Title: Counterpoint

Summary: Rebuilding after a war.

Characters/Pairings: Gale/Johanna.

Rating: R

Disclaimer: Suzanne Collins. A quote somewhere.

Warnings: Unhealthy amounts of angst. Fluffyfluffyfluff. Switching POVs. Purple.

~.~

She cries all the time.

A justified reaction, and yet Gale Hawthorne cannot help but turn away from the screen, something very much like disgust jarred in his teeth. Beside him, Katniss makes a small noise of frustration as Johanna Mason's interview dissolves yet again in a flurry of tears. That girl has been crying since she was reaped.

It pissed him off.

~.~

Gale had always been infuriated by the meekness in others, the quiet submissions and proffered weaknesses, all the different pretenses people in the districts used to get by. He had watched, all through his life, scores of neighbors, in their own way, acting complicit to Capitol injustice. They watched and did nothing, perpetuated their own ignorance through averted ears and eyes, carried on in silent obedience as generation after generation, the Capitol held life and liberty in a chokehold, let starvation reign in their homes and injustice in their streets, condemned swathes of children to brutal deaths, hundreds more to maimed lives.

The anger is a slow burn in his bones, slowly-unfurling poison in his blood, erupting in flash whenever he imagined himself in the arena – or Katniss, or Rory, Vick, Posy – hunted for sport, whenever he imagined himself a future sank in the coal mines, a fire smothered, trading hard labor for a pittance, denied the dream of anything else.

It maddened that people could be happy with their meager lot in the world, a space that seemed to him more claustrophobic than the mines. He wanted to shake them. How could they live not being angry, not being enraged with the theft of all they could be, when the emotion burns like starfire, so powerfully in him he feels he could set his arrows afire with it, so destructively that he only lets Katniss glimse it in modulated doses – angry soliloquys, disdain at Madge Undersee's life of comfort, cheap digs at Effie Trinket's capitol accent.

Petty things, he knows, and certainly hypocritical unless he himself did something about the inequity – impossible, unless he could stand the immediate retribution to his family, until the opportunity breaks like a sun over the dark horizon. Gale will wait in static for that augured time, outrage in check, ready to fight, and when it comes, when rebellion sparks, he knows he will not stop, a man of inertia caught in the momentum of war, a hailstorm after his name.

In any case, the world is still in the lull of unstable peace, and the Games are cruising slowly. Johanna Mason, cowardice manifest, keeps crying for people to save her. Crying for the Capitol! Her pathetic behavior alienates him to the point that, when the Careers finally bear down on her trail, having tired of mercy and down to the final eight, Gale barely feels the usual surge of pity, drowned beneath tepid wash of contempt.

~.~

Johanna Mason realizes the exact extent of the risk she took when, after five days and seventeen cannon blasts and endless tears and a constant watch on the sky, no silver parachutes fall.

Her mentor chose the boy.

Or at least that's what Johanna tells herself, nevermind that she'd seen his face already hung among stars in the night, a bloodbath kill. The betrayal would sting less, somehow, than the knowledge that, throughout all of Panem, no one would take a chance to keep her alive.

Well, doesn't that just blow.

It seems to her that she was born specifically to be disliked and betrayed. Johanna doesn't like to think on it, but here and now, with the arena allayed still by the creeping night, the swamp weaving out its nighttime melody of swirling water and cold fog and sharp insect chirps, and death wrapping tendrils upon her heels, the mind is like quicksand, letting nothing go.

She remembers parents that failed her, left her on a doorstep and got themselves killed for trying to run, expendable figures in the algebra of their society. An community shelter with caretakers that, while strictly nice and kept her fed most of the time, chose to see the inappropriateness of her spirit, rather than a enormity of it, furrowed brows and worried eyes shaped so unlike her own. She remembers friendship, or something approximating it, a flight of girls sharing cold nights on a windowsill, sleepovers which pretty much ended when they spread rumors about crazy, outspoken Johanna Mason for all the world to laugh at. She remembers names and first loves and stars and bosses, grizzled old lumberjacks living in isolation showing her to swing an axe, how to listen for trees, how to knock those giants out of the sky. She remembers being disliked by everyone, the sensation of unfairness that trilled in her castaway blood.

She remembers a lifetime of trying to fill a void that endlessly emptied whatever she put in, in the hope if getting something in return, a balance, of the eventual disappointment that stripped her heart bare of compassion and inured her body to hardship.

She remembers a sort of invasive hurt she cannot name, an emotion too young yet to solidify into resentment, whenever the face of betrayal grinned at her, as though saying hey, long time no see, didja miss me, until all she could do is wearily grin back. Hey.

~.~

The Games are down to two and Johanna Mason, with her eyes clear and her axe steady and powerful and her talent unimaginably star-kissed, blazes through televisions screens across Panem like a meteor. A magnificent end, an incredible upset, and her standing blood-drenched over the fallen tribute from District 2, face feral and glowing with an incandescent light like a creature out of myths, the starry sky waving behind her compact body like a banner. Trumpets sound an anthem of victory, Johanna Mason looks up, shakily raises a hand, grins.

~.~

The Capitol liked their Games, liked them plenty, but not when they were the ones being played. Bets on the Games spiralled downhill with the unexpected coup and too many important people lost.

President Snow insists Johanna reimburse them. These people who already had everything and more, maggots mindless with consumption, living in luxurious rot, their city with endless projections of materialism in their sky: restaurants all-you-can-eat, advertisement of glowing-gold skin, trailers and action shots of the Games.

Fools, the lot of them, idiotic miserable fools Johanna could outthink and outsmart at twenty paces, and yet, for twelve days, her life had been subject to their machinations. She owes them – absolutely, indisputably, in all sense of the word – nothing. Johanna looks to the President in his unnervingly pale eyes and flatly refuses.

His face twists with foreboding, and Johanna feels the onset of gathering storm.

~.~

She refuses and, as a consequence, everyone dies. It eclipses being left behind and being misunderstood and being betrayed because, before, she never really knew the extent of what it meant to have someone. Until then, until they were all gone. Everyone she ever loved, everyone who ever – maybe – belonged to her, everyone who she belonged – maybe – to. Suffocated in a forest fire. Crushed by a tree. Committed suicide. Torn apart by predators in the wood. Framed for crime they did not commit and hanged. Everyone gone.

