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She’d gotten the call yesterday, from some local government officials looking for someone skilled enough to take a half-dead tree down from the top without damaging the roof of their brand-new office. Johanna had just laughed and offered a: “Fuck you, it’s three degrees outside,” but Gale had later informed her that she’d cussed out his favorite co-worker, so she had begrudgingly called back and agreed to do it.
It was tall, probably sixty to eighty feet; and it was old. She was guessing at least half a century. While it was a damn shame, her initial assessment had found enough diseased limbs to justify its future as her personal firewood. At this point in her life, she had too much money to know what to do with, but Paylor’s administration insisted upon generosity at all levels. So she’d be hauling some of the wood home to her shop and her splitting stump.
Unfortunately, indecision due to bureaucratic incompetence had landed her in a position to top and remove a tree in the dead of winter— at temperatures that most sane people (even the ones from Seven) would not climb in.
Luckily, Johanna had never been one for caution. She’d headed out the door with her saw and her ballistic nylon pants and climbing spurs— which was how she found herself halfway into the stratosphere, roped into the crown of frozen branches, dodging falling snow that she jostled with her footfalls on the trunk.
When she’d first seen it, she’d huffed a bitter laugh. It was a larch, the tree her middle name was derived from. It was in some long-forgotten language, created by the first inhabitants of this land. Her mother had always made sure to point her namesake out to her.
“They drop their needles when it gets cold. But they always come back,” she’d said often. “They’re different. Strong, but flexible. Resilient. Good, useful trees.”
The thought had crossed her mind frequently in the years after she’d been punished for refusing to give herself over to the Capitol’s perversions.
They weren’t coming back, no matter how resilient they had all been in life. Her stubborn older brother and mother, who people said she got her attitude from. Her kind father, who had always been the cautious one. Her carpenter grandfather, who had taught her how to tap the trees for sap to boil down, how to swing an axe, how to split firewood, and how to build anything she could ever need. Her first girlfriend, from a sawyer family— a beautiful, soft young woman with green eyes that still haunted her sleep over fifteen years later. Blight, a solid mentor who could’ve been a good friend, but she’d squandered that for fear of killing him, too. Finnick, who had been the only person she could talk to about the rest. Sometimes, she even found herself including Nuts in the list of personal casualties she left her in her wake.
The rough surface of the rope in her hands forced Johanna’s focus, holding her to the trunk of the enormous larch. She’d gotten nearly all the way up the tree, cutting limbs as she ascended. She had to check where things were landing, though. If she dropped the crown onto the roof of Paylor’s brand-new Justice Building, there would probably government hell to pay.
She’d been a climber since she was thirteen, doing extra work for neighbors who could afford it and local officials just to get by. She never got tired of the views, although these days, her age was beginning to show. In this weather, she was fighting not only the thinness of the air, but also her own hands. Peeta often joked about her having joint pain at the ripe age of thirty-two, but when that happened, she usually just called him a spoiled baker brat and told him to ask Katniss how her ribs were before hanging up on him just to piss him off.
Besides, she’d switched to full-time carpentry almost a decade ago after she’d been recruited to help with rebuilding efforts. At the time, she’d been pissed about it— why did she have to do anything useful? She could just build herself a cabin and drink until she died like Haymitch. But then the people from Two had gotten Haymitch on the phone, and the way he’d chewed her out reminded her so much of her disappointed father from years ago, when she’d constantly been climbing too high or playing too rough or raising her voice when she wasn’t supposed to. And she’d reluctantly agreed to get up and do something with her life, if only to have an indoor job.
However, she had apparently built a lasting reputation in Seven years ago as the best arborist on this side of the mountains. So she settled for going up only when the people needed a complex job done or a tree dropped near a structure. And the government of New Panem had been so generous when they’d offered to pay her exorbitantly for this job. She rolled her eyes. Tamarack to take home and work with would be good enough. There needed to be a class on how to interact with Victors, because so far this administration was doing a piss-poor job of asking her for favors correctly.
