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When Johanna drops down from her perch on a low-hanging branch to land, catlike, on the beach beside Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire startles so dramatically, so completely, that before either of them can draw breath, there’s an arrow strung and pointed right at Johanna. Right at her face. Charming.
“Easy, easy, don’t get your panties in a twist.”
The girl on fire stares at her, breathing hard, eyes wide and hot with that familiar old victor fear-fury. Stares long enough that for a moment Johanna wonders idly if this might be it, that she might let that arrow fly, and wouldn’t it be mighty fucking ironic if the one to kill Johanna in the end is a girl she’s risking her own life to save? Then Everdeen blinks, sighs, slips the arrow back into the quiver slung over her shoulder.
“Don’t ever do that again.”
“Scare ya, did I?”
Everdeen glares at her - God, this one is just too much fun to fuck with, so precious - and doesn’t answer.
It’s not lost on Johanna that Everdeen doesn’t sit back down until Johanna does. She intentionally sits down right there, leaning against the tree trunk, knees drawn up to her chest, right next to the spot Everdeen chose to keep watch from, just to see what the girl on fire does then. Whether she’s too ill-at-ease to take being in such close proximity, if she’ll spook and flinch away.
She’s mildly surprised - pleased - when Everdeen doesn't move away, takes up her previous position, one leg stretched out before her, the other crooked up, foot braced in the sand. Close enough to Johanna that their arms are pressed together.
For someone supposed to be keeping watch through the night, making sure those bastards from One and Two don’t appear to rip them all limb from limb, Everdeen’s not paying an awful lot of attention to the shadowed fringes where the jungle breaks into the beach. Keeps letting her gaze stray back to that fiancé of hers, asleep less than a foot away, curled into the sand. When she does, the permanent tension-line between her brows softens, and the corners of her plush-full lips quirk up. Just a little. Not enough for the cameras to pick up on. Not enough to be faked.
And, well, call Johanna a cynic, but that is mighty surprising.
She shifts closer, leans in to rest her sharp chin on Everdeen’s shoulder. Everdeen tenses up - Johanna can feel it, muscles tautening under smooth tan skin, can hear her reflexive swallow - but doesn’t pull away. There’s a streak of dirt over her cheekbone, and she smells of sweat, of crushed leaves, earthy and musky and real.
It’s been so long since Johanna fucked anyone but affected Capitol clones, all perfume and powder and pretence. Four years it’s been, since she spread her legs in the arena for the boy from Two and then buried her axe in the back of his neck. It’s been a lifetime.
“You really do love him, don’t you?”
The snarl of Everdeen’s response is too quick, too knee-jerk, to be anything but genuine. “Of course I do.”
Well, that’s part of that mystery solved. Time to see what else is hiding under the purer-than-pure act.
She pitches her voice low. Low and breathy, quiet enough to slide under the radar of all the cameras and microphones she knows are trained on them. Always was the worst thing about the Games, about the Capitol: forgetting what it was like to live your life unwatched.
“Mm, that’s nice. Do you want him, though?”
And finally she drags Everdeen’s attention away from Peeta Mellark’s pretty pretty soft-in-sleep face. She twists her neck so they’re facing each other, glaring like Johanna’s said the single most offensive thing she’s ever heard in her sheltered little back-of-beyond life.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Everdeen hisses, outraged.
Oh God, this is just too much. Johanna wasn’t this innocent when she was seventeen. Johanna wasn’t this innocent when she was twelve, but that’s beside the point. Everdeen is seventeen and engaged and supposedly pregnant, for fuck’s sake. Johanna can’t decide if it’s hysterical, or kinda hot, or just tragic. Maybe a bit of all of the above.
She chuckles a little, husky. “Oh, I think you know, honey.”
Everdeen pulls back at that, making this noise in the back of her throat, animalistic, almost a growl. She cuts her gaze away, and it’d be a pretty impressive show of disdain if it weren’t for the way she can’t quite keep from looking back, eyes lingering on Johanna’s lips, points of colour rising over her high cheekbones. Reminds Johanna of standing naked in that elevator, Peeta Mellark with his eyes practically falling out their sockets, that old drunk Haymitch grinning unabashedly, as the girl on fire went flaming red, doing her best to stare at the floor, at the ceiling, all the while glancing back at Johanna, her lips and breasts and thighs.
And Johanna thought then, like she thinks now, well well. Not quite their perfect little fairytale princess, are you.
