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“Is that what you think a princess looks like?” Katniss asks as she turns the picture in her hand. It’s drawn on a greasy sheet and faintly smells of cheese, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that Peeta is repurposing food packing material, rather than take this seriously. She didn’t give him a pile of crisp white paper she bartered off one of the traders at the station for nothing.
“It’s just a rough sketch,” he says because he can probably read her thoughts. “If you tell me what it’s for and what you expect, I’ll adjust it.”
She narrows her eyes. He seems innocent enough but that is always the trick. She used to fall for that all the time. Whenever she assumed him to be sincere, he played her like a fiddle. After everything, she still doesn’t know what goes on in his head.
She looks at the sketch. It shows a girl in a dress with long flowing hair. It’s not technically bad. If anything, it reminds her of one of the outfits she wore back when she tried to convince Panem that she was just a girl in love. To some, that probably is what a fairytale princess is supposed to look like. But it’s not the type of princess she has in mind.
She wonders if their view is different because Peeta doesn’t see women like that. Maybe he doesn’t understand. Maybe he never understood because he always just saw her as a dumb girl in a dress.
The problem is that she needs him for this because she can hunt and fish and gather edible plants. But she can’t draw.
“She needs to look stronger,” she says vaguely.
He frowns. “Physically?” He seems to ponder about it for a moment. “Like a warrior?”
She suspects that he meant to say ‘Career’ instead.
“No, like–” She doesn’t even know how to begin describing it. She knows that what he drew is wrong. But she can’t properly picture what she wants either. Not a weak girl, not a career tribute, not anyone she would have seen in real life.
He sighs and takes the sketch back as if that could give him a hint.
She can tell he’s trying and that just makes it worse. It would be easy to refuse a stupid request like that. She would. But he probably feels that he still owes her something. It never ends, this feeling of them being bound by a messed-up sense of guilt.
So she tries to take a step in his direction and says, “She’s from a story I heard as a girl about a princess who runs off into the woods and winds up in a kingdom where summer never ends. As she stays there, she realizes that in a world without winter, she will never grow up. She doesn’t want that, so she goes back.”
It’s embarrassing, said out loud. It doesn’t even take Peeta staring at her as though she’s a confused deer wandering out of the forest to drive that point home.
Before her father died, her mother used to tell her and Prim the story whenever the first leaves started changing color in early fall. It’s the only one she can remember apart from the song her father taught her.
“I want to write it down,” she says because she figures that it’s already too late to back out now. “That’s what I want the picture for. I want to turn it into a book.”
The thing with Johanna is that she tends to hide anything but her flaws. She’s rude. She picks fights. She conveniently forgets chores she doesn’t want to do. She complains about the smallest things and ignores questions she doesn’t feel like answering. To most people, she seems awful at first glance.
Sometimes, when a newcomer sees them together, they throw Katniss that look. The look asking her why she would be with Johanna of all people and that, deep down, she understands. Because they can’t know. They can’t see the person below the surface. The one who habitually seizes liquor bottles from Peeta and who makes everyone’s problems her problem. The one who tried to build Katniss a hunting blind despite not knowing how. The one who easily gets jealous and is afraid of the rain. The one who has a secret stash of books tucked under their bed and who reads all the time, but only when she thinks that no one is watching.
Katniss isn’t an avid reader, so at first, she didn’t see the signs. She thought the occasional book just meant that Johanna was bored. There were novels and encyclopedias and nature guides and cookbooks and poetry collections and a catalog with high-tech farming equipment. There was no pattern. She seemed like a hoarder who grabbed anything printed on bound pages just for the sake of it. Katniss even doubted that Johanna really ever had a proper look at half the stash.
But then, over the months, when the number of random books kept increasing, she slowly realized that she looked at it the wrong way.
Johanna reads about anything because they’re in a place where books are a difficult commodity to come by. She reads whatever she can get her hands on, carried to the district by the settlers who are trying to build a new life. She has to because District 12 is a place without a school or a library. The only way to buy things is by ordering them via the weekly train service and anything but the bare essentials they need to survive and rebuild the place is a luxury.
Katniss didn’t know what to do about that. She could only assume that the hunt for books is to Johanna what her time in District 13 had been like, back when she had used any loophole to leave the stuffy corridors underground and visit the forest above them.
So she tried to find a way to get new books.
The idea to make a book herself came to her a few days ago when the train brought wooden parts for some of the new houses, barrels filled with dried fish, and nothing but an old math book with a ripped spine. It was always like this. She hoped Johanna would be luckier since they bribed different people, and was about to go home.
