Chapter Text
“What would you say if I said I wanted to live in a cottage in the middle of the woods?”
“You’d better fucking take me with you,” Johanna responds, feet propped up on the filthy kitchen table. She wasn’t the one the question was directed at, though; Katniss’ gaze remains firmly locked on Haymitch, awaiting his response.
He grunts, and his first response is to reach for the nearest bottle of liquor, naturally. He takes a long swig. “I’m just fucking surprised you haven’t done that already, sweetheart.”
Katniss doesn’t laugh; she’s just come back from the real estate agent’s office in the Main Street of the district. She doesn’t particularly care how much she gets for her house in the Victor’s Village; it’s always felt more like a mausoleum instead of a home, anyway. It’s been close to a year since Peeta died, two since Prim. She’s realised that between the memories of Snow, of Prim and her mother, of Gale and Peeta, she’s slowly beginning to suffocate between those walls.
And Katniss Everdeen wants to know what it’s like to breathe again.
“You don’t need my permission for anything, kid,” Haymitch continues. He looks hungover — or at least, more so than usual. Katniss makes a note to water down some of the bottles in his personal stock when he’s not looking. “Do what you want. You’ve earned it.”
“Well, I want to live in a cabin in the middle of the woods.”
“Figures,” he grunts. “You’ll come back here for family dinner every Sunday?”
“We’ve never done family dinner, let alone on a Sunday,” she deadpans.
“Too bad, Katniss. That’s my only request if you want to run off into the woods and become a fucking forest fairy or whatever.”
Katniss’ cottage in the middle of the woods is a three hour trek, on foot, from District Twelve. Naturally, it’s situated overlooking her father’s lake; the old hut where she met Bonnie and Twill, and once argued with Gale, has been pulled down and rebuilt by Thom and his men. They insist that Katniss has overpaid them for their efforts; she insists there’s no such thing as overcompensation, in a world without the Capitol constantly breathing down their necks.
“I don’t understand why you’d ever want to come back here,” Thom mutters to her, one afternoon, as she’s helping nail the shingles down on the roof. She’s lighter than the other labourers and most ideal for the task at hand; they’re busy hacking logs into neat timber lengths to construct an outhouse for her. “Too many bad memories here.”
Katniss looks up from her handiwork and at the scenery around her, the glossy blue lake ringed by thick forest. Thom is correct in saying that there are bad memories here — the memory of the survivors of District Twelve after the Capitol’s firebombs, gathering here on the shore with not a shred of hope between them all. But there are also memories of her father here, of leisurely summer days before and after the Games, of Peeta painting under the trees on one of his better days.
She offers Thom a small, tight, tired smile. “It’s the sort of memory I’m willing to live alongside, rather than fight against forever.”
Katniss has effortlessly fallen into a routine of her own making, in her cottage in the woods by the lake, when Johanna Mason once again barges into her life to interrupt it all.
“Twelve is bloody boring without you around,” Johanna announces without preamble, as she treks up the handmade steps to Katniss’ porch. It’s a miracle she turned up the same time Katniss was at home; she’s sitting cross-legged in a wicker chair, Buttercup asleep on an old cushion beside her, braiding heads of garlic together. Her vegetable gardens are beginning to flourish, and she’s fumbling through what to do with an abundance of fresh food, for the first time in her life.
“If a clinically mentally unstable teenage girl was the only source of entertainment in your life Johanna, then you seriously need to reevaluate your life choices.”
Johanna snorts indelicately as she rests her axe and a pack against the wooden railing of the porch, before dropping into the second wicker chair next to Katniss’. “Fuck off, Everdeen. Is that really how you greet an old friend?”
“I didn’t have many of those in the first place. Not many opportunities to practise.”
“Hmph. Fair enough.”
Katniss ties off the braid of garlic heads and sets it aside. Mornings are for hunting, afternoons for gardening and work around the cottage. Every Sunday she walks back to Twelve for lunch with Haymitch and to trade at the market that’s been set up in the district square. Unlike the Hob, everything is out on display in the open sunlight, with no cause to hide goods from the prying eyes of Peacekeepers. “What brought you out here?”
“Like I said, I was bored.”
“That’s what you said when you first moved to Twelve. I’m beginning to think you just like following me around.”