She flashes Everdeen her very best grin, all teeth and dimples. The grin she pulls on for cameras, sponsors, the Capitol’s Games groupies, the one that says, I’m playing tame, believe me if you like, but remember the ten kids I killed who believed me first.
“Look at him.”
She nods towards the boy, curled in foetal position, chest rising and falling, fingers twitching against the sand. Everdeen obeys, and when her gaze lands on him, her lips part around the softest of sighs. Johanna looks from Peeta Mellark, blond and angelic, to Katniss Everdeen, dark and intense, each as gorgeous as the other, thinks how sweet it would be to be caught between both those beautiful bodies, to fuck the two of them at once. Husband and wife, they ought to share, after all.
“Your fiancé. Now tell me, do you want him?”
Again Everdeen lets slip that tiny sigh. There’s a long pause, the humid quiet broken only by the faint chirp of cicadas from somewhere behind them in that damned jungle. Johanna doesn’t slip any closer, doesn’t push her luck, just watches Everdeen watch Mellark, the tenderness in her face, the lack of heat. She wonders.
Just when Johanna’s given up on getting any kind of response, is ready to admit defeat and get some shut-eye in before it gets light, Everdeen clears her throat.
“I don’t know,” she says, barely a whisper, but they’re still almost cheek-to-cheek. To Johanna it’s clear as day, loud as the death-cannons that always ring out in her dreams.
She smacks Everdeen’s shoulder with the back of her hand, then scoots away, lies down on the hot damp sand. Pillows her head on her left forearm, keeps her right hand curled around the handle of her best throwing axe. Closes her eyes, grins into the night.
“Well, let me know when you figure it out.”
“We don’t want to hurt you, Miss Mason.”
The interrogator's voice is soft, light, Capitol-accented. Always civil. Always polite. The guards scream at her, flecking her face with spittle as they call her a whore, a mutt, a used-up piece of filth, hold her head in the trough and press the electrodes to her skin, laugh when she cries and struggles and pisses herself. The interrogator is always calm, quiet, sounds so fucking reasonable.
Johanna wants to stuff her fist down his throat and rip out the diseased fucking abomination he calls a heart -
“We want this to stop just as much as you do.”
- and then tear it to pieces with her goddamned teeth. God, she hates him, she hates him, she hates him, why won’t they stop? Why won’t they let her up, let her breathe? Why won’t they fucking STOP
She tries to scream but there’s no air, only water, water so cold it burns. Her limbs are shaking, convulsing in the vice-grip of the guards, and they’re laughing, one of them smacking her ass and that just makes them laugh harder, shrieking with it now and if they’d let her up she’d kill every single one of them and she wouldn’t even need her axe. She’d do it with her bare fucking hands.
“All you have to do is tell us where Katniss Everdeen is. That’s all, Miss Mason.”
Her lungs are burning, burning, burning, her pulse is throbbing red right across her vision, she thinks she’s crying and it’s so stupid because that’s just more water and there’s too much water already, too much water nothing but water and she can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe, Mommy help me Mommy please, she hasn’t had a mother since she was seven years old but Mommy Mommy please I can’t breathe
“Tell us where the rebels took Katniss Everdeen. Tell us where she is and you walk free.”
Some signal she can’t hear, and then she’s being hauled backwards, hands rough and heavy yanking her by her hair, her shoulders, her hips, dragging her out of the trough. Out of the water. Out of the water and into the air. They fling her onto a floor that’s steel-hard and crushed-glass-rough but she doesn’t even care because she can breathe.
Oh God, she can breathe.
Johanna tries to sit up, gravity see-saws wildly, and she vomits. Vomits hard, noisily, stomach spasming with the force of it. For a moment she’s pathetically grateful she managed to lean to the side just enough not to get it on herself, and then there’s a boot at the nape of her neck, grinding her face down into it.
It feels like she’s always been here. Shuddering as oxygen sears its way back into her lungs, bile acrid in her nostrils, shaking, shaking, shaking. There never was anything before. The forests of Seven, the mountains of her first arena, the clock of her second, the girl on fire - nothing - nothing but this -
“We want this to stop - don’t you?”
The pressure relents. She’s allowed to lift her face from the pool of her own vomit, to curl into herself on the cold unforgiving floor. Knees tight to her chest, face hidden, one arm curled over her head, her safety position, her sleeping-in-doorways position, her nights-in-the-arena position.