But then she accidentally witnessed an argument between Finnick, Wade and the trader from District 4 who had accompanied one of the cars.
She walked past them when the trader asked, “What is this? The fisherman and his wife? Do you think I’m the flounder who grants wishes?”
It was an odd comment, so she slowed down a little.
Finnick was perfectly unfazed when he replied. “Hardly. I’m not asking you to give us anything for free. I just want what we pay you for.”
Something about the moment struck her.
“What’s the fisherman and his wife?” she asked when she found Finnick repairing one of his baskets in the kitchen shortly after noon.
“Who?” he asked with his eyes trained on his busy hands.
“The fisherman and his wife. You talked about that to the guy from the train,” she said. It sounded silly, said out loud.
“He tries to cheat us every month,” he said with a shrug. “The whole car smelled rotten. I don’t know who he’s trying to fool here. We’re the last ones on his route, so we always get the leftovers. I’m not going to buy–”
“Not that,” she said before he could continue talking about the delivery. If not for District 4 settlers insisting on their seafood-based diet, they wouldn’t have these issues but she wasn’t going to argue about that. “Is it a story? One with a magical fish?”
He seemed confused when he looked up. “Yeah. It’s a fairytale,” he said. “You don’t have that here?”
The Fisherman and His Wife is about a fisherman who is granted a wish by a fish in return for setting it free, and about his wife making him catch the same fish over and over again because her greed is insatiable. In the end, they lose everything the fish gave them.
It’s a fairytale she never heard of before. Neither did others from outside District 4 she tried to ask about it.
Which meant that Johanna wouldn’t either.
There would be dozens of stories like that, stories from the people of all twelve districts who came as volunteers and are staying as settlers. If she could collect them all, it would probably be enough for a book.
So she decided to involve Peeta, the one person who she felt might understand.
“Like this?” Peeta asks when he pushes the sheet across the kitchen table. She slowly realizes why he didn’t initially use the good paper. He erased and redrew so many lines by now, they’re permanently indented on the surface.
The sketch is completely different from the first one. The princess is still wearing a dress but it looks as if she can run in it and she doesn’t have the same sweetly dazed expression any longer. She seems stubborn enough for the girl who thinks that she can cheat nature.
“Almost,” she says although she admittedly likes it a lot. But it has to be perfect for the book.
Peeta looks exhausted but sounds composed when he asks, “Which part is still bothering you?”
She opens her mouth but then never gets to respond because the backdoor is thrown open. She quickly turns the sheet upside down and pulls it under the table.
“Ugh, you’d think that Evergreen would get the message and leave me alone with her fucking attendance lists for her fucking town meetings but she followed me again when I walked home from the market,” Johanna says as she marches inside and angrily shrugs out of her vest. “At this point, she’s nothing but a stalker. And anyway, do I look like someone who wants to do clerical jobs? I literally told her that–” She doesn’t finish the sentence because she’s caught off guard when she notices them staring at her. “What?”
Katniss quickly looks down and presses the sheet of paper against the underside of the table as if that could make it stick. Peeta is still holding the pencil.
“Am I interrupting a secret meeting?” Johanna asks.
Peeta looks at Katniss who has no good explanation for this and then puts on an apologetic smile. “I wasn’t sure how to approach you about the gunk in the bathroom sink, so I decided to consult her first.”
Johanna immediately scowls. Cleaning is a constant discussion topic in the house and the gunk is usually the result of Johanna spitting her toothpaste into the sink and then not rinsing it off. It’s the perfect distraction because nothing makes her forget what she meant to say or do the way an argument does.
“Is that so?” she asks. “Should I then consult you about how the hell I’m even supposed to find the sink when every surface is covered in Finnick’s beard stubble?”
Peeta gasps in mock offense and before Katniss can get dragged into it, she quickly flees the scene with the sheet pressed to her chest.
It’s difficult to hide things while they all live in such close proximity to each other but she quickly finds ways to get the information she needs while making sure that Johanna doesn’t notice anything. She spent years hunting in secret, so she knows how to be cautious.
She asks around for stories and writes them down on loose sheets of paper she tucks into her boots. It’s the best place she can think of because Johanna believes that all feet stink, so she stays away from other people’s shoes.
When Katniss trades two furs for a notebook bound in leather, however, she figures that she has to find a proper hiding spot. She considers leaving it in a tree hollow but then worries about water damage and entrusts it to Gale instead. Gale’s room in her old house is the last place Johanna would step foot into.
