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“Come see us,” Annie says over the phone. “Seamus is starting to walk.”
Of course, you want to say, I’d love to. But what comes out is: “I’m too busy. I can’t get away.”
Annie hums down the line, and you remember Finnick’s voice, low and entrancing, singing songs to help you sleep. “Think about it,” she says. “We miss you.”
You say, “I miss you too,” and, “I’ll try,” even though you know you won’t, not really.
You can’t think of anything worse than going to District 4 so you can be haunted by Annie Cresta and a carbon copy of your dead best friend.
-
Outside they’re building a statue, something to commemorate the war and the bloodshed and the lives lost. It’s of Katniss fucking Everdeen, of course, her gold-plated face staring at you through your window.
You call Haymitch to complain.
“You never used to be this whiny,” he tells you. His voice is rustier than ever: he’s getting old. “If you don’t like it, just move.”
Easier said than done. There’s nothing left of District 7, the trees razed to the ground, the mills destroyed. Your house is gone, the Victor’s Village nothing but pieces of charred stone. You couldn’t go back to the Capitol: too many memories there, too much pain and suffering (and not all your own). And even here in District 2, where people still stare at you out of the corner of their eyes, suspiciously, wary, like you didn’t help win the damn war. This building, full of the last of the victors and the heroes, is the only place no one looks at you funny.
“What are you thinking about?” Haymitch asks.
What you say is: “Nothing.” What you mean is: sometimes I think it was better the way it was.
-
Gale Hawthorne lives in your building. You discover it one night when you stumble back from a bar, some hole in the wall where they don’t give you a second glance, and he’s standing in the lobby, waiting for the elevator.
“Johanna,” he says, giving you a half-smile. “How are you?”
“Drunk,” you say, and he raises an eyebrow. You squint at him in the bright light. “How about you, Hawthorne?”
The elevator dings in response. You shuffle on together, and you get to stare at yourself in the mirror, watch the way you tilt towards the wall. In the mirror, Gale is watching you too, almost slyly, and you know what the next words out of his mouth will be.
“Have you spoken to Katniss recently?” he asks, a whisper in the silence of the elevator.
You haven’t, not since she and Peeta slunk off back to District 12. She is your friend, your ally, someone who held your hand and mopped your brow, snuck you her morphling when the doctors weren’t looking, but there are things even friendship can’t undo: the world set on fire in her name, the lives sacrificed to save hers.
But Gale Hawthorne doesn’t need to know that.
“Maybe,” you say. “Why do you care?”
Gale frowns, like he can’t figure out if you’re being deliberately dumb. “I just wondered if you knew how she was doing.”
“You killed her sister,” you say, because you have always been blunt (except with a blade in your hand and then you’re so so sharp). “How do you think she’s doing?”
Gale, to his credit, barely even flinches.
“I know,” he says softly. He sighs, and he looks like a child, so sad and lost. “But I didn’t have a choice. The bombs were the only option.”
You laugh, and it comes out harsher than you thought it would. “You had a choice. People died; a lot of people. Children.”
Gale’s mouth twists angrily. “I did what I had to do,” he says, and if he feels remorse, he’s hiding it well.
You smile; it feels jagged in your mouth. “You’d have been good in the Games,” you say, and it’s no surprise when he flees the second the elevator doors open.
-
There was a time when you thought you might get over the nightmares, when you thought you could maybe get a full night’s sleep. They started to disappear over the years: the blood splattered across the backs of your eyelids dulled, the feel of it on your hands fading away.
(But that doesn’t mean you ever forget –
You won the Hunger Games. You were crowned: a victor, a murderer, blood still matting your hair and smeared across your skin. You killed twenty-three children to get to where you are now, and sometimes when you look in the mirror their ghosts are staring right back.)
And just when you thought it was over, the Capitol gave you new nightmares. Water, water everywhere, in your mouth and your nose and your ears and your eyes, taking over, filling you up, swallowing you whole, drowning you, taking you down down down –
When you scream yourself awake in the dead of the night, you always reach out, searching, but the other side of the bed is always empty. There’s no blue-eyed boy to sing you back to sleep.
-
Peeta calls. “How are you?” he asks, before you can tell him you’re too busy to talk.
“Fine.”
He laughs down the line. “I thought we didn’t lie to each other,” he says. “So, how are you?”
And that’s what you sometimes forget: you and Peeta are friends, closer than you ever were with Katniss. Shared experiences and all that.
The two of you were neighbours in that place. You listened to his screams at night and when he heard you whimpering, he’d talk to you through the wall, murmuring low and quiet, telling you the secrets the Capitol was trying to take from him. Sometimes you’d talk back, on the days when the water hadn’t stolen your voice.
“Gale Hawthorne lives on the fifth floor,” you tell him in lieu of an answer.
Peeta’s breath hitches. “I knew he lived in Two,” he says carefully. “Are you friends?”
You snort. “I don’t have friends,” you say condescendingly, even though you know that’s not true, never has been: you have Haymitch and Annie and Peeta and Katniss and Cinna and Finnick and –
You can hear Peeta rolling his eyes. “Maybe you should try talking to him. He’s not a bad guy. He’s been through the wringer too.”