Snow forces her to watch the tapes, waiting for her to bow beneath the responsibility of their deaths. Her mentor's bones shrivelling in a fire, the shelter razed to the ground, woodchips like bullets burying in all her baby brothers' neck, muttations chasing after her first boyfriend in the ravine just outside the District, tearing him apart. Reminding her that in the end, that's what people are, that's what she is, a layer of skin over flesh over bone, easily broken, easily burnt.

~.~

Afterwards, the forest.

Johanna takes long hikes into the woods, walks on and on without thinking beneath the thick leafy canopy of trees and breathes in their troubled solitude, the perennial smell of woodsap – this the Capitol cannot take away, cannot undo centuries of creation beneath the bark – until the night comes with its comforting hollows, bringing the dark and biting coldness. She goes deeper into its arm day after day, and comes back covered in leaves and pine needles and questions burning in her eyes.

Johanna couldn't know the why of life, couldn't see the point of its unfolding patterns, how it could be so cruel and unfair that the human race is better off snuffed out entirely, how it could still want to exist despite the overwhelming hatred and the utter lack of sense and justice and liberty, how it could break your heart, let love take you by the hand and to the edge and just let go.

Just. Let. Go.

She decides she doesn't want to know, doesn't care about, the answers. There is nothing in her heart, none of the debilitating emotion and none of the tangible want, she wants none of it. She is wood hewn dry and turned to stone, nothing to lose, alone and alive.

Alive because she paid a too exorbitant price for living. Alive because it's the worst retaliation she can manage against Snow, live and laugh and be loud. Alive because she's Johanna Mason and she's strong and she doesn't do sob stories.

~.~

The 74th Games come and go. The pattern of the world changes, careens, ripples, becomes enmeshed in fire.

~.~

Johanna Mason was actually as close to Gloss and Cashmere – who had impeccable fashion sense – as to Finnick or Haymitch. That doesn't stop her from planting an axe in Cashmere's face. There is no regret, there is no reluctance; she owes them nothing, nothing significant in scope, this they should've understood with heartbreaking clarity.

Victors, after all, are foremost among the people in the world who understand the consuming quality of debt, particularly the debt you owe to the dead, the shameful handprint it leaves on the soul: you can kill, you can live however you want, you can go to waste and try to burn that imaginary ledger of names with whatever poison of Lethe, but you will never stop owing. It ratchets up so high that the only way to repay is by singleminded devotion to a single cause, no looking away no matter how painful the sight. Cecelia's children. Finnick's Annie. Peeta's Katniss. Katniss's sister. Haymitch's to ghosts. Johanna to, well, being a jerk.

The strategist in her factors this in and the sum of it is that the Quarter Quell – Blight dead, Wiress down, Finnick on her side, the Mockingjay and her load safe, Enobaria alive, Brutus bloodthirsty – is too close to call. Whoa.

~.~

She's lived through a childhood bad enough to embed abandonment issues in anyone else. a swamp arena with a poisonous silver fog interwoven with illusions and screams and insect muttations without a single help from the outside. Suffered complete emotional dismemberment. Spent years in the staggering Capitol spotlight, dancing to the Capitol's violent song, featured on magazine covers, threatened with silky voices. Forced through a second reaping, went into a second Games without a hope of coming out alive. Dragged a maimed man along a far shoreline through a rain of blood, thick and warm and maddening. Stopped caring whether anyone thought her worth loving, worth helping.

That is why, when the dust clears from where they were thrown by starbursts of lightning, when the rebel Hovercraft leaves her standing on the bloodstained beach, silently disappearing into a dark speck in the sky, she's surprised that it still hurts.

~.~

What can be said about the revolution?

That there were incredibly large sacrifices. That there were good men, and men with something to protect, lost men and men without fault, and evil men, and fever-bright children, and none of them walked away clean. That lives flickered out like lights on a winter night. That the will to fight had to be gleaned from the spirit, and that's what the Mockingjay was for, a pool of pure, golden bravery to dip into when one was bled dry of it. That there were nightlock pills and bomb-riddled corpses and water shortages and never enough morphling to numb. That a white flag is merely the symbolic end of a war, and even as the flag waves, repercussions unfold unceasing, unending, craters and Icarus deaths in their wake. That even in District Thirteen, miles away from the probes and completely, Johanna still wakes with electricity sizzling along her skin. That Primrose Everdeen shouldn't have died. That it shouldn't be talked about in the first place.

~.~

To the Capitol, and to life Johanna knows, there is no such thing as playing fair. So, face shuttered, eyes unyielding, she says why not and votes to have another Hunger Games. She wants to burn the entire city down. She wants everyone dead. She want to raze all the debts, tilt the blind scales of justice to the side of the districts, exact retribution for every scar on her skin.

She votes yes and knows in the same moment that, even if it were carried out, if each and every one of the Capitol children were forced into an arena to be hunted and drowned and burned, it offers no comfort. It doesn't balance out her afflictions, it adds to them.

~.~

It's raining when Gale and Johanna arrive in District Two, moisture blue in the air and crashing silver sheets that make Johanna gnash her teeth in exasperation. The train pulls into the station – rebuilt but yet still carried reminders of war: a charred slice of pavement, the acrid sulphuric whisper of bombs, bullet holes – and together, they make a mad dash for the nearest shelter, anonymous in long black raincoats, heavy knapsacks like makeshift umbrellas over their heads.

It takes awhile before they get to the house, an old, isolated structure coincidentally farther into the woods than most. It was the only log cabin in a city of endless metal and stone. Ceilings soaring up two stories high to exposed roof beams, an off-the-path shooting range, a roof that promises a crisp view of the city skyline. They hadn't planned on sharing living space until it became inevitable that they'd fight over it.

A representative for the new government, a District 2 native, shows them the added security features Plutarch Heavensbee insisted on, the rooms, the telephone, not quite succeeding in hiding the mix of awe and fear in her eyes. Gale does not blame her; Johanna Mason, even when more decent than he remembers her being, and smiling to boot, is a disconcerting presence.

