1. III
They finish the play structure the next morning in an hour and walk back to his place together without question, as if they had decided it ahead of time.
Afterward, she wanders into the kitchen in her underwear and his t-shirt and pokes through all the drawers and cupboards. There is nothing in his fridge but one sad beer and a jar of mystery condiment, but his cupboards are stocked with rice and dried beans and rows of canned goods.
He finds her sitting on the counter with one leg dangling down, eating dry granola right out of the box.
"You have nothing good in your kitchen," she says as he comes in.
He takes a handful of granola from the box in her hands.
"That's not true. Just because you have the kitchen skills of my six year old sister doesn't mean there is nothing good in here."
She pelts him with a piece of cereal, and when he turns to her with a wide grin, she feels something strange contract in her stomach, not unpleasantly.
She starts spending more and more time at his place every time she goes over there.
A couple of times she brings him to her room in the boarding house, the landlady's grim looks as they pass making them laugh together every time. One night he stays, taking up too much space in her bed, but after she is sure he is asleep, she curls her body around his, and she likes the way it feels.
They learn things about each other.
That he won't eat strawberries or blackberries. That she can split logs so easily it makes him think that there are seams in the logs that he can't see. That she likes her coffee thick with sugar and that he doesn't like his at all. That he can do a handstand forever and when he smiles large enough, one dimple shows up on his right cheek. That when she laughs for real, she does it with her whole body.
But other things too. Bigger things that they don't realize they are telling each other.
Sometimes he disappears for days, driving the car that he gets for government business as fast as it will go on twisting mountain roads or sleeping out in the woods instead of at home with just the small knife in his boot for protection.
Sometimes she doesn't leave her room, not sleeping, not eating, just sitting in the dark alone with her thoughts.
One time she gets an electric shock from the metal doorknob on his front door, and she falls back instantly, curled and shaking on the ground, and he carries her back to his bed, quietly smoothing the hair back from her forehead until she relaxes enough to fall asleep.
Once, when she is sleeping next to him, he sits up with a start, screaming out Her name, and he sobs, deep, wracking sobs while she rubs her hand steadily down his back.
Once he is woken by her shaking him saying "I'm sorry. I wasn't there. I'm sorry. I should have been there," as she cries.
He always keeps a glass of water by the bed, and sometimes she wakes up to find him gasping and gulping it down, the memories of fires burning in his eyes.
One of those times he turns to her with his hands open and a helpless look on his face.
"What am I? What did I become?"
She runs her hands tiredly through her hair as she sits up a little.
"Ggguh," she groans, "do they put something in the water in District 12 or something? What is it with you guys constantly trying to put everything on yourselves? You survive, you move on, you stop bitching about it."
"It isn't all about you. The choices you had to make, that we all had to make, they aren't choices that anyone should ever have to even think about. How many times do we have to talk about who the enemy really is? It sure as hell isn't you, Soldier Hawthorne. You have to forgive yourself for what was and what wasn't and what could have been. Do you forget what we did? What you did? What you are still doing? We made sacrifices, huge sacrifices..." She pauses for a second, eyes closed.
"But ultimately, we have to think they were worth it. Because this world is going to be different."
"If she blames you, it's because it's easier that way," she finishes more quietly. "But not because it's right. She'll figure it out, it just hurts too much right now.
They never talk about it in the morning.
One night they are both lying face down on his mattress, her head on his shoulder blade, her body extended out at an angle from his. The bright moonlight from his curtainless window is the only light. She runs her hands down his back to the edge of where the sheet crosses his body, then traces the ridges of the pale stripes that run diagonally across his back.
"Poaching," he says quietly, turning his face toward her.
She lightly fingers the dark vertical scar on his other shoulder.
"Shrapnel. When we got you and Annie and Peeta."
She touches the puckered starburst of a gunshot wound.
"Peacekeeper. Last day in the Capitol." He squeezes his eyes shut for a second.
She touches the small break on the back of his head where no hair grows.
"Wild dog. Came out of nowhere. Fell back over an outcropping of rock."
She runs her hands up to a shallow scar on his upper arm.
"Falling rock in the mine."
And up farther to the just healing pink cut on his hand.
"Crazy girl stabbed me in the forest."
"Well you are just barely held together with scar tissue and tape, huh?" she whispers in his ear as she moves to straddle his back.
"Barely," he says, turning over between her legs so he is facing her.
He runs his hands over her entire body as she sits on top of him, from the puckered circular scars on her arms all the way down to the puckered circular scars on her legs.
"Electricity goes in, electricity has to come back out," she says as indifferently as she can, but he feels the tiny shiver that runs through her as she says it. There aren't that many scars on the body, they are all buried inside, so he leans up toward her, kissing her hard.
One night he is trying to teach her to cook in his kitchen and figuring out pretty quickly that Johanna Mason does not like to be told what to do. He tried to show her an easier way to cut the onion she is struggling with and almost got another knife to the hand, so he just quietly starts to break down the bird he felt just a little guilty about buying from the butcher on the other side of the stove.
"Did you know," she says as she brushes her bangs out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, "you can pay someone to do this for you? They have entire storefronts dedicated to that very thing. It's much more convenient."