She notched the top few feet of the crown, then looked down for a comfortable space to drop it. In her childhood, they would have had a crew on the ground for this, but she preferred to work alone lately. The younger generation of climbers and rope handlers lacked the work ethic one could only gain from the ever-looming threat of death by Peacekeeper if the job wasn’t done right. It was cynical, maybe even mean, but it was true.
Johanna pushed the crown away from her, listening for the telltale creaking that meant she had seconds to adjust. Once she heard it, she gave it one last shove straight out in front of her, and watched as the neatly-arranged branches tumbled fifty feet to the ground, recoiling lightly as they landed in the snow between the Justice Building and the offices next to it.
She took her time on her way down, sawing the trunk into sections small enough that she could drop them between the roofs without consequence. She made good time, reaching the bottom in a couple hours and plopping down on the stump. She powered off the saw, loaded a few of the bigger logs into her truck, and called out for the landscapers at the Justice Building to come handle the rest before she took off for a mundane drive home.
She had not, however, anticipated the jagged streaks of color in her peripheral to be greeting her at the door when she got there. Fuck. Gale wouldn’t be back from the office for a couple hours and now she was stuck in the middle of an attack on her own. Hopefully she didn’t puke.
She’d been diagnosed with a string of various neurological quirks, starting a few months after the war ended. Three doctors later, and her medical team had concluded that once her stress levels lowered enough to pull her out of survival mode, her body had responded to the electrical trauma by doing… all sorts of weird shit. Some days it was nerve pain, other days it was debilitating headaches that wiped out her vision and made her vomit, sometimes it was just drowning in fatigue, and it was never any sort of predictable.
Johanna blinked a few times, hoping maybe it was just snow blindness. When the colorful patterns refused to disappear, she set her things down, sloughed off her work coat, and dragged herself to the cabinet where she kept her pills, groaning. She took two, then collapsed onto her (admittedly sort of shitty) couch.
Luckily, the exhaustion of taking down the tree in subzero temperatures was seeping into her bones anyway, so she figured she would just succumb to sleep before the headache hit. Maybe when she woke up her vision would be normal again. She pulled a thick wool blanket up to her neck and rolled over to face the back of the couch, trying to block out as much light as possible. Cocooned in her blanket, she focused on the warmth soothing her freezing, aching body until she slipped blissfully into unconsciousness.
She could tell she’d been out several hours when she’d woken up and rolled over to discover inky blackness through the window. The lamp on the side table was on though, so she must have slept through Gale coming in. Her eyes were still sensitive, but as she blinked, she noticed a vase of perfectly sun-dried arctic lupines and a glass of whiskey on the side table as well.
She barked a laugh as she sat up. The flowers must’ve been preserved from one of his hunting excursions in the mountain meadows last summer. As a general rule, she hated flowers. He’d found out that she tolerated arctic lupines because they reminded her of home during their time working together in Two several years ago, and apparently he hadn’t let it go.
She picked up the glass of whiskey and held it under her nose, inhaling. Maple. Also a beloved District Seven staple. Johanna knew it was a terrible idea to drink on a migraine day, but when they’d first started working together in Two, she’d told Gale what she told everybody about her terrible ideas: “My body’s already fucked up from the torture anyway. How much worse can it get?” And he’d indulged her from there on out. Maybe he was just angry he didn’t get a monopoly on angst so he was letting her self-destruct, she’d thought at the time.
They’d run into each other a couple of years after the war, working on the rebuilding efforts. She’d been asked to consult on some construction project Plutarch had going on for the new government, and she didn’t know anyone in the district. They’d had a couple of drinks after work one Friday, and for the next several years were fuck buddies when it was convenient. The banter was easy, the sex was good, and the feelings were uncomplicated… until they weren’t, at which point Gale had confronted her and she had run to Seven.