~.~

When the news had made its rounds of him going to District 2, Johanna had gone as well – a decision that was typically her: impulsive and a little reckless and brilliant in hindsight.

District 2 had been the Capitol stronghold for more than enough years to breed Capitol loyalty within certain fractions in the populace and was held together only by an armistice as weak as the paper it was written on. It was direly in need of leaders with clear vision to counter the uneasy stability, and also public figures to relate to. The culling of the victors had left a large void of figureheads to rally around after the Mockingjay burned herself out, and Enobaria certainly wasn't doing the rebel cause much favor.

~.~

The first few days they do not even see each other, caught up in long days of strategizing restoration plans and military aid dispatches, early mornings doing propos and late nights speechifying about the revolution, clarifying the murk of victory for a people still unused to it. Johanna leaves before they start filming the segments on heroes and martyrs – often interchangeable – long ropes of names and deeds that leave a bitter, sardonic taste in her mouth. Gale stays, says what need to be said in a tightly-caged voice, panders, gives more three-fingered salutes than he should've, empathic maybe, comforting perhaps. But Johanna is a victor and, despite understanding in theory what people need to hear from their celebrities, understands better the need for pain to be kept private, under lock and key, one's own.

~.~

When they do see each other, they do not talk very much, not at first, not when the things that are surface on their minds are better left unspoken: the war, the hunger games, the gashes and the wide spaces they left. They do not talk about the fact that they are yet hollow beings, and Gale is grateful.

This, at least, he and Johanna agree on: they are not criers, they are doers.

And while in another life he might have wanted to take revenge for every iniquity and every slur and every abuse, in this one want is a foreign thing, and he's had quite enough of hatred, of blame. This precarious peace was all he needed, the capability to have a desire and take it unfettered, the freedom to live up to one's potential loosed upon the next generation.

He instead works the strangling grief and leftover rage into the infrastructure of the house, pours himself into reconstruction as though it could cancel out the destruction the same hands have caused. Strike a balance, somehow. It equates in his mind that if he built this home and this district well enough to stand, the feeling of exile would vanish; that if he helped enough people, the suffocating feelings of wickedness and guilt would find absolution.

Johanna Mason watches him with an unreadable expression for a couple of hours before shrugging and joining in.

~.~

The house is old – ancient – and far in the gentle decline to disrepair. While a commission of Capitol engineers and district stonemasons lay out a new network of roads, stabilize the electrical grids, strip buildings to their bones to build anew, Gale and Johanna work on entire weekends on their own house: fixing the roof, slapping fresh layers to pain to the dividers, clean out the musty unused rooms, haul the debris out.

"I adore that we're playing house, don't you?" Johanna asks him one day, kneeling on the damp soil, turning over soil for a garden. "We should get a dog. Of course, we could always capture a mockingjay?"

"Why did you come here anyway?" he asks, sharper than he intended. "We both know it wasn't to help humanity."

"Followed you," Johanna grins, a cruel parabola, and thinks about it. "I don't know. Nothing to go home to, nothing else to do... true, I could always work public relations in the Capitol, but I don't think it would work, y'know? The excitement's here." A one-shoulder shrug in the general direction of the Nut. "Guns and planes. Strategy. I've been good at that."

Gale remembers a crying girl suddenly turning deadly, triumphing over so many favorites. He pauses to observe her, slight frame crooked over upturned soil, spade in hand, slightly appalled at the realization that they could do something as refreshingly ordinary as this, after bloodbaths and bombs. The dewy sunshine reflects off her hair and, for a moment, Johanna Mason looks as achingly young as he feels. "I see."

"Besides, I've been missing Enobaria."

He doesn't quite hide his snort of laughter.

~.~

Johanna watches Gale Hawthorne too. His hair, dark as coal, sticks out in little tuffs over skin dewed with sweat. His body is tall and trim, would probably always be a little thin, the vertebra curved and prominent as he reaches up to saw another branch off the surrounding trees. Her eyes trace the unbroken line of his jaw, flick to his face, clean and honest like litmus, tincted with concentration. Definitely gawgeous.

It was a shame that he seemed to forget it, in the haze of his vain resolve to purge the hollowness out of him through working and moving until he was exhausted enough to crash, a ridiculous notion of the mathematics of atonement. Yesterday, he'd come in late and rain-slicked from a hunt. Uncharacteristically reckless. Unbelievably stupid.

She had let it slide, in no position to judge, but – just saying – it's not the man who put himself on the forefront of the rebellion and won a revolution.

~.~

"I don't do life stories, Hawthorne," Johanna had once growled after a particularly bad, particularly rainy day as she dug into the still-steaming stew Gale prepared for himself.

Johanna Mason doesn't do life stories but like everyone else, she leaves enough pieces of herself in mannerisms, breakfast conversations and shared workspaces (and screaming nightmares). In gradual increments, details scattered about and in between the crossfire of words, Gale gleans that they are alike in a number of horrible ways.

That they find value in the same traits – self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, competitiveness, the ballsy sort of bravery that evades understanding. That they similarly acknowledge – though not respect, on Johanna's part – the importance of privacy. That they both have a recurring fixation with food and security. That they shared a unalterable need for wide open spaces and competence.

~.~

He's surprised to find that she has an eye for beauty. It shows when they start furnishing the house: oceanic glass covers and sage-green candlesticks on tables, sleek furniture in warm wooden colors to complement the gray slate floors, soft green curtains from Seven. High-grade kitchen appliances from Three. A wicked set of silver from One.

"It's my money and I'm a brat," Johanna Mason had smirked. "Feel free to move out if you don't like it."

The mattresses from Three are the most comfortable he's ever slept on, his closets are stacked with clothes like Mayor Undersee might once have worn, and the refrigerator is always kept well-stocked for even the most workaholic of men. There are power tools for their perusal and weapons pilfered from the district's armory. Johanna Mason can make all the jokes about nesting she wants, but there is none more appreciative than him.

~.~

On good evenings, they share a balcony and a cup of – and this stuff is so good, Johanna might kill for it – black coffee, maps and plans and sample building materials before them in a deluge of paper.

