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Johanna is still in the hospital when they tell her the Star Squad’s been killed. Annie joins her, not long after, for so-called observation. She sleeps, mostly, cries softly when she's awake, and Johanna has never been any good at comforting people but sometimes she sits next to Annie’s bed and holds her hand.
Johanna just feels numb. Has since she flunked her test on the Block, her last-ditch effort to be worth something, failed like every test since the Arena. Underneath all that, somewhere, she's furious. It comes out sometimes, late at night when it's quiet and dark and they're weaning her off the drugs, again, and everything hurts, again, and she can't fucking do anything, again and still and forever.
So when they ask her if she wants to go to the Capitol she says yes. They tell her Katniss Everdeen is alive, and her first, uncharitable thought is that she wanted it the other way around. Would trade Katniss for Finnick in a heartbeat, because she knows, deep down, that Katniss would make the trade. Katniss isn't so different from Johanna, after all.
But sure, she'll go to the Capitol to spit on the smoking rubble. Why the fuck not? And then they take her out to the range again and ask her if she remembers her training.
“I'm not that worthless,” she snarls, puts the rifle together in near record time, picks off the targets and tries not to think about doing this with Katniss. Tries not to wish she could go back in time and do better, because what the fuck is she thinking, that she could save them? Isn’t that a joke.
On the hovercraft they give her a list of names. And supplies: rifle, bullets, a couple of knives.
She practices with the gun when they get in, behind the President’s mansion, fury coiled tight in her stomach so that she has to force her hands not to shake with it.
They make her stop, at almost midnight. Take her to a room with a wide, soft bed, and Johanna falls asleep with her hand around the barrel of her rifle.
She sleeps better than she has in weeks. Months.
She's on her own, here. A special assignment. Coin doesn't know—plausible deniability, they tell her. If she gets caught, gets seen by someone important enough, they'll claim she's just an unhinged Victor drunk on revenge.
She tells them that’s fine, but she'll kill herself before she lets them put her in another cell.
They pass her information. Her target will be at an event on Friday. She takes him out from a rooftop as he's walking toward his car. One shot and he goes down. One more shot into the body for good measure, ignoring the screams from the sidewalk, before she walks away.
There’s no more Peacekeepers, after all. A real shame, how dangerous the city is becoming.
There are a few names she looks up on her own. She knocks on the door of an untouched mansion. Cassius answers the door himself, smiles when he sees her.
She sits on his lap, cradles the back of his head while she kisses him, slides her knife up under his ribcage, swallows his hitch of breath, lets his head fall back against the couch.
And then she strips off her bloody coat, walks out, and goes to the nearest bar. To celebrate.
Doctor Aurelius asks her how she's doing. She smiles.
And then Katniss Everdeen kills Alma Coin, and one of Paylor’s generals comes to see her.
“We know what you've been doing,” he says. “It stops now.”
They take her weapons. The ones they know about, anyway.
She prowls the streets, looking for anyone the world would be better off without. Until she turns a corner and runs into one of Paylor’s new Peacekeepers. He escorts her back to her room.
She fumes. They’re still out there, these people, and Paylor’s going to give them trials, and comfortable jail cells, and she wants them to pay.
She’s at a bar one night when someone says they should just put down the rest of the Victors. “That Everdeen girl’s nuts, they’re all unstable, who cares? Just be done with them.”
When someone pulls her off him, there’s blood on her knuckles, on the toes of her boots. He’s smirking at her.
She shakes off the hands on her arms and goes home.
There’s no drugs to be found in any of her usual spots. Nothing to help her sleep, nothing to shut up the parade of bullshit her brain drags out to present her with now that she has nothing to do to keep her busy.
Plenty of alcohol though. It’ll have to do.
Haymitch turns up at her door one day, bottle in hand. He collapses onto the chair in the corner. Johanna sits on the floor, back against the bed.
“You sure you oughta be seen with me?” Johanna asks.
He guffaws. “Hell, who’s gonna see?” he asks, twisting the top off the bottle. He drops the cap, takes a long swig, hands her the bottle.
“To the new Panem,” Johanna says, raising the bottle, drinking deep while Haymitch laughs.
She wakes up on the floor. Haymitch is snoring in the chair.
She climbs into bed, goes back to sleep.