Apparently by that point, he’d worked out her defenses because he followed her there. She was pissed and sent him packing for Twelve one week in. And then she’d gotten a call from Peeta, who had very politely told her that her options were basically “stay pissed or die alone.” Okay, maybe he’d been more diplomatic about it, but she’d gotten the gist. So she had reluctantly dialed first Aurelius, then Gale. She’d even dialed Katniss out of some sense of misplaced guilt, but her mouth went on autopilot when Katniss had answered and she’d opened with: “Your cousin can fuck.”
Katniss told her to call back when she was stable.
Predictably, she and Gale took months to get their shit together sufficiently, despite her regular therapy. And his.
Mostly, she had been terrified to learn that she had someone who cared about her again. There had been a lot of what her head doctor called ‘unpacking’ and ‘unlearning,’ then she had eventually surprised herself. Because when she’d finally come down just enough to think about it rationally, she realized that she did, in fact, give a shit about Gale. Just what Peeta and Haymitch had accused her of.
They weren’t insufferably glued at the hip like Katniss and Peeta, but they had found that their individual lives fit together well. Gale could work remotely from anywhere, and they’d even taken up cohabitation in Seven a few years back. It was nice to be home. It was nice to not have to be alone anymore.
She was taking slow sips of her maple whiskey when she heard the soft rustling of Gale’s quiet hunter’s tread padding down the hallway. Wordlessly, he sat down next to her on the couch and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to her temple.
“I’m not gonna break, you know.” Some days she thought she’d never be able to stop reminding him.
“I know. I just like taking care of you since it pisses you off,” he snickered, grinning.
She punched him in the shoulder halfheartedly in response, smiling despite herself.
Gale reached over to her other side and grabbed the plaid blanket she’d left on the couch when she sat up. Carefully, almost reverently, he wrapped it around her shoulders, settling his arm around them too.
“You alright, J?”
He’d fondly nicknamed her the a few months into their casual… thing. She found she liked it better than most people’s names for her. The only person who had ever called her something other than her full first name was her mother, who had called her “Jo.” She was so relieved that he’d picked something different.
She nodded slowly. “Why?”
“You left a trail of sawdust in the kitchen a mile long and you reek of cedar.”
“Larch.”
“Oh, whatever. What’s going on? I could have come home if you’d called.”
“Just my brain’s fucked up wiring tripping itself again.”
“Migraine?”
She nodded wordlessly.
“Mm.” He hummed in acknowledgment. “Thought so. You don’t sleep like that.”
He was right. Neither of them were sound sleepers; she normally would have been roused by the door when he came in from work.
“I cleaned up the sawdust. Something set you off?”
“Nothing, for once. I just overdid it outside.”
“Why the hell did you go out in this? Isn’t your arthritis acting up?” He laughed out of shock rather than genuine amusement.
“Well, yeah, dumbass, but someone’s government buddies needed a tree topped out in January.”
“I didn’t…” he sighed, running his hands over his face. “Why’d they ask you to do it now?! I thought they’d contract you for the spring or something.”
She shrugged. “Was a good excuse to get out of the house though. Good workout, too.”
“You need help.”
“I was like, thirty feet from your office. You didn’t hear the saw?”
“Why would I ever think you’d be in a fifty foot half-dead tree when it’s negative twenty outside? I thought that was the construction across the street.”
“You’re the one who told me I needed to be nicer to our gracious new government. Also, it was three. Only negative if you factor in the wind.”
He closed his eyes, sighing. “Whatever. Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better,” she told him. “Thanks for the drink.”
“Mhm.” He leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
The warmth of the sweet whiskey was blooming in her chest now, and she quietly passed the glass to Gale. He brought it to his lips before setting it down on the side table again. Noticing the considerable remnants of ice, she picked it up again and brought the cool glass to her forehead. It helped a little with the residual pain.
“Did you take your pills?” Gale asked, fixing her with that sweet, genuine look that used to scare the shit out of her.
“Yeah. Quit worrying about me.” She bumped her knee against his in admonishment.
“Someone’s gotta do it.”
“Shut up.” She rolled her eyes and flipped him off in mock indignation. She felt a twinge of pain when her eyebrows knit together. “My head’s getting hot again.”
“Do you want me to get you some real ice?”