Gale starts reading up on Capitol literature – the old ones, the ones without heartless Machevellian bullshit in them justifying the maiming of entire populations – and his paltry education grows by leaps and bounds. He had fought the enemy blindly, unknowing of its machinations and its thoughts and its history that tunneled humanity to its present existence; it was time he knew its real face.

He narrates them to her wry attention, running a hand over the expanse of sky as though sweeping away the night with the ignorance – history and political science, the subtle clockwork of democracy, bills of human rights, natural sciences – feeling only slightly cheated that he had been left so untrained for so long.

~.~

The next months dawn with blue-sky mornings and cold windy evenings and mountains of work.

Gale is often up with the sun, going through the same rounds required of him when he was still newly drafted in Thirteen's army, circuiting through the trees and practicing motions. He is, essentially, a man of action rather than words. His is what people would call a fancy job, council meetings and publicity work, but Johanna sees him everyday walking the district, studying the topography and available materials, consorting with the district people, getting up close and personal, ensuring that they get what they want. These things he does that are above the call of duty and currency. Benevolent, kind, and just a little infuriating.

And still, not everyone appreciates it. There are ingrates, and though she is not in a position to comment, she does anyway.

"Wow," she scoffs at him over dinner. "You saved people, won one war and now you're doing this? You dumbass, do you even know when to stop giving? Seriously, not your business."

It says a lot about their relationship that Gale doesn't even blink. "I'm the one who has to live with it. My business."

"Fine, go ahead, it's a free country."

This garners a smile.

"Yeah, yeah, it is," Gale smiles wanly before sobering. "You know, Coin once told me that leadership – it's like planting trees – wait, don't interrupt – planting trees under whose shade you'll never sit, whose wood you'll never use, which can fall on you. I'm just finding that out."

~.~

And then there are people who hate him.

~.~

It is a hefty part of their responsibility to stop stirrings of unrest before they quicken into a tide the sweep the peace away. During the rebellion, more than a thousand bullets had whistled and more than a hundred bombs had dropped, the lean monster of starvation had picked off a great many of the rest. And yet there are still people, factions with varying loyalties and differing agendas, their hatred unbridled, their anger unsatisfied by peace, their view of the new government weak, ready to restart the vicious cycle.

Gale leaves these discussions with crescent-shaped marks on his hands where he dug his nails in frustration; the idea that were those willing to die to stir up destruction is sickening.

Johanna has enough of a convoluted view of humans to expect the unfolding events – anonymous threats to Paylor, to Capitol citizens, to the Mockingjay – a grim perception that too often works. The sessions are almost a throwback to her life before the war, battlelines steepled in stark black and white, mostly black.

The night President Paylor is almost assassinated, Plutarch Heavensbee is called in to brief the patchwork military on possible situations, and even Haymitch Abernathy flies in for a brief while to represent the victors. There is a national broadcast of Peeta Mellark addressing exactly why he voted against a Capitol Games; they tape him against a familiar meadow that make Gale's teeth ache with longing.

The world is still an open wound, subtly infected, painfully sensitive, needing to be bled out before it begins the slow healing.

~.~

One day, while the dawn sky is still as gray as the iron ores of the district, they're called to a mass grave not far from the outskirts of the District. They arrive to see groups of men in the chilly air hauling dry dirty bones from behind large piles of earth to large mechanized carts.

Among the diggers is man who looks like Thread.

Gale swallows, long and hard, and closes his eyes like something hurts. Johanna beside him squeezes his shoulder in a weak modicum of comfort. She's heard this story before – abridged from histrionics, okay, okay – put it together with perceptive quickness. She dourly offers a lethal consolation.

His body remembers twenty lashes and a map of red welts crisscrossing his back hot as acid, his hands fist at his sides, and his mouth is slow to respond to her raised eyebrows.

"It's not his fault," He bites out tightly. "And Thread is dead besides." It is one of those remarks which told too much about a person: that he was one who did his best to understand when it came to things of tenuous morality, that he was trying hard not to lose himself again.

"Breezy philosophy you've got there, Martyr Hawthorne," Johanna tips him a smile like a perfectly executed salute, before dragging him to a cart and toeing one of the grimy skulls with her boot. "You think they've been here long?"

Laboratory results from Five divulge the biological secrets of the bones: war prisoners, abducted families of suspected rebels, children... what seemed to be kids who once would've gone on to become Career tributes. The official report reads – some as recent as of last year – and Johanna threatens to be sick.

~.~

In between, Gale teaches her how to hunt, how to lay a trap, how to nock an arrow into a makeshift and let it soar to further than she could see.

Eventually, with well-placed criticism and more effective vulgarities, she starts hitting targets well enough to follow him hiking in the woods. She had sometimes joined him during his brisk-paced scouring of the town, mostly to make insightful comments in the most scathing way possible, and her slender frame has no trouble keeping up with his predatory gait.

Maples and spruce trees tower above them, the colorful array of leaves mottling the wispy morning sunlight. Somewhere beyond, a mockingjay trills and rivers surge a bubbling melody, but their treads are silent upon the leafy carpet.

Gale, the idiot huntsman, breaks the requisite silence. "You know, I've always been a little in awe of you."

Johanna looks sharply at him for a moment, smirks, and picks a fight because he was being nice.

"Careful, Hawthorne, of what you say to people who have your back."

~.~

In return, she shows him how to build a world out of wood, shows him all the tricks the victors had shown her, shows him the perfect cliff-diving position embezzled from Finnick Odair. During the day, they learn from the finest military commanders and guerilla fighters ways to pull insurgency plans open like unspooling a ball of string. Nights she takes him dancing, takes him drinking, tells him to get wasted only on her watch, can't have your famous mug plastered all over the screens now, Haymitch might take offense.

Gale has friends, many of them like him, drafted young men across the districts, impromptu revolutionaries, but for the most enjoyable company, he really needn't look no further than his own house.

~.~

One evening, Gale comes home to find her staring morosely at Cashmere and Gloss dolls in their Victory attire, lemon yellow and royal blue pieces of silk, crafted in magnificent detail. Rage seems to shimmer off her skin as she, delicate bones flickering in a fast deliberate motion, trashes the dolls.

"Did you know," She asks him. "there used to be cocktails named after us tributes? Bloody Mason. Foxfizz. Girl On Fire was the hottest thing in the Capitol for a while."