She’s crying and wishes she wasn’t. Wishes she had a gun, an axe, a knife, fangs like Enobaria’s, even a fucking potato peeler would do. Something, anything to make them pay. Make them bleed. Show them what happens when you fuck with a victor.
Bring a teeny tiny bit of the Games to the Capitol. See how the motherfuckers like it then.
“Don’t you want to go home, Johanna?”
That voice again. Gentle, so gentle, so hated.
She can hear screaming. Muffled, but not so very far away. Through a couple of walls, maybe. It’s impossible to tell for sure, probably just her imagination, but it sounds like Peeta. That boy she once watched sleep, angelic, while the girl on fire looked at his face and smiled for him and not for the cameras.
It feels like she’s been here forever, but she hasn’t. She remembers.
Johanna uncurls. Just a little. Just enough to bring her face out from the shelter of her arms and close-pressed knees so she can bare her teeth up at the guards, the interrogator, silhouetted against the stark always-on flare of the ceiling lights.
“What I want is you. Dead at my feet like Cashmere and all those other kids I killed.”
A sigh, drawn in through Capitol-perfect teeth. Could even be regretful.
“Very well. Put her back in the trough, gentlemen.”
"Should I go up to the hospital? Fetch one of the nurses?"
"Don't you fucking dare, you brainless–"
Before Johanna can finish telling her roommate just what she thinks of her goddamn condescension, another wave of nausea hits her and her back's arching as she spits bile into the bowl of the toilet. Her mouth is fuzzy with acid and the metallic tang of oral rehydration pills and something else, sour and all-pervading, that's been haunting her since her last dose wore off. The taste of absence.
It's been two days, four hours, sixteen minutes. Not that she's counting.
When she's finished retching, Katniss pushes a glass of water into her hands. It's fizzy from another of those pills, and cold. Johanna presses it against her sweaty forehead, lets out a long, long exhale.
Reminds her of slowly broiling in that fucking rainforest during the Quell, of how she'd wanted to cry when Finnick dug the spile into the tree and the first few drops fell wet on her dry-throbbing lips.
Reminds her of screaming soundlessly into freezing water.
And, shit, that reminds her of how long it's been. Two days, four hours, seventeen minutes. What she wouldn't give – who she wouldn't kill – for a drip in her arm. Needle snug in her vein. Morphling soft in her blood.
"You need to actually drink that," Katniss says. Hovering over Johanna like some kind of fucking mother hen, like Johanna's that sainted little sister of hers, instead of four years older and a murderer ten times over. Catching Johanna's bleary-eyed glare, Katniss shrugs, crosses her arms. "Just making a suggestion."
"Go fuck yourself," Johanna suggests. God, is she ever sick of Katniss Everdeen and the concern in those famous grey eyes and the way she looks at Johanna out the corners of them when she thinks Johanna isn't paying attention and the way she's always so earnest all the fucking time.
The coolness of the water is soothing to her bile-scorched throat, but the taste of the rehydration pill stops it from being actually refreshing. And isn't that just typical of Thirteen? Everything to keep you alive and nothing to make it feel worth your while.
Seven wasn't all that great, hell, Johanna spent a good few years there living hand-to-mouth and sleeping curled up in doorways. But even when she was an eight-year-old gutter-rat, at least she could see the sun and smell the sap from the fresh-cut trees and talk her favourite street vendor into giving her a handful of roasted chestnuts on the house. At least Seven had soul.
Or maybe the problem isn't Thirteen at all, just Johanna.
She realises her aching fingers are rubbing over and over and over at the purple bruises in the crooks of her arms,where the needle used to sit, and links them together. Twists them together, knuckles grinding and groaning.
"Are you sure you don't want me to go get a nurse? Or take you back up to the hospital, maybe? You look rough as hell."
"Thank you so much. You look like shit too."
The hell of it is, that's a lie. Katniss doesn't look great, certainly nothing like the radiant girl on fire, but nowhere near as bad as she did by the end of her first Games, either. She's too thin, she's scarred, her skin's got this waxy cast to it, and her hair could really use a wash – but that's par for the morphling-withdrawal course. Point is, she's not projectile vomiting, or chewing her lips and nails to pieces to keep from tearing her hair out, or losing her eyes in the shadows of her skull, or running a fever so high she couldn't stop shivering to save her life. Johanna looks, feels, like she's knocking on death's door, and there’s Katniss looking like she just had a few late nights too many. The bastard.