“Don’t go around thinking too highly of yourself. I’m not exactly a diehard Mockingjay fan.”
Katniss shakes her head, a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Whatever you say, Mason.”
Over the next few weeks, Johanna visits her again, and again, and again. Perhaps she really is bored of Twelve, as she claims. But when Katniss brings the topic up, Johanna shakes her head adamantly.
“Where is there left to go that isn’t either another shit hole or reminds me way too much of the fucking Capitol?” But then she shoots Katniss a wry grin. “You’re stuck with me. Deal with it.”
Katniss isn’t entirely sure how to explain the feeling, but something warm and delicate blossoms in her stomach, like a flower opening its face to the sunshine. Her smile is forced as she desperately tries to ignore the sensation.
In the autumn, Johanna brings her a pup.
Katniss regards the wriggling bundle of fur and tongue and ears and tail that Johanna somehow managed to manhandle all the way from Twelve out to the lake. The pup is effortlessly adorable, russet brown coloured, with arrow-shaped ears, a bear-like face and a thick, fluffy tail.
“I know you’re a cat person,” Johanna pants as she properly presents Katniss was the pup. “But that fucking moggy isn’t going to help keep you warm once winter properly hits. Didn’t hunters used to take dogs with them, anyway?”
“I think so,” Katniss says, hesitantly letting the pup investigate her palm with its nose. She doesn’t have much experience with dogs, except for the wild packs that still roam the woods or the ones that ended up in Greasy Sae’s stew. “What’s its name?”
“Dunno. Breeder said it was up to you. It’s a boy, but.”
Katniss cautiously hoists the pup into her arms, cringing away instinctively when he licks her neck, but smiles despite herself. “Everyone only brings me dead animals. It’s nice to receive a live one, for once.”
“There’s a first for everything, Katniss.”
Her neck jerks in Johanna’s direction, eyes narrowing slightly. “It’s been a while since you used my first name.”
“Almost forgot you had one,” Johanna quips. She nods to the pup. “Where’s your moggy at? Let’s introduce them.”
She names the dog Moose, because it makes them laugh, and Katniss tells herself that she could always use a good reason to laugh. It’s not until Johanna waves goodbye and treks back into the forest towards Twelve does she realise she chose the name because Jo had so enthusiastically approved of it, and she’d do anything to see Jo’s boyish, gleeful grin all over again.
Winter comes eventually, bitterly cold with long bouts of rain and sleet that keep her shut up in the cottage. Katniss is eternally grateful she spent spring and summer time preparing and storing food as well as eating it; for once in her life, without the Capitol’s blood money supplementing her income, there’s enough food to go around. Moose is seemingly growing every day; Katniss has been training him to round up game and collect her kills. Buttercup, naturally, still despises his presence, preferring to spend his time hunting mice underneath the floors or snoozing in Katniss’ bed.
There are less bad days. She thinks about Prim and Peeta, and Rue and Finnick, and Cinna and her father and Madge, almost every day. Their ghosts are with her when she wakes and when she falls asleep; but it feels as if they’re smiling down at her, standing over her, rather than looking down at her with condemnation. She thinks rarely of her mother and Gale. As for Johanna — well, Katniss thinks about her likely far, far more often than she should.
Still, the nightmares pursue her, almost every night. There are moments when something simple and nonsensical violently launches her back into a memory that has her shaking and folding in on herself. She does not go near the part of the woods where the tree stump that Peeta hung himself stands.
Johanna regularly shows up unannounced, usually around late morning, bringing fresh bread and her ever-present sharp tongue. On one such morning when it’s sleeting down, the older girl’s line of vision falls on the mostly emptied supply of firewood stacked along the northern side of Katniss’ cottage.
“Everdeen, your wood pile is fucking disgraceful.”
“It’s been cold lately,” Katniss justifies. In the brief moments where the weather relents, she focuses on hunting and checking her snare lines; firewood hasn’t exactly been the priority, despite that it is the one thing consistently keeping her from freezing to death. Apart from Moose, of course.
“That’s the most pissweak excuse I’ve heard in a while, and you know it.” Johanna scans the span of the lake, her eyes brightening as a confident warmth settles firmly on her features. “Where’s my axe?”