When she wakes up again, he’s gone.
They’re clearing out the President’s Mansion. Haymitch is going back to Twelve with Katniss. Peeta is off with the brain doctor. Annie’s long since back in Four, who the fuck cares about Enobaria, and Beetee, well, he’s probably made himself useful somewhere.
She asks one of the Paylor people how she can get back to Seven.
The next day she’s on a train. Going back with the same nothing she came with, a hundred years ago when they came for the Games.
This is a cargo train, hauling fuck knows what, a few passengers crowded into a dirty car lined with benches. Johanna huddles in a corner in her coat, hood covering her face, sullen and silent. Nobody pays her much attention.
The Victors Village is more or less intact, from the outside. When she pushes open her door, though, her house has been ransacked. She wanders from one room to the next, collecting a few things that’ve survived: a couple unbroken plates, a tin cup from camping trips with Blight. There’s some clothes left in her closet—the fancy stuff, too flimsy to be any use in Seven. Bare mattress on the bed, apparently too awkward to carry out.
She goes into town. Buys bread, cheese, a couple wool blankets and bottles of cheap moonshine. Used to be that shit’d be sold under the table, but now it’s right out in the open on near-bare shelves.
There’s still wood stacked behind Blight’s house. Not nearly as much, but the fucking ridiculous stockpile hasn’t been totally carted away yet.
Johanna thinks about looking to see if there’s anything worthwhile inside. The idea of going in turns her stomach.
She makes a fire in her fireplace, wraps herself in the blankets, and opens a bottle.
What’s she supposed to do? She asks the fire, out loud because there’s nobody to hear. Everyone’s dead that mattered. It’s an unfunny joke: Finnick had people to come back to and he’s dead. She has nothing, and she’s alive.
She goes out into the woods the next day. Finds her old spots, the hidden hollows that’d always felt something like peaceful. Walks out to the lake where Blight and Ila’s cabin is in disarray. No ice-fishing shack this year, the lake’s still frozen but the snow’s empty of any trace of people.
She stays out until dark. Goes home. Makes a fire again. Slices off a hunk of cheese, a hunk of bread, washes it down with the liquor.
The next day it’s snowing, hard. She stays inside. Builds up the fire till it roars, feeds it broken furniture, feeds it the Capitol clothes she’s never wearing again, feeds it letters from Finnick, still tucked into the empty dresser.
Wishes she could feed it the whole house.
Drinks.
It’s near dawn when she—well. Not so much decides as stops fighting.
Takes the rest of the liquor with her, walks out to her favorite hollow, sits on a fallen log with her back to a pine tree. Breathes in the smell of the sap, the damp cold of just-after-snow.
Drinks.
It doesn’t take long before she stops feeling the cold. Her hands are clumsy in her thin leather gloves, but that’s okay. It’s fine. She finishes the bottle, hears it fall from fingers she can’t feel, and for once, nothing hurts.
Nothing hurts at all.
And then everything does, her skin is burning and her throat is on fire and what the fuck?
“Come on, girl,” a voice says. “Wake up, come on.”
“What the fuck?” Johanna’s voice comes out garbled even to herself. “Leave me alone!”
She looks around. White, tiles, towels, bathtub, someone stripping her out of her clothes. She struggles ineffectually, but they keep moving, stripping her down to nothing and lifting her into—
“No!” she screams, as they lower her into the water and the burning starts. She smells electricity and burning skin and she thrashes and claws at them. She’s not doing this again. She can’t. She’ll die before she lets them—and that’s when she throws up, because she tried and they won’t even let her do that, and someone reaches behind her, holds her upright while she vomits into the water, and then she’s pulled out, wrapped in—fuck, feels like sandpaper—lifted off her feet.
Voices, and movement, and then she’s in another room, and there’s machines beeping and doctors and she feels a needle in her arm, fire in her veins and heat in her chest and pain, everywhere, and…
When she wakes up again, she opens her eyes and groans. Hospital.
It takes a few minutes to conjure up the snow, and the cold, and then she curls up on her side, closes her eyes again. She’s still here. Fucking fantastic. Then she remembers Henrik, telling her he’d make hell look like fun, and she laughs, and laughs, until she’s sobbing.
And that’s when Dr. Aurelius comes in.
He waits. Until she’s collected herself enough she can take a breath.