Eventually, the kitchen in that house is also where Peea ends up doing his sketches and watercolor drawings while pretending to be there for the oven. The sketches aren’t always great but as Katniss watches the figures come to life in the notebook, she feels that she is witnessing something more magical than she could have ever imagined. Peeta’s pictures are beautiful and intricate and fill her with a strange sense of sorrow.
She wishes Prim could be here to do the writing. Prim had the prettiest handwriting she had ever seen. Katniss’ is nothing but scrawls in comparison.
It was just supposed to be her project. Involving Peeta couldn’t be helped. Involving Gale seemed safe enough.
But as her collection of stories grows, her circle of accomplices accidentally also gets bigger.
It’s the day she finally decides to properly copy down the first story. She considered having someone else do it, only to realize that the only person with decent handwriting around her is Peeta. She doesn’t want it to become his book. He is already doing enough.
She carefully writes down the title but gets distracted when, across the table, Wade says, “That’s not what a flounder looks like though. Give me that.”
She looks up. Wade looms over the table and wrestles the old cheese wrapping paper and the pencil from Peeta to doodle something.
Katniss can’t see the drawing but Peeta peers at it with polite disapproval, so it can’t be great. “Why are the eyes like that?”
Before Wade can explain anything, Finnick leans over and says, “Flounders camouflage themselves and hide in the sand to ambush their prey, so it makes more sense for the eyes to be on the same side.”
“Right,” Peeta says but seems unhappy with that explanation. “And the fisherman absolutely has to catch a flounder instead of a normal fish.”
“What is he supposed to catch, a tuna?” Wade asks under his breath.
Finnick is more diplomatic. “If it was a fish with eyes on two sides, he maybe wouldn’t have let it talk. But if he caught one for the first time, he maybe got surprised enough that he gave the fish some momentum.”
“Are there fishermen who have never seen a flounder though? They’re not that uncommon,” Wade says. Finnick shoots him a look.
Peeta, meanwhile, ignores the remark. “And then it tells the fisherman that it’s actually an enchanted prince,” he says as if the whole thing doesn’t sound right to him. Katniss can empathize. It’s not even close to being her favorite among the fairytales she collected.
“Yeah but that’s not important to the story,” Finnick says with a shrug. “That’s just why it can talk. It never actually turns back into a prince.”
Peeta sighs and seems resigned as he hovers with the pencil over the sheet. “All right. Two eyes on one side it is then.”
When he finally hands Katniss the finished sketch of the old fisherman bending down to talk to a fish that looks like it was invented by a child, she isn’t sure what to think. It doesn’t improve her image of the fairytale in the least. She can, however, picture Johanna cracking up because of it.
“That’s probably good enough,” she says because she figures that Finnick and Wade would prevent any improvements.
Peeta doesn’t look happy with that. She thought he hated all the revisions she made him do. But in the end, he is probably an even worse perfectionist than she could ever be.
Without him, the whole book wouldn’t be possible. She is supposed to despise that idea but for the first time in years, it feels right to depend on him for something.
Late summer turns into fall and the book slowly takes shape. At first, she was hesitant to fill the pages but with every story she completes, she feels a little more confident. She thinks she can finish it before spring.
But it was probably stupid to assume that Johanna wouldn’t notice a thing.
“Are you hiding something?” she asks when they’re alone in their room one evening.
Katniss is in the middle of peeling herself out of her sweater, so she can’t see her expression.
“Hide what?” she asks and tries to make it sound completely innocent while mentally cursing herself.
She and Peeta came home at the same time because they hadn’t realized how late it had gotten when they had watched Gale and Haymitch argue about the details of a tale about a giant mole living in the mines that neither she nor Peeta had ever heard of. She was in a good mood because she figured Johanna would enjoy stories about monsters more than stories about princesses, so she wasn’t cautious enough.
She thinks she can get out of the moment. She just needs to distract Johanna with something. Maybe pick a fight about the overflowing laundry basket. Maybe complain about any of Johannas’s declared enemies.
But then she turns around, and Johanna searches her gaze with a serious expression.
When Katniss has no explanation to offer, Johanna just says, “Never mind.”
She thinks she can keep the book a secret for a little longer.
When the temperatures start dropping, she figures it’s about time to write down her mother’s story.
She fills the pages around Peeta’s paintings to the light of the low afternoon sun and can convince herself that winter won’t be so bad. Winter means that spring will follow.