"Fuck." The thing Gale likes about Johanna Mason is that he never has to censor himself around her. He sits down beside her, suddenly boneless.

"Yeah," Her eyes involuntarily fill with tears even as she extends him a distorted smile that crumbles with the memory behind it. "No one was safe. That's the thing. We – we all thought it was over. I hate false security, if you can even call it that."

Gale remembers the siblings: golden-haired careers with bejeweled eyes and white sponsor-stealing smiles, perfect indestructible mirrors of each others. He doesn't remember Johanna ever shown with them during the Quell, except pre-mortem, but then he may had been too busy plotting routes for food distribution with Madge. She might have been acquainted with them, he doesn't know – Johanna hasn't broken silence on that part of her life yet.

He gives her an awkward one-armed hug as though they were friends.

~.~

They start talking. As they work, as they build, words come like spilled paint. Steady streams of peripheral conversation punctuated with lapses into silence. Gale tells her about District 12, the claustrophobic spaces of his childhood, hunting and trading. His roaming attempts to the unmapped country of the Wilds – which, as far as he could tell, was endless fields and water. His family, the burst of pride whenever he was able to provide for them. The good times of the past. Sometimes Johanna pitches in a memory like something old dredged up – the first time she learned to wield an axe, her prodigious learning curve with it, a delicious feast during someone else's victory tour. Some memories are with a bitter streak, some without.

They talk about the abortion of governance in Panem when they think they know adequately enough about the structural latticework of society for the conversation to be practical rather than foolish. Words like deprivation and prostitution and poverty and hunger come up laced with venom until it seems like the only way they knew to talk was to fight.

They talk about tactics and plots and game plan. Gale funnels his ideas into a far-off future like he was some kind of twisted visionary while Johanna doesn't – just – doesn't. She sees the future like she sees through trees, in thin careless slices that won't matter until she's there.

The only thing Gale doesn't talk about is how the present hurts. The loss of Katniss like something in his bloodstream, unintrusive but omnipresent. But he feels like he doesn't even have the right to bring it up, not when things like heroics and sacrifices were better left unsung, too painful or sacred to touch.

(The same way no one is allowed to pick over someone else's time in the Games, a occasional comment maybe, but discussion was what only Capitol citizens used to do.)

~.~

On the eve of the first snowfall, they go on an icy hike to the highest point of the Nut where the bright sunlight shatters like diamond against the pristine snow. Johanna shivers and complains about the cold, about the wind, about the treacherous path they took like he was about to get them killed. Gale smiles, tells her she can be more obnoxious than that.

Back home, they dry themselves in front of the huge stone fireplace that had been witness to so many inanities. The fire, neither dark nor destructive, casts soft circles on the floor an walls. Gale runs a hand over a long cut sustained from the climb down the icy crag. Johanna hands him a hot chocolate, the taste of it pure and rich, and laughs at his bewildered, inquisitive face.

"What?" She sits cross-legged in front of him, her own mug in her hands, splays her fingers over his and squeezes briefly. "Don't you know? We're friends."

She proceeds to daub the wound with antiseptic and none too gently either. He hisses against the sharp ice-blue sting. "Bitch."

"Charmer," she retorts.

Their firelit reflections on the black glass of the windows show two people superbly comfortable together. A frisson of sadness and sentimentality wells in her. This, this should be how they are.

Friends. Comrades. Castaways. Kindred spirits. Two people defined by living, all senses engaged, forging through with determination and savage wit. Not survivors, not really, fighters. The fact that they could manage a friendship despite all atrocities attest to the fact.

They fall asleep there, sprawled, each other's arms a strange refuge. He smells like fresh water, earth and the woods, her woods, the only place where she's ever felt safe.

~.~

District Seven smells so strongly of the woods that he wonders how Johanna could've survived Thirteen, its sterile scent like an olfactory blindness.

"There's no family, so don't worry about meeting them," Johanna says. For half an hour, they've been trekking through a forest of charred trees and scorched paths. But as she led them deeper, more trees spring up like pillars from the ground, giants that seemed to pulse with lifetimes.

Further on, they stop at a clearing. "I used to vent here."

The sight is a punch to the gut. Fallen trees, haphazardly cut, jagged splinters and torn grain. Ripped trunks on the forest floor, covered lightly with fuzzy green moss and fungi. Deep in the woods where Johanna Mason desposited her pain into the bark, hacked the unimaginable pain into the wood. Scars on the earth, wounds too big for her body to handle alone. A trick of light and he sees her, swinging her axe over and over into the trunk, grunting with exhaustion, staggering beneath the silver weight, destroying a place where she'd felt safe.

He could very well imagine her here even younger, lighter than air, chasing fireflies through the same trees, looking to the stars and wondering, happy and unknowing, about where life would take her. Lulled into a false security. But happy too.

Abrasive, cynical Johanna Mason had been happy here.

The fact slots in his mind and he realizes, all this time, it seems that he'd been filling her in in his mind, filing away color and light and a thousand lingering details on sly Johanna Mason and the woman beneath that: a collection of memories associated with peace, restoration, home, trust, friendship, a new life and other carefully-built things.

He sees her then, sunlight falling around her like a gold gauzy curtain, feels something strong and tender unfurling where the heart must lie, something sad, something undoing. He moves closer, gray eyes smoky, twines fingers in her hair, seemingly unable to breathe. The endless storm in him roars, stills, calms.

He kisses her before she could finish saying Damn it, Hawth–

It's a kiss with loneliness. A liquid warmth that was wholly bone-melting. Slow, undertoned with starfire, and more meaningful that any he's ever had with girls from the Seam, women from the town, or Katniss Everdeen. That moment, the burdens and the guilt and the grief and the anger melt away, adrift and forgotten in an alcohol haze.

~.~

Johanna has had enough of invasive emotion. Of love and the gaping wide emptiness it left. But it feel so impossibly nice, his insistent mouth, nice enough to forgive the sudden loss of her bearings, being drawn back from the dark forest of her soul into dreams of open sunlit fields, no canopy of leaves and thorny branches to obscure the wide sky.

But she's had enough. Johanna takes it as it is, no strings, no blind spots.