It’s your turn to laugh, but it’s cold where Peeta’s was warm. “He’s not like us,” you say harshly. “He was never in the arena. He doesn’t get it.”
Peeta sighs in your ear. “It wasn’t just your war, Joanna,” he says. “Remember that.”
-
The fifth floor is exactly like the first floor, exactly like the seventh floor, exactly like the twelfth floor.
(All the buildings are twelve stories high. You hate that number.)
Gale Hawthorne’s door isn’t hard to find. He has a brass nameplate, and a few starry eyed girls hanging around outside. They scatter when they see you, leaving whispers in their wake: Johanna Mason, she was a victor, look at her now.
When Gale opens the door, he doesn’t hide his shock fast enough; it makes you smile.
“I think I owe you an apology,” you say, and hold up the wine bottle in your hand.
He looks from it to you and back again. “Wasn’t it drinking that caused the problem in the first place?”
It startles a laugh from you: Gale Hawthorne making a joke. “I guess so,” you admit. “But it was this or flowers, and I didn’t think you were the bouquet kind of girl.”
Gale smiles at you, and it hits you how beautiful he is like this, up close and personal, not through the fog of morphling or streaked with blood and dirt. He’s gorgeous, and you wonder how Katniss ever gave him up.
“Well come on in then,” he says, and swings the door open wide.
-
You don’t always dream of death or destruction. No matter what you and everyone else may think, your life has been more than bloodshed and bodies dropping at your feet.
Sometimes it’s the feeling of wind rustling your hair, dappled sunlight on your face as you climb higher and higher, right up into the sky until the world below is nothing but a distant memory.
Sometimes it’s Haymitch smiling at you, holding out a drink for you to take, his voice saying you fooled us all, kid, and you snarling at him, all youth and rage and prickly edges.
Sometimes it’s you using your spare key to let yourself into Cinna’s apartment, helping yourself to his food, laughing when he comes home to find you at the counter eating the last of his cereal.
Sometimes it’s you and Finnick in a bed at the end of a long night, curled together like matching puzzle pieces, holding each other tight: anchors in a storm.
-
The next time you and Gale hang out (like you’re something other than passing acquaintances, like you’re friends), you finally spill the beans.
“I don’t talk to Katniss,” you tell him, and watch the way his face shutters at the sound of her name, hands clenching tight around the glass he’s holding.
“Why lie?” he asks, peering at you with those dark grey eyes (Haymitch’s eyes, Katniss’ eyes).
You shrug; why do you do anything these days? “I don’t hate you,” you tell him, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Gale blinks at you, then his eyes crinkle at the corners. “I never thought you did,” he says with a laugh, and you think he’s maybe not that bad after all.
-
Haymitch comes to visit. He looks old, hair finally going grey, the wrinkles around his eyes more pronounced than ever; but more than that, he looks happy.
“How are your geese?” you ask.
He laughs and goes to the cabinet, pouring you both a drink. The liquid splashes like gold into the glass. “Do you mean Peeta and Katniss?”
It makes you snort: “Is that what you named them?”
He laughs again, amused. “Glad you still you can still joke.” He hands you the glass and you take a sip: it’s sweet, but there’s still a sharpness to it, cleansing it of that fake Capitol taste. “I know a good one too: Johanna Mason and Gale Hawthorne walk into a bar – stop me if you’ve heard this one before.”
You hum, licking your lips to chase the sour-sweet of the drink. “You’ve been talking to Peeta,” you deduce. Haymitch just shrugs. “We’re friends,” you tell him. “We hang out. He’s a good drinking buddy.”
Haymitch’s eyebrows tick upwards. His tone is caustic when he says, “Is that so?”
(There’s a conversation you and Haymitch had once:
You should stay away from Finnick.
Stop worrying, there’s nothing going on, he’s a good drinking buddy.)
“Tell me you’re being safe,” Haymitch says. “Won’t do you good to be hurt again.”
It takes a lot of effort not to spit your drink at him. He means well, but this is how Haymitch is with you, how you are with each other: no holds barred, always trying to draw blood. It hurts, but sometimes it’s nice to remember you can still feel.
“It’s none of your business,” you tell him instead. Even to your own ears, your tone is cold.
“Don’t give me that,” Haymitch says, and he sounds bored in the face of your simmering rage. “There’s more to Gale Hawthorne than a pretty face, and if that’s all you can see –”
You think about telling him to go fuck himself, but Haymitch has always found that sort of thing funny. “You’re an idiot,” you say instead. He laughs at you anyway and it makes you want to punch him. “I’m not in love with him.”
“That’s what you said last time,” Haymitch says. He’s looking at you but his eyes are distant, like he’s watching ships out at sea. “And look how that turned out.”