“Hello, Johanna,” he says, solemn.
No. She is not doing this. “Fuck you,” she says, rolls over and stares at the wall.
He waits for a while, and then leaves.
It’s the same thing, for the next four days.
On the fifth day, a nurse comes in with clothes. Jeans and a warm wool sweater, and Johanna puts them on and waits.
Dr. Aurelius comes back in.
“You’re going to District Four,” he says, without preamble.
Johanna stares. “Why?” she asks. It’s the first thing she’s said to him since that first day.
“Annie Cresta said you should come stay with her.”
“This some kind of crazy-Victor consolidation?” Johanna snaps. “May as well keep us lunatics together?”
“No,” Dr. Aurelius says, mildly. “She said you’d be welcome. And I don’t think you should be on your own.”
Great. She won the fucking Games once, went in a second time, got tortured and rescued and trained as a soldier and killed children for Snow and so-called men for Coin and for herself, and now she needs a fucking guardian.
Dr. Aurelius sighs, sits down. “Johanna,” he says, and for once it’s not brain-doctor detached and mild, it’s tired and annoyed and maybe real. “I don’t like babysitting. I’m going back to the Capitol tomorrow on the train. If you want to stay here and be miserable, fine. But your friend wants you to come to Four.”
“She’s not my friend, I barely know her,” Johanna retorts, forgetting she wasn’t going to talk to him.
“She wants you to come.”
“Bullshit,” Johanna spits. “Nobody wants me.” And that was not at all what she wanted to say, it sounds stupid and melodramatic, but it’s not wrong.
Dr. Aurelius pulls out his phone and dials, hands it to her.
“Hello?” It’s Annie’s voice. Startled, worried, and Johanna fights back the sounds of screams and the feeling of concrete and the oppressive weight of Thirteen, and swallows, and doesn’t know what to say.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“It’s Johanna.”
“Oh! Hi Jo,” Annie says, sounding relieved. But the last person to call her “Jo” was Finnick, and Johanna’s eyes burn and her throat closes.
“Hi,” Johanna grits out. Swallows hard. “Look, this idiot brain doctor wants to ship me off to Four.”
“It was my idea,” Annie says, speaking quickly. “Look, I know you don’t know me that well, and you didn’t exactly see me at my best but I—“ she pauses, and Johanna can her her shaky inhale over the background static of the inter-district call. “It’d be great to have you here.”
Finnick had a way of being so damn sincere, so open and honest it made Johanna want to smack him. And she hears the same fucking thing in Annie’s voice, and it’s the same reaction, automatic: to snarl something mean, just to make it stop.
“Aren’t you having a fucking baby?”
“Yes?”
“Annie, all I do is break shit, you really fucking don’t want me around a baby.”
“Johanna, I really do,” Annie says, calm. Johanna’s jaw hurts from clenching it, she’s mixed up and furious and explosive like always, and somehow Annie is quiet and steady and calm, and fuck this. But then Annie sighs. “Nobody here understands,” she adds.
It thuds into Johanna’s head, heavy and solid and indisputably true. She can’t breathe.
“Johanna?”
“Yeah,” Johanna says, and then snaps back to reality. Sighs. “Yeah, okay,” she says, “I’ll come.”
She can practically hear Annie smile. “Oh, I’m glad,” Annie says. “I’ll meet you at the station.”
Johanna hands the phone back to Dr. Aurelius.
“Shut up,” she says, before he can open his mouth. “I’m not doing this for you.”
He smiles, hands her a train ticket, and walks out.
It’s warm in Four. Warm and wet and smells like springtime and salt and fish, and Annie Cresta is standing on the platform with an umbrella, her hair pulled back from her face, her stomach impossibly huge.
Johanna hitches her duffel bag up on her shoulder—not like it’s heavy—and walks over.
“Hi,” she says, awkward, hands in her pockets.
Annie moves so the umbrella covers both of them. “Welcome to Four,” she says.
Johanna looks around as they walk. There’s kids splashing in puddles, fishermen in bright yellow raincoats at the dock, families living in the houses of the Victors’ Village.
It’s alive.
She’s alive.
And maybe—her shoulder brushes Annie’s arm, Annie smiles at her as she leads the way up the steps to a wide porch—maybe that’s okay.