~.~

As they make plans, they make love. It's rough and unpracticed at first, without finesse, but slowly they learn each other's bodies. Sometimes she pushes him on his back, sometimes she's on hers. Sometimes they sleep in his room, sometimes in hers. Sometimes they make love like a mercy killing, quick and desperate and sicksweet. Sometimes she snaps up from nightmares of swamp monsters and electricity, sometimes he cries in his sleep for a district razed to ashes. Sometimes they don't sleep at all, but talk through the night, comfortably naked.

"The Banging Tree, huh? We should go there."

"I said Hanging Tree. Hanging."

It's the first in a long while that he remembers going to sleep laughing.

~.~

Unlike during hunting, he doesn't ever slip Katniss between his lips, never uses her for that. It makes Johanna feel bad – and thus, irritated – to keep expecting it.

~.~

Sometimes he leaves her at dawn, with a kiss to wake her up. She doesn't tell him it's unnecessary, that she's awake, as attuned to his touch as bowstring. He says where he's going, asking if she wanted to tag along, hunting or running or an early start at the black market.

"What are you telling me for?" Johanna would ask, lying pliant and shapeless on his bed and her thousand-thread-count sheets. "I don't own you."

Gale would shrug, smile with teeth. "Sorry – it's just me being, you know, normal."

"Mmhmm."

~.~

Their relationship is worryingly music without structure, charged with a delirium almost like morphling, smooth as ice on the surface and just as thin. Johanna navigates it with baby steps, rather furiously, it would crack open underneath if she made more solid ones. Sex is sex, but friendship is something that is hard to come by, especially at the Johanna Mason station, and she would be a fool to lose his.

~.~

When Gale is promoted, his first thought is of Johanna. When the new position requires him to spend a couple of weeks in Eleven to observe and learn food distribution lines, learns the bitter feuds over it, he thinks of what she might think of the vastly-improved conditions there. When he checks in Three to check factory operations and visit Beetee, he tells the inventor about her (Beetee is surprised).

Mostly, he worries.

District Two, more than the others, is in the throes of unrest. On many occasions, calls had come in the middle of the night – news of anonymous attacks, sirens blaring in the background – asking for aid, calling for taping another emergency propos, telling them to lock down.

There are been direct threats, with both of them very high profile and him – to be very honest – being politically groomed. There had been vandalism that left Johanna flushed red and riproaring mad. They'd never affected him to the point of nightmares before, but he has dreams now. Of security failing during one of the rolling blackouts. Of them being shot at and her going limp in his arms.

(He'd never worried a fraction as much during either of her two sojourns in the Arenas, or during her stint in torture, electrical shocks, spine bending backwards so unnaturally it should break.)

~.~

The next time fate – or whatever – comes to call, it doesn't so much betray as wrongfoots her. It was just as well that Hawthorne was away, in Five, because she lets out a litany of broken swearwords. She staggers out the bathroom and begins to pace the hallway like an angry cat, reality a solid weight within her. She cordons clammy panicked thoughts behind experience-honed steel and analyzes the situation clinically.

On the one hand, the war is over, there are no more Games. Anything has to better than the Starvation Generation.

On the other, she doesn't wanta kid. She doesn't love anyone, can't possibly raise a baby, can't even care for it. And Gale. He doesn't – doesn't want –

A cold lump knots in her throat, rapidly souring to anger. Of course, of course. That bastard. Gale Hawthorne was never a clear shot, but he always, always, always built traps better than anyone. Well, this one ensnared both of them.

Johanna takes a deep breath, sits down, affixes her gaze to the cloudy sky. It's Gale. It's his child. Months and moments and histories and extenuating circumstances all proved that, despite his name, he was a crazy steadfast man, coolheaded under the apocalypse, her friend. She could rely on him. And even though it felt like ripping innards out, she could do that.

~.~

Before Johanna could tell him though, there is a war.

~.~

Or almost.

District Eight, bereft of its Victors and still living in dirty tenements, had seen three factories go up in smoke. Six dead, several more injured. Black smoke trails to the sky where machines and bolts of cloth burn in piles. A bloody banner rises up declaring usurpation of the new government, is forcefully taken down, methodically addressed.

~.~

The Mockingjay is called to send out one last broadcast. Even as Katniss Everdeen sits in the new military center of District 2, Peeta and Haymitch and Gale and Johanna there to siphon conviction into her words, her voice remains mechanical, her eyes lost. Katniss, who'd never wanted a revolution until it closed in over her head, brave and broken.

After the final shooting – we'll get Beetee to edit it, do a voice over, grumbles Haymitch – Gale approaches Katniss with a sad-eyed face that wasn't him, Johanna thinks. He wears the kind of frown that wasn't his at all, too still, too calculated to be lighter than the emotion within his skin – clear longing. He was never the type to wear his heart on his sleeve, never with her, never with anyone else.

But then, this was Katniss Everdeen and maybe, if Gale thought it would do her good, he'd carve the organ right out of his chest. He unthinkingly gives too much of himself to Katniss, always, ladles out everything and nothing left.

Johanna swallows, reminds herself that she doesn't own him. (She doesn't own anybody.)

"Katniss," he implores, and the word falls from his lips like a two-syllable cage of regret, turbulent sadness in his eyes, so at odds with his clean-cut face, expensive suit.

"Gale," Katniss whispers and, for a moment, there is something there, a spark, before it sinks into a pool of despair and rage. She starts screeching.

Peeta moves forward but Johanna stops him with a white-knuckled grip.

"I know what I did, Katniss!" Gale now shouts. "We were at war!"

~.~

We were at war.

But how do you tell a broken and beloved girl that we were at war meant weighing the fate of one little girl you love against a thousand others you don't and make the terrible, ugly choice and pay for it. That he would do it again, sacrifice what he can, if it meant the war would end sooner, that one would be killed to save a thousand was a bargain. Martyr Hawthorne, that's right, who robbed everyone he loved because of a twisted anger that leeched compassion like marrow from the bone.

"Children, Gale! Prim! It could've been Posy!"

He thinks of Posy whom he hasn't seen in a long time, small quiet Posy, who trusted him to keep them all safe, and he can't justify it anymore. His face crumples.

