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It takes three days to sell all the moonshine. On the third day, the train stops in the station, and the crew all step off and tour the market, and they buy up the rest of the supply, pleased to find some authentic District 12 white liquor. He only wished he had more time so he could have raised the price before he saw them coming.
He walks back to the house with the empty wagon around noon, thinking already about how he has just enough cornmeal that he can probably start another batch tomorrow, but his thoughts about the moonshine are broken up with thoughts of Johanna, who he expects will be at home sleeping when he arrives. She'd taken to keeping an off schedule from him, so they could avoid each other as much as possible. She'd sit up at night, watching television or drinking tea or doing whatever while he slept, and then, when he came downstairs, she'd retreat to the bedroom to sleep.
He thinks she's been using the morphling, too, but she's secretive, and he knows this is his own fault. He shouldn't have started the conversation the way he did. He wants to kick himself for chastising her about it first thing, knowing she was only here after being run out of District 2 for morphling, but he had a girlfriend ruin her life to the stuff, he's sensitive.
When he gets home, he's surprised to find her awake, digging through the pocket of her discarded clothes for something. She's in the living room, several pieces of her clothes draped on his furniture now, and several of her empty mugs are on the table. He's come to realize that neither of them are particularly neat, so even though she has very few possessions, his house has become cluttered in only a few days.
"Are you looking for something?" he asks.
She turns towards him, still on her hands and knees, as if startled that he's home so early. Her jaw is clenched, face set in that now-familiar way that means she is in pain. "I…" she trails off, almost as if she forgot what she was going to say. She shakes out the shirt and, realizing it is empty, stands, and rifles through the couch cushions for whatever it is she's searching for.
She's sweating a bit, he can see, and he wonders if she's feverish. She probably has no immunity to the run-of-the-mill bugs around District 12. "I sold all the moonshine," he tells her. "Time to start a new batch."
She barely glances at him. "Good for you," she says, in a tone that says she couldn't care less. She sighs, rubbing at her eye. "Fuck."
He approaches her slowly. He's never seen her like this, not before the war and not since she's come back. "Jo, what's going on?" he asks. He puts a hand on her shoulder to steady her, to force her to acknowledge him, and she is almost thrumming under his touch, all heat and energy.
She looks at him with confusion, a tinge of fear in her expression. She turns and looks around the living room as well. "This has already happened…" she says, and he has no idea what she means, because she's only lived in his house for a few days, and they've only touched one other time, and that was near the stills.
And then she's falling, and then she's collapsed, before he really understands what's happened. She's jerking, badly, and he's frozen, just watching, until her jaw clamps shut and she bites her tongue hard and too much blood comes out of her mouth. He grabs the shirt she had just been shaking and crouches down beside her, shoving it into her mouth, acting more on instinct than any true medical training, hoping he can keep her from biting her tongue off. And he holds her, trying to keep her limbs mostly steady, trying to make sure her head is braced against him and not hitting the floor.
Finally, after an eternity, she stills. It felt like the attack lasted for an hour, but when Haymitch looks at the clock, it must have been only a minute or two. Johanna is dazed on the floor but she is still, and he is sore and sweaty, his heart beating too quickly. "Can you hear me?" he asks her, but she doesn't respond. Her eyes are open but they're glassy, and the blood continues to ooze from the corner of her mouth. He pulls out the shirt and turns her head to the side so she doesn't choke on blood, but is frozen for what to do next.
They don't have a Healer. They don't have a hospital, they don't have anything in the District that would be much help. He suddenly feels like he is 16, like he's in the Games without proper support, with someone who needs help and no idea what to do. It's the same adrenaline-pumping sort of terror, and he has to reach for the same center of calmness that he doesn't even remember he has to keep moving. But he finds it, somehow.
He props Johanna on her side with a couch cushion and goes to the telephone, in the doorway of the kitchen. He can still see her, barely, and from there he calls Peeta.
"Hello?"
