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It’s unfair that Katniss still gets to be so pretty after everything. And she’s not even pretty in some annoying, sweet, girlish way. No, she doesn’t have chubby cheeks and a round face and big, brown doe-eyes and positively delicate hands the way Johanna does. No, no, fate was just cruel enough to give Katniss dagger-sharp cheekbones and feline-slanted eyes and a perfect Cupid’s-bow mouth and slender, powerful fingers with long, elegant nailbeds.
Call Johanna stupid, but she’s jealous that Katniss, despite everything, is still so fucking pretty. Even her hair, that thick, black, glossy hair that she lost so much of to the Gamemakers’ fog, is beautiful.
Johanna doesn’t even have hair anymore, and the Capitol was none-too-gentle in shaving it off. There are still bald patches of scar tissue, nicks and scrapes on her scalp from where they’d dug the clippers into her skin, that may never grow hair again.
Even the chubby cheeks that so many of Snow’s comrades and confidantes had loved, the sweet, innocent roundness to Johanna’s face, is gone. The skin there is thin and sallow and nearly sagging, almost giving her jowls.
Whatever. It’s not like Johanna has any need to be pretty, not the way The Mockingjay does. Johanna could slice off her own nose if she wanted to, and nobody could get angry at her.
That…might not be such a bad idea, actually. It could get her more morphling.
Or more than likely nothing at all, since apparently District 13’s made up of a bunch of stingy fucking bastards, but the thought is nice.
…it’s still not fair that Katniss gets to be pretty. So unfair.
“You know, Katniss,” Johanna asks one night as they dress for bed, “I’ve got a question that’s been bugging me since the interview night before the Quell.”
Katniss sighs, all angry and put-upon, and turns around. She’s naked, so Johanna gets a full-frontal view of everything Katniss has to offer; the faint edges of her ribs, the crests of her hips, her itty-bitty waist that so many girls in the Capitol had gushed over, the scars from two Games that not even Thirteen could get rid of, the lines of lean muscle in her torso.
She could be just Johanna’s type. That is, if Johanna gave enough of a shit to have a type.
“What is it, Johanna?”
“Were you actually knocked up?”
Katniss scowls. She’s only seventeen or eighteen, but she looks so much older whenever Johanna needles her. It’s fun.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business, Johanna.”
“Maybe not, but can you blame a girl for asking?”
“Yes.”
Johanna sticks her tongue out at Katniss. She’s feeling childish and maybe a little jealous tonight, and wants to poke at all of Katniss’s many, many soft spots. “Come on, Katniss. Even if you weren’t actually pregnant, I’ve gotta know, did you ever actually do anything with loverboy?”
“Don’t call him that!” Katniss snaps, and throws her shirt at Johanna in anger. “It’s not your business. Now leave me alone.”
“So you did sleep with him,” Johanna says, tossing the shirt back at Katniss. “Was it any good?”
“I didn’t say-”
“You didn’t have to,” Johanna cuts Katniss off, “your face turns the exact color of cherry wood when you’re embarrassed, and you only get that embarrassed when people talk about sex.”
“I hate you.”
“Yeah, I know,” Johanna smiles as Katniss angrily puts on her pajamas. “But you still didn’t answer my question. I know ‘officially’ you had a miscarriage, but did you really?”
Katniss is quiet for a long moment, and Johanna’s almost worried she’s pushed too far, that Katniss is going to strangle her or break her nose or something, but she finally starts speaking in a low, hushed tone, like she’s sharing a secret.
“If you look at my medical records,” she says mechanically, “I had a first-trimester miscarriage. I was…approximately ten to twelve weeks pregnant when I suffered a…spontaneous abortion,” Katniss spits the words, face screwing up in pain, “of my fetus. That’s what’s on my medical records. That’s what happened. Officially.”
“Officially,” Johanna says slowly, “you had a miscarriage.”
“If you ask me, it never happened.”
“If I ask you.”
“And you asked me, didn’t you?”
Ah. This, Johanna can understand. Deny, deny, deny.
“I did, didn’t I?” Johanna sighs, and allows herself to flop back onto her bed. She stares up at the ceiling and contemplates.
Johanna needs a bath. She needed a bath three weeks ago. She’s not going to take one.