"I'm sorry." He repeats it, repeats it until Katniss breaks down and sobs against him, broken reflections of each other, two Seam kids just holding on fast.

~.~

Johanna notices it now, though she should've seen it every time he suggested doing something life-threatening, every time he threw himself at his work, all the signs were there: it was the whitewater regret choking the life from his skin. All his natural recklessness kept under and let out in sporadic suicidal bursts, punishing himself, being bayed down by ghosts, carrying him into their graves, stifling him.

Hello. We have a candidate for the Victor's club, she thinks dully.

~.~

Johanna plunges right into one of the most ill-timed confrontations of her life. (But then she'd always done it that way: rushed the Career, spat at Snow, jumped headlong into the revolution.)

"Someone ought to tell you that the war is over," she says, after the District Twelve contingent leaves. "Move on. Let go of your hoard of angst."

He looks away from her, from the accusatory heaviness of her gaze, to the window. Outside is a periwinkle sky shot with red. The mountainous horizon looks as though set on fire.

He rounds on her with eyes stormier than a tornado sky. "Easier said than done."

Her eyes narrow into slits. "You'd do it again, you know, you'd use the bombs again if you needed to. I know you. I even understand why you'd lie. Gosh, if you told her the truth, Katniss just might fly over the edge." She could tell him too that there was nothing gentle about deceit like this, like a knife under silk, all sharp jagged edges beneath the softness.

Gale mutters something don't talk like you understand which fills her with a terrible, inexplicable anger.

"I'd forgotten you were spoken for," She hisses. "You really should get over that too, by the way. It's hard to see a man I respect reduced to groveling. You are not pretty on your knees, Hawthorne."

He is pale beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, and his words, softly spoken, unfurl like a poison fog. "You think you're an authority on loss now? You move on easy, Johanna, because you've got nothing left and you don't let anything in there."

Malice adds silk to her voice. "I don't let anything in here?"

"You don't," Then his eyes are on her, alight like he's just understood something. "You're still the girl in the Games, deceiving everyone around, a shell. That's why nobody would ever stay for you."

That one more thing they have in common: a knack for finding the weak spot. This time she can't stop the blood drain from her face. The flinch is there and gone as quick, a flash of silver, winking beneath her shuttered face.

It seems to break Gale out of his destructive haze. "Fuck, I didn't mean – I'm sorry – "

Johanna Mason had never been known for her benevolence. She was known to attack when attacked, and attack where it hurts, where to strike the killer blow.

"You're sorry?" She croons, then screams. "Sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry, story of your life! You don't go with her to the Games, you're sorry! You don't save everyone, you're sorry! You bang Prim Everdeen, you're sorry! Here lies Gale Hawthorne, he was sorry! Always Sorry! You're a fuckup."

A silence. His hand jerks, like a slap cut short. "Get out."

"Gale – "

The contemptuous curve of his mouth doesn't soften. "Get the fuck out and go home."

Johanna bristles. "I'm not leaving, you – "

He leaves abruptly, walks away and out the door with only the clothes upon his back and it's then she realizes he's become someone to lose. It's another betrayal, somehow deeper and more meaningful than before. Nothing she could rely on. Still, she should've been used to it by now.

Instead, she curls in on herself like she hadn't done since before being reaped, when there still was a ghost of comfort available to her, when there was still a chance of someone, alive, stroking her hair and her cheeks, it's okay, it's okay, love you, love you. But after, when what little she had were slaughtered, hanged, taken, she hadn't begged for anyone's comfort.

She doesn't go after him.

~.~

The night comes like a slow blindness. Gale doesn't come back; Johanna doesn't wait.

Affection was only a habit after all and she was a master at getting over it. The body does not remember emotion, whatever little of it she'd invited in in the first place, and she could still breathe, she could still move, she could still think. That's all she needed to survive.

The next morning she walks the woods around the Nut, observes the small erosions and this loud mountainous country, thinks about what he said.

Deceiving. A shell. Well, she could at least admit that was true. Two things never brought up were sacrifice and suffering, how much you could lose, how much you could live through. He should try out her life and see if he comes out functional. Deceiving and emptying herself out are the only ways Johanna knows to survive in the arena of the mind. Because the mind remembers, all the sorrow and hurt of being uprooted. The mind remembers.

Johanna ruminates on that for a while, chews on self-pity and irritation at herself for even bringing it up. When all the blood starts rushing to her head, she leans against a small pine. The tree is beautiful and young, perhaps as old as her; it was rooted on the wasteland of the Nut, witness perhaps to untold atrocities, smoke and sulfur and evil.

Yet here it was, existing, pulsing with peaceful energy.

~.~

He sees Johanna Mason at the station with her short hair in a knot and wearing sunglasses, carting a huge bag of belongings. Her gaze whips to him, contemptuous, pins him to the walls.

District 4, she says finally, cocking her head like bracing for a fight. A glare surely behind the tinted lenses. They're trying to take Finnick's baby away from Annie. Yeah, right. Over my dead body.

I'm going too – look, we –

Nuh-uh. Johanna pushes past him. You'll stay here even if I have to stake you to the walls. I'll be back for my , why do they have to live near water,

Gale tells himself, against the unexpected rush of panic, that it was for the best. They were radioactive together apparently, counting off moments like seconds to destruction.

~.~

The doctors have yet to declare Annie Odair fit for parenting – never would, Johanna knows, she knows what therapy is capable of and what the Capitol did to Annie Cresta and sadly, they're incongruent – and Annie is granted custody of Fry only after much talking, threats, and running interference from District 12. Johanna holds the tiny baby with eyes like blue-green seaglass and remembers Finnick, who had love like a sickness in his blood, a permanent madness to mirror his wife's, remembers debt and the recurring quality of it, made real in another generation to live for.

He feels so real, doesn't he feel real, Annie had asked the first night, which had raised all kinds of alarms in Johanna's head. But Annie had held the baby so protectively, so tenderly – you remember Daddy, don't you Fry – that Johanna could choose, without feeling any guilt whatsoever, leaving the kid with his lunatic, delusional mother over robbing him of another parent.