But then Johanna snaps.
It’s another careless mistake. Johanna has started helping out in the new district administration building next to the market, so she usually isn’t home in the early afternoon. She leaves after lunch and then comes back when the sun starts setting to complain about Evergreen being an idiot and Gale being an alleged psychopath.
It’s because Katniss is sure that they’re safe that, when Peeta pulls a folded sheet of wrapping paper out of his apron, she opens it right in the kitchen. It’s a sketch of the diamond-covered dragon from District 1.
“It’s–” she says and can’t find the right adjective.
Peeta wipes his hands on his aprons. She isn’t sure if it’s because of flour or sweat. “I never drew a dragon before, so it’s just a test. I can still improve it.”
“Oh,” she says and looks at it. It fills her with a vague sense of fear and awe. “No. I mean, it’s good. It looks like a dragon.”
He lets out a long sigh and dramatically clutches his chest. “That’s honestly a relief. I had to draw it from memory, so if you had told me it’s bad, I wouldn’t have known how to make it any better.”
There’s something familiar about the moment. It reminds her of those months after she and Gale survived the Hunger Games, when Peeta was their neighbor, the guy who always smiled at her and who gave them bread and cake and made her think that, one day, the nightmares might end. She missed it, even if she never allowed herself to acknowledge that. She missed the version of him who didn’t try to kill her, the one she didn’t get confused about.
It’s like she gained something she thought she lost, like the princess in his painting who steps into a snow-covered forest.
“I could have caught you a lizard to study,” she says to dispel the impending awkwardness at that new realization.
He frowns but then cracks a smile. “I’m not sure that’s the same.”
She shrugs and tries to keep a serious expression but feels the corner of her mouth twitching. “Why not? How do you think people came up with the concept of dragons? They probably just saw a big lizard.”
He now full-on laughs. “Lizards can’t fly and spew fire though. Isn’t that the whole point?”
“Maybe they could,” she says. Her voice comes out like a hiccup because she tries not to guffaw. “Maybe there were big lizards who could fly and spew fire.”
“So you’re saying dragons are just–” he says and then suddenly jumps and looks at something behind her.
She immediately wheels around.
It’s Johanna.
Not her usual self but the one people are still scared of. The one who could survive anything. She stands in the door like a harbinger of destruction.
“You having fun?” she asks with a smile. It feels like falling into a frozen lake.
“Johanna,” Katniss says. She realizes that she’s still holding the sketch and hides it behind her back like a child caught stealing.
“We’re just–” Peeta tries to say but Johanna immediately cuts him off.
“You shut up,” she says. She doesn’t raise her voice but it’s still like a sharp blade. “I know you can’t help it. We’ve gone through this. You’ve already done enough with your random fucking acts of kindness, at this point, I have no hope that you ever understand just what the fuck you’re doing. But you–” She now glares at Katniss. “Are you a moron? Are you that fucking delusional? After everything you’ve seen, after that whole fucking drama, you still think he could see you like that?”
Katniss doesn’t understand.
Peeta meanwhile does. He sounds serious when he says, “Johanna, that’s not what’s happening here.”
She scoffs. “To you, it maybe isn’t.”
It takes her entirely too long. But when it hits Katniss, her voice is too loud as she asks, “What? You think I’m in love with him?”
They both flinch.
It’s preposterous.
It’s as if, to Johanna, she never changed. She’s still that girl who falls in love with any guy around her. The girl who got so confused by that image of her that she still isn’t sure if any of the things she felt were real or if she just fooled herself into thinking that her platonic feelings for her best friend and her mentor were more.
This is what lies do. Lies never improve anything. All they do is cause hurt.
So she pulls out the sketch of the dragon and says, “He helped me draw this.”
Johanna refuses to look at the paper, so Katniss walks over and grabs her hand to force her to hold it. Johanna tries to let go but then catches a glimpse and is so confused that she goes limp. “What the–”
Katniss could explain it. She could put it into words. But she’s getting agitated and when she’s agitated she doesn’t trust herself to phrase anything the right way, so she takes Johanna’s free hand and pulls her toward the door. “There’s something I need to show you.”
She manages to walk her halfway across the lane before Johanna snaps out of her stupor and starts struggling. “Show me what? What the fuck?” she yells and tries to stand her ground. They come across people who stop in surprise and seem unsure whether they’re supposed to intervene.