-
The first time you met Finnick Odair – now that’s a story. Somewhere amongst the rose bushes of Snow’s mansion, a thousand people flitting around you like bees to honey. Everyone in the colours of the rainbow: sea blues and forest greens, the dusky pinks of sunset, oranges and yellows like the burning sun. And you in the middle of it, terrified, covering it with barbed words sharper than any axe you’d ever thrown.
A man smiling at you, all teeth, pressing a drink into your hand: “Drink up,” he said; “You’re going to need it.”
You knew who he was, of course: Finnick Odair, the Capitol’s darling, but you still sneered at him, knocked his hand away, asked “Do you want something?” in your snidest tone.
“Just helping out a fellow victor.” He’d sipped from his glass, all elegance and class and Capitol refinement. “How are you enjoying the party?”
It had made you snort, scornful and unimpressed. “I’d enjoy it more if we were celebrating anything other than this.”
And he’d just laughed (a genuine laugh you realised later, one of the few times you heard it), and leant in to press his lips to your ear and you’d shivered in the cool evening air.
“I like you, Mason,” he’d said; “We’re going to be fast friends.”
-
They’re showing a documentary on TV: the making of Katniss Everdeen: a glorious play-by-play of her life, clips from her interviews, both her Games, every propos ever made. There are interviews with her family and friends, and Finnick’s there, his face plastered across your screen, immortalised in high definition.
You last five minutes before you have to turn it off.
The thing is, Katniss hadn’t seemed like much that first year: this dark-haired girl from some unknown district. No one from 12 ever really stood a chance, but she scored well, held her own in the interview. She was prickly, spiteful, sharp in the ways that mattered in the arena.
(Finnick nudging you sharply in the side, whispering she reminds me of you.)
Gale at your door, on your couch: “Did you see it?”
You shake your head, images of Finnick’s face staring out at you, bright blue eyes and golden skin going round and round in your mind.
Gale blinks at you. “Why not?”
(Because you’re a coward: always have been, always will be, under all that bravado and bitterness, you’re just the scared little girl they dragged kicking and screaming into the arena.)
When you look at him, he’s scrubbing at his eyes roughly. You’ve never seen him look tired, not even when he was building bombs, not even after they dropped and destroyed everything. His skin is too-pale, like you’re not the only one who’s seen a ghost.
Finnick once said honestly is never the best policy, but these days you have no secrets to keep. The whole world was burned to the ground, every piece of the Capitol pulled apart and rebuilt, and everyone in Panem has seen Johanna Mason for what she really is.
“My best friend died,” you say, and the words stick in your throat. “I was in love with him and I never told him.”
Gale sighs, his arm slipping around your shoulder. You hold in your flinch – the last person who touched you like this is dead.
“I’m in love with a girl who hates me,” he says quietly, like he’s telling you a secret.
It makes you snort, the hysteria at the edge of your conscious giving it a sharp edge. You curl into him a little more, and his arm settles tighter around you, an almost familiar weight, wrapping you up, keeping you safe.
You hide your face in his chest, say, “Aren’t we a pair,” and smile when he laughs.
-
Someone’s screaming, high-pitched and panicked, the kind of screaming that comes with a death. It’s only when you open your eyes to Gale’s terrified face that you realise it’s you.
“Johanna,” he says, and his voice is wrecked to your ears.
“I’m okay,” you tell him, “Gale, I’m okay,” but his hands are shaking as they cradle your face, touch your hair and your shoulder.
“I thought someone was –” He shakes his head. You’ve never seen him look so distraught. “I thought you were –”
“I’m not,” you whisper, and push yourself upright, into the tight circle of his arms. You tuck your head under his chin, butt up against the sharp scruff of his beard. “Gale, I’m right here.”
He presses his face into your hair, and you think about how you got here. A bottle of wine on the table, a bottle of liquor in the cabinet: one drink turning into two, three. Your body sliding off the couch to the floor, the feel of the cool stone against your cheek. Gale’s hands lifting you, legs carrying you; the darkness of the bedroom, the softness of the bed beneath your body. Lips on your forehead, someone tucking you in like a child.
Gale’s voice is soothing, breath tickling your scalp: “What were you dreaming about?” he asks.
You shrug. “Nothing important,” you tell him.
He snorts, but his voice is kind when he says, “Tell me about him.”
(Oh, the things you could tell –
Finnick out at sea, ducking down under the waves, and when he came up he smiled at you, white teeth against gold skin against blue sea –
Finnick in the dead of the night, lit up by the stars, and you had to look away he was so beautiful, burning bright, setting you on fire –
Finnick slumped over a bar, looking at you with those eyes, his mouth moving, saying tell me all your secrets, Miss Mason –
Finnick laughing –
Finnick dancing –
Finnick – )
Gale sighs. “He really did a number on you.”
You scoff: “Like Katniss didn’t on you.”
He flinches and you feel like the worst person in the world. The thing you know now is: you can’t help who you’re in love with.
-
Once upon a time, you thought there couldn’t be anything worse than that first year. The people love you; it’s like they can’t see how much that golden crown has cost. The victory tour was long, drawn out: press pushing microphones in your face and people chanting your name. Every night you slept on beds of silken sheets with blood dancing on the back of your eyelids and the names of twenty-three dead tributes on your lips.