She spends the rest of the day felling trees and shucking them into smaller chunks for Katniss’ wood fire, and Katniss spends the rest of the day pretending not to watch Johanna doing so. It’s especially difficult once Johanna discards her coat and she’s strutting around in a thin, sleeveless tunic that does little to cover the obvious muscle carding her shoulders and arms, her torso. For somebody so small, Johanna’s easily one of the strongest people Katniss has ever set eyes on.
Neither of them really register the darkening sky until Johanna mutters something about setting a fire for Katniss the proper way, and their eyes both turn skyward.
“I need to head off,” Johanna says immediately, swiping the sweat from her brow.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Katniss retorts. “It’s the asscrack of winter and an hour until sundown.”
“I’m not scared of the dark, Katniss.”
“It’s not that I’m worried about,” Katniss mutters, thinking of snow and wild dogs. “Stay the night and you can head off in the morning. You must be exhausted, anyway.”
Johanna shakes her head, eyes bright. “Are you joking? I haven’t had a full day of work since before the Quell. You’ve done me the favour, if anything.”
Katniss feels her eyebrows lift but doesn’t comment. She’s become well accustomed to Johanna’s tendency to throw axes around as a coping mechanism.
Despite the fact she hasn’t shared a house with anyone else in months, it’s surprisingly effortless to open her space to Johanna that evening. Once the sky darkens completely, they make supper together, rabbit stew and the bakery bread Johanna brought earlier that day.
They share Katniss’ bed that evening, because Johanna refused to let Katniss slum it on the floor. “Stop trying to be a fucking gentleman and get your ass into bed. I’m not dragging you back to Twelve to get treated for pneumonia because you forgot to have a bit of common sense.”
The objections die on Katniss’ tongue and she wordlessly slides onto the mattress next to Johanna. The mattress is only a modest single, so it’s impossible to ignore the other girl’s presence besides her. It especially doesn’t help when Johanna orders Katniss to get on her side, insisting she’s hogging the bed, before the older girl folds herself around Katniss, effectively spooning her.
Immediately Katniss tenses up; the experience is overwhelming, and it’s not just the fact that the last person who held her like this was Peeta, the night before the Quarter Quell. It’s the fact that Johanna Mason is in her bed, her toned bare thighs bracketing Katniss’ backside, one arm secured around her middle, her breathing hot and even on the nape of Katniss’ neck. Something hot and intimate unspools low in Katniss’ stomach, and she’s very glad for the darkness so that Jo can’t see how flushed her cheeks are.
Johanna gives her a squeeze. “Everything all right?”
Katniss counts to three before she can untie her tongue. “Yes, everything is perfectly fine.”
The next morning, Katniss is struggling to meet Johanna’s eyes. Whilst the sky is still grey with dawn, she uses hunting as an excuse to slide out of bed. Drowsily, Johanna retreats her limbs from Katniss, muttering sleepily about how sore her limbs are from all the wood-chopping.
She wastes absolutely no time in rugging up, pulling on her boots, and retrieving her bow and game bag before she’s skidding down the steps of her porch and onto the icy ground of the forest, Moose padding along at her heels with his tongue out. Even though she’s long since left the warmth of Johanna’s body, her skin still feels hot and hypersensitive; Katniss has barely slept.
She wants to smack herself. She’d never had such wild ideas around Peeta or Gale, ever — why was Johanna the exception?
“D’you wanna tell me what the hell is going on between you and Mason, sweetheart?”
Katniss doesn’t give Haymitch the satisfaction of seeing her blush, ducking her head away from his keen gaze. It’s an overcast Sunday; they’re sitting on his porch, drinking wine and half watching the flock of geese he’s gradually started accumulating the last few months. Or at least, Haymitch is drinking wine. She’s content sipping on her tea, thank you very much.
She’s glad there’s remotely no chance of Johanna overhearing their conversation; she’s in District Four, visiting Annie Cresta and her son, before she goes to the Capitol itself to yell at Plutarch about something or other. Only Johanna Mason would travel to the other end of the country to verbally abuse somebody who’s pissed her off.
“She’s not as intolerable as I thought she was,” Katniss replies, flatly. “We’re friends.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll remember that the next time she doesn’t shut up about you for two hours straight.” Haymitch belches, obnoxiously. Katniss doesn’t even bother cringing. “She’s a better pick than Hawthorne ever was.”