In the next room, Annie bakes seaweed bread and chops fish with a deftness that spoke volumes of her days as a Career – Oh, Johanna, you haven't seen knives until you see my girl this year – so Johanna starts off a rather brutally hopeful fairytale about a sweet but forgetful fish who just kept swimming, swimming, swimming – Annie, of course.

~.~

District 4 mornings are unlike the rest of them, so sublimely bright and colorful: lights playing in a sky grey as bone. Seagulls fly in high arching loops. Waves singing a maritime melody like laughter. The fishermen on the beach give her a wide berth, until about a week later, when it becomes clear to them that she's as pathetically soft as Annie when it came to harmless, well-intentioned folk like them. Johanna watches them at work, dragging nets and boats and iceboxes, their wives weaving and drying. She watches their kids playing in the surf and foam.

She remembers Fry Odair, feels her own. A generation that doesn't have to fear for their lives, doesn't have to fight. They would grow up free to learn and play sports and choose. Finnick had put his faith in this, faith and pound of flesh and everything else. She imagines it was worth it, to him.

It suddenly occurs to her what had bothered her about the tree growing on the Nut, squeezing out every last grain of nutrient from the bloodied soil. Johanna knows trees like she knows herself and a tree like that should've grown thorns, venomous fruit. That it continued to live without barriers – something had to have been worth that fight too.

Johanna tries to remember the last thing she'd found worth fighting for, not against. Her first Games. Her life. She bided her time, waited and worried, ultimately decided to stop being a coward, maybe she'd win, maybe she could finally discover what victorious feels like. Even now, the memory of despair – having that hope shot down – chokes her.

~.~

One never really knows they wear a mask until they find the surface of it, until losing it felt like skinning flesh, shedding skeleton. Johanna Mason, afraid to run after happiness just because she didn't think she could catch it, ever. She shouldn't scare like that, not in this life, and certainly not when the war was over. Smacked around, bruised and battered, she'll go down fighting just the same, and that was better, maybe.

~.~

Gale missed her: the cracks, the tart cleverness, the arms snaking around him, the terrifying presence.

Go home, he told her in inertial fury; he was a fool. Go home where?

They roasted her District, they killed everyone she had.

Johanna Mason. Blazing like a meteor under the dome of the arena, firelit, yet by now, he should've known better. Meteors were bits of dead star, freewheeling rock, frighteningly alone in its infinite orbit. He should've realized it when, while she thought him sleeping, it became her habit to mark a X on his chest, right over his heart. How she'd bought things like she didn't have anything else. Behind the forceful brave – so, so brave he couldn't imagine – woman was a little girl with eternally wide eyes with her heart bled open too many times.

He's lucky, Gale realizes, that she was the woman he'd grown up with after the war. Honed himself against like a slow healing. Learned from. Taught to. He thinks of all the things he'd discovered and associated with her, surprised at how much he'd attributed to her. Feels regret – but it's warmer, more urgent than the cold, crushing freeze after Prim's death.

Gale knows what he needs to do. Johanna was right; the war is over. Katniss, he thinks, and finally lets her go like cauterizing a wound. A new feeling pervades him, warm and sad. It feels like forgiveness; he won't lose himself this time.

~.~

Some things aren't as fragile as they appear: whiny crying tributes, the human spirit, free will, bonds. Despite harsh words, their bond is still there, the camaraderie and affection. Delicate indestructible. Johanna watches him come out of the house and thinks it amazing that she could have seen pure evil, so often over the years, and still remember how to forgive.

She sets forward. An uncertain smile, bereft of armory, knocked on at the last minute.

~.~

He sees her beneath the arbor, the sun slipping like honey on her sunburnt skin, lighting her dark hair to the shade of maple leaves in the fall. Earthy, exhilarating Johanna Mason. Suddenly, the lingering traces of the girl he's loved for almost forever is swept away to an ache that will fade with time, leaves him clean, free.

"Wow, um, so I was already planning to go, thought I'd be the stronger one, for once," Gale runs a hand through his hair.

She gives him a look that says what the hell is that gibberish you're spouting.

"Okay, cards on the table," He takes a deep breath. "Don't go to District Four, please. No, you can go, but you have to stay too. I'd give anything to have you stay."

"I'm not – "

"I mean stay. With me. Together." His eyes are earnest, fiery still, but chaotic no longer, sea-steady. "I know enough that you don't like it. I can't guarantee that I won't leave you too – this world, it's dangerous. But, god help me, I'll do everything for that not to happen."

Her eyes are wide, flicking sharply like waiting for a catch.

"I mean it," Gale grounds out, taking her hand. She almost flinches again at the contact. Humans are cells and liquid and weakness, yes, but that moment, it seemed somehow stronger than any other force in the universe. Someone who would never let go of her, never let her fall alone. Too good to be true, always too good to be true.

"I... understand..." Johanna gulps audibly. This time. Essential, for once in her life, to say the right thing. Do or die. "That Katniss is a fundamental part of your life."

"You are too," Gale ducks his head, smiles. "I'm doomed to love surly girls."

Love. Love.

~.~

No one else, ever, in the history of the world, had claimed her, like this, for their own.

~.~

A balance. A counterpoint. Something worth the fight and all the hurt. Her reward. The endgame that repays all the debts of the past to her. Happiness engulfs her, flooding her senses; a light she didn't know existed vibrates in her skin.

It seemed these past months, she was making her way out the forest of her heart, her sanctuary and prison both. Until now, she had not been out of the woods yet, but there were fewer and fewer trees, as she chased that slice of light she had always been a little afraid of.

"I'm not perfect," Gale continues; he sounds almost angry to admit it.

"...right. No one said anything about perfect. What am I, your warden?" Johanna takes time to admire the maples and the shafts of light turning orange with the sunset. "Cards on the table, Hawthorne? I'm staying. And I'm pregnant."

"I hope," Gale finally intones after a stunned silence. "She inherits your sunny disposition."

And Johanna's out, the forest set behind her, nothing more than spectres to be forgotten.

Someone once told her – Finnick, maybe, or even Annie, just that the words seemed to smell of salt – that the world broke your heart again and again and again until it stayed open. Maybe that's the case. Maybe that's the point.

~.~

~.~

~.~

Notes: Reaction to this fic is this is why I should stick to minor personality-less characters. :-/