For a long time, you thought you’d been to hell and back. Then President Snow calls you into his office and asks you to do things for him, the kind of things no seventeen year old wants to do, and you said no, and go fuck yourself, and President Snow said you’re going to regret this, Miss Mason, and you did, oh god you did.
Your house burning, setting the great trees alight around it, the oaks and maples going up in flames; your mother and father and little brothers screaming and screaming and screaming until the smoke swallows their voices.
No funeral for the innocent: just you standing in the dust, ash still spinning in the air around you. It follows you back to the Capitol, grey dust in your hair and your clothes, crusted under your nails for days to come.
“Stop it,” Finnick had said, leaning in the doorway, watching you scrub and scrub and scrub like the dirt will ever come out.
(It never does – some days you still see the dust etched into the lines of your palms.)
He’d put hands around your wrists, led you away. You remember the shadows on his face as you tripped down the corridor: light brushing the tops of his cheekbones, the line of his nose; he was so handsome then, the most beautiful man you’d ever seen.
And when you finally broke, the tears wet on your cheeks, he’d pulled you into him, hands gentle and kind, and held you there: so sweet, so patient; and your heart had broken just a little more.
-
You have a life here in Two.
You work for the government, use your knowledge to help build houses. It’s nice to do something useful with your hands, something that can maybe wash away the blood. You help out at a local shelter, cooking meals for people who don’t have homes because your rebellion blew them to pieces.
People don’t see the Victor; they just see Johanna, a hard worker, a skilled carpenter, an okay cook.
Sometimes though, it’s a little too much. Sometimes, people look at you with sympathy, pity and your hands start to shake. Sometimes, people stop you in the street to say thank you and the cravings start to buzz at the back of your brain.
“I’m leaving,” you announce one night, sprawled out on your couch while Gale cooks – burns – your dinner. “Want to come with me?”
Gale knocks some pans together; the sound ricochets around the room. “They need me here,” he says.
It makes your heart ache. He and Finnick are alike like that: always needing to be needed. Katniss needed Gale, needed his body and his heart and his soul. Thirteen needed Gale, needed his mind and his hands and his convictions.
In return he got: loss, death, blood on his hands, a District blown to ashes, a family who couldn’t stand the sight of him, a girl so broken she’d gone insane.
“Maybe one day,” you try, peering at him over the top of the couch.
Gale echoes you: “Maybe one day,” but he can’t quite meet your eyes.
-
The whole world was in love with Finnick Odair.
In the Capitol they screamed his name, their voices rising up in the streets, echoing off the buildings until it sounded like the world was crying out for him. They took photos and made him sign autographs. He got fan mail by the bundle, hundreds of men and women asking to sleep with him, to marry him, offering gold and jewels and everything in between.
The whole world was in love with Finnick Odair, every man, woman and child, and you were no different from the rest.
What did that make you?
-
This time it’s Gale in your apartment, slumped on your couch. He’s not crying, but it’s a close thing. There’s a fine tremor shaking his hands where they’re clenched in his lap, white-knuckled against the dark fabric of his pants.
“I called my mom,” he says, voice barely a whisper. “It’s Posy’s birthday so I wanted – I wanted to –”
You go to the cabinet, find the cheapest liquor Haymitch has ever sent you. When you come back, Gale hasn’t moved, just sits there staring blankly at the wall.
“She wouldn’t let me speak to her,” he’s saying. “She said I wasn’t – I wasn’t a good man – that Posy shouldn’t know me –”
The bottle clanks when you set it down on the table, and it jolts Gale from his daze. He glances at you, eyes dark as a storm and haunted, terrified. You sit next to him, legs tucked up under you, and when you touch Gale he trembles under your hands. You turn his face towards you, tilting it until he meets your eyes.
“It was war,” you tell him; “You did what you had to. That doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“Doesn’t it?” He shakes his head. “I killed a lot of people with those bombs.”
It makes you laugh, harsh in the silence. “And I killed a lot of people with my bare hands. Does that make me a bad person?”
Gale jerks back, surprised. “You were in the Games,” he says. “You didn’t have a choice.”
“Neither did you.”
Gale makes a noise, low in his throat, eyes screwed tightly shut as if he’s hiding from the truth, and you lean in to press your forehead to his: an old gesture, one your mother used to do in the dark of the night.
“She’s wrong about you,” you whisper to him. “She doesn’t understand what you did or why you did it – she probably never will. You and me, we’re survivors. We made our choices and we can’t doubt them, not for a second. I don’t – you shouldn’t either.”
Gale hiccups a noise that could be a laugh: “You’re not a very good liar, Jo,” he says.
-
It’s late, way past midnight, but you’re at Gale’s door, knocking at the wood hard enough that the whole thing shakes in its frame. Out in the city there’s nothing but twinkling lights, everyone safe and sound in their beds. Everyone except you.
Gale opens the door: his face is cast in silver, starlight on the ridge of his brow, the line of his nose. His eyes are reflective pools.