“You just never liked him because he barged into the ‘star-crossed lovers’ bullshit you spent two years of your life trying to keep intact.”
He grunts. “I never liked him because he was trying to get in your pants when to the rest of us, it was pretty clear the Games had fucked you up.”
Katniss hums, regarding the half-full cup of tea still held between her hands. “Couldn’t you say the same about Peeta?”
“He was always nice enough that I let it slide.” Haymitch pauses for a long moment. “If things had turned out differently, I reckon you would have walked away from him eventually, anyway.”
It feels ill will to be speaking so flippantly about Peeta — Peeta, whose headstone she can see from Haymitch’s porch, winking at them from the small, private graveyard attached to the Victor’s Village — but also it strikes Katniss that Haymitch is utterly correct. Her and Peeta were never made to last forever, in the same way that her and Gale were never made to be anything but well-balanced hunting partners.
She clears her throat. “And what makes Johanna so different?”
“Dunno. Sticking you pair in a room is like watching two storms come together. You work just when you start to think you won’t.”
On New Year’s Eve, Katniss makes the trek back into Twelve to celebrate. The district square has been decked out for the occasion, adorned with lanterns and colourful string, with a live band and stalls boasting food and drink. It’s the first time in perhaps two years that Katniss Everdeen has attended a community event, and many of the townspeople pause to stare as she walks by.
The district has transformed, Katniss notes. Twelve’s rebranding from coal mines to medicine was a good idea, it seems; there are more people she recognises from the Seam, former mining families, whose bodies are full and flush with health, as well as many new families she doesn’t recognise. There’s more coin being passed between hands, more smiles being shared. Peacekeepers are not hovering unpleasantly like buzzards, and gone is the weary cattle feel Katniss long since associated with her district.
With Moose lurking at her heels on a leash — he’s still young and excitable enough that Katniss doesn’t entirely trust him to not go running off — she soon locates Haymitch and Johanna. Naturally, they’ve set themselves up about fifteen paces from a stall conveniently advertising various kegs of fancy alcohol — wine, cider, mead and bourbon. Johanna is smoking, and swings a casual arm around Katniss’ shoulder when she settles in beside them.
Katniss bites the inside of her cheeks, willing herself to not start grinning like a loon.
The sky gets darker, but the lights get brighter and the music gets louder. There are children dancing in great circles around the square, and it reminds Katniss of when she danced with Prim at Finnick and Annie’s wedding; but rather it prompts her to smile, instead of her throat to constrict. Moose yips and tugs at his lead, and more kids stop to pat and coo over him, eyes widening comically when they realise who his owner is. At some point Haymitch convinces the other two to try flagons of mead with him; it’s more appetising than what Katniss gave it credit for, and she eagerly accepts refills.
The hours fold into each other; at some point, men pull up wagons of fireworks and send them spiralling into the midnight sky, exploding in fantastic blooms of colour and sparkles. Katniss thinks of bombs, and fire, and children screaming — but then Johanna squeezes her hand, and Katniss is suddenly reminded of the joy, the safety, that so abundantly surrounds her.
Ten, nine, eight …
And then the townspeople are screaming down the numbers until midnight, and kids are bouncing around and couples are embracing each other, and Johanna Mason’s hand is now resting delicately on her chin.
… seven, six, five …
“Katniss,” Johanna says, so quietly she’s sure she’s imagined it. Behind Johanna’s head, a blue firework tears itself apart like a supernova.
… four, three …
They’re so close. When did they get so close? Not that Katniss is exactly objecting to it; quite the opposite, really.
… two, one …
And Johanna is kissing her, and Katniss is kissing her back, hands claiming hair and skin and clothes, and she can’t quite tell where one ends and the other begins. She is drunk, drunk on the mead Haymitch bought for her, drunk on kissing Johanna, more drunk than she’s ever been in her life. Katniss feels exactly like the fireworks that are blossoming over her head, bright and burning beyond belief, seemingly impossible to contain within her own skin.
… HAPPY NEW YEAR!
They fall apart, and just as Katniss reaches out to caress Johanna’s cheek, an unreadable expression colours her sharp features. Before Katniss can begin to decipher it, the other girl steps away from her entirely and turns on her heel, shouldering her way through the crowds and out of the square.