Two days, four hours, twenty-five minutes. Surely the worst ought to be over by now?
"I don't know, Johanna …"
"What don't you know? Gonna have to narrow it down a bit, moron."
One of Katniss's many infuriating traits is that, after fuck knows how many weeks stuck together in the hospital with no one else for company, she's stopped rising to the barbs. Johanna's gonna have to up her game.
"Maybe you shouldn't have come off it all in one go."
"You think I'm not as strong as you, girl on fire? Huh?"
And that would probably be a lot more impressive, a lot more cutting, if Johanna's voice wasn't shot to pieces and didn't break embarrassingly in the middle. Fuck this. Sincerely, fuck everything about this situation.
"My mother always used to say if someone's been taking a lot of a drug, they have to be weaned off. If I went up and told them how sick you are, they might could give you a little bit to make it easier, you know?"
Everything in Johanna goes still instantly.
They might could give you a little bit.
Back when she was a street kid, raised by hookers and thieves and smugglers but mostly herself, Johanna had seen morphling addicts in the derelict buildings and back alleys, never paid them much mind. They were harmless, mostly. Back when she was a victor, returning to the Capitol once a year every year to watch kids become killers, she saw the drunks and the addicts and the crazies and despised them. How fucking weak could you get? After all the shit she'd fought through to keep herself alive, she wanted to live, not hide away in some chemical haze.
Course, that was Before.
Before she watched Katniss Everdeen set herself on fire and the whole damn country with her. Before Johanna dared to start hoping. Before Haymitch Abernathy and Finnick Odair came calling, the one sober and the other serious, never thought she’d see the day, and she said, what the hell, count me in.
Before she stepped back into the arena, once again with a plan that came down to keeping one single girl alive – just a different girl this time. Before the girl on fire blew the arena apart and the hoverships came for Johanna and her world became a hell that didn't burn her but drowned her, over and over and over again. Before she knew what it was like to be unmade, every piece of her pulled apart and exposed to the light and shattered so thoroughly that even when Thirteen sewed her back together, it never quite fit right, like the left knee she smashed in her first Games that still grates with every step.
Before that doctor fit an IV to her arm and soft waves of narcotic numbness dragged her under. Before she understood the magic, the evil fucking beautiful magic of morphling – not that it takes the pain away, but that it takes everything away.
Oh, she wants it. Wants it so much she could cry and fall to the floor at Katniss's feet and beg and beg and beg her. Beg her and tell her whatever she wanted to hear, break the way she never did in the Capitol's ever-bright room.
Two days, four hours, thirty-one minutes.
Johanna looks up at the girl standing awkward in the doorway of their shared bathroom. Katniss's eyebrows are drawn close, lines etched deep between them, her eyes storm cloud-grey. She looks a little – just a little – like she did when she volunteered for her sister, when she held that dying girl from Eleven, when she watched Peeta Mellark sleep on the beach. Half broken, half a legend.
Well, Johanna’ll be fucked if she's letting Little Miss Mockingjay out-stubborn her.
"Fuck off. I don't want any fucking morphling."
Katniss grins as wide as Johanna's ever seen her. There are crinkles at the corners of her eyes and the ghost of a dimple in her left cheek. It might even be genuine.
"Stop looking so happy, will you? It's giving me a headache."
And damned if Katniss doesn't sit down next to her, cross-legged. The bathroom's tiny, functional and not an inch more, and their knees knock together.
"That's the spirit."
Two days, four hours, thirty-four minutes. Not that she’s counting.
The woods in Twelve - well, what used to be Twelve, Before - smell different to the woods in Seven. They’re colder, wilder, muskier. Beneath that there’s this industrial hint of oil, coal dust, and running underneath that an undertone of ash. Graveyard ash.
Maybe that last is just in Johanna’s mind.
They’re real woods, here, woods that have grown untouched by the hands of humanity, the last gasp of wilderness, whereas Seven’s forests were planted and farmed and tamed. There’s more types of bird living here than Johanna can name, rabbits and squirrels and wild boar, deer and snakes and even, according to Katniss, bears. She could lose herself here, no paths to guide her, and never find her way back to the too-empty, too-full house in what used to be Twelve’s Victors’ Village.
She’s thought about it.