“Hi,” he says, eyes sweeping over you, taking in the too-tight dress, the too-high heels. You grin, lopsided, and his eyebrow ticks upwards. “Been partying, have we?”
You sway into him: you’re drunk, head spinning a little as you look up at him. “Can I stay here?” you ask. “My apartment’s empty. I don’t like sleeping alone.”
Gale laughs at you, but he still says, “Sure,” and helps you all the way to his bedroom.
You’ve been in here before, a few times now. Even in the dark you know the walls are painted a dark green and the bed has a black comforter. There’s an armchair in the corner that Gale found on the street: you know because you helped him carry it upstairs.
“Put this on,” and he hands you a worn t-shirt.
It’s one of his, some relic from Thirteen that he still hasn’t thrown out – unlike you; they were gone the first chance you got. You pull off your dress, slipping the fabric over your head, and when you glance over Gale is watching you, eyes on the thin curve of your body as your wriggle into his shirt. You catch his eye and he looks away quickly; in the dark you can’t tell if he’s blushing.
“Drink this,” and he pushes a glass into your hand.
It’s water, cool and sweet. When you tilt your head back to gulp at it, Gale’s eyes stray to the line of your neck, the jut of your collarbones beneath his shirt.
(The last time someone looked at you like that –
In the Capitol, one hand on your shoulder, the other around your neck, and pain, blood and cum tacky between your thighs, the faint sound of laughter tinkling in your ears –)
“Johanna,” he says, leaning over to take the water your hand, “Are you still with me?”
You rush him, hands in his shirt, mouth to his: it’s sloppy, teeth clashing together, but beneath that a sweetness, a gentle hand on your face, lips smooth and soft. He tastes like toothpaste under the dullness of sleep.
When you pull back he’s staring at you like you’re a madwoman. (You are, a little. But that’s old news.) “You’re drunk,” he says, almost a whisper but still a thunderclap in the silence.
You bare your teeth at him: vicious, violent, victor. “Not drunk enough,” you snarl and try to roll away, but there’s a hand around your arm, Gale keeping you tethered.
“Johanna,” he says. You know that tone: impatient, verging on angry. “Let me finish.”
It makes you sigh, frustrated. This is not going the way you wanted. “Go ahead, Hawthorne. Make my day.”
He laughs, amused; his hand comes up to brush back your hair. It’s so gentle it makes your heart clench; no one’s been this kind with you in a long time.
“Ask me in the morning,” he says, as his thumb brushes a long line over your cheekbone. “Ask me when you’re sober.”
And he pulls you in, lets your wrap around him like an octopus, and you fall asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.
-
He went to Annie first. In the hospital, screaming through the doors, Katniss and Haymitch hot on his heels: he didn’t even see you.
You were there on the bed, right next to her, pulling tubes out of your nose and your arm. There were scabs around your wrists and in the crook of your arm; you had no hair and stark burn marks on your temples and your scalp. You looked like a monster, some creature pulled from the darkest depths of the Capitol.
You opened your mouth to call to him, to say Finnick and please and help me, but his eyes flitted over you, unseeing, searching desperately for red hair and green eyes.
He went to Annie and Katniss went to Peeta. All you had was dark eyes watching you: Haymitch, the doctors, the soldiers: wary like they were waiting for you to attack them, to lunge for a weapon, for something to slit your wrists with.
You just lay there on the bed and laughed until you choked.
-
You make plans: book tickets, find someone to water your plants. Then you sit for ten hours, staring blankly out the window. The train rattles and shakes, not as smooth as the ones you rode in the Capitol. Outside the landscape changes from urban jungle to rolling plains, on and on until you hit the mountains, looming over you, peaks shrouded in cloud.
(You came to District 12 once, a long time ago. You killed one of their tributes: a boy of seventeen, strong, hands calloused from working in the mines; but they didn’t watch you with hatred here, just pity. You never came back.)
Everything is grey out here. Grey skies, grey houses, grey mountains in the distance. The town is gone: here the ruins of buildings tilt at awkward angles, rubble strewn across the ground. It’s a wasteland. You don’t know why anyone would want to live here.
Of course the Victor’s Village still stands in all its tarnished splendour: the last pieces of the Capitol that couldn’t be scrubbed away. It’s obvious which houses are still lived in; there are lights burning golden bright behind the shades. Everything else is overgrown, twisted vines creeping along the walls and the buildings, snaking in through shattered windows and open doors. The only sound is the faint squawking of birds somewhere in the distance.
You stand under the gate for a long time. Victor’s Villages are a rare thing these days, victors even more so.
There’s movement in one of the houses: a face at the window: dark hair, darker eyes; and the front door opens. It’s Peeta, smiling like he’s never been so happy to see anyone in his life; behind him a shadow of a person, lurking.
“You couldn’t have called first?” he yells to you, too loud in the still of the evening.
You look away. There’s ice on the fountain, maybe thick enough to stand on, the kind you only ever saw in the Capitol in the dead of winter. Calling would have been the polite thing to do, but you’ve never been known for your good manners.