“No. I was just gonna go stick my head out the door. Less work.”
“Well, it is negative twenty. Hear it’s great weather for tree work.”
“Fuck off, Hawthorne.”
“I’ve lived here three winters now and I can’t remember one where the ambient temperature stayed above ten and the snowfall below a foot.”
“Not my fault coal miners aren’t built cold-resistant.”
“Not my fault everyone in Seven has antifreeze for blood!” She heard him call from the sofa as she strode towards the door.
She turned the knob and sighed, closing her eyes as the relief of the cold air washed over her aching head. Blinking, she squinted at the sky and was surprised to find that it was clear.
There was a faint glow on the horizon as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She leaned back over the threshold and grabbed the flannel shirt she kept by the door.
“Gale!” She called out, hoping he hadn’t gone far.
He appeared almost too quickly, breathing heavily. Sometimes she forgot that she had the privilege of being worried over again.
“Sorry,” she said, beckoning for him to follow her to the door. “I just wanted to show you something. This is the best part of home.”
He stepped out the door, following her. “What am I supposed to be seeing? I’m freezing.”
“Give your eyes a minute to adjust.”
“What is that?”
“Polar lights.”
“Huh?”
“Just watch.”
Johanna looped her arm through his and pulled him out onto the steps of the cabin porch with her. The ease they shared was still something foreign to her after years.
When they had first met in Two, he’d asked if she’d want to have lunch a few days a week since they were old friends. He was sarcastic, obviously, but she had nevertheless informed him that she had “coworkers and a dick appointment, not friends,” then immediately inquired about which category he wanted to be a part of. He’d chosen ‘coworker,’ but of course there’d been some overlap. She was prickly, not blind.
She directed his attention towards the brightening greenish glow low in the sky. It was kicking up now, the purples and blues starting to appear in gentle, fluttering curtains above the soft ribbon of emerald.
“Why’s the sky purple?” He laughed incredulously.
She snorted at his question. “The sun. It throws off some kind of particles and they bounce off the atmosphere and do that. We didn’t learn much outside of lumber at school, but that was one thing I never forgot.”
“Is it dangerous?”
She laughed loudly at that. “No. Used to watch them with my granddad when I was little,” she told him, looking off into the lights.
“They’re very pretty.”
Johanna stood quietly for a few moments, taking in the now-bright rays of purple swaying gently across the sky as if they were some sort of cosmic stand of spruce. The freezing, desolate tundra that was Seven in winter was transformed into stunning beauty, the fresh snow illuminated in gentle green and purple as it bounced back the light.
“Shit,” Gale whispered in astonishment, interrupting her thoughts.
“I thought you needed an official District Seven initiation. They’ve always been my favorite thing about home. When I came back here, after… at first it was the only thing I could stand about being here. Too many ghosts in everything else.”
“Well, it’s very like you.”
“Hm?”
“Delighting in watching the sky burn.”
She turned to face him so she could roll her eyes directly at him. “Whatever. I’m not that much of an asshole. Despite the rumors, I actually do have a will to live.”
“Whatever you say.” He held his hands up, feigning innocence. They lapsed into comfortable silence for a few moments. “It really is beautiful, though.”
Johanna felt maudlin, the bittersweet feeling of being home threatening to sweep her under. It hadn’t been a place she wanted to be since before she won the Games. She felt her eyes stinging against her will. She squeezed them shut and hoped Gale wouldn’t notice.
Unfortunately, he was used to her bullshit. He threaded his fingers through hers silently, acutely aware of her tendency to get pissed off when comforted. She relented, letting her arm slide around his waist and her head fall to his side. She craned her neck up to face him.
“You ‘kay?” He whispered.
“Mhm,” she hummed. “Just thinking.”
“You do that?”
She laughed softly.
“Yeah. Sometimes.”
“What about?”
“Just… I don’t feel like total shit anymore,” she smiled.
“Well… I’m glad you only feel semi-shit.” He dropped to kiss the top of her head, then pulled her closer as they stared out at the dancing lights.
Home.