When she wakes, it’s with an impossibly dry mouth and persistently throbbing temples. She hasn’t been hungover since the morning after the Reaping requirement of the Quarter Quell was broadcasted, and Katniss has forgotten exactly how lousy it makes her feel.
She’s tucked up in the bed of Haymitch’s guest bedroom, with both a jug of water on the nightstand and a bucket on the floor waiting for her. Moose’s familiar heat and weight is flush against her leg, on top of her blankets, sprawled on his back in such a manner that makes Katniss laugh to herself a little.
Blinking the sleep out of her eyes, she drags a hand down her face as she attempts to recall the night before. New Year’s Eve. The district square. Drinking mead with Haymitch. Fireworks. Kissing Johanna.
Katniss’ sluggish mind halts on that last thought. Kissing Johanna.
She’s up and out of bed before she’s even really finished processing it. She’s still wearing her clothes from the night before, her coat and boots set aside. Katniss slurps half the contents of the jug, water sloshing down her chin, as she hops around into her boots, Moose dancing around at her feet, immune to her panic.
Katniss gracelessly barges out of the guest bedroom and down to the kitchen, where nobody is to be seen. Good. She swipes two cheese buns from the bread cupboard and upends a whole box of tea bags into the pocket of her coat, before rummaging around in Haymitch’s refrigerator, handing some pork sausages to Moose.
The door bangs open, and Johanna is standing there. “Everdeen,” she delivers in a voice so raspy it’s practically a growl. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”
Katniss is shaking her head, already backing away. “We’re not going to talk about it.”
“Katniss!”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she resolves, and turns away, waltzing out of Haymitch’s back door and towards the woods.
Once she’s properly sobered up, Katniss stews over why she hadn’t wanted to talk to Johanna.
She deduces that some of it is survivor’s guilt. There’s so much blood on her hands — too much blood. Why should the Mockingjay be allowed to be carefree and happy, when so much death and destruction was the consequence of her actions?
Part of it is Peeta; for months, she thought that she’d fallen in love with him, eventually, after the Quell. But she’s never wanted to kiss Peeta as badly as she’s wanted to kiss Johanna, which conflicts Katniss far more than she’d like to admit.
And part of it is the simple fact that Katniss didn’t think she even liked Johanna Mason all that much, until she fell in love with her.
Katniss doesn’t go back to Twelve for two weeks.
She feels a little guilty for punishing Haymitch when he had nothing to do with it and received no explanations whatsoever, but he’s fucking roommates with the one person she wants to avoid. The winter storms are always relentless in January, and this year is no different; she spends days holed up in the cottage with Buttercup and Moose. At some point, she retrieves one of the few things in her possession that once belonged to her mother, a basket of yarn and knitting needles. Her mother tried to teach Katniss how to knit when she was small, when they still acted the parts of mother and daughter happily rather than reluctantly. At the time, it had been disastrous; Katniss had been too full of energy and too ready to go running off into the woods at a moment’s notice.
It takes a good few hours for her fingers to remember how to do it correctly, at one point she transfers the yarn from needle to hand to needle again, in which direction does she wind the yarn, how best to start a row, how taut does she need to keep the wool (as loose as possible, it turns out).
It’s a repetitive process, one that gives Katniss something to do with her hands as her thoughts take over. She thinks about her mother, who she hasn’t really, properly dwelled on since she received her letter. She thinks about Gale, and burning his picture at the bottom of a bucket. She thinks about her father, and wonders what he would say about this life she’s built for herself in the woods, wonders what he would have said if he’d gotten to witness all the things Katniss had said and done and gone through. She thinks about Rue, and all of the other tributes and victors she ever watched die. She thinks about Finnick, and how she still hasn’t met his son yet, even though she was the last person who ever saw him alive. She thinks about Cinna, and perhaps he’s one of the only ones who’d really be proud of her. And of course, she thinks about Prim, and Peeta, and Johanna.
Naturally, she starts to go a little mad.
As soon as the storms come to an end, Katniss collects all of the scarves and blankets and tablecloths she’s made, sets them aside, and then burns her mother’s basket of knitting supplies. Fire, it seems, is the Mockingjay’s weapon of choice, more so than her bow and arrows ever were.