“Johanna,” Peeta says, and his feet clump on the boards as he comes down to meet you, “I’m glad you came.”
-
Katniss is –
Katniss is not what she used to be. She is a shadow, a dark shape in the corner of your eye. She hangs around her house like a ghost, haunting Peeta, haunting the world. She watches you with barely concealed dislike.
“Ignore her,” Haymitch tells you. He’s got his feet up on the table, sipping from a metal cup. The whole room smells like fresh baked bread. “She just doesn’t like to be reminded of what happened.”
“It’s pretty hard to forget,” you snipe back. He just rolls his eyes.
There are footsteps upstairs: Peeta chasing Katniss from room to room, a puppy still chasing after its master. Even after all this long, it still makes you feel sick to your stomach.
Haymitch swirls the liquor around in his cup; it’s sounds like water going down a drain and isn’t that a familiar sound. “You came to tell her about Gale,” he says.
You shake your head, but his words make you sit a little straighter in your chair. “There’s nothing to tell.”
Haymitch scoffs. “I’ve known you for a long time, girl. I can see that twinkle in your eye.”
The correct answer is: what twinkle? But what comes out is: “Shut up, old man.”
-
You were telling the truth that one time: Finnick was a good drinking buddy.
Haymitch never knew the rest, but he suspected: the way you two came together, ships at sea, rocked by the storm.
Four years of Finnick on your couch after the Games, crying for his dead tributes: half distraught, half thankful. Four years of being drunk in bars, pink and blue Capitol faces leering at you, and Finnick at your hip, warm, comforting. Four years of fights and laughter and tears, of you holding your tongue and being the steadying weight to help Finnick to his feet time and time again.
Here’s another truth: Gale is also a good drinking buddy.
As for the rest –
-
You stay at Haymitch’s house, but that doesn’t mean you can avoid Katniss Everdeen. On the third day of her pretending you don’t exist, you wake up to find her sitting on the end of your bed.
“Good morning, sunshine,” you croak out, struggling upright.
Katniss just blinks at you, steady and undaunted. She’d looked at you like that in the arena once upon a time: she wasn’t scared of you, so confident in herself and her strength and her skills: the fearless Mockingjay.
(Oh this girl, the Girl on Fire, all the things she could’ve been, could’ve done, all gone now.)
“Did you want something, Katniss?” you ask. You draw your feet up under you, away from her; who knows if you’ll have to make a quick exit. “Or are you just going to stare at me?”
It makes her smile, a twitch of her lips. “Hi,” she says.
You haven’t spoken to her in a long time: she was having a breakdown, and you were too busy trying to get out of Thirteen; and now her voice makes your hands tremble, like you’re back in that bed, clawing at your skin, strung out and desperate for drugs to keep the monsters at bay.
You have to look away from her, memories threatening to drown you. “What have you been up to?” you ask instead, watching the way Katniss fiddles with her hair, bites at her nails.
“Peeta’s teaching me to bake,” she says. “I go fishing sometimes. I feed Haymitch’s geese in the mornings.”
You snort: of course Haymitch is too lazy to feed his own damn pets; and Katniss smiles at you, halfway to happy. Then it sours, her eyes going dark and hands clenching in the sheets, olive against stark white.
You know what’s coming next: “How’s Gale?” she asks quietly.
The look on her face is guilty: there are feelings still there, buried deep under layers of hate and pain and sorrow. It makes you want to snarl, hit out protectively – of you or him, you couldn’t say.
“You could just ask him yourself,” you snap.
Katniss sighs, head dropping down to expose the curve of her neck. She looks so brittle, all jagged edges, bent to the point of breaking. It makes you wonder how she ever survived the Games, the war. How any of you did.
“I see him on TV,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper; “He looks happier.” Her eyes cut up to you and there’s a sadness there, as endless as the sea. “You do too.”
This would be where you smile and say yes, and now that the war’s over, but both of you know that looks can be deceiving. So you just sit there, the two of you on the bed: victors, victims: what a pair you make.
Downstairs scuffling feet, hushed voices through the floorboards: Peeta and Haymitch, lurking. They think I might attack you,” Katniss says.
You raise an eyebrow: “Would you?”
Katniss blinks, lashes long and dark against her cheeks, and her gaze flits over you, tracing the curve of your muscles under your shirt. She looks like she’s debating who would win in a fight. It’s hardly a competition these days, not when Katniss looks like you could knock her over with a feather.
“Peeta seems happy here,” you say, to drag you both away from those dark thoughts and the dangerous paths they lead down. “You both do.”
“I love him,” she says, and she sounds almost surprised by it. “He’s good for me.”
It goes unspoken between you: Gale is not.
You sit in silence for a long minute, both of you caught by thoughts of people you lost to the war. When you look at Katniss, her eyes are haunted. You wonder if she’s thinking of Gale, if she thinks about him the way you do: in terms of laughter and light, strong hands and soft lips; or if she still can’t see through the shadows of their shared past.