"Katniss, is Peeta there?"
"He's still at the market."
Haymitch doesn't know what he wants, so he doesn't really know why he wanted Peeta more than Katniss. Part of it is to shield Katniss, really, like he always wants to, but Katniss is an adult. Katniss was in the Games, twice. Katniss was shot. Katniss dealt with Primrose dying and her mother's abandonment. He really wonders if he's doing her a disservice. "Listen, Katniss, something's wrong with Johanna, like seriously wrong. I think she had a seizure or something."
There's a pause, for a moment, and Haymitch wonders if Katniss is going to go silent again. "I can bring my mom's medicine kit, and her book. I don't know how to use it, really, but we can take a look."
"Leave a note for Peeta and bring it, would you?"
Haymitch hangs up the phone and goes to Johanna, who's brought her hand up to her face. He thinks she's wiping away the blood at her mouth, but as he walks closer, he sees her swipe at tears with the back of her hand. "Hey, it's alright," he says, crouching down again and pushing her hair out of her face.
"I'm sorry," she says, her words a little thick. "I thought I was better."
Whatever reply he had dies on his tongue at the thought that this has happened before, that this has happened multiple times, and he had no idea. Had it happened in District 13? What was he doing? Trying to end the war, and trying to keep Katniss alive, he supposed. Was this what Peeta was saying, that he never looks at Johanna, because he was too busy with Katniss?
"Let's go upstairs," he suggests, and she nods, pushing herself up and standing on weak legs. He doesn't trust her on the stairs, not with the way she almost looks ready to fall on the living room floor, so he picks her up and carries her instead. He knows she must be feeling bad from the way she doesn't resist, but simply allows him to bring her up to the bed. She kicks her legs under the sheet, settling back onto the pillows.
"There it is," she says, with a sad smile on her face, nodding to the corner of the room, where her bottle of pills has rolled. He picks them up and opens it, handing one to her, and she takes it with the glass of water on the nightstand.
"Is that for… this?" he asks.
She nods, and he can see the fatigue setting in. "Told you they weren't fucking pain pills," she says, but there's no bite left.
There's a knock at the door, and he hears it open. "It's me," Katniss says. He knows she'll see the blood, the mess of the living room, the general unkempt way he keeps his home, but it doesn't matter right now.
"Up here," he calls. Johanna turns on her side, away from the door, as if trying to prepare herself for being seen by Katniss. When Katniss enters, she has a leather satchel, one Haymitch hasn't seen in years. He remembers her mother using it, the custom straps filled with herbs and little tinctures, and the main compartment holding a large reference tome.
"I'll get a chair," Haymitch says, realizing he has no other seats in his bedroom than the bed itself. He goes back downstairs to get a chair from the dining table and sees a letter torn open on the table. At first he thinks Johanna has gone through his mail, but then he realizes it's directed to her. It's a summons, for a court date in District 2, in a couple weeks' time. They'd tracked her down. No wonder she had been so agitated when he got home.
He feels his heart race again with the unreality of the situation. The fact that the war is over, there are no more Games, no more prostitution, and still Johanna is facing a prison sentence because she needed morphling to cope with the pain that the Capitol burdened her with. This was all stemming from torture they inflicted on her but would never be punished for.
He brings the chair upstairs, and finds Katniss handing Johanna a cloth to use to wipe the blood off of her face. Katniss sits in the chair beside the bed, and opens the book on her lap. "I was never any good at this," she says. "My mom used to tell Prim how to do all this, because I never had any mind for it."
He thinks she's talking to Johanna, but when she looks, Katniss is looking at him. Johanna blinks a few times, trying to keep her eyes open, but he can tell she's about to fall asleep. "I think it's ok," Haymitch says. "I think I panicked a bit."
Katniss looks from Johanna to the book to Haymitch, as if unsure if he's telling her the truth, or just trying to give her an excuse to get off easy, but slowly, she closes the book. "We did see people with seizures from time to time," she says. "But I don't think my mom really had anything for that. I think really she just gave them things for the anxiety and the muscle pain."