When Katniss goes hunting, like this morning, Johanna goes along, won’t take no for an answer. She cuts them down firewood, and she’s getting better with traps and arrows, and shit, there’s not much that’s hotter than watching that focus slide over Katniss’s features, the predatory stillness of her, the silent accuracy. And there’s no one out here but them and the animals, either, no need to swallow their moans, can scream as loud as they please, up against a tree or splayed out on a rock or rolled into bushes.
But that’s not why she always follows Katniss out into the forest, not really. Not the only reason, at least.
It’s because sometimes, even now, when the past comes awake beneath her skin, she can’t breathe easy unless she’s here. Surrounded by trees, this last echo of home, of Before. It’s too much like Seven, and not enough, all at once, and it’s the only thing she’s got to remind her the past is the past and the now is the now, but sometimes it feels like it’s driving her mad.
She came to Katniss and Peeta because she couldn’t stand it in Seven, alone but for the ghosts of Games past, and because those two were tearing each other apart with the intensity of their need. And most days it works, the three of them balancing out, more or less. Then there’s the days when it doesn’t.
“I really hate your shitty little District,” she tells Katniss conversationally.
It’s a lie. Twelve is too much and not enough, but it’s quiet and it’s far away from anything and it’s starting to feel like somewhere she belongs. Maybe. But today she misses the noise of Seven and the patter of the street vendors, and they’ve been walking through the forest for hours and her knee is aching and she’s tripped over twice and all they’ve got to show for it are a couple of rabbits and a bag full of blackberries. It feels like there are things crawling under her skin, an itch that can’t be scratched.
This is the worst thing about getting better. The things you can’t put your finger on. At least with screaming nightmares you know where you are.
Katniss glares at her but it’s half-hearted. Obviously Peeta’s given her another pep talk about not rising to Johanna’s bait and, wonder of wonders, it’s actually sunk in a bit.
There’s nothing more irritating than when Katniss tries to be the better person.
They make their way down a steep slope, towards a stream, babbling over smoothened rocks. Last summer, they’d all gone out together, followed that stream down to the lake, where Johanna and Peeta dangled their feet in the water, and she taught him how to whittle, while Katniss swam and then stretched out in the sun, reading one of the novels her mother sends.They ate strawberries, and the biscuits had Peeta made, didn’t go back to the house till it was almost dark. It had been a good day, that.
When they were last in the forest, Katniss set a snare in one of the bushes by the water’s edge, hoping to catch perhaps a rabbit, perhaps a pheasant or wild turkey. It’s been sprung, but there’s no animal there.
“Honestly, you’d think by now you’d’ve worked out how to set a halfway decent trap, but no. No, sir, not the great Katniss Everdeen.”
Katniss kicks at a stone, mutters something under her breath. Johanna doesn’t catch it, but she catches the tone, and now she’s grinning a little, on the inside. It’s been too long since they’ve had a decent fight. Been playing nice for Peeta, pretending to be tame, but that isn’t who either of them are. Not really.
As Katniss wanders along the bank of the stream, Johanna follows, a few paces behind. Just far enough to appreciate the curves of her, the casual grace in her stride. Doesn’t seem so long ago she was rail-thin, worn away at the seams, looked like her legs might give way from under her at any moment, and even Johanna couldn’t look at her and not feel the urge to protect. But now -
Well. She doesn’t think Katniss will ever really understand the effect she has. Not on Peeta, not on Johanna, not on the whole goddamn country.
Sickening, honestly. Really it is.
“I mean, you’ve dragged me halfway round this wretched forest, it’s been all morning, and what do we get out of it? A pair of mangy rabbits. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.”
And at that, Katniss whips around, braid flying out behind her like a pennant caught in the wind. She grabs Johanna by the lapels of her battered leather jacket, has her pinned against a tree before she knows what’s going on. The breath’s all knocked out of her, no air in her lungs, and it’s not so much from the impact - even when Katniss flips, she’s never brutal that way - but from the abruptness of the strike, how quickly and absolutely the hunter she is deep down shucks off her guise of civility -
“What the fuck is with you, Johanna?” There are hot points of anger-red standing out across the tops of her high cheekbones. It’s not a shout, but a snarl, low and dangerous. “You’re the one who insisted on coming with me, you always do -”
“Aw, honey, maybe I’m just disappointed in you.” Said with a grin she couldn’t help even if she wanted to. Not with the press of Katniss’s long lean body against hers, just inches separating their mouths, the dead rabbits forgotten on the ground beside them.