Katniss keeps herself busy. She relocates some of her firewood onto her porch, where it’s more sheltered from the elements and can dry off a little. With all of the snow and wind, she doesn’t bother going hunting when she has enough supplies at hand. She uses her cast iron pot to make loaves of bread and breaks open the cellar Thom had dug for her, where she’d spent the summer hoarding jars of pickled plants and salted meat.
Her lake has entirely frozen over; Katniss goes out onto the ice to investigate. She keeps Moose on his lead, and Buttercup trails after them, suspicious as ever but also not wanting to miss a thing. She could probably ice skate on here, she muses, tapping the thick ice with a foot. Nobody had ever been able to afford skates in Twelve — especially in the dead of winter, when all of the miners were a handful of coins away from starving or freezing to death — but it had been popular in the Capitol. She’d once gone to an artificial skating rink with Peeta on their Victory Tour; once Katniss had found her feet, she’d been as light and agile as Rue airborne in the treetops. Peeta, with his leg, had been an entirely different story.
She swallows, thickly, and amends to visit his grave the next morning, if the weather will permit.
Her old house in the Victor’s Village was sold to a family of seven who had moved to Twelve from District Eight; almost all of the children had been adopted by the couple after being orphaned during the war. Katniss learns this from the kids, having paused to speak to them after seeing them running around in the yard.
Their eyes widen a little as they recognise her, but they answer her questions politely and enthusiastically. At one point, one of the younger kids breathe, “ Are you Katniss Everdeen? ”, but his sister elbows him in the ribs and hisses at him about manners.
Their mother comes out to see what all of the fuss is about, eyes widening at the sight of Katniss leaning up against the fence. She is invited inside for a cup of tea. Despite the fact that this is her old house, the house she was given after her first Games and the one she was exiled back to, it feels like an entirely different building. The walls have been repainted, and there are framed pictures and paintings. There are toys and shoes scattered throughout the rooms, and each room feels like it’s actually been used rather than avoided.
It no longer feels like a mausoleum. It feels like a home, and Katniss is glad about it.
The mother, Amlie, sets a cup of tea and biscuits before Katniss. “I hear you’re living in the woods these days.”
She wraps her chilled fingers around the teacup. “The district rumour mongers are correct then, for once.”
Amlie flushes a little. “Please don’t get me wrong, Miss Everdeen —“
“Katniss,” she interrupts. “ ‘Miss Everdeen’ was always too formal for me.”
“Katniss,” Amlie corrects. “I’m no gossip. People simply talk about you a lot.”
Katniss regards the surroundings of the kitchen around her. Like everything in this house now, it is bright and clean and warm. There are flowers and herbs in jars of water on the window sill, and music is playing quietly somewhere. “Do they talk about the other victors here much?”
“Only when Haymitch has made a fool of himself publicly when drunk, or Johanna Mason’s thrown another axe at some nosy reporter from the Capitol.”
She laughs. “That sounds about right. Did the real estate agent tell you who you’d bought this house off?”
“Yes and no,” Amlie takes the seat across from Katniss. She’s older than she realised, Katniss notes, now that Amlie is sitting so close. Easily forty or so, when she’d earlier mistaken her to be in her early thirties. “They implied it had belonged to an unfortunate victor, but that could have been yourself or Peeta. It wasn’t until we’d moved in that Haymitch clarified it for us.”
Katniss clears her throat. “Did I … leave anything behind in particular?”
Amlie smiles. “Only the sleeping nests in all sorts of absurd places. Three of my children found pillows and blankets on the floor of their closets. Every time I think we’ve found the last of them, another crops up.”
Katniss laughs, a little. “Sorry about that. I was in a dark place back then.”
Emphasis on ‘back then’ , her mind realises.
Visiting Peeta’s grave is relatively uneventful. Katniss lets herself into the private graveyard attached to the Victor’s Village, wipes the snow off his headstone, and sits the flowers she brought with her into the little vase. She then kicks a clear spot in the snow and sits in front of the grave, curling herself against the snow.
“I once told Johanna that I’ve never loved a man in the way he wanted me to,” she says. If somebody was to come up and see her talking to a headstone, so be it. Katniss’ sanity has been questioned by the general public for a long time now. “I think that applied to you as well, and I’m sorry about that.”