Minutes, hours later, Katniss shifts, as if she’s been startled. That’s what war does to you: flashbacks, insomnia, fight or flight response in overdrive.
“I didn’t see you when it happened,” she says, like you’re meant to know what she’s talking about.
She’s fiddling with her hands, as if there’s meaning in the bitten-raw tips of her fingers. You’re getting ready to open your mouth, to call for Haymitch, to say she’s having an episode, when she glances up and you’re caught by her eyes, so dark and haunted, and you know.
She’s talking about Finnick. She’s talking about Finnick’s death.
All the breath leaves your lungs: “Katniss,” you choke out, pleading with her, but she just watches you, unblinking.
“I saw Mags and Annie, and Four, I saw the sea and the ships and the sky, but not you.” Her hand snakes out to catch at yours, fingers slotting together. “I’m so sorry.”
You don’t scream, but it’s a close thing.
-
When the war was over, when all was said and done, when the bodies were buried and the rebellion quietened, Annie came to you, pale and shaking but gaze clearer than you’d ever seen. She’d placed a thin, trembling hand on your wrist where the bones jutted out and stared at you with those bright green eyes.
“Thank you,” she’d said, “For keeping him safe.”
You’d felt your gorge rise; your hands curled tight in the stark white sheets. Violence surged under your skin, anger flashing through you like lightening in the arena. Words on the tip of your tongue: he wasn’t safe in the arena, he wasn’t safe in Thirteen, he wasn’t safe in those tunnels, not then, not ever.
Over her shoulder, Haymitch hovering: “Annie,” he’d murmured, low and concerned, hand coming up to land heavy on her shoulder. “Time to go.”
She’d turned, hair spinning out like a bird’s wings and your breath had caught, memories of a summer’s day in the Capitol, Finnick pointing out the gulls wheeling in your mind.
So you’d said, “Of course;” you’d said, “Anything for you;” and Annie had smiled, soft and so so sad, a heartbroken girl in the body of a courageous woman.
You knew she knew: safe was never a word that was in either of your vocabularies.
-
You’re in Four. You don’t know how you got here – hands moving, feet moving of their own accord. There’s sand between your toes and water stretching out in every direction, blue as far as the eye can see.
For once, your hands don’t shake at the sight of it.
There’s movement down the shore: a little boy, tottering along the beach, laughing when the water splashes him. He looks so familiar, blonde hair and blue eyes, a smile to bright it could light up the world, and it feels like you’ve been punched in the stomach.
“Jo,” a voice is calling, “You came,” and when you look up its Annie, smiling at you, laughing. It’s easier than you thought it would be to smile back, to fall into her waiting arms.
(There was a time when Annie didn’t smile – for days, months, even after years had passed, her mind still stuck in the arena watching the killing blow fall over and over again.)
“I missed you,” you tell her, and it’s true: you feel it deep down in your soul.
“I know,” she says, sure as the dawn, as the tide, as if she has never been anything but. “Come on, it’s going to rain.”
-
It does rain, for days on end, the sky and sea matching shades of grey as the storms roll in. It’s almost beautiful, the way the waves crash against the sand and the wind howls, but water is water is water and if there’s one thing in the world you hate (more than the Games, more than the Capitol) it’s that.
You sit in Annie’s house on the edge of the ocean and watch her and Seamus play games, childish games, the kind that are okay now that there is no Reaping waiting for him. Annie is smiling, laughing, happy even after everything that has happened.
That is not the Annie you remember. That Annie, Finnick’s Annie, was a fragile little thing, a bird all caught up in barbed wire, fluttering desperately, trying to get out. That Annie had dull eyes and a thousand-yard stare. That Annie couldn’t ever look you in the eye.
The storm rages on.
“I’m going for a walk,” you say. Annie glances at you, concerned, but she says nothing: she trusts you to know what you’re doing.
Outside the streets are rivers, water knee-deep. This is the worst part, of all the things the Capitol left you with, this fear of something so basic, so important. These days you don’t shower or use baths, you don’t swim in pools or lakes or rivers no matter how much you want to. Most of the time it doesn’t matter but here, now, it feels like a defeat.
It feels like you’re still letting them win.
What hits you first is the cold – oh, fuck, so cold, the kind that makes your heart skip a beat, shocking, numbing, leaving you shaking in your shirt and shorts. The water surges over you, slicking your hair to your face, sticking your clothes to your body. It trickles into your eyes and ears, pounding against your skin, and you clench your eyes shut to keep it out, to keep the memories out: Capitol soldiers with grins sharper than their knives, eyes colder than their water. You open your mouth to scream but it’s full of water, your breath stolen from you. There’s panic banked under your skin, surging through your blood, and it’s overflowing, overwhelming, you’re wrecked under the deluge.
(Somewhere Haymitch is laughing at you: Johanna Mason, scared of a little water, who’d have thought.)
You open your eyes and the world is shimmering, light reflecting off the water to dance around you. You breathe in and the air claws its way back into your lungs, pushing the panic away. You hold out your hands and touch the water, feel the way it surges against the tips of your fingers, the rough pads of your palms.
