A/N: This story takes place about five pages before the end of Mockingjay. In the book, Katniss has been asleep on her sofa in her house in Victor's Village when she is woken up by the sound of scraping from outside. In the book, Katniss runs from the house and sees that Peeta has come back to 12. For the sake of this AU, it's not Peeta she finds when she runs outside.
I wake with a start. Pale morning light comes around the edges of the shutters. The scraping of the shovel continues. Still half in the nightmare, I run down the hall, out the front door, and around the side of the house, because now I'm pretty sure I can scream at the dead. When I see her, I pull up short.
Glancing up at me with wide, brown eyes, her hands filthy and clutching a metal rake, is literally the last person on earth I would expect to see here outside my home, dead friends and relatives included. Johanna Mason takes me off guard in casual clothes—it seems like every time I've seen her she has been in a hospital gown or some sort of uniform, and of course I can't forget the tree costume or the time she was naked in that elevator—and I notice her short hair has evened out and no longer looks like an accident, but I still know her immediately from her dark eyes, the gentle-yet-defined lines of her face, and the pale and somehow powerful contours of the muscles in her arms. For the first time in weeks, a blush comes to my cheeks as I realize my look has lingered just too long. But it's okay because I'm crazy, right?
I shift my glance to the rake she holds and ask, "Johanna, what are you doing?" I am genuinely confused and forget almost completely about the awful nightmare that brought me out here.
I instinctively look back to her face when I speak. There's something in the way she is looking at me that I don't trust. It's not because I am suspicious of Johanna for anything, but for the first time, she looks torn between insulting me and saying something neutral, or even nice. There is a battle being waged behind her calm exterior, but what is it with? Sympathy? Compassion? Companionship? Or possibly just morphling? She seems steady-handed, though, as she leans her rake against the side of my house and brushes her hands off on her dressed down denim pants. She takes a couple of steps toward me; makes my affront into a conversation.
"I am clearing out a space for a garden," she says as if that is enough to answer my question. When my blank face tells her it's not, she explains, "It's part of my therapy. My head doctor thinks I need to learn to be 'soft' and 'gentle' sometimes, so he wants me to be responsible for something. For a life. Only he wouldn't trust me with an animal or anything like that unless I proved that I could keep plants alive."
"Okay," I respond, but I don't think she understood what I was asking. "But I meant what are you doing here?"
"Oh, well I figured if I was going to have a garden, I'd rather it be where someone can see it, and there really aren't many places around here where people would," she gestured out to cluster of houses called Victor's Village, "so I brought it to you." I think to myself that this is possibly the most she's ever said to me at once, certainly the most she's said without insulting me. Maybe I shouldn't push my luck, but what does it matter, anyway? This is the most I've spoken at all in a while.
"What are you doing 'around here'? In this place? In District 12?" I can tell after I ask that she knew what I was asking, she just didn't want to answer. She ponders the question for a second, and then looks away, back toward the patch of grass she was just de-leafing.
"Why shouldn't I be here?" she asks. "There is nothing for me anywhere else. District 13 sucks. You couldn't pay me to go to the Capitol. 7 just isn't home anymore. Too much bullshit, ya' know? Stirs too much up."
I do know. She has no idea the state my life has been in since Prim's death, but she can probably relate better than anyone else in the world. There is a little comfort in that, the first bit of comfort since it all went down, and I surprise myself by welcoming it. Maybe my own mother can't handle to be around this wrecked up, shadowy version of myself, but Johanna is broken, too. She's lost everything to the Capitol, and when she had nothing left to take away, they aimed for her sanity, her very quality of life. Just like me.
I've been standing for too long and start to feel a little dizzy, so I walk past Johanna and sit down in the grass of her little clearing with my back leaning against the house. With little hesitation, she follows suit and lowers herself down next to me, close. Surprisingly, her company is the first thing that's made me feel anything positive in weeks. I could just soak it up here in the shade of my Victor's house until I'm forcibly removed. She's the first to speak.
"It's strange, thinking of being responsible for raising a garden, responsible for giving life. Especially after District 7, where your primary responsibility is the death of the very plants I am supposed to be tending to here."
"I guess it would be," I say thoughtfully. I have had a lot of time lately to ponder death, too. "But someone has to tend to the forests of the lumber district, too, surely. You have to keep the trees alive long enough to be of use to you. Like raising cattle for slaughter… or children."
The tears are falling from my eyes before I know I am crying, and I know there is no stopping them now. The whole in my chest where my heart once was is hurting around the edges now, like a gash, but there is no blood, no physical wound to show for it. I ball my hands into fists and look in the opposite direction of Johanna, thinking maybe she won't see my tears, but it's too late for that as well.
That's when Johanna does something I never would have seen coming from her. She reaches over and ever so gently, she puts her hand on one of my wrists. The touch of her skin comes as a shock to my nerves and for a moment I forget the pain. Her fingers slide down the palm of my hand and undo my fist, lacing into mine.
Could this work? I start to wonder. Could Johanna and I exist side-by-side in solidarity with each other, providing comfort to one another without constantly reopening our wounds? The whole in my chest throbs painfully and the tears don't stop, but alongside the familiar there is suddenly a new feeling. With this thought, for the first time since the bombing outside of President Snow's mansion, I think I feel… hope.