“God, what is it you even want? Huh?”
Katniss shakes her, just slightly. Her eyes are ice grey, gunmetal grey, gleaming with fury. When she’s like this, sometimes Johanna thinks Katniss is gonna consume her, tear her to pieces and eat her up.
Sometimes Johanna thinks she wouldn’t even mind.
“What the fuck do you want from me, Johanna?”
It’s a facer of a question, alright, but right now? Only one answer.
Johanna’s never had quite the co-ordination, the natural athleticism of the woman they used to call the girl on fire, but when she wants to, she can give her a run for her money. And she’s got the element of surprise.
She grabs the collar of Katniss’s thick flannel shirt in her left hand, wraps her right around the base of her skull, fingers twisting into her hair. Pulls her close, presses their mouths together. For half a heartbeat, Katniss resists, and then - then she lets out a bitten-off groan, opens her mouth, gets with the programme.
They kiss like they’re trying to devour one another, all teeth and lips, Katniss gripping Johanna’s jaw - she can smell the leather of her hand protector - tight enough to bruise. There’s a knee between her thighs, throwing her off balance with only the press of Katniss’s hips holding her up. The bark of the tree behind her is coarse and cold, and there’s Katniss hemming her in, the warmth of her, skin silk-soft at the curve of her throat, her shoulder.
Johanna lifts her knee, grinds it up against Katniss, grins into the kiss when her hips buck and her breath stutters.
“You little shit,” Katniss gasps out, ducks her head to bite at Johanna’s neck, sucking at that spot at the corner of her jaw, that - right there -
God, there’s nothing quite like this, there really isn’t, fucking like a challenge, the give-and-take, taking each other apart and making a battle of it. They’ve been pushing each other since the day they met and now that Katniss isn’t batting her eyes and putting on a show, isn’t the figurehead and the poster girl, she gives as good as she damn well gets.
Johanna pushes a hand up under Katniss’s shirt, runs her fingers down the arc of her spine, digging in with her fingernails, just a little - not enough to really hurt, just enough to tease at it, the way that always makes Katniss melt against her. And sure enough, Katniss arches into it, pressing her breasts into Johanna, hips straining forward reflexively, grabbing at Johanna’s waist for purchase. She moans softly where she’s mauling at Johanna’s neck, breath hot and damp.
It’s that that always gets to Johanna about Katniss, drives her mad: the contrast of her. The teeth, savage and sharp, and the gentle damp gasps. The way she’ll blush at an off-colour joke, then fuck Johanna senseless with Peeta right there, watching. The push and pull.
Johanna scrapes her nails down again, shoulder-blades to waist, presses one hand hard at the small of Katniss’s back, holding them even tighter together. The other slides around and up her side, over the scar-rippled ribcage, up and up. She never wears a bra, little miss bow-and-arrow, not unless she’s forced, and Johanna’s always loved that about her.
The instant Johanna palms her nipple - the faintest of touches, barely even a tease - Katniss jerks against her, whole body tensing. It drives her knee sharply up against Johanna’s crotch, sudden pressure that rides the edge of pleasure and pain, forces a throaty cry out of her, reflexive. She traces round and around the bud of that nipple, tweaks it, delicate, drawing it out. Katniss’s hand tightens at her jaw, pulls her head to one side, baring her throat as she bites down hard. Johanna’s hips are twitching of their own accord now, and Katniss’s thumb is in her mouth, running over her lips, pressing in as she licks at it, the taste of leather and sweat and maple syrup, of Katniss, heavy on her tongue.
That spot at Johanna’s neck is throbbing now, bruise blooming hot beneath Katniss’s teeth, pulse beating hard, and she can feel it between her legs, too, aching with the denim-on-denim friction that’s so damn good but not enough. By now she’s too far gone to tease, pinches at Katniss’s nipple, twists, cupping the sweet weight of her breast and squeezing. That gets her a moan, high and breathy, and then Katniss’s other hand is grabbing at her crotch, tight, heel of her hand pressing up just right, setting up a rhythm she rocks into, fast and hard.
And because she just can’t help it, she gives Katniss’s ass a quick slap, gasps out, “That all you’ve got, sweetie-pie?”
Katniss lifts her head from Johanna’s throat, pushes her fingers into Johanna’s mouth, a makeshift gag. “You’re gonna wish you never said that,” she says, low and threatening, grinning, all white teeth and swollen lips, eyes dancing, steel-bright and hot.