She stares at his headstone for a long moment. “I think I’m ready to move on now, Peeta Mellark.”
She receives no response, only the wind howling in her ear, and the cold biting her toes.
“Don’t tell me you were planning on hanging around without dropping in to say hello. The old man’s had the kettle boiling for the last two hours.”
Katniss doesn’t need to look to know who’s fallen into step with her. Johanna is scowling, swaddled up against the cold with a woolly cap crammed over her head, swinging one of her smaller axes from one hand. Once again, they’re stripped to the most basic identities of themselves, the hunter and the lumberjack, kindred in so many ways, but blatantly unalike in the ones that always seem to most matter.
But she doesn’t run, doesn’t make an excuse to slip away to the woods. Katniss keeps her expression and tone neutral. “Hello, Johanna.”
“Don’t pretend everything’s fine and dandy. You’re one of the worst actresses I know.”
“Tell that to every Capitolite who fell for the whole ‘star-crossed lovers’ display,” she mutters.
“I don’t want to bring Peeta into this,” Johanna says back. Even though she seems to eject the words with the speed of a snap, they’re softer, quieter.
“Why not?”
“Dunno how to explain it. You two were tied up in each other for so long, it felt like a lot of people forgot to think of you as separate people. Now he’s gone, and people expect you to spend the rest of your life mourning him like a widow.”
“So you’re jealous,” Katniss deduces, flatly.
“Never when he was still alive. You were a pain in my ass until a few weeks ago.” Johanna’s mouth hitches up at the corner. “Sue me for resenting a dead man. But people are always going to consider you Peeta’s girl.”
Katniss looks down. They’ve drawn up short, standing close together but there’s still distance between them. They’re under the snow-decked branches of a pine tree, partially veiled from the omnipresent view of the Victor’s Village. “You said you had a bone to pick with me. What about?”
“I was mad.”
She lifts an eyebrow delicately. “When are you not?”
“At myself, not you.” Johanna swallows thickly. “Everyone I’ve ever given a shit about is either dead or wishes I am. And —“ she stumbles over her words, flipping her axe nervously from one hand to the other. “— and I didn’t want you to be the same. Yet here I am.”
Katniss expels a rough breath. Her hands are shaking. “We have time to work it out. More so than any other Victor ever had.”
It’s not the “happily ever after” narrative that has been imposed on Katniss since she was sixteen years old and fresh from her first Games. It’s a little indistinct, the lines smudged like wet ink, but nonetheless it’s more stable and fulfilling than any ending the Capitol had ever designed for her.
They live together in a cottage in the woods, the hunter and the lumberjack. The townspeople of Twelve know they’re out there amongst the trees somewhere, emerging every Sunday to trade at the markets in the town square and share a meal with the one of the few other survivors of the Hunger Games, a gruff old man who’s a little too fond of alcohol, but will tell stories to the district children in exchange for whatever they can spare, apples or string or buttons. They have a simple life, living off the land, with no threats of dying children and Reapings, no honeyed threats from Snow. When the winter months stretch out for a little too long, they pack their things and take the train to District Four, to live with Annie Cresta and her son, or to Eleven, where they rent a room in a commune full of people who despite the turn out of the war, can never bring themselves to step foot in the Capitol again.
Her and Johanna are some strange intersection of allies and friends and lovers, suitably so. They hunt together, and Johanna maintains the snare line so Katniss is less reminded of Gale. Katniss is the one who plunges into the water for Johanna when necessary, repulsed by the memory of torture, the memory of Finnick. Twice a month, they take from their abundant supplies of food and give them to the district orphanage, to help feed the many mouths piled there. Once a month, they visit Peeta’s grave, and once a year, his hanging tree. They share each other’s arms and beds, they kiss, they hold hands. But they also screech at each other and bicker and argue about who has to clean up after Buttercup when he’s been sick on the rug. They can never leave behind their ghosts, or the memories that accompany them, and for that reason they can never truly set aside the weapons that were so crucial to their survival in the first instance. But they can leave behind the Capitol’s expectations of them, blunt, angry young girls who were raised in poverty and suffering, thrown into the cave of lions and emerged with teeth and claws of their own.
It was never the life Katniss had dared envisioned for herself, but it is an improvement in so many ways than just one.