Haymitch sits on the edge of the bed, careful not to wake Johanna. He's grateful that Katniss is speaking again, after months of silence, and that she is not in her perpetual morphling daze anymore. But due to that long, zombie-like period, it is easy to forget how perceptive she really is. That even though she says she has no mind for medicine, she really did know what her mother did for certain patients, and maybe she just didn't want to say she had nothing while Johanna was awake.
"She has something here," he says, holding up the pills. "From 2 or from 13. We should be able to get more." He doesn't say that the trade-off to getting more is Johanna turning herself in, facing prison, which is where she got the injuries that caused this in the first place.
Katniss nods. "That's good, then. I can leave this here, just in case. I don't… really like having it around." She gestures to the tome and the satchel, and Haymitch wonders if he should turn her down. It feels like one of the last few ties to her mother, but then again, her mother is still alive. Snow hadn't killed her mother, like he had his own, or Peeta's, or Johanna's. Katniss's mother had chosen to leave, and that was an entirely different kind of hurt he couldn't relate to.
"Sure," he says. "I'll hold onto it."
After, once Katniss has gone home, he sits in the chair instead and wonders if this is what it would have been like had he sat next to Johanna in that hospital in District 13. He tells himself that he meant to, that he saw her come back from the Capitol in that terrible state and thought she ought to have someone sit there with her so she wasn't alone. But then Peeta had attacked Katniss, and his obligation to his District, and to the Mockingjay had surfaced, as it always did. He sat with Katniss, both to make sure she was alright, and to make sure she would be able to continue to fight in the rebellion. He had sat next to Peeta, to try to bring his mind back from whatever insane place the Capitol had led it. And he had obligations with Coin, with Plutarch, with Beetee, with everyone else who needed him for this and that. He told himself that Finnick would sit with Johanna, but of course he wouldn't, because Annie had been in that prison, too, and he knew from experience that Finnick would choose Annie every time, when push came to shove.
In his heart, he knows that her feelings towards him aren't misplaced. He did put her second every time, and that meant she was left behind, that meant she might die in the arena so Katniss could survive. It meant she was tortured in the Capitol prison, and it meant that after she had to recover alone, since his priorities were elsewhere. But he thinks that if he had made a different choice, perhaps the rebellion would have failed.
"Hey," she says, waking up. She looks pale and her hair is a mess, but for the first time since she has come to stay with him, he looks at her properly, and thinks she looks nice, despite everything. Older, certainly, but so is he. She's pretty in a way that isn't artificially Capitol. It's always been her downfall, and it's always been his attraction.
"How do you feel?"
She shrugs, sitting up a bit. "Like I just did hours of training for the Games," she says. "Not as bad as being electrocuted."
A terrible thought strikes him then, and he wonders why it never occurred to him before. Of course they had used electricity. He had manipulated his Games by sending an electric current through the arena, and he and Beetee had worked out a plan to do the same in the third Quarter Quell. Snow must have understood this, that it was Haymitch behind the operation rather than Katniss, and used that knowledge to pick an appropriate torture method for Johanna.
He was always thoughtful in his sadism like that. Snow had sent Peeta back as a killing machine, Katniss's closest ally turned against her. He sent Annie back without her clothes, a sign that all Finnick's efforts to keep her from the prying hands of the Capitol were for naught. And he sent Johanna back after shocking her, to show Haymitch that he knew about their tryst all along, and he would, without fail, bring harm to every woman he tried to get close to.
"What are you thinking about?" she asks. He looks at her and is surprised by the intensity with which she is looking at him, studying him almost. He feels undeserving to have so much of her attention, even in a room so sparse.