Fuck yeah, that’s what Johanna was going for.
She bites at Katniss’s fingers, tosses her head and flashes her widest grin. “Put your money where your mouth is, Everdeen.”
Next thing she knows, Katniss is yanking her jeans open, shoving her hand inside. Doesn’t even bother with getting her jeans down, just pushes her panties aside, and this is where months of fucking come in handy, because Katniss knows her. Knows she’s ready - soaked panties’d be a dead giveaway anyways, but still - knows to get right to it, three fingers sliding inside sudden and shocking and sending Johanna’s head whiplashing back.
“Fuck -”
Katniss laughs, mouth against her cheek, low and throaty and smug. Nips at her jaw. She crooks her fingers, and Johanna could swear she feels it all the way up her spine, so good she can’t stand it.
She fumbles Katniss’s belt, shoving at her jeans, hands shaking as she moans, shudders, but there she is, there, and she knows Katniss’s body just as well as Katniss knows hers. Johanna’s coming apart with the relentless press and thrust and fuck of Katniss’s fingers, an uncoordinated mess, but she finds the right angle - two fingers pressed into the heated wetness of her cunt, thumb circling her clit - the rhythm -
And then Katniss is clutching at her, crying out, that high desperate almost-a-shriek that she only lets out when she’s close, and Johanna’s trembling, legs threatening to give out, back arching, toes curling in her boots. They’ve hit the right tempo, crescendoing together, Johanna’s moans and Katniss’s wails ringing out in perfect time, and God, God, she feels so complete, so full, fingers stretching her, Katniss inside her, buried so deep, and she wants, so bad it hurts.
They come one after the other, Johanna with a groan that comes up from her feet, through her whole body, Katniss with a single piercing cry. The aftershocks they ride out together, Katniss leaning heavy on Johanna, propped up by the tree that’s rubbed her shoulders raw.
The quiet of the forest never sounds so vast as it does in these post-coital moments, when the sweat starts to cool and the heartbeat to slow.
Katniss says, “You never answered me.” Her voice is sated, soft.
“What?” Johanna’s brain is still fogged, whited-out. Can’t expect her to remember what conversation they were having, for God’s sake.
“What d’you want from me?”
It could sound resentful, but Katniss kisses her. Loose, quiet. Sweet, almost. It makes Johanna’s nerves jangle.
She zips up her jeans, shakes out her hair. Pats Katniss’s ass again, tips her a Finnick Odair-standard wink. “Thought I gave a pretty good demonstration.”
Katniss barks a laugh, steps back, pulling her jeans back up, straightening her flannel shirt. She squats to pick up the two dead rabbits, the morning’s none-too-impressive catch. When she stands back up she looks Johanna in the eye, and she’s not hazy-flushed with lust, or savage-flushed with anger, but calm. Her eyes are the colour of the lake in the forest on winter mornings.
“You can’t keep running from that question forever,” she says.
As a rule, Johanna makes a point of not hiding in her room. They’ve all three of them got their own bedrooms to retreat to when they need space and solitude, it’s the only way they could possibly make their three-way whatever it is work. She’s not shy about using it, sleeping alone in there when she and Katniss are ready to claw one another’s eyes out or Peeta’s ghosts and hers are feeding off each other, dragging them both down. But she doesn’t hide.
Johanna Mason doesn’t do hiding. Not anymore. Not since she was sixteen.
Except, apparently, she does.
It’s just - it’s alright for Katniss to throw it out there, but it’s not a fucking easy question. Not an easy question at all. Johanna turned twenty-four last week, and she’s gone her whole life purposefully not asking it of herself.
No point. Not like she’s in the habit of getting what she wants. Not anything that she really wants, wants in the deep-down of her, anyway.
So, yeah. It threw her. A little.
Trust Katniss fucking Everdeen. The girl’s a goddamn menace.
So maybe she’s spent most of the day shut up in her bedroom, whittling and listening to her bootleg collection of street-music from Seven and maybe crying. Doesn’t mean anything. She wasn’t hiding. Just wasn’t hungry at lunch. Enjoying her own company, that’s something her head-doctor’s always going on about, that’s what it was.