It takes some maneuvering. At one point, she’s afraid that Johanna is going to bite her wrist. But after a lot of struggling, she gets her to the house and up the stairs and into the room where Gale falls out of his bed when she slams the door open and wakes him from his nap.
“What? Him, too?” Johanna asks but seems more confused than angry.
“What’s going on?” Gale asks as he groggily rubs his head.
Katniss ignores them both and walks to the shelf to get the books she wrapped in a cloth. She feels the weight for a moment and then shoves it at Johanna.
“What’s that?” Johanna asks and sounds suspicious but unwraps the cloth when Katniss nods at it. “How does this explain–” She trails off when she flips open the front cover to the first page where Peeta wrote ‘Tales from Panem’ and ‘Collected by Katniss Everdeen’ in beautiful letters that made Katniss feel bad for snapping at him for not consulting her.
“It’s not finished,” she says and feels the heat rising up her face. “It was supposed to be a surprise. Peeta helped me with it. He did the drawings. It’s for you.”
Johanna just stares at the book. She carefully flips open the next page to the picture with the ugly fish. “What the fuck is that?” she mutters under her breath. She looks at the next one, and the next one, and with every page her pace increases a little. She stops at the first picture of the Summer Princess and finally looks up. “You wrote this. For me.” She seems dumbstruck.
“Yeah,” Katniss says awkwardly. “I mean, I wrote it but not really. They aren’t my stories. It says where they’re from under the–”
“Why the fuck would you do something like this?” Johanna asks. It doesn’t sound angry or malicious but Katniss can’t be sure. Johanna has a temper like a volcano.
This is the truly difficult part. Katniss hates confrontations like this. She planned to just hand Johanna the book without a word and then never talk about it again. It was supposed to be one of the many under the bed.
“You like to read, so…” she says and doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.
Johanna doesn’t immediately respond. She carefully closes the book and holds it to her chest. She suddenly looks terrified.
“Look, I didn’t mean to lie about it, I just wanted to…” Katniss says.
“You’re the worst fucking–” Johanna says with a voice so frail that Katniss feels something cracking inside her. “How can you even– What is this shit? You won’t even read a recipe before throwing shit in a pot and then wonder why the fuck the cabbage is overcooked and now you suddenly write a book? Who the fuck are you because I– I just–” She quickly wipes her eye but after the initial tear, there are more. “This is stupid. Fucking sneaking around all day, hanging out with Peeta until late, laughing about lizards, talking to random people. You hate talking to people. I thought you were–”
“I’m sorry,” Katniss says. She carefully comes closer because she doesn’t want to upset her even more and trigger an adverse reaction.
“You better fucking be,” Johanna says and lets out a small sob when Katniss uses her sleeve to wipe the tears off her cheek.
Katniss lightly pulls her close and Johanna, still clutching the book, uses her free hand to claw into the back of Katniss' sweater like a hawk and buries her face in her shoulder.
Katniss thinks they can stay like this for a bit, at least until Johanna calms down, but then Gale says, “So I think I better leave but you’re blocking the door.”
Katniss winces and tries to move a little to the side to let him through.
Johanna, meanwhile, groans against her collarbone. Her voice is still weak but she’s amazingly quick at channeling her anger when she glares at him and asks, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you absolutely have to ruin every single day? Can’t you discreetly climb out of the window like a decent human being?”
Gale looks a little exasperated but he, too, probably figured out that Johanna rarely means what she says. “Didn’t think of that,” he says with a shrug and stalks off.
The book was supposed to be a present. That was the only reason why Katniss didn’t tell Johanna about it.
But now that Johanna knows it’s hers, it also slowly dawns on Katniss what it would have meant to involve her early on.
“We have to talk about this fish,” Johanna says as she accusingly holds up the first story and waves the book at Peeta as they’re preparing dinner. “Were you trying to sabotage her or did you have a stroke when you drew this?”
Peeta, in the middle of cutting a loaf, throws a glance at the page but doesn’t let that interrupt him. “You have to talk to Finnick about that.”
“What does Finnick have to do with it?” she asks in annoyance but is careful not to drop the book when she has to move out of the way as he gets a small basket for the sliced bread.
Finnick, like that ghost from the story from District 2 who appears when its name is chanted, chooses that exact moment to enter the kitchen. When he notices everyone gawking at him, he barely flinches.
He has a quick look at Johanna’s foul expression and the page she’s pointing at and immediately says, “Don’t tell me I have to explain to you what a flounder is. It’s supposed to look like that.”