"Just feeling sorry for myself," he says, which sounds pathetic even to his ears. God, they were all so miserable, none of them having a good go of it, but his Games were what? 25 years ago now? And he still was haunted by them every day. By his family's death after. By Lenore. Then the years after, when he thought things might be alright, when he met Chaff, and Elin, as Mentors. When he tried to get a girlfriend again.
And then Snow kidnapped Elin's sister and it all went to hell, ending their relationship and starting her morphling addiction, making him realize that he would have a target on his back until the Capitol fell or the day he died, whichever came first. He took a lover for companionship, here and there, but didn't dare think of having another girlfriend. Now, Snow is dead, the war is over, they won, and he realizes that he still has been living with the thought that he is cursed, that he ought to stay single forever.
"Want to feel sorry for yourself over here?" she asks.
He realizes that she is inviting him to the bed, to his own bed, and he wonders why he is hesitating. Of course he wants to lay beside her. He wants to pull her close, to reassure himself that she's alright now, and fall asleep with her pressed against him. But there's the letter. There's her other life in District 2, there's the fact that he's let her down enough times that he doesn't know if he deserves to come crawling back now. And would it be worse, for both of them, to have a bit of comfort now, only to have things end badly like they always do? She said she'd rather die than go to prison again, and he believes her. It makes him tremble with the thought that she has survived two Games plus the torture of the Capitol, only to kill herself after the war.
She realizes he's waited for too long to move, plagued with some kind of indecision, and he sees something break in her face. Her jaw tightens, and she turns away.
"It's not like that-"
"Forget it," she says. "I don't want to hear it."
He's hungry. He's thirsty, and he's maybe a little hungover. He's tired. He wants to change his clothes because he sweat in them, and he has Johanna's blood on one of his sleeves. But he tries to forget all of that. He walks to the other side of the bed and sits beside her, leaving a gap. "Tell me about District 2," he says.
She hesitates for a moment, but then seems to accept that he has asked in good faith. She still looks tired, and her voice is sleepy as she speaks. "It's so warm, all the time," she says. "Except for at night." He closes his eyes, listening. "The earth is red dirt, and in every direction there are these massive mountains. When I got there, I still wasn't well. I moved into a place with Baria, but I was at the clinic all the time. I'd have seizures, or these headaches that made me go blind. Once my ear started bleeding, and I thought I was going to die."
He's sitting on the side that she's facing, and she reaches out to fiddle with his belt, passing the end of it back and forth into the last loop, as if she can't keep her hands still. It feels good to have some sort of connection, no matter how slight. "But they got me medications and everything got better after a few months. Well, except for the pain. They're crazy strict with the morphling there, but I found a guy, so that was ok, too. I got a job at the clinic, in the end. I saw a posting while I was there. Just like… cleaning out the rooms, handing the Healers things they needed, vaccinating people. Stuff like that. There's so many people in 2 that were caught in the civil war, with burns, missing limbs, bullet wounds, it's really sad."
"You're a Healer?" he asks, not bothering to hide his surprise.
"Are you even listening?" she asks, her normal impatience in her tone. "I just did what they told me to do. That's how you do everything in 2, you just follow orders. Anyways, I fucked up in the end. My bag spilled at work and they saw my morphling. One of the Healers accused me of stealing it from the dispensary. I didn't, but proving that led to them realizing I got it through less than legal means."
"They couldn't have let it go?"
She shrugs. "That's how it is in 2. They follow rules like… that's what gives their whole life meaning. I didn't get it at first, but Baria helped me see it."
He dares to grab her hand that has been toying with his belt, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand. "I saw your summons."
"Yeah."
"What are you going to do?"
She pauses a moment, and then draws closer. "I don't know." She presses her face into his chest and he can feel her crying, tears of fear and frustration that reflect his own feelings. He holds her, realizing that he doesn't want her to leave. He wants to make a go of them properly, now that the war is over. He wants to try to have a girlfriend, and see if he is any good at it, now that Snow cannot sabotage him. And he feels like he's fighting against the pull of an old Panem, that is trying to lure Johanna back into its clutches.