The door to the kitchen’s ajar. The smell of stewing rabbit, of sweet potato and thyme, is thick in the air, and her mouth’s watering despite herself. She can hear the murmur of Katniss and Peeta’s voices beneath the radio. It’s tuned to a music station, playing Twelve’s characteristic bluegrass that they love so much. None of them listen to the news anymore, nor watch much of the entertainment channels. Only music.
Katniss says something, and Peeta laughs, a rich baritone rumble. She remembers hearing that voice breaking on screams, on tears, on gasps of ecstasy.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. She’s a victor. Fought through the Games, twice over. This is nothing. Johanna clenches her fist, takes a deep breath, chin up, shoulders back, the way they coached her for Caeser and the cameras, and slips through the door.
It’s warm in the kitchen, almost uncomfortably so, heat from the range soaked deep into the stone floor. Peeta’s sitting on a stool by the cooker, keeping a watchful eye on the stew, Katniss lounging in a chair, steel-toed boots propped up on the table, reading another of those books of hers.
Johanna crosses over to the fridge, sticks her head inside, takes a gulp from the open carton of milk. It’s more for something to do than anything else.
“Hey, J, pass the milk?”
If it were Katniss asking, she’d turn her nose up, or throw it to her at most, but Katniss is Katniss, and Peeta’s Peeta. Johanna walks over to him, hands him the carton, and he knocks it back. Always has a massive appetite, that boy.
The sleeves of his t-shirt are rolled up past his elbows, and she can see the ripples of the Capitol’s scar tissue around his wrists, up his forearms. His prosthetic leg is propped up in the corner, must be chafing him today. When Peeta puts the milk down, he leans over to kiss her on the lips, close-mouthed and casual.
“I don’t get a kiss, then, that it?” Katniss drawls from behind her book.
“Not til you get your feet off of my table, you barbarian,” Peeta says sternly, whacks at her boots with her wooden spoon.
“Hey, hey, I’m the one working my fingers to the bone to bring food home for y’all, I can put my feet where I like.”
“Yeah, and I’m the one cooking it. Off the table with you.”
Peeta whacks her boots again, shaking his fist, while Katniss tips her head back and laughs. Her hair’s loose, out of its habitual braid, falling free in dark waves to the small of her back, rippling with her every movement.
Katniss with her hair untied and no weapon to hand, Peeta with his prosthesis off and his scars bared - it’s like seeing their tender underbellies exposed. Like them offering up that sweet spot at the nape of the neck where she could sink an axe to sever the spinal cord.
It’s something she never thought to see.
Johanna smiles as they bicker on, can’t help it. She reaches over to the stove-top of the range, lifts the lid of the stew pot, takes a sniff.
“Well, whaddaya know, Katniss, he can make even those two mangy rabbits smell good. Man’s a genius.”
Peeta grins broad, puffs out his chest, as Katniss says, “Ingrates! Ingrates! The pair of you, I swear to God -”
“Right, mangy rabbit stew’s nearly done, bowls and eating irons would be good, barbarian.”
Katniss gives a long and melodramatic moan as she stands up. While Johanna brings out their mismatched bowls, she lays out the cutlery, helps Peeta over to the table. Then Johanna’s pouring them each out a glass of milk, and Peeta’s dishing out the stew, and the song on the radio changes, and Katniss is singing along, high and pure.
“I’m thinking it’ll be apple time soon, we could brew up some cider, make some pie,” Peeta says.
Katniss sits down at his left, opposite Johanna. She stretches her legs out under the table, knocking their feet together. “Sounds good. That’s why we keep you around, right Johanna?”
“Good in the kitchen and good in bed, what more could we ask?”
Peeta rolls his eyes. When Katniss looks down at her food, his gaze stays on her, and his face softens. Johanna’s caught him with that expression before, sometimes when she wakes in the wee hours and he’s propped up on one elbow, sleepless, watching over Katniss.
Watching over Johanna, too. Sometimes.
The rabbit doesn’t taste half bad. It’s no Capitol banquet, but, fuck, it’s not bad. She’s been a street kid and she’s been a victor and now she’s whatever it is she is, and it’s a damn sight better than anything that's gone before.
She kicks Katniss’s ankle. “Hey.”
Katniss looks up, hair framing her face in long silk curtains. She looks so much younger, so much older, than the girl on fire. “What?”
“This,” Johanna says, waves her fork to indicate Peeta, and Katniss, and the kitchen, and herself. “This, okay?”
Katniss’s smile is small, and crooked, and brilliant. “Okay.”