“You know, Katniss,” she starts, stops, thinks, starts again, “I was… ‘officially’ not pregnant once.”
“What?”
“I never suffered a miscarriage either.” Technically, Johanna didn’t have a miscarriage. She took that fancy Capitol medicine that made her cramp and bleed and puke something awful after one of Snow’s lackeys got her knocked up when she was eighteen, but it’s close enough, right? “I wasn’t pregnant.”
“I thought you liked women.”
“I do. Snow didn’t care. He just cared how much money I could make him.”
“I thought you didn’t love anyone.”
“I don’t. Not anymore.” Johanna learned that lesson in the hardest way possible. Maybe that makes her selfish, but she doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, so it doesn’t matter.
“I see,” Katniss breathes, then, “how…how do you deal with the loneliness?”
“I fill my waking hours with thoughts of the many ways I could kill the president.”
Johanna can’t see her, but she knows Katniss is smiling at that. This is one of a handful of things they agree on. “Got any creative ones?”
“Strangle him with his own intestines. Plant an axe in his skull. Kick him in the balls and just keep on kicking until I’ve kicked him in half. I could go on and on and on.”
Katniss laughs when she talks. “Oh, come on, Johanna, you can do better than that.”
Johanna laughs, too, and surprises herself when she realizes it’s genuine. Fuck, has Katniss Everdeen, the skinny little girl from the coal district with a bow in her hands and a kiss on her lips, won her over, too? Just like the rest of Panem?
Is this what it’s like to have a little sister who you really, really can’t stand but who keeps on impressing you anyway?
“Feed him his own spleen. Chop off bits of him and toss them to his own mutts. Burn him alive on a pile of logs. They used to do that, you know, Katniss? Like, a million years ago, even before North America? We learned it in District 7, that people used to be burned alive for their crimes all those years ago.”
“Well, we have our ancestors to thank for your creativity.”
Johanna laughs again, and Katniss joins her, and for a moment, there is peace. It’s foreign, even here in Thirteen where Johanna knows she’s…relatively safe, and something squirms in Johanna’s chest.
“You know, Katniss, I’m really glad you were never actually pregnant.”
“Oh, yeah? Why is that?” Katniss’s voice still carries a note of her laughter, and Johanna knows this is the time to strike. It’s going to end one of two ways, and Johanna’s fine with either.
“Because you’re still so young. So pretty.”
“How would me being pregnant have changed that?” Katniss sounds genuinely confused, and Johanna drops the bomb.
“Your boobs, Katniss. Breastfeeding destroys them, and yours are your best feature. It’d be a shame to ruin them.”
Silence stretches between them for an uncomfortably long time before Katniss starts laughing again. It’s a different laugh than before, raucous and loud and pained, like she’s sobbing and cackling all at once. It takes a moment for Katniss to muffle it, with her hands or maybe a pillow, Johanna isn’t sure, but that doesn’t help anything. She’s still probably waking their neighbors, and maybe even the dead down in the morgue waiting to be cremated, but at least she’s laughing, and laughing is easier than thinking about things, and probably better for her heart than being angry like Johanna is.
“God, I hate you,” Katniss finally manages once she pulls herself together, “I hate you so much.”
“What? I’m just being honest. I wish I had boobs like yours. After being starved for so long, it’s like mine just deflated. They hang down like…like pears left to ripen on a tree for too long. You’ve seen them. It’s sad.” Johanna sits up and looks at Katniss, who has tears streaming down her cheeks from laughing too hard. “Promise me you’ll never ruin them. I’ll live vicariously through you and stare at your chest in your Mockingjay propos and pretend mine are still pretty.”
Another bout of pained laughing leaves Katniss’s body. “Why are you like this, Johanna?”
Johanna shrugs. “Life gets easier once you stop caring.”
“That doesn’t sound like a life I want to live.”
Johanna feels herself crack a dry smile. “You’re probably right. I don’t think you could do it if you tried.”
“I can’t tell if you’re insulting me or not.”
Johanna drops her smile and rolls her eyes, but she’s not angry, not in any meaningful way. “Just go to bed, Katniss.”
It…probably says something bad about Johanna that she sleeps easier with Katniss screaming than with hospital patients calmly snoring.
She doesn’t look too deep into it. Not when she doesn’t care.