poisoned. She wonders what this turn in their relationship is, why they can only fight now. "Why are you working out for hours?" she asks instead, trying to redirect the conversation to something she can handle.
Now it's he who is a little off-kilter, he who is wordless for an extra second. "I won't be weak," he says firmly, "I will be ready."
Is that how he sees her? A victim because of her weakness? She swallows and it is thick, heavy, like she's swallowing a fear that she's been tasting for a while, only to have it settle in her chest. She tries to stay calm, to remind herself that it's not about her, not really, that Peeta is concerned with himself, with his own weakness, with how he compares to Katniss and Haymitch, with how he fares when thrown into the Capitol's death machines. But it's no use, not really. They can both feel it, the way that something has to give: either Katniss's rebels need to be defeated for good, or Coin's transitional government needs to be taken out, without mistakes this time. There will be a final showdown, and they need to prepare. "Who will you choose?" she asks, wondering if his answer will inform her own.
He sighs, taking a sip of the water. Peeta is strong, he is clearheaded, he's a good man, but sometimes she wonders if he's like her: too personally close to Katniss and Haymitch to see things clearly, too upset and hurt about how things turned out, and somewhere, deep down, harboring a secret hope that things might go back to how they were. "I will choose with my gut, in the moment," he says.
He is stoic as he says it, but she knows this is deceptive. That there's a difference between making a plan with conviction and then actually being down on the ground in the arena again. And there's sure to be a difference between planning to stick to your gut, and having a past lover plead before you again.
She wants to ask him if he thinks she's weak, for eating so little, for having limbs that don't work right, for abusing morphling and alcohol when it feels like her chest might explode, or when the nerve pain gets bad enough she can't think about anything else. But she's afraid he'll say yes, so she keeps her mouth shut. She's heard the opinions of men for too many years, she lets this one go.