"It is actually useful skill to have, being able to feed yourself," he says mildly as he expertly detaches the legs from the bird with a quick whack of his hand against the back to his knife.
"I am perfectly capable of-little piece of shit!" she yells, stabbing her knife straight down through the chunk of the onion that didn't manage to escape, pinning it to the cutting board.
He looks at her with laughter in his eyes, struggling to keep a straight face.
"Well you know Miss Mason-"
She was almost smiling at herself but her face goes dark in a second.
"Don't call me that," she says quietly.
The laughter drains out of his face as he looks at her carefully, appraisingly. But he only says "okay" and lets it go, filing that piece of information away with the others.
Johanna lies back on Gale's couch, slowly leafing through the book he brought home from his office for her. He is sitting at the cheap folding table in the window, marking notes on the pages of food production statistics that are just coming out of District 11.
Johanna sighs as she readjusts herself, her cracking back breaking the comfortable silence.
"You have to get rid of this couch," she say, turning back to look at Gale. "It is so ugly and uncomfortable, it is basically torture. And I should know a little something about torture."
Gale looks up from his work.
"No," he says before focusing back on the paper in front of him.
Johanna puts the book on the cardboard box behind her.
"You're right, we have to do something about all of this," she says. "It's pathetic. You have been living here for months and most of your stuff is just piled on the floor.
"There is nothing wrong with my apartment. Do you know what I paid for that couch?"
"If it was more than one copper cent…" Johanna mutters under her breath.
"It cost the beer I bought for Beecher to get him to help me get it up the stairs," he says triumphantly.
"That was still probably too much. Look, you can't keep pretending you are a coal miner who is going to go back to District 12. You are here, you are an adult, you have to start acting like one. I am going to buy it for you if that's what the problem is."
He doesn't say anything to that, and before he fully understands what is happening, he is in town, buying a soft grey couch and a neat little wood table at a store in the middle of town, spending more money than has ever spent at one time in his life. She had ideas about a whole mess of other things, but the dazed look on his face makes her let him off with just the two items.
The next week she comes to his apartment with a small bookcase and a matching side table, and he doesn't know what to say. He looks at the things carefully, the prettily turned legs, the smooth sheen of the natural grain of the wood, the elegance of both.
"We didn't see anything like this the other day," he says slowly.
"Oh," she shrugs, "I made them."
She says it so easily, but she knows that she hasn't made anything in years, at least not something that wasn't just to prove to the Capitol that she was doing something.
He turns to look at her with surprise and something else, something soft in his grey eyes.
"What?" She says back to his look. "It's just a side table, sheesh. I would have done a lot more to not have to look at that stupid cardboard box anymore."
He walks over and takes her in his arms and kisses her, and there is something effortless and tender in it that hadn't been there before.
Gale runs down the stairs of the boarding house two at a time. He is going to be late, or more accurately, not as early for work, and he is still fumbling with his tie as he flings open the door, right into the flash of a tabloid news reporter's camera.
He had gotten into trouble with them before, so now he just ignores them completely as he walks briskly to work. They must have finally figured out that Johanna is in District 2, suddenly making him more interesting again. He can only be glad that they didn't get a picture of the two of them together, but if they know where she is staying, it is only a matter of time.
That night they meet up in the woods just before it starts to get dark.
"You have to move," he tells her.
"I knew you were trouble," she says lying back on the soft carpet of pine needles. "I guess it's time to move on."
A quick fire runs through him, then he shakes his head to himself for thinking that she might have said anything else. He stays silent, smoldering, thinking that she can do what she wants, when suddenly he decides that he is sick of fighting, sick of thinking that holding everything in is protecting him from getting hurt.
"You should get an apartment here," he says quietly, not looking at her. "You should stay. The offer to work in the government still stands. You could choose whatever department you wanted."
She sits up, her back and hair covered in pine needles, and digs her hands into the loamy soil, as if to anchor herself.
"Stay..." she says quietly. She thinks about it, wondering what it would be like to try and make this concrete district her home. What it would be like to try and piece together what she could of herself and make all her fancy talk of worthwhile sacrifices and moving on actually into something. But she doesn't know what that would look like when she is burned through like a tree that has been struck by lightning but still insists on standing, hiding charred black paths of destruction on the inside.
"Yeah, stay," he says still quieter.
And suddenly she is furious at him for making her think about it. For making her think that anyone or anything could depend on her when she is barely standing herself. She sits up straighter and brushes her hand brusquely on her sides.
"No. I have to go."
He stiffens, then stands quickly and starts heading deeper into the forest.
"Where are you going?" she calls after him, still angry.
"What the hell do you care?" He has turned around to face her, towering and furious, and she hates how attractive she finds him. "You have to go, remember?"
"It's getting dark," she yells as she stands up. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"
"Yes, Johanna," he hisses venomously as he steps toward her, "I am trying to get myself killed. I engage in self destructive behavior, Johanna. What do you think this," he waves his hand between the two of them, "was?"
He turns on his heel and walks silently into the dark arms of the forest while she stands, rooted to the spot, and screams in frustration.