For once, the fear fades. For once, the Capitol loses.
Behind you, there’s a light in the house: Annie and her son watching out the window, the ghost of your best friend peering over their shoulders with a smile.
-
He’d called your name on the beach. The way he sounded: so hopeful, so ecstatic; like he’d never thought he’d see you again. He’d never said your name like that before.
That was the problem with these Games: broken alliances, shattered friendships, the death of trust and love and everything you hold dear.
When you think of the way you nearly left it, when the clock was ticking down to the final hour, standing in the doorway to his rooms: the way he was looking at you, desperate and sad, and you, all rage and hate for some pretty little girl who didn’t know what was being done in her name.
“We don’t owe her anything,” you’d said, and Finnick just shook his head.
“She’s the answer,” he’d said. “She’s our way out.”
Your hands fisted in his shirt, the ridges of your knuckles white and frail, and he’d folded his hands over yours. Warm, calloused, comforting. You’d never felt so helpless.
“We can do this, Jo,” he’d said: “You just have to believe.”
He knew then, just as he knew later: you didn’t. You never would, never could.
Sometimes you wonder if things would be different, if you’d just believed. Like Cinna did, like Finnick and Mags and Wiress, all those people who gave everything to make sure a new day dawned. If you had – would Finnick be alive? Would Katniss be something other than an empty shell?
Haymitch’s voice in your head: those are the sort of questions that drive a person mad
-
Two is the same as ever. You wait for the elevator and think about how everything here is grey: grey walls, grey ceiling, grey people. All you want these days is a little colour in your life: the blues of Four, the green of Seven, anything but grey. It’s like being in Thirteen all over again.
Your feet take you to Gale’s door; he opens it before you even raise a hand to knock.
“How was your trip?” he asks, letting you pass.
There are two glasses on the kitchen counter, a freshly-opened bottle of cheap wine between them. The apartment smells like meat and spices: there are dishes drying by the sink. When you turn, Gale is watching you expectantly, mouth curved upwards.
You’re thinking: it looks like home. You’re thinking: it feels like home.
He’s staring at you, and you realise this is where you should tell him everything: the ruins of Twelve, Katniss’ dark stare, the feel of water lapping at your feet, Finnick’s mirror image curled up in your lap.
But when you open your mouth, the water has swallowed your voice again and there’s nothing left but tears.
-
You wake up in Gale’s bed. This is starting to become a habit, and not one you’re sure you like. He’s in the armchair across the room, pale hands clenched in the dark fabric. His face is pensive, lost deep in thought: from the furrow of his brow, the creases around his eyes, it’s Katniss who’s on his mind.
(That same look: Finnick in the hospital, at your bedside, his hands twisting nervous loops in a dark piece of rope, fingertips raw and bloody. He was looking at you but thinking of someone else.)
“Gale,” you croak out, your voice rough as sandpaper.
He’s at your side in a second, helping you upright. That distant look it gone; he’s all yours now. He doesn’t ask how you’re feeling, if you need anything; he knows you don’t want sympathy. Instead he curls in beside you, lets you rest your head on his chest like a child.
“Are you done running?” he asks.
“I wasn’t running,” you tell him. “I just – needed to think.”
Gale’s voice is carefully neutral when he says, “In Twelve.”
You shrug. “Couldn’t do it here.”
He huffs against your head: he’s used to your bluntness by now. “Did you figure it out?” he asks. “Whatever you were looking for?”
You don’t say anything: you don’t even know what you were looking for. Closure, answers, a reason; whatever it was, something has healed the gaping hole in your heart, calmed the panic and fear that lurk in your nightmares. Here in the dark, with Gale beneath you, everything finally feels like it’s where it was always meant to be.
Gale shifts, jostling your head, and when you look up at him, his eyes are warm and steady. “Hey,” he says, voice barely above a whisper, “Are you sober right now?”
You can see it coming from a long way off: a wave starting to rise; and when he finally leans in, the water crashes over you, washes you away in the flood.
-
A bright day in Four: sea a startling blue, birds dark shapes dancing against a burning sky.
“Good day for a funeral,” Haymitch mutters as you slog through the sand.
You reach the crowd by the shore; family and friends in a semicircle, Katniss’ dark hair next to Peeta’s blonde. Out at sea, figures move in the waves: Annie waist-deep in the water, Seamus on her hip, head tucked into the curve of her neck. They look tiny, dark specks lost in endless blue.
There’s no casket here like they used to have in Seven, just the ashes of what was left of Finnick Odair when the war was over, and Annie is throwing handful after handful of it into the air. It billows in great grey clouds, spinning about them like they’re the eye of a storm.
Everything is painted in oranges and reds; there were sunset like this in Seven, in the Capitol, in the arena. Gale’s hand finds yours in the crowd and he steps closer, a reassuring presence at your back.
“It’s okay,” he says, voice tickling your ear. “Time to say goodbye.”
Above, the birds circle and caw, and way down the beach: the ghost of a man: Finnick